Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of The Painted Valley: Artists Along Alberta's Bow River, 1845-2000, By Christopher Armstrong And H. V. Nelles, Mary-Beth Laviolette

Great Plains Quarterly

As books about art go, The Painted Valley is an unusual undertaking because neither Christopher Armstrong nor H. V. Nelles is a specialist in the field of Canadian art. Both emeritus professors at Toronto's York University, they are environmental historians who, in the process of researching a book about southern Alberta's 600-kilometer-Iong Bow River, "stumbled" upon a "cache of pictures" inspired by that stony ribbon of blue: paintings, photographs, and works on paper found largely in the collections of Calgary's Glenbow Museum, Banff's Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, and the Edmontonbased Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

The contents of …

Review Of Pat Green's Dance Halls & Dreamers , By Luke Gilliam, Cory Lock

Great Plains Quarterly

In Texas, music and dancing are inseparable. Whether country, blues, Tejano, or zydeco, most Texas music is crafted specifically for active audience participation. Dance halls have been the cornerstones of many Texas communities; thus it is not surprising that two recent books, Pat Green's Dance Halls & Dreamers and Texas Dance Halls: A Two-Step Circuit, examine these cultural institutions. Both works investigate how personal and community histories unfold across the dance floor and celebrate the individual owners, musicians, and patrons who distinctly mark each hall.

As the title suggests, country musician Pat Green conceptualized Pat Green's Dance Halls & Dreamers, …

Review Of The Cherokee Nation And The Trail Of Tears. By Theda Perdue And Michael D. Green, Rowena Mcclinton

Great Plains Quarterly

Past chief of the Cherokee Nation (1985- 1995) and social activist Wilma Mankiller remarked, "We are still here." Facing rampant racism, a fraudulent treaty, and then dislocation from their homelands in the southeast, Cherokees not only survived but prevailed. Reflectively, Theda Perdue and Michael Green have summarized the complexity and cunning complicity surrounding the 1838-39 infamous Cherokee displacement known as the Trail of Tears, adding to the scholarship of Tim Garrison, Gary Moulton, Walter Conser, Mary Young, and the late William G. McLoughlin.

They juxtapose the remarkable lives of two adversarial Cherokee figures, Major Ridge (along with his son John …

Review Of Violence, The Arts, And Willa Cather. Edited By Joseph R. Urgo And Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Karsten H. Piep

Great Plains Quarterly

This compilation of twenty-three essays proves that contemporary scholarship has moved beyond trite debates about Cather's alleged propensity to romanticize violence. Accordingly, the volume's editors have assembled a series of nuanced readings that reconsider Willa Cather's artistic uses of violence as well as her appropriations of various art forms before the backdrop of World War I, modernist aesthetics, Nativism, and 1920s feminism. Approaching their subject through the lenses of biographical, historical, aesthetic, psychoanalytical, and gender criticism, the contributors paint Cather as a sometimes generous, sometimes severe critic of American culture, whose insistence on the inescapability of violence is attended by …

Review Of William F. Cody's Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows. By Robert E. Bonner, Jack R. Preston

Great Plains Quarterly

Robert Bonner's book provides wonderful insight into Cody's promotional activities outside of Madison Square Garden. The tale of his sponsorship of the Shoshone irrigation projects and the formation of the town of Cody aptly illustrates that even in the business world William Cody was still the showman promoter.

The book is very well documented, based on an abundance of correspondence found in the files of the participants of the Shoshone project. It tells how Cody, always the man in charge, badgered, cajoled, and saw things through rose-colored glasses. He used his power and "vision" on his friends and business associates …

Review Of Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, The Battle To Save The Buffalo, And The Birth Of The New West. By Michael Punke., Phillip Drennon Thomas

Great Plains Quarterly

Although the decline of the American bison is an often-told story, Michael Punke's meticulously researched work provides an engaging and careful delineation of George Bird Grinnell's singular role in marshaling the resources and support that led to the preservation and protection of the buffalo. -It's a story with many chapters, including the hunting and near extermination of the buffalo by hide hunters after the Civil War; the experiences of Grinnell in the lands beyond the Mississippi beginning in 1870 and his evolving interest in the region's wildlife and natural history; the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and the …

Review Of The Seminole Freedmen: A History. By Kevin Mulroy, Murray Wickett

Great Plains Quarterly

One is dumbstruck, upon completing Kevin Mulroy's The Seminole Freedmen: A History that it took more than thirty years after the publication of Daniel Littlefield's Africans and Seminoles: From Removal to Emancipation to bring new light to this fascinating saga of race in the Great Plains region. Mulroy's book is sure to become the definitive account of the Seminole Freedmen experience, and his interpretation challenges long- held myths concerning black,. Indian relations in the American West.

