American Studies Commons^™

Custer, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, And The Little Bighorn, Ron Mccoy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the summer of 1876, the United States government launched the Great Sioux War, a sharp instrument intended to force the last nonagency Lakotas onto reservations. In doing so, it precipitated a series of events that proved disastrous for its forces in the short run and calamitous for the Lakotas in the much longer scheme of things.

On June 17, Lakotas and Cheyennes crippled General George Crook's l,300-man force at the Battle of the Rosebud in southern Montana. Eight days later and thirty miles to the west, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, the "Boy General" of Civil War fame, led …

Leading The "Father" The Pawnee Homeland, Coureurs De Bois, And The Villasur Expedition Of 1720, Christopher Steinke

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1742 two sons of the explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de La Verendrye met an indigenous nation they called the Gens de l'Arc somewhere along the middle Missouri River near present-day Pierre, South Dakota.¹ Louis-Joseph and Francois were searching for the mythical Sea of the West, and the former asked the chief of the Gens de l'Arc if he "knew the white people of the seacoast." When the chief replied that "'[tlhe French who are on the seacoast are numerous'" and have "'many chiefs for the soldiers, and also many chiefs for prayer,'" Louis-Joseph believed he had at …

Review Of Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions In Theory, Politics, And Literature Edited By Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, And Scott Lauria Morgensen, Margaret Noori

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A colleague and I were asked recently to speak at the Midwest regional conference for LGBTQ and ally-identified college students. We teach an Indigenous language (Anishinaabemowin), one of us has lived in a same-sex relationship, both of us are allies, but the politics and theory of the community are daunting. As we looked across a sea of young faces, empowered by proximity, we saw hope and we said, "gego bigidnike aanji'igwa." This phrase, "don't let them change you," has long served us teaching about identity, freedom, and survival in Native communities and was perfect for the gathering of young LGBTQ …

Review Of Rich Indians: Native People And The Problem Of Wealth In American History By Alexandra Harmon, Kathleen Pickering Sherman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Across American history, Native American tribes were impoverished through land and natural resource appropriations accomplished through a wide variety of well-documented political, military, and cultural means. Alexandra Harmon, in her book, provocatively titled Rich Indians, focuses on a handful of exceptions to this statistical pattern to explore American discourses about wealth accumulation by Native Americans. Armed with an impressive collection of primary sources, as well as literature from history and anthropology, Harmon also uncovers parallel discourses by Native Americans themselves about wealth accumulation among their own peoples. The result is a complex, multilayered, and fascinating melange of contradictory attitudes and …

Review Of Hill Country Deco: Modernistic Architecture Of Central Texas By David Bush And Jim Parsons, Richard Cleary

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 2008, Jim Parsons and David Bush, staff members of the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance, published Houston Deco: Modernistic Architecture of the Texas Coast, a photographic sampling intended to draw attention to the region's surviving examples of buildings erected between the 1920s and the late 1940s in the modernistic styles popularly known as Art Deco and Art Moderne. Hill Country Deco applies this model to Central Texas, covering an area considerably beyond the geographical Hill Country to include San Antonio and Austin as well as towns in the prairie lands to the east. Like its predecessor, Hill Country Deco …

Review Of Rightful Place By Amy Hale Auker Review Of Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories By David Mogen, Nick Bascom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Much contemporary western writing, including memoirs such as Judy Blunt's Breaking Clean (2003), abandons the mythic character of early western narratives, striving instead for realism. These two collections of essays do one better offering a satisfying blend of stark realism and wistful nostalgia for heroic western archetypes. With contrasting educational backgrounds and biographies, their authors show us the West from widely different perspectives: Mogen has taught English at Colorado State University for many years; Auker married at nineteen and has worked on ranches ever since. Yet both strike a similar balance, capturing the harsh truths of western living while describing …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 32 / Number 1 / Winter 2012

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Myth, Memory, And Massacre: The Pease River Capture Of Cynthia Ann Parker By Paul H. Carlson And Tom Crum, Joaquin Rivaya-Martinez

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The so-called "Battle of Pease River," in which the Comanche Indians purportedly suffered a crucial defeat, has become a recurrent topic in the literature on the Indian wars of the Southern Plains, as well as in the collective memory of Anglo-Texans. In this extraordinary book, Carlson and Crum scrutinize numerous accounts of the event to unveil one of the most blatant fabrications in the history of Texas. The authors' painstaking meticulousness has permitted them to discriminate numerous falsehoods and forgeries from the following few discernable facts: a massacre occurred on the banks of Mule Creek, a tributary of the Pease …

