American Studies Commons^™

Do Invasive Riparian Woody Plants Affect Hydrology And Ecosystem Processes?, Julie Huddle, Tala Awada, Derrel Martin, Xinhua Zhou, Sue Ellen Pegg, Scott Josiah

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

© 2011 Copyright by the Center for Greot Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Review Of The Frontier Newspapers And The Coverage Of The Plains Indian Wars By Hugh J. Reilly, Kyle Carsten Wyatt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a community of scholars, we need to ask more from books like this. Despite a topic ripe with fruitful and compelling potential, Reilly's approach to newspaper coverage of the Plains Indian Wars lacks rigor, nuance, and engagement with contemporary critical conversations.

Reilly, a communications professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, discusses eight "watershed events," from the Great Sioux Uprising in 1862 to the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1891. Newspapers throughout the United States, indeed the world, reported on these conflicts. The coverage that appeared in national publications, such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune …

Review Of Native American Drama: A Critical Perspective By Christy Stanlake, Julie Pearson-Little Thunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Understanding Native American drama requires a critical perspective often lacking in theater and academia. Christy Stanlake's book helps remedy this problem with a two-fold strategy. First, she identifies four Native-authored discourses generated in part by the study of American Indian fiction and poetry. Then she applies these discourses to readings from nine Native plays, showing how Native philosophies shape Native drama on the page and in performance. Stanlake explains that place, or "platiality," in western theater assumes new dimensions in Native drama, expressing complex relationships among character, language, and landscape. She examines the historical and political aspects of Native storytelling …

Review Of The Color Of The Land: Race, Nation, And The Politics Of Landownership In Oklahoma, 1832-1929 By David A. Chang, Jacob Sherman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Power is often tied to who controls the economic capital, and whoever has it will delineate terms of membership within that society. Oklahoma's and the Great Plains' greatest capital is land. The Color of the Land effectively examines how Creek Nation lands defined membership along racial lines both inside and outside of the tribe. David Chang skillfully pieces together the fluctuation of racial complexities as lands transferred from communal to wealthy private ownership.

Chang notes that Creek lands were primarily communal based upon clan loyalties. Clans had no racial distinctions. Racial definitions developed as Creeks began owning slaves by the …

Review Of Literary Life: A Second Memoir By Larry Mcmurtry, Tom Pilkington

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Literary Life is the second entry of Larry McMurtry's projected trilogy of memoirs. The first, Books (2008), recalls his lifelong avocation as book scout, dealer, and eventually bookstore owner. The yet-to-be-published third, Hollywood, will relate his experiences as a screenwriter. Literary Life takes as its subject McMurtry's career as prolific writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove (1985).

Let it be said right off the bat that this slim volume is a mess, a lazy, sloppy collection of random memories that lacks anything resembling a coherent structure. Though it begins at the beginning-with the young McMurtry reading boys' …

Review Of Patrick Connor's War: The 1865 Powder River Indian Expedition By David E. Wagner, John H. Monnett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Patrick Connor's War is the late David E. Wagner's second book in the past year dealing with the military operations against Lakotas and Cheyennes in the Powder River country of today's Wyoming and environs in 1865. Like his previous work, Powder River Odyssey, dealing with Nelson Cole's wing of an expensive army offensive operation against the Plains tribes in the wake, some contend, of raids on the Overland Trail avenging the Sand Creek Massacre, the current book relies heavily on campaign records, personal recollections, and diaries of the officers, civilian contractors, and enlisted men involved in the campaign. The …

Great Plains Research, Spring 2011, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Complete Issue)

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

Workplace Religious Accommodation for Muslims and the Promise of State Constitutionalism • Peter J. Longo and Joan M. Blauwkamp . 3

Using Euro-American Hunting Data to Assess Western Great Plains Biogeography, 1806-35 • Cody Newton . 17

The Political Consequences of Population Consolidation in Nebraska • Diane L. Duffin . 27

Cottonwood Riparian Site Selection on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation • Julie A. Thorstenson, Diane H. Rickerl, and Janet H. Gritzner . 39

Do Invasive Riparian Woody Plants Affect Hydrology and Ecosystem Processes? • Julie A. Huddle, Tala Awada, Derrel L. Martin, Xinhua Zhou, Sue Ellen Pegg, and Scott …

"What's A Goin' On?" People And Place In The Fiction Of Edythe Squier Draper, 1924–1941, Aubrey R. Streit Krug

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This essay is devoted to looking back into the life and fiction of Edythe Squier Draper, a twentieth-century writer in Oswego, Kansas. Many of Draper’s stories are set in southeastern Kansas. Through them, we gain a sense of how she attempted—and at times failed—to perceive, articulate, and adapt to her place on the Great Plains. Draper claimed the identity of a rural woman writer by writing herself into narratives of colonial, agricultural settlement, and she both complicated and perpetuated stereotypes of class and race in her fiction. By examining her and her characters’ perspective on their place in the Great …

