Cultural History Commons^™

Review Of Terrible Justice: Sioux Chiefs And U.S. Soldiers On The Upper Missouri, 1854-1868 By Doreen Chaky, Steven C. Haack

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When strong tensions exist between cultures, small incidents can have grave consequences. Thus, in August of 1854, when a Sioux Indian living near Fort Laramie, Nebraska Territory, found a lame cow and killed it to feed his family, a sad chapter began. The cow's emigrant owner complained of his loss to the fort's commander, and Lt. John Grattan was soon on his way to a Sioux encampment to demand that the thief be turned over to face justice. As a cannon rolled into place to reinforce his demand, violence broke out, and thirty soldiers, including Grattan, soon lay dead. Secretary …

Review Of Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History Edited By Susan A. Miller And James Riding In, Angela Parker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Susan Miller and James Riding In position this anthology as the first to collect historical work from Native scholars participating in an "Indigenous discourse"-an academic conversation "rooted in North American Indigenous thought" and, they claim, global Indigenous thought. If your essentialism alarm bells are ringing, it is for good reason. Ignore the alarms long enough to work your way through the entire anthology and you will find rich, complicated, vibrant historical analysis and critique from Indigenous historians working in Canada and the United States.

The introduction and framing essays by Susan Miller in part 1 elaborate on the idea of …

Review Of Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past And Present By Jean A. Boyd, John Mark Dempsey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The patrons of Saturday-night Texas dance halls still two-step to the music of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, more than thirty-five years after Wills's death. Jean Boyd is one of the Texas music authors who has mythologized Wills in her previous "We're the Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mills": An Oral History (2003) and The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (1998). In her newest book, Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present, Boyd puts the spotlight on less well known practitioners of the music that Wills pioneered along with …

Review Of Weapons Of The Lewis And Clark Expedition By Jim Garry, Brooke Wibracht

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Jim Garry's recent publication offers a meticulous assessment of the Corps of Discovery's arsenal. One of Garry's goals centers on correcting outdated information from well-known books, about the Corps and the weaponry the men carried, especially Carl P. Russell's Guns of the Early Frontiers (1957). The author acknowledges that historians have continuously advanced the scholarship on the Corps' weaponry, but misconceptions about the arsenal still exist, muddying the historical record. He encourages readers to view his book as a tool for placing the expedition and the weapons of the early nineteenth century in an accurate historical context.

The volume contains …

Review Of Villages On Wheels: A Social History Of The Gathering To Zion By Stanley B. Kimball And Violet T. Kimball, W. Paul Reeve

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Villages on Wheels is the culmination of historian Stanley B. Kimball's more than fifteen years' research on and long career as a scholar of the Mormon Trail. When he died in 2003, his wife, Violet, a writer, photojournalist, and occasional student of the trail herself, completed the project. This social history, a detailed examination of the everyday aspects of creating and maintaining a mobile society, is the result of their collaboration.

Based upon "hundreds of journals"-mostly located at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Church History Library in Salt Lake City, the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at …

Eastern Beads, Western Applications Wampum Among Plains Tribes, Jordan Keagle

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the seventeenth century, when Europeans first arrived in what are now the New England and mid-Atlantic states, they encountered a wide array of indigenous tribes already calling the land home. The new setrlers soon realized the importance of shell beads called wampum. Manufactured primarily along Long Island Sound, these beads, shaped from marine shells, could be made into belts or grouped as strings.¹ Though whites failed to grasp the nuances of wampum culture, leading to the generalization of wampum as "Indian money," they nevertheless recognized its significance in Native American trade and diplomacy. Eventually, wampum came to be …

Review Of A Geography Of Blood: Unearthing Memory From A Prairie Landscape By Candace Savage, Susan Naramore Maher

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Candace Savage and her companion Keith Bell first discovered Eastend, Saskatchewan, on a journey home to Saskatoon from Cody, Wyoming. They planned a brief stopover but ended up hooked on the town, returning for further visits, and finally buying a home. In a sense, Savage has been pursuing a deeper habitation of Eastend for many years. As a recent transplant, she has sought to understand this comer of Saskatchewan across many spatial manifestations and through many layers of cultural existence. A frequent visitor to the Wallace Stegner House, immortalized in Wolf Willow, she has also worked to uproot Stegner's …

The 2013 Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, R. Matthew Joeckel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

After long deliberations by members of three subcommittees and the chairs of those committees, the Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize was awarded to Blackfoot Redemption: A Blood Indian's Story of Murder, Confinement, and Imperfect Justice, by William E. Farr, published by the University of Oklahoma Press. As the chair of the prize committee, I am pleased to state that many fine books were submitted for the competition, and that each of them was meritorious in some way. Nevertheless, Blackfoot Redemption is unique among the submissions-and indeed among the vast majority of accounts of Plains Native American lives in …

Review Of Theodore Roosevelt In The Badlands: A Young Politician's Quest For Recovery In The American West By Roger L. Di Silvestro, Mark Harvey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Biographers of Theodore Roosevelt have long been aware of the significance of the time he spent in the Badlands of Dakota Territory during the 1880s. After an initial visit in 1883, Roosevelt returned the following year, this time overwhelmed with grief. Earlier that year he had experienced unimaginable personal tragedy when his beloved wife, Alice, and his mother died on the very same day. A few months later TR returned to western Dakota by train, bound for a landscape he hoped would bring him solace, healing, and renewal.