Review Of My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back To Kansas By Tracy Seeley., Sarah Smarsh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Kansas-born playwright William Inge said, "It wasn't until I got to New York that I became a Kansan." For English professor Tracy Seeley, it was San Francisco that did the trick. For years she lived a life of pleasure there grading papers in hip coffee joints, cycling through the cool fog, reveling in the progressive political climate. Her nomadic Kansas childhood was behind her, even beneath her, she thought. Then, an emotional earthquake- triggered by a cancer diagnosis and the deaths of both parents, in quick succession forces a reckoning with mortality and sends her looking for home. But for …

Review Of Assault On The Deadwood Stage: Road Agents And Shotgun Messengers By Robert K. Dearment, David A. Walker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Robert DeArment, a prolific historian depicting outlaws, gamblers, and lawmen throughout the American West, focuses on individuals associated with the stagecoach network centered in the boomtown of Deadwood, Dakota Territory. This network stretched across the Northern Plains from presentday Bismarck, North Dakota, to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and on to Sidney, Nebraska, and in each case was linked to a transcontinental railroad.

DeArment introduces his readers to the Texas Gang, the Hat Creek Gang, the Joel Collins Gang, and the Tom Price Gang, as well as to a wide variety of characters with such colorful nicknames as "Big Nose George" Parrott, "Laughing …

Review Of Bird Cloud: A Memoir By Annie Proulx, Alex Hunt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Annie Proulx's latest is nonfiction, recounting her attempt to inhabit a section of land in south-central Wyoming. While tough winters and unmaintained roads make year-round residence too difficult, Proulx glories in the wild isolation of a place that inspires her to research and write as well as to build fence and monitor eagles. Bird Cloud is a book that Proulx's regulars will find both enjoyable and revealing; however, its self-indulgence and lack of polish leave us with a feeling akin to Proulx's own house high in the mountain valley-it remains raw and isolated.

This is not entirely a negative. Proulx's …

Review Of Llano Estacada: An Island In The Sky Edited By Stephen Bogener And William Tydeman, George Lubick

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Island in the Sky" aptly describes the Llano Estacado, the southern extension of the Great Plains that rises some 800 feet above the surrounding terrain in northwestern Texas and northeastern New Mexico. It is this expansive landscape that William Tydeman and Stephen Bogener have placed in the forefront of an excellent collection of essays and photographs that explore the connections between the region's geography and culture. The plateau's flat terrain-"horizontal yellow," as historian Dan Flores has described it-invariably defines the Llano, but Stephen Bogener reminds us also that "85 percent of what the human eye registers on the Llano Estacado …

Review Of Great Sioux War Orders Of Battle: How The United States Army Waged War On The Northern Plains, 1876-1877 By Paul L. Hedren, Charles M. Robinson Iii

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great Sioux War of 1876-77 was the greatest Indian war ever fought by the United States government. That, together with the continued fascination of the Little Bighorn, has generated enough books and articles to fill a small library. Most follow a common thread of narration or analysis, but Paul L. Hedren's Great Sioux War Orders of Battle takes a different approach. Divided into three parts, it covers the 1876 army, its mission and strategy in the Plains, deployment and tactics, and analysis.

On the surface, this would seem like a book for the specialist. However, the body of text …

Review Of Valentine T. Mcgillycuddy: Army Surgeon, Agent To The Sioux By Candy Moulton, Jason Pierce

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Valentine T. McGillycuddy is not famous, but he should be. His presence at many critical events in the 1870s and '80s compelled Candy Moulton to write this engaging biography. McGillycuddy worked as a doctor and surveyor on the Northern Boundary Survey and the 1875 Newton-Jenney Expedition into the Black Hills. He tended wounded soldiers as an army surgeon during the war with the Lakotas and Cheyennes in 1876 and served as an Indian agent on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1879-86. He brushed shoulders with such iconic western figures as Calamity Jane, William F. Cody, Marcus Reno, Red Cloud, and …

Review Of William Clark's World: Describing America In An Age Of Unknowns By Peter J. Kastor, Thomas P. Slaughter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book, though not a biography, is biographical. It considers William Clark's attempts to describe the American West within the context of other descriptions during his lifetime (1770-1838). Peter J. Kastor explores the conscious agendas of writers and mapmakers that supported their particular political and cultural goals. He addresses problems that grew from describing the unknown and the ambivalence that inspired many of the attempts. He aims for a subtle and less valedictory analysis than is traditional, while avoiding a flip of that view into a simple indictment of empire-building and ethnic cleansing on the American frontier.

