American Studies Commons^™

Collateral Damage: Veterans And Domestic Violence In Mari Sandoz's The Tom-Walker, Kathy Bahr

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Tom-Walker (1947) associates domestic violence on a national scale with the domestic violence of veterans returning home after the Civil War and two world wars. This novel anticipates both the rise of McCarthyism and the long shadow cast by the atom bomb over the years constituting the Cold War. ... The Tom-Walker is remarkable in its depiction of the ugly, almost unmentionable effects of war on the domestic lives of individual veterans. Sandoz, like a number of her contemporaries, was particularly concerned about the horrors of war, but unlike many writers, she focuses on the home front and on …

Seeing Through The Eyes Of Maximilian And Bodmer: Review Of The North American Journals Of Prince Maximilian Of Wied, Volume I: May 1832-April 1833. Edited By Stephen S. Witte And Marsha V. Gallagher., Clay S. Jenkinson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The German prince Maximilian of WiedNeuwied (1782-1867) traveled up the Missouri River in 1832-33 to study American Indian culture before it was fatally compromised by the encroachment of Euro-American civilization. Aware of the expansionist and industrial dynamics of the Jacksonian Era in the United States, Maximilian wanted to study what he regarded as the vanishing Indian while there was still time. The idea had come to him during his 1815-17 journey through Brazil. For the publication that followed, Reise nach Brasilien in den Jahren 1815 his 1817 (1820), Maximilian had provided his own illustrations. These were criticized, including by his …

Narrative Mappings Of The Land As Space And Place In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Karen E. Ramirez

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

At the conclusion of Willa Cather's 1913 novel O Pioneers!, Alexandra Bergson muses about landownership, and more broadly about the human-land relationship, by reflecting on the transience of the county plat map, one of the most popular forms of mapping rural America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These maps were not only housed at the county clerk's office; by the 1880s and 1890s, while Cather was living in Nebraska, commercialized survey maps periodically were collected and published in large, colorful county atlases, also called plat books, becoming among the most widely circulated maps of rural areas …

Scandal On The Plains: William F. Slocum, Edward S. Parsons, And The Colorado College Controversies, Joe P. Dunn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a story about a scandal that took place on the western frontier, a sexual harassment crisis involving one of giants of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century education and the disgraceful treatment of the man who pursued the case. The treatment of the two related incidents in the several official histories of the institution constitutes a travesty that one is tempted to call "scandalous." The physical place of this saga is important because the original events transpired within a burgeoning frontier community and at a young western institution that was successfully carving out its place in the national academic scene. …

"It's Now We've Crossed Pease River" Themes Of Voyage And Return In Texas Folk Songs, Ken Baake

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Stories of development from childhood to adulthood or of journeying through a 1ifechanging experience to gain new knowledge are replete in oral and written tradition, as exemplified by the Greek epic of Odysseus and countless other tales. Often the hero journeys naively to an alien land and then, with great difficulty, returns home wiser but forever scarred. Such a journey can take the hero to a terrible place, from which he may escape physically, but from which he can never escape emotionally. The hardship of travel and its ensuing lessons is a common theme in human narratives, its protean form …

Review Of Broken Treaties: United States And Canadian Relations With The Lakotas And The Plains Cree, 1868-1885 By Jill St. Germain, Laura Woodworth-Ney

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What appears to be another book exploring the broken treaty relationships of the United States and Canadian federal governments turns out to be nothing of the sort. In challenging the long-honored "broken treaties tradition," Jill St. Germain has written a groundbreaking and welcome revision of the history of treaty and reservation-making on both sides of the United States-Canadian border.

Using a fresh, comparative approach to the analysis of federal records and the manuscript collections of federal Indian agents and officials, St. Germain focuses on the implementation of the Treaty of 1868 between the United States and the Lakota Sioux, and …

Review Of Agnes Lake Hickok: Queen Of The Circus, Wife Of A Legend By Linda A. Fisher And Carrie Bowers, Kim Warren

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Agnes Lake Hickok rode horses, walked on slack wires, and trained various animals. If that was not enough, she was also a smart, diligent entrepreneur who became the first woman to own and operate a circus in the United States. The circus business brought her a busy schedule, some profitable opportunities, and wide acclaim as an entertainer who traveled with legendary performers P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill Cody. Although Agnes Lake Hickok did not necessarily invent circus shows, she certainly helped to popularize this form of entertainment in the nineteenth century and prepared the next generation of performers, including …

