Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Prairie University: A History Of The University Of Nebraska By Robert E. Knoll, Paul F. Sharp

Great Plains Quarterly

Institutional histories are often dull and lifeless- but not this one. From its preface to its final chapter celebrating the university's 125th year, this impressive history of the University of Nebraska entertains with colorful vignettes of its facuity, staff, and administrative leaders. With candor, curmudgeons are called curmudgeons, the less than able are identified, and the irascible remain irascible in the story's able telling.

Students of higher education will find this a rich study. Nebraska alumni will respond to its anecdotes with vivid memories, and many readers will enjoy the lively, sometimes opinionated analyses. All will find it a detailed …

Review Of Lone Wolf V. Hitchcock: Treaty Rights And Indian Law At The End Of The Nineteenth Century By Blue Clark, Ramona Skinner

Great Plains Quarterly

Clark's unique approach in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock allows him to go beyond the initial examination oflegal precedent to reveal a story of human dignity and a people's survival. The book presents an authoritative account of Kiowa band chief Lone Wolf's relentless attempts, through various legal channels, to halt the selection and assignment of his own allotment. In the end, he joined the Elk Creek Baptist church and lived on his allotment with his family. What Lone Wolf and his tribe hoped to gain from the lawsuit, how the Court bestowed on Congress unlimited power over Indian affairs, and the …

Review Of We Are A People In This World: The Lakota Sioux And The Massacre At Wounded Knee By Conger Beasley, Jr, Joe Starita

Great Plains Quarterly

To tell the group's story, Beasley has employed a kind of literary double helix-juxtaposing chapters which alternately flash back to summarize the massacre of 1890, then flash forward to chronicle the memorial ride of 1990. Occasionally tedious, the device fulfills one vital function: it provides a superb context while poignantly illuminating similarities between two events separated by a century. Beasley, a poet, is often at his best describing the almost unimaginable cold (temperatures of 40 below, wind chills approaching 80 below) endured by the group.

Review Of Roadside History Of South Dakota By Linda Hasselstrom, Charles Vollan

Great Plains Quarterly

A decidedly non-traditional history, the work is organized into a series of short essays arranged geographically. Hasselstrom first details the history of a region, from before human occupation to the present, noting its general characteristics and its social and political tendencies. She does the same for each town and its local celebrities, successfully balancing a love of the past with an appreciation of the present. She does not limit herself to the South Dakota of the last half of the nineteenth century, but reaches for the entirety of the region's past, from Paleo-Indians to contemporary ranchers. What results is an …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

VISITING SCHOLARS PROGRAM

CALLS FOR PAPERS

Review Essay:The Way West Written And Directed By Ric Burns, Martin Blythe, Mia Graeffe, Sanna Heinsalo, Ossi Heinänen, Ari Helo, Kari Hirvinen, Piia Kiviniemi, Vello Ruus, John Wright, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly

The Way West, scripted and directed by Ric Burns, is advertised as the story of United States expansion into the American West from 1845 to 1893. Burns sets the series' temporal boundaries arbitrarily from a New York editor's first use of the term "manifest destiny" in 1845 to Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 address on the significance of the frontier and his announcement of its close. The documentary's episodes actually focus on the struggle for control of the Great Plains, pitting the U.S. Army against the Sioux nation and its allies. Largely forsaking the challenge of providing a sure overview of …

Review Of Nebraska: An Illustrated History By Frederick C. Luebke, Michael W. Schuyler

Great Plains Quarterly

Masterfully highlighting the contribution that individuals such as William Jennings Bryan, George Norris, and Norbert Tiemann have made to the state, Luebke is able at the same time to relate Nebraska's history to national and international developments. He also provides a sure account of the state's history during the past fifty years. The concluding essay, "Change in Contemporary Nebraska, 1970-1995," is especially helpful in understanding recent changes in population trends, agriculture, the economy, and Nebraska's relationship to the rest of the world. With the assistance of the staff of the Nebraska State Historical Society, to whom the book is dedicated, …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIUM

IN MEMORIAM (Erwin H. Goldenstein)

CALLS FOR PAPERS

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ASSOCIATIONS

RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS

"With One Mighty Pull" Interracial Town Boosting In Nicodemus, Kansas, Claire O'Brien

