American Studies Commons^™

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 …

Review Of And Grace Will Lead Me Home: African American Freedmen Communities Of Austin, Texas, 1865-1928 By Michelle M. Mears, Maria Franklin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Michelle Mears's book on the rural and urban freedmen settlements of Austin is a welcome contribution to the social history of African Americans in Texas. By considering postemancipation black lifeways at such a small scale, as few existing works do, it offers readers a more comprehensive view of the experiences, struggles, and accomplishments of African Americans within a specific historical context. Mears also achieves a good balance between discussing Austin's historic black communities and situating them within the social, economic, and political processes occurring more broadly within the state and the greater South.

Her research is meticulous, and scholars will …

Review Of Modernism And Mildred Walker By Carmen Pearson, Ken Egan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Can a regionalist be a major writer? That's the question at the heart of Modernism and Mildred Walker. It's a question that hovers over contemporary responses to Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner. Since their best work inhabits definable places (though far more varied than readers often realize), it's tempting to localize them, limit their power, impact, and appeal.

Not surprisingly, these two writers figure prominently in this sophisticated study of another writer often treated as limited in range (in every sense). Full disclosure: I have written on Walker as a Montana writer, one best known for her brilliant World War …

Review Of The Indian Commissioners: Agents Of The State And Indian Policy In Canada's Prairie West, 1873-1932 By E. Brian Titley, George Colpitts

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

E. Brian Titley's The Indian Commissioners makes a fine contribution to Great Plains history and, in Canadian studies, the shaping of western Indian policy. The case of Canada's Indian Commissioners, appointed from 1873 to 1909 and again between 1920 and 1932, is worthy of a single study. Titley's thesis is solidly argued: though responsible for putting into practice Ottawa's policies, the five Indian commissioners in the history of the service retained some latitude in carrying them out. Beneficiaries of party patronage, and often enjoying the confidence of either the Prime Minister or various Ministers of Interior, they had backing enough …

Review Of The Masterworks Of Charles M. Russell: A Retrospective Of Paintings And Sculpture Edited By Joan Carpenter Troccoli, Sarah L. Burt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Charles M. Russell (1864-1926) has long been celebrated as America's "Cowboy Artist," beloved as much for his charismatic personality as for his authentic portrayal of the Old West. The magnitude of Russell's celebrity may have, at times, overshadowed his artistic achievement, and thus the complexity of cultural themes reflected in his work, the iconographic richness of his art, and the evolving sophistication of his technique may come as revelations to some. These qualities emerge, perhaps more comprehensibly than ever, in The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell, a superb catalogue of the excellent retrospective exhibition organized jointly by the Denver …

Review Of "I Do Not Apologize For The Length Of This Letter": The Mari Sandoz Letters On Native American Rights, 1940-1965 Introduced And Edited By Kimberli A. Lee, Alan Boye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Novelist, historian, and biographer Mari Sandoz holds a unique position as an authority on the American West. She was born in 1896 in one of the last areas of the West to be settled by whites, the sparse and empty Nebraska Sandhills. Her father befriended many of the Sioux and Cheyennes from the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation. Sandoz grew up hearing the stories of people like He Dog, a close friend of Crazy Horse and brother-in-law of Red Cloud, Wild Hog, the Cheyenne warrior who played a crucial role in the Cheyenne Exodus, Short Bull, Old Cheyenne Woman, and others …

Review Of Historical Atlas Of The American West: With Original Maps By Derek Hayes, J. Clark Archer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Historical Atlas of the American West is a visually appealing and well-organized representation of cartographic works thoughtfully selected from several centuries of map making. As demarcated for the Atlas, the American West extends from the eastern borders of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas to the Pacific coasts of California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. While some of the included maps show the entire American West, most depict smaller subregions of interest such as one or a few states or even individual cities or towns. The cartographic scales, map themes, and graphical styles of the maps reproduced vary greatly, …

"We Were Beet Workers, And That Was All" Beet Field Laborers In The North Platte Valley, 1902-1930, Dustin Kipp

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John and Alex Loos, two brothers who spent their childhood summers working in the beet fields of western Nebraska in the 1910s, suggested that a migrant beet field laborer could become, by the end of one season, "a trusted member of the community."¹ It took years of hard work and saving, but field workers could become farmers. Families could own land and work for their own benefit rather than for the subsistence wages of the migratory laborer. Although locals often viewed them with suspicion as outsiders, German Russian migrants were increasingly encouraged to stay to help build the burgeoning …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 31 / Number 1 / Winter 2011

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Sapphira And The Slave Girl By Willa Cather, Robin Hackett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Willa Cather's last novel, set in Virginia where she spent her early childhood, is often a mystery to readers who know Cather by her loving evocation of Great Plains landscapes and cultures. This scholarly edition clarifies the seeming anomaly of Sapphira and the Slave Girl by placing it in its historical and biographical contexts, and by building from it an analysis of Cather's accomplishments and aesthetic concerns over the length of her career. The most significant achievement of this edition is that it will help scholars at every level understand the novel as evidence of Cather's involvement in public intellectual …

Review Of Between Languages And Cultures: Colonial And Postcolonial Readings Of Gabrielle Roy By Rosemary Chapman, Carol J. Harvey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Canadian author Gabrielle Roy (1909-1983) is usually recognized as one of Quebec's foremost writers. Although Bonheur d'occasion, the novel that launched her career in 1946, is set in Montreal, much of her subsequent work is set in the Prairies of her youth. Born in the small francophone town of Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, she spoke French at home but was educated in English, since French had lost its status as an official language of the province. This linguistic and cultural duality is fraught with many tensions, as Rosemary Chapman demonstrates in her recent book.

