Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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

Wskg Public Broadcasting: Identifying And Quantifying The Need For Local News Coverage, Ava Melissa Rosenblatt

MPA Capstone Projects 2006 - 2015

WSKG Public Broadcasting is a non-profit radio and television station located in Binghamton, NY which serves NY's Southern Tier, as well as parts of Central NY and Northeastern Pennsylvania. The majority of news material currently aired on WSKG is supplied by National Public Radio (NPR), a national non-profit organization. WSKG leadership acknowledges complaints that WSKG does not broadcast enough local news to serve their listening community. However, no thorough assessment has been conducted to demonstrate that a local radio news service is needed, nor is there an understanding of the listening community's preferences with regard to such a service. This …

Triangulating A Modernization Experiment: The United States, France And The Making Of The Kossou Project In Central Ivory Coast, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

Toward the end of the 1960s, authorities in the Ivory Coast decided to build the Kossou Dam, a hydro-electric dam on the Bandama River near the geographic center of the Francophone country. Initially conceived as a technopolitical measure to meet the growing energy demand of the most economically successful country of France's former colonies, the damming experiment soon emerged as a multipurpose regional development project aimed at correcting the regional disparities that tarnished the Ivory Coast's phenomenal economic growth.

This article focuses on the Kossou modernization experience and the sociopolitical transformations that it caused. I argue that the nationalist enthusiasm …

Boundaries Of The Self, W. Hunter Stamps

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

Care, Cure, And Control: A Politics Of Dietetics, Rick Dolphijn

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

[Review Of] A Cultural Dictionary Of Punk, Robert A. Aken

Library Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Distributive Politics And Electoral Cycles In The American Political System, 2004-2006, Travis Roline

Political Science Theses and Capstones

Each year, billions of dollars are distributed from the federal government to benefit state and local governments, individuals, and private and nonprofit corporations. These benefits are available in a variety of forms including: project, block, and formula grants. Are the amounts of federal funding manipulative based on the political party in charge of or in contest for the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives? Data for this project was obtained via multiple venues. The Federal Assistance Award Data System online was used for the collection of project, block, and formula grant data. House and Senate party control and representation …

Welfare Benefits After The 1996 Reform Act: A New Look At The Idea Of States As Welfare Magnets, Erin Sollund

Political Science Theses and Capstones

The focus of this research is to find the differences of how each state’s welfare policies have changed since the welfare reform act of 1996, and also how recipients have responded to this change. In my analysis I combined data from the U.S Department of Health and Human Services, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the U.S. Department of Commerce. Preliminary results suggest that states with a higher percentage of recipients on welfare before the reform showed a greater change in number of recipients than states starting with a lower percentage as did states with stronger Democratic leanings, a more …

Is “Fake News” The New News? The Effect Of “The Daily Show” On Media And Political Knowledge, Heather Avenson

Political Science Theses and Capstones

One can hardly argue the impact that “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” have had on popular culture. But do these shows also hold an impact on journalism and political knowledge? In other words, are “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” reasonable sources of news? Using data gathered by the Pew Research Center in April of 2008, and by myself through a survey of Bemidji State University students enrolled in political science courses, I attempt to answer the following questions: Are people who watch either “The Daily Show” or “Colbert Report” more informed than their counterparts? Do people who watch …

April Roundtable: Genocide And Us National Interests Introduction

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

“How Genocide Became a National Security Threat” by Michael Abramowitz & Lawrence Woocher. Foreign Policy. February 26, 2010.

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.”

Review Of "Masks Of Authority: Fiction And Pragmatics In Ancient Greek Poetics" By C. Calame, Translated By P.M. Burk, Grace M. Ledbetter

Classics Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Ex Libris, Spring 2010, West Virginia University. Library.

Ex Libris: The WVU Libraries Magazine

From 1960 to 1977, Dr. Robert F. Munn compiled five bibliographies focusing on the coal industry, Appalachia, and West Virginia publications

Book Review, W. Reed Smith, Norman C. Rotham, Pedro P. Geiger, Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

The Difficulties Of Teaching Non-Western Literature In The United States, Ian Barnard

English Faculty Articles and Research

"My goal in this article is to build on Priya Kandaswamy’s discussion of students’ response to difference in Radical Teacher #80 by unfolding the pitfalls of teaching and responding to “non-Western” literature in the United States as embodied in my own experience teaching non-Western literature to a group of racially and ethnically diverse, mainly working-class students at a large urban comprehensive public university."

Cupping The Spark In Our Hands: Developing A Better Understanding Of The Research Question In Inquiry-Based Writing, Bernice Olivas

McNair Scholars Research Journal

This article serves to highlight the unique position the research question holds in inquiry-based research writing. Inquiry-based educational theories (see Dewey; 1910, Bruner; 1962, Ballenger; 1997) contend that learning begins with the act of questioning. Research writing remains especially challenging for many first- year college students (see Larsen; 1982, Carroll; 2002, Alsup; 2002). The author conducts a two part study of writing inquiry-based research writing samples and concludes that the inquiry-based research question should be treated as text in its own right and as such should be approached through process writing. Students should be encouraged to pre-write, draft, and revise …

Comrade Father Thomas Mcgrady: A Socialist Priest's Quest For Equality Through Socialism, Jacob H. Dorn

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.