United States History Commons^™

Introduction, Barbara Lewis

Trotter Review

What is the political valence of blackness at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century; has it waxed or waned? Is it headed to greater potency or back into the dark days of the past when complexion determined the worth of character? Major political advances have been achieved nationally in the last ten years, most significantly in the election of the nation’s first African American president. Yet a resistant status quo remains. The push to unseat President Obama is virulent, and it is hard to imagine that all of the motivation to do so is tied only …

"Spectacular Opacities": The Hyers Sisters' Performances Of Respectability And Resistance, Jocelyn Buckner

Theatre Faculty Articles and Research

This essay analyzes the Hyers Sisters, a Reconstruction-era African American sister act, and their radical efforts to transcend social limits of gender, class, and race in their early concert careers and three major productions, Out of Bondage and Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad, two slavery-to-freedom epics, and Urlina, the African Princess, the first known African American play set in Africa. At a time when serious, realistic roles and romantic plotlines featuring black actors were nearly nonexistent due to the country’s appetite for stereotypical caricatures, the Hyers Sisters used gender passing to perform opposite one another as heterosexual lovers in …

Collective Memory, Commemoration And Ways Of Remembering Little Rock: 50 Years After The Integration Crisis At Central High School, Caroline Daly

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis uses the 50th Anniversary of the 1957 Integration Crisis at Central High School as a case study to explore issues of memory and remembrance. After looking at various forms of commemoration, Little Rock proves to provide key insights into the dangers of memory, as well as more effective ways of remembering.

Cosmopolitanism And The Uses Of Tradition: Robert Redfield And Alternative Visions Of Modernization During The Cold War, Nicole Sackley

History Faculty Publications

The history of the rise and fall of “modernization theory” after World War II has been told as a story of Talcott Parsons, Walt Rostow, and other US social scientists who built a general theory in US universities and sought to influence US foreign policy. However, in the 1950s anthropologist Robert Redfield and his Comparative Civilizations project at the University of Chicago produced an alternative vision of modernization—one that emphasized intellectual conversation across borders, the interrelation of theory and fieldwork, and dialectical relations of tradition and modernity. In tracing the Redfield project and its legacies, this essay aims to broaden …

Custer, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, And The Little Bighorn, Ron Mccoy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the summer of 1876, the United States government launched the Great Sioux War, a sharp instrument intended to force the last nonagency Lakotas onto reservations. In doing so, it precipitated a series of events that proved disastrous for its forces in the short run and calamitous for the Lakotas in the much longer scheme of things.

On June 17, Lakotas and Cheyennes crippled General George Crook's l,300-man force at the Battle of the Rosebud in southern Montana. Eight days later and thirty miles to the west, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, the "Boy General" of Civil War fame, led …

Leading The "Father" The Pawnee Homeland, Coureurs De Bois, And The Villasur Expedition Of 1720, Christopher Steinke

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1742 two sons of the explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de La Verendrye met an indigenous nation they called the Gens de l'Arc somewhere along the middle Missouri River near present-day Pierre, South Dakota.¹ Louis-Joseph and Francois were searching for the mythical Sea of the West, and the former asked the chief of the Gens de l'Arc if he "knew the white people of the seacoast." When the chief replied that "'[tlhe French who are on the seacoast are numerous'" and have "'many chiefs for the soldiers, and also many chiefs for prayer,'" Louis-Joseph believed he had at …

Review Of Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions In Theory, Politics, And Literature Edited By Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, And Scott Lauria Morgensen, Margaret Noori

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A colleague and I were asked recently to speak at the Midwest regional conference for LGBTQ and ally-identified college students. We teach an Indigenous language (Anishinaabemowin), one of us has lived in a same-sex relationship, both of us are allies, but the politics and theory of the community are daunting. As we looked across a sea of young faces, empowered by proximity, we saw hope and we said, "gego bigidnike aanji'igwa." This phrase, "don't let them change you," has long served us teaching about identity, freedom, and survival in Native communities and was perfect for the gathering of young LGBTQ …

