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Global Trends In Private Protected Areas And Their Implications For The Northern Great Plains, Jeff Langholz

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

Like many parts of the world, the Northern Great Plains faces immense challenges to sustainable land use. Privately owned conservation areas have emerged as a potential solution. This article reviews five global trends in so-called private protected areas and discusses their implications for the Northern Great Plains. The trends point to five recommendations to the Northern Great Plains community: (1) act now to tap rapidly growing policy support; (2) combine many models, including private protected areas that are owned by individuals and groups, formal and informal, large and small, and are dedicated to strict protection as well as sustainable use; …

Conservation And Economic Lessons Learned From Managing The Namibrand Nature Reserve, Nils Odendaal, Danica Shaw

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

The NamibRand Nature Reserve, located in southern Namibia, is a private nature reserve established to protect and conserve the unique ecology and wildlife of the southwest Namib Desert. At 172,200 ha, NamibRand is one of the largest private conservation areas in southern Africa. The reserve consists of 13 former livestock farms rehabilitated into a continuous natural conservation area and shares a 100 km border with the Namib-Naukluft National Park. The reserve is a model for private conservation in southern Africa, as it demonstrates holistic biodiversity conservation balanced with financial sustainability. Innovative approaches to resource management ensure that this critical area …

Book Review: Transplanting The Great Society: Lyndon Johnson And Food For Peace By Kristin L. Ahlberg, R. Douglas Hurt

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

In 1954 the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, commonly known as Public Law 480, established a new food aid program designed to eliminate agricultural surpluses and improve farm prices. Although Congress also intended it to expand foreign trade, encourage foreign economic development, and enhance the foreign policy of the United States, Lyndon Johnson used Public Law 480 as a political tool to extend the principles of the Great Society internationally and, most importantly, fight Communist expansion. Rechristened as the Food for Peace program in 1959, Lyndon Johnson later transformed it from a domestic agricultural policy to a foreign policy …

Great Plains Research Spring 2010 Front Matter

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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Saving the World’s Grasslands: An Introduction Richard Edwards and Richard P. Reading, Guest Editors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Global Trends in Private Protected Areas and Their Implications for the Northern Great Plains Jeff Langholz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . …

Book Review: Lipset’S Agrarian Socialism: A Re-Examination Edited By David E. Smith, Jim Mochoruk

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

Seymour Martin Lipset, rather famously associated with the concept of “American Exceptionalism” and renowned as one of the leading practitioners of political sociology in the United States, was better known in Canada for works that seemed to make little, if any, impression upon U.S. readers. First and foremost was his landmark study of the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation’s (CCF) rise to political power in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan—Agrarian Socialism. It is the stuff of legend in Canadian academic circles how a young PhD student—a Jewish leftist from New York no less—came to Saskatchewan in the mid …

Saving The World’S Grasslands: An Introduction, Richard Edwards, Richard Reading

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

Grasslands cover a large portion of the world’s land surface but increasingly suffer from numerous threats. Temperate grasslands are the most endangered and least protected biome in the world (Hoekstra et al. 2005; Henwood, this issue). Grasslands suffer from the twin dangers of seeming to lack charismatic features deserving of protection (the Great Plains, one of the world’s great grasslands, has sometimes been dismissed as “the Great Empty” because it lacks mountains or coastal areas) and of being prime land for conversion to crop agriculture. As a result, people converted or destroyed much of the original Great Plains grassland and …

Book Review: North For The Harvest: Mexican Workers, Growers, And The Sugar Beet Industry By Jim Norris, Maria S. Arbelaez

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

From its origins at the end of the 19th century, the American sugar beet industry has been linked to Mexican immigrant labor. Moreover, the painstaking job of thinning, topping, and harvesting the large and heavy beets became an almost entirely Mexican labor specialty by the turn of the 20th century. Betabeleros, as the Mexican and Mexican-American laborers were and are known, sojourned north from the borderlands to Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, South and North Dakota, Michigan, and Minnesota fields. In each of these states, the sugar beet industry willingly pursued immigrant labor to do the work while immigrant networks did …

