American Studies Commons^™

Book Review: Thunder And Herds: Rock Art Of The High Plains By Lawrence L. Loendorf, Linea Sundstrom

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

Archaeology is often described as detective work. In this detailed exploration of the High Plains of Colorado and New Mexico, archaeologist Lawrence Loendorf proves as adept as Sherlock Holmes in bringing diverse and often surprising clues to bear on understanding the who, when, where, and why of ancient rock carvings and paintings. From climate change to cultural migrations to landscape, Loendorf carefully reconstructs the contexts, cultural and physical, in which long-ago and not-so-long-ago American Indians created this complex array of images.

The twin joys of archaeology are discovery and the challenge of filling in missing pieces of history. The former …

Book Review: Cranes: A Natural History Of A Bird In Crisis By Janice M. Hughes, Paul A. Johnsgard

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

Janice Hughes’s research has mostly involved evolutionary studies of cuckoo-like birds. Thus I would not have expected her to produce what is easily the best account of America’s effort to save from extinction the whooping crane, one of our rarest and, arguably, most beautiful birds. Over the years there have been several book-length accounts of these efforts, by authors such as Robert Doughty, J.J. McCoy, Faith McNulty, and Jerome Pratt. None of these is as complete, as well written, or as compelling as this book. Additionally, it is the most up-to-date, bringing the story of the whooping crane’s recovery program …

Book Review: One Hundred Summers: A Kiowa Calendar Record By Candace S. Greene, Phillip Earenfight

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

In One Hundred Summers, Candace Greene examines a recently discovered bundle of heavily worn Kiowa calendar drawings by one of the great Kiowa calendar keepers, Silver Horn, now in the collections of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (SNOMNH). The loose drawings, once bound in a ledger book, document events from 1828 to 1929, a period that brought unprecedented change to the Kiowas.

Greene opens her study with an introduction to the Kiowa calendar tradition, followed by two shorter chapters dealing specifically with Silver Horn’s calendar at the SNOMNH. Chapter 4 presents the 64 surviving sheets that …

Book Review: The Power Of The Texas Governor: Connally To Bush By Brian Mccall, Sean P. Cunningham

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

According to Brian McCall, a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives since 1991, the governorship of Texas is an office designed for individuals with the ability to project power in creative ways—beyond the mere execution of expressed authority, and with the complementary skill of a strong vision-casting and agenda-setting leadership style. Put another way, in The Power of the Texas Governor: Connally to Bush, McCall, who equates power to “a social game,” boldly claims that the Texas governorship stands as among the best laboratories for any study of human behavior. McCall attempts to use that laboratory to …

Book Review: Kiowa Ethnogeography By William C. Meadows, Michael P. Jordan

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

With his latest book Meadows has made a significant contribution to our understanding of Native American ethnogeography. Comprehensive in scope, the work addresses the Kiowa people’s evolving relationship to the land from their initial migration from the headwaters of the Yellowstone River to contemporary life in rural southwestern Oklahoma. Meadows demonstrates that the Kiowa people have maintained a sense of homeland throughout two episodes of migration, confinement to a reservation, and the allotment of tribal lands in 1901. After providing a useful overview of research on Native American ethnogeography, he delves into a discussion of Kiowa interactions with the environment …

News And Notes Great Plains Studies (Spring 2010)

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

CONFERENCES

PROGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT

CHARLES E. BESSEY AWARD

LESLIE HEWES AWARD

THE GREAT PLAINS DISTINGUISHED BOOK PRIZE

Book Review: Health Care In Saskatchewan: An Analytical Profile By Gregory Marchildon And Kevin O’Fee, Kelly Chessie

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

Marchildon and O’Fee set out to provide a detailed description of the Saskatchewan health care system, integrating details of how health care is organized, funded, and delivered in this Canadian prairie province. To accomplish their goal of fostering a better understanding of the provincial health system and its inputs and outcomes, they walk their readers through a thicket of details, including standings on health status indicators; macrolevel organizational structures; financing and expenditures; range of services, resources and technologies; and a sample of semirecent health reforms. They then close with a brief assessment of the system’s performance.

