Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review Of Conquests & Consequences: The American West From Frontier To Region By Carol L. Higham And William H. Katerberg, Aubrey Streit Krug

Great Plains Quarterly

The textbook Conquests & Consequences provides a cohesive narrative framed by the question: How does a historical perspective of cultures, empires, and environments in the American West inform and influence understandings of the West as a frontier, colony, region, borderland, or "center of power in its own right"? To engage undergraduate history students, Carol L. Higham and William H. Katerberg employ a folksy, conversational style (Native pit houses are "roughly the length of an average single dormitory room"). The text also contains an impressive number of photographs and illustrations. Most importantly, Higham and Katerberg introduce terms and content in the …

Review Of Between Languages And Cultures: Colonial And Postcolonial Readings Of Gabrielle Roy By Rosemary Chapman, Carol J. Harvey

Great Plains Quarterly

Canadian author Gabrielle Roy (1909-1983) is usually recognized as one of Quebec's foremost writers. Although Bonheur d'occasion, the novel that launched her career in 1946, is set in Montreal, much of her subsequent work is set in the Prairies of her youth. Born in the small francophone town of Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, she spoke French at home but was educated in English, since French had lost its status as an official language of the province. This linguistic and cultural duality is fraught with many tensions, as Rosemary Chapman demonstrates in her recent book.

Review Of Sapphira And The Slave Girl By Willa Cather, Robin Hackett

Great Plains Quarterly

Willa Cather's last novel, set in Virginia where she spent her early childhood, is often a mystery to readers who know Cather by her loving evocation of Great Plains landscapes and cultures. This scholarly edition clarifies the seeming anomaly of Sapphira and the Slave Girl by placing it in its historical and biographical contexts, and by building from it an analysis of Cather's accomplishments and aesthetic concerns over the length of her career. The most significant achievement of this edition is that it will help scholars at every level understand the novel as evidence of Cather's involvement in public intellectual …

On The Road Again Consumptives Traveling For Health In The American West, 1840-1925, Jeanne Abrams

Great Plains Quarterly

From the mid-nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of health seekers, on the advice of their physicians, family members, or popular advertisements, took to the road to "chase the cure" for tuberculosis, the most dreaded disease of the era. Indeed, tuberculosis, also commonly known as consumption or "the White Plague," held the dubious distinction of being the leading cause of death in nineteenth century America. In the first years of the twentieth century 150,000 Americans died of it yearly, and more than ten times that number were afflicted with the disease.¹ Whether …

Narrative Mappings Of The Land As Space And Place In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Karen E. Ramirez

Great Plains Quarterly

At the conclusion of Willa Cather's 1913 novel O Pioneers!, Alexandra Bergson muses about landownership, and more broadly about the human-land relationship, by reflecting on the transience of the county plat map, one of the most popular forms of mapping rural America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These maps were not only housed at the county clerk's office; by the 1880s and 1890s, while Cather was living in Nebraska, commercialized survey maps periodically were collected and published in large, colorful county atlases, also called plat books, becoming among the most widely circulated maps of rural areas …

Review Of We Are All Treaty People: Prairie Essays By Roger Epp. Edmonton, J. William Brennan

Great Plains Quarterly

In the aftermath of the 1996 release of the massive report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and Canada's subsequent official statement of regret for the "Indian policies" that successive governments have pursued down to our own day, "We Are All Treaty People: History, Reconciliation and the 'Settler Problem'" is arguably this book's most provocative essay. Roger Epp begins by asserting that the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Euro-Canadian settlers who came afterward "constitutes a ... powerful common history, inherited, not chosen, whose birthright we can either disavow, because its burdens are too great, or else make our …

Review Of Catlin's Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, And The Ethics Of Nature By John Hausdoerffer, Steven Conn

Great Plains Quarterly

All these years later, after several biographies, numbers of exhibitions, and various conference symposia, George Catlin remains an irresistible figure. He was born in 1796 and died in 1872 and in between became one of the best known artists, writers, and showmen of the era. After casting about a bit in his young adulthood, Catlin found his calling out West where in the 1830s he took several trips into what was then Indian country to paint the people and lives he encountered. He produced dozens and dozens of canvasses, many of which now stand as iconic.

John Hausdoerffer hasn't given …

Review Of Branding Texas: Performing Culture In The Lone Star State By Leigh Clemons, Paula Marks

Great Plains Quarterly

Leigh Clemons identifies Texas cultural identity as composed of "a complex set of performances" reinforcing ideas about the state's distinctiveness and its inhabitants' lives and values. She examines a number of cultural and historical depictions of Texas people and events, not surprisingly finding that the privileged cultural identity is that born of the Texas Revolution, with forceful Anglo males at center stage and other, less powerful groups on the periphery challenging the dominant narrative.

