Cultural History Commons^™

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 …

Review Of Forts Of The Northern Plains: Guide To Historic Military Posts Of The Plains Indians Wars By Jeff Barnes, Barton H. Barbour

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Jeff Barnes's book presents brief histories and the historical importance of about fifty military forts in Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming. Only sites that played roles in the "Indian Wars" of the West, roughly from 1820 to 1890, are included. Each entry describes the post and its significance, and offers good suggestions for further reading. Barnes also provides a sidebar offering directions to each site, its hours of operation, admission costs, special events, and available amenities to help visitors plan their trips.

Barnes offers updated information on posts that have been treated in a number …

Review Of Notes From Texas: On Writing In The Lone Star State Edited By W. C. Jameson, Karl Germeck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For Notes from Texas, W. C. Jameson compiles essay responses from esteemed veterans of the Texas writing community in an effort to understand how each came to choose a career in writing and succeeded in doing so, as well as the role Texas (its myths and lore, geography, history, and culture) has played in that process. The result is a collection of fourteen personal essays from eleven native, and three transplant, Texans, including such notables as former and co-founding director of the University of North Texas Press, Frances Brannen Vick, novelists Elmer Kelton, Paulette Jiles, James Reasoner, and poet/songwriter …

Review Of The Fall Of A Black Army Officer: Racism And The Myth Of Henry O. Flipper By Charles M. Robinson Iii, Bruce A. Glasrud

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1881 Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper, the first black graduate of West Point, was accused of embezzlement and conduct unbecoming an officer. A court-martial subsequently found Flipper guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer, but not of the embezzlement charges, and dismissed him from the army. In his 1994 account, The Court-Martial of Lieutenant Henry Flipper, Charles Robinson III concluded that "racism affected the sentence. Dismissal was totally out of line with sentences given to white officers for more serious offences." With this 2008 revision of his earlier work, The Fall of a Black Army Officer, Robinson finds Flipper …

Review Of War Of A Thousand Deserts, Jesús F. De La Teja

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Among the challenges that battered Mexico in the decades following independence was raiding from independent Indian groups that increasingly found plunder preferable to peace. In this ambitious and erudite work Brian DeLay argues that it was exhaustion from fighting Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowas among northern Mexicans that largely made for the easy victory of the United States in its 1846- 1847 war of conquest against Mexico. As the evidence mounted for American policy makers that the Mexican government was not only unable to develop its northern territories properly but was incapable of defending them, the logic of incorporating Texas into …

Review Of Listening To The Land: Native American Literary Responses To The Landscape By Lee Schweninger, Kelli Lyon Johnson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Listening to the Land, Lee Schweninger demonstrates a Native American connection to Mother Earth to be a prevailing stereotype in cultural representations of Indigenous peoples in literature, television, and film. While refusing to dismiss "an indigenous relationship to, appreciation for, awareness of, or understanding of the land that is significantly different from non-Indian relationships," Schweninger analyzes the complicated portrayal of the landscape in Native American literature in the context of this stereotype, which he calls the "Land Ethic Stereotype," the framework with which he begins his study of a wide range of twentieth-century Native writers from a number …

Review Of For All We Have And Are: Regina And The Experience Of The Great War By James M. Pitsula, Brandon Dimmel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great War touched many places in Canada, but James M. Pistula's book is the first to examine closely its impact on a distinctly agrarian and western community. Regina, Saskatchewan, was, like many towns in the Canadian prairies after the turn of the century, dependent on agriculture, ethnically diverse, and led by an Anglophile majority that viewed the war as an ideological clash between the democratic British Empire and the despotic German autocracy. That way of thinking made the city of 30,000 a veritable battleground between "Germantown," the "alien" immigrant district, and its English-speaking majority, who through assimilative social reform …

Review Of Laura Ingalls Wilder And Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time, And Culture By John E. Miller, Philip Heldrich

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his third book on Laura Ingalls Wilder, John E. Miller presents another fascinating study of this most cherished writer and her times. Miller weighs in on a number of the continuing controversies surrounding Wilder's books, foremost among them the question of how the Little House books were authored. He also enters into the continuing debate on the racial politics of Wilder's writing, especially in Little House on the Prairie, that has become the focus of many newer studies of Wilder's work. Miller presents Wilder and daughter Rose Wilder Lane as products of their respective times, showing how during …

Review Of Sentimental Journey: The Art Of Alfred Jacob Miller By Lisa Strong, Martha A. Sandweiss

