American Studies Commons^™

Oscar James Dunn: A Case Study In Race & Politics In Reconstruction Louisiana, Brian Mitchell

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The study of African American Reconstruction leadership has presented a variety of unique challenges for modern historians who struggle to piece together the lives of men, who prior to the Civil War, had little political identity. The scant amounts of primary source data in regard to these leaders’ lives before the war, the destruction of many documents in regard to their leadership following the Reconstruction Era, and the treatment of these figures by historians prior to the Revisionist movement have left this body of extremely important political figures largely unexplored. This dissertation will examine the life of one of Louisiana’s …

The Seven Spices: Pumpkins, Puritans, And Pathogens In Colonial New England, Michael Sharbaugh

Michael D Sharbaugh

Water sources in the United States' New England region are laden with arsenic. Particularly during North America's colonial period--prior to modern filtration processes--arsenic would make it into the colonists' drinking water. In this article, which evokes the biocultural evolution paradigm, it is argued that colonists offset health risks from the contaminant (arsenic poisoning) by ingesting copious amounts of seven spices--cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, allspice, vanilla, and ginger. The inclusion of these spices in fall and winter recipes that hail from New England would therefore explain why many Americans associate them not only with the region, but with Thanksgiving and Christmas, …

Lg Ms 020 Equal Protection/Portland Archives Finding Aid, Maeve Wachowicz

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Equal Protection/Portland (EP/P) was a volunteer organization formed in Portland, Maine in 1992 that campaigned to uphold a Human Rights Ordinance passed by Portland’s City Council. Ultimately the ordinance was upheld in a referendum vote on November 3, 1992. That year was contentious for LGBT issues around the country and gay rights figured prominently in a presidential election for the first time in the race between Bill Clinton and George Bush. The Archives contains EP/P administrative files and campaign materials, such as flyers, brochures, press releases, survey results, audio recordings, and a bus banner. Articles reflecting national attention to …

Lg Ms 019 Westbrook Citizens For Equal Rights Archives Finding Aid, Maeve Wachowicz

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Description:

Westbrook Citizens for Equal Rights (WCER) was a Political Action Committee (PAC) registered in Westbrook, Maine in June of 2002. WCER was formed to promote civil rights in Westbrook, and notably campaigned to uphold the Westbrook Human Rights Ordinance of 2002. The archives contain materials from both the “Vote Yes” and “Vote No” campaigns on the Human Rights Ordinance referendum, such as flyers, pamphlets, campaign signs and stickers, advertisements, volunteer instructions, and correspondence. There is also information on the 2003 election in Westbrook, and on similar ordinance campaigns in Falmouth, Maine, and in Kalamazoo and Traverse City, Michigan, in …

Guggenheim For Governor Antisemitism, Race, And The Politics Of Gilded Age Colorado, Michael Lee

Great Plains Quarterly

In the summer of 1893 financial panic struck Colorado. The price of silver, in a protracted downward spiral since the conclusion of the Civil War, finally crashed. The British government announced that its Indian mints were ceasing the coinage of silver rupees. The news of that decision caused a torrent of selling on the international market. In a matter of hours, the price of silver plummeted from eighty cents to sixty-four cents an ounce. The collapse in value of Colorado's most important commodity precipitated runs on local banks. Twelve banks alone collapsed in Denver during the month of July. By …

Review Of Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols And The Politics Of Motherhood By Marilyn S. Blackwell And Kristen T. Oertel, Barbara Cutter

Great Plains Quarterly

After a difficult first marriage that ended in divorce, Clarina Irene Howard Nichols became an avid supporter of married women's property rights, mothers' custody rights, and, eventually, female suffrage. She was a journalist, a newspaper editor, and in 1852 she became the first woman to speak to the Vermont state legislature, in an address in favor of women's school suffrage. By 1853, she was traveling through the Northeast and Midwest as a public lecturer on temperance and women's rights. She emigrated to Kansas in 1854 as a strong advocate of the free soil cause, but also because she had high …

Review Of Bound Like Grass: A Memoir From The Western High Plains By Ruth Mclaughlin, Linda K. Karell

Great Plains Quarterly

At a time when so many recent western women's memoirs either eschew the family farm or ranch as a bastion of male domination, or praise it as the fading location of authentic westernness, Ruth McLaughlin's memoir hits a new and sometimes heartbreaking note. Set in the High Plains of northern Montana, the memoir's dustcover photograph is riveting in its expressive ordinariness-and is a courageous choice to represent the lives within. Next to a barbed-wire fence, young Ruth, farm-kid skinny in oversized play clothes, gently pats a calf on the head. Behind them the landscape rolls on promisingly. Within the first …

Review Of The North American Journals Of Prince Maximilian Of Wied, Volume 2: April-September 1833 Edited By Stephen S. Witte And Marsha V. Gallagher, Michael G. Noll

Great Plains Quarterly

The travel accounts of Prince Maximilian of Wied have long been considered one of the finest early scientific and ethnographic descriptions of North American landscapes. Maximilian journeyed with the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer through the United States in 1832-34 to study its natural environments and Indigenous peoples. His keen observations were published in German in 1839-41, were translated into other languages in the following years, and have been harvested ever since for their factual information. Maximilian's publication, however, left out a good portion of his original observations.