Willa Cather [From Blackwell Encyclopedia Of Twentieth-Century American Fiction], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Willa Cather is known primarily for her novels representing the experiences of women immigrants on the Nebraska prairies in the late nineteenth century, but Cather’s 10 novels and scores of short stories’ produced over a career spanning 50 years actually range widely over space and time, from seventeenth-century Quebec to twentieth century New York. A social conservative who proudly identified herself as one of the backward-looking, her experiments with fictional form and her approach to culture nevertheless ally her with modernism. It is, perhaps, the depth and diversity of Cather’s body of work and the impossibility of reducing her achievement …

Every Week Essays: Associated Sunday Magazines And The Origins Of Every Week, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Every Week Magazine, published from 1915-1918, was a significant magazine phenomenon of its day, with a weekly circulation of 600,000 copies. The contents provide a rich cultural resource for those interested in the World War I home front, popular fiction, advertising, and constructions of race and gender during this period. Until the development of this digital edition, the magazine could be accessed by scholars and readers only with great difficulty due to its embrittled condition and rarity. Magazines provided courtesy of the University of Wisconsin.

Every Week Essays: Every Week’S Editorial Staff, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Every Week Magazine, published from 1915-1918, was a significant magazine phenomenon of its day, with a weekly circulation of 600,000 copies. The contents provide a rich cultural resource for those interested in the World War I home front, popular fiction, advertising, and constructions of race and gender during this period. Until the development of this digital edition, the magazine could be accessed by scholars and readers only with great difficulty due to its embrittled condition and rarity. Magazines provided courtesy of the University of Wisconsin.

Review Of Seldom Seen: A Journey Into The Great Plains By Patrick Dobson, Geitner Simmons

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great Plains often are dismissed as ho-hum fly-over country lacking in significance or appeal. But in the skillfully written narrative of Seldom Seen, Patrick Dobson describes how he finds the Plains a source of emotional sustenance and, ultimately, rejuvenation. Seldom Seen is the story of the author's trek, largely by foot, from Kansas City, Missouri, to Helena, Montana. Along the way Dobson-- a 32-year old blue-collar worker seeking relief from a variety of intense personal frustrations-meets a long string of open-hearted if often dirt-poor souls and comes to find hope in what he'd largely considered a "mean and …

The American Imprint On Alberta Politics, Nelson Wiseman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Characteristics assigned to America's classical liberal ideology-rugged individualism, market capitalism, egalitarianism in the sense of equality of opportunity, and fierce hostility toward centralized federalism and socialismare particularly appropriate for fathoming Alberta's political culture. In this article, I contend that Alberta's early American settlers were pivotal in shaping Alberta's political culture and that Albertans have demonstrated a particular affinity for American political ideas and movements. Alberta came to resemble the liberal society in Tocqueville's Democracy in America: high status was accorded the selfmade man, laissez-faire defined the economic order, and a multiplicity of religious sects competed in the market for …

Review Of Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, And Healing By Jo-Ann Episkenew, Keavy Martin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Metis scholar and activist Jo-Ann Episkenew examines the potential of literature to assist Canadian Indigenous communities in healing from the impacts of colonial government policy in this, her first scholarly monograph. While the discourse of "healing" has been a central feature of both bureaucratic and academic discussions of Indigenous issues since the 1990s, Episkenew's study appears at a time when the detrimental effects of policies like the residential school system are again gaining public attention as Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission gets underway. The book contains a useful overview of the government interventions that have impinged upon Indigenous peoples in …

Review Of Replenishing The Earth: The Settler Revolution And The Rise Of The Anglo-World, 1783-1939 By James Belich, Jon Lauck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the early modern era, the great powers of the world enjoyed a rough parity of strength. But in the nineteenth century, during a great "divergence," the Anglo-American world gained ground over the others. Some historians have attributed this to inherent advantages of Anglo-Saxon culture, others to the natural resources of the Anglo world, and others to its growth-promoting institutions. James Belich believes historians must also consider another factor, what he calls the Anglo-American "Settler Revolution" of the nineteenth century.