Review Of The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, And Transculturation In American Art, 1890-1915 By Elizabeth Hutchinson, Linda M. Waggoner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Elizabeth Hutchinson's The Indian Craze examines the trend that was not merely "fad or fancy" but "a significant artistic phenomenon with lasting effects on both American art history and U.S. Indian policy." Although the origin of Native American art as art is commonly associated with the Santa Fe movement of the 1920s and 1930s, Hutchinson declares that "this cross-cultural conversation," fueled by progressive primitivism, began at least two decades earlier.

Enhanced by historical images and informed by Janet C. Berlo's anthology, The Early Years of Native American Art History (1992), The Indian Craze revives a politically charged and artistically productive …

Review Of Savages And Scoundrels: The Untold Story Of America's Road To Empire Through Indian Territory By Paul Vandevelder, Robert J. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Paul VanDevelder has written a lively and fast-paced account of some of the major examples of the United States' acquisition of American Indian lands and assets. He focuses largely, though, on the Northern Plains, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, and the modernday example of the taking of tribal lands via the Pick-Sloan Garrison Dam project. He depicts graphically the destruction the dam and its reservoir have brought to the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota and the inundation of some of the richest farmland in America. In fact, he shows that ninety-two percent of the land taken to control …

Review Of Under The Big Sky: A Biography Of A. B. Guthrie Jr. By Jackson J. Benson, Capper Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On the Web site of a major bookseller, a "customer reviewer" claims that A. B. Guthrie Jr.'s 1947 novel The Big Sky "is really about freedom." Jackson Benson acknowledges the romanticism of Guthrie's writing, but he argues more convincingly that the novel is actually about how "man always destroys the thing he loves." Benson applies this idea to all of Guthrie's work, describing the writer as a Western environmentalist, saddened and angered by his region's history of damage and depredation.

Benson places Guthrie (1901-1991) in the pantheon of writers who have "tried to refute Western myth, to tell it as …

Review Of Jayhawkers: The Civil War Brigade Of James Henry Lane By Bryce Benedict, Craig Miner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While this book contains a good deal of useful information, both its research and approach are flawed. The presentation is often tedious, freighted as it is with undigested detail.

The major question must be why so much detail of the military action of the so-called Lane Brigade (the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Kansas Volunteer Regiments) is significant when the personality and background of Lane himself is mostly left out. Benedict opens with a disclaimer that his book is not a biography of Lane, and includes "only the most cursory background information." The reader is referred for Lane's biography to a …

Review Of Warriors In Uniform: The Legacy Of American Indian Heroism By Herman J. Viola, Janne Lahti

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book celebrates the military contributions of American Indians in United States wars. It is a fluently written, although mainly descriptive, overview of American Indian participation stretching from the American Revolution to the present War on Terrorism. Visually, everything is stunning; the illustrations are numerous and impressive. At the beginning the narrative sufficiently describes some of the main events of various conflicts and Native participation, but as the book progresses closer to the present day the often very interesting personal stories of American Indian soldiers take much more space, so much that they seem to leave too little room for …

Review Of Catlin's Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, And The Ethics Of Nature By John Hausdoerffer, Steven Conn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

All these years later, after several biographies, numbers of exhibitions, and various conference symposia, George Catlin remains an irresistible figure. He was born in 1796 and died in 1872 and in between became one of the best known artists, writers, and showmen of the era. After casting about a bit in his young adulthood, Catlin found his calling out West where in the 1830s he took several trips into what was then Indian country to paint the people and lives he encountered. He produced dozens and dozens of canvasses, many of which now stand as iconic.