Over the next several years, Roosevelt returned to the Badlands for weeks …

Review Of The James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection: Selected Works Edited By Mark Andrew White, Emma I. Hansen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Beginning in the 1950s, Arizona collector James T. Bialac assembled an extensive and eclectic collection of Native American art, consisting of approximately 2,500 paintings and 1,500 kachina dolls, baskets, jewelry, pottery, and sculptures. The collection represents several regions, with particular strengths in the southwestern and southeastern United States and the Southern Plains. Produced by the University of Oklahoma in recognition of Bialac's donation of his collection to the university's Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, the catalogue provides an overview of this assemblage, featuring images of selected works and accompanying essays.

Following Mary Jo Watson's introduction, ''A Tradition of Appreciation: …

Review Of Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, And The Struggle For Civil Rights In Texas By Brian D. Behnken, Edwin Dorn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

If you are an African American, a Mexican American, or a progressive Anglo who grew up in Texas in the past century, reading Brian Behnken's book, filled as it is with examples of the state's racism, is sure to tear off a few old scabs. Behnken's main objective, however, is to explain the factors that kept black civil rights activists from working with their Hispanic counterparts to reduce racial segregation and discrimination.

One factor, Behnken argues convincingly, was geography: the battleground for the black struggle was in the eastern part of the state, the Mexican American battleground hundreds of miles …

Review Of Hell Of A Vision: Regionalism And The Modem American West By Robert L. Dorman, Allen Frost

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This thorough study of the American West takes as a given the region's contested and continuously shifting identity among scholars as well as among artists, activists, and government agencies. One of Robert Dorman's many contributions to the field in Hell of a Vision is his decision to chart the formations of these multiple Wests alongside each other, from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the present day.

The primary texts examined here range from the canonical to the unexpected. Dorman's archive begins with John Wesley Powell's maps of the "Arid Region," produced in 1891 for the U.S. Geological …

Review Of The Indianization Of Lewis And Clark By William Swagerty, Clarissa W. Confer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This two-volume work sets out to chronicle and analyze the process of change experienced by the men of the Corps of Discovery as they traveled through the homelands of diverse American Indian cultures on their way to the Pacific and back. Doubtlessly, an undertaking as bold and arduous as the Lewis and Clark expedition altered those who experienced it. One could examine these changes a variety of ways. Here, author William Swagerty focuses on the intersection between Euro- American and Native American cultures-the point at which white men traded aspects of their culture for those of the people they had …

Review Of Living With American Indian Art: The Hirschfield Collection By Alan J. Hirschfield With Terry Winchell, Heather Ahtone

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As the reality sets in that Native Americans have not become the vanishing race, their continuum of artistic excellence is underscored in the collection amassed by Alan and Berte Hirschfield. Living with American Indian Art documents how these avid collectors have integrated a broad range of cultural materials into a private Wyoming home, reflecting their collecting passion and broad interests. From the TIingit baskets to the Zia pottery to the Cheyenne buckskin dresses, the Native arts found in the Hirschfield collection are exquisite works, in keeping with Alan Hirschfield's mantra, "When you see something beautiful, buy it!"

Racialized Nationality: Mexicans, Vaqueros, And U.S. Nationalism In Buffalo Bill's Wild West, Pablo A. Rangel

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The development of the vaquero, as he appeared in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West performances and other shows, mirrors the experiences of Mexicans and Mexican-descent people in the United States at the end of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth century. This thesis explores and analyzes the history of the vaquero in the Wild West show through an analysis of the principal performers and their experiences. Chapter one explores the history of the Wild West show with an emphasis on the vaqueros. This chapter will also explore the origins of the vaqueros. Chapter two explores how the Wild West …

Community, Power, And Memory In Díaz Ordaz's Mexico: The 1968 Lynching In San Miguel Canoa, Puebla, Kevin M. Chrisman

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

On September 14th, 1968, approximately 1,000 enraged inhabitants wielding assorted makeshift weapons formed a lynch mob that brutally murdered four people and injured three others in San Miguel Canoa, Mexico. According to the generally accepted account, Canoa’s inhabitants feared that recently-arrived Universidad Autónoma de Puebla employees, in town on a weekend mountain-climbing expedition, were in actuality communist agitators threatening the town’s social order. The lynching in Canoa received limited press coverage and was subsequently overshadowed by the much larger government orchestrated Tlatelolco massacre that occurred in Mexico City, on October 2, 1968. While Tlatelolco remains an important historic event from …

