American Studies Commons^™

Review Of William Wayne Red Hat, Jr.: Cheyenne Keeper Of The Arrows By William Wayne Red Hat, Jr., Christina Gish Hall

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In an attempt to add a Cheyenne voice to the voluminous literature published about this Great Plains Indian nation, Sibylle M. Schlesier has come together with William Wayne Red Hat, Jr. to produce a text that transcribes this Cheyenne Arrow Keeper's multiple personal narratives, ranging in topics from his experiences in Vietnam to his religious role in his community to ruminations on Cheyenne history, culture, and oral tradition. As the daughter of anthropologist Karl Schlesier, Schlesier was in a unique position to collaborate with Red Hat, Jr., having known the Red Hat family from childhood. Since Red Hat, Jr. was …

Review Of Frontier Medicine: From The Atlantic To The Pacific, 1492-1941 By David Dary, Joshua Dolezal

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This survey of medicine in the U.S. from European contact to World War II rambles from generalities to anecdotes in a manner much like the cowboy Dary describes in his preface, who "started up one canyon and came out another." While the premise of the book might seem self-evident (that the practice of "frontier medicine" began long before the Oregon Trail), it offers little insight into the idea of the frontier, omitting Turner's Frontier Thesis entirely, and relies more on chronology than context for its narrative. For these reasons, Frontier Medicine will be more useful to casual readers than …

Review Of Outside Looking In: Viewing First Nations Peoples In Canadian Dramatic Television Series By Mary Jane Miller, Doris Baltruschat

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mary Jane Miller sets out to answer the question "What are the stories that we tell and show to ourselves about Aboriginal peoples?" The strength of her book lies in its breadthin particular, the timeframe she chose, spanning the past fifty years, for investigating the portrayal of Aboriginal peoples on Canadian television. As a result, she provides a comprehensive overview of dramatic children and adult series, from Radisson to Forest Rangers and The Beachcombers, describing characters, themes, and topics in great detail. Her key point is that these series have mostly been produced from the "outside looking in." In …

Great Plains Quarterly, Volume 30, Issue 2, Spring 2010, Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Masthead

Contents

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes and News: FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD, CALLS FOR PAPERS, 2010 WILLA CATHER SPRING CONFERENCE, WEB RESOURCES OF INTEREST

"This Must Have Been A Grand Sight": George Bent And The Battle Of Platte Bridge, Steven C. Haack

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Battle of Platte Bridge, July 26, 1865, is a noteworthy event in the annals of the American Indian Wars. An alliance of Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapahoe, numbering in excess of 2,000 warriors, traveled three days to a specific military objective, an undertaking unusual both in terms of its magnitude and its level of organization. The battle is also of interest because we have a detailed description of the event written from the Native American viewpoint. This description comes in the form of a number of letters written to George Hyde by Southern Cheyenne George Bent. George Bent, son of …

Review Of African Cherokees In Indian Territory: From Chattel To Citizens By Celia E. Naylor, Sharlotte Neely

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In African Cherokees in Indian Territory, Celia E. Naylor tackles the controversial issue of slave-owning by Cherokee Indians and cuts through wishful myths to the truth that slavery is not somehow better when one's master is also nonwhite. In her remarkable book, Naylor traces the lives of African slaves and freedmen from 1839 when the forced removal over the Trail of Tears dumped the Cherokees of the southern Appalachians and their black slaves on the Great Plains to 1907 when Indian Territory became the state of Oklahoma. Naylor is thorough in searching out all the primary source material, and …

Review Of Cherokee Thoughts: Honest And Uncensored By Robert J. Conley, Kirby Brown

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It is often said that if you present fifty Cherokees with a given proposition, you'll get fifty-one opinions about how best to proceed. Cherokee Thoughts captures the humor, complexity, and contention embedded in such aphorisms. Careful to emphasize that the volume speaks neither for all Cherokees nor for any Cherokee government, Robert J. Conley engages a variety of contemporary tribally specific conversations, ranging-in no particular order-from the highly contentious issues of Cherokee citizenship, identity, and the freedman debates, to thoughts on tribal specific historical fiction and intellectual production ("Cherokee Literature," "Tribally Specific Historical Fiction," "John Oskison and Me"), to Cherokee …

Great Plains Quarterly, Volume 30, Number 1, Winter 2010--Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Masthead

Contents

Book Reviews

News and Notes: CALLS FOR PAPERS; INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CZECH AND SLOVAK AMERICANS; BEST ARTICLE PRIZE IN WOMEN'S HISTORY; VISITING SCHOLARS PROGRAM GRANTS FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD

