American Studies Commons^™

Review Of Addie Of The Flint Hills: A Prairie Child During The Depression (1915-1935) By Adaline Sorace, Karen Manners Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In her early nineties, decades after she had left the Kansas Flint Hills, Adaline Beedle Sorace sat down with her daughter to write her memoirs. With extraordinarily vivid recall, she evokes the place and the people of her youth, weaving the strands of a family and personal saga that stretches from the 1860s to the 1930s.

"Addie" Sorace's maternal forebears, the pioneering RogIer family, were German immigrants who settled in Chase County, Kansas, in the 1860s. Over the decades, the Roglers acquired thousands of acres of rolling grassland and became one of the wealthiest and most influential cattle ranching families …

Review Of A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880-1941 By Suzanne Barta Julin, Robert Wellman Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Tourists," said Doane Robinson, the father of Mount Rushmore, "soon get fed up on scenery." As car-based tourism exploded after World War I, South Dakotans believed the Black Hills needed not just pretty pines and streams, but a new layer of roadside attractions to bring in more tourists and keep them spending longer. This book is about the making of that tourist landscape-not so much the landscape itself, or the tourists looking at it, but the makers and movers behind the scenes who drove the transformation.

This is, in other words, a book about economic planning. It is a left-wing …

Review Of Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary, Mystic By Michael F. Steltenkamp, Dale Stover

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary, Mystic, Michael Steltenkamp explains that because of his chance acquaintance with Black Elk's daughter, Lucy Looks Twice, who "wanted people to know about his [Black Elk's] life as a catechist, I became the biographer of his life in the twentieth century." The author claims that his earlier book, Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala (1993), which reports Lucy's version of her father's life, "showed how this otherwise stereo typically Plains Indian medicine man assumed a Christian identity, and how this was the religious legacy for which he was most remembered within …

Review Of The Girl In Saskatoon: A Meditation On Friendship, Memory And Murder By Sharon Butala, Susan Maher

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On a warm May evening in 1962, young Saskatoon resident Alexandra Wiwcharuk left her flat to mail some letters and enjoy a little time on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River before reporting in for her night shift as a nurse at City Hospital. Sitting near a weir, she was within sight of a parking area and city streets. Many others were out that evening, sharing Alex's delight in heat and late sun on a holiday weekend, walking the paths, laughing over jokes and shared gossip, watching children play, and soaking in the city scene. But none of them …

Review Of African Americans On The Great Plains: An Anthology Edited And With An Introduction By Bruce A. Glasrud And Charles A. Braithwaite, David J. Peavler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the last decade, Great Plains Quarterly has taken the lead in soliciting and publishing articles about the African American experience in the Central Plains. Editors Bruce A. Glasrud and Charles A. Braithwaite have incorporated these articles into a single anthology that should become required reading in college history courses throughout the region. Unfortunately for readers of this journal, however, the book offers little in the way of new information about this important topic.

The editors provide a brief historiographical introduction that details the important scholarly contributions to Great Plains African American history. Although the editors' definition of the region …

Review Of Dakota Philosopher: Charles Eastman And American Indian Thought By David Martinez, Gwen W. Westerman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a Dakota man, Charles Alexander Eastman (1858-1939) carried the values and history of his people into a rapidly changing world at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most often noted for his contributions as a narrator of Dakota life on the Great Plains in Indian Boyhood and From the Deep Woods to Civilization, Eastman was also an intellectual and an activist who worked diligently to address contemporary issues of Indian rights-efforts now brought into a new light in Dakota Philosopher: Charles Eastman and American Indian Thought.

Review Of Delaware Tribe In A Cherokee Nation By Brice Obermeyer, Dawn G. Marsh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The federal acknowledgment process is a highly contested procedure under the best of circumstances. For the Delaware Tribe of Oklahoma the negotiations to establish their national identity while living within the physical boundaries of the Cherokee Nation continue to divide its members and challenge modern interpretations of enrollment. Brice Obermeyer, a cultural anthropologist at Emporia State University and NAGPRA representative for the Delaware Tribe, provides a comprehensive discussion of this historic relationship.