Other European powers, Belich argues, did not have the staying power of the Anglo-American world. The Dutch, for example, had …

Review Of Gateway To The Northern Plains: Railroads And The Birth Of Fargo And Moorhead By Carroll Engelhardt, Kimberly K. Porter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One worries about the editorial staff at the University of Minnesota Press in determining to accept the manuscript for Gateway to the Northern Plains. You can almost see them scratching their heads, frustrated with the job of marketing a volume that could belong in every section of every bookstore and could find an appropriate home on the shelf of any scholar of the American experience. Indeed, that is the delightful challenge of Carroll Engelhardt's labor of love. Engelhardt, an emeritus professor of history at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota, clearly devoted years of research and writing to the preparation of …

Review Of First Nations, First Thoughts: The Impact Of Indigenous Thought In Canada Edited By Annis May Timpson, Priscilla Settee

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This timely collection offers perceptive, thought-provoking perspectives on contemporary issues Indigenous communities face. Privatization, governance, language preservation, museums, public policy, and official knowledge are some of the topics the book tackles. Written by a range of seasoned and emerging scholars, First Nations, First Thoughts is organized into five subject areas (each containing two or three papers): challenging dominant discourses; oral histories; cultural representation; governance; and political self-determination. The title is a clever response to Thomas Flanagan's First Nations? Second Thoughts (2000). One of the articles rebuts the content of this infamous, rather anti-Indigenous-sovereignty book. Because Flanagan is consulted on issues …

Review Of Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining The Bird In British Romantic And Contemporary Native American Literature By Thomas C. Gannon, Frederick White

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Thomas Gannon's verve animates his investigation and contrast of avian images from British Romantic poets and Native American authors. In the introductory chapter, he provides a steadfast theoretical basis grounded in a syncretic psychological-ecotheory. In the next two chapters he meticulously constructs his view that the British Romantic poets' attempt to connect with nature, specifically birds, at the surface level seems accomplished but, with deeper pondering, falls far short of being convincing. Gannon exposes how western expression of nature cannot capture any essence of subject-subject, that is "I-Thou." The second and third chapters explore examples to show avian representation is …

Review Of White Mother To A Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, And The Removal Of Indigenous Children In The American West And Australia, 1880-1940 By Margaret D. Jacobs, Lynette Russell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Comparative studies involving similar historical events in different locales have been neglected over the last few decades, in my opinion to the detriment of history. It is indeed gratifying to see this change with the publication recently of several important comparative works. Two that compare North America with Australia are Penelope Edmonds's outstanding Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (2010) and Katherine Ellinghaus's Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in Australia and the United States, 1887-1937 (2006). To this we can now add Margaret D. Jacobs's important White Mother to …

Review Of Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong By Paul Chaat Smith, Laura M. Furlan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his recent collection of essays, associate curator at the National Museum of the American Indian Paul Chaat Smith argues for a reorientation of knowledge about Indian peoples. The essays, all previously published, are sometimes autobiographical, sometimes humorous, and range in topic from Ishi to the Alcatraz occupation. In "The Big Movie," for example, Smith takes on films that feature Indians, from the first moving picture made by Thomas Edison in 1894, Sioux Ghost Dance, to The Searchers, Last of the Mohicans, and Dances with Wolves. Indians, Smith writes, have become "a kind of national mascot." These …

Moneneheo And Naheverien Cheyenne And Mennonite Sewing Circles, Convergences And Conflicts, 1890-1970, Kimberly D. Schmidt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Marie Gerber Petter was skeptical. Born in the Swiss Jura Mountains, she knew that one does not find water in high places. It was 1893 when Marie and her husband, Rodolphe Petter, came to North America for the express purpose of bringing Christianity to Native Americans. After studying English and visiting Mennonite churches in Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas to garner monetary support for their work among the Southern Cheyenne, they made the forty-mile journey from Darlington, Oklahoma Territory, to an area near present-day Hammon by covered wagon. She was in need of water. When she asked, the local Cheyenne chief, …

Review Of Art As Performance, Story As Criticism: Reflections On Native Literary Aesthetics By Craig S. Womack, Mark Rifkin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Art as Performance, Story as Criticism is a grand experiment. In it, Womack plays with the possibilities of critical form as well as analytic content. One of the commonplaces of Native literary studies is that knowledge is made through story, so artistic production should count as a means of studying the world. Following this line of thought, Womack here blends story with more conventional scholarship, creating a multilayered counterpoint that conveys more the sense of an opening to a conversation than the self-enclosure that can emanate from thesis-driven arguments. In this vein, the pieces collected here-ranging from new short …

Review Of Our Boys: A Perfect Season On The Plains With The Smith Center Redmen By Joe Drape, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The best book on Great Plains sports is H. G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights (1990). That classic has spawned a critically acclaimed television series and numerous awards. FNL not only told the story of a football season at Odessa Permian High School in urban West Texas; it also asked and answered some very big questions that concerned high school athletic corruption, coaching pressures, cheerleader/ football player interaction, school integration, local community politics, treatment of players of color, Texas's new rules prohibiting playing with failing grades, pressures on teachers, drugs, player abuse, and on and on. It remains a beautifully written …