Review Of Wild Bill Hickok And Calamity Jane: Deadwood Legends By James D. Mclaird, Joesph A. Stout, Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For decades after the Civil War, people trekked west across the United States to find new homes, make quick fortunes in gold or silver mining, or as soldiers of the Indianfighting army. No area attracted more attention during this era than the northern Great Plains. When gold was discovered near Deadwood, South Dakota, in the middle 1870s, the region drew characters of dubious reputation. Among these were Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, two vagabonds from the Midwest whose alleged exploits made them famous in the Northern Plains and across the country.

James McLaird peers into the lives of these …

Review Of Waiting For Coyote's Call: An Eco-Memoir From The Missouri River Bluff By Jerry Wilson, Mark D. Dixon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book documents its author's move to the bluffs of the Missouri River valley in southeastern South Dakota and his experiences and personal reflections during twenty-five years of life there. In the spirit of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, Jerry Wilson weaves together observations about the natural and human history of the bluffs and reflections-derived from his experiences on the South Dakota bluffs and his childhood on an Oklahoma farm-about how to live ethically on the land and toward its creatures. In so doing, he fashions an intimate tapestry of the Missouri River bluffs and woodlands that are …

Review Of Passion And Preferences: William Jennings Bryan And The 1896 Democratic National Convention By Richard Franklin Bensel, Raymond D. Screws

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Richard Franklin Bensel offers a masterful inspection of William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech and the 1896 Democratic National Convention. As Bensel demonstrates, this convention, held in the newly finished Coliseum in Chicago, was a watershed in American political history. Southern and western Democratic leaders, including those from the Great Plains, wrested the power of the party from "the patricians of the East"; the soft money men, or silver supporters, defeated the gold or hard money Democrats. Bryan did not alter this course, but his "Cross of Gold" speech, one of the most famous orations in American political history, …

Rationale For Pride Of Baghdad, Crag Hill Ph.D.

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

A rationale for teaching the graphic novel Pride of Baghdad at the secondary level.

Sequential Art, Graphic Novels, And Comics, Brian Kelley

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The first global distribution of a paper prepared for the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Graphic Novels Special Interest Group of the International Reading Association,the Executive Board of the New Jersey Reading Association, and the Legislative and Professional Standards Committee of the NJRA.

Review Of Modern American Indian Leaders: Their Lives And Their Works 2 Vols. By Dean Chavers, Deborah Welch

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This two-volume set contains eighty-seven biographical sketches of notable Indian men and women drawn almost exclusively from the last half of the twentieth century. The author (Dean Chavers is director of Catching the Dream, an American Indian scholarship program) categorizes his subjects into eight leadership sections-Tribal, War, Sports, Literary, Education, Movement, Religious, and Other. Each division includes familiar names: Phillip Martin and Wilma Mankiller (tribal leaders), Ira Hayes (war), Jim Thorpe (sports), N. Scott Momaday {literary), Beatrice Medicine (education), Dennis Banks (movement), and Leon Shenandoah (religious), among others. Roughly half of the biographies focus on lesser-known leaders, many of whose …

Review Of Sitting Bull By Bill Yenne, Carole A. Barrett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Yenne's Sitting Bull is not so much a biography as it is a panorama of Northern Plains history from the time of Sitting Bull's birth, about 1831, to a period beyond his death in 1890. In this telling, Sitting Bull becomes the dominant figure in a history seeking to explain and analyze the great clash of cultures, lifeways, and worldviews that took place in the nineteenth-century American West. Yenne views Sitting Bull as an enigma, and by sifting through the "flickering amalgam of images" he seeks to present the reader with a portrait of a "great man ... but also …

Review Of Back In Time: Echoes Of A Vanished America In The Heart Of France By Kent Cowgill, Juliette Parnell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Who would have thought Nebraska and France share so many similarities? Kent Cowgill's title gives out an important clue. In the winter of 2005, Cowgill travels to France for a dual purpose: to discover the French people's "real" views towards America, after Bush's reelection, and also to find out if rural France still brings back memories from past days in America's heartland.