Book Review: Rewilding The West: Restoration In A Prairie Landscape By Richard Manning, Mace Hack

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

Rewilding the West gives a first impression of being the story of an innovative conservation project—creation of a 3.5 million-acre wildlife preserve from both public and private lands, restocked with bison and other traditional Plains wildlife—in the Missouri Breaks of eastcentral Montana. However, Manning only devotes thirteen pages to the project at the end of the book, with a few additional references to it scattered throughout. Instead, he traces the history of the site, from the days of the bison to modern times. In doing so, he provides a fascinating and useful frame of reference for current conservation efforts in …

"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

Google Bus

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Amid uncertainty regarding Google’s future in China, on March 10, 2010, a line 319 bus near the East Gate of Beijing University is wrapped in an advertisement for the company. The URL on the back of the bus still works, though it’s now being routed through Hong Kong.

—Photo by Sara Kile

Sara Kile is a PhD candidate in premodern Chinese literature at Columbia University. She is currently in Nanjing conducting research for her dissertation, “Experimenting in the Limelight: Cultural Entrepreneurship in Early Qing China.”

William Vollmann’S Burqa, Guy J. Reynolds

Department of English: Presentations

William Vollmann’s career exemplifies the importance of the historical moment in the life of a writer.   It is hard to imagine his writing temporally outside the very specific circumstances of the last thirty years, a context that has shaped his work’s hectic, cosmopolitan energy. Born in 1959, Vollmann is a writer of the 1980s and 1990s, an author who witnessed the emergence of a radically-globalized world. Vollmann’s fascination with central and eastern Europe (as in the 2005 fiction, Europe Central) looks back to the Cold War; but the insistent non-Western focus in much of his reportage and storytelling, as in …

"The Coming Tide": Viewpoints On The Formation Of U.S. Federal Indian Termination Policy, 1945–1954, Samuel H. Herley

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Despite the painful legacy of post-World War II federal Indian policy, the issue of termination during the era had nuanced elements that meant different ideas to different groups and individuals. Especially during its formulation prior to its widespread implementation across the United States starting in 1953, there existed division and even confusion as to what termination entailed. Those charged with making difficult decisions on termination during the formative years of the policy also came from diverse backgrounds and held varying, even shifting, viewpoints on the issue. Individual perspectives on termination had much to do with not only race, class, and …

Conservative Radicals: The Einwohnerwehr, Bund Bayern Und Reich, And The Limits Of Paramilitary Politics In Bavaria, 1918–1928, Roy G. Koepp

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In the years after the First World War numerous paramilitary organizations were set up in Bavaria with the expressed purpose of preventing a communist revolution in the state. Encouraged by Germany’s and Bavaria’s Social Democratic leaders, military officers and men of means formed Freikorps units to overturn the Spartacist revolt in Berlin in January 1919 and the Räterepublik in Munich in April 1919. After the specter of revolution receded these groups did not disband but reorganized themselves as paramilitary leagues. In Bavaria the most significant of these early organizations was the Civil Defense Guards, or Einwohnerwehr, which was succeeded …

Pragmatism, Disciplinarity And Making The Work Of Writing Visible In The 21st Century, Michael W. Kelly

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation outlines how Pragmatism, as a philosophy richly conceived, can act as a useful intervention on three levels ranging from the pedagogical issues surrounding teaching writing teacher to labor issues Composition. In contemporary writing center scholarship, conversations about the utility of theory are hotly debated. Throughout much of its disciplinary history, much writing center scholarship has taken a decidedly best practices approach to its research. This emphasis on applicability is challenged by the trend in some pockets of the field that have incorporated a theoretical bent into their work. The effect of this work has been met with skepticism. …

Fearing The "Turban'd Turk": Socio-Economic Access To Genre And The "Turks" Of Early Modern English Dramas And Broadside Ballads, Katie S. Sisneros

