Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Mamluk Kaaba Curtain In The Bursa Grand Mosque, Sumiyo Okumura

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

A Kaaba curtain is a door curtain which covers the door of the holy Kaaba, the most sacred site of Islam in Mecca. Upon the occasion of the conquest of Egypt and Hejaz by Sultan Selim I in 1517, Selim I donated a Kaaba door curtain to the Bursa Grand Mosque, one of the five most important mosques in the Islamic World. This Mamluk curtain is very different from Ottoman Kaaba curtains in both its shape and design motifs. It is noticeable that five fragments, including a piece of inscription, hang down from the upper border. We see a similar …

The Kanga, A Cloth That Reveals- Co-Production Of Culture In Africa And The Indian Ocean Region, Phyllis A. Ressler

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The Kanga is one of Africa's least understood textiles. As a simple cotton, colorful, hand and machine printed cloth it embodies dynamic historical co-production of culture throughout African and Indian Ocean trade networks. Exploring African mercantile trade history, the coproduction and exchange of iconography, the diverse use and meanings of the Kanga, suggests a valuable discursive role for this textile. Despite its longevity of more than 150 years, its significant role in creation of identities, and its contribution to communication through design and social meaning, the Kanga, receives limited attention in textile research. Though seen by many as a simple …

The Parenthetical Notation Method For Recording Yarn Structure, Jeffrey C. Splitstoser

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Until now, describing yarn structure has been more art than science, especially for complex yarns and cordage like those encountered at Cerrillos, a Paracas (ca. 900-100 B.C.E.) site in the Ica Valley of Peru, where yarns and cordage frequently involve multiple colors, sub-structures, and materials (e.g., Image 1). My early attempts at describing yarn structures using notation were essentially undecipherable to others. Likewise, narrative methods proved too wordy and no less confusing. (For instance, a narrative description of the structure of specimen 2001-L185-B1654- S001, a rope-like yarn pictured in Images 2 and 3, would be: Twelve Z-spun-singly-ply yarns Ztwisted with …

The Twenty-First Century Voices Of The Ashanti Adinkra And Kente Cloths Of Ghana, Carol Ventura

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Craft production and use are continually adapting to meet the needs of consumers and the market in order to survive. The Adinkra and Kente cloths of Ghana are no exception, having maintained their visibility and viability by addressing changing and challenging economic and political realities. Fabric strips are sewn together to produce rectangular Adinkra and Kente cloths that are wrapped around human bodies in styles determined by gender and rank. These cloths are not only beautiful, but communicate as well. Old and new symbols representing proverbs, beliefs, and politics are woven into Kente and printed onto Adinkra cloths. Commemorative fabrics …

Queen Alexandra’S 1902 Coronation Gown, Donald Clay Johnson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Queen Victoria's wearing black mourning clothes for 40 of the 63 years of her reign prompted much discussion between fashion-setting Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra about what should the new queen wear for her coronation, the first state occasion in which they, as king and queen, could define taste and fashion for what was to become the Edwardian era. With such a long interval of time since the last coronation there were no strong expressions of traditional attire for such a ritual occasion which prompted the new king and queen to think expansively about the roles and functions the coronation …

On Sir Charles Bell’S The Hand, 1833, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay explores the cultural context in which Sir Charles Bell’s 1833 Bridgewater Treatise was published by focusing on the work as a culmination of his deep religious faith, his Edinburgh anatomical training, and his occupation as a surgeon at the Leeds Infirmary. It argues that The Handwas not merely an extension of Paleyan natural theology but also an important response to the era’s struggle with the grim physical reality of the supersession of manual labor by automatic manufacture.

Samplers, Sewing And Star Quilts: Changing Federal Policies Impact Native American Education And Assimilation, Lynne Anderson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Illustrating the U.S. federal government's changing policies on the assimilation of Native American children is the role of needlework instruction in the schooling of Indian girls. Described and discussed are three examples of 19th and 20th century policy, with emphasis on the textiles resulting from those policies. Early 19th century policy supported mission schools for Indians. Learning to sew was a valued domestic skill in 19th century female education, culminating in the making of a needlework sampler. This focus was adopted in mission schools, illustrated by Christeen Baker's 1830 sampler stitched at the Choctaw Mission School in Mayhew, Mississippi. Shortly …

