American Studies Commons^™

Review Of Jayhawkers: The Civil War Brigade Of James Henry Lane By Bryce Benedict, Craig Miner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While this book contains a good deal of useful information, both its research and approach are flawed. The presentation is often tedious, freighted as it is with undigested detail.

The major question must be why so much detail of the military action of the so-called Lane Brigade (the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Kansas Volunteer Regiments) is significant when the personality and background of Lane himself is mostly left out. Benedict opens with a disclaimer that his book is not a biography of Lane, and includes "only the most cursory background information." The reader is referred for Lane's biography to a …

Collateral Damage: Veterans And Domestic Violence In Mari Sandoz's The Tom-Walker, Kathy Bahr

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Tom-Walker (1947) associates domestic violence on a national scale with the domestic violence of veterans returning home after the Civil War and two world wars. This novel anticipates both the rise of McCarthyism and the long shadow cast by the atom bomb over the years constituting the Cold War. ... The Tom-Walker is remarkable in its depiction of the ugly, almost unmentionable effects of war on the domestic lives of individual veterans. Sandoz, like a number of her contemporaries, was particularly concerned about the horrors of war, but unlike many writers, she focuses on the home front and on …

Review Of Anthology Of New Perspectives Edited By John R. Wunder And Kurt E. Kinbacher, Clara Sue Kidwell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book grew out of the ninth biennial Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference on North American Studies hosted by the Renvall Institute at the University of Helsinki in 2002. It thus includes significant coverage of Canadian as well as American Indian history and several comparative studies of Canadian and American tribes. It is also wide ranging in terms of disciplines, including historical, anthropological, and literary studies.

Of the volume's seventeen articles, nine are authored by scholars either trained in or currently teaching at Finnish and Canadian institutions, thereby contributing an international flavor to the collection. The complexities of Metis identity …

Review Of Class And Race In The Frontier Army: Military Life In The West, 1870-1890 By Kevin Adams, Samuel Watson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Class and Race in the Frontier Army is social history first, military second. Adams has two theses: that an "enormous class division" trumped ethnicity, but not race, and that military historians have sought comfort in depicting the army as socially isolated, a unique institution. A book so critical deserves critique; Class and Race is both a laudable effort to connect military to social history, and a product of late twentieth-century graduate school, producing focused insights and reminding us of the big picture, but leaving the mid-level blurry. Adams's historiographical undertone is that whiteness scholars have exaggerated the racialization of European …

"Picturing The Past" Farm Women On The Grasslands Frontier, 1850-1900, Sara Brooks Sundberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

According to a widely used, recently published college survey text about westward expansion in the United States, "rural life in the great open spaces of the trans-Mississippi west was filled with hard work, monotony, and often stultifying isolation." The textbook goes on to say, "Nowhere were the physical hardships more starkly revealed than in the lives of pioneer women." The authors emphasize this point with a passage from Hamlin Garland's autobiography describing his family's pioneer experience on the prairie: '''My heart filled with bitterness and rebellion, bitterness against the pioneering madness which had scattered our family, and rebellion toward my …

Review Of Broken Treaties: United States And Canadian Relations With The Lakotas And The Plains Cree, 1868-1885 By Jill St. Germain, Laura Woodworth-Ney

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What appears to be another book exploring the broken treaty relationships of the United States and Canadian federal governments turns out to be nothing of the sort. In challenging the long-honored "broken treaties tradition," Jill St. Germain has written a groundbreaking and welcome revision of the history of treaty and reservation-making on both sides of the United States-Canadian border.

Using a fresh, comparative approach to the analysis of federal records and the manuscript collections of federal Indian agents and officials, St. Germain focuses on the implementation of the Treaty of 1868 between the United States and the Lakota Sioux, and …

Review Of An Honourable Calling: Political Memoirs By Allan Blakeney, John C. Courtney

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As NDP premier of his adopted province for eleven years, Allan Blakeney was one of the main combatants in the federal-provincial turf wars of the 1970s and early 1980s over resource development and taxation and the patriation of the Canadian constitution. Before entering active politics he spent a decade as a public servant in Saskatchewan. For four years he served as a cabinet minister responsible for, successively, three key departments (education, finance, and health), and seven years on the opposition benches (one as leader of the opposition). By the time he left active politics in 1988, Blakeney had devoted thirty-eight …

Review Of Catlin's Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, And The Ethics Of Nature By John Hausdoerffer, Steven Conn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

All these years later, after several biographies, numbers of exhibitions, and various conference symposia, George Catlin remains an irresistible figure. He was born in 1796 and died in 1872 and in between became one of the best known artists, writers, and showmen of the era. After casting about a bit in his young adulthood, Catlin found his calling out West where in the 1830s he took several trips into what was then Indian country to paint the people and lives he encountered. He produced dozens and dozens of canvasses, many of which now stand as iconic.