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores an important means for the non-noble and non-gentry population of England to read and interpret the figure of the Turk as textually represented: the broadside ballad. Cheap to print and produced on an expansive scale, broadside ballads had access to economic and geographic segments of England beyond the reach of the drama. Aimed at a far more general audience than theater-goers (especially during the Restoration period), broadside ballads provide an alternative literary interpretation of the Turk, one long-neglected in Anglo-Ottoman studies. Current scholarship’s almost-exclusive focus on drama has led to a progress narrative positing an evolution in …

"Good English": Literacy And Institutional Systems At A Community Literacy Organization, Charise G. Alexander

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores the impact of institutions and the systems and communities of which they are a part on literacy instruction, practices, and rhetoric at a community literacy organization in Lincoln, Nebraska. A majority of students served by this organization are adult English Language Learners, many of whom receive instruction from volunteer tutors. In this unique context, a number of factors affect literacy learning, particularly the perpetuation of conservative, hegemonic discourses about literacy by the organizations which fund literacy education programming at this site.

The power dynamics at work in these granting organizations and in larger systems that control and …

Native But Foreign: Indigenous Transnational Refugees And Immigrants In The U.S.–Canadian And U.S.–Mexican Borderlands, 1880–Present, Brenden Rensink

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Post-Columbian borderlands between competing Euro-American empires and North America’s indigenous populations were complex multi-national and international landscapes. Nineteenth and twentieth-century transnational indigenous migration across U.S-Canadian and U.S-Mexican borders provide important narratives for better understanding these contested regions. During these years, Canada, the United States and Mexico increasingly strove to use the borders as barriers to define what Native peoples fell within the confines of their jurisdiction or responsibility. Concurrently, some Native groups used the geopolitical implications of imposed Euro-American borders to escape persecution and seek better conditions in newly defined “foreign” lands. These transnational narratives resulted in unique Native North …

Background Environmental Justice: An Extension Of Rawls's Political Liberalism, Edward Abplanalp

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation extends John Rawls’s mature theory of justice out to address the environmental challenges that citizens of liberal democracies now face. Specifically, using Rawls’s framework of political liberalism, I piece together a theory of procedural justice to be applied to a constitutional democracy. I show how citizens of pluralistic democracies should apply this theory to environmental matters in a four stage contracting procedure. I argue that, if implemented, this extension to Rawls’s theory would secure background environmental justice. I explain why the theory can be viewed as a partially specified political conception of environmental pragmatism, and how it relates …

I'Ve Fallen In Love With Every One Of You..., Kayleigh L. Speck

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

Photographs best show and describe the world, capturing a split second in time without necessarily providing the viewer with any sort of explanation or answer as to why something looks the way it does. Although the camera captures images of the “real,” it has the ability to tell lies. It changes our perception of space, the color of light, and the way things look overall. This is the reason I have chosen this medium; I want to see what my world looks like in a photograph.

Through these photographs of the every day lives of my subjects and myself, I …

Am I Here?, Carla M. Potter

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

My interest in art and figuration has its roots in a childhood where ballet classes and performing were my first love. This work is about an accumulation of experience that relates to that rich formative time in my life, so I choose a format of presenting the figure that reflects that stage of my life. I make small-scale narrative sculptures that show me at various ages with objects that are emblematic of my experiences at those times. These items, ranging from a child’s car seat to the lacy veil from First Holy Communion, additionally represent those societal institutions intended to …

Selected Works For Violin And Piano By Chen Yi: Western Influences On The Development Of Her Compositional Style, Xiang He

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, Student Creative Work, and Performances

This document is a study of the violin and piano pieces, Fisherman’s Song (1979) and Romance of Hsiao and Ch’in (1998), by the leading Chinese-born American composer, Chen Yi (b.1953). The two pieces are representative works of Chen Yi’s Chinese (college) period and American period respectively. Through detailed analysis, comparisons, and consultation with Dr. Chen Yi, the document attempts to reveal Chen Yi’s stylistic changes caused by the Western influences.

Chapter One provides a brief summary of the changes of compositional style throughout five generations of Chinese composers (from 1920s to present), which resulted from Western influences. Chapter Two examines …