American Studies Commons^™

"This Must Have Been A Grand Sight": George Bent And The Battle Of Platte Bridge, Steven C. Haack

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Battle of Platte Bridge, July 26, 1865, is a noteworthy event in the annals of the American Indian Wars. An alliance of Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapahoe, numbering in excess of 2,000 warriors, traveled three days to a specific military objective, an undertaking unusual both in terms of its magnitude and its level of organization. The battle is also of interest because we have a detailed description of the event written from the Native American viewpoint. This description comes in the form of a number of letters written to George Hyde by Southern Cheyenne George Bent. George Bent, son of …

Review Of For All We Have And Are: Regina And The Experience Of The Great War By James M. Pitsula, Brandon Dimmel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great War touched many places in Canada, but James M. Pistula's book is the first to examine closely its impact on a distinctly agrarian and western community. Regina, Saskatchewan, was, like many towns in the Canadian prairies after the turn of the century, dependent on agriculture, ethnically diverse, and led by an Anglophile majority that viewed the war as an ideological clash between the democratic British Empire and the despotic German autocracy. That way of thinking made the city of 30,000 a veritable battleground between "Germantown," the "alien" immigrant district, and its English-speaking majority, who through assimilative social reform …

Review Of Mennonite Women In Canada: A History By Marlene Epp, Katherine Jellison

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Marlene Epp's overview of two hundred years of Mennonite women's history in Canada focuses largely on the two major sites of Mennonite settlement-Ontario and the Great Plains of Manitoba. Her discussion of the Manitoba settlers-so-called "Russian Mennonites" whose Germanic ancestors migrated to Russia in the early nineteenth century-encompasses their history from the group's arrival on the Plains in the 1870s to the present. Her study provides a wealth of material for historians of Great Plains women, immigrants, and religious minorities.

Review Of Back In Time: Echoes Of A Vanished America In The Heart Of France By Kent Cowgill, Juliette Parnell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Who would have thought Nebraska and France share so many similarities? Kent Cowgill's title gives out an important clue. In the winter of 2005, Cowgill travels to France for a dual purpose: to discover the French people's "real" views towards America, after Bush's reelection, and also to find out if rural France still brings back memories from past days in America's heartland.

Cowgill's original plan was to revisit six areas: first Normandy at Arromanches, then the southwest region, the Languedoc province, and finally Burgundy. He actually ends up exploring tinier communities than originally planned. His various encounters and discussions with …

Review Of Race And The Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty In The Nineteenth Century By Fay A. Yarbrough, Julie Reed

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Fay Yarbrough's Race and the Cherokee Nation adds to recent literature, including Tiya Miles's Ties That Bind (2005) and Celia Naylor's African Cherokees in Indian Territory (2008), that reexamines racial ideology among slave-holding American Indians. Through the use of Cherokee statutory law, marriage licenses, newspaper articles, court records, and WPA interviews, Yarbrough argues that nineteenth-century Cherokee politicians adopted racial laws to serve "as a demonstration of sovereignty" and reconfigured Cherokee identity by intermingling "blood, race, and legal citizenship." Matrilineal clan descent no longer provided the principal claim to Cherokee identity; race increasingly replaced clan identification to determine those who could …

Review Of Forts Of The Northern Plains: Guide To Historic Military Posts Of The Plains Indians Wars By Jeff Barnes, Barton H. Barbour

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Jeff Barnes's book presents brief histories and the historical importance of about fifty military forts in Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming. Only sites that played roles in the "Indian Wars" of the West, roughly from 1820 to 1890, are included. Each entry describes the post and its significance, and offers good suggestions for further reading. Barnes also provides a sidebar offering directions to each site, its hours of operation, admission costs, special events, and available amenities to help visitors plan their trips.