Review Of "I Thought Pocahontas Was A Movie": Perspectives On Race/Culture Binaries In Education And Service Professions. Edited By Carol Schick And James Mcninch., Tracy L. Friedel

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

This edited volume argues that a race/culture binary lies at the heart of Canada's ongoing relationship with the descendants of the country's First Peoples. In looking at the service professions, editors Carol Schick and James McNinch trouble taken-for-granted assumptions based upon racial, cultural, and ethnic difference, arguing that representations of Indigenous peoples as culturally inferior, a trope that has replaced the idea of biological inferiority, is highly instrumental in the social positioning and unequal power relations that exists today in Canadian society. In turn, the editors tie this discussion back to Canada's colonial history and the social, material, and ideological …

Review Of The Western Landscape In Cormac Mccarthy And Wallace Stegner: Myths Of The Frontier By Megan Riley Mcgilchrist, Harry F. Thompson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Megan Riley McGilchrist sees the Vietnam War and the cultural upheaval it represents as a watershed event in understanding how the western novel treats the theme of landscape. She constructs her analysis through the writings of Wallace Stegner and the western novels of Cormac McCarthy, the former retaining a belief in the innate goodness of the land and the latter rejecting the benevolence of the natural world. McGilchrist argues that, as the fulfillment of the frontier ethos, the Vietnam War-absent in Stegner but present in McCarthy-changed life in the mythimbued West. For McGilchrist, elements of the mythic West, both abhorrent …

Review Of The American Military Frontiers: The United States Army In The West, 1783-1900 By Robert Wooster, Mark R. Scherer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Given the vast breadth and depth of American military historiography, well-organized and well-written narrative overviews of the field are always welcome. Robert Wooster's recently released The American Military Frontiers certainly fits that description. Wooster, a professor of history at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, and the author of four other books on western military history, synthesizes several generations of previous scholarship to support his most fundamental theme: that the Army served not only as the executor of nineteenth century national policy, but also as an important catalytic "shaper" of that policy. In its attention to the multiple roles played by …

Review Of Seeking Life Whole: Willa Cather And The Brewsters By Lucy Marks And David Porter, Kari A. Ronning

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Seeking Life Whole, eighth in Fairleigh Dickinson's series on Willa Cather, is a volume in two parts, with nine subdivisions, and excellent notes. Part 1 contains Lucy Marks's biographical account of the lives of expatriate painters Achsah Barlow Brewster and her husband Earl H. Brewster, and David Porter's biographical and critical account of the previously unknown relationship between the Brewsters and Willa Cather. The Brewsters went to Europe after their marriage in 1910 to dedicate themselves to painting, nature, study, and a simple, beautiful way of life; they attracted a remarkable range of friends. Their type has been satirized, …

Review Of Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, And Violence In Pre-Civil War Kansas By Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, Michael D. Pierson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bleeding Kansas has long been an important topic for political historians exploring how it influenced Congress, presidential campaigns, and the coming of the Civil War. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel's book uses the insights of recent social historians to add depth to this political narrative, thereby strengthening our understanding of how antebellum Kansas changed America.

Bleeding Borders begins with a chapter that positions Kansas as a frontier territory. Oertel's antebellum Kansans are divided by race, but not just between white and black. Starting her history in the 1820s, Oertel finds that "white settlers' perceptions of and interactions with Kansas Indians played a …

Review Of No Place Like Home: Notes From A Western Life By Linda M. Hasselstrom, Gretchen Legler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What's happening to Linda Hasselstrom's Great Plains is happening everywhere, even in western Maine, where New Yorkers migrate north, buying second houses in communities once home to lobstermen, farmers, and lumberjacks, changing the face of the social, political, and natural landscape. It's enough to make a person, well, want to let off some steam, and perhaps try to come to some conclusions about what is happening to land and community in America in general and in the Great Plains in particular, which is what Hasselstrom does in her newest work of nonfiction. In this collection of linked essays, she returns …

Review Of Lee Lawrie's Prairie Deco: History In Stone At The Nebraska State Capitol By Gregory Paul Harm, Robert S. Haller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book is a tribute to the power of art, specifically, of the sculpture outside and inside the Nebraska State Capitol. It so impressed Gregory Harm in his youth that he has undertaken in maturity an enthusiastic exploration of the aesthetic and historical background of that sculpture and its creator Lee Lawrie (1877-1963). He found his way to the Lawrie archives at the Library of Congress, the University of Nebraska, and the Capitol itself, and stood in awe before Lawrie's monumental works for Rockefeller Center and other public buildings around the country. His book makes the case that Lawrie should …