History Commons^™

"Hunger Is The Best Sauce": Frontier Food Ways In Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books, Erin E. Pedigo

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House book series for the frontier food ways described in it. Studying the series for its food ways edifies a 19th century American frontier of subsistence/companionate families practicing both old and new ways of obtaining food. The character Laura in Wilder's books is an engaging narrator who moves through childhood and adolescence, assuming the role of housewife. An overview of the century's norms about food in America, the strength of domesticity as an ideal, food and race relations, and the frontier as a physical place round out this unexplored area of Little House …

Remarkable Russian Women In Pictures, Prose And Poetry, Marcelline Hutton

Zea E-Books Collection

Many Russian women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tried to find happy marriages, authentic religious life, liberal education, and fulfilling work as artists, doctors, teachers, and political activists. Some very remarkable ones found these things in varying degrees, while others sought unsuccessfully but no less desperately to transcend the generations-old restrictions imposed by church, state, village, class, and gender.

Like a Slavic “Downton Abbey,” this book tells the stories, not just of their outward lives, but of their hearts and minds, their voices and dreams, their amazing accomplishments against overwhelming odds, and their roles as feminists and …

Review Of Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, And The Struggle For Civil Rights In Texas By Brian D. Behnken, Edwin Dorn

Great Plains Quarterly

If you are an African American, a Mexican American, or a progressive Anglo who grew up in Texas in the past century, reading Brian Behnken's book, filled as it is with examples of the state's racism, is sure to tear off a few old scabs. Behnken's main objective, however, is to explain the factors that kept black civil rights activists from working with their Hispanic counterparts to reduce racial segregation and discrimination.

One factor, Behnken argues convincingly, was geography: the battleground for the black struggle was in the eastern part of the state, the Mexican American battleground hundreds of miles …

Review Of The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, And Place Edited By Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, And Karla Armbruster, Jenny Kerber

Great Plains Quarterly

Given the emphasis that advocates of bioregionalism have historically placed on principles of decentralization and localization in the development of more ecologically sustainable modes of inhabitation, it is perhaps not surprising that no wide-ranging survey of bioregional literary criticism has appeared on the scene until now. This is a shame, however, because it turns out that examining bioregional practices across cultures and places yields a wealth of new ideas about how to live more sustainably in one's home place. In The Bioregional Imagination, readers finally have access to a much-needed set of comparative perspectives on bioregionalism, ranging from the implementation …

Review Of Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History Edited By Susan A. Miller And James Riding In, Angela Parker

Great Plains Quarterly

Susan Miller and James Riding In position this anthology as the first to collect historical work from Native scholars participating in an "Indigenous discourse"-an academic conversation "rooted in North American Indigenous thought" and, they claim, global Indigenous thought. If your essentialism alarm bells are ringing, it is for good reason. Ignore the alarms long enough to work your way through the entire anthology and you will find rich, complicated, vibrant historical analysis and critique from Indigenous historians working in Canada and the United States.

The introduction and framing essays by Susan Miller in part 1 elaborate on the idea of …

Great Plains Quarterly Fall 2013 Vol. 33 No.4 -- Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Making War On Jupiter Pluvius The Culture And Science Of Rainmaking In The Southern Great Plains, 1870-1913, Michael R. Whitaker

Great Plains Quarterly

For two weeks in August 1891, the grounds of the "C" Ranch in rural West Texas thundered with the sound of explosions, as a federal government- sponsored expeditionary force hurled hundreds of pounds of heavy ordnance against an invisible enemy. In command of this unusual operation was "General" Robert Dyrenforth, who with $9,000 of congressional funding in pocket was doing his utmost to find out whether, as a bit of folk wisdom ran, the furious tumult and aerial concussions of battle could somehow cause rain. From tiny western hamlets to the metropolises of the East, Americans were fascinated by the …

Eastern Beads, Western Applications Wampum Among Plains Tribes, Jordan Keagle

Great Plains Quarterly

In the seventeenth century, when Europeans first arrived in what are now the New England and mid-Atlantic states, they encountered a wide array of indigenous tribes already calling the land home. The new setrlers soon realized the importance of shell beads called wampum. Manufactured primarily along Long Island Sound, these beads, shaped from marine shells, could be made into belts or grouped as strings.¹ Though whites failed to grasp the nuances of wampum culture, leading to the generalization of wampum as "Indian money," they nevertheless recognized its significance in Native American trade and diplomacy. Eventually, wampum came to be …

The 2013 Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, R. Matthew Joeckel