Great Plains Quarterly

One steamy July day in 1887, a young American of African descent named H. R. Cayton arrived in the little northwestern Kansas town of Nicodemus in Graham County. He had traveled from Wyandotte to try his luck in the real estate and loan business, for he had heard that Nicodemus, a town founded by former slaves a decade earlier, was the place to be for an ambitious young black man like himself. Cayton's arrival was enthusiastically noted by one of the town's two newspapers, the Western Cyclone: "Mr. C. is a promising young man and has got 'git up …

African Americans And The Great Plains An Introduction, Keith D. Parker

Great Plains Quarterly

During 23-25 February 1995 the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln sponsored its nineteenth annual interdisciplinary symposium, "African Americans and the Great Plains." The conference, attended by more than 300 people from throughout the United States and Canada, sought to highlight African Americans' role in Great Plains culture by looking at their contributions in various areas such as agriculture, anthropology, archeology, art, biology, dance, education, history, literature, medicine, music, photography, religion, sports, theater, and urban studies. The four papers in this issue of the Great Plains Quarterly were selected to illuminate the diversity of roles …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE GREAT PLAINS: AN INTRODUCTION (Keith D. Parker)

THE GREAT PLAINS SIT-IN MOVEMENT, 1958-60 (Ronald Walters)

PRELUDE TO BROWNSVILLE: THE TWENTY-FIFTH INFANTRY AT FORT NIOBRARA, NEBRASKA, 1902-06 (Thomas R. Buecker)

FROMPIN' IN THE GREAT PLAINS: LISTENING AND DANCING TO THE JAZZ ORCHESTRAS OF ALPHONSO TRENT, 1925-44 (Marc Rice)

"WITH ONE MIGHTY PULL": INTERRACIAL TOWN BOOSTING IN NICODEMUS, KANSAS (Claire O'Brien)

BOOK REVIEWS

Talking Up a Storm: Voices of the New West

Girl on a Pony

Tough Daisies: Kansas Humor from "The Lane County Bachelor" to Bob Dole

Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas

Indians and the …

The Great Plains Sit-In Movement, 1958-60, Ronald Walters

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1960, black youths conducted a "sit-in" in Greensboro, North Carolina to obtain the right to eat at a segregated lunch counter. Others quickly replicated sit-ins throughout the South and, just as quickly, the press labeled Greensboro the "first" sit-in. Historian David Levering Lewis, for instance, said: "There were not a few white southerners, and probably a majority of white northerners, who would have wished to say to the first sit-in students, as did the woman in the Greensboro Woolworth's, 'you should have done this ten years ago.'" Even data-oriented social scientists such as Doug McAdams portray the sit-ins as …

Review Of Girl On A Pony By La Verne Hanners, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly

This small book is written in a straightforward, unassuming, conversational style with the result that it's deceptively simple, seeming at first to be just another reminiscence of pioneer days, although in a somewhat unusual place. It's the story of La Verne Hanners's childhood and young womanhood in the Valley of the Dry Cimarron of New Mexico, only a few miles from the border of the Oklahoma Panhandle and just south of the Colorado border. Here is a landscape of grandeur, of severe drought, of sudden, fierce hail and wind and snow storms, of walls of water unexpectedly racing down dry …

Review Of Catch Rope: The Long Arm Of The Cowboy: The History And Evolution Of Ranch Roping By John R. Erickson, Michael C. Coleman

Great Plains Quarterly

Erickson sets his account in the literature of cowboys and roping and supplies a short but useful annotated bibliography. There is nothing here of the "New Western History," however, and little about socio-economic conditions, gender issues, Indians, or African American cowboys. Sharply focused on catch roping, the book nevertheless communicates well the tribulations and satisfactions of life on the range. The many quotations and paraphrases of stories by fellow cowboys give Catch Rope its evocative sense of camaraderie: we feel like we're sitting around a campfire with the author and his friends. And it is a good feeling.