On The Road Again Consumptives Traveling For Health In The American West, 1840-1925, Jeanne Abrams

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From the mid-nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of health seekers, on the advice of their physicians, family members, or popular advertisements, took to the road to "chase the cure" for tuberculosis, the most dreaded disease of the era. Indeed, tuberculosis, also commonly known as consumption or "the White Plague," held the dubious distinction of being the leading cause of death in nineteenth century America. In the first years of the twentieth century 150,000 Americans died of it yearly, and more than ten times that number were afflicted with the disease.¹ Whether …

Review Of Reopening The Frontier: Homesteading In The Modern West By Brian Q. Cannon, Benjamin T. Arrington

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Brian Q. Cannon has established himself as one of America's preeminent historians of agriculture and the modern West. Reopening the Frontier will only add to this well-deserved reputation. In it, he examines the rejuvenation of western homesteading- the idea of the federal government providing cost-free land to settlers willing to live on and cultivate it-after World War II. As Cannon demonstrates, the challenges of homesteading in 1950s Washington or Oregon were often just as severe as those of trying to "prove up" a claim in 1870s Nebraska or Kansas.

Review Of All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives On Montana Literature Edited By Brady Harrison, Sue Hart

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This remarkable collection of essays offers something for every reader interested in Montana literature, from the well read to newcomers to the field. All the contributors are literary scholars, but some of their subject matter might come as a surprise. For example, Nancy Cook examines romance writers' use of Montana as a setting in her essay, pointing out in a footnote that despite the number of young, handsome ranch owners available in the pages of such books, "the average age of a farm/ranch operator in Montana [in 1997] was fifty-four, with the number of men under age thirty-four about 0.5 …

Review Of Crisscrossing Borders In Literature Of The American West Edited By Reginald Dyck And Cheli Reutter, Linda K. Karell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

With its uninspired Pepto-Bismol pink-colored cover, Crisscrossing Borders in the Literature of the American West might escape attention. That would be a loss because this new collection, edited by Reginald Dyck and Cheli Reutter, is a striking series of essays that simultaneously argue for and model new postnational and transnational approaches to western literary studies. In the introduction, Dyck asks, "Is it possible to have a western literary studies that recognizes the many forms of difference that create borders within and around the region while neither reifying those borders nor discounting their power?" The strategies employed by the various authors …

Review Of Writing Indian, Native Conversations By John Lloyd Purdy, Geraldine Mendoza Gutwein

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Writing Indian, Native Conversations provides keen discussion across three decades of Native American literature in the twentieth century along with consideration of literature in the new millennium. Interviews with well-known Native American scholars and authors such as Paula Gunn Allen, Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, and Louis Owens provide a foreground from which Purdy delves more deeply into the works of Silko, Welch, Erdrich, King, Vizenor, and others. The critical, theoretical framework from which he analyzes the works is based on a construct that has at its core the assumption that "we all come to a work of literature …

Review Of Border To Border: Historic Quilts And Quiltmakers Of Montana By Annie Hanshew, Barbara Caron

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

State-wide efforts to document quilts began with the Kentucky project in 1981; by 2010 more than fifty books reported the findings of projects in thirty-seven states. Border to Border is the culmination of the Montana Historic Quilt Project, which began in 1987 and ultimately registered more than 2,000 quilts. A perceptive introduction by Mary Murphy, professor of history at Montana State University - Bozeman, places Montana quilts within a wider context not only of needlework and women's roles, but also of westward expansion, industrialization, transportation networks, consumerism, fairs and expositions, and other state and world events. Murphy commends the Montana …

Review Of Wallace Stegner And The American West By Philip L. Fradkin, Bonney Macdonald

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Philip L. Fradkin's biography constitutes a balanced and well-researched addition to the biographical scholarship currently available on a treasured and enduring American and western American author, environmentalist, and teacher. Adding to previous work by Forrest and Margaret Robinson (1977), as well as by Jackson Benson (1996), Fradkin supplements these portraits of Wallace Stegner with his own emphases-in particular Stegner's continuing commitment to thinking about the American West, about water and aridity, and about public intellectuals' obligations to conservation and environmental responsibility.

Review Of The Lipan Apaches: People Of The Wind And Lightning By Thomas A. Britten, Deborah Bernsten

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Lipan Apaches is the first comprehensive study of a people who were important, integral actors in the history of the Southern Plains, most especially the history of Texas. Rather than casting the Lipans as the victims of Spanish or later American conquest, this meticulously researched work brings to life Lipan history, one steeped in a "tradition of adaptation and cultural reinvention" that of necessity was constantly responding to new and often painful shifting social realities. Britten poses these questions: Who were the Lipan Apaches and under what circumstances did a tribal identity emerge ? To what extent did they …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

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

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

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

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

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

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

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

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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