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Book Reviews

East Texas Historical Journal

No abstract provided.

Lg Ms 019 Westbrook Citizens For Equal Rights Archives Finding Aid, Maeve Wachowicz

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Description:

Westbrook Citizens for Equal Rights (WCER) was a Political Action Committee (PAC) registered in Westbrook, Maine in June of 2002. WCER was formed to promote civil rights in Westbrook, and notably campaigned to uphold the Westbrook Human Rights Ordinance of 2002. The archives contain materials from both the “Vote Yes” and “Vote No” campaigns on the Human Rights Ordinance referendum, such as flyers, pamphlets, campaign signs and stickers, advertisements, volunteer instructions, and correspondence. There is also information on the 2003 election in Westbrook, and on similar ordinance campaigns in Falmouth, Maine, and in Kalamazoo and Traverse City, Michigan, in …

Art+Politics, Shannon Egan, Jenna L. Birkenshock, Hillary B. Goodall, Tessa M. Sheridan, Josiah B. Adlon, Megan E. Hilands, Emily A. Francisco, Molly E. Reynolds, Shelby P. Glass, Colleen L. Parrish, Francesca S. Debiaso

Schmucker Art Catalogs

For the exhibition Art + Politics, students worked closely with the holdings of Gettysburg College's Special Collections and College Archives to curate an exhibition in Schmucker Art Gallery that engages with issues of public policy, activism, war, propaganda, and other critical socio-political themes. Each of the students worked diligently to contextualize the objects historically, politically, and art-historically. The art and artifacts presented in this exhibition reveal how various political events and social issues have been interpreted through various visual and printed materials, including posters, pins, illustrations, song sheets, as well as a Chinese shoe for bound feet. The students' …

Traces Volume 39, Number 3, Kentucky Library Research Collections

Traces, the Southern Central Kentucky, Barren County Genealogical Newsletter

Traces, the South Central Kentucky Genealogical Society's quarterly newsletter, was first published in 1973. The Society changed its name in 2016 to the Barren County Historical Society. The publication features compiled genealogies, articles on local history, single-family studies and unpublished source materials related to this area.

South Union Messenger (Fall 2011), Kentucky Library Research Collections

South Union Messenger

No abstract provided.

From "No Place" To Home The Quest For A Western Home In Brewster Higley's "Home On The Range", C. M. Cooper

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the spring of 1934, New York attorney Samuel Moanfeldt set out on a trip that would take him through most of the states west of the Mississippi in search of the origins of the popular American folk song "Home on the Range." The reason for his trip was a $500,000 lawsuit filed by William and Mary Goodwin of Tempe, Arizona, who claimed that they had written the song-which was then the most popular tune on the American airwaves-and were owed royalties in arrears for its broadcast on public radio.

Review Of When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, The History Of Sexuality, And Native Sovereignty By Mark Rifkin, Clark D. Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mark Rifkin's When Did Indians Become Straight? is a thoughtful examination of the complicated landscape that lends itself to answering the question the title poses. Rifkin carefully and methodically scrutinizes the rhetoric of straightness within settler colonialism, highlights the intersection between Indigenous kinship models and conjugal couplehood, and problematizes subsequent nuclear/bourgeois homemaking as the dominant model for "family" within U.S. borders.

Review Of The Red Corner: The Rise And Fall Of Communism In Northeastern Montana By Verlaine Stoner Mcdonald, Bradley D. Snow

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It's not often that such names as Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky figure centrally in works dealing with Montana history. But that's the case with Verlaine Stoner McDonald's The Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana. McDonald's history deals with a little-known but fascinating chapter in Montana, and western, history the 1920s electoral takeover of the local government of Sheridan County, Montana, by Communist Party members. As McDonald shows, Sheridan County, an agrarian territory of 10,000 persons in the extreme northeastern corner of the state, proved fertile territory for a variety of leftist political movements, including …

Review Of Beyond Mount Rushmore: Other Black Hills Faces Edited And Introduced By Mary A. Kopco, David A. Wolff

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 2010, the South Dakota State Historical Society celebrated its fortieth year of publishing the award-winning journal, South Dakota History. Over the years, South Dakota History has published about 500 articles, an impressive number. As with most journals, once an article appears, it soon disappears into past volumes, almost forgotten. But good articles can have a second life, and Beyond Mount Rushmore provides that for ten articles that appeared in South Dakota History between 1993 and 2009. These essays relate to the Black Hills, a popular topic among book buyers, but what ties them together is their focus on …

Review Of The Johnson~Sims Feud: Romeo And Juliet, West Texas Style By Bill O'Neal, Robin C. Sager

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In The Johnson-Sims Feud, Bill O'Neal describes how interactions soured between two West Texas families due, in part, to an unfortunate marriage. Joining numerous scholars who have traced the presence of violence in frontier areas, O'Neal contends that the bad blood between the Johnsons and the Simses escalated into a feuding state that lasted for decades.

