Digital Commons Network^™

Review Of "Picturing A Different West: Vision, Illustration, And The Tradition Of Cather And Austin," By Janis P. Stout, Thomas Austenfeld

Great Plains Quarterly

Janis Stout's credentials are impeccable: as the author of biographies {of Cather and Katherine Anne Porter} and of critical studies of American women novelists, and as denizen of the West and Southwest, she knows her topic. Starting from what she terms Willa Cather's and Mary Austin's "highly visual prose," Stout builds upon an argument about gender in the West made by Cather scholar Susan Rosowski in her 1999 book, Birthing a Nation. Stout posits that Austin and Cather encountered a West already pictorially determined by the monumental imagery of white, Anglo-Saxon, adventuresome, imperialist, violent, rugged, and most of all …

Review Of "Banned In Kansas: Motion Picture Censorship, 1915-1966," By Gerald R. Butters Jr., Thomas Fox Averill

Great Plains Quarterly

From 1915 to 1966, Kansas maintained an active film censorship board, empowered by BOOK REVIEWS 73 the legislature to review each film that might be shown in the state. The board could accept the film, remove scenes or titles (and, when pictures began to talk, objectionable language), or reject the film entirely-hence the title of Butters's book.

In 1920, the Kansas Board of Review first published its official standards. These included the positive: a film should be wholesome, and should not ridicule any religious sect or race of people. But the "shall nots" quickly asserted themselves: no debasing of morals, …

Review Of "Frontier Farewell: The 18705 And The End Of The Old West," By Garrett Wilson, Ted Binnema

Great Plains Quarterly

You might just want to buy two copies-one for yourself, and one for a friend. This book by a Regina lawyer turned writer tells the story of the Canadian prairie West from the arrival of the first European explorers to 1881, although most of the book deals with the period beginning in 1869, and five of the twenty-two chapters deal with the events surrounding the time that Sitting Bull and several thousand other Sioux spent in Canada. The book was obviously written with a popular audience in mind, but it makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the history of …

Review Of "Jazz Mavericks Of The Lone Star State." By Dave Oliphant, Jean A. Boyd

Great Plains Quarterly

Jazz Mavericks of the Lone Star State is a collection of sixteen essays that can be read according to interest rather than order. They cover a wide range of jazz-related topics, from important jazz musicians to important jazz discographies; Dave Oliphant is emphatic throughout about the important contributions of Texas-born jazz musicians to every phase of jazz. I have the same concern now that I did when reading Oliphant's earlier book, Texan Jazz (1996), namely that he deals less with jazz in Texas than with Texas-born jazz musicians who left the state to work in top bands. Nevertheless, this collection …

Review Of "This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, And The New Deal." By Sarah T. Phillips, Brian C. Cannon

Great Plains Quarterly

In this sophisticated reinterpretation, Sarah T. Phillips traces the history and impact of New Deal conservation policy. She argues persuasively that rural conservation programs deserve a prominent place in New Deal historiography because they significantly shaped the New Deal state and because they were integral to the New Deal's campaign for economic recovery. Her work is sufficiently broad and innovative to invite criticism at multiple points on evidentiary grounds, but the book is consistently engaging.

Phillips shows that during the 1920s, eastern land use planners and politicians, along with progressives in the USDA, advocated planned and coordinated use of natural …

Review Of "Landscapes Of Colorado: Mountains And Plains." By Ann Scarlett Daley And Michael Paglia, Rose Glaser Fredrick

Great Plains Quarterly

Landscapes of Colorado: Mountains and Plains, with a historical overview by Ann Scarlett Daley, the book's curator, and text by Michael Paglia, is a handsome survey of contemporary landscape painters and photographers working in the state. One could argue with a choice here and there. For example, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, European installation artists who have lived in New York since 1964 and created just one major work for Colorado in 1972, Valley Curtain, Grand Hogback, with one more in the planning stages for 2011, are said to have "a long commitment to Colorado." Though their work is seminal, …