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Alfred Jacob Miller (181O-1874) spent six months in the Rocky Mountain West in 1837, capturing a visual record of the fur trader's world for his patron, the Scottish nobleman William Drummond Stewart. He created only about a hundred works in the West, but over the next thirty-five years he painted close to one thousand western scenes in his studio in Baltimore, benefiting not just from Stewart's patronage, but from the sustained patronage of Baltimore's leading merchant princes, many of whom had commercial interests in the West. As Strong argues here in this beautifully illustrated book, published to accompany an exhibition …

Governing Gambling In The United States, Maria E. Garcia

CMC Senior Theses

The role risk taking has played in American history has helped shape current legislation concerning gambling. This thesis attempts to explain the discrepancies in legislation regarding distinct forms of gambling. While casinos are heavily regulated by state and federal laws, most statutes dealing with lotteries strive to regulate the activities of other parties instead of those of the lottery institutions. Incidentally, lotteries are the only form of gambling completely managed by the government. It can be inferred that the United States government is more concerned with people exploiting gambling than with the actual practice of wagering.

In an effort to …

Religious Experiences In New England, Douglas L. Winiarski

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This chapter examines the shifting language of conversion in New England Congregationalism - the bastion of Puritan culture in North America - from the period of settlement in the 1630s to the eve of the Civil War. Evidence is drawn from a database of more than a thousand church-admission narratives from nearly three dozen communities scattered across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Throughout this period, most Congregational ministers remained committed to a Calvinist theology that emphasized innate human depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, and irresistible grace. Yet the importance of conversion - the sacred calculus through which God winnowed saints …

Lakewood Farm: The Private Zoo That The Public Loved, Geoffrey D. Reynolds

Faculty Publications

Lakewood Farm:  The Private Zoo That the Public Loved is an article concerning the private zoo in Holland, Michigan, that was owned by Chicago coal merchant George Fulmer Getz and helped form the Illionois based Brookfiekd Zoo and John Ball Zoo of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The Grizzly, December 10, 2009, Caitlin Dalik, Katie Callahan, Andrea Magnolo, Liz Kilmer, Maryanne Berthel, Lisa Jobe, Michael Delaney, Bridget Resetco, Gianna Paone, Cory Kram, Elizabeth Mahoney, Joshua C. Walsh, Helen Ann Coin, Zach Shamberg, Matt Campbell, Kate Lechleitner

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

Escape Velocity Performs Winter Show: Celebrate! • Management Teams Tally Up Their Profits • Sustainability: Dreaming of a Green Christmas • Ursinus Hosts "America Reads" for the Tenth Annual Holiday Celebration • UC United Brings Inspirational Speaker Nancy Hunter Denney to Ursinus • Dangerous Effects of Tanning Beds • New Mammogram Recommendations • Bizarre Foods: The Fabulous Five Dollar Festive Feast • Opinion: Present Your Partner with the Perfect Present: Holiday Gift Ideas • Breaking School Records and Then Some

The Grizzly, December 3, 2009, Caitlin Dalik, Katie Callahan, Ashley Mccomeskey, Jonathan Edward Barber, Gianna Paone, Lisa Jobe, Matt Whitman, Claire Peterson, Carly Siegler, Helen Ann Coin, Zach Shamberg, Matt Campbell, James Wagner

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

Students Write Letters to Raise Money for St. Jude • Usernames Unlock Opportunities: UC Career Net Overview • Introducing the Ursinus Bioethics Society • Tuition Increases to Stay Competitive and to Cut Back on State Debts • Savoring Beer: All it Needs is a Little Love • Ursinus Japan Club Makes One Thousand Paper Cranes • Opinion: "Can Ex-Significant Others Ever Be Your New Close Friends?" • Ursinus Men's Basketball Wins Home Opener; Improves to 3-1

Into The Murky World Of Class Consciousness, Peter S. Carmichael

Civil War Institute Faculty Publications

In a 1975 article on the place of yeomen farmers in a slave society, Eugene D. Genovese identified a critical question concerning the nature of the Old South. The issue, he wrote, is to explain “the degree of class collaboration and social unity” that existed among all whites, which to Genovese appeared “all the more impressive in the face of so many internal strains.” Although some critics mistakenly charged that Genovese argued for non-slaveholder passivity in the face of planter hegemony, he was, in actuality, acknowledging that class relations were permeated with tension and discord, causing bitter resentments that occasionally …