Review Of Rich Indians: Native People And The Problem Of Wealth In American History By Alexandra Harmon, Kathleen Pickering Sherman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Across American history, Native American tribes were impoverished through land and natural resource appropriations accomplished through a wide variety of well-documented political, military, and cultural means. Alexandra Harmon, in her book, provocatively titled Rich Indians, focuses on a handful of exceptions to this statistical pattern to explore American discourses about wealth accumulation by Native Americans. Armed with an impressive collection of primary sources, as well as literature from history and anthropology, Harmon also uncovers parallel discourses by Native Americans themselves about wealth accumulation among their own peoples. The result is a complex, multilayered, and fascinating melange of contradictory attitudes and …

Review Of Hill Country Deco: Modernistic Architecture Of Central Texas By David Bush And Jim Parsons, Richard Cleary

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 2008, Jim Parsons and David Bush, staff members of the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance, published Houston Deco: Modernistic Architecture of the Texas Coast, a photographic sampling intended to draw attention to the region's surviving examples of buildings erected between the 1920s and the late 1940s in the modernistic styles popularly known as Art Deco and Art Moderne. Hill Country Deco applies this model to Central Texas, covering an area considerably beyond the geographical Hill Country to include San Antonio and Austin as well as towns in the prairie lands to the east. Like its predecessor, Hill Country Deco …

Review Of Rightful Place By Amy Hale Auker Review Of Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories By David Mogen, Nick Bascom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Much contemporary western writing, including memoirs such as Judy Blunt's Breaking Clean (2003), abandons the mythic character of early western narratives, striving instead for realism. These two collections of essays do one better offering a satisfying blend of stark realism and wistful nostalgia for heroic western archetypes. With contrasting educational backgrounds and biographies, their authors show us the West from widely different perspectives: Mogen has taught English at Colorado State University for many years; Auker married at nineteen and has worked on ranches ever since. Yet both strike a similar balance, capturing the harsh truths of western living while describing …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 32 / Number 1 / Winter 2012

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Myth, Memory, And Massacre: The Pease River Capture Of Cynthia Ann Parker By Paul H. Carlson And Tom Crum, Joaquin Rivaya-Martinez

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The so-called "Battle of Pease River," in which the Comanche Indians purportedly suffered a crucial defeat, has become a recurrent topic in the literature on the Indian wars of the Southern Plains, as well as in the collective memory of Anglo-Texans. In this extraordinary book, Carlson and Crum scrutinize numerous accounts of the event to unveil one of the most blatant fabrications in the history of Texas. The authors' painstaking meticulousness has permitted them to discriminate numerous falsehoods and forgeries from the following few discernable facts: a massacre occurred on the banks of Mule Creek, a tributary of the Pease …

Review Of My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back To Kansas By Tracy Seeley., Sarah Smarsh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Kansas-born playwright William Inge said, "It wasn't until I got to New York that I became a Kansan." For English professor Tracy Seeley, it was San Francisco that did the trick. For years she lived a life of pleasure there grading papers in hip coffee joints, cycling through the cool fog, reveling in the progressive political climate. Her nomadic Kansas childhood was behind her, even beneath her, she thought. Then, an emotional earthquake- triggered by a cancer diagnosis and the deaths of both parents, in quick succession forces a reckoning with mortality and sends her looking for home. But for …

Review Of Assault On The Deadwood Stage: Road Agents And Shotgun Messengers By Robert K. Dearment, David A. Walker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Robert DeArment, a prolific historian depicting outlaws, gamblers, and lawmen throughout the American West, focuses on individuals associated with the stagecoach network centered in the boomtown of Deadwood, Dakota Territory. This network stretched across the Northern Plains from presentday Bismarck, North Dakota, to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and on to Sidney, Nebraska, and in each case was linked to a transcontinental railroad.

