Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Forging An American Identity: The Art Of William Ranney: With A Catalogue Of His Works. By Linda Bantel And Peter H. Hassrick, Kenneth Haltman

Great Plains Quarterly

Since the appearance of Francis S. Grubar's William Ranney, Painter of the Early West, a catalogue raisonne published to accompany the artist's 1962 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Ranney's reputation has revolved around the thirty-odd images of western trappers, hunters, and pioneers he worked up in New York {and later in an impressive two-story studio he kept across the river in West Hoboken} during the 1840s and early 1850s, at least in part from sketches dating to the time of his enlistment as a soldier in the Texan war for independence more than a decade earlier. The …

Review Of The Force Of Vocation, By Adele Wiseman, Leslie Ianno

Great Plains Quarterly

Adele Wiseman's literary career began with the publication of her acclaimed first novel, The Sacrifice, in 1956. Public success and scholarly praise of the novel were followed by the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. Though Wiseman continued to write plays, fiction, memoirs, and essays throughout her career, she never again enjoyed the success of her earliest novel. In The Force of Vocation, the first booklength study of Wiseman's work, Ruth Panofsky attempts to account for the rise and fall of this Jewish Canadian woman of letters.

Responding to the lack of attention to the publishing side of …

Review Of War Dance At Fort Marion: Plains Indian War Prisoners. By Brad D. Lookingbill, Michael Jordan

Great Plains Quarterly

Fort Marion in San Augustine, Florida, 'may seem far removed from the Great Plains, but as Brad Lookingbill ably demonstrates the events that transpired there between 1875 and 1878 form an important chapter in the history of several Plains Indian communities. In April 1875, thirty-three Cheyenne, twenty-seven Kiowa, nine Comanche, two Arapaho, and one Caddo prisoners departed Fort Sill, Indian Territory, destined for imprisonment in Florida. Captain Richard Henry Pratt, a staunch proponent of forced Indian assimilation, was placed in charge of them. At Fort Marion he implemented a regimen designed to erase any vestiges of the prisoners' Indian identities …

Table Of Contents- Winter 2008

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 28 / Number 1 / Winter 2008

THE PAGEANT OF PAHA SAPA: AN ORIGIN MYTH OF WHITE SETTLEMENT IN THE AMERICAN WEST

U.S. INDIAN POLICY, 1865-1890: AS ILLUMINATED THROUGH THE LIVES OF CHARLES A. EASTMAN AND ELAINE GOODALE EASTMAN

NAMING A PLACE NICODEMUS

REVIEW ESSAY: THE PERSISTENCE OF POPULAR MEMORY: THE CINEMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of "Injuns!": Native Americans In The Movies By Edward Buscombe Killing The Indian Maiden: Images Of Native American Women In Film. By M. Elise Marubbio, S. Elizabeth Bird

Great Plains Quarterly

THE PERSISTENCE OF POPULAR MEMORY: THE CINEMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

These two books, while having significant subject matter in common, are very different in style. Buscombe's small volume serves as an effective review of much that has already been written about cinematic representation of "Injuns," offering some useful new interpretations, but apparently not primarily with a scholarly audience in mind. Marubbio's book is very much a specialized work of scholarship, with a much narrower focus, being essentially the first full-length treatment of the cinematic representation of Native American women.

Buscombe is known for his works in film criticism, …

Review Of Texas Women On The Cattle Trails. Edited By Sara R. Massey, Judy Alter

Great Plains Quarterly

It's been almost twenty years since Patricia Limerick debunked myths of the Old West and forced us to look at the role of women, Native Americans, and minorities in the American West. But if the new history brought women to prominence, it was as stoic homemakers in difficult, almost impossible circumstances. We see them walking patiently beside wagon trains, collecting buffalo chips for fuel, hoeing rock-hard ground for a vegetable garden, but never on cattle drives, never on horseback. Men-Anglo men-drove those cattle north. This book demonstrates that many women in the Great Plains, specifically Texas, did indeed work and …

Review Of Fire In The Water, Earth In The Air: Legends Of West Texas Music By Christopher J. Oglesby, Kent Blaser

Great Plains Quarterly

From Bob Wills, Buddy Holly, and Waylon Jennings to Stevie Ray Vaughn, Joe Ely, and Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks, Lubbock and its greater West Texas environs have been home to an unusually eclectic and creative musical community. Defining precisely what constitutes West Texas music is difficult, and diversity and variety often overshadow common features, but a West Texas "sound," blending elements of country, western, blues, early rock and roll, and folk and roots traditions into an identifiable if multifaceted genre, is widely accepted. The list of music "legends" associated with this region is indeed long and impressive and …

Review Of Cather Studies 6: History, Memory, And War Edited By Steven Trout, Margaret Doane

Great Plains Quarterly

Steven Trout's engrossing History, Memory, and War, volume 6 of the acclaimed Cather Studies series, is a collection of essays showing how pervasively war appears in Cather's works: the "sheer number of armed conflicts evoked in her fiction is perhaps unprecedented in American literature." Trout's wide-ranging volume shows "the ubiquity of armed conflict . . . as a major theme or as a background feature in Cather's writing" as well as showing that she personally "thought of war on a regular basis."

