Cultural History Commons^™

Review Of Survivance: Narratives Of Native Presence Edited By Gerald Vizenor, Lisa Cole

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Gerald Vizenor's concept of survivance, first introduced in Manifest Manners (1994), articulates a means of conceiving new expressions of Native life, free from the simulated "Indian," thereby highlighting the cultural value of precontact history. In this anthology, eighteen scholars variously acknowledge Vizenor's contribution of survivance to literary analysis and the wide-ranging applications of his insights to contexts such as language, race, and culture.

Vizenor functions as both a contributor to and editor for this volume. His organization of the chapters is particularly noteworthy in the intricate ways each one relates to those in close proximity. Thus, he enters into …

Review Of Branding Texas: Performing Culture In The Lone Star State By Leigh Clemons, Paula Marks

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Leigh Clemons identifies Texas cultural identity as composed of "a complex set of performances" reinforcing ideas about the state's distinctiveness and its inhabitants' lives and values. She examines a number of cultural and historical depictions of Texas people and events, not surprisingly finding that the privileged cultural identity is that born of the Texas Revolution, with forceful Anglo males at center stage and other, less powerful groups on the periphery challenging the dominant narrative.

Clemons begins with "archival spaces of Texan cultural memory," including the Alamo and other Revolutionary battlefields. Here she examines how the old triumphalist narratives of Anglo-centered …

Review Of Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading The West By Marcia Meredith Hensley, Sandra Schackel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since the republication of Letters of a Woman Homesteader in 1982, Elinore Pruitt Stewart's descriptions of homesteading near Burnt Fork, Wyoming, have served as a model for the single woman's homesteading experience. Although Pruitt held her homestead for barely a week before marrying her employer Clyde Stewart, her letters shaped our notions of the homestead experience in the early twentieth century. Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading the West, a collection of twentieth-century homesteading accounts, many of them in the Great Plains region, greatly expands this genre.

A newcomer to Wyoming in 1983, author Marcia Meredith Hensley recognized that neither …

Review Of Fort Laramie: Military Bastion Of The High Plains By Douglas C. Mcchristian, Mark R. Scherer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the annals of American westward expansion in the nineteenth century, few locations stand out more prominently than Fort Laramie in eastern Wyoming. During its almost sixty years as an active military post, the fort and the community that grew up around it bristled with the activities of the full array of iconic western figures, from fur traders and overland emigrants to Native Americans and the soldiers and government officials dispatched to deal with them, either through negotiation or military force. With Fort Laramie: Military Bastion of the High Plains, former National Park Service field historian Douglas C. McChristian breathes …

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 Seth Bullock: Black Hills Lawman By David A. Wolff, Christopher J. Steinke

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this short biography of Seth Bullock, the first sheriff of Deadwood, South Dakota, David A. Wolff challenges a few of the myths surrounding a former frontier icon. Bullock did not in fact "clean up" Deadwood, Wolff concludes, nor did he single-handedly prevent skirmishes with nearby Lakotas. His role in establishing Yellowstone National Park was "a greatly exaggerated part of his legend." And his reputation as a military man was mostly unwarranted; he spent most of the Spanish-American War in Georgia and never saw action.

In Wolff's retelling, Bullock emerges as an opportunistic "frontier capitalist" more than anything else, someone …

Review Of Youth And The Bright Medusa By Willa Cather, Mark A. Robison

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great Plains launched Willa Cather's career. Her multilayered imagining of frontier folk in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918) placed the region-and the noveliston the literary map. In 1920, Youth and the Bright Medusa combined recent urban stories" Coming, Aphrodite!," "The Diamond Mine," ''A Gold Slipper," "Scandal"-with four stories from 1905's Troll Garden anthology-"Paul's Case," "A Wagner Matinee," "The Sculptor's Funeral," and "'A Death in the Desert.'" Youth and the Bright Medusa explores dilemmas arising from pursuit of the shining Medusa of art. Can pure art reconcile with commercial acceptance? Will a singer survive her parasitic entourage? Who …

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 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 Regionalism And The Humanities Edited And With An Introduction By Timothy R. Mahoney And Wendy J. Katz, John E. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Emerging out of a 2003 conference in Lincoln, Nebraska, organized by the Consortium of Regional Humanities Centers, the sixteen disparate essays included in this engaging volume, ably edited and introduced by Timothy Mahoney and Wendy Katz, testify to the catholicity and vitality of the "new regionalism" in American studies. They both illustrate and justify what has been labeled by some the "local turn" in humanities scholarship. Because of the location of the conference on the border between the Midwest and the Great Plains, half of these essays focus upon those two regions. Each author assumes that place matters-that in addition …