Black Us Army Bands And Their Bandmasters In World War I, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

This essay sketches the story of the bands and bandmasters of the twenty seven new black army regiments which served in the U.S. Army in World War I. They underwent rapid mobilization and demobilization over 1917-1919, and were for the most part unconnected by personnel or traditions to the long-established bands of the four black regular U.S. Army regiments that preceded them and continued to serve after them. Pressed to find sufficient numbers of willing and able black band leaders, the army turned to schools and the entertainment industry for the necessary talent. The newly formed bands entertained servicemen and …

Significant Themes In 19th-Century Literature, Matthew L. Jockers, David Mimno

Department of English: Faculty Publications

External factors such as author gender, author nationality, and date of publication affect both the choice of literary themes in novels and the expression of those themes, but the extent of this association is difficult to quantify. In this work, we apply statistical methods to identify and extract hundreds of "topics" from a corpus of 3,346 works of 19th-century British, Irish, and American fiction. We use these topics as a measurable, data-driven proxy for literary themes. External factors may predict fluctuations in the use of themes and the individual word choices within themes. We use topics to measure the evidence …

Using Place Conscious Education And Social Action To Plug The "Rural Brain Drain", Danielle M. Helzer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The following thesis will explore the Rural Brain Drain phenomenon as outlined by researchers Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas and its relation to a rural Nebraska school. In order to take action against the exodus of small-town America’s best and brightest, I propose a pedagogical solution that is a blend of Place Conscious Education and Social Action. The last part of the document features a narrative section describing how I’ve implemented the aforementioned solution into English 9 classes at Ogallala High School and the impact this had on students involved.

Adviser: Robert Brooke

Money Painting And The Duplicitous Multiple: The Interdependence Of American Copyright Legislation And Artistic Production, Jaclyn N. Siemers

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

In this thesis I investigate the interworking and influences of the United States’ federal copyright legislation, specifically its relationship to the history of artistic production from the late nineteenth-century to the present. A detailed analysis of the evolving copyright statute, the social and legal impact of the multiple (including the counterfeit copy), and the progressive recurrence of representational money paintings will reveal the mutually dependent relationship of copyright legislation and artistic production. The progression of styles in America art—nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil illusionism, mid-century Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and contemporary appropriation art—provides an illustrated roadmap of the complex relationship between the …

What I Mean When I Say Autism: Re-Thinking The Roles Of Language And Literacy In Autism Discourse, Bernice M. Olivas

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Literacy studies are deeply intertwined with issues of identity. Olivas explores the ways that public discourses of autism have constructed an autism “Identity kit,” as defined by James Paul Gee, which harms autistic students and communities more than it helps. This is particularly true for adult autistics. Considering the growing presence of the autistic learner in the composition classroom, it is important to understand how public discourse influences classroom dynamics. Drawing heavily on her own experience as the mother of autistic sons and on Melanie Yergeau’s “Circle Wars: Reshaping the Typical Autism Essay,” Olivas explores how her children have been …

"On Our Way For The Sunny South, Land Of Chivalry": Northern Imperial Attitudes In The Civil War South, Kaci Nash

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examines the discourse of Northerners who traveled into the South during the Civil War. Northern soldiers, nurses, teachers, relief workers, and officers’ wives adopted an imperial framework in their encounter with the South. By the eve of the war, years of sectional turmoil had resulted in a perceived ontological separation between the North and the nation’s internal Other—the South. To Northerners, the region was comprised of untamed wilderness, an antiquated society, and an inferior culture. When over two million Northerners mobilized and entered the southern states, they broadly adopted imperial viewpoints and awakened to the cultural power they …

All Good Things Must Come To An End: China Beat’S 1,000th Post, Maura Cunningham, Kate Merkel-Hess, Ken Pomeranz, Jeff Wasserstrom

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

With much gratitude, the China Beat editors say goodbye.

What a difference four years can make—for a blog, a country, and a planet. (“Blog, country, planet” might have made a nice coat of arms if we’d thought of it…) When China Beat launched early in 2008, blogs seemed like relatively new kids on the block, at least to academics. Four years later, the genre is old hat, sharing a landscape with newcomers like Tumblr, Twitter, and other microblogging platforms, and we’re increasingly catching up on China news not on computers but on devices that fit in our palms.

