Cultural History Commons^™

Review Of Violent Encounters: Interviews On Western Massacres Edited By Deborah And Jon Lawrence, Paul H. Carlson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Massacre" is a fiery, often provocative word, and sometimes it is hard to define. In the American West, for example, in a violent encounter, how does one distinguish between 'massacre and battle? Such violence as Cutthroat Gap (1833), Oatman (1851), Mountain Meadows (1857), Bear River (1863), Sand Creek (1864), and McComas (1883) should be defined as massacres. But, how should one define the Sioux Uprising (1862), the Saline and Solomon rivers and the Washita (1868), Little Big Horn (1876), and Wounded Knee (1890)?

Review Of Indigenous Women And Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture Edited By Cheryl Suzack, Shari M. Huhndorf, Jeanne Perreault, And Jean Barman, Elizabeth Archuleta

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The editors of this volume recognize politics, activism, and culture as three areas where Indigenous women come together across place and time in order to counter colonial policies that have diminished their power, status, and material circumstances in mainstream society as well as in their own communities. The essays included in Indigenous Women and Feminism explore these three areas through the work of Indigenous women living in the Great Plains regions of Canada and the United States.

The essays in part 1, "Politics," point to leadership as an imperative component of Indigenous feminism. Their authors examine the politics of leadership …

Review Of The Brokeback Book: From Story To Cultural Phenomenon Edited By William R. Handley, Neil Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Brokeback Book's subtitle suggests that it aims to be something more comprehensive than a collection of essays on Annie Proulx's story or director Ang Lee's film. In this respect, this impressive book works well to bring together some previously published essays, such as those by David Leavitt and Daniel Mendelsohn, which took particular positions on the debates around the "gayness" of the film, and places them alongside direct and indirect responses to such critical readings. Hence we have the producer of the film James Schamus's reply to Mendelsohn in which he argues that through "mainstreaming" gayness "we disturb the …

Beyond The Violence Indian Agriculture, White Removal, And The Unlikely Construction Of The Northern Cheyenne Reservation, 1876-1900, James R. Allison Iii

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Upon first glance, a specific act of violence seemed to fix the particular location of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. On December 12, 1880, the prominent Northern Cheyenne chief, Little Wolf, staggered into a white-owned trading store near Fort Keogh, Montana Territory, and, in a drunken stupor, shot and killed a fellow Cheyenne named Starving Elk. Enraged at Starving Elk for gambling with his daughter, Little Wolf committed the most atrocious act a Cheyenne could commit, the killing of another Cheyenne. Blood spilled within the tribe polluted the Mahuts, the four sacred arrows the Creator gave to the Cheyenne people to …

Review Of Principle Over Party: The Farmers' Alliance And Populism In South Dakota, 1880-1900 By R. Alton Lee, Francis Moul

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"During this era, farmers and workers watched as forces of wealth captured control of both major political parties, promoting the formation of monopolies. . . . In the process, the small capitalist class gained control of the great bulk of the nation's wealth. This monetary disparity exacerbated class divisions in the country, and many worried that it would lead to violence and upheaval." That sounds like contemporary headlines about the Occupy Wall Street movement. It isn't. Those words in this book's introduction describe the era from 1865 to 1894, taking in the conditions that spawned one of the most successful, …

Review Of The Notorious Dr. Flippin: Abortion And Consequence In The Early Twentieth Century By Jamie Q. Tallman, Sarah B. Rodriguez

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Born into slavery, the child of Hugh Flippin and one of his slaves, Vera Denipplf, the teenage Charles Flippin joined the 14th United States Colored Troops Company A in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1864. While enlisted, he learned to read. Following the war, he married, had two children, and, following his wife's death, moved to Kansas to start a farm. In the 1880s, Flippin apprenticed with an eclectic physician in Kansas and traveled to the Bennett College of Medicine in Chicago for further study. The local newspaper announced his return as "the only colored medical graduate in the state of Kansas."

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 antimodern 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 The Art Of John Snow By Elizabeth Herbert, Robert Steven

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Elizabeth Herbert's aim in The Art of John Snow is to restore John Snow (1911-2004) to the register of the most significant artists in Calgary's recent art history. She does this by documenting the recognition he received in his lifetime, the close working relationship he had with other significant artists of his day, the reasons she sees for his neglect by historians, and, more than anything else, the sophistication she sees in his work.

The book is the ninth in a series titled Art in Profile that aims to provide "insight into the life and work of an artist or …

Review Of The Northern Cheyenne Exodus In History And Memory By James N. Leiker And Ramon Powers, Alan Boye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1878, about 350 Northern Cheyennes fled captivity in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma, in an attempt to return to their homeland in present-day Montana. Before long, thousands of soldiers involving three departments of the U.S. Army, dozens of cowboys, a number of pioneer families, and such mythic figures as Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were swept up in the event.

The Cheyennes successfully withstood several battles with the army on their flight. For much of the distance, they paused only long enough to steal horses and food; but, while crossing northwestern Kansas, a number of the Cheyennes …

Review Of Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, And Film From Alcatraz To The Nmai By Dean Rader, Beverly R. Singer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This study is a wholehearted exploration of artistic and cultural production engaging the theme of American Indian resistance, perhaps going further than previous American Indian art forums in print with a thematic analysis. Rader organizes an inventory of the creative process of resistance (against extinction, misrepresentation, and debasement) by detailing in chapter 2 artistic works-including Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's large painted canvases denoting maps of Indigenous-named states in the U.S.-that Rader says represent a resistance to settler society's seizings and its attempted erasure of Natives while simultaneously claiming their continued presence.