John Hausdoerffer hasn't given …

Seeing Through The Eyes Of Maximilian And Bodmer: Review Of The North American Journals Of Prince Maximilian Of Wied, Volume I: May 1832-April 1833. Edited By Stephen S. Witte And Marsha V. Gallagher., Clay S. Jenkinson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The German prince Maximilian of WiedNeuwied (1782-1867) traveled up the Missouri River in 1832-33 to study American Indian culture before it was fatally compromised by the encroachment of Euro-American civilization. Aware of the expansionist and industrial dynamics of the Jacksonian Era in the United States, Maximilian wanted to study what he regarded as the vanishing Indian while there was still time. The idea had come to him during his 1815-17 journey through Brazil. For the publication that followed, Reise nach Brasilien in den Jahren 1815 his 1817 (1820), Maximilian had provided his own illustrations. These were criticized, including by his …

Review Of Survivance: Narratives Of Native Presence Edited By Gerald Vizenor, Lisa Cole

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Gerald Vizenor's concept of survivance, first introduced in Manifest Manners (1994), articulates a means of conceiving new expressions of Native life, free from the simulated "Indian," thereby highlighting the cultural value of precontact history. In this anthology, eighteen scholars variously acknowledge Vizenor's contribution of survivance to literary analysis and the wide-ranging applications of his insights to contexts such as language, race, and culture.

Vizenor functions as both a contributor to and editor for this volume. His organization of the chapters is particularly noteworthy in the intricate ways each one relates to those in close proximity. Thus, he enters into …

Review Of Branding Texas: Performing Culture In The Lone Star State By Leigh Clemons, Paula Marks

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Leigh Clemons identifies Texas cultural identity as composed of "a complex set of performances" reinforcing ideas about the state's distinctiveness and its inhabitants' lives and values. She examines a number of cultural and historical depictions of Texas people and events, not surprisingly finding that the privileged cultural identity is that born of the Texas Revolution, with forceful Anglo males at center stage and other, less powerful groups on the periphery challenging the dominant narrative.

Clemons begins with "archival spaces of Texan cultural memory," including the Alamo and other Revolutionary battlefields. Here she examines how the old triumphalist narratives of Anglo-centered …

Review Of Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading The West By Marcia Meredith Hensley, Sandra Schackel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since the republication of Letters of a Woman Homesteader in 1982, Elinore Pruitt Stewart's descriptions of homesteading near Burnt Fork, Wyoming, have served as a model for the single woman's homesteading experience. Although Pruitt held her homestead for barely a week before marrying her employer Clyde Stewart, her letters shaped our notions of the homestead experience in the early twentieth century. Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading the West, a collection of twentieth-century homesteading accounts, many of them in the Great Plains region, greatly expands this genre.

A newcomer to Wyoming in 1983, author Marcia Meredith Hensley recognized that neither …

Review Of Fort Laramie: Military Bastion Of The High Plains By Douglas C. Mcchristian, Mark R. Scherer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the annals of American westward expansion in the nineteenth century, few locations stand out more prominently than Fort Laramie in eastern Wyoming. During its almost sixty years as an active military post, the fort and the community that grew up around it bristled with the activities of the full array of iconic western figures, from fur traders and overland emigrants to Native Americans and the soldiers and government officials dispatched to deal with them, either through negotiation or military force. With Fort Laramie: Military Bastion of the High Plains, former National Park Service field historian Douglas C. McChristian breathes …

The Role Of Conservation Research And Education Centers In Growing Nature-Based Tourism, Richard Edwards, Eric Thompson

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

There are increasing numbers of private (nonprofit and for-profit) centers that carry out conservation research and education in locations of environmental concern. Such centers generate revenue streams that directly support conservation programs and also sustain surrounding human communities. This paper assesses the size of the centers’ economic impacts. We conducted separate studies of the economic impacts of the Cheetah Conservation Fund (Namibia) and (jointly) the Rowe Bird Sanctuary and Whooping Crane Trust (central Nebraska, USA). We collected data on direct expenditures and surveyed visitors and volunteers on their spending. For the Cheetah Conservation Fund, we estimate total economic impact using …

Proposed Standards And Guidelines For Private Nature Reserves In The Northern Great Plains, Curtis Freese, Dawn Montanye, Steve Forrest

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

More than three-quarters of the land in the Northern Great Plains is privately owned and less than 2% of the region is in public protected areas; therefore, sound private-land management is critical for restoring and conserving the region’s biodiversity. Although considerable progress has been made in recent years in fostering and assembling nature reserves on private lands in various regions of the world, this approach has received little attention in North America, including the Northern Great Plains. We review here recommendations, trends and issues related to private protected areas globally and in Canada and the United States. We then discuss …