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 …

Review Of Outside Looking In: Viewing First Nations Peoples In Canadian Dramatic Television Series By Mary Jane Miller, Doris Baltruschat

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mary Jane Miller sets out to answer the question "What are the stories that we tell and show to ourselves about Aboriginal peoples?" The strength of her book lies in its breadthin particular, the timeframe she chose, spanning the past fifty years, for investigating the portrayal of Aboriginal peoples on Canadian television. As a result, she provides a comprehensive overview of dramatic children and adult series, from Radisson to Forest Rangers and The Beachcombers, describing characters, themes, and topics in great detail. Her key point is that these series have mostly been produced from the "outside looking in." In …

Great Plains Quarterly, Volume 30, Issue 2, Spring 2010, Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Masthead

Contents

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes and News: FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD, CALLS FOR PAPERS, 2010 WILLA CATHER SPRING CONFERENCE, WEB RESOURCES OF INTEREST

Interview With Danny Davis, Terence Sims

Chicago Anti-Apartheid Movement

Length: 67 minutes

Oral history interview of Danny Davis by Terence Sims

Dr. Davis begins by outlining his introduction into activism and politics, when he served as executive director for the Greater Lawndale Conservation Commission in 1968. He explains how his definition of apartheid, which he is still fighting against, encompasses the massive underrepresentation of Black Americans in U.S. government positions. He details his childhood in rural Arkansas, growing up with ten siblings on a farm. He recalls early figures in the Civil Rights Movement in Arkansas, like the Little Rock Nine and Martin Luther King, Jr. He explains how …

Interview With Helen Shiller, Jacob Martin Lingan

Chicago Anti-Apartheid Movement

Length: 50 minutes

Oral history interview of Helen Shiller by Jacob Martin Lingan

Ms. Shiller first outlines the path that led her to forming the Anti-Apartheid Ordinance, beginning with her work with the Minister of Information for ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) and a trip to Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa, which led to her interest in the latter. She recalls how, when she returned to Chicago, she was motivated to strengthen legislation against the Apartheid government. She describes the process they went through to force Chicago banks to divest from South Africa, which happened to coincide with Nelson Mandela’s …

Interview With Clarice Durham, Lauren Ashley Alexander

Chicago Anti-Apartheid Movement

Length: 95 minutes

Oral history interview of Clarice Durham by Lauren Ashley Alexander

Clarice Durham recalls her childhood and recounts her work with the Illinois NAACP, The National Anti-Imperialist Movement in Solidarity with African Liberation (NAIMSAL), and as co-chair of the National Alliance Against Racial and Political Oppression. She campaigned for justice in the Scottsboro Boys case in 1931, attended the founding convention of the Progressive Party in 1948, and participated in the March on Washington in 1963. As Durham recaps her trip to South Africa, she recalls the change it had on her and her views of the movement. …

The Grizzly, March 25, 2010, Caitlin Dalik, Katie Callahan, Michael Delaney, James Kilduff, Liz Kilmer, Lisa Jobe, Sara Hourwitz, Jessica Zatwarnicki, Matt Whitman, Carly Siegler, Deborah Yanessa, Olivia Minick, Stefanie Moyer, Matt Campbell, James Wagner

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

27th Annual Airband Benefits Dignity House • Ursinus College Theater Presents "The Elephant Man" • Bank Robber Flees to Ursinus Campus Parking Lot • InterVarsity Group Travels to Camden Over Spring Break • Dangerous Risk to Multi-Tasking • Ursinus Field Hockey Intramurals are Open for Spring • UC Baseball Makes Best of Florida Trip • UC Alum Coaches Cornell to Sweet 16

The Grizzly, March 4, 2010, Caitlin Dalik, Katie Callahan, Liz Kilmer, Michael Delaney, Lisa Jobe, Gianna Paone, Chelsey Nehila, Helen Ann Coin, Joshua C. Walsh, Ellen Bernhard, Deborah Yanessa, Cory Kram, Elizabeth Mahoney, Carly Siegler, Zach Shamberg, Stefanie Moyer, Katie Haldeman

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

Ursinus Theater presents "The Crucible" • Political Cartoonist, Author Discusses New Book • CoSA Application, Logo Submission Deadlines Extended • Interest in Bioethics in Medicine Rises at UC • American Heart Month • Ursinus Looks Into "The Buried Life" • "Neshoba" Highlights Civil Rights Corruption in Honor of Black History Month • Chat Roulette Gambles with the Issues of Social Networking • Ursinus Lacrosse Looks to Outwork Opposition • Indoor Track & Field Championship