Review Of "Charles Goodnight: Father Of The Texas Panhandle," By William T. Hagan, West Texas A&M University

Great Plains Quarterly

In tackling Charles Goodnight, William Hagan successfully condenses an epic life story into a concise form-one of the requirements of University of Oklahoma Press's Western Biographies Series. Hagan's biography is wellpaced, smoothly written, and engaging. It's a story well told, but not a revisionist history. Even as he points out the way in which Goodnight has reached Western hero status, Hagan does not question or challenge the grand narrative of the pioneer West that provides the basis for Goodnight's iconic position.

In the course of telling Goodnight's story, however, Hagan corrects a number of legendary errors-notably that Goodnight was first …

Review Of "Cather Studies 7: Willa Cather As Cultural Icon," Edited By Guy Reynolds, Susan Kress

Great Plains Quarterly

Since its founding in 1990, Cather Studies has offered seven occasions for the publication of a volume devoted to Willa Cather scholarship. Of late, the series's editors have focused on a theme; in volume 7, editor Guy Reynolds, director of the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, offers an introduction and twenty essays by both established Cather scholars and relative newcomers relating directly or indirectly to the matter of Willa Cather as cultural icon. Several essayists provide

Several essayists provide provocative definitions of what it means to have reached the status of icon. For Elsa Nettels, "Writers become icons …

Review Of "So This Is The World & Here I Am In It," By Di Brandt, Tanis Macdonald

Great Plains Quarterly

When Di Brandt speaks about poetryand its political dimensions, people listen, sometimes with their mouths agape, at her audacity and at her long looping ecoerotic sentences. Brandt's literary, ecocritical, and philosophical stances are well represented in So this is the world, as are her poetics, emphasized here through her reading of the prairie as both aesthetic and consciousness, a local that has much to teach us about the global. The collection is bracketed by two luminous essays-"This land that I love, this wide, wide prairie" and the title essay, "So this is the world and here I am in …

Review Of "Buffalo Soldiers In The West: A Black Soldiers Anthology." Edited By Bruce A. Glasrud And Michael N. Searles, Dwayne Mack

Great Plains Quarterly

During the Civil War, some 180,000 African Americans served with courage in the Union Army, and more than 40,000 died. Following the war, as the United States moved to secure its Western territories, African American infantry and cavalry, whom the Cheyennes and Comanches of the Plains called "Buffalo Soldiers," helped in this endeavor. The Army Reorganization Act of 1866 approved the formation of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry. In Buffalo Soldiers in the West, Bruce A. Glasrud and Michael N. Searles collect previously published essays on these intrepid servicemen. The collection describes how Buffalo …

Review Of "Native American Fiction: A User's Manual." By David Treuer., James Ruppert

Great Plains Quarterly

In his User's Manual, David Treuer reviews many of the works of contemporary Native American writers as well as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and Asa Carter to demonstrate that "there is no such thing as Native American Literature-at least, no such thing as Native American novels anyway." For Treuer, good literature is good literature and the standards that govern the great works of Western literature govern novels by Native writers. He sees the inclusion of myth, oral tradition, and ceremony as a longing for culture and not culture itself and believes that readers and writers have misconstrued artistic structure for authenticity. …

Review Of "Destroying Dogma: Vine Deloria Jr. And His Influence On American Society." Edited By Steve Pavlik And Daniel R. Wildcat, Tink Tinker

Great Plains Quarterly

Here is a fine collection of eights essays on American Indian topics by friends and former students of Vine Deloria Jr. (Dakota/Lakota), the towering figure of our era among American Indian scholars and writers. While some contributions are more about Deloria's work than others, the whole collection is intended to demonstrate his influence on the thinking of scholars writing in American Indian studies today instead of merely placarding his prominence. Rather than simply praising Deloria, the volume continues his work. Anyone interested in the state of discourse in American Indian studies would benefit greatly from reading its contents. Most of …