The collection includes essays by fourteen Cather scholars and moves from the Civil War through World War …

Review Of Jane Gilmore Rushing: A West Texas Writer And Her Work By Lou Halsell Rodenberger, Tom Pilkington

Great Plains Quarterly

In her career as critic and scholar, Lou Rodenberger has made a significant contribution to the study of Texas literature. Texas Women Writers: A Tradition of Their Own (1997), which she co-edited with Sylvia Grider, is in particular a readable and extremely useful literary history. Rodenberger's new book, Jane Gilmore Rushing, offers a full-scale biography and critical assessment of one of the most important Texas women writers of the twentieth century.

Rushing's engaging memoir, Starting from Pyron (1992), supplies much of what we know about the author's beginnings. Jane Gilmore was born in 1925 and grew up in the …

Review Of 900 Miles From Nowhere: Voices From The Homestead Frontier. By Steven R. Kinsella, Thomas Isern

Great Plains Quarterly

Steven R. Kinsella's work is an uneasy admixture. On the one hand it is fresh, because it goes to the grassroots, sampling the writings of settlers up and down the Plains. On the other it's stale, stereotypical. The documents, stirring as individual pieces, are arranged into categories and schema as predictable as they are questionable.

Plains pioneers were, the title says, 900 miles from nowhere. They were "sturdy and determined people" who battled a "harsh, inhospitable landscape," a place of "loneliness and homesickness." The "constant roar" of the wind "drove some settlers mad" on a day-today basis, while the "troublesome …

Review Of In The Days Of Our Grandmothers: A Reader In Aboriginal Women's History In Canada Edited By Mary-Ellen Keim And Lorna Townsend, Gillian Poulter

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection of articles published since the early 1990s makes a welcome contribution to the range of texts available for both Native Studies and Women's Studies courses at the upper and graduate leveL In an excellent short introductory essay, Mary-Ellen KeIrn and Lorna Townsend provide a useful historiographic context for the collection and explain their desire to bring Aboriginal women "out of the shadows" by choosing essays that reflect contemporary scholarship and illustrate the diversity of Aboriginal women's histories. They take contributor Jean Barman at her word in turning the past on its head and making Aboriginal women rather than …

Review Of Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora In Indian Country Edited By Tiya Miles And Sharon P. Holland, Susan Stebbins

Great Plains Quarterly

This edited volume grew out of presentations made at the '''Eating Out of the Same Pot': Relating Black and Native (Hi)stories" conference held at Dartmouth in 1998, which examined the intersecting histories of American Indians and African Americans.

The collection includes fifteen essays, with an afterword by Robert Warrior, who reflects both on the essays and the '''Eating Out of the Same Pot'" conference. The introduction, co-edited by Miles and Holland, nicely summarizes some of the issues that gave rise to the Dartmouth conference and the essay collection. Cultural artifacts such as "doing things in an Indian way" may be …

U.S. Indian Policy, 1865-1890 As Illuminated Through The Lives Of Charles A. Eastman And Elaine Goodale Eastman, Gretchen Cassel Eick

Great Plains Quarterly

Rapid change, passionate convictions, acute regional differences, ethnic conflict, and an army looking for a mission characterized the United States from 1865 to 1890. The Civil War was over and most of the soldiers had mustered out and gone home. The others were assigned either to the South to oversee reconstruction or, the larger number of them, to the area between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains-the Great Plains. The U.S. Army's new mission was to "pacify" the Great Plains, to protect the thousands of migrants enticed there by Congress's offer through the Homestead Act of 160 acres-free, contingent upon …

Naming A Place Nicodemus, Rosamond C. Rodman

Great Plains Quarterly

Nicodemus, one of the first all-black settlements in Kansas, and the sole remaining western town founded by and for African Americans at the end of Reconstruction, has received a good deal of scholarly attention. Yet one basic matter about it remains unclear: how the town came by its unusual name. Most scholars now think that the name of the town derives from a legendary slave rather than the biblical character.

This essay challenges that consensus, contending the name Nicodemus indeed refers to the biblical character, and in doing so exemplifies the way that the dominated disguise their speech, making it …