Clemons begins with "archival spaces of Texan cultural memory," including the Alamo and other Revolutionary battlefields. Here she examines how the old triumphalist narratives of Anglo-centered …

Review Of Under The Big Sky: A Biography Of A. B. Guthrie Jr. By Jackson J. Benson, Capper Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly

On the Web site of a major bookseller, a "customer reviewer" claims that A. B. Guthrie Jr.'s 1947 novel The Big Sky "is really about freedom." Jackson Benson acknowledges the romanticism of Guthrie's writing, but he argues more convincingly that the novel is actually about how "man always destroys the thing he loves." Benson applies this idea to all of Guthrie's work, describing the writer as a Western environmentalist, saddened and angered by his region's history of damage and depredation.

Benson places Guthrie (1901-1991) in the pantheon of writers who have "tried to refute Western myth, to tell it as …

Review Of The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, And Transculturation In American Art, 1890-1915 By Elizabeth Hutchinson, Linda M. Waggoner

Great Plains Quarterly

Elizabeth Hutchinson's The Indian Craze examines the trend that was not merely "fad or fancy" but "a significant artistic phenomenon with lasting effects on both American art history and U.S. Indian policy." Although the origin of Native American art as art is commonly associated with the Santa Fe movement of the 1920s and 1930s, Hutchinson declares that "this cross-cultural conversation," fueled by progressive primitivism, began at least two decades earlier.

Enhanced by historical images and informed by Janet C. Berlo's anthology, The Early Years of Native American Art History (1992), The Indian Craze revives a politically charged and artistically productive …

"It's Now We've Crossed Pease River" Themes Of Voyage And Return In Texas Folk Songs, Ken Baake

Great Plains Quarterly

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 …

Great Plains Quarterly, Volume 30, Issue 2, Spring 2010, Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly

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

Collateral Damage: Veterans And Domestic Violence In Mari Sandoz's The Tom-Walker, Kathy Bahr

Great Plains Quarterly

The Tom-Walker (1947) associates domestic violence on a national scale with the domestic violence of veterans returning home after the Civil War and two world wars. This novel anticipates both the rise of McCarthyism and the long shadow cast by the atom bomb over the years constituting the Cold War. ... The Tom-Walker is remarkable in its depiction of the ugly, almost unmentionable effects of war on the domestic lives of individual veterans. Sandoz, like a number of her contemporaries, was particularly concerned about the horrors of war, but unlike many writers, she focuses on the home front and on …

Seeing Through The Eyes Of Maximilian And Bodmer: Review Of The North American Journals Of Prince Maximilian Of Wied, Volume I: May 1832-April 1833. Edited By Stephen S. Witte And Marsha V. Gallagher., Clay S. Jenkinson

Great Plains Quarterly

The German prince Maximilian of WiedNeuwied (1782-1867) traveled up the Missouri River in 1832-33 to study American Indian culture before it was fatally compromised by the encroachment of Euro-American civilization. Aware of the expansionist and industrial dynamics of the Jacksonian Era in the United States, Maximilian wanted to study what he regarded as the vanishing Indian while there was still time. The idea had come to him during his 1815-17 journey through Brazil. For the publication that followed, Reise nach Brasilien in den Jahren 1815 his 1817 (1820), Maximilian had provided his own illustrations. These were criticized, including by his …

Review Of Class And Race In The Frontier Army: Military Life In The West, 1870-1890 By Kevin Adams, Samuel Watson

Great Plains Quarterly

Class and Race in the Frontier Army is social history first, military second. Adams has two theses: that an "enormous class division" trumped ethnicity, but not race, and that military historians have sought comfort in depicting the army as socially isolated, a unique institution. A book so critical deserves critique; Class and Race is both a laudable effort to connect military to social history, and a product of late twentieth-century graduate school, producing focused insights and reminding us of the big picture, but leaving the mid-level blurry. Adams's historiographical undertone is that whiteness scholars have exaggerated the racialization of European …

Review Of Agnes Lake Hickok: Queen Of The Circus, Wife Of A Legend By Linda A. Fisher And Carrie Bowers, Kim Warren

Great Plains Quarterly

Agnes Lake Hickok rode horses, walked on slack wires, and trained various animals. If that was not enough, she was also a smart, diligent entrepreneur who became the first woman to own and operate a circus in the United States. The circus business brought her a busy schedule, some profitable opportunities, and wide acclaim as an entertainer who traveled with legendary performers P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill Cody. Although Agnes Lake Hickok did not necessarily invent circus shows, she certainly helped to popularize this form of entertainment in the nineteenth century and prepared the next generation of performers, including …

Review Of Seth Bullock: Black Hills Lawman By David A. Wolff, Christopher J. Steinke

Great Plains Quarterly

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 Fort Laramie: Military Bastion Of The High Plains By Douglas C. Mcchristian, Mark R. Scherer

Great Plains Quarterly

In the annals of American westward expansion in the nineteenth century, few locations stand out more prominently than Fort Laramie in eastern Wyoming. During its almost sixty years as an active military post, the fort and the community that grew up around it bristled with the activities of the full array of iconic western figures, from fur traders and overland emigrants to Native Americans and the soldiers and government officials dispatched to deal with them, either through negotiation or military force. With Fort Laramie: Military Bastion of the High Plains, former National Park Service field historian Douglas C. McChristian breathes …

Review Of Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading The West By Marcia Meredith Hensley, Sandra Schackel

Great Plains Quarterly

Since the republication of Letters of a Woman Homesteader in 1982, Elinore Pruitt Stewart's descriptions of homesteading near Burnt Fork, Wyoming, have served as a model for the single woman's homesteading experience. Although Pruitt held her homestead for barely a week before marrying her employer Clyde Stewart, her letters shaped our notions of the homestead experience in the early twentieth century. Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading the West, a collection of twentieth-century homesteading accounts, many of them in the Great Plains region, greatly expands this genre.