Great Plains Quarterly

After long deliberations by members of three subcommittees and the chairs of those committees, the Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize was awarded to Blackfoot Redemption: A Blood Indian's Story of Murder, Confinement, and Imperfect Justice, by William E. Farr, published by the University of Oklahoma Press. As the chair of the prize committee, I am pleased to state that many fine books were submitted for the competition, and that each of them was meritorious in some way. Nevertheless, Blackfoot Redemption is unique among the submissions-and indeed among the vast majority of accounts of Plains Native American lives in …

Review Of Inside The Ark: The Hutterites In Canada And The United States By Yossi Katz And John Lehr, Rod Janzen

Great Plains Quarterly

Geographers Yossi Katz and John Lehr's new book on the Hutterites provides an in-depth analysis of the social life of one of the four branches of the Hutterite Church in North America, the Group 2 Schmiedeleut. In many ways it is also an informative introduction to Hutterite life in general.

Katz and Lehr provide detailed explanations of virtually every aspect of Hutterite life in the province of Manitoba. This includes social and political organization at the colony and intercolony levels, religious and cultural traditions, the impact of space and how it is employed (with helpful charts and images), as well …

Review Of Theodore Roosevelt In The Badlands: A Young Politician's Quest For Recovery In The American West By Roger L. Di Silvestro, Mark Harvey

Great Plains Quarterly

Biographers of Theodore Roosevelt have long been aware of the significance of the time he spent in the Badlands of Dakota Territory during the 1880s. After an initial visit in 1883, Roosevelt returned the following year, this time overwhelmed with grief. Earlier that year he had experienced unimaginable personal tragedy when his beloved wife, Alice, and his mother died on the very same day. A few months later TR returned to western Dakota by train, bound for a landscape he hoped would bring him solace, healing, and renewal.

Over the next several years, Roosevelt returned to the Badlands for weeks …

Review Of The James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection: Selected Works Edited By Mark Andrew White, Emma I. Hansen

Great Plains Quarterly

Beginning in the 1950s, Arizona collector James T. Bialac assembled an extensive and eclectic collection of Native American art, consisting of approximately 2,500 paintings and 1,500 kachina dolls, baskets, jewelry, pottery, and sculptures. The collection represents several regions, with particular strengths in the southwestern and southeastern United States and the Southern Plains. Produced by the University of Oklahoma in recognition of Bialac's donation of his collection to the university's Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, the catalogue provides an overview of this assemblage, featuring images of selected works and accompanying essays.

Following Mary Jo Watson's introduction, ''A Tradition of Appreciation: …

Review Of Terrible Justice: Sioux Chiefs And U.S. Soldiers On The Upper Missouri, 1854-1868 By Doreen Chaky, Steven C. Haack

Great Plains Quarterly

When strong tensions exist between cultures, small incidents can have grave consequences. Thus, in August of 1854, when a Sioux Indian living near Fort Laramie, Nebraska Territory, found a lame cow and killed it to feed his family, a sad chapter began. The cow's emigrant owner complained of his loss to the fort's commander, and Lt. John Grattan was soon on his way to a Sioux encampment to demand that the thief be turned over to face justice. As a cannon rolled into place to reinforce his demand, violence broke out, and thirty soldiers, including Grattan, soon lay dead. Secretary …

Review Of Hell Of A Vision: Regionalism And The Modem American West By Robert L. Dorman, Allen Frost

Great Plains Quarterly

This thorough study of the American West takes as a given the region's contested and continuously shifting identity among scholars as well as among artists, activists, and government agencies. One of Robert Dorman's many contributions to the field in Hell of a Vision is his decision to chart the formations of these multiple Wests alongside each other, from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the present day.

The primary texts examined here range from the canonical to the unexpected. Dorman's archive begins with John Wesley Powell's maps of the "Arid Region," produced in 1891 for the U.S. Geological …

Review Of Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past And Present By Jean A. Boyd, John Mark Dempsey

Great Plains Quarterly

The patrons of Saturday-night Texas dance halls still two-step to the music of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, more than thirty-five years after Wills's death. Jean Boyd is one of the Texas music authors who has mythologized Wills in her previous "We're the Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mills": An Oral History (2003) and The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (1998). In her newest book, Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present, Boyd puts the spotlight on less well known practitioners of the music that Wills pioneered along with …

Review Of Living With American Indian Art: The Hirschfield Collection By Alan J. Hirschfield With Terry Winchell, Heather Ahtone

Great Plains Quarterly

As the reality sets in that Native Americans have not become the vanishing race, their continuum of artistic excellence is underscored in the collection amassed by Alan and Berte Hirschfield. Living with American Indian Art documents how these avid collectors have integrated a broad range of cultural materials into a private Wyoming home, reflecting their collecting passion and broad interests. From the TIingit baskets to the Zia pottery to the Cheyenne buckskin dresses, the Native arts found in the Hirschfield collection are exquisite works, in keeping with Alan Hirschfield's mantra, "When you see something beautiful, buy it!"