Obermeyer summarizes the histories that brought the Cherokees and Delawares to eastern Oklahoma and the legal efforts to establish an independent Delaware identity since the 1867 Cherokee-Delaware Agreement. …

Review Of Native Liberty: Natural Reason And Cultural Survivance By Gerald Vizenor, Michael Snyder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Poet, novelist, and critic Gerald Vizenor is arguably the most accomplished and prolific intellectual in the field of Native American studies. His new collection of cultural criticism includes four original essays and nine expanded revisions of uncollected published pieces. "Ontic Images," perhaps the finest selection, applies his concept of Native transmotion to representations of Natives in photography. Two perceptive pieces of art criticism discuss the aesthetics and contributions of Anishinaabe artists George Morrison and David Bradley. On the whole, this work serves as a useful introduction to the theory and criticism of this brilliant Anishinaabe (aka Ojibwe, Chippewa) writer.

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 (through 2013)

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 Meriwether Lewis By Thomas C. Danisi And John C. Jackson, J. I. Merritt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

With the possible exception of Aaron Burr, perhaps no figure from the early history of the Republic remains more enigmatic than Meriwether Lewis, who with fellow Army officer William Clark led one of the most celebrated expeditions in the history of exploration. Lewis and Clark's twenty-eight-month "tour," which took them to the Pacific Ocean and back via the Missouri and Columbia drainages, gave the young nation a wealth of knowledge about the Louisiana Territory and Pacific Northwest. Lewis was just thirty-two years old when the Corps of Discovery banked its canoes in St. Louis in September 1806. Yet the young …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 30 / Number 4 / Fall 2010

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait Of A Community In Black And White By Bob Ray Sanders, Carla Williams

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait of a Community in Black and White came about through the confluence of two significant events around 1994: the enthusiastic reception surrounding the publication of a similarly themed title, Behold the People: R. C. Hickman's Photographs of Black Dallas, 1949-1961; and Littlejohn's family contacting the director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin about possibly donating his prints and negatives there. These are significant because they point to the need for an archive to preserve and organize material of this scope-some 70,000 negatives and 55,000 prints made over …

Review Of Uprising! Woody Crumbo's Indian Art By Robert Perry, Robert B. Pickering

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In any discussion of important Indian artists of the twentieth century, Woody Crumbo (1912-1989) is a pivotal player. His dynamic figures, brilliant colors, and traditional themes were combined to create a new kind of art. He used traditional art forms and themes from his Potawatomi background as well as themes and incidents from other tribal traditions to inspire his work. Not satisfied with just creating art, Crumbo mentored other artists, and for much of his life he was personally involved in the business of art-creating new opportunities for himself and other Indian artists.

Review Of Taming The Land: The Lost Postcard Photographs Of The Texas High Plains By John Miller Morris, Anne E. Peterson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The advent of the real photographic postcard (RPPC) and the burgeoning growth in the early twentieth century of the Texas Panhandle area of the southern Great Plains coincide. More than 100,000 "optimists" spilled into the region after 1906. The frontier receded as farmsteads grew around railroad towns. The era also witnessed a surge in popularity of the real photographic postcard from 1906 into the 1920s, mailed by the tens of thousands and collected in albums documenting the region. As the population grew, photographers increasingly worked for land developers making images of farmland and also of excursionists traveling to see the …

Review Of A Nation In Transition: Douglas Henry Johnston And The Chickasaws, 1898-1939 By Michael W. Lovegrove, Lisa K. Neuman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What happens when a Native American nation is gradually and purposefully dismantled in order to make way for a new state government? How do tribal leaders meet the challenges of an impending dissolution of their own government and simultaneously fight against the erosion of their tribal sovereignty? These compelling questions inform A Nation in Transition: Douglas Henry Johnston and the Chickasaws, 1898-1939, a new history of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and its leadership under Governor Douglas Henry Johnston (1898-1902; 1904-1939), whose tenure, according to author Michael W. Lovegrove, was longer than that of any other American Indian executive. …

Review Of Faces Of The Frontier: Photographic Portraits From The American West, 1845-1924 By Frank H. Goodyear Iii, With An Essay By Richard White And Contributions By Maya E. Foo And Amy L. Baskette, Mary Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The rise of photography in the United States coincided with the spread of Manifest Destiny, and this handsome exhibit catalogue presents a veritable photographic who's who of the men (and a few women) who were pivotal actors in both the conquest and representation of the American West. The National Portrait Gallery organized the exhibition, Faces of the Frontier, in 2009, with travels to the San Diego Historical Society and the Gilcrease Museum in 2010. The book consists of essays by curator Frank H. Goodyear III and Richard White and the portraits themselves, accompanied by biographical captions.

