Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Using Schools To Map The Frontier Of Settlement On The Canadian Prairies, John C. Lehr, Brian Mcgregor

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Most attempts to map the frontier of agricultural settlement in western Canada have used land alienation data or population density calculated from census returns. Both methods are fraught with difficulties. Population density data are only available at five-year intervals at the 36-square-mile township level. Land alienation does not always reflect settlement. In Manitoba, entire townships were alienated years before they were occupied. The organization and building of schools is a better indicator of actual settlement and the emergence of community-based institutions. To test this hypothesis, school formation and land alienation in 35 townships in southeastern Manitoba were plotted. This showed …

Personal Characteristics Preceding Pro-Environmental Behaviors That Improve Surface Water Quality, Courtney E. Quinn, Mark E. Burbach

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

The decisions made by individual farmers to adopt conservation practices that improve surface water quality will be of increasing importance in the 21st century. Currently, models attempting to explain pro-environmental behaviors ignore or minimize the role of individual personality characteristics. In this paper we give an overview of current research regarding how personal characteristics influence the adoption of Best Management Practices (BMPs) and propose an expansion of measured characteristics to include farmers' work motivation, environmental attitude, and moral reasoning toward the environment. Our purpose is to spur an interest in understanding the antecedents to the pro-environmental behavior of farmers that …

Great Plains Reasearch: A Journal Of Natural And Social Sciences Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2008: Table Of Contents

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

NATURAL SCIENCES

Engineer Cantonment, Missouri Territory, 1819-1820: America's First Biodiversity Inventory (Hugh H. Genoways and Brett C. Ratcliffe)

Testing Multigenerational Colonization of Carrion by Blow Flies in the Great Plains (Timothy E. Huntington, David O. Carter, and Leon G. Higley)

Mapping Agricultural Land Cover for Hydrologic Modeling in the Platte River Watershed of Nebraska (Patti R. Dappen, Ian C. Ratcliffe, Cullen R. Robbins, and James W. Merchant)

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Using Schools to Map the Frontier of Settlement on the Canadian Prairies (John C. Lehr and Brian McGregor)

Mapping the Dispossession: Scandinavian Homesteading at Fort Totten, 1900-1930 (Karen V. Hansen and …

Review Of Eau Canada: The Future Of Canada's Water. Edited By Karen Bakker., Henry David Venema

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Karen Bakker has assembled an impressive list of contributors from academia and civil society, including internationally renowned physical and social scientists and prominent former civil servants. Lavishly referenced and weighing in at a hefty 400-plus pages, the book is broken into five main sections on current governance systems, jurisdictional fragmentation, privatization and markets, pathways to better management, and worldviews. Despite its heft, Eau Canada is a compelling read. A key message repeated in several chapters is that the federal government has largely ignored the principles set out in its own 1987 Federal Water Policy, which declared an overall objective of …

Review Of Greener Pastures: Decentralizing The Regulation Of Agricultural Pollution. By Elizabeth Brubaker, Eva Pip

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Greener Pastures chronicles the proliferation of intensive hog production in Canada. Exploring the history of right-to-farm legislation, Elizabeth Brubaker focuses on the experiences of Manitoba, New Brunswick, and Ontario, although parallel situations may be found throughout the country. Starting with Manitoba's notorious 1976 Nuisance Act, which paved the way for similar industryshielding legislation in all other provinces, this book follows the devious evolution of laws that protect barn operators from environmental and public health liabilities, erode citizens' rights to seek relief and compensation through the judicial system, and remove decision-making powers from the communities that will be most affected. The …

Review Of Scats And Tracks Of The Great Plains: A Field Guide To The Signs Of Seventy Wildlife Species. By James C. Halfpenny, Raymond S. Matlack

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Scats and Tracks of the Great Plains provides accounts of the scats, tracks, and other signs of 70 species, including 5 species of amphibians, 5 species of reptiles, 23 bird species, and 37 species of mammals. In some instances, accounts focus on a group of similar species. For example, all snakes are covered in one account. The author limited the book's geographic scope and number of species covered to keep the material manageable and for easy use in the field.

Review Of George Miksch Sutton: Artist, Scientist, And Teacher. By Jerome A. Jackson., Paul A. Johnsgard

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Sutton, an introspective and very private man, sadly destroyed many of his personal papers before he died. His Bird Student: An Autobiography (1980) documents his life only through 1935 and the end of his Cornell days. Jackson's book is especially valuable, therefore, in documenting Sutton's later years, after he had reached his prime both as scholar and artist. Although I thought I personally knew Sutton very well and wrote a small book based on a collection of his paintings of baby birds, I learned much from Jackson's narrative, which details Sutton's World War II experiences, his often frustrating years at …

Review Of The Niobrara: A River Running Through Time. By Paul A. Johnsgard., Fritz L. Knopf

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Paul Johnsgard has authored an exemplary list of books as an ornithologist and natural historian. This volume approaches (may actually be) his 50th. The Niobrara reads as if one is on an auto tour with a premier naturalist who has a trunk full of documented species data. Residents from Harrison to Niobrara will find herein a welcome overview of their own unique natural history.

Review Of Handbook Of Forage And Rangeland Insects. Edited By William O. Lamp, Richard C. Berberet, Leon G. Higley, And Craig R. Baird. Lanham, J. E. Mcpherson

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

This handbook is another in the outstanding series published by the Entomological Society of America, now in cooperation with the American Phytopathological Society. Arranged in four sections-"Forage and Rangeland Production," "Arthropods and Their Management," "Injurious Arthropods," and "Beneficial Organisms"- each of these is divided into clearly delineated subsections, allowing readers easy access to information (along with references) that particularly interests them. The text is accompanied by outstanding color photographs throughout.

"Forage and Rangeland Production" includes a forage production history followed by discussions of North America's important legumes and grasses. Along with detailed tables of both groups' major species and their …

Review Of From Snake Oil To Medicine: Pioneering Public Health. By R. Alton Lee. Westport, Michael H. Fox

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

In this meticulously documented chronicle of Samuel Crumbine's life, Professor R. Alton Lee provokes similarly unsettling images of a physically diminutive giant in the field of public health feted at the Waldorf-Astoria late in life against those of the young medical student from rural Ohio selling Piso's Consumptive Cure on the dusty streets of Dodge City, Kansas, to friends like lawman Bat Masterson. Among pioneers of public health such as Lemuel Shattuck or Jonas Salk, Crumbine is the pioneer in deed as in name, whose life's purpose took hold under the prairie skies of western Kansas.

Review Of Drinking And Sobriety Among The Lakota Sioux. By Beatrice Medicine., Teresa Milbrodt

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Depicting alcohol use among Lakotas as both complex and culturally-specific, Beatrice Medicine's book is an important addition to Native American and Great Plains studies. Medicine emphasizes that to comprehend its social, psychological, and economic dimensions fully, one must understand Lakota customs and two hundred years of history.

Review Of Folsom: New Archaeological Investigations Of A Classic Paleoindian Bison Kill. By David J. Meltzer., Steven R. Holen

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Well written and well researched, Folsom is appropriate for both avocational and professional audiences as well as for general readers with an interest in archaeology. I was especially drawn to the historical aspects of the research and the analysis of old museum collections. The figures and tables are appropriate, and the artifact illustrations in chapter 8 are of high quality. This excellent book should be in every major public library and in the personal library of everyone interested in Paleoindian studies, the early peopling of the Americas, and the history of archaeology. It is destined to become a classic.

Review Of The Geography Of American Poverty: Is There A Need For Place-Based Policies? By Mark D. Partridge And Dan S. Rickman., David J. Peters

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

This book is a comprehensive examination of poverty in the United States from 1969 to 1999. Its three main objectives are to document the uneven distribution of poverty, to explore its underlying demographic and economic determinants, and to offer policy prescriptions for its amelioration. The analysis of rural poverty is likely to be of most interest to readers of Great Plains Research.