John Hausdoerffer hasn't given …

Review Of William Wayne Red Hat, Jr.: Cheyenne Keeper Of The Arrows By William Wayne Red Hat, Jr., Christina Gish Hall

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In an attempt to add a Cheyenne voice to the voluminous literature published about this Great Plains Indian nation, Sibylle M. Schlesier has come together with William Wayne Red Hat, Jr. to produce a text that transcribes this Cheyenne Arrow Keeper's multiple personal narratives, ranging in topics from his experiences in Vietnam to his religious role in his community to ruminations on Cheyenne history, culture, and oral tradition. As the daughter of anthropologist Karl Schlesier, Schlesier was in a unique position to collaborate with Red Hat, Jr., having known the Red Hat family from childhood. Since Red Hat, Jr. was …

Review Of Frontier Medicine: From The Atlantic To The Pacific, 1492-1941 By David Dary, Joshua Dolezal

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This survey of medicine in the U.S. from European contact to World War II rambles from generalities to anecdotes in a manner much like the cowboy Dary describes in his preface, who "started up one canyon and came out another." While the premise of the book might seem self-evident (that the practice of "frontier medicine" began long before the Oregon Trail), it offers little insight into the idea of the frontier, omitting Turner's Frontier Thesis entirely, and relies more on chronology than context for its narrative. For these reasons, Frontier Medicine will be more useful to casual readers than …

Influence Of Crosslink Density On Swelling And Conformation Of Surface-Constrained Poly(N-Isopropylacrylamide) Hydrogels, Ryan S. Cates

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A stimuli-responsive microgel is a three-dimensional polymer network that is able to absorb and expel a solvent (commonly water). These materials are unique in the fact that their sponge-like behavior can be actuated by environmental cues, like temperature, ion concentration, pH, and light. Because of the dynamic properties of these materials they have found applications in drug-delivery systems, micro-assays, selective filtration, artificial muscle, and non-fouling surfaces. The most well-known stimuli-responsive polymer is Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) or PNIPAAm and it experiences a switchable swelling or deswelling over a critical temperature ( T_c=~32°C). Below the critical temperature, the gel begins mixing with …

Optimization Of A Ball-Milled Photocatalyst For Wastewater Treatment Through Use Of An Orthogonal-Array Experimental Design, Bradley J. Ridder

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The effects of various catalyst synthesis parameters on the photocatalytic degradation kinetics of aqueous methyl orange dye are presented. The four factors investigated were: i) InVO₄ concentration, ii) nickel concentration, iii) InVO₄ calcination temperature, and iv) ballmilling time. Three levels were used for each factor. Due to the large number of possible experiments in a full factorial experiment, an orthogonal-array experimental design was used. UV-vis spectrophotometry was used to measure the dye concentration. The results show that nickel concentration was a significant parameter, with 90% confidence. The relative ranking of importance of the parameters was nickel concentration > InVO …

Low Documented Risk Cesarean Sections And Late-Preterm Births: The Florida Experience, Heather Breeze Clayton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are increasing concerns about the excessive use of cesarean delivery in the United States, as cesarean deliveries have been associated with adverse maternal and infant health outcomes. Currently, the cesarean section (C/S) rate for Florida is the second highest in the nation. Furthermore, preliminary reports from the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) have implicated the increasing rate of cesarean delivery to an increase in the rate of late preterm births (PTB) in Florida (births at 34 to 36 weeks gestational age). Information on the impact of late PTB associated with cesarean delivery on the rate of maternal and infant …

Faculty Perspectives On Doctoral Student Mentoring: The Mentor‘S Odyssey, Carol A. Burg

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, mentoring has emerged as a research domain, however, the preponderance of mentoring research has been situated first, in the business or organizational settings and second, in the K-12 educational setting, focusing on protégé experiences, using quantitative survey instruments to collect data. Thus, mentoring research literature includes a paucity of formal studies in the arena of graduate education.

Situated in the higher education setting, this study investigated the perspectives of faculty-mentors who provided mentoring to doctoral students who completed the doctoral degree, employing the qualitative research methodology known as phenomenology, as an orthogonal but complimentary epistemology to previous …

Lived Experience: Near-Fatal Adolescent Suicide Attempt, Phyllis Ann Dougherty

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Adolescent suicide has become a national health crisis. Suicide now ranks as a leading cause of adolescent death in the U.S. In response to this, the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention (2001b) recommended the promotion and support of research into suicide and prevention, particularly high-risk groups such as adolescents. However, due to concerns for safety and liability, there have been few studies of highly suicidal individuals, specifically adolescents. Leading suicidologists have agreed that studying the qualities of the near-fatal suicide attempt can most resemble the completed suicide.

This case study explored the phenomenon of the near-fatal suicide attempt through the …