Cultural History Commons^™

Ua68/1/3 Arts & Letters, Vol. 4, No. 2, Wku Potter College Of Arts & Letters

WKU Administration Documents

Magazine created by WKU Potter College of Arts & Letters regarding faculty and student research, events and programs.

Field And Factory: Chinese Revolutionary Posters, Molly E. Reynolds

Schmucker Art Catalogs

The images on display for Field and Factory, political propaganda used by the Communist Party of China during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, construct a fictitious world. In perceiving these kinds of illustrations, the audience is asked either to visualize the society in its ideal form or unify in opposition to a national enemy. In the first half of the twentieth century, before the possibilities of the television advertisement were fully realized, posters were one of the most popular forms of propaganda: cheap to produce in mass quantities and simple enough to hang in any public building. The art form’s …

Lincoln And Liberty, Too, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

“The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty,” Abraham Lincoln said in 1864. And surely, from Lincoln of all people, that statement must come as a surprise, and for two reasons. In the first place, no one in American history might be said to have been a more shining example of liberty than Abraham Lincoln. Not only had he exercised liberty to its fullest extent, rising from poverty and obscurity to become the 16th president of the United States, but in the process he became the Great Emancipator of over three million slaves, and if anyone …

Review Of The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, And Place Edited By Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, And Karla Armbruster, Jenny Kerber

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Given the emphasis that advocates of bioregionalism have historically placed on principles of decentralization and localization in the development of more ecologically sustainable modes of inhabitation, it is perhaps not surprising that no wide-ranging survey of bioregional literary criticism has appeared on the scene until now. This is a shame, however, because it turns out that examining bioregional practices across cultures and places yields a wealth of new ideas about how to live more sustainably in one's home place. In The Bioregional Imagination, readers finally have access to a much-needed set of comparative perspectives on bioregionalism, ranging from the implementation …

Great Plains Quarterly Fall 2013 Vol. 33 No.4 -- Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Inside The Ark: The Hutterites In Canada And The United States By Yossi Katz And John Lehr, Rod Janzen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Geographers Yossi Katz and John Lehr's new book on the Hutterites provides an in-depth analysis of the social life of one of the four branches of the Hutterite Church in North America, the Group 2 Schmiedeleut. In many ways it is also an informative introduction to Hutterite life in general.

Katz and Lehr provide detailed explanations of virtually every aspect of Hutterite life in the province of Manitoba. This includes social and political organization at the colony and intercolony levels, religious and cultural traditions, the impact of space and how it is employed (with helpful charts and images), as well …

Review Of I'Ll Be Here In The Morning: The Songwriting Legacy Of Townes Van Zandt By Brian T. Atkinson, Chuck Vollan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Texas's Townes Van Zandtwas a musician's musician whose fame grew after his 1996 death. Brian T. Atkinson, contributor to the Austin AmericanStatesman, Texas Music, Lone Star, American Songwriter, and No Depression, has woven together a collection of interviews from Van Zandt's contemporaries and friends, as well as his musical heirs-singer-songwriters who grew up too late to have known the troubled author of "Pancho and Lefty," "Tecumseh Valley," and "Lungs" but who admired his dark, poetic lyrics.

The Diminishment Of The Great Sioux Reservation Treaties, Tricks, And Time, Alan L. Neville, Alyssa Kaye Anderson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Historically, Indian-white relations have been marred by mistrust and dishonesty. This is especially true in numerous land dealings between the United States government and the Lakota/ Dakota/Nakota people of the northern Great Plains. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court noted, "A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history."¹

Our focus here is to chronicle and analyze the tragic diminishment of the Great Sioux Reservation, first established by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.² The land loss progressed with the Homestead Act of 1862, Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, …

Making War On Jupiter Pluvius The Culture And Science Of Rainmaking In The Southern Great Plains, 1870-1913, Michael R. Whitaker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For two weeks in August 1891, the grounds of the "C" Ranch in rural West Texas thundered with the sound of explosions, as a federal government- sponsored expeditionary force hurled hundreds of pounds of heavy ordnance against an invisible enemy. In command of this unusual operation was "General" Robert Dyrenforth, who with $9,000 of congressional funding in pocket was doing his utmost to find out whether, as a bit of folk wisdom ran, the furious tumult and aerial concussions of battle could somehow cause rain. From tiny western hamlets to the metropolises of the East, Americans were fascinated by the …

Review Of Terrible Justice: Sioux Chiefs And U.S. Soldiers On The Upper Missouri, 1854-1868 By Doreen Chaky, Steven C. Haack

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When strong tensions exist between cultures, small incidents can have grave consequences. Thus, in August of 1854, when a Sioux Indian living near Fort Laramie, Nebraska Territory, found a lame cow and killed it to feed his family, a sad chapter began. The cow's emigrant owner complained of his loss to the fort's commander, and Lt. John Grattan was soon on his way to a Sioux encampment to demand that the thief be turned over to face justice. As a cannon rolled into place to reinforce his demand, violence broke out, and thirty soldiers, including Grattan, soon lay dead. Secretary …

Review Of Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History Edited By Susan A. Miller And James Riding In, Angela Parker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Susan Miller and James Riding In position this anthology as the first to collect historical work from Native scholars participating in an "Indigenous discourse"-an academic conversation "rooted in North American Indigenous thought" and, they claim, global Indigenous thought. If your essentialism alarm bells are ringing, it is for good reason. Ignore the alarms long enough to work your way through the entire anthology and you will find rich, complicated, vibrant historical analysis and critique from Indigenous historians working in Canada and the United States.

The introduction and framing essays by Susan Miller in part 1 elaborate on the idea of …

Review Of Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past And Present By Jean A. Boyd, John Mark Dempsey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The patrons of Saturday-night Texas dance halls still two-step to the music of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, more than thirty-five years after Wills's death. Jean Boyd is one of the Texas music authors who has mythologized Wills in her previous "We're the Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mills": An Oral History (2003) and The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (1998). In her newest book, Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present, Boyd puts the spotlight on less well known practitioners of the music that Wills pioneered along with …

Review Of Weapons Of The Lewis And Clark Expedition By Jim Garry, Brooke Wibracht

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Jim Garry's recent publication offers a meticulous assessment of the Corps of Discovery's arsenal. One of Garry's goals centers on correcting outdated information from well-known books, about the Corps and the weaponry the men carried, especially Carl P. Russell's Guns of the Early Frontiers (1957). The author acknowledges that historians have continuously advanced the scholarship on the Corps' weaponry, but misconceptions about the arsenal still exist, muddying the historical record. He encourages readers to view his book as a tool for placing the expedition and the weapons of the early nineteenth century in an accurate historical context.

The volume contains …

Review Of Villages On Wheels: A Social History Of The Gathering To Zion By Stanley B. Kimball And Violet T. Kimball, W. Paul Reeve

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Villages on Wheels is the culmination of historian Stanley B. Kimball's more than fifteen years' research on and long career as a scholar of the Mormon Trail. When he died in 2003, his wife, Violet, a writer, photojournalist, and occasional student of the trail herself, completed the project. This social history, a detailed examination of the everyday aspects of creating and maintaining a mobile society, is the result of their collaboration.

Based upon "hundreds of journals"-mostly located at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Church History Library in Salt Lake City, the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at …

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 …