Review Of The Philosophy Of The Western Edited By Jennifer L. Mcmahon And B. Steve Csaki, Robert B. Pippin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The topic of this collection immediately raises a number of questions. In what sense do artworks have, or express, a "philosophy"? If they can be said to imply or assert propositional claims, why not just make the claims and argue for them? Do the films just serve as examples of philosophical ideas? (The majority of these essays seem to take this approach.) If so, how important is it that the examples are artworks? Would complex and imaginative thought experiments do? Are commercial Hollywood films and television shows artworks at all, and if so, in what sense? Is an artwork a …

Review Of Montana Moments: History On The Go By Ellen Baumler, Amy L. Mckinney

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ellen Baumler, interpretive historian and coordinator of Montana's National Register Sign Program at the Montana Historical Society, once again delights readers with her excellent Montana Moments: History on the Go. The book is the result of years of research she conducted while writing sign texts for the National Register of Historic Places and her popular History Half-Note radio vignettes for KCAP in Helena. She selected about 250 of her favorite snippets for this collection.

Baumler does a fine job offering readers short, well-researched, and entertaining stories on a variety of topics including animals, buildings, people, events, and nature that …

Review Of America's School For War: Fort Leavenworth, Officer Education, And Victory In World War Ii By Peter J. Schifferle, Donald J. Mrozek

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In America's School for War, Peter J. Schifferle examines the role of professional military education at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, notably through the Command and General Staff College (CGSC), in preparing officers for likely responsibilities as staff officers and leaders in future wars. Focusing on the period between the two world wars, he emphasizes continuity in thinking and doctrine and, related to both, in the rationale for the curriculum at CGSc. Whatever the number of students (which expanded as U.S. involvement in World War II loomed) or the structure of the curriculum (which went from two years to one in …

Review Of Shot In Oklahoma: A Century Of Sooner State Cinema By John Wooley, Joseph A. Kestner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John Wooley's Shot in Oklahoma is pioneering in every sense of the word. Not only is it the first book to engage the entirety of cinema in the state of Oklahoma; it will also serve as an archive for future researchers in the field. Wooley has used massive amounts of materials, including interviews with principal figures, but he has especially researched the files of the Tulsa World, the now-defunct Tulsa Tribune, and the Daily Oklahoman for newspaper reactions to all the cinematic activity in the state.

Small though the state of Oklahoma may be, its engagement with cinema began almost …

Review Of Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine Of Discovery In The English Colonies By Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, And Tracey Lindberg, Blake A. Watson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Doctrine of Discovery provides that colonizing European nations automatically acquired certain property, governmental, and commercial rights over Indigenous inhabitants. In recent years, Indigenous peoples, legal scholars, religious institutions, and nongovernmental organizations have pressed for official repudiation of the Doctrine. In 2007, the United Nations voted (over the initial opposition of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States) to adopt the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which contains several provisions that acknowledge the rights of Indigenous peoples to their lands. In 2012, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples will devote its Eleventh Session to a …

Converting The Rosebud Sicangu Lakota Catholicism In The Late Nineteenth And Early Twentieth Centuries, Harvey Markowitz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Following the Civil War, the United States government undertook a massive reform of its Indian policy, replacing the antebellum goal of permanently segregating Indian and white populations with that of "civilizing and Christianizing" (i.e., assimilating) Native peoples. To aid in this reform, the federal Indian Bureau successfully petitioned leaders of mainline denominations, including members of America's Catholic Church hierarchy, to enlist personnel to educate Indians in the manners and customs of "Christian citizenship."

In 1886 priests and brothers belonging to the Jesuit's Buffalo Mission and Franciscan sisters of Penance and Christian Charity from Stella-Niagara, New York, arrived on the Rosebud …

"A Little Place Getting Smaller" Perceptions Of Place And The Depopulation Of Gove County, Kansas, Aaron Gilbreath

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Go west on Interstate 70, past Salina and Highway 81, the unofficial line of demarcation between eastern and western Kansas. Beyond Bob Dole's childhood home of Russell and the regional center of Hays you will come to Gove County. Though the highway is littered with advertisements for Colby and Goodland, towns that lie farther west, nothing signals the unsuspecting driver that Gove County is approaching. Nothing sings the praises of Gove County's industries, historic figures, or the local quality of life. You simply pass from Trego County into Gove County, your arrival marked by a single sign reading "Gove County …