Review Of Texas Through Women's Eyes: The Twentieth-Century Experience By Judith N. Mcarthur And Harold L. Smith, Jean A. Stuntz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Texas Through Women's Eyes tells the story of twentieth-century Texans who are mostly left out of Texas history texts. Including women of all races and social classes, the book is arranged to make it especially useful for college classes, but is written in a manner non-academics can enjoy. Each of its four chronological parts (1900-1920, 1920-1945, 1945-1965, and 1965-2000) begins with a lively narrative broken down into several topics, accompanied by a suggested reading list, and ends with a selection of documents pertaining closely to the narrative.

Part 1, "Social Reform and Suffrage in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920," effectively links …

Review Of Empire Of The Summer Moon: Quanah Parker And The Rise And Fall Of The Comanches, The Most Powerful Indian Tribe In American History By S. C. Gwynne, Joseph A. Stout Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

By 1836, white settlement had moved steadily westward into the Southern Plains, confronting nomadic Indians and leading to increasing violence between the two. When Nokoni Comanches that year attacked Fort Parker-a stockaded fort in east central Texas-they killed or captured white settlers, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker numbered among them. Parker survived to become the wife of Peta Nocona, a Comanche warrior known for his hatred of whites and ferocity in battle. She bore him children, including Quanah Parker.

Review Of Working The Land: The Stories Of Ranch And Farm Women In The Modern American West By Sandra K. Schackel, Mary Zeiss Stange

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1995 Sandra Schackel, then professor of history at Boise State University, was asked to contribute a chapter about rural women's experiences to an anthology on the post World War II American West. The research Schackel accumulated for that chapter, largely in the form of interviews of farm- and ranchwives, provided the foundation for this slender volume. It is a foundation upon which she did relatively little to build. While her oral historical approach suggests some tantalizing avenues for further exploration, they remain for the most part rural roads not taken.

Review Of Empires, Nations, And Families: A History Of The North American West, 1800-1860 By Anne F. Hyde, Walter Nugent

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This extraordinary book is a recasting and retelling of virtually the entire history of the trans-Mississippi West from 1804 to about 1860. Its solid source foundation ranges from early fur-trade documents to the most recent monographs. It is amply illustrated with rarely seen visuals from many archives and replete with scores of real women and men-AngloAmerican, French, Native, and Metis. The focus is on family connections-marital, sexual, social, economic-and the crossing of racial boundaries and networks. Women are never absent, and their agency is evident. Every chapter opens with a vignette about a family member-man, woman, or child.

Review Of Writing In Dust: Reading The Prairie Environmentally By Jenny Kerber, Aubrey Streit Krug

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When do the prairies begin in history? And are they now in danger of ending? Jenny Kerber notes that settler cultures have relied upon two narratives to understand the Great Plains of North America. The first is about how history begins on the prairie when it is recultivated as an Edenic garden; the second is about how that garden falls from grace into a barren wasteland.

Kerber opens up these Western, Christian traditions for interdisciplinary critique. By considering ecological, feminist, Indigenous, and other marginalized perspectives, she explores "how different stories might contribute to a vision of sustainable dwelling on the …

Review Of All Indians Do Not Live In Teepees (Or Casinos) By Catherine C. Robbins, Bruce E. Johansen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Catherine C. Robbins's highly personal tour of contemporary Indian Country begins with a moving description of 2,000 sets of human remains being returned from Harvard University "to the people of the Pecos Pueblo and their kin at Jemez" in 1999. The book then degenerates into a long rant of pet peeves that annoy its author.

Robbins's portrait of Indian casinos is not flattering (their glitziness spoils reservation vistas, she says). She doesn't think Indians dignify themselves by lecturing whites about sovereignty. In Robbins's view, Indians practicing their hunting and fishing rights under treaties bring an unwelcome din to the streams …

Review Of Women Writers Of The American West, 1833-1927 By Nina Baym, Jim Hoy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great Plains, particularly in pioneer times, has been described as a place that was good for men and dogs but hell on women and horses, a notion that could be extended to the American West as a whole. In other words, the West was a man's country, initially explored by men, settled by men, written about by men. Nina Baym, however, well documents the inaccuracy of this last point in Women Writers of the American West.

Following an introductory chapter, nine chapters divide the West into nine geographic regions, each of these offering brief descriptions of the hundreds of …

Review Of West Of 98: Living And Writing The New American West Edited By Lynn Stegner And Russell Rowland, Matthew J. C. Cella

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

West of 98 is an ambitious and comprehensive collection of personal essays and poems by over sixty contributors who work to define the parameters of the American West: the vast and complex region west of the 98th meridian. As Lynn Stegner explains in the collection's introduction, the goal of the book is to offer a "Greek chorus that might define, remark upon, and otherwise characterize the West as each of [the writers] grew to know it, and equally important, the West that is still becoming." The chorus of voices featured in the collection reflects a broad range of cultural and …

Review Of State Of Minds: Texas Culture And Its Discontents By Don Graham, Ken Baake

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Don Graham sets out in State of Minds to address two threats he sees to the literary landscape of Texas: one, the perception that Texas culture, if it exists at all, is inconsequential and "lowbrow"; and, two, that college students even within Texas are becoming illiterate in regards to their state's rich heritage of creative fiction and nonfiction writing and film. The book succeeds on both counts, reminding readers familiar with the canon of how much fun it is to enter the world of Texas's written and film literature and how much one can learn from it about the timeless …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 32 / Number 2 / Spring 2012

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News