Barnes offers updated information on posts that have been treated in a number …

Review Of Looking Close And Seeing Far: Samuel Seymour, Titian Ramsay Peale, And The Art Of The Long Expedition, 1818-1823 By Kenneth Haltman, Robert Slifkin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While the inescapable subjectivism of historical writing has become something of a given in the age of postmodern theory, the objectivity of visual documents, especially in scientific and technical realms such as topography and natural history, has remained less examined and analyzed. In his challenging and imaginative study of the numerous sketches produced by Samuel Seymour and Titian Ramsey Peale during the survey expedition following the Platte River led by Major Stephen Long (considered to be the first western expedition to include professional artists), Kenneth Haltman skillfully demonstrates not only the complexity of these ostensibly slight and impartial images, but …

White County Heritage 2010, White County Historical Society

White County Heritage Journal

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication
Presidental Message by Mary Beth Waters
Buford M. Maddox
White County Publications
Recently Reprinted Works
My Father Was A Cpl. In the U.S. Army by Diann Poe
Azalee by Ray Tolar
Things sure have changed!!
Little League Baseball in Searcy Began Sixty Years Ago
1950’s Sandwich Menu from Woodworths
Up from the Cotton Fields by Helen Stinnett
Houseboat Child by Fannie Brown
New Dixie Drive-In Theater
Jack Edward Caldwell
The John P. May Family in Searcy by Milton Davis May
A Different Use for Onion?
Reflections On A Local Legend by Cliff Roberts
Searcy Population Tops …

American Cars: Patriotic Consumption After September 11th, Lori Bindig, M. Bosau

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

Beginning September 20, 2001, the same day President Bush reiterated his call to participate in the U.S. economy, General Motors provided an outlet for patriotic consumption with a commercial announcing 0 percent financing on every new GM car and truck.

The Obama Effect On American Discourse About Racial Identity: Dreams From My Father (And Mother), Barack Obama's Search For Self, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Joseph Curl reported that the Obama organization "would not answer when asked why the biracial candidate calls himself black," replying only that the question didn't "seem especially topical." Biracial ancestry and racial identity are still sensitive subjects in the United States, not suitable for sound bites. But they are perfect topics for the introspective musings of an autobiography, and Barack Obama must have thought he had answered this question in depth in Dreams from My Father (1995). In his introduction, Obama hesitates to use the term "autobiography" because it connotes, he says, "a certain closure"; …

Faulkner's Sexualized City: Modernism, Commerce, And The (Textual) Body, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Such classicism is the aesthetic opposite of what Faulkner demonstrates at moments in Mosquitoes and that would go on to become his famously baroque style. In the discussion that follows, I will be asking a number of questions about that development, among them the following: What is the role in Faulkner of a baroque, highly refined language, especially when Faulkner uses it to convey sexuality? And what connections (or disconnections) might that style have to Faulkner’s use of the setting of the city, as in Mosquitoes, or elsewhere of the rural countryside? As we will see, changes in these …

Kittens In The Oven: Race Relations, Traumatic Memory, And The Search For Identity In Julia Alvarez’S How The García Girls Lost Their Accents, Natalie Carter

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The search for an ever-elusive home is a thread that runs throughout much literature by authors who have immigrated to the United States. Dominican authors are particularly susceptible to this search for a home because “for many Dominicans, home is synonymous with political and/or economic repression and is all too often a point of departure on a journey of survival” (Bonilla 200). This “journey of survival” is a direct reference to the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, who controlled the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961. The pain and trauma that Trujillo inflicted upon virtually everyone associated with the Dominican Republic …

The Religious Divide: Why Religion Seems To Be Thriving In The United States And Waning In Europe, Steven Pfaff

Sociology Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"In the decades following the Second World War, most social scientists expected convergence among the Western industrial democracies. Modernization was expected to bring prosperity and opportunity, initiating a “culture shift” to posttraditional values and lifestyles.

However, in recent years observers have remarked on a growing divide between Europeans and Americans. This divergence may be nowhere greater than in the religious sphere. While faith is loudly proclaimed and a bustling diversity of religious organizations jostles for attention in all arenas of public life in the United States, the European Union (EU) is described as thoroughly secularized, comprised of societies in which …

Metaphysics And The Charge Of Misanthropy : Ralph Waldo Emerson’S “Circles” As A Cipher For Understanding The Connection Between Robinson Jeffers And Herman Melville, Hunter Stark