The Diminishment Of The Great Sioux Reservation Treaties, Tricks, And Time, Alan L. Neville, Alyssa Kaye Anderson

Great Plains Quarterly

Historically, Indian-white relations have been marred by mistrust and dishonesty. This is especially true in numerous land dealings between the United States government and the Lakota/ Dakota/Nakota people of the northern Great Plains. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court noted, "A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history."¹

Our focus here is to chronicle and analyze the tragic diminishment of the Great Sioux Reservation, first established by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.² The land loss progressed with the Homestead Act of 1862, Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, …

Review Of Weapons Of The Lewis And Clark Expedition By Jim Garry, Brooke Wibracht

Great Plains Quarterly

Jim Garry's recent publication offers a meticulous assessment of the Corps of Discovery's arsenal. One of Garry's goals centers on correcting outdated information from well-known books, about the Corps and the weaponry the men carried, especially Carl P. Russell's Guns of the Early Frontiers (1957). The author acknowledges that historians have continuously advanced the scholarship on the Corps' weaponry, but misconceptions about the arsenal still exist, muddying the historical record. He encourages readers to view his book as a tool for placing the expedition and the weapons of the early nineteenth century in an accurate historical context.

The volume contains …

Review Of I'Ll Be Here In The Morning: The Songwriting Legacy Of Townes Van Zandt By Brian T. Atkinson, Chuck Vollan

Great Plains Quarterly

Texas's Townes Van Zandtwas a musician's musician whose fame grew after his 1996 death. Brian T. Atkinson, contributor to the Austin AmericanStatesman, Texas Music, Lone Star, American Songwriter, and No Depression, has woven together a collection of interviews from Van Zandt's contemporaries and friends, as well as his musical heirs-singer-songwriters who grew up too late to have known the troubled author of "Pancho and Lefty," "Tecumseh Valley," and "Lungs" but who admired his dark, poetic lyrics.

Review Of Villages On Wheels: A Social History Of The Gathering To Zion By Stanley B. Kimball And Violet T. Kimball, W. Paul Reeve

Great Plains Quarterly

Villages on Wheels is the culmination of historian Stanley B. Kimball's more than fifteen years' research on and long career as a scholar of the Mormon Trail. When he died in 2003, his wife, Violet, a writer, photojournalist, and occasional student of the trail herself, completed the project. This social history, a detailed examination of the everyday aspects of creating and maintaining a mobile society, is the result of their collaboration.

Based upon "hundreds of journals"-mostly located at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Church History Library in Salt Lake City, the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at …

Review Of A Geography Of Blood: Unearthing Memory From A Prairie Landscape By Candace Savage, Susan Naramore Maher

Great Plains Quarterly

Candace Savage and her companion Keith Bell first discovered Eastend, Saskatchewan, on a journey home to Saskatoon from Cody, Wyoming. They planned a brief stopover but ended up hooked on the town, returning for further visits, and finally buying a home. In a sense, Savage has been pursuing a deeper habitation of Eastend for many years. As a recent transplant, she has sought to understand this comer of Saskatchewan across many spatial manifestations and through many layers of cultural existence. A frequent visitor to the Wallace Stegner House, immortalized in Wolf Willow, she has also worked to uproot Stegner's …

Review Of The Indianization Of Lewis And Clark By William Swagerty, Clarissa W. Confer

Great Plains Quarterly

This two-volume work sets out to chronicle and analyze the process of change experienced by the men of the Corps of Discovery as they traveled through the homelands of diverse American Indian cultures on their way to the Pacific and back. Doubtlessly, an undertaking as bold and arduous as the Lewis and Clark expedition altered those who experienced it. One could examine these changes a variety of ways. Here, author William Swagerty focuses on the intersection between Euro- American and Native American cultures-the point at which white men traded aspects of their culture for those of the people they had …

The Military-Masculinity Complex: Hegemonic Masculinity And The United States Armed Forces, 1940-1963, Brandon T. Locke

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The military-industrial complex grew rapidly in the build up to the Second World War and continued to expand in the decades that followed. The military was not only much larger, but had also changed their relationship with American citizens, impacting their lives in new and complex ways. The defensive needs of World War Two and the Cold War made the military an imperative and prestigious institution in the United States, and the Selective Service Draft, beginning in 1940 and running continuously until 1973, gave the military unfettered access to the young men of the nation.