Four thematic sections …

Review Of Indian Tribes Of Oklahoma: A Guide By Blue Clark, Ron Mccoy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Oklahoma's license plates, which formerly displayed an Osage shield, now depict a representation of Native son Allan Houser's evocative sculpture of a fellow Apache preparing to fire an arrow at the sky. The legend running across the bottom of the plate reads: "Native America." This is an apt statement about Oklahoma, site of pre-Columbian Indian settlements, westernmost extension of Mississippian mound building cultures, home for Kiowa and Comanche buffalo hunters, and adopted land of Cherokees and others forced to abandon familiar stomping grounds east of the Mississippi River. On a per capita basis, Oklahoma boasts the nation's largest Native American …

Review Of Charles Deas And 1840s America By Carol Clark, With Contributions By Joan Carpenter Troccoli, Frederick E. Hoxie, And Guy Jordan, Gail E. Husch

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

His known works are not many-ninety-eight paintings, drawings, and prints are listed in Carol Clark's catalogue at the end of this richly documented volume-and almost half have not been located. Most of the artist's extant paintings were produced between 1833 and 1849. By the age of thirty, Charles Deas (1818-1867) was disturbed enough to require institutionalization; he spent the rest of his days in one asylum or another. With a career of such apparently limited scope and scale, one might wonder whether the artist deserves the attention he is given in this book and in the exhibition at the Denver …

Review Of Lanterns On The Prairie: The Blackfeet Photographs Of Walter Mcclintock Edited By Steven L. Grafe, With Contributions By William E. Farr, Sherry L. Smith, And Darrell Robes Kipp, Brian W. Dippie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Walter McClintock (1870-1949) is principally known for two books, The Old North Trail; or Life, Legends and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians (1910) and Old Indian Trails (1923). Both are illustrated with McClintock's photographs, The Old North Trail generously so. They convey an idealized vision of the traditional Blackfeet culture that captivated McClintock when, as a Yale graduate aspiring to a career in forestry, he visited the Blackfeet reservation in Montana in 1896. On subsequent visits through 1912 his collection grew to over 2,000 photographs, and he established himself as an authority on the tribe, delivering lectures in America and …

"If The Lord's Willing And The Creek Don't Rise" Flood Control And The Displaced Rural Communities Of Irving And Broughton, Kansas, Robin A. Hanson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this case study, I examine how the residents of two displaced rural Kansas towns, and their descendants, exhibit a sense of identity common to small farm communities throughout the Great Plains, and how tenacious these ties are even after the physical reminder of their communal bonds no longer exists. By examining the struggles to survive faced by these two towns, Irving and Broughton, the resiliency of the people who called them home, and the continuing expression of community solidarity by the individuals associated with them, I propose that the individuals living within these communities created a transcendental identity similar …

Review Of "I Am A Man": Chief Standing Bear's Journey For Justice By Joe Starita, John M. Coward

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On the night of January 2, 1879, Standing Bear and thirty other Ponca men, women, and children slipped away from their disease-ridden new home in Indian Territory. Standing Bear was on a mission, leading his band back to the tribe's ancestral lands along the Nebraska-South Dakota border where he could honor his dying son's last wish, to be buried near the sacred chalk bluffs above the Missouri River.