The Geography of American Poverty authoritatively documents the trends and determinants of American poverty across both space and time. Its strength is in its quantitative analysis, but what interests poverty researchers may be tedious for nontechnical audiences. Its …

Review Of Drought Adaptation In Cereals Edited By Jean-Marcel Ribaut, Patrick F. Byrne

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing plant biologists this century is developing crop varieties tolerant to drought stress. A warming climate, more extreme weather patterns, and competing demands for limited water supplies will likely combine to increase the frequency and severity of periods of drought, particularly in the Great Plains. Against that backdrop, this volume provides the valuable service of summarizing the state of the art of drought adaptation research involving the world's most important group of crops, the cereals. Editor Jean-Marcel Ribaut of the Generation Challenge Program has enlisted leading authorities on abiotic stress tolerance to author 17 chapters grouped …

Review Of Canada's Wheat King: The Life And Times Of Seager Wheeler. By Jim Shilliday, Merle Massie

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

The writing is fluid and simple, and each chapter, in true literary style, ends with either a commentary or a cliffhanger. The photographs are clear and well chosen, with a good balance of field and family, if perhaps too many of the Isle of Wight, and not enough of the farm where his work took him to fame. There are a few historical stumbles: for example, Shilliday's sketch of the 1885 Riel Rebellion paints it as an Indian uprising, contrary to recent scholarship such as Bill Waiser and Blair Stonechild's Loyal Till Death (1997), which portrays a clear distinction between …

Review Of Tied To The Great Packing Machine: The Midwest And Meatpacking. By Wilson J. Warren, R. Douglas Hurt

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Wilson J. Warren provides important answers to that complex question. In this study, he traces the transformation of the red meat industry across the Midwest from the terminal stockyards in Chicago, Kansas City, and Omaha to plants near small towns, particularly in the Great Plains, where cattle and hogs arrive via trucks rather than railroad cars. Warren emphasizes the packers' shift from buying through commission men at terminal markets to direct buying from farmers at plants located close to feed, water, and cheap labor. He also discusses the technical and marketing innovations that substantially changed the meatpacking industry, beginning about …

Annual Index

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

ANNUAL INDEX

Investigating Psychosocial Well-Being Among Ethnically Diverse Rural Women: Expect The Unexpected, Rochelle L. Dalla, Catherine Huddleston-Casas, Maria León

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

The purpose of this study was to examine patterns of similarity and difference in psychosocial well-being among 42 first-generation, Spanish-speaking Latinas, 23 second-generation, English-speaking Latinas, and 25 English-speaking Caucasian women residing in five unique rural Nebraska communities. Participants completed a series of self-report survey instruments to assess indices of psychosocial health, including: marital satisfaction, marital communication, family communication, social support, and depression. Spanishspeaking Latinas and English-speaking Caucasians evidenced the greatest similarity in patterns of experience. Twenty-eight percent of the total sample (n = 25) scored above the clinical cutoff for depression. Implications and suggestions for future work are discussed.

Historic And Recent Distributions Of Elk In Nebraska, Kent A. Fricke, Michael A. Cover, Scott E. Hygnstrom, Scott R. Groepper, Hugh H. Genoways, Kit M. Hams, Kurt C. Vercauteren

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Elk (Cervus elaphus) were historically found throughout North America but were extirpated from Nebraska and much of the Great Plains in the 1880s due to consumptive uses by settlers, miners, market hunters, and others. Elk began to reappear in Nebraska in the 1950s and 1960s, and established a stable, nonmigratory population that currently consists of seven herds and an estimated 1,400 individuals throughout western and central Nebraska. The reappearance and subsequent persistence of elk in Nebraska suggests there is adequate habitat to support a self-sustaining population. The general movement of elk eastward may lead to an eventual statewide …