Death Became Them: The Defeminization Of The American Death Culture, 1609–1899, Briony D. Zlomke

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Focusing specifically on the years 1609 to 1899 in the United States, this thesis examines how middle-class women initially controlled the economy of preparing the dead in pre-industrialized America and lost their positions as death transitioned from a community-based event to an occurrence from which one could profit. In this new economy, men dominated the capitalist-driven funeral parlors and undertaker services. The changing ideology about white middle-class women’s proper places in society and the displacement of women in the “death trade” with the advent of the funeral director exacerbated this decline of a once female-defined practice. These changes dramatically altered …

Family, Ethnic Entrepreneurship, And The Lebanese Of Kansas, Jay M. Price, Sue Abdinnour

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As they entered the elegant lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, Elias G. Stevens and his wife, Handuma, must have marveled at how their lives turned out. They had both been born and raised in what was once the Ottoman province of Syria. They had come to the United States at the turn of the century, found their way to Wichita, Kansas, and worked hard to build a successful candy and tobacco business. They were in New York to meet with representatives from Philip Morris. Surveying the accommodations, however, Handuma noticed a major problem that had to be addressed right away. …

Crowns Of Honor Sacred Laws Of Eagle-Feather War Bonnets And Repatriating The Icon Of The Great Plains, Leo Killsback

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I dedicate this article to all the current Cheyenne Council of Forty-Four Chiefs, headmen of the warrior societies, and combat veterans, as well as modern tribal leaders, warriors, ceremonial practitioners, and tribal citizens who continue to use eagles in the traditional manner, thus ensuring the survival of the warrior ways.

In 2010 a war bonnet belonging to Oglala Lakota chief Fools Crow was repatriated to hereditary chief Mel Lone Hill of Batesland, South Dakota, which is located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Fools Crow’s war bonnet was of the original warrior types, made of immature golden eagle tail feathers, …

Sibley’S Winnebago Prisoners: Deconstructing Race And Recovering Kinship In The Dakota War Of 1862, Linda M. Waggoner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On October 21, 1862, two months following the first violent outbreak of the U.S. and Dakota War, Alonzo J. Edgerton, captain of Company B of the Tenth Minnesota Regiment, pursued “quite a young looking Indian” after he was spotted crossing the Blue Earth River headed toward the Winnebago Indian Agency, twelve miles east of Mankato in Blue Earth County. Unarmed and riding bareback, Edgerton’s suspect was not a Dakota warrior on the lam but a Ho-Chunk Indian trying to return home. Nothing but a dirty rag covered his head, while his pierced ear lobes flashed a pair of shiny brass …

“Ever Since The Hanging Of Oliphant” Lynching And The Suppression Of Mob Violence In Topeka, Kansas, Brent M.S. Campney

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

“The most remarkable scene ever enacted in the heart of a great city was witnessed in Topeka last night, in the final act of the tragedy on which the curtain rose with the sunrise yesterday,” reported the Topeka Daily Capital on June 5, 1889. “Twelve hours after the spirit of Alonzo T. Rodgers had taken its flight, his murderer was hung in the very center of the capital city, under the broad glare of the electric light and by a body of ‘vigilantes’ which in its composition was equalled by no other in all the history of the western world.” …

“How Badly Can Cattle And Land Sales Suffer From This?” Drought And Cattle Sickness On The Ja Ranch, 1910–1918, Matthew M. Day

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Timothy Dwight Hobart, general manager of the JA Ranch in northwestern Texas, had a problem on his hands. Trying to sell his cattle in 1918, he had helped transport hundreds of head of cattle within the ranch. However, J. W. Kent, who was with the JA Ranch for a substantial portion of its history to date, noticed that the cattle were not feeling well. Anthrax had poisoned the cattle, and it was spreading quickly. “We are burning the carcasses,” Hobart wrote, “and not leaving a stone unturned to stamp out the disease.” What was he to do?

