American Studies Commons^™

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 …

Uncoverings: The Research Papers Of The American Quilt Study Group, Volume 33 (2012), Lynne Zacek Bassett, Nancy C. Bavor, Gloria Craft Comstock, Mary Ellen Ducey, Kathryn "Kitty" Ledbetter, Joan Laughlin

Uncoverings Journal

Preface by Lynne Zacek Bassett

Common Threads: Nine California Art Quilt Pioneers by Nancy Bavor

Hortense Horton Beck Tells Her Story: "I wanted to do something important" by Gloria Craft Comstock

The Palladian Quilt: Exploring the Possibilities by Mary Ellen Ducey and Joan Laughlin

Textiles, Print Culture and Nation Building in the 1840s by Kathryn Ledbetter

Contributors

Index

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 …

"To Bend Without Breaking": American Women's Authorship And The New Woman, 1900–1935, Amber Harris Leichner

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation focuses on constructions of female authorship in selected prose narratives of four American women writers in the early twentieth century: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zitkala-Ša, and Gertrude Schalk. Specifically, it examines portraits of women in pieces that appeared in national magazines from 1900-1935 that bracket these writers’ careers and that reflect anxieties about their professional authorial identities complicated by gender and, in the case of Native American Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Sioux) and African American Gertrude Schalk, race as well. In a period characterized by fierce debates over the role of women in a dawning modern age, these writers participated …

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, …

From "No Place" To Home The Quest For A Western Home In Brewster Higley's "Home On The Range", C. M. Cooper

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the spring of 1934, New York attorney Samuel Moanfeldt set out on a trip that would take him through most of the states west of the Mississippi in search of the origins of the popular American folk song "Home on the Range." The reason for his trip was a $500,000 lawsuit filed by William and Mary Goodwin of Tempe, Arizona, who claimed that they had written the song-which was then the most popular tune on the American airwaves-and were owed royalties in arrears for its broadcast on public radio.

Review Of When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, The History Of Sexuality, And Native Sovereignty By Mark Rifkin, Clark D. Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mark Rifkin's When Did Indians Become Straight? is a thoughtful examination of the complicated landscape that lends itself to answering the question the title poses. Rifkin carefully and methodically scrutinizes the rhetoric of straightness within settler colonialism, highlights the intersection between Indigenous kinship models and conjugal couplehood, and problematizes subsequent nuclear/bourgeois homemaking as the dominant model for "family" within U.S. borders.

Review Of The Red Corner: The Rise And Fall Of Communism In Northeastern Montana By Verlaine Stoner Mcdonald, Bradley D. Snow

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It's not often that such names as Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky figure centrally in works dealing with Montana history. But that's the case with Verlaine Stoner McDonald's The Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana. McDonald's history deals with a little-known but fascinating chapter in Montana, and western, history the 1920s electoral takeover of the local government of Sheridan County, Montana, by Communist Party members. As McDonald shows, Sheridan County, an agrarian territory of 10,000 persons in the extreme northeastern corner of the state, proved fertile territory for a variety of leftist political movements, including …

Review Of Beyond Mount Rushmore: Other Black Hills Faces Edited And Introduced By Mary A. Kopco, David A. Wolff

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 2010, the South Dakota State Historical Society celebrated its fortieth year of publishing the award-winning journal, South Dakota History. Over the years, South Dakota History has published about 500 articles, an impressive number. As with most journals, once an article appears, it soon disappears into past volumes, almost forgotten. But good articles can have a second life, and Beyond Mount Rushmore provides that for ten articles that appeared in South Dakota History between 1993 and 2009. These essays relate to the Black Hills, a popular topic among book buyers, but what ties them together is their focus on …

Review Of The Johnson~Sims Feud: Romeo And Juliet, West Texas Style By Bill O'Neal, Robin C. Sager

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In The Johnson-Sims Feud, Bill O'Neal describes how interactions soured between two West Texas families due, in part, to an unfortunate marriage. Joining numerous scholars who have traced the presence of violence in frontier areas, O'Neal contends that the bad blood between the Johnsons and the Simses escalated into a feuding state that lasted for decades.