The work begins in the late 1870s with the arrival of early settlers "Billy" Johnson and Dave Sims, two men determined to "create cattle empires in the rugged vastness of West Texas." Embracing the intricacies of ranching life, they both met with great …

Desegregating State Universities In The Great Plains, Raymond Wolters

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On February 9, 1969, the University of Oklahoma kicked off its annual Black History Week with an especially distinguished visitor, the noted African American author and television journalist Louis E. Lomax. After Lomax's public address, there was a reception at the home of George Henderson, one of only a handful of black professors at the university and the first African American ever to purchase a home in the university town of Norman. When Henderson escorted Lomax back to his room at the Holiday Inn, the two reminisced about the civil rights movement. "Then, as if speaking to himself, [Lomax] said …

Review Of War Party In Blue: Pawnee Scouts In The U.S. Army By Mark Van De Logt, Kevin Adams

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There are many positive things to say about Mark van de Logt's study of Pawnee Indian scouts. The research, particularly in primary sources, is deep, while van de Logt's prose is so clean it practically sparkles. War Party in Blue is the result of great care taken by both author and press.

Van de Logt's intent, as expressed in his clear and concise introduction, is to revise traditional interpretations that attribute the scouts' success to Major Frank North's leadership. Given the contours of historical scholarship in the mid-twentieth century, as well as the voluminous accounts left us by Luther North, …

Review Of Bound Like Grass: A Memoir From The Western High Plains By Ruth Mclaughlin, Linda K. Karell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

At a time when so many recent western women's memoirs either eschew the family farm or ranch as a bastion of male domination, or praise it as the fading location of authentic westernness, Ruth McLaughlin's memoir hits a new and sometimes heartbreaking note. Set in the High Plains of northern Montana, the memoir's dustcover photograph is riveting in its expressive ordinariness-and is a courageous choice to represent the lives within. Next to a barbed-wire fence, young Ruth, farm-kid skinny in oversized play clothes, gently pats a calf on the head. Behind them the landscape rolls on promisingly. Within the first …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 31 / Number 4/ Fall 2011

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Cowboy's Lament: A Life On The Open Range By Frank Maynard, Kenneth L. Untiedt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Jim Hoy, who edited this volume of the Voice in the American West series, discovered a gold mine when he happened upon Frank Maynard's unpublished autobiography and personal papers. Cowboy's Lament, comprising these documents, is a beneficial resource for Great Plains historians, scholars researching the literature of the American West, and even folklorists. Maynard, who is credited with penning the lyrics to what most people recognize as "The Streets of Laredo," was a mostly self-educated "rangIer" who had the good sense to record his adventures on the frontier. Although he had limited success in publishing his narrative during his lifetime, …

Review Of Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols And The Politics Of Motherhood By Marilyn S. Blackwell And Kristen T. Oertel, Barbara Cutter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

After a difficult first marriage that ended in divorce, Clarina Irene Howard Nichols became an avid supporter of married women's property rights, mothers' custody rights, and, eventually, female suffrage. She was a journalist, a newspaper editor, and in 1852 she became the first woman to speak to the Vermont state legislature, in an address in favor of women's school suffrage. By 1853, she was traveling through the Northeast and Midwest as a public lecturer on temperance and women's rights. She emigrated to Kansas in 1854 as a strong advocate of the free soil cause, but also because she had high …

Review Of Looking Back: Canadian Women's Prairie Memoirs And Intersections Of Culture, History, And Identity By S. Leigh Matthews, Lori Ann Lahlum

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Looking Back, Leigh Matthews, a literary scholar, argues that memoirs written by white, English-speaking women who settled in western Canadian prairie communities have been "lost or ignored" and have received little "critical attention from both historians and literary critics." These published accounts of the Euro-Canadian "prairie settlement project" or "homesteading project," terminology used throughout the book, allow Matthews to assess the "Prairie Woman," the stereotypical image of the white, English-speaking female settler, against the more nuanced and diverse experiences of the "prairie woman" who actually migrated to the region. These memoirs, Matthews asserts, both "confirm and challenge …

Review Of Bad Land Pastoralism In Great Plains Fiction By Matthew J. C. Cella, Becky Faber

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Matthew Cella's Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction is based on the concept of "the dialogue between human culture and nonhuman nature on the Great Plains" as explored through the region's literature. Cella defines "bad land pastoralism" as "a persistent effort to both confront and transcend the losses accrued during the ongoing attempt to permanently inhabit a bioregion defined by motion and transience." The reader, to follow Cella's argument, must consider and reconsider the stereotypes of the Great Plains, particularly as they apply to how the region was populated and what the concept of land can mean to Plains …

Guggenheim For Governor Antisemitism, Race, And The Politics Of Gilded Age Colorado, Michael Lee

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the summer of 1893 financial panic struck Colorado. The price of silver, in a protracted downward spiral since the conclusion of the Civil War, finally crashed. The British government announced that its Indian mints were ceasing the coinage of silver rupees. The news of that decision caused a torrent of selling on the international market. In a matter of hours, the price of silver plummeted from eighty cents to sixty-four cents an ounce. The collapse in value of Colorado's most important commodity precipitated runs on local banks. Twelve banks alone collapsed in Denver during the month of July. By …

Review Of Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles By Panthea Reid, Cinzia Biagiotti

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The large book by Panthea Reid (449 pages, 16 chapters, a prologue, epilogue, and three appendices) tracks Tillie Olsen's long life (1912-2007) step by step, beginning from the Jewish-Russian origins of both her maternal and paternal families, up to her death on January 1, 2007.

The book could have been a useful addition to Olsen scholarship, if not for the biographer's insistent efforts to destroy the image of a writer and a woman who was committed so extensively to unhinging the political, social, and cultural stereotypes built up to contain the action of women in America and elsewhere.