Mulroy portrays a society in which Seminole Freedmen enjoyed far greater privileges than blacks in other regions of the United States. They were able …

Open To Horror The Great Plains Situation In Contemporary Thrillers By E. E. Knight And By Douglas Preston And Lincoln Child, A. B. Emrys

Great Plains Quarterly

From the agoraphobic prairie where the father of Willa Cather's Antonia kills himself, to the claustrophobic North Dakota town of Argus devastated by storm in Louise Erdrich's "Fleur," to Lightning Flat, the grim home of Jack Twist in Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," much Great Plains literature is situational, placing human drama in the context of historicalor contemporary setting. Isolation, fierce weather, and inherent pressures on survival remain primary, and the Plains is a character in itself that appears as a presence, whether foregrounded or ghostly, in works that cannot help but evoke the Great Plains then and now. The Plains' …

Review Of A Terrible Glory: Custer And The Little Bighorn-The Last Great Battle Of The American West By James Donovan; The Day The World Ended At Little Bighorn: A Lakota History By Joseph M. Marshall; Custerology: The Enduring Legacy Of The Indian Wars And George Armstrong Custer By Michael A. Elliott, Robert W. Larson

Great Plains Quarterly

During the last few years a number of books on the Indian wars fought in the upper Great Plains have been published. The three under review here are among the best. Donovan's A Terrible Glory, the most ambitious, is a study of epic proportions involving the life of George Armstrong Custer and his military career, starting with his rather humble birth in Ohio and ending with his death at the Little Bighorn. Donovan does more than just focus on Custer and his tumultuous years with the U.S. Army, however. His first chapter, for instance, deals with the long and …

Death, Murder, And Mayhem Stories Of Violence And Healing On The Plains, Susan Naramore Maher

Great Plains Quarterly

12,000,000 years afo: On the grassy plains of what is now northeast Nebraska, the ordinary circumstances of life buckled under the sudden, steady fall of volcanic ash, abrasive and glassy, that was the harbinger of catastrophe. An eruption much farther west in Idaho had spewed ash up into the upper atmosphere where winds carried the particles eastward. Seventeen species of prehistoric animals would meet their death near a watering hole. The smallest animals succumbed first, their lungs quickly overcome by the cutting particles; the larger animals lived on up to five weeks before the ash killed them. When the event …

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Great Plains Quarterly

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Coronado And Aesop Fable And Violence On The Sixteenth-Century Plains, Daryl W. Palmer

Great Plains Quarterly

In the spring of 1540, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led an entrada from present-day Mexico into the region we call New Mexico, where the expedition spent a violent winter among pueblo peoples. The following year, after a long march across the Great Plains, Coronado led an elite group of his men north into present-day Kansas where, among other activities, they strangled their principal Indian guide, a man they called El Turco. In the pages that follow, I focus on the events leading up to and including the execution of this Indian guide. Although Coronado, his chroniclers, and modern historians have …

Review Of The American Far West In The Twentieth Century. By Earl Pomeroy., Carl Abbott

Great Plains Quarterly

After publishing his path breaking study The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada in 1965, Earl Pomeroy embarked on the even larger task of writing a history of the American West in the twentieth century. The present volume is the result, deeply researched by Pomeroy over four decades and completed after his death in 2005 by his student and friend Richard Etulain.

The book is a fascinating mix of carefully presented details and wide-ranging topical coverage. Pomeroy expanded his "Pacific Slope" vision to include Alaska, Hawaii, the rest of the Rocky Mountain states, and …

Review Of Memory And Vision: Arts, Cultures, And Lives Of Plains Indian People. By Emma Hansen, Bill Anthes

Great Plains Quarterly

This publication-based on the award-winning reinterpretation and reinstallation in 2000 of the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming-is much more than a catalog of that institution's collections. Founded with the clothing and adornments of the Plains performers who toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, the museum has since grown with the acquisition of major private collections, and most recently by collecting the work of living Plains artists. Illustrated with color photographs of objects and archival images and illuminated by quotes from interviews, ethnographies, and oral histories, Hansen's volume surveys the cultures of Plains …

Review Of Nebraska Moments. By Donald R. Hickey, Susan A. Wunder, And John R. Wunder, Kent Blaser