The work begins in the late 1870s with the arrival of early settlers "Billy" Johnson and Dave Sims, two men determined to "create cattle empires in the rugged vastness of West Texas." Embracing the intricacies of ranching life, they both met with great …

Desegregating State Universities In The Great Plains, Raymond Wolters

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On February 9, 1969, the University of Oklahoma kicked off its annual Black History Week with an especially distinguished visitor, the noted African American author and television journalist Louis E. Lomax. After Lomax's public address, there was a reception at the home of George Henderson, one of only a handful of black professors at the university and the first African American ever to purchase a home in the university town of Norman. When Henderson escorted Lomax back to his room at the Holiday Inn, the two reminisced about the civil rights movement. "Then, as if speaking to himself, [Lomax] said …

Review Of War Party In Blue: Pawnee Scouts In The U.S. Army By Mark Van De Logt, Kevin Adams

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There are many positive things to say about Mark van de Logt's study of Pawnee Indian scouts. The research, particularly in primary sources, is deep, while van de Logt's prose is so clean it practically sparkles. War Party in Blue is the result of great care taken by both author and press.

Van de Logt's intent, as expressed in his clear and concise introduction, is to revise traditional interpretations that attribute the scouts' success to Major Frank North's leadership. Given the contours of historical scholarship in the mid-twentieth century, as well as the voluminous accounts left us by Luther North, …

Review Of Bound Like Grass: A Memoir From The Western High Plains By Ruth Mclaughlin, Linda K. Karell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

At a time when so many recent western women's memoirs either eschew the family farm or ranch as a bastion of male domination, or praise it as the fading location of authentic westernness, Ruth McLaughlin's memoir hits a new and sometimes heartbreaking note. Set in the High Plains of northern Montana, the memoir's dustcover photograph is riveting in its expressive ordinariness-and is a courageous choice to represent the lives within. Next to a barbed-wire fence, young Ruth, farm-kid skinny in oversized play clothes, gently pats a calf on the head. Behind them the landscape rolls on promisingly. Within the first …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 31 / Number 4/ Fall 2011

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Cowboy's Lament: A Life On The Open Range By Frank Maynard, Kenneth L. Untiedt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Jim Hoy, who edited this volume of the Voice in the American West series, discovered a gold mine when he happened upon Frank Maynard's unpublished autobiography and personal papers. Cowboy's Lament, comprising these documents, is a beneficial resource for Great Plains historians, scholars researching the literature of the American West, and even folklorists. Maynard, who is credited with penning the lyrics to what most people recognize as "The Streets of Laredo," was a mostly self-educated "rangIer" who had the good sense to record his adventures on the frontier. Although he had limited success in publishing his narrative during his lifetime, …

Review Of Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols And The Politics Of Motherhood By Marilyn S. Blackwell And Kristen T. Oertel, Barbara Cutter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

After a difficult first marriage that ended in divorce, Clarina Irene Howard Nichols became an avid supporter of married women's property rights, mothers' custody rights, and, eventually, female suffrage. She was a journalist, a newspaper editor, and in 1852 she became the first woman to speak to the Vermont state legislature, in an address in favor of women's school suffrage. By 1853, she was traveling through the Northeast and Midwest as a public lecturer on temperance and women's rights. She emigrated to Kansas in 1854 as a strong advocate of the free soil cause, but also because she had high …

Review Of Looking Back: Canadian Women's Prairie Memoirs And Intersections Of Culture, History, And Identity By S. Leigh Matthews, Lori Ann Lahlum

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Looking Back, Leigh Matthews, a literary scholar, argues that memoirs written by white, English-speaking women who settled in western Canadian prairie communities have been "lost or ignored" and have received little "critical attention from both historians and literary critics." These published accounts of the Euro-Canadian "prairie settlement project" or "homesteading project," terminology used throughout the book, allow Matthews to assess the "Prairie Woman," the stereotypical image of the white, English-speaking female settler, against the more nuanced and diverse experiences of the "prairie woman" who actually migrated to the region. These memoirs, Matthews asserts, both "confirm and challenge …

Review Of Bad Land Pastoralism In Great Plains Fiction By Matthew J. C. Cella, Becky Faber

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Matthew Cella's Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction is based on the concept of "the dialogue between human culture and nonhuman nature on the Great Plains" as explored through the region's literature. Cella defines "bad land pastoralism" as "a persistent effort to both confront and transcend the losses accrued during the ongoing attempt to permanently inhabit a bioregion defined by motion and transience." The reader, to follow Cella's argument, must consider and reconsider the stereotypes of the Great Plains, particularly as they apply to how the region was populated and what the concept of land can mean to Plains …