As author Joe Starita explains, Standing Bear's journey was plagued by subzero temperatures and gales. When their Omaha Indian friends went out to meet them 600 miles and two months later, Starita …

Review Of He Was Some Kind Of A Man: Masculinities In The B Western By Roderick Mcgillis, John M. Clum

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It takes something of a masochist to watch close to two hundred B westerns, but Roderick McGillis claims to have done that in researching this book. For those of you who are not film history buffs, a B movie was a cheap, relatively short (sixty to seventy-five minutes), formulaic genre film made to be the second half of a double feature. A lot of B movies were westerns because they were cheap and popular, particularly with boys and young men. They had their own stars, many of whom moved on to television, which killed the B movie: Roy Rogers, Gene …

Wish List Wilderness Endgame In The Black Hills National Forest, Robert Wellman Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In January 1979 Dave Foreman loosened his tie, propped his cowboy boots up on his desk, and brooded awhile on RARE II. In a second try at Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE), the u.s. Forest Service had just spent two years deciding once and for all how much of its undeveloped land should be designated Wilderness. To Foreman, a Washington executive of the Wilderness Society, RARE II tasted of bitter defeat, and he lonesomely "popped the top on another Stroh's" as he brooded. The Forest Service had just recommended increasing its Wilderness acres from 18 million to 33 million, …

Review Of The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story By Elliott West, Dennis Baird

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Nez Perce people (who call themselves Nimiipuu) are ancient inhabitants of Idaho's Clearwater Valley and of the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon. Driven by both curiosity and economics, they have a rich history of travels to distant places, including California, the Rio Grande Valley, and across the Plains to Missouri. Buffalo drew large segments of the tribe to the Great Plains, where many leaders where born. They have an equally rich history of generosity to visitors, a category that included Lewis and Clark, fur traders and missionaries, and eventually the miners and settlers who helped various federal officials …

Nahm, Max Brunswick, 1864-1958 (Mss 329), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 329. Correspondence of Max B. Nahm relating mainly to his involvement with the Mammoth Cave National Park Association and the Kentucky National Park Commission in the establishment of Mammoth Cave National Park, Edmonson County, Kentucky. Includes some Association and Commission minutes. Also includes some of Nahm's speeches, writings, personal photographs, and material relating to the Nahm family.

Settle-Dewitt Family Papers (Mss 332), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans of Folders 2 and 3 relating to genealogy (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Collection 332. Includes correspondence, genealogical materials; wills, deeds and other legal documents of the Settle and DeWitt families; and the memoir of Marcus Bearden DeWitt, a minister in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and a Civil War chaplain (Click on "Additional Files" below). Also of interest is information related to the Settle rifle makers of Barren County, Kentucky.

Lg Ms 018 Maine Won’T Discriminate Archives Finding Aid, Karin A. France

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Maine Won't Discriminate (MWD) was an organization created to work toward passing LGBT civil rights legislation in Maine and to advocate against/for citizens referenda that would have overturned/sustained such legislation. The Archives contains organizational records as well as print and audiovisual material created and used by the organization. The majority of the materials relate to MWD’s ultimately successful efforts to oppose referendum Question 1 in 2005, which read: “Do you want to reject the new law that would protect people from discrimination in employment, housing, education, public accommodations and credit based on their sexual orientation?” The materials include polling …

Interview With Opal Cline Crabb Regarding Her Life (Fa 154), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Oral Histories

Transcription of an interview with Opal Cline Crabb conducted by Joe Adams for an oral history project titled "A Generation Remembers, 1900-1949." Crabb discusses her life and times, including information about growing up in McLean County, Kentucky, education, her teaching experience in a one-room school, food preservation at home including hog butchering and meat processing, the introduction of radios and televisions, the Green River and steamboats.

Saints In Sin City: Religion And Community Building In Twentieth Century Las Vegas, Matthew R. Davis

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Due to an absence of social and religious tradition, Las Vegas provided the perfect setting for Jewish and Mormon faiths to create communities closely linked to their own spiritual doctrine. This thesis traces the evolution of these groups from the turn of the twentieth-century to the present, focusing on issues such as education, geographic location, and business acumen as avenues for personal and spiritual growth. This thesis also considers the relatively small number of religious studies conducted in the American West, and serves as a possible example for future study by using an urban religious framework to synthesize the dearth …

Burt, John D., B. 1955 (Mss 325), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 325. Proof copy of a book titled "Democracy and Poetry: Robert Penn Warren and the Fate of Inwardness." (365 p.) This manuscript was adapted and later published as "Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism."