American Studies Commons^™

Place-Based Civic Education And The Rural Leadership Crisis In Nebraska, Christie L. Maloyed, J. Kelton Williams

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The Great Plains is facing a pending leadership crisis as rural depopulation decreases the number of residents who are available to serve in civic and government positions. This problem is compounded by the loss of youth populations in rural areas. In this essay, we offer a cross-disciplinary analysis of avenues for addressing the rural leadership crisis. We bring together work from rural demography, education policy, and civic studies to argue that civic education in rural areas needs to be reformed specifically to train and retain rural youth for leadership positions. We use Nebraska as a case study as it has …

Considering Native American Students In Rural School Consolidation, Andrea Miller

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

When discussing school consolidation it is important to consider the educational effects on Native American students. Many Native American students live in homes of poverty, deal with difficult home lives, and struggle academically. While there are many areas of concern in discussing consolidation, loss of a low student-teacher ratio, loss of connection with the school community, and loss of autonomy or control of schools are of particular importance. Consolidation efforts may bring some positive education opportunity for Native students which may include offering a diversified and expanded curriculum, specialization for staffing, and specialized resources for students. Discussing the potential effects …

Economic Issues In School District Consolidation In Nebraska, Bree L. Dority, Eric C. Thompson

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

This research article examines how per-pupil spending on public primary and secondary education in Nebraska varies by school district size, and whether expenditures are expected to rise or fall after districts consolidate. We find a U-shaped relationship between per-pupil spending and the number of students per school district in Nebraska. We also find a similar relationship between property tax base and the number of students per school district. However, our analysis of perpupil spending before and after consolidation fails to find consistent evidence that consolidation lowered per-pupil spending, in either rural or non-rural districts. The gains from consolidation become even …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 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 (through 2013)

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 (through 2013)

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 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 (through 2013)

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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!"

Mission Work, Conversion, And The Italian Immigrant In Turn-Of-The-Century New York City, Alexandra A. De Luise

Publications and Research

Anson Phelps Stokes Italian Free Library was an example of an ethnic library located in an Italian enclave of New York City in the 1890s to 1910s. It served a need in helping educate and Americanize Italians living in that area, while also indoctrinating them into Protestant faith by its library director, Pastor Antonio Arrighi.

Great Plains Research, Volume 23, Number 2, Fall 2013 (Complete Issue)

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

CONTENTS

Introduction — Richard Edwards and Peter Longo

School Consolidation and Community Development — Gary Paul Green

The Importance of Being Emily: Lessons from Legislative Battles over

Forced School Consolidation — Marty Strange

Tiebout in the Country: The Inevitable Politics of Rural School Consolidation — Steven L. Willborn

Place-Based Civic Education and the Rural Leadership Crisis in Nebraska — Christie L. Maloyed and J. Kelton Williams

Considering Native American Students in Rural School Consolidation — Andrea Miller

Photo Essay: Atmosphere for Learning Undistracted: Rural Schools of Nebraska — Charles W. Guildner

Economic Issues in School District Consolidation in Nebraska — …

"I Have Thought Proper To Inform The World": Reading Unconventional Testaments Of 18th-Century New England Women, Elyssa Tardif

Open Access Dissertations

Early New England women chose to pass down what they owned and valued: clothing, cupboards, pewter dishes, commonplace books, etc. But some women passed down something more: a written testament, which sought to shape public opinion in colonial New England. A "testament" usefully suggests a text that both serves as a witness to lived experience as well as the means by which the individual herself can frame the narrative for those who come after. This project aims to examine not only written records but also their audience: who were the heirs to these testaments and how were the records preserved …

Le Nature Degli American Studies, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

Al “Futures of American Studies Institute” di Dartmouth del 2003 lanciai una provocazione sulle “geografie immaginate” dell’americanistica. Volevo mettere in discussione sia le celebrazioni romantiche del “luogo” in quanto elemento in qualche modo autentico e particolare, minacciato da un mondo sempre più globalizzato e controllato dalle multinazionali, sia l’esaltazione della “delocalizzazione” nelle società in rete, negli “spazi di flusso”, nella mobilità senza attrito. Suggerivo che queste, come altre geografie poco studiate, si sposano troppo facilmente con molte correnti dell’eccezionalismo americano.

Slaughterhouse-Five And The Bombing Of Dresden: Reconciling Fiction With Non-Fiction, Philip Webb, Dr. Trent Hickman

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Some historical events, singular in their atrocity and horror, are not easily forgotten. Every nation, culture, and religion, claims one event and remembers it with solemnity. For Japan, it was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For Jews, the Holocaust. Now in Indonesia, it is a devastating tsunami. For America it could be Pearl Harbor or September 11. Germans are no exception. They remember the night of February 13, 1945—the bombing and annihilation of their beloved Dresden. And when the talk turns to Dresden, it turns to Slaughterhouse-Five.

Montell, William Lynwood, 1931-2023 - Collector (Sc 2765), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2765. Program of The Sixth Annual Gathering of Authors, presented by the Paul Sawyier Public Library and held in Frankfort, Kentucky, on 24 August 2013. The program is autographed by the attending authors, some of whom include inscriptions to Dr. Lynwood Montell.

Rave Reviews The History Of Akron's Tuesday Musical, Thomas Bacher, Cynthia Harrison, Sharon Cebula

University of Akron Press Publications

The Tuesday Musical Club was founded in 1887 by thirteen young Akron women who had an overwhelming desire to share their love of music. With further support of Gertrude Penfield Seiberling, the wife of industrialist Frank Seiberling, the organization grew like many other musical organizations across the country. Unlike similar clubs, the Akron-based entity continued to expand and is one of a very few that have survived. Among the artists who have appeared as a part of the rich history of Akron's Tuesday Musical Organization are Vladimir Horowitz, Artur Rubinstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Yascha Heifetz, Glenn Gould, Van Cliburn, Isaac Stern, …

New Mexico's Nuclear Enchantment: Local Politics, National Imperatives, And Radioactive Waste Disposal In The Desert, Jennifer Richter

American Studies ETDs

The use of nuclear technologies has left an indelible mark on American society. The environmental, political, economic, and social costs of creating, producing, and utilizing technologies such as nuclear weapons and nuclear energy have left a legacy of radioactive waste. To date, there is no comprehensive path for disposing of the different kinds of waste produced by the nuclear industry, including spent nuclear fuel that is now held on site at nuclear power plants. The question of how to deal with nuclear waste has plagued the nuclear industry, governmental agencies, and the concerned public for most of the nuclear era. …