Toward A Strategy For The Conservation And Protection Of The World’S Temperate Grasslands, William D. Henwood

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

Temperate grasslands are one of the world’s great biomes and were once home to some of the largest assemblages of wildlife the earth has ever known. Today these grasslands are considered the most altered terrestrial ecosystem on the planet and are recognized as the most endangered ecosystem on most continents. While species and habitat declines continue, temperate grasslands have the lowest level of protection of the world’s 14 biomes. With only 4% of the biome under protected status, considerable effort will be required to increase this level of protection. Several international bodies have suggested that achieving at least a 10% …

Cattle Ranching And Biodiversity Conservation As Allies In South America’S Flooded Savannas, Almira Hoogesteijn, Rafael Hoogesteijn

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

Cattle ranching in Latin America supports wildlife conservation. Ranching probably represents one of the few land uses in which we can advance conservation goals. The approximately 950,000 km2 of Bolivian, Brazilian, Paraguayan, Colombian, and Venezuelan savannas that are privately owned and dedicated to meat production provide a model for conservation programs. We present a geographic and historical description that covers several centuries and ends with descriptions of seven successful cattle ranches (three in the Venezuelan Llanos and four in the Brazilian Pantanal) where cattle ranching, ecotourism, and wildlife conservation coexist. These three activities support each other: tourism creates additional income …

The Role Of Ecotourism In Biodiversity And Grassland Conservation In Botswana, Glyn Maude, Richard Reading

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

Botswana has a variety of ecosystems, all of which support a multitude of wildlife species. The Kalahari is a vast semidesert that covers over 84% of the country. Grasslands along with scattered trees and drought-resistant undergrowth dominate large tracts of the Kalahari’s landscape. The northeastern Kalahari extends into the wetter environments of Botswana—the Okavango Delta, the Savuti, and the Chobe—within which grassland habitats support abundant wildlife species. Botswana is unique in that most of its biodiversity remains intact, with a higher percentage of its total landmass conserved than any other country. Botswana achieves this level of protection primarily through ecotourism, …

Book Review: Strengths And Challenges Of New Immigrant Families: Implications For Research, Education, Policy, And Service Edited By Rochelle L. Dalla, John Defrain, Julie Johnson, And Douglas A. Abbott, Katherine Fennelly

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

Strengths and Challenges of New Immigrant Families is a multidisciplinary compendium of articles and essays about immigrants and refugee families. Most (but not all) of the studies were conducted in the Great Plains states. The authors include academics, providers, and policy advocates. The work is well intentioned, but demonstrates the risks of compiling conference papers into a book; the result is a tome of variable quality. Indeed, in the introduction the editors acknowledge that it was a challenge “arranging the final manuscripts into a coherent whole.” That said, one value of the book is the inclusion of research on a …

Book Review: Healing Traditions: The Mental Health Of Aboriginal Peoples In Canada Edited By Laurence J. Kirmayer And Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, Peter Menzies

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

In Healing Traditions, the editors have assembled the voices of 29 academics, researchers, and mental health professionals from across Canada as well as Australia and the United States. This distinguished panel offers an important contribution to our understanding of Aboriginal mental health issues and the unique healing processes currently underway in a number of communities. Kirkmayer and Valaskakis contextualize mental health in a distinctive manner, acknowledging how Canada’s First Peoples have been affected by colonization over several hundred years. We learn how historic social policies continue to affect individuals, their families, and the communities in which they live. The …

Book Review: Colorado Water Law For Non-Lawyers By P. Andrew Jones And Tom Cech, Glenn Patterson

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

Water touches the lives of all of us every day, and so, at least indirectly, do the rules that govern its allocation. Since the days of the Anasazi, and of the northern Mexican communities of irrigated farms, and especially since the 1859 gold rush, Colorado has been a leader in the development of water law in the arid West. For years, interested lay readers have faced an important gap when searching for information about Colorado water law. Justice Greg Hobbs’s Citizen’s Guide to Colorado Water Law, 3rd ed. (2009) is well written and helpful, but by design is brief …

Book Review: The Grace Abbott Reader Edited By John Sorensen With Judith Sealander, Sonya Michel

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

Those familiar with the Abbott sisters generally regard Grace as the doer, Edith as the thinker. Both were leading Progressive-Era reformers, but while Edith made her mark as a pioneering social work educator and theorist, Grace—a one-time resident of Hull House who fought for women’s suffrage, immigrant rights, and child welfare—went on to become the second chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau and gained a reputation as a powerful advocate and effective administrator. Along the way, however, Grace Abbott also wrote a number of articles and speeches that reflect deep thought as well as strong beliefs in equality and progress. …