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Herman Melville’s and Robinson Jeffers’s metaphysical thoughts reflect Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of looking towards Nature for discovery; all three writers’ observations of Nature influence how they see humanity’s place in existence. Both Melville and Jeffers observe Nature decentralizing humanity, which distinguishes their views from Emerson’s. Where Jeffers’s verse sternly voices this message, openly criticizing the anthropocentric viewpoint, Melville utilizes humor, subtly confronting the anthropocentric proponent and downplaying humanity’s power. Jeffers garners the label of misanthrope, whereas Melville’s metaphysical realm in Moby-Dick largely escapes this charge with the masking quality of his humor. Comparing both writers’ texts to an Emersonian …

Book Review Of Just One Vote: From Jim Walding’S Nomination To Constitutional Defeat By Ian Stewart., James A. Mcallister

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

This story is almost Shakespearean in its dramatic proportions. It includes an overly ambitious politician frustrated by his leader’s refusal to make him a cabinet minister, an even more ambitious politician’s wife pushing him beyond his abilities and fostering his bitterness, and a government leader faced with a difficult colleague whose actions brought down the government, led to the leader’s resignation, and almost destroyed a political party. Just One Vote is a welcome addition to the already significant Canadian literature on the New Democratic Party of Manitoba. The attention paid to this subject reflects the party’s democratic socialist ideology and …

The Mother Tongues Of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The relation of modernism to immigrant literatures should not be conceived in terms of an opposition between universalistic and particularistic discourses. Rather, we should explore what can be called a modernist transnationalism based on a general universalist argument. Two examples of this transnationalism are explored side by side: Ezra Pound’s and Anzia Yezierska’s definitions of the aesthetic act in terms of translation. The readings show that the critical discourses of these two authors are structured by a belief in universalism while showing opposite possibilities, both generated by modernist transnationalism. The essay concludes that we now need to interpret the cultures …

Edith Lewis As Editor, Every Week Magazine, And The Contexts Of Cather's Fiction, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

On 26 August 1915 the New York Times reported the spectacle of two "Women Editors" who became "Lost in Colorado Canon" as a "Result of Trip with Inexperienced Guide." "Miss Willa Sibert Cather, a former editor of McClure's Magazine, and Miss Edith Lewis, assistant editor at Every Week, had a nerve-racking experience in the Mesa Verde wilds," they reported, giving Lewis and Cather roughly equivalent status as magazine professionals and comic fodder ("Lost"). The war in Europe was still far away for most Americans that August, although the sinking of the Lusitania in May had inched the conflict closer. In …

Susanna Rowson’S Transatlantic Career, Melissa J. Homestead, Camryn Hansen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The contention that Charlotte is best understood as part of Rowson’s career, a career that spanned a period of years and the Atlantic Ocean, is central to our analysis and to the recovery of Rowson’s authorial agency. In Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America, Angela Vietto argues for the importance of the “literary career” as a category of analysis for women, of “examinin[g] the course writers followed in their pursuit of writing as a vocation—their progress in a variety of kinds of projects, both in their texts and in their performances as authors” (91). Although we leave the work …

Review Of Their Own Frontier: Women Intellectuals Re-Visioning The American West Edited And With An Introduction By Shirley A. Leckie And Nancy J. Parezo, Kathleen A. Boardman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Pioneering women ethnohistorians and anthropologists who studied American Indians and the trans-Mississippi West deserve greater recognition, not only for the important information they gathered but also for their theoretical insights and methodological advances. As we learn about these women's lives and scholarly contributions, we also come to understand the barriers and prejudices they dealt with in order to pursue the work they valued. This is the argument of Shirley Leckie and Nancy Parezo's collection of intellectual biographies of ten women, born between 1873 and 1910, whose active research careers spanned most of the twentieth century. Their Own Frontier extends the …

Review Of Sitting Bull By Bill Yenne, Carole A. Barrett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Yenne's Sitting Bull is not so much a biography as it is a panorama of Northern Plains history from the time of Sitting Bull's birth, about 1831, to a period beyond his death in 1890. In this telling, Sitting Bull becomes the dominant figure in a history seeking to explain and analyze the great clash of cultures, lifeways, and worldviews that took place in the nineteenth-century American West. Yenne views Sitting Bull as an enigma, and by sifting through the "flickering amalgam of images" he seeks to present the reader with a portrait of a "great man ... but also …