Great Plains Quarterly

The original version of Nebraska Moments, authored by Don Hickey in 1992, admirably filled an important niche as an accessible, eminently readable introduction to many of the highlights of Nebraska history. Susan and John Wunder have thoroughly revised and updated this delightful book for a new generation of readers. The changes to the earlier edition are substantial, including a number of entirely new chapters. The book opens with one of them, on the ill-fated Spanish Villasur expedition, which allows the Wunders to explore the preLouisiana Purchase era of Nebraska history. All five final chapters-on the Kearney Arch, the rape …

Review Of The History Of Texas Music. By Gary Hartman, Kent Blaser

Great Plains Quarterly

Texas encompasses a uniquely wide-ranging and diverse blend of ethnic and regional cultures that have in turn fostered an amazingly rich and creative musical environment. It has arguably contributed more, in both quality and variety, to the overall development of American music than any other single state. While much has been written about specific aspects of Texas music, this book is one of the first to attempt a comprehensive treatment of the subject.

Hartman's first major theme concerns "tejana" musical traditions, the blending of Spanish/Mexican with Anglo-American music in the Southwest borderlands. Mariachi, canciones, and corridos were the foundations for …

Review Of The Prairie West As Promised Land. Edited By R. Douglas Francis And Chris Kitzan, J. William Brennan

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection of eighteen essays explores the "ways in which the Prairie West was identified as a Promised Land in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." In one variant, western Canada became a place where individuals could escape from the stresses of urban and industrial society in Europe or the United States and find a land of natural abundance, full of God's bountiful riches that would be bestowed on those worthy of living there, the "Chosen People." This imaginary construct, Doug Owram points out, was first advanced by those who lobbied successfully for Canada to acquire Rupert's Land from …

Review Of Transatlantic Voices: Interpretations Of Native North American Literatures. Edited By Elvira Pulitano, Laura Castor

Great Plains Quarterly

Transatlantic Voices represents some of the most recent critical studies of contemporary Native North American literature by fourteen European scholars. Drawing on Paul Gilroy's notion of the Atlantic as a site for cross-cultural exchange in our globalized era, editor Elvira Pulitano suggests that until now the Atlantic has not been sufficiently recognized as important for Native American studies. Transatlantic Voices seeks to fill this gap. Acutely aware of their strategic location as neither Natives nor Americans, the authors explore various kinds of "crossings": theoretical, geographical, thematic, and epistemological. Their essays present original contributions to current debates in Native North American …

Review Of Before The Country: Native Renaissance, Canadian Mythology. By Stephanie Mckenzie, Jo-Ann Episkenew

Great Plains Quarterly

In Before the Country, Stephanie McKenzie examines Canadian literature of the 1960s and 1970s "to identify mythological patterns that are likely to become formulas when critics assume that Canada is like any other nation to have emerged since the breakdown of Charlemagne's empire." A time when Canadians were struggling to invent a collec~ tive identity, the years surrounding Canada's centennial were critical for the development of Canadian literature and culture.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Indigenous people, in contrast, were experiencing what McKenzie terms "the Native Renaissance," and their literary output caused a crisis for settlers: "a nationally inspired …

Review Of Working Girls In The West: Representations Of Wage-Earning Women. By Lindsey Mcmaster, Judy Fudge

Great Plains Quarterly

Lindsey McMaster provides a lively account of how the working girl was "imagined, represented, and constructed as a figure within the cultural narratives of Canada, the West, and the empire" during the period of rapid economic growth and profound social transformation from the late 1800s to the early 1920s. She examines a range of different types of textsnewspaper reports, reform and social-purity discourse, official reports on labor, women's travel accounts of Canada, and Canadian literature and poetry-for common themes and tropes. Her goal is to see how social narratives of the working girl in the West, that vast imaginary from …

Review Of John Steuart Curry's "Hoover And The Flood": Painting Modern History. By Charles C. Eldredge, Wendy Jean Katz

Great Plains Quarterly

In this multidimensional study of a single painting, Hoover and the Flood, art historian Charlie Eldredge asks, "Why was [John Steuart] Curry, an artist generally associated with midwestern landscape and genre subjects drawn from his Kansas upbringing, depicting a subject from the Mississippi Delta? Why was he tackling a subject of national rather than regional or simply personal consequence?" He finds answers in politics, in Curry's artistic ambitions and sense of social responsibility, and in popular and literary interest in the enduring power of the nation's rivers. The result will interest scholars of 1930s regionalism, whatever their discipline.

In …