Guggenheim For Governor Antisemitism, Race, And The Politics Of Gilded Age Colorado, Michael Lee

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the summer of 1893 financial panic struck Colorado. The price of silver, in a protracted downward spiral since the conclusion of the Civil War, finally crashed. The British government announced that its Indian mints were ceasing the coinage of silver rupees. The news of that decision caused a torrent of selling on the international market. In a matter of hours, the price of silver plummeted from eighty cents to sixty-four cents an ounce. The collapse in value of Colorado's most important commodity precipitated runs on local banks. Twelve banks alone collapsed in Denver during the month of July. By …

Review Of Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles By Panthea Reid, Cinzia Biagiotti

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The large book by Panthea Reid (449 pages, 16 chapters, a prologue, epilogue, and three appendices) tracks Tillie Olsen's long life (1912-2007) step by step, beginning from the Jewish-Russian origins of both her maternal and paternal families, up to her death on January 1, 2007.

The book could have been a useful addition to Olsen scholarship, if not for the biographer's insistent efforts to destroy the image of a writer and a woman who was committed so extensively to unhinging the political, social, and cultural stereotypes built up to contain the action of women in America and elsewhere.

Review Of West And West: Reimagining The Great Plains By Joe Deal, Larry Schwarm

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The geography of the Great Plains defies conventions of what a beautiful landscape is supposed to be. There are no mountains, forests, or pristine streams and lakes. It is mostly a flat horizon line, broken by an occasional tree, and bodies of water are almost always muddy ponds. To the untrained eye, it appears featureless.

It takes a special understanding to appreciate its vastness and subtleties. It requires an especially acute sensitivity to be able to translate these qualities to a photographic image. Most photographers approach this landscape looking for atypical qualities, anomalies rather than the common.

Joe Deal in …

Effects Of Herbicides And Grazing On Floristic Quality Of Native Tallgrass Pastures In Eastern South Dakota And Southwestern Minnesota, Alexander J. Smart, Matthew J. Nelson, Peter J. Bauman, Gary E. Larson

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

Historic herbicide use and grazing have influenced natural diversity and quality of native pasturelands in the Great Plains. Floristic quality assessments are useful to assist agencies in prioritizing conservation practices to enhance native grasslands. The objective of this study was to determine the effects of past land-use practices on the floristic quality of remnant native pastures in eastern South Dakota and southwestern Minnesota. Floristic quality assessments were conducted on 30 native pastures and categorized by past management practices (herbicide application and grazing intensity). Mean coefficient of conservatism (C) and floristic quality index (FQI) were calculated for each site~Results showed that …

New Records Of Carrion Beetles In Nebraska Reveal Increased Presence Of The American Burying Beetle, Nicrophorus Americanus Olivier (Coleoptera: Silphidae), Jessica Jurzenski, Daniel G. Snethen, Mathew L. Brust, W. Wyatt Hoback

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

Surveys for the American burying beetle, Nicrophorus americanus Olivier (Silphidae), between 2001 and 2010 in Nebraska resulted in 11 new county records for this endangered species and 465 new county records for 14 other silphid species. A total of 5,212 American burying beetles were captured in more than 1,500 different locations. Using mark-recapture data, we estimated the population size of the American burying beetle (ABB) for six counties in the Sandhills. Blaine County (2003) had the largest population, with an estimated 56 ABBs per km² (1,338 ± 272 ABBs). The remaining estimates were between 2 and 36 ABBs per …

Review Of Manitoba Politics And Government: Issues, Institutions, Traditions. Edited By Paul G. Thomas And Curtis Brown., Jim Mochoruk

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

This collection of20 essays stems from a conference held at St. Johns College, University of Manitoba, in the fall of 2008, convened specifically to address what its organizers (now the book's editors) saw as the most glaring gaps in the coverage of "various aspects of Manitoba society, politics, government and contemporary policy issues." As with all such projects-especially when contributors come from several different fields-the contents are a bit uneven. Indeed, readers may feel somewhat whipsawed as they move from the smooth prose and deft touch of western Canada's leading historian, Gerry Friesen (who provides the first substantive chapter), to …