What the authors attempt …

Book Review: The Grace Abbott Reader Edited By John Sorensen With Judith Sealander, Sonya Michel

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

Those familiar with the Abbott sisters generally regard Grace as the doer, Edith as the thinker. Both were leading Progressive-Era reformers, but while Edith made her mark as a pioneering social work educator and theorist, Grace—a one-time resident of Hull House who fought for women’s suffrage, immigrant rights, and child welfare—went on to become the second chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau and gained a reputation as a powerful advocate and effective administrator. Along the way, however, Grace Abbott also wrote a number of articles and speeches that reflect deep thought as well as strong beliefs in equality and progress. …

Global Trends In Private Protected Areas And Their Implications For The Northern Great Plains, Jeff Langholz

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

Like many parts of the world, the Northern Great Plains faces immense challenges to sustainable land use. Privately owned conservation areas have emerged as a potential solution. This article reviews five global trends in so-called private protected areas and discusses their implications for the Northern Great Plains. The trends point to five recommendations to the Northern Great Plains community: (1) act now to tap rapidly growing policy support; (2) combine many models, including private protected areas that are owned by individuals and groups, formal and informal, large and small, and are dedicated to strict protection as well as sustainable use; …

Conservation And Economic Lessons Learned From Managing The Namibrand Nature Reserve, Nils Odendaal, Danica Shaw

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

The NamibRand Nature Reserve, located in southern Namibia, is a private nature reserve established to protect and conserve the unique ecology and wildlife of the southwest Namib Desert. At 172,200 ha, NamibRand is one of the largest private conservation areas in southern Africa. The reserve consists of 13 former livestock farms rehabilitated into a continuous natural conservation area and shares a 100 km border with the Namib-Naukluft National Park. The reserve is a model for private conservation in southern Africa, as it demonstrates holistic biodiversity conservation balanced with financial sustainability. Innovative approaches to resource management ensure that this critical area …

Book Review: Transplanting The Great Society: Lyndon Johnson And Food For Peace By Kristin L. Ahlberg, R. Douglas Hurt

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

In 1954 the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, commonly known as Public Law 480, established a new food aid program designed to eliminate agricultural surpluses and improve farm prices. Although Congress also intended it to expand foreign trade, encourage foreign economic development, and enhance the foreign policy of the United States, Lyndon Johnson used Public Law 480 as a political tool to extend the principles of the Great Society internationally and, most importantly, fight Communist expansion. Rechristened as the Food for Peace program in 1959, Lyndon Johnson later transformed it from a domestic agricultural policy to a foreign policy …

Great Plains Research Spring 2010 Front Matter

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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Saving the World’s Grasslands: An Introduction Richard Edwards and Richard P. Reading, Guest Editors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Global Trends in Private Protected Areas and Their Implications for the Northern Great Plains Jeff Langholz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . …

Book Review: Lipset’S Agrarian Socialism: A Re-Examination Edited By David E. Smith, Jim Mochoruk

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

Seymour Martin Lipset, rather famously associated with the concept of “American Exceptionalism” and renowned as one of the leading practitioners of political sociology in the United States, was better known in Canada for works that seemed to make little, if any, impression upon U.S. readers. First and foremost was his landmark study of the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation’s (CCF) rise to political power in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan—Agrarian Socialism. It is the stuff of legend in Canadian academic circles how a young PhD student—a Jewish leftist from New York no less—came to Saskatchewan in the mid …

Saving The World’S Grasslands: An Introduction, Richard Edwards, Richard Reading

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

Grasslands cover a large portion of the world’s land surface but increasingly suffer from numerous threats. Temperate grasslands are the most endangered and least protected biome in the world (Hoekstra et al. 2005; Henwood, this issue). Grasslands suffer from the twin dangers of seeming to lack charismatic features deserving of protection (the Great Plains, one of the world’s great grasslands, has sometimes been dismissed as “the Great Empty” because it lacks mountains or coastal areas) and of being prime land for conversion to crop agriculture. As a result, people converted or destroyed much of the original Great Plains grassland and …

Book Review: North For The Harvest: Mexican Workers, Growers, And The Sugar Beet Industry By Jim Norris, Maria S. Arbelaez

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

From its origins at the end of the 19th century, the American sugar beet industry has been linked to Mexican immigrant labor. Moreover, the painstaking job of thinning, topping, and harvesting the large and heavy beets became an almost entirely Mexican labor specialty by the turn of the 20th century. Betabeleros, as the Mexican and Mexican-American laborers were and are known, sojourned north from the borderlands to Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, South and North Dakota, Michigan, and Minnesota fields. In each of these states, the sugar beet industry willingly pursued immigrant labor to do the work while immigrant networks did …

Book Review: Rewilding The West: Restoration In A Prairie Landscape By Richard Manning, Mace Hack

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

Rewilding the West gives a first impression of being the story of an innovative conservation project—creation of a 3.5 million-acre wildlife preserve from both public and private lands, restocked with bison and other traditional Plains wildlife—in the Missouri Breaks of eastcentral Montana. However, Manning only devotes thirteen pages to the project at the end of the book, with a few additional references to it scattered throughout. Instead, he traces the history of the site, from the days of the bison to modern times. In doing so, he provides a fascinating and useful frame of reference for current conservation efforts in …

Review Of Seth Bullock: Black Hills Lawman By David A. Wolff, Christopher J. Steinke

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this short biography of Seth Bullock, the first sheriff of Deadwood, South Dakota, David A. Wolff challenges a few of the myths surrounding a former frontier icon. Bullock did not in fact "clean up" Deadwood, Wolff concludes, nor did he single-handedly prevent skirmishes with nearby Lakotas. His role in establishing Yellowstone National Park was "a greatly exaggerated part of his legend." And his reputation as a military man was mostly unwarranted; he spent most of the Spanish-American War in Georgia and never saw action.

In Wolff's retelling, Bullock emerges as an opportunistic "frontier capitalist" more than anything else, someone …

Review Of Youth And The Bright Medusa By Willa Cather, Mark A. Robison

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great Plains launched Willa Cather's career. Her multilayered imagining of frontier folk in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918) placed the region-and the noveliston the literary map. In 1920, Youth and the Bright Medusa combined recent urban stories" Coming, Aphrodite!," "The Diamond Mine," ''A Gold Slipper," "Scandal"-with four stories from 1905's Troll Garden anthology-"Paul's Case," "A Wagner Matinee," "The Sculptor's Funeral," and "'A Death in the Desert.'" Youth and the Bright Medusa explores dilemmas arising from pursuit of the shining Medusa of art. Can pure art reconcile with commercial acceptance? Will a singer survive her parasitic entourage? Who …

Review Of Regionalism And The Humanities Edited And With An Introduction By Timothy R. Mahoney And Wendy J. Katz, John E. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Emerging out of a 2003 conference in Lincoln, Nebraska, organized by the Consortium of Regional Humanities Centers, the sixteen disparate essays included in this engaging volume, ably edited and introduced by Timothy Mahoney and Wendy Katz, testify to the catholicity and vitality of the "new regionalism" in American studies. They both illustrate and justify what has been labeled by some the "local turn" in humanities scholarship. Because of the location of the conference on the border between the Midwest and the Great Plains, half of these essays focus upon those two regions. Each author assumes that place matters-that in addition …

Review Of Outside Looking In: Viewing First Nations Peoples In Canadian Dramatic Television Series By Mary Jane Miller, Doris Baltruschat

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mary Jane Miller sets out to answer the question "What are the stories that we tell and show to ourselves about Aboriginal peoples?" The strength of her book lies in its breadthin particular, the timeframe she chose, spanning the past fifty years, for investigating the portrayal of Aboriginal peoples on Canadian television. As a result, she provides a comprehensive overview of dramatic children and adult series, from Radisson to Forest Rangers and The Beachcombers, describing characters, themes, and topics in great detail. Her key point is that these series have mostly been produced from the "outside looking in." In …