The blog …

Disciplinary Permeations: Complicating The "Public" And The "Private" Dualism In Composition And Rhetoric, Erica E. Rogers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As Composition and Rhetoric rose in disciplinary status and academic legitimacy the discourse practice of negation, the positioning of texts in oppositional binaries that set the “new” over the “old,” the “novel” over the “familiar,” became embedded in academic tradition, seeming to be an inherited part of scholarship instead of an individual’s rhetorical choice and deliberate ethos strategy. Negation, when one idea or set of ideas constructed by another is critiqued, advocated, and/or redeveloped by another scholar, is a discourse practice firmly established in the Rhetorical Tradition as part of Socratic dialogues, reappears in “modern rhetoric”, and remains today as …

Review Of Goodlands: A Meditation And History On The Great Plains By Frances W. Kaye, Curtis Mcmanus

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Frances Kaye examines the different ways that Natives and Europeans perceived and interacted with the Great Plains during the age of nineteenth- and twentieth-century North American settlement. Commendably, she conceptualizes the Great Plains as a unity rather than two distinct regions bisected by the 49th parallel. Kaye uses the history of the region to "articulate a Great Plains consciousness" rooted in "Indigenous ideologies" to establish "what it means to make good use of the land."

Review Of Prairie Fire: A Great Plains History By Julie Courtwright, Ted Binnema

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The scholarly literature on the history of fire has proliferated over the last generation or so, but until now we have lacked a general history of prairie fire. Julie Courtwright fills this gap. She explains that she hopes "to open a wider discussion of prairie fire and to foster recognition of its environmental and social influence on the Great Plains, thereby broadening the larger history of fire and of the American West." That statement of purpose hints at the intended contributions of the book; Courtwright does not offer many interpretations and arguments that will surprise those familiar with the scholarly …

Review Of Women On The North American Plains Edited By Renee M. Laegreid And Sandra K. Mathews, Rebecca A. Buller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Despite over thirty years having elapsed since Joan Jensen and Darlis Miller, in "The Gentle Tamers Revisited," called for new approaches to western women's history, popular stereotypes of what constitutes a Great Plains woman remain deeply ingrained in the general public's imagination. Although three decades of scholarship have slowly chipped away at the typecast, until recently no one piece has consolidated the diversity of women's experiences within the Canadian and American Great Plains.

We should herald, therefore, the arrival of Women on the North American Plains. This long-needed collection delivers a powerful corrective to scholarship's and popular imagery's shortcomings. …

"I Fear The Consequences To Our Animals": Emigrants And Their Livestock On The Overland Trails, Diana L. Ahmad

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"You cannot be too careful of your teams; on their condition depends entirely your success in getting through" to the Pacific coast, warned Philip L. Platt and N. Slater in their 1852 Travelers' Guide across the Plains upon the Overland Route to California.¹ The diaries, letters, and guidebooks written by the emigrants who crossed North America on the overland trails during the mid-nineteenth century reveal a new awareness of the animals that journeyed with them. Often written as advice to those who might follow them, the travelers worried about their animals in ways beyond what theologians and philosophers …

Review Of Texas, New Mexico, And The Compromise Of 1850: Boundary Dispute And Sectional Crisis By Mark J. Stegmaier, Bryan Turo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this revision of his 1996 publication, Mark Stegmaier has polished up an already comprehensive history of the Compromise of 1850 as it unfolded from the perspective of Texas and New Mexico. Whereas most histories have focused on the compromise from the standpoint of the national question about slavery, this work illuminates the significance of the part that fixed the boundary between Texas and New Mexico. Stegmaier argues that the boundary dispute acted as the linchpin for the entire block of compromises the 31st Congress passed in 1850. More so than any other issue-including statehood for California, the new fugitive …

Review Of Life Stages And Native Women: Memory, Teachings, And Story Medicine By Kim Anderson, Rebeka Tabobondung

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Life Stages and Native Women unearths the vital teachings of fourteen diverse Indigenous elder oral historians who share their knowledge about the life cycle of Native women. From conception to walking, childhood and youth, adult years, to grandmothers and elders, author Kim Anderson weaves the four life stages from a series of oral history interviews conducted over a period of five years beginning in 2007. Cree/Metis elder and master storyteller Maria Campbell guides Anderson on her journey to gain knowledge from a generation of Creel Metis, Cree, Saulteaux, and Ojibwe elders, each of whom holds tightly to the stories of …

