Cultural History Commons^™

Review Of Lone Stars Iii: A Legacy Of Texas Quilts, 1986- 2011 By Karoline Patterson Bresenhan And Nancy O'Bryant Puentes, Marcia Kaylakie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Long awaited by the quilt world, Lone Stars III is the summation of a trilogy of Texas quilt history and quilt documentations. Following the tremendous success of the first two volumes (1986, 1990), book three is another visual wonder of quilt artistry in all its forms. The book is well constructed to create a unified flow of images and ideas. In their introductory "A Quarter Century of Change," Karoline Patterson Bresenhan and Nancy O'Bryant Puentes present a graphic account of the thoughts of modern quilt artists as they struggle to find meaning in modern events.

Review Of West-Words: Celebrating Western Canadian Theatre And Playwriting Edited By Moira J. Day, Scott Sharplin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Collecting essays from a 2007 national conference hosted by the University of Saskatchewan Drama Department and the Canadian Association of Theatre Research, West-words purports to be "the first comprehensive study of contemporary theatre across the [Canadian] prairies" since 1977. It is certainly wideranging, in terms of style, subject matter, and theme; "comprehensive," however, is beyond the reach of this scattershot anthology.

Editor Moira J. Day divides the entries according to provincial content, moving east to west like the colonists' path across the three prairie provinces. A fourth heading, "Crossing Regional Borders," seems to undermine the tidy geographical categorization of Manitoban, …

Review Of Will Rogers: A Political Life By Richard D. White Jr., Paul F. Lambert

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A child of the Southern Plains, Will Rogers became an iconic national figure in the 1920s and '30s. Renowned as a vaudevillian, a comedic movie star, a syndicated newspaper columnist, a radio commentator, and an author, Rogers's significance as a political figure has largely been minimized or overlooked. Richard D. White Jr. demonstrates successfully that Rogers indeed was an influential political commentator whose support on behalf of various issues was sought and coveted by presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt.

Review Of Masculine Style: The American West And Literary Modernism By Daniel Worden, Blake Allmendinger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Daniel Worden argues that masculinity isn't a biological identity or a fixed construct, but a type of performance that allows for fluidity, enabling individuals "the freedom to refashion the self and live as an equal among others." The men and women who assume such a style challenge a hierarchical system in which men are equated with power and dominance. They reveal a complex subjectivity, sometimes engaging in sentimental relationships and forming unorthodox friendships and unions-unlike the traditional cowboy, who is portrayed in literature as a rugged and isolate, though presumably heterosexual, male. Worden examines the subversion of stereotypical western masculinity …

Review Of Imprisoned Art, Complex Patronage: Plains Drawings By Howling Wolf And Zotom At The Autry National Center By Joyce M. Szabo, Phillip Earenfight

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Imprisoned Art adds to its author's growing list of impressive publications that consider the so-called ledger drawings created by Plains Indian warriors incarcerated, as prisoners of the Southern Plains wars, at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, between 1875 and 1879. It focuses on what were once two fully intact books of drawings, one by Zotom (Kiowa), the other by Howling Wolf (Cheyenne). Treated earlier in Dorothy Dunn's 1877: Plains Indian Sketch Books of Zo-Tom and Howling Wolf (1969), and, with respect to Howling Wolf, in Szabo's Howling Wolf and the History of Ledger Art (1994), the books receive here …

Review Of After Custer: Loss And Transformation In Sioux Country By Paul L. Hedren, Rani-Henrik Andersson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Paul Hedren is well known for excellent studies focusing on the Sioux wars and the Northern Plains. In After Custer: Loss and Transformation in Sioux Country, Hedren returns to his favorite topics, but this time telling a story no longer focused on Northern Plains conflicts between Indians and whites, but on the changes that took place in the years following the Plains Indian Wars. His approach is admirable, since for most people-scholars and general readers alike-interest often ends with the conclusion of open combat. The years between Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee are seldom treated so thoroughly as in …

Indians And Empires: Cultural Change Among The Omaha And Pawnee, From Contact To 1808, Kurt E. Kinbacher

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great Plains is in the middle of everywhere. It has been crossed and recrossed for tens of thousands of years. Because of its central location, the region served as a historical laboratory where people were "forever imagining new environments and trying to muscle them into being." In what is now the state of Nebraska-the very center of the middle-divergent groups of Native Americans claimed vast territories and created dynamic cultures. Among these peoples were the Omaha, who settled on the Missouri River, and the Pawnee, who lived in the Platte Valley. Four empires--Spain, France, Great Britain, and the United …

The 2012 Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, Andrew Jewell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Selecting a single book to win a prize is a tremendous challenge. There can be something unsatisfying about ranking creative scholarly works knowing there is no such thing as a sole "best" book in a group of quality titles. And yet, each year that I've been a part of the Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize committee, it has happened relatively easily: a book is chosen as the prize winner. The ease does not emerge from a casual attitude toward the selection. On the contrary, the many people involved with choosing the Book Prize winner take it very seriously. I also …

Review Of Indian Voices: Listening To Native Americans By Alison Owings, Sally Thompson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Have you ever noticed how often historians and anthropologists write about Indians in the past tense? This phenomenon is one of the most disempowering experiences for an Indian to encounter. Journalist Alison Owings's unique book helps to correct this misperception, while covering broad subjects of history and culture through the lives of sixteen Native Americans, most of whom are unknown outside of their own communities.

Owings's accounts entwine the contemporary with the past. The reader finds intelligent first-hand reflections on how treaties, allotments, reorganization, relocation, termination, federal recognition, NAGPRA, and other federal policies, alongside blood quantum controversies and gaming, have …

Review Of Scenery, Curiosities, And Stupendous Rocks: William Quesenbury's Overland Sketches, 1850-51 By David Royce Murphy, With Contributions By Michael L. Tate And Michael Farrell, James Peck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This handsome volume is a welcome addition to the growing literature detailing nineteenth- century overland migration, especially travel in and through the Great Plains. Its subject is the Omaha World-Herald's William Quesenbury sketchbook, published here in its entirety for the first time. Quesenbury, who traveled west from Arkansas to California seeking gold in 1850 and returned east with John Wesley Jones as part of his team of Pantoscope artists in 1851, produced more landscape drawings of the North Platte and Sweetwater Rivers High Plains regions than any other historical figure.

Review Of A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, And The Agrarian Ideal In America By Janet Galligani Casey, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In A New Heartland, Janet Galligani Casey tackles the difficult issue of how to judge modernity in early twentieth-century America by focusing on a group often thought to embody traditional and anti modern America, its rural women. The book is not about the realities of rural life. Instead, it is about the depiction and idea of rural life, and women's place within these. Galligani Casey examines women's place in the periodicals, literature, and photography of the time, doing a particularly good job of analyzing the leading farm women's periodical of the day, The Farmer's Wife. The book connects agrarian …

Review Of Goodlands: A Meditation And History On The Great Plains By Frances W. Kaye, Curtis Mcmanus

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Frances Kaye examines the different ways that Natives and Europeans perceived and interacted with the Great Plains during the age of nineteenth- and twentieth-century North American settlement. Commendably, she conceptualizes the Great Plains as a unity rather than two distinct regions bisected by the 49th parallel. Kaye uses the history of the region to "articulate a Great Plains consciousness" rooted in "Indigenous ideologies" to establish "what it means to make good use of the land."

Review Of This Is Not The Ivy League: A Memoir Y Mary Clearman Blew, Julene Bair

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mary Clearman Blew reports that her "gorge still rises" recalling "the dearth of expectations" held out for her during her remote Montana childhood. In passages reminiscent of Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, we see a smart girl who, to realize her potential, must bring her own volition ruthlessly to bear.

Of course, she is not forgiven for overstepping her bounds. Most critical of her are her husband's parents. When, after marrying at age eighteen, she becomes pregnant within the year, her mother-in-law is triumphant: "I guess this is finally the end of college for you!" Instead, Blew …

Review Of Women On The North American Plains Edited By Renee M. Laegreid And Sandra K. Mathews, Rebecca A. Buller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Despite over thirty years having elapsed since Joan Jensen and Darlis Miller, in "The Gentle Tamers Revisited," called for new approaches to western women's history, popular stereotypes of what constitutes a Great Plains woman remain deeply ingrained in the general public's imagination. Although three decades of scholarship have slowly chipped away at the typecast, until recently no one piece has consolidated the diversity of women's experiences within the Canadian and American Great Plains.

We should herald, therefore, the arrival of Women on the North American Plains. This long-needed collection delivers a powerful corrective to scholarship's and popular imagery's shortcomings. …

Review Of American Indian Nations From Termination To Restoration, 1953-2006 By Roberta Ulrich, James Allison

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Roberta Ulrich's blistering, 2S0-page tour of dozens of different Indian groups undergoing termination and restoration can at times leave the reader dizzy and gasping for air. With so many different communities undergoing such diverse experiences, it is often hard to see the utility of housing these stories under one roof. Convenience is welcome, but analytical coherence is better. Ulrich herself provides little justification for the project and rarely draws illustrious conclusions across tribal experiences. She does, however, dutifully collect all the stories together and provides a clear structure that allows readers easily to discern common themes and patterns. For that, …

Transcript Of Everybody Helps Everybody, Dave Larkins

All Story Transcripts

This story is an excerpt from a longer interview that was collected as part of the Launching through the Surf: The Dory Fleet of Pacific City project. In this story, Dave Larkins describes his experience with the supportive nature of the dory community.

Transcript Of When Your Motor Quits, Michael (Mike) Dixon

All Story Transcripts

This story is an excerpt from a longer interview that was collected as part of the Launching through the Surf: The Dory Fleet of Pacific City project. In this story, Michael (Mike) Dixon describes what happens when a boat’s motor dies at sea.

Transcript Of First Day On The Water, Michael (Mike) Dixon

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This story is an excerpt from a longer interview that was collected as part of the Launching through the Surf: The Dory Fleet of Pacific City project. In this story, Michael (Mike) Dixon describes his first experience of fishing on the ocean.

Transcript Of Breaking Into The Sunset West, Dave Larkins

All Story Transcripts

This story is an excerpt from a longer interview that was collected as part of the Launching through the Surf: The Dory Fleet of Pacific City project. In this story, Dave Larkins recounts breaking into the local bar with friends.

Every Man A Historian Means Every Man: Speaking With The Fringe, John M. Rudy

Interpreting the Civil War: Connecting the Civil War to the American Public

The amazing power of the internet age is the pure democratizing ethic it has injected into our culture. We aren't simply pleased when the world around us solicits and listens to our opinions, we've come to expect it. Every news story has a comment thread; every article asks for our feedback. The White House solicits input from the American "user" and offers meaningful responses. In short, we are a people who are growing more vocal in our daily lives. The brilliant constitutional law professor and master of cultural understanding Lawrence Lessig has called our culture "Read-Write" as opposed to "Read-Only." …