Self-Advocacy Of Women In Sexualized Labor, 1880–1980s, Kim Marie Matthews

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this study is to centralize, into women's history, the marginalized historical voices of women activists working in sexualized labor (and/or those using sexualized economic strategies). This thesis situates the work of Josie Washburn, a former madam who turned self advocate in 1907, squarely within the Progressive Era debate on prostitution, By centralizing women's voices of sexualized lahor, it provides a means to track the long-term evolution of the intersections between women's sexualized labor choices, traditional labor choices, self-advocacy, popular media, and social/political movements on behalf of women. This study asserts that a majority Progressive Era working women …

The Grizzly, November 19, 2009, Caitlin Dalik, Katie Callahan, Jonathan Edward Barber, Seika Ueda, Christopher Wierzbowski, Lisa Jobe, Ashley Mccomeskey, Dante Dimidio, Callie Ingram, Gianna Paone, Maryanne Berthel, Ellen Bernhard, Abbie Cichowski, Helen Ann Coin, Liz Kilmer, James Kilduff, Kate Lechleitner, Luke Benko

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

WVOU Gains Notoriety • UCTV Prepares for Second Show • Ursinus Involved in Main Street Program • Train Hopping: An Adventurous Way to Travel • Relay for Life Holds Open House to Recruit Teams for 2010 Event • Tau Sig Brings "Cuts for a Cause" to UC • Faculty and Staff Challenged to Improve Their Health and Fitness • Ursinus Students Rethinking, to Recreate • Philadelphia's Own Revival Tour Hosts Chuck Ragan as Guest • Opinion: Men are From Mars, Women Read Cosmopolitan; "Hello, I'd Like You to Meet My...": Dating vs. Friends with Benefits • Ursinus Men's, Women's Swimming …

The Grizzly, November 12, 2009, Caitlin Dalik, Katie Callahan, Liz Kilmer, Ashley Mccomeskey, Gianna Paone, Lisa Jobe, Alex Doll, Rebecca Smyth, Andrea Magnolo, Ellen Bernhard, Abbie Cichowski, James Kilduff, Jason K. Mullins, Seika Ueda, Zach Shamberg, Kate Lechleitner, Christopher Michael

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

Picasso at the Lapin Agile Draws in Audiences • Ursinus Awarded Teagle Grant • H1N1: How Ursinus is Battling the Swine Flu • Health Stats on the Ursinus Campus • Guest Speaker Addresses Urban (Dis)order • Four Students Hope to Pursue their Dreams with Watson Fellowship • Philly's Practically Single Proves Pop-Punk Prevails; Set to Play Ursinus Friday • Veterans: The Brave Who Allow Us to be Free • Ghost Hunter Gives Presentation on Campus • Opinion: Hamid Karzai: Further Complicating Issues in Afghanistan; Ursinus' Need for an Intro to Writing Class • Field Hockey Hoists C.C. Trophy for Sixth …

The Grizzly, November 5, 2009, Caitlin Dalik, Katie Callahan, Liz Kilmer, Andrea Magnolo, Gianna Paone, Lisa Jobe, Rebecca Smyth, Ellen Bernhard, Jonathan Edward Barber, Seika Ueda, Joe Walsh, Colin Hart, Matt Whitman, Kate Lechleitner, Luke Benko

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

Escape Velocity Performances are "Timeless" • Dr. William Keim Inspires with Humor • National Deficit May Favor Health Care Reform • Second Annual Greek Activities Fair Held in Wismer Parents Lounge • Sophomores Learn About the ILE • Behind the Scenes: Association for Computing Machinery • Educational Effect of the International Film Festival • Haunted Ursinus: Good ole' Ghost Stories • Opinion: Where Did the Lounges Go? The Cramped UC Community; Texting and Facebook IM: Our Generation Conversation; Drop the Natural Light and Expand Your Beverage Horizons • UC Athletics Spotlight: Alyssa Thren of Field Hockey

The Grizzly, October 29, 2009, Caitlin Dalik, Katie Callahan, Alex Doll, Christopher Wierzbowski, James Kilduff, Lisa Jobe, Jonathan Edward Barber, Seika Ueda, Gianna Paone, Ellen Bernhard, Maryanne Berthel, Zach Shamberg, Carly Siegler, Abbie Cichowski, Andrea Magnolo, Christopher Michael

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

Senator John C. Rafferty Speaks in Olin • Mid-term Aftermath • Students Enjoy the PA Renaissance Fair • Copyright Infringement on Rise Among College Students • Berman Museum Receives Gifts from Expressionist Painter • Healthy Spin on America's Economic Recession • Kindle: Electronic Reading Device Next iPod? • Recycling Made Easier on Campus Next Week • Opinions: Textual Relations: Double-edged Sword; Wet vs. Dry College Campuses • Football Moves Into Tie for First Atop Centennial Conference