Book Review: Remarkable Plants Of Texas: Uncommon Accounts Of Our Common Natives By Matt Warnock Turner, Jackie M. Poole

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

At last: a book dealing with numerous Texas plants that is neither a field guide nor a dry litany of ethnobotanical uses. Remarkable Plants of Texas is an easy, informative, and enjoyable read. Its 65 entries cover over 80 species of some of the most common, well-known, and well-used plants of Texas (many of which also occur in the southeastern or southwestern United States or Mexico). The short (four- to eight-page) chapters are grouped by life form: trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants (also including cacti, grasses, vines, and aquatics). Although most treatments are about a single species, a few cover …

Book Review: Silent Victims: Hate Crimes Against Native Americans By Barbara Perry, Beth R. Ritter

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

Anyone familiar with Indian Country and the endemic racism and discrimination—on and off the reservations—that persist for Native Americans in the United States might assume that hate crimes perpetuated against this population are not only common but also well documented. As Barbara Perry provocatively establishes, only the former is true: Native Americans are subjected routinely to ethnoviolence, yet they rarely report these transgressions. In fact, according to Perry, Native Americans reported only 83 incidences of hate crimes in 2004 (< 1% of all reported hate crimes that year).

Perry explores several explanations for this apparent anomaly, including traditional Native cultural values of nonconfrontation. Her thesis, however, focuses primarily …

Book Review: The Politics Of Official Apologies By Melissa Nobles, Rebecca Tsosie

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

In recent years there has been an active dialogue on whether historic injustice has relevance in contemporary societies and, if so, whether an official “apology” accomplishes any beneficial purpose. Many scholars working on the topic of reparations have argued that an apology is largely irrelevant as a mere “symbolic act” unless accompanied by some material recognition of rights or transfer of resources that demonstrates a commitment to “repair” the injustice. This book, however, posits that the apology itself has value. Nobles proposes a “membership theory of apologies” that focuses on the ideological and moral value of apology rather than anticipated …

Book Review: Skeletal Biology And Bioarchaeology Of The Northwestern Plains Edited By George W. Gill And Rick L. Weathermon, W. Raymond Wood

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

This volume is a capstone of George W. Gill’s long and productive (and continuing) career at the University of Wyoming, where he has spent the last three and a half decades teaching and in pursuit of the data encapsulated here. Contributions from 21 scholars, most of them his students, present studies of bioarchaeology and skeletal biology, especially in the fields of demography, pathology, and morphology. The 19 chapters (and the introductory comments by William M. Bass, Douglas H. Ubelaker, and the senior editor) cover 10,000 years on the Northwestern Plains, from the Archaic period to historic times, encompassing studies of …

Scandal On The Plains: William F. Slocum, Edward S. Parsons, And The Colorado College Controversies, Joe P. Dunn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a story about a scandal that took place on the western frontier, a sexual harassment crisis involving one of giants of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century education and the disgraceful treatment of the man who pursued the case. The treatment of the two related incidents in the several official histories of the institution constitutes a travesty that one is tempted to call "scandalous." The physical place of this saga is important because the original events transpired within a burgeoning frontier community and at a young western institution that was successfully carving out its place in the national academic scene. …

The World’S Temperate Grasslands Conservation Priorities Great Plains Studies (Spring 2010)

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

Plate 2. Identified priorities for conservation of the world’s temperate grasslands. Figure produced by Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada, 2009.

Book Review: Ancient Nomads, Daniel J. Wescott

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

Ancient Nomads is the companion book to a Canadian Museum of Civilization exhibition comparing the cultures of nomadic peoples from the Russian and Canadian grasslands. Following an introduction, the “Grasslands” chapter describes the terrain, climate, vegetation, and wildlife in the Russian Steppes and the Canadian Great Plains. The authors then provide a brief archaeological history of both regions from approximately 35,000 to 5,000 years ago. The subsequent chapters provide an overview of various cultural aspects of nomads from the Steppes and the Plains: subsistence, food, transportation, housing, clothing, use of metal, spiritual life, and relationships with other nomadic and sedentary …

Book Review Of James Lovelock: In Search Of Gaia, By John Gribbin And Mary Gribbin, Robert F. Diffendal Jr.

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

My book review editor asked me what might be relevant to the Great Plains in a biography of James Lovelock, a book I’d suggested as worth reviewing in Great Plains Research. I assured him that much in it either is or should be relevant to the Great Plains and to science researchers working on studies of aspects of the Great Plains.

James Ephraim Lovelock, born on July 26, 1919, of fairly humble origins, did not do well in school, partly because he was dyslexic. In spite of this and other health problems over the years, he went on to …