DeArment introduces his readers to the Texas Gang, the Hat Creek Gang, the Joel Collins Gang, and the Tom Price Gang, as well as to a wide variety of characters with such colorful nicknames as "Big Nose George" Parrott, "Laughing …

Review Of Bird Cloud: A Memoir By Annie Proulx, Alex Hunt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Annie Proulx's latest is nonfiction, recounting her attempt to inhabit a section of land in south-central Wyoming. While tough winters and unmaintained roads make year-round residence too difficult, Proulx glories in the wild isolation of a place that inspires her to research and write as well as to build fence and monitor eagles. Bird Cloud is a book that Proulx's regulars will find both enjoyable and revealing; however, its self-indulgence and lack of polish leave us with a feeling akin to Proulx's own house high in the mountain valley-it remains raw and isolated.

This is not entirely a negative. Proulx's …

Review Of Llano Estacada: An Island In The Sky Edited By Stephen Bogener And William Tydeman, George Lubick

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Island in the Sky" aptly describes the Llano Estacado, the southern extension of the Great Plains that rises some 800 feet above the surrounding terrain in northwestern Texas and northeastern New Mexico. It is this expansive landscape that William Tydeman and Stephen Bogener have placed in the forefront of an excellent collection of essays and photographs that explore the connections between the region's geography and culture. The plateau's flat terrain-"horizontal yellow," as historian Dan Flores has described it-invariably defines the Llano, but Stephen Bogener reminds us also that "85 percent of what the human eye registers on the Llano Estacado …

Review Of Great Sioux War Orders Of Battle: How The United States Army Waged War On The Northern Plains, 1876-1877 By Paul L. Hedren, Charles M. Robinson Iii

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great Sioux War of 1876-77 was the greatest Indian war ever fought by the United States government. That, together with the continued fascination of the Little Bighorn, has generated enough books and articles to fill a small library. Most follow a common thread of narration or analysis, but Paul L. Hedren's Great Sioux War Orders of Battle takes a different approach. Divided into three parts, it covers the 1876 army, its mission and strategy in the Plains, deployment and tactics, and analysis.

On the surface, this would seem like a book for the specialist. However, the body of text …

Review Of Valentine T. Mcgillycuddy: Army Surgeon, Agent To The Sioux By Candy Moulton, Jason Pierce

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Valentine T. McGillycuddy is not famous, but he should be. His presence at many critical events in the 1870s and '80s compelled Candy Moulton to write this engaging biography. McGillycuddy worked as a doctor and surveyor on the Northern Boundary Survey and the 1875 Newton-Jenney Expedition into the Black Hills. He tended wounded soldiers as an army surgeon during the war with the Lakotas and Cheyennes in 1876 and served as an Indian agent on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1879-86. He brushed shoulders with such iconic western figures as Calamity Jane, William F. Cody, Marcus Reno, Red Cloud, and …

Review Of William Clark's World: Describing America In An Age Of Unknowns By Peter J. Kastor, Thomas P. Slaughter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book, though not a biography, is biographical. It considers William Clark's attempts to describe the American West within the context of other descriptions during his lifetime (1770-1838). Peter J. Kastor explores the conscious agendas of writers and mapmakers that supported their particular political and cultural goals. He addresses problems that grew from describing the unknown and the ambivalence that inspired many of the attempts. He aims for a subtle and less valedictory analysis than is traditional, while avoiding a flip of that view into a simple indictment of empire-building and ethnic cleansing on the American frontier.

Review Of The Philosophy Of The Western Edited By Jennifer L. Mcmahon And B. Steve Csaki, Robert B. Pippin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The topic of this collection immediately raises a number of questions. In what sense do artworks have, or express, a "philosophy"? If they can be said to imply or assert propositional claims, why not just make the claims and argue for them? Do the films just serve as examples of philosophical ideas? (The majority of these essays seem to take this approach.) If so, how important is it that the examples are artworks? Would complex and imaginative thought experiments do? Are commercial Hollywood films and television shows artworks at all, and if so, in what sense? Is an artwork a …