Six Centuries Of Fire History At Devils Tower National Monument With Comments On Regionwide Temperature Influence, Michael C. Stambaugh, Richard P. Guyette, Erin R. Mcmurry, Joseph M. Marschall, Gary Willson

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

This study documents over six centuries of historic fire events at Devils Tower National Monument in northeast Wyoming, USA. The 691-year tree-ring chronology is based on 37 ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa C. Lawson) trees collected at the monument. The period of tree-ring record ranged in calendar years from 1312 to 2002 and fire scar dates (n = 129) ranged from 1330 to 1995. The mean fire interval (MFI) for the entire record was 24.6 years, and intervals for individual trees ranged from 4 to 119 years. A period of increased fire frequency (MFI = 5.7 years) occurred from about …

Great Plains Research: A Journal Of Natural And Social Sciences, Volume 18, Number 2 (2008): Table Of Contents

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Stated Preferences for Ecotourism Alternatives on Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation (Robert R. Hearne and Sheldon Tuscherer) ......... 131

Investigating Psychosocial Well-Being among Ethnically Diverse Rural Women: Expect the Unexpected (Rochelle L. Dalla, Catherine A. Huddleston-Casas, and Maria León) ........ 143

Moving to the Rural Great Plains: Point of Origin Differences in the Decision-Making Process (Randy Cantrell, Cheryl Burkhart-Kriesel, Bruce Johnson, Charlotte Narjes, and Rebecca Vogt) ........ 155

Producer Responses to Carbon Sequestration Incentives in the Northern Great Plains (Dean A. Bangsund and F. Larry Leistritz) ........ 165

Natural Sciences

Six Centuries of Fire History at Devils Tower …

Book Review: Invasive Plants: A Guide To Identification, Impacts, And Control Of Common North American Species By Sylvan Ramsey Kaufman And Wallace Kaufman, Craig R. Allen, Aaron L. Alai, A. C. Kessler, T. Kinsell, A. L. Major, K. Nemec, B. J. Stephen

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

The authors place the invasive species problem in context prior to providing species descriptions. The first three chapters offer background information on how invasive species become established, their impacts, and an overview of approaches to controlling problem species. The fourth chapter consists of a general key for identifying and locating unknown plant species. The majority of the field guide consists of profiles of individual species, including information on taxonomy, identifying characteristics, habitat, geographical range, ecological effects, introduction pathway, management strategies, and additional references. Most species are accompanied by at least two color photos, including a full view and a closeup, …

Book Review: Managing Biodiversity In Agricultural Ecosystems Edited By D.I. Jarvis, C. Padoch, And H.D. Cooper, Richard K. Baydack

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Managing Biodiversity in Agricultural Ecosystems is a series of 18 edited contributions that investigate a vast body of material relating to the broad category of "agricultural biodiversity." This subject is of increasing importance across the Great Plains of North America as we strive to ensure that our planet is able to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the abilities of future generations to meet theirs. As such, the editors have sequenced and categorized the contributions so as to ensure that treatment of a wide range of topics- crop genetic resources; livestock genetic resources; aquatic biodiversity; pollinator diversity; …

Book Review: Slipping Backward: A History Of The Nebraska Supreme Court By James W. Hewitt., Cloyd Clark

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

James W. Hewitt answers that question and many more in his history of the Nebraska Supreme Court, Slipping Backward, which covers the court and its judges from 1938 through 1995. It is the first history of the Nebraska Supreme Court and the first book-length study of a Great Plains supreme court. Hewitt approached his task by reading each of the 14,335 cases decided by the Nebraska Supreme Court during those years, then artfully organizing his history around four Chief Justices of the court: Robert G. Simmons (1938-63), Paul W. White (1963-78), Norman Krivosha (1978-87), and William C. Hastings (1987-95). This …