From Periodical To Book In Her Early Career: E. D. E. N. Southworth’S Letters To Abraham Hart, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

E.D.E.N. Southworth's correspondence with Henry Peterson of the Saturday Evening Post and Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger, both of whom serialized her novels in their weekly story papers, is sometimes dramatic and emotional. In September 1849 Peterson chided Southworth for a “capital literary error” in an installment of her novel The Deserted Wife, in which the Reverend Withers uses his patriarchal authority to maneuver the young, unwilling Sophie Churchill into marriage. The incident would make readers “thro[w] down the tale in disgust,” he warns, and he omitted it from the serialization. In December 1854 he raised …

Introduction To E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering A Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, Melissa J. Homestead, Pamela T. Washington

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In early 1901, Willa Cather visited Prospect Cottage in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the longtime home of the recently deceased novelist Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevirte (E. D. E. N.) Southworth. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1819 to southern parents (her father from Virginia, her mother from Maryland), Southworth lived in Washington with her family until she married Frederick Hamilton Southworth and moved with him to Wisconsin in 1841. When he deserted her and their two children,' she returned to Washington and taught school to support herself, running to writing to supplement her income from teaching. Within a few …

A Chronological Bibliography Of E. D. E. N. Southworth's Works Privileging Periodical Publication, Melissa J. Homestead, Vicki L. Martin

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Previous attempts at a comprehensive bibliography of E. D. E. N. Southworth's fiction have organized her works alphabetically by book title or chronologically by book publication date. Serialization information--if included at all--is subordinated to book entries or listed separately. These bibliographic conventions better suit authors who published fewer novels than Southworth did and/or did \ not routinely serialize their works. As a result, earlier bibliographies have caused confusion about the size and chronology of Southworth's body of work. Adding to the confusion, her book publisher T. B. Peterson arbitrarily broke many of her novels that appeared in serial form under …

Study Guide For United In Anger: A History Of Act Up, Matt Brim

Open Educational Resources

The United in Anger Study Guide facilitates classroom and activist engagement with Jim Hubbard’s 2012 documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. The Study Guide contains discussion sections, projects and exercises, and resources for further research about the activism of the New York chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The Study Guide is a free, interactive, multimedia resource for understanding the legacy of ACT UP, the film’s role in preserving that legacy, and its meaning for viewers' lives.

Constitution Day 2012: The American Judiciary, Robert Berry

Librarian Publications

Robert Berry, research librarian for the social sciences at the Sacred Heart University Library, has written an essay about the role of the American Judiciary in interpreting laws of the United States government. The essay was written for the occasion of Constitution Day 2012 at Sacred Heart University.

The Continuing Exodus: The Synagogue And Jewish Urban Migration, Samuel D. Gruber

Religion - All Scholarship

Catalog essay in Silent Witnesses: Migration Stories Through Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt or Abandoned (Farmington Hills, MI, 2012) that deals with Jewish settlement and migration in American cities (especially New York, Boston and Cleveland) and the religious and community buildings erected and left behind in the process.

Mexican-Americans In Los Angeles: Strengthening Their Ethnic Identity Through Chivas Usa, Stephanie Goldberger

CMC Senior Theses

A large Mexican-American population already exists in Los Angeles and, with each generation, it continues to rise. This Mexican-American community has maintained its connection to its heritage by playing and watching soccer, Mexico’s top watched sport. In this thesis, I analyze how Major League Soccer's Chivas USA serves as an outlet through which many Mexicans in Los Angeles have developed their ethnic identities. Since the early twentieth century, Mexicans in Los Angeles have created separate residential communities and sports organizations to strengthen their connections with one another.

To appeal to Mexican-Americans, Chivas USA has branded itself closely to its sister …

Cultivating A Movement: Excerpts From An Oral History Of Organic Farming And Sustainable Agriculture On California’S Central Coast [Book Review], Charles A. Francis

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

Edited by I. Reti and S. Rabkin, 2011. University of California, Santa Cruz, Library, Santa Cruz, California, United States. 299 p., US$19.95, ISBN 9-780972-33431, paper.

Often the most compelling evidence for success of organic farming comes from the personal stories of farmers. Coupled with reports on the application of science in organics, the practical knowledge of people in the field provides a rich foundation for the ongoing growth of this intriguing sector of the food system. This collection of interviews by the staff of the Regional History Project is one unique activity of the University of California, Santa Cruz library, …