The Methodists' Great 1869 Camp Meeting And Aboriginal Conservation Strategies In The North Saskatchewan River Valley, George Colpitts

Great Plains Quarterly

George McDougall, chairman of the Methodist Missions to the Indians of the Northwest Territories, kept a large, black book in which he jotted sermon notes, references to classical and biblical literature and sometimes simply his itineraries by horseback from Victoria, the primary Methodist mission in the far British northwest. Under the "s" tab and labeled "Saskatchewan," he noted repeatedly in the 1860s the food crisis facing North Saskatchewan residents. In sum: ''A time of starvation. No buffalo."

In this article I analyze a buffalo hunt which occurred in 1869. That spring, many hundreds of Cree, Assiniboine, Stoney, and Metis hunters …

Review Of "Mary Martin, Broadway Legend." By Ronald L. Davis, John M. Clum

Great Plains Quarterly

Mary Martin has not been as well treated in biographies as her sometime colleague Ethel Merman, the subject of two fine books in the past year. So Ronald L. Davis's volume is a welcome addition to lore about the stars of the Golden Age of the Broadway Musical.

Ronald Davis got interested in Martin in part because of her Texas connections {she was born and raised in Weatherford, Texas}. A historian with interests in oral history and show business {he has written books on John Wayne, John Ford, and Linda Darnell}, Davis interviewed Martin before her death as well as …

Review Of "Playing Ourselves: Interpreting Native Histories At Historic Reconstructions." By Laura Peers, Sandra Dudley

Great Plains Quarterly

Based on research carried out over a decade into enactment at five North American reconstructed historic sites in the Great Plains and around the Great Lakes, this is essentially a book about encounters: encounters between Native interpreters and visitors at historic sites, of course-but also encounters between differing preconceptions of history, between ways of life, between people and things, and between the present and the past. Indeed, the chapters are interspersed with "vignettes" or snapshots of such encounters.

All the sites discussed in the book depict the people, activity, and material culture associated with missions and fur trading. They were …

Review Of Women In Texas Music: Stories And Songs By Kathleen Hudson, Gail Folkins

Great Plains Quarterly

Women musicians take center stage in Women in Texas Music, from the gender barriers they've broken as performers and artists to the growing recognition and musical territory they claim. Through a series of personal interviews, Kathleen Hudson depicts more than thirty women musicians' journeys in Texas, the Southwest, and in many cases beyond. The author's lively exchange with songwriters and performers invites readers deeper into the conversation, as if they've snuck backstage themselves to listen in.

One of the more engaging themes in Women in Texas Music is the various paths traveled by these artists, each road distinct and none …

Review Of Willie Wells: "Ei Diablo" Of The Negro Leagues, By Bob Luke, Leslie Heaphy

Great Plains Quarterly

Bob Luke introduces readers to Willie Wells the man as well as Willie Wells the ball player. Wells's life is placed in the larger context of where he came from in Texas as well as what was happening in America during and after his baseball career ended. To tell his story Luke relies on primary sources as much as possible. Interviews and Wells's own letters are nicely woven throughout the text, giving readers an immediate feel for Wells as a person.

After presenting Wells the player and family man, Luke offers a discussion of the long road to the Hall …

Review Of Medicine Bundle: Indian Sacred Performance And American Literature, 1824-1932, By Joshua David Bellin, Edward W. Huffstetler

Great Plains Quarterly

The central metaphor of Joshua David Bellin's study is an intriguing one, that the BOOK REVIEWS 157 interaction between "sacred performance by Indians and the performance of Indianness by Indians and whites alike" functions as a kind of cross-cultural repository, or Amedicine bundle," for the emerging America of the nineteenth century. His argument, in a nutshell, is that the co-opting of Indian sacred performance by the dominant white culture has shaped the evolution of both Indian and white notions of spirituality and cultural identity these performances help create. And while this is unquestionably true, the argument in the end seems …