With this, the second of three volumes of Maximilian's journals, Stephen S. Witte …

Review Of Cowboy's Lament: A Life On The Open Range By Frank Maynard, Kenneth L. Untiedt

Great Plains Quarterly

Jim Hoy, who edited this volume of the Voice in the American West series, discovered a gold mine when he happened upon Frank Maynard's unpublished autobiography and personal papers. Cowboy's Lament, comprising these documents, is a beneficial resource for Great Plains historians, scholars researching the literature of the American West, and even folklorists. Maynard, who is credited with penning the lyrics to what most people recognize as "The Streets of Laredo," was a mostly self-educated "rangIer" who had the good sense to record his adventures on the frontier. Although he had limited success in publishing his narrative during his lifetime, …

Review Of The Red Corner: The Rise And Fall Of Communism In Northeastern Montana By Verlaine Stoner Mcdonald, Bradley D. Snow

Great Plains Quarterly

It's not often that such names as Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky figure centrally in works dealing with Montana history. But that's the case with Verlaine Stoner McDonald's The Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana. McDonald's history deals with a little-known but fascinating chapter in Montana, and western, history the 1920s electoral takeover of the local government of Sheridan County, Montana, by Communist Party members. As McDonald shows, Sheridan County, an agrarian territory of 10,000 persons in the extreme northeastern corner of the state, proved fertile territory for a variety of leftist political movements, including …

Review Of West And West: Reimagining The Great Plains By Joe Deal, Larry Schwarm

Great Plains Quarterly

The geography of the Great Plains defies conventions of what a beautiful landscape is supposed to be. There are no mountains, forests, or pristine streams and lakes. It is mostly a flat horizon line, broken by an occasional tree, and bodies of water are almost always muddy ponds. To the untrained eye, it appears featureless.

It takes a special understanding to appreciate its vastness and subtleties. It requires an especially acute sensitivity to be able to translate these qualities to a photographic image. Most photographers approach this landscape looking for atypical qualities, anomalies rather than the common.

Joe Deal in …

Review Of Steamboats West: The 1859 American Fur Company Missouri River Expedition By Lawrence H. Larsen And Barbara J. Cottrell, Ken Robison

Great Plains Quarterly

Using two exceptional traveler journals, Steamboats West takes the reader on a remarkable journey "on one of the most memorable feats of steamboat navigation in North American history." The adventurous travelers, Elias J. Marsh, medical officer, and Charles Henry Weber, tourist, boarded the steamboat Spread Eagle for the annual American Fur Company expedition up the Missouri River to Fort Union in Dakota Territory.

In the words of historian Hiram Chittenden, "The incidents of a single steamboat voyage from St. Louis to Fort Union would make an entertaining chapter in any book of adventure." But, for Marsh and Weber, their adventure …

Review Of Looking Back: Canadian Women's Prairie Memoirs And Intersections Of Culture, History, And Identity By S. Leigh Matthews, Lori Ann Lahlum

Great Plains Quarterly

In Looking Back, Leigh Matthews, a literary scholar, argues that memoirs written by white, English-speaking women who settled in western Canadian prairie communities have been "lost or ignored" and have received little "critical attention from both historians and literary critics." These published accounts of the Euro-Canadian "prairie settlement project" or "homesteading project," terminology used throughout the book, allow Matthews to assess the "Prairie Woman," the stereotypical image of the white, English-speaking female settler, against the more nuanced and diverse experiences of the "prairie woman" who actually migrated to the region. These memoirs, Matthews asserts, both "confirm and challenge …

Review Of When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, The History Of Sexuality, And Native Sovereignty By Mark Rifkin, Clark D. Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly

Mark Rifkin's When Did Indians Become Straight? is a thoughtful examination of the complicated landscape that lends itself to answering the question the title poses. Rifkin carefully and methodically scrutinizes the rhetoric of straightness within settler colonialism, highlights the intersection between Indigenous kinship models and conjugal couplehood, and problematizes subsequent nuclear/bourgeois homemaking as the dominant model for "family" within U.S. borders.