Cowgill's original plan was to revisit six areas: first Normandy at Arromanches, then the southwest region, the Languedoc province, and finally Burgundy. He actually ends up exploring tinier communities than originally planned. His various encounters and discussions with …

Review Of Heart Of The West: New Painting And Sculpture Of The American West Edited By Laura Caruso, With Essays By James H. Nottage, Ann Scarlett Daley, Gordon Mcconnell, And Mindy A. Besaw, Monica Kjellman-Chapin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since the valorization of abstraction beginning at midcentury, Western realist art has suffered from the sense that it is too regional, nostalgic, conventional, and populist to be considered a significant and relevant contribution to the contemporary American pictorial tradition. Richly illustrated and drawing upon the resources of the Denver Art Museum's Institute of Western American Art, as well as an exhibition of drawings and sculptures by George Carlson, Heart of the West attempts to reposition contemporary Western realist art and situate this work as an important and persistent contribution to American art. In addition to an introduction by the director …

Review Of Habits Of Empire: A History Of American Expansion By Walter Nugent, Jeffrey Ostler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Two decades ago, "new western historians," led by Patricia Nelson Limerick in Legacy of Conquest, attempted to banish any mention of Frederick Jackson Turner and his frontier thesis. Although the Turner thesis was ethnocentric and its grounding of democracy in a frontier experience flawed in various ways, a nagging question remained: did the fact that America had a frontier matter at all?

In Habits of Empire, Walter Nugent, past president of the Western History Association, thinks the frontier mattered a great deal. This is not because it created democracy, but because it "taught Americans a twisted ideology: that …

Review Of Mennonite Women In Canada: A History By Marlene Epp, Katherine Jellison

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Marlene Epp's overview of two hundred years of Mennonite women's history in Canada focuses largely on the two major sites of Mennonite settlement-Ontario and the Great Plains of Manitoba. Her discussion of the Manitoba settlers-so-called "Russian Mennonites" whose Germanic ancestors migrated to Russia in the early nineteenth century-encompasses their history from the group's arrival on the Plains in the 1870s to the present. Her study provides a wealth of material for historians of Great Plains women, immigrants, and religious minorities.

Review Of Looking Close And Seeing Far: Samuel Seymour, Titian Ramsay Peale, And The Art Of The Long Expedition, 1818-1823 By Kenneth Haltman, Robert Slifkin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While the inescapable subjectivism of historical writing has become something of a given in the age of postmodern theory, the objectivity of visual documents, especially in scientific and technical realms such as topography and natural history, has remained less examined and analyzed. In his challenging and imaginative study of the numerous sketches produced by Samuel Seymour and Titian Ramsey Peale during the survey expedition following the Platte River led by Major Stephen Long (considered to be the first western expedition to include professional artists), Kenneth Haltman skillfully demonstrates not only the complexity of these ostensibly slight and impartial images, but …

Review Of Race And The Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty In The Nineteenth Century By Fay A. Yarbrough, Julie Reed

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Fay Yarbrough's Race and the Cherokee Nation adds to recent literature, including Tiya Miles's Ties That Bind (2005) and Celia Naylor's African Cherokees in Indian Territory (2008), that reexamines racial ideology among slave-holding American Indians. Through the use of Cherokee statutory law, marriage licenses, newspaper articles, court records, and WPA interviews, Yarbrough argues that nineteenth-century Cherokee politicians adopted racial laws to serve "as a demonstration of sovereignty" and reconfigured Cherokee identity by intermingling "blood, race, and legal citizenship." Matrilineal clan descent no longer provided the principal claim to Cherokee identity; race increasingly replaced clan identification to determine those who could …

Review Of Breathing In The Fullness Of Time By William Kloefkorn, David Pichaske

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The central metaphor in this final installment of Nebraska State Poet Bill Kloefkorn's four-part celebration of life in the Great Plains is air. Whereas his three previous memoirs- water, fire, and earth-explored childhood and adolescent memories, Kloefkorn here focuses mainly on adult experiences in college and the Marine Corps, teaching English at Nebraska Wesleyan, classroom adventures as a poet-in-residence, and his celebrated victory in the North Platte, Nebraska, hog-calling contest. Time and tradition are central concerns in this book, as is desire-in football and marriage, in writing poetry and being a good Marine or hog caller, in overcoming adversities like …

Review Of Death Of A Gunfighter: The Quest For Jack Slade, The West's Most Elusive Legend By Dan Rottenberg, J. Randolph Cox

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Freight teamster and wagon master along the Overland Trail, stagecoach driver in Texas, as well as stagecoach division superintendent along the Central Overland route, Joseph Alfred "Jack" Slade (1831-1864) is remembered for having helped launch and operate the Pony Express in 1860-61. He is also remembered as a gunfighter and the "Law West of Kearney." The legends about him (including those in Mark Twain's Roughing It and Prentiss Ingraham's dime novels about Buffalo Bill) are largely false, but the truth has been difficult to establish.