In this study …

Zoomorphic Penannular Brooches In 6th And 7th Century Ireland, Esther G. Ward

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

In this thesis the author examines the evolution, manufacture, and societal significance of zoomorphic penannular brooches, a type of metal dress fastener used in early medieval Ireland that is often decorated. The brooches examined are dated to the 6^th and 7^th centuries, during which the Irish underwent a process of religious conversion from Celtic paganism to Christianity, and social rank was paramount. It is in this social context that the brooches are examined. Despite the significance of this time of social change, brooches from this period tend to be overlooked by scholarship in favor of the more ornate …

New Deal Leftists, Henry Wallace And "Gideon's Army," And The Progressive Party In Montana, 1937-1952, Hugh T. Lovin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Many forces occupied America's sociopolitical terrain to the left of New Dealers who dominated U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's administration of the 1930s. Some fastened themselves temporarily to the New Dealers' coattails. Ideologically motivated, others touted their special panaceas for ending the Great Depression that had begun in 1929, and certain of the mainstream Democratic Party's expatriates added to this cacophony by pursuing their own agendas. Comprised principally of the Democratic Party's out-of-power people, another group wanted to restore Roosevelt's reforming to its 1933-34 height, change the federal government's thrust to the leftward in. certain particulars, and impose New Deal-style reform …

Review Of The Catherian Cathedral: Gothic Cathedral Iconography In Willa Cather's Fiction By Christine E. Kephart, Nicholas Birns

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Christine Kephart's book is published in a series dedicated to the late Merrill Maguire Skaggs, one of the leading Cather scholars. It honors Skaggs's memory with an original, sprightly, and captivating illumination of the motif of the cathedral throughout Cather's writing. We all know about Death Comes to the Archbishop and, to a lesser extent, Shadows on the Rock with their overt engagement of New World Catholicism and the presence within them of churches, cathedrals, and bishops. But Kephart looks for the cathedral motif throughout Cather's oeuvre, beginning with her failed first novel, Alexander's Bridge, where Kephart sees the …

Review Of The Grads Are Playing Tonight! The Story Of The Edmonton Commercial Graduates Basketball Club By M. Ann Hall, Carly Adams

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

M. Ann Hall, author of The Girl and the Game (2002), one of the "must read" books on Canadian women's sport history, brings us this fascinating look at the Edmonton Commercial Graduates Basketball Club. Historians' fascination with the Edmonton Grads, perhaps the most well-known story in Canadian women's sport history, has resulted in numerous published articles over the last two decades and a 1987 National Film Board of Canada film, Shooting Stars. Yet this is the first comprehensive book about the club. In an extensively researched, accessible, yet detailed read, Hall reveals new insights into the team, the organization, the …

Review Of Ned Wynkoop And The Lonely Road From Sand Creek By Louis Kraft, James T. Carroll

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This narrative opens in typical form for a biography portraying the life of a nineteenth- century frontiersman in the American West. Ned Wynkoop sought adventure on the American frontier, encountered various Native American cultures, engaged in resource speculation, attempted to enter territorial politics, and served with distinction in the Civil War. These common attributes, however, are only a small part of Wynkoop's historical significance. His worldview was completely transformed after prolonged contact with Native peoples and the events surrounding the massacre at Sand Creek, Colorado Territory, in November 1864.

Ned Wynkoop arrived in Colorado Territory by a circuitous route in …

Review Of American Indians And The Mass Media Edited By Meta G. Carstarphen And John P. Sanchez, Dean Rader

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Earlier in the year, I spent some time on the White Earth Lake Reservation (Ojibwe) in northern Minnesota. At one point, to counter some nasty diaper rash (not mine), I went into a store to buy corn starch. My only choice was Argo. I was prepared for discomfort-I've always hated the bizarre half-Indian-maiden / halfcorncob figure that has come to be recognized as Argo's brand, and the irony of purchasing this item, on this reservation, in the middle of the Corn Belt was too much. But, thankfully, Argo had changed its label, so at least there was one less thing …

Review Of The First We Can Remember: Colorado Pioneer Women Tell Their Stories Edited And With An Introduction By Lee Schweninger., Dee Garceau

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although the term "pioneer" in the book title recalls Turner's West where white emigrants were the vanguard of civilization, Lee Schweninger places these narratives within the contexts of gendered and postcolonial scholarship. In a thoughtful introduction, Schweninger emphasizes the value of firsthand testimony from ordinary people, especially women, who lived outside circles of public leadership and power. Women's narratives provide insight into changing family and community relations; links between local, regional, and national economies; contests over land and resources; racial-ethnic identities and tensions; and how women made meaning out of their western experience.

In the winter of 1933-34, the Civil …

Review Of Indigenous Dance And Dancing Indian: Contested Representation In The Global Era By Matthew Krystal, Jacqueline Shea Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a thoughtful, helpful, somewhat unusually focused book that looks at K'iche Maya Traditional Dance in Guatemala, Native American Powwow (particularly in the Upper Midwest), Folkloric dance in the Chicago area, and at the University of Illinois's "Chief Illiniwek" dancing mascot from an anthropologically informed ethnographic perspective. The section on Maya dance comes from the author's dissertation research, while the sections on Indigenous dance and "playing Indian" in the Midwest are from fieldwork he has undertaken, postdissertation, while teaching at North Central College in Illinois. Krystal brings these diverse performance practices into dialogue with each other by looking at …