Review Of Talking Up A Storm: Voices Of The New West By Gregory L. Morris, Gerald Shapiro

Great Plains Quarterly

Morris's subjects include a handful of very well-known writers: Amy Tan, Thomas McGuane, Ron Hansen, and Richard Ford, winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize. Mixed in with these are interviews with lesser known western writers such as James Crumley, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Mary Clearman Blew, and Ralph Beer. For readers interested in Western literature, an especially useful feature of Talking Up a Storm is the bibliography following each interview. As with any collection like this one, a reader is likely to be left with some questions: Why is this author included but that one left out? Why is the West seemingly …

Review Of Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns Of Kansas By Daniel C. Fitzgerald, James R. Shortridge

Great Plains Quarterly

The Kansas State Historical Society maintains a file on about six thousand failed towns in the state, a figure large almost beyond comprehension in this modern age of one town per county. Dan Fitzgerald helps to put urban development in proper perspective by offering thumb-nail sketches of one hundred and six of these nearly forgotten communities. It is history from the grass roots, well done, and written in an unpretentious style that should appeal to scholarly and general audiences alike. The sketches range in length from one to seven pages, usually accompanied by an old photograph or plat map, and …

Sacramental Language Ritual In The Poetry Of Louise Erdrich, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly

As an intensely personal genre, poetry intimately reveals Louise Erdrich's voice as her well-known fiction does not. Evident in that voice are elements of the mosaic of cultural experiences that comprise Erdrich's life: Catholicism, German ancestry, working class, university education, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa. Erdrich's poetry is her first published work, her own writing without the collaborative effort and editing of her husband, Michael Dorris (Modoc). While some of Erdrich's poems garner their cultural rhetoric from differing points of view and values, most exhibit the variety of experiences that result from marginalization inherent in the omnipresence of race in North …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

REVIEW ESSAYS

CALLS FOR PAPERS

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

SACRAMENTAL LANGUAGE: RITUAL IN THE POETRY OF LOUISE ERDRICH (P. Jane Hafen)

THE FRONTIER MEDICAL COMMUNITY OF LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS (Charles R. King)

WILLIAM McKINLEY HOLT AND THE INDIAN CLAIMS COMMISSION (Francis Moul)

THE MISSOURI RIVER BASIN ON THE 1795 SOULARD MAP: A CARTOGRAPHIC LANDMARK (W. Raymond Wood)

REVIEW ESSAYS

Stephan E. Ambrose. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (John L. Allen; Clara Sue Kidwell; Donald Worster)

BOOK REVIEWS

The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains

The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt and Other Blackfoot Stories

Stephen Long and American Frontier …

Review Essay: Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, And The Opening Of The American West By Stephen E. Ambrose, John L. Allen

Great Plains Quarterly

From time to time, a serious book excites the imaginations of a vaster public than the audience of scholarly journals. Because the Center for Great Plains Studies has, over the past sixteen years, sponsored the reediting and publication of The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, we could not help but notice the enormous popular success of Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. To provide a focus on some of the scholarly concerns raised by this new text, we invited three prominent scholars to review the book from …

Review Essay: Native American Studies, Clara Sue Kidwell

Great Plains Quarterly

Being asked to review a book from a Native American perspective raises a basic question about the peer review process for academic journals. What constitutes historical objectivity in the review? Will a review identified as representing a particular perspective be received in the same way as a review by a historian who writes about American history?

Given that very few Indian voices are recorded in the journals that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark kept during their epic western explorations, and that Ambrose can record only snatches of their thoughts, we cannot recover fully the many different ways that people of …

Review Of O Little Town: Remembering Life In A Prairie Village By Harlo L. Jones, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly

O Little Town is competently written in clear, concise prose which, despite some masterful description, on the whole doesn't quite reach the level of art. All of this makes for many of us a pleasant, undemanding read, but for others-historians, people of the future, and those who remember with fondness and nostalgia their childhoods in small town North America of the first half of this century-it is something much more: a valuable document of a-by this rendering, anyway-sweeter time, forever lost.