Review Of The Rhythm Boys Of Omaha Central: High School Basketball At The '68 Racial Divide By Steve Marantz, Amy Helene Forss

Great Plains Quarterly

During the school year of 1967-68, African American basketball sensations John Biddle, Willie Frazier, Dwaine Dillard, Roy Hunter, and Phil Griffin electrified the predominantly white student body, coaches, and administrators of Omaha Central High School. These five "Rhythm Boys" and the racially tense times they lived through inspired Steve Marantz, a 1966 Omaha Central graduate, to write an examination of the first-string basketball players and the surrounding discrimination and racism they faced on and off the court. It was a year in which their high-school principal, J. Arthur Nelson, privately referred to black students as "Smoky Swedes" and employed only …

Review Of Bad Land Pastoralism In Great Plains Fiction By Matthew J. C. Cella, Becky Faber

Great Plains Quarterly

Matthew Cella's Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction is based on the concept of "the dialogue between human culture and nonhuman nature on the Great Plains" as explored through the region's literature. Cella defines "bad land pastoralism" as "a persistent effort to both confront and transcend the losses accrued during the ongoing attempt to permanently inhabit a bioregion defined by motion and transience." The reader, to follow Cella's argument, must consider and reconsider the stereotypes of the Great Plains, particularly as they apply to how the region was populated and what the concept of land can mean to Plains …

Review Of Reopening The Frontier: Homesteading In The Modern West By Brian Q. Cannon, Mark Engler

Great Plains Quarterly

FREE LAND was the Cry! For 123 years the Homestead Act provided millions of people the opportunity to pursue the American Dream of land ownership. Moreover, it had a tremendous impact beyond individual people or families, profoundly changing the nation and the world.

Brian Q. Cannon's Reopening the Frontier: Homesteading in the Modern West is one of several recent titles exploring America's epic homesteading story. Within Cannon's book readers will find events tying back to the early years of the homestead movement that have been repeated time and again. While one may believe that modern homesteading between 1946 and 1966 …

Review Of Vernon Fisher By Vernon Fisher, Matthew Bourbon

Great Plains Quarterly

Internationally acclaimed artist Vernon Fisher is known for making paintings that contain complex, and frequently competing, renderings of the world. His carefully crafted art is crowded with stylistically variant depictions of colonial maps, portraits of classic movie stars, and cartoon drawings of Mickey Mouse. The arrangement of such disparate imagery within discrete paintings encourages the viewer of Fisher's art to make comparisons between the different subjects portrayed. Reconciling the often discordant narrative implications remains an enduring entertainment of Fisher's work.

A long-time resident of Fort Worth, Texas, the artist creates his paintings by co-opting and manipulating images he considers slightly …

Review Of Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles By Panthea Reid, Cinzia Biagiotti

Great Plains Quarterly

The large book by Panthea Reid (449 pages, 16 chapters, a prologue, epilogue, and three appendices) tracks Tillie Olsen's long life (1912-2007) step by step, beginning from the Jewish-Russian origins of both her maternal and paternal families, up to her death on January 1, 2007.

The book could have been a useful addition to Olsen scholarship, if not for the biographer's insistent efforts to destroy the image of a writer and a woman who was committed so extensively to unhinging the political, social, and cultural stereotypes built up to contain the action of women in America and elsewhere.

Desegregating State Universities In The Great Plains, Raymond Wolters

Great Plains Quarterly

On February 9, 1969, the University of Oklahoma kicked off its annual Black History Week with an especially distinguished visitor, the noted African American author and television journalist Louis E. Lomax. After Lomax's public address, there was a reception at the home of George Henderson, one of only a handful of black professors at the university and the first African American ever to purchase a home in the university town of Norman. When Henderson escorted Lomax back to his room at the Holiday Inn, the two reminisced about the civil rights movement. "Then, as if speaking to himself, [Lomax] said …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 31 / Number 4/ Fall 2011

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Beyond Mount Rushmore: Other Black Hills Faces Edited And Introduced By Mary A. Kopco, David A. Wolff

Great Plains Quarterly

In 2010, the South Dakota State Historical Society celebrated its fortieth year of publishing the award-winning journal, South Dakota History. Over the years, South Dakota History has published about 500 articles, an impressive number. As with most journals, once an article appears, it soon disappears into past volumes, almost forgotten. But good articles can have a second life, and Beyond Mount Rushmore provides that for ten articles that appeared in South Dakota History between 1993 and 2009. These essays relate to the Black Hills, a popular topic among book buyers, but what ties them together is their focus on …

Review Of Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum In American Indian Literature By Christopher B. Teuton, Lindsey Claire Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