Dan Rottenberg was faced with three challenges in writing this book, the first to deal …

Review Of Their Own Frontier: Women Intellectuals Re-Visioning The American West Edited And With An Introduction By Shirley A. Leckie And Nancy J. Parezo, Kathleen A. Boardman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Pioneering women ethnohistorians and anthropologists who studied American Indians and the trans-Mississippi West deserve greater recognition, not only for the important information they gathered but also for their theoretical insights and methodological advances. As we learn about these women's lives and scholarly contributions, we also come to understand the barriers and prejudices they dealt with in order to pursue the work they valued. This is the argument of Shirley Leckie and Nancy Parezo's collection of intellectual biographies of ten women, born between 1873 and 1910, whose active research careers spanned most of the twentieth century. Their Own Frontier extends the …

Review Of Fire Light: The Life Of Angel De Cora, Winnebago Artist By Linda M. Waggoner, Nancy Parezo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In my research on Native Americans artists there have been people I have been fascinated with yet knew little about. One of these was Angel De Cora (1869-1919), a Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) artist I would catch glimpses of in an exhibit at the Heard Museum or find in records on the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, her art the cornerstone of the Indian Service exhibit in the government building. Fortunately for me and for others interested in the lives of individuals who made a difference in the early twentieth century, as well as for scholars in American history, American Indian studies, and …

Book Review Of Weather Matters: An American Cultural History Since 1900 By Bernard Mergen., Donna L. Woudenberg

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

Weather Matters is a varied collection of everything sky and weather related, from history, to poetry and art, to the monitoring and impacts of weather-related natural hazards. Mergen states the book is “about the everyday experience of weather and the ways in which those experiences are perceived, marketed, and managed.” The volume is broken into five chapters focused on talking about, managing, seeing, transcribing, and suffering weather. “Talking about Weather” begins with a historical overview of “weather-bureau weather,” starting with the Congressional creation of a meteorological service administered by the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1870 and ending with a …

Ranching And State School Land In Cimarron County, Oklahoma, Jacqueline Vadjunec, Rebecca Sheehan

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

Ranchers in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, have turned to leasing school trust land to sustain and sometimes expand their operations. Changes in the land tenure process have undergone profound transformations in the last 20 years, greatly impacting land use in the region. Coupled with an almost decade-long drought, land managers pursuing seemingly “traditional” agricultural practices call upon increasingly complicated, mixed private and public tenure options in order to make ends meet. Using a political ecology framework, we examine conflicting relationships between school land, the state, and local land managers as well as the sustainability of cattle ranching on school trust land …

The 37th Interdisciplinary Symposium Sponsored By The Center For Great Plains Studies, University Of Nebraska–Lincoln: Diverse Faces, Shared Histories Immigrants On The Great Plains

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

This one-day symposium features national and state scholars and writers speaking on various aspects regarding the history, politics, and personal narratives on immigration. Native, Asian, African American, and Latino perspectives vary yet share overlapping histories. This symposium is designed to broaden our perspectives about immigration on the Great Plains.

Determinants Of Net Migration In Montana, Evelyn D. Ravuri

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

The Great Plains has experienced population loss for most of the 20th century while the Rocky Mountain region has experienced rapid population growth in the past few decades. This paper examines net migration by county for Montana between 1995 and 2000 disaggregated by age and educational level. Montana was chosen because it straddles the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions and thus provides an opportunity to compare and contrast net migration and population change in two regions undergoing fundamentally different population processes. Regression analysis was applied to determine the predictor variables responsible for net migration between 1995 and 2000. Dependent …

Great Plains Research 2010: News And Notes

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

CONFERENCES

October 31–November 3, 2010 The 2010 Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America will be in Denver, Colorado. The theme is “Reaching New Peaks in Geoscience.” Website: www.geosociety.org/meetings/.

November 17–21, 2010 The 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association will be held Sheraton New Orleans and Marriott New Orleans in New Orleans. The theme is “Circulation.” Website: www.aaanet.org/meetings/.

December 12–15, 2010 The 58th Annual Meeting of the Entomological Society of America will be held at the Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center in San Diego, California. The theme is “Entodiversity: Disciplinary, Biological, and Geographical.” Website: www.entsoc.org/am/index.htm. …