Review Of Portraits Of The Prairie: The Land That Inspired Willa Cather By Richard Schilling, Richard Jussel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ultimately, it seems, most Nebraskans seek to return to their roots: to the "home place," a tree-shaded glen, a favorite swimming hole, or a hilltop view of the old town. Essentially, this is what Richard Schilling returns us to in Portraits of the Prairie: The Land that Inspired Willa Cather. Strolling through Cather's works, he weds her words to his own sketches and watercolors, although quickly pointing out that his paintings "are not illustrations of Cather's stories," but images of the land that an artist sees today. As a result, Schilling creates a work of art that explores the sensitivity …

Review Of Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, The Law, And The Making Of A Settler Society By Lesley Erickson, William Katerberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Westward Bound is a detailed study of sex and violence in Canada's prairie provinces and British Columbia-the circumstances and causes of that violence, its policing and prosecution, and the role of both in the shaping of class, race, and gender relations during the settlement era. Lesley Erickson's study can be read profitably along with studies of the us. West, such as David Peterson del Mar's Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West (2002). Erickson makes few comparisons to the US., framing her analysis instead mostly in relation to historiography on other parts of Canada and Britain. But …

Review Of Always An Adventure: An Autobiography By Hugh A. Dempsey, Michael Payne

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Autobiography has been dismissed as the most self-indulgent of literary forms-biographer Humphrey Carter called it the "most respectable form of lying"-but Always an Adventure seems a little deficient in these respects. Instead, it offers a forthright account of the life of one of Canada's most eminent public historians.

After starting his working life in 1947 as a sign painter, Hugh Dempsey quickly moved on to become a newspaper reporter and publicist before taking up a career with the Glenbow Museum and Archives in Calgary. His book discusses the early, and sometimes contentious, history of the Glenbow, and Dempsey's stories of …

Review Of Indian Voices: Listening To Native Americans By Alison Owings, Sally Thompson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Have you ever noticed how often historians and anthropologists write about Indians in the past tense? This phenomenon is one of the most disempowering experiences for an Indian to encounter. Journalist Alison Owings's unique book helps to correct this misperception, while covering broad subjects of history and culture through the lives of sixteen Native Americans, most of whom are unknown outside of their own communities.

Owings's accounts entwine the contemporary with the past. The reader finds intelligent first-hand reflections on how treaties, allotments, reorganization, relocation, termination, federal recognition, NAGPRA, and other federal policies, alongside blood quantum controversies and gaming, have …

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 anti modern 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 …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 32 / Number 3 / Summer 2012

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Christopher Lasch And Prairie Populism, Jon K. Lauck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Christopher Lasch was born in Omaha in 1932. By the end of his life, cut short at age sixty-one, he had become one of the most famous intellectuals in the world. During his life of active writing from the time of the early Cold War until the fall of the Soviet Union, Lasch's distinctive voice pierced through the din of the nation's noisy political and cultural debates. The historian Jackson Lears recalled, in particular, the "spell that Lasch cast over a generation of historians and cultural critics who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s." A product and one-time …

Review Of Turning Points: A Memoir. By George A. "Bud" Sinner And Bob Jansen. Foreword By Clay S. Jenkinson, Stephen W. King

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Turning Points focuses on the political career of George Sinner from the 1960s to his two terms as a Democratic governor of North Dakota from 1984 to 1992. His legacy, however, is felt beyond North Dakota and was influential on the national scene as well. Many of the. governor's reflections on his early life provide insight into the seminal events that influenced him as an adult. Sinner's reflections on his experience after politics focus on his family and on what his life has taught him.

Review Of Eyewitness At Wounded Knee By Richard E. Jensen, R. Eli Paul, And John E. Carter, Dawn G. Marsh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge, the Ghost Dance are all phrases that invoke, perhaps more than any others, the senseless, prolonged acts of atrocity against Native Americans. The story of the events, peoples, and places unfolds on a bleak wintry landscape of the Northern Plains at the end of the nineteenth century. Scholars tell and retell this story, pondering the causes and failed communications, often seeking explanations or rationalizations for the assault on Sioux men, women, and children that took place in South Dakota leaving more than 250 dead. Storytellers, poets, and screenwriters employ the frozen, barren landscapes of the Northern …