Review Of The Amazing Death Of Calf Shirt And Other Blackfoot Stories By Hugh A. Dempsey, Gregory R. Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly

Every Native American society has elders who recount the traditions of their people. Some of these traditions are purely religious in nature, explaining their universe and their place in it. Other oral traditions often impart life's lessons, providing a cultural road map for living in a particular society. Still other accounts concern historical events involving prominent men and women. These traditions provide each member of a society with a sense of his or her own collective history and cultural identity. The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt and Other Blackfoot Stories is such a collection of historical accounts, a compilation of …

Review Of Soul In The Stone: Cemetery Art From America's Heartland By John Gary Brown, Robert Duncan

Great Plains Quarterly

John Gary Brown, a professional photographer from Lawrence, Kansas, has collected over a period of time a variety of unique photographs documenting examples of cemetery art found in the central states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico. The author, through his photographs and to some degree his text, illustrates the rich mixture of personal efforts that stone sculptors and vernacular artists have developed in this special art form. While cemetery art is public, the photographs Brown presents, through his use of a multiplicity of artistic images, often suggest particularly private stories. Brown begins …

Review Of An Indian In White America By Mark Monroe, David Murray

Great Plains Quarterly

Mark Monroe's autobiography, edited from his tape-recorded memories by Carolyn Reyer, joins a sizable body of Indian autobiographies resulting from a collaboration between white editors and Indian narrators. Where earlier accounts often catered to white fascination with traditional Indian life, the title here indicates different concerns. After a traditional childhood in North Dakota, Monroe moves ro Alliance, Nebraska, where he experiences small town racial prejudice. Unable to find work, he enlists and is wounded in Korea. Initially successful as a baker when he returns, he drifts into a gruelingly portrayed alcohol addiction, which wrecks many years of his life. On …

Review OfLinoleum, Better Babies, And The Modern Farm Woman, 1890-1930 By Marilyn Irvin Holt, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

Great Plains Quarterly

Marilyn Irvin Holt describes Linoleum, Better Babies, and the Modern Farm Woman, 1890- 1930 as a study of "the domestic economy movement and the rural women it targeted." Focusing on the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, she examines the many ways in which reformers worked to improve life on American farms through education and uplift programs for American farm women and their children. These efforts included the establishment of home extension programs, home economics education, and 4-H programs, among others. Their goals were the physical improvement of the farm home and the farm child, with the intent of keeping …

Review Of Critical Spaces: Margaret Laurence And Janet Frame By Lorna M. Irvine, Robert L. Ross

Great Plains Quarterly

In Critical Spaces, Lorna M. Irvine presents a complex body of material in clear prose and organizes that material in an accessible manner. Irvine not only examines the critical reaction to the fiction of Canadian Margaret Laurence and New Zealander Janet Frame but also reflects on the ways the writers' work and the response to it mirror the growing nationalism in the two countries.

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIUM

FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD (Frederick C. Luebke)

CALL FOR PAPERS

IN MEMORIAM (James Sinclair Ross)

Marl Sandoz's Portrait Of An Artist's Youth Robert Henri's Nebraska Years, Helen Winter Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly

Robert Henri's life story would have appealed to Mari Sandoz even if he were not an important early twentieth-century American artist. Robert Henri (born Robert Henry Cozad) came from a time, a place, and a family that at first glance seem unlikely to have produced an avant garde painter of landscapes, cityscapes, and portraits; it was the sort of paradox Sandoz liked to explore. That Henri had spent much of his youth in her native Nebraska in a family headed by a magnetic and dominating man not unlike her own father also interested her. That the family left Nebraska in …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

AN INTRODUCTION (Barbara Rippey; John R. Wunder)

"SHE DOES NOT WRITE LIKE A HISTORIAN": MARl SANDOZ AND THE OLD AND NEW WESTERN HISTORY (Betsy Downey)

MARl SANDOZ'S SLOGUM HOUSE: GREED AS WOMAN (Glenda Riley)

RECASTING EPIC TRADITION: THE DISPOSSESSED AS HERO IN SANDOZ'S CRAZY HORSE AND CHEYENNE AUTUMN (Lisa R. Lindell)

MARl SANDOZ'S PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST'S YOUTH: ROBERT HENRI'S NEBRASKA YEARS (Helen Winter Stauffer)

BOOK REVIEWS

Prairie University: A History of the University of Nebraska

Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas

Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains: Years of Readjustment , 1920,1990

Lakol Wokiksuye: …