Book Review: Patriots, Politics, And The Oklahoma City Bombing By Stuart A. Wright, Lane Crothers

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Stuart A. Wright offers an interesting account of the rise of the Patriot movement in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Employing insights from social movement theory, he argues that Patriots-that group of Americans who regularly advocated and practiced armed resistance to government authorities in the 1980s and 1990s-emerged at the intersection of the Cold War, race politics of the 1960s, and the farm crisis and the rise of white supremacist groups in the 1980s. Thus, the horror of Timothy McVeigh's destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, was not the …

Book Review: Reclaiming Assessment: A Better Alternative To The Accountability Agenda By Chris W. Gallagher, Mary E. Diez

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Chris Gallagher's description of Nebraska's Schoolbased, Teacher-led Assessment and Reporting System (STARS) is a very thoughtful participant-observer account of the state's unique response to the call for accountability in the No Child Left Behind legislation. As a researcher charged with supporting and evaluating the STARS effort, Gallagher outlines principles that have guided the STARS process, including local control, teacher leadership, professional development, community engagement, and student engagement in meaningful classroom assessment. But it is his use of narrative "portraits of practice" that gives a sense of what this Nebraska effort really means for stakeholders, from students and teachers to administrators …

Book Review: The Flora Of Nebraska: Keys, Descriptions, And Distribntional Maps Of All Native And Introduced Species That Grow Outside Cultivation: With Observations About Their Past, Present, And Future Status By Robert B. Kaul, David Sutherland, And Steven Rolfsmeier, James R. Estes

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Floras are guides for the identification of the plants of a specific region-in this case, the Cornhusker State. A flora is best judged after seasons of using it for field identification, several semesters teaching the identification of plants using its keys and descriptions, or over the years as a close companion faithfully beside your dissecting scope in the herbarium. Alas, I was denied the luxury of decades, and this review was undertaken in the dead of winter, miles south of Nebraska, and out of reach of a herbarium. Even so, it is abundantly clear that in a few years The …

Book Review: Aryan Cowboys: White Supremacists And The Search For A New Frontier, 1970-2000 By Evelyn A. Schlatter, Mark S. Hamm

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Drawing from diverse sources-historical, journalistic, the Internet, and interviews with several imprisoned members of the Order-Schlatter offers a panoramic view of the American white supremacy movement. In many ways, this movement is emblematic of late modernity's defining trait: a world always in flux, awash in marginality and exclusion. Schlatter argues that the eccentric beliefs of white supremacy groups are sewn together from the threads of previous movements. The Klan of the 1920s and William Dudley Pelly's Silver Shirts of the German Nazi era are threaded to the millennialism of Aryan Nations, the Posse Comitatus, and Timothy McVeigh through Protestant agrarianism …

Book Review: Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, And Struggle In Winnipeg By Esyllt W. Jones, Mark Osborne Humphries

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Jone's argument is convincing, even if the book relies a little too heavily on newspaper accounts. On the other hand, the author makes use of the unmined files of the Manitoba Mothers' Allowance and the Winnipeg Children's Home to catch a rare and fleeting glimpse of familial life during the pandemic.

On the whole, Influenza 1918 is a stylistically mature, well-documented, and engaging book that delivers cogent and insightful analysis on a timely topic. It is the new standard for studies of the flu and epidemics in Canada and will serve as an excellent model for some time to come.

Book Review: Zhorna: Material Culture Of The Ukrainian Pioneers By Roman Paul Fodchuk, Svitlana P. Kukharenko

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

For Roman Paul Fodchuk the zhorna, or stone quem mills, symbolically represent the hardships early Ukrainian pioneers in Alberta experienced and successfully overcame while adapting to their new life. The book covers a broad range of the material culture topics-from pioneers' clothing and house utensils to house building and agricultural technology. Throughout its six chapters, the author presents the pioneers' chronological "becoming" through the lenses of material culture objects, both those brought with them at the end ofthe 19th century and also objects made in Canada.