A newcomer to Wyoming in 1983, author Marcia Meredith Hensley recognized that neither …

Review Of Youth And The Bright Medusa By Willa Cather, Mark A. Robison

Great Plains Quarterly

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 Jayhawkers: The Civil War Brigade Of James Henry Lane By Bryce Benedict, Craig Miner

Great Plains Quarterly

While this book contains a good deal of useful information, both its research and approach are flawed. The presentation is often tedious, freighted as it is with undigested detail.

The major question must be why so much detail of the military action of the so-called Lane Brigade (the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Kansas Volunteer Regiments) is significant when the personality and background of Lane himself is mostly left out. Benedict opens with a disclaimer that his book is not a biography of Lane, and includes "only the most cursory background information." The reader is referred for Lane's biography to a …

Review Of Anthology Of New Perspectives Edited By John R. Wunder And Kurt E. Kinbacher, Clara Sue Kidwell

Great Plains Quarterly

This book grew out of the ninth biennial Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference on North American Studies hosted by the Renvall Institute at the University of Helsinki in 2002. It thus includes significant coverage of Canadian as well as American Indian history and several comparative studies of Canadian and American tribes. It is also wide ranging in terms of disciplines, including historical, anthropological, and literary studies.

Of the volume's seventeen articles, nine are authored by scholars either trained in or currently teaching at Finnish and Canadian institutions, thereby contributing an international flavor to the collection. The complexities of Metis identity …

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

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 Music Of The First Nations: Tradition And Innovation In Native North America Edited By Tara Browner, Anna Hoefnagels

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection of nine essays examines diverse traditions and issues in contemporary Native American music from a variety of perspectives. The anthology also covers a wide geographic span, ranging from the Inuits of northern Canada to the Choctaws of Mississippi, and the Passamaquoddies of New Brunswick in eastern Canada to the Coast Salish of western Washington. Many of these chapters highlight the movement of Aboriginal people and their music, as well as the transformations and retentions that characterized these movements and interactions with other Aboriginal groups and European settlers. An article addressing intertribal powwow music and another on country music …

Review Of William Wayne Red Hat, Jr.: Cheyenne Keeper Of The Arrows By William Wayne Red Hat, Jr., Christina Gish Hall

Great Plains Quarterly

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

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 Braiding Histories: Learning From Aboriginal Peoples' Experiences And Perspectives By Susan Dion, Lynne Davis

Great Plains Quarterly

In its final report in 1996, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples observed that Canadians have little knowledge of Aboriginal people, the issues of importance to them, and the history that underlies Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relationships today. How can this be changed? In Braiding Histories, Susan Dion takes up the complexities of transforming the consciousness of non-Aboriginal people through education.

The book is organized around three focal points. First, the author and her brother Michael Dion {re)write and {re}tell the life stories of several Aboriginal people, including Beothuk survivor Shanawdithit, the Plains Cree leader Mistahimaskwa, and the writers' mother, Audrey Dion, …

Review Of An Honourable Calling: Political Memoirs By Allan Blakeney, John C. Courtney

Great Plains Quarterly

As NDP premier of his adopted province for eleven years, Allan Blakeney was one of the main combatants in the federal-provincial turf wars of the 1970s and early 1980s over resource development and taxation and the patriation of the Canadian constitution. Before entering active politics he spent a decade as a public servant in Saskatchewan. For four years he served as a cabinet minister responsible for, successively, three key departments (education, finance, and health), and seven years on the opposition benches (one as leader of the opposition). By the time he left active politics in 1988, Blakeney had devoted thirty-eight …

Review Of Survivance: Narratives Of Native Presence Edited By Gerald Vizenor, Lisa Cole

Great Plains Quarterly

Gerald Vizenor's concept of survivance, first introduced in Manifest Manners (1994), articulates a means of conceiving new expressions of Native life, free from the simulated "Indian," thereby highlighting the cultural value of precontact history. In this anthology, eighteen scholars variously acknowledge Vizenor's contribution of survivance to literary analysis and the wide-ranging applications of his insights to contexts such as language, race, and culture.

Vizenor functions as both a contributor to and editor for this volume. His organization of the chapters is particularly noteworthy in the intricate ways each one relates to those in close proximity. Thus, he enters into …

Review Of Outside Looking In: Viewing First Nations Peoples In Canadian Dramatic Television Series By Mary Jane Miller, Doris Baltruschat

Great Plains Quarterly

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 …