During the same time, government …

Woodrow Wilson's Colonial Emissary: Edward M. House And The Origins Of The Mandate System, 1917-1919, Scot D. Bruce

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

After World War I, reallocating the former German and Turkish colonies proved to be one of the more challenging feats of the peace process. After months of negotiation in 1919, first in Paris, then in London, the various national leaders agreed to create the mandate system, which proved to be a compromise between outright colonial expansion and genuine independence, whereby the former German and Turkish colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East were mandated to the conquering nations in trust until the indigenous peoples were deemed ready to administer their own governments and societies. For decades, the mandate system …

Railroads And Coal: Resource Extraction In Indian Territory, 1866-1907, Robert J. Voss

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines the history of the interaction of railroads and coal during the end of the nineteenth century in what is today eastern Oklahoma. The Indian territory presented complex opportunities and challenges for railroad developers, coal operators, miners, railroad workers, and Native Americans. Using primary sources, such as published and unpublished accounts of both prominent and typical Native Americans and Euro-Americans, congressional debates, railroad company annual reports, railroad company correspondence, account books, treaties, court cases, and maps, this dissertation explores the process of railroad and coal company incursion in the region and the conflicts that resulted. All participants in …

La Grande Misère / Great Misery, Maisie Renault, Jeanne Armstrong , Translator

Zea E-Books Collection

In June 1942 Maisie Renault and her sister Isabelle were arrested in Paris by the Gestapo for their activities in support of the French Résistance cell directed by their brother Gilbert Renault, known by the code-name “Colonel Rémy.” Over the next two years they were held at La Santé prison in Paris, at Fresnes Prison, south of the city, at Fort de Romainville on the outskirts, and at the Royallieu-Compiègne internment camp in northeast France.

In August 1944 they were deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany, opened in 1939 and housing mainly women and children. By 1944 …

Review Of Nazan Çiçek, The Young Ottomans: Turkish Critics Of The Eastern Question In The Late Nineteenth Century, Bedross Der Matossian

Department of History: Faculty Publications

The ‘Eastern Question’, coined by European powers in the nineteenth century, came to denote the diplomatic and political problems posed by the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The historiography on the Eastern Question has been mostly Eurocentric, addressing the diplomatic history of the Eastern Question without taking into consideration the Eastern actors of the Question, that is, the Muslim Turks. One of the major actors to emerge during the height of the Eastern Question was a group known as the Young Ottomans who became extremely critical of the Tanzimat reforms in general and the Ottoman Porte’s handling of the Eastern …

Racialized Nationality: Mexicans, Vaqueros, And U.S. Nationalism In Buffalo Bill's Wild West, Pablo A. Rangel

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The development of the vaquero, as he appeared in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West performances and other shows, mirrors the experiences of Mexicans and Mexican-descent people in the United States at the end of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth century. This thesis explores and analyzes the history of the vaquero in the Wild West show through an analysis of the principal performers and their experiences. Chapter one explores the history of the Wild West show with an emphasis on the vaqueros. This chapter will also explore the origins of the vaqueros. Chapter two explores how the Wild West …

Researching North America: Sir Humphrey Gilbert’S 1583 Expedition And A Reexamination Of Early Modern English Colonization In The North Atlantic World, Nathan Probasco

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 expedition to North America was the first attempt by an Englishman to colonize beyond the British Isles, and yet it has not been subject to thorough scholarly analysis for more than seventy years. Although it is often overlooked or misinterpreted by scholars, an exhaustive examination of the voyage reveals the complexity and preparedness of this and similar early modern English expeditions. Gilbert recruited several specialists who expended considerable time and resources while researching and otherwise working in support of the voyage. Their efforts secured much needed capital, a necessary component of expensive private voyages, and they …

Many Worlds Converge Here: Vision And Identity In American Indian Photography, Alicia L. Harris

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Photographs of Native Americans taken by Frank A. Rinehart at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898 were then and continue to be part of the construction of indigenous identities, both by Anglo-Americans and Natives. This thesis analyzes the ramifications of Rinehart’s portraits and those of his peers as well as Native American artists in the 20^th and 21^st centuries who have sought to re-appropriate these images to make them empowering icons of individual or tribal identity rather than erasure of culture.

This thesis comprises two sections. In the first section, the analysis is focused on the historical …