Christopher Teuton's study of four American Indian writers-No Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Gerald Vizenor (Anishinabe), Ray A. Young Bear (Meskwaki), and Robert J. Conley (Cherokee}-offers a useful model for theorizing the interdependence of oral and written traditions within Indigenous communities. In Teuton's view, a limiting separation between oral and written discourse has prevented scholars from recognizing the balance among various forms of signification that, reflecting community histories and identities, has long been a mainstay for Native peoples amid contexts of both tradition and change. This unnecessary divide, which he terms the "oral-literate binary," has informed scholarly practice, comprising "oral-literate theory." Despite …

Review Of The Johnson~Sims Feud: Romeo And Juliet, West Texas Style By Bill O'Neal, Robin C. Sager

Great Plains Quarterly

In The Johnson-Sims Feud, Bill O'Neal describes how interactions soured between two West Texas families due, in part, to an unfortunate marriage. Joining numerous scholars who have traced the presence of violence in frontier areas, O'Neal contends that the bad blood between the Johnsons and the Simses escalated into a feuding state that lasted for decades.

The work begins in the late 1870s with the arrival of early settlers "Billy" Johnson and Dave Sims, two men determined to "create cattle empires in the rugged vastness of West Texas." Embracing the intricacies of ranching life, they both met with great …

Review Of War Party In Blue: Pawnee Scouts In The U.S. Army By Mark Van De Logt, Kevin Adams

Great Plains Quarterly

There are many positive things to say about Mark van de Logt's study of Pawnee Indian scouts. The research, particularly in primary sources, is deep, while van de Logt's prose is so clean it practically sparkles. War Party in Blue is the result of great care taken by both author and press.

Van de Logt's intent, as expressed in his clear and concise introduction, is to revise traditional interpretations that attribute the scouts' success to Major Frank North's leadership. Given the contours of historical scholarship in the mid-twentieth century, as well as the voluminous accounts left us by Luther North, …

Public Opinion Is More Than Law Popular Sovereignty And Vigilantism In The Nebraska Territory, Sean M. Kammer

Great Plains Quarterly

While debating Senator Stephen A. Douglas in the fall of 1858, Abraham Lincoln declared the principle of popular sovereignty, as applied to the Kansas Territory, to be "nothing but a living, creeping lie from the time of its introduction till today."¹ While Lincoln conceded the right of majorities to rule and to shape policy, he maintained that there were moral limits to this right-a line beyond which democratic majorities could not govern. This view contrasted sharply with that of Douglas, who argued that the ultimate source of authority was the will of the people, and that this authority was …

From "No Place" To Home The Quest For A Western Home In Brewster Higley's "Home On The Range", C. M. Cooper

Great Plains Quarterly

In the spring of 1934, New York attorney Samuel Moanfeldt set out on a trip that would take him through most of the states west of the Mississippi in search of the origins of the popular American folk song "Home on the Range." The reason for his trip was a $500,000 lawsuit filed by William and Mary Goodwin of Tempe, Arizona, who claimed that they had written the song-which was then the most popular tune on the American airwaves-and were owed royalties in arrears for its broadcast on public radio.

"This Murder Done": Misogyny, Femicide, And Modernity In 19th-Century Appalachian Murder Ballads, Christina Ruth Hastie

Masters Theses

This thesis contextualizes Appalachian murder ballads of the 19^th- and early 20^th-centuries through a close reading of the lyric texts. Using a research frame that draws from the musicological and feminist concepts of Diana Russell, Susan McClary, Norm Cohen, and Christopher Small, I reveal 19^th-century Appalachia as a patriarchal, modern, and highly codified society despite its popularized image as a culturally isolated and “backward” place. I use the ballads to demonstrate how music serves the greater cultural purpose of preserving and perpetuating social ideologies. Specifically, the murder ballads reveal layers of meaning regarding hegemonic …

New Deal Experimentation And The Political Economy Of The Yankton Sioux, 1930-1934, Teresa M. Houser

Great Plains Quarterly

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's election to the presidency in 1932 signaled a mandate for sweeping reform at the federal level to lift the nation out of the economic turbulence of the Great Depression. Under Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) joined other agencies in launching policies to rebuild economic stability. Much of the scholarship on the Indian New Deal to date necessarily focuses on the centerpiece of Collier's reform efforts: the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). But prior to tribal consideration of the IRA, the Roosevelt administration undertook a series of steps in an attempt to …

Immigration To The Great Plains, 1865-1914 War, Politics, Technology, And Economic Development, Bruce Garver

Great Plains Quarterly

The advent and vast extent of immigration to the Great Plains states during the years 1865 to 1914 is perhaps best understood in light of the new international context that emerged during the 1860s in the aftermath of six large wars whose consequences included the enlargement of civil liberties, an acceleration of economic growth and technological innovation, the expansion of world markets, and the advent of mass immigration to the United States from east-central and southern Europe.1 Facilitating all of these changes was the achievement of widespread literacy through universal, free, compulsory, and state-funded elementary education in the United States, …