Cultural History Commons^™

Review Of Conquests & Consequences: The American West From Frontier To Region By Carol L. Higham And William H. Katerberg, Aubrey Streit Krug

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The textbook Conquests & Consequences provides a cohesive narrative framed by the question: How does a historical perspective of cultures, empires, and environments in the American West inform and influence understandings of the West as a frontier, colony, region, borderland, or "center of power in its own right"? To engage undergraduate history students, Carol L. Higham and William H. Katerberg employ a folksy, conversational style (Native pit houses are "roughly the length of an average single dormitory room"). The text also contains an impressive number of photographs and illustrations. Most importantly, Higham and Katerberg introduce terms and content in the …

Review Of Meriwether Lewis By Thomas C. Danisi And John C. Jackson, J. I. Merritt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

With the possible exception of Aaron Burr, perhaps no figure from the early history of the Republic remains more enigmatic than Meriwether Lewis, who with fellow Army officer William Clark led one of the most celebrated expeditions in the history of exploration. Lewis and Clark's twenty-eight-month "tour," which took them to the Pacific Ocean and back via the Missouri and Columbia drainages, gave the young nation a wealth of knowledge about the Louisiana Territory and Pacific Northwest. Lewis was just thirty-two years old when the Corps of Discovery banked its canoes in St. Louis in September 1806. Yet the young …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 30 / Number 4 / Fall 2010

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait Of A Community In Black And White By Bob Ray Sanders, Carla Williams

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait of a Community in Black and White came about through the confluence of two significant events around 1994: the enthusiastic reception surrounding the publication of a similarly themed title, Behold the People: R. C. Hickman's Photographs of Black Dallas, 1949-1961; and Littlejohn's family contacting the director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin about possibly donating his prints and negatives there. These are significant because they point to the need for an archive to preserve and organize material of this scope-some 70,000 negatives and 55,000 prints made over …

Review Of Uprising! Woody Crumbo's Indian Art By Robert Perry, Robert B. Pickering

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In any discussion of important Indian artists of the twentieth century, Woody Crumbo (1912-1989) is a pivotal player. His dynamic figures, brilliant colors, and traditional themes were combined to create a new kind of art. He used traditional art forms and themes from his Potawatomi background as well as themes and incidents from other tribal traditions to inspire his work. Not satisfied with just creating art, Crumbo mentored other artists, and for much of his life he was personally involved in the business of art-creating new opportunities for himself and other Indian artists.

Review Of Taming The Land: The Lost Postcard Photographs Of The Texas High Plains By John Miller Morris, Anne E. Peterson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The advent of the real photographic postcard (RPPC) and the burgeoning growth in the early twentieth century of the Texas Panhandle area of the southern Great Plains coincide. More than 100,000 "optimists" spilled into the region after 1906. The frontier receded as farmsteads grew around railroad towns. The era also witnessed a surge in popularity of the real photographic postcard from 1906 into the 1920s, mailed by the tens of thousands and collected in albums documenting the region. As the population grew, photographers increasingly worked for land developers making images of farmland and also of excursionists traveling to see the …

Review Of A Nation In Transition: Douglas Henry Johnston And The Chickasaws, 1898-1939 By Michael W. Lovegrove, Lisa K. Neuman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What happens when a Native American nation is gradually and purposefully dismantled in order to make way for a new state government? How do tribal leaders meet the challenges of an impending dissolution of their own government and simultaneously fight against the erosion of their tribal sovereignty? These compelling questions inform A Nation in Transition: Douglas Henry Johnston and the Chickasaws, 1898-1939, a new history of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and its leadership under Governor Douglas Henry Johnston (1898-1902; 1904-1939), whose tenure, according to author Michael W. Lovegrove, was longer than that of any other American Indian executive. …

Review Of Faces Of The Frontier: Photographic Portraits From The American West, 1845-1924 By Frank H. Goodyear Iii, With An Essay By Richard White And Contributions By Maya E. Foo And Amy L. Baskette, Mary Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The rise of photography in the United States coincided with the spread of Manifest Destiny, and this handsome exhibit catalogue presents a veritable photographic who's who of the men (and a few women) who were pivotal actors in both the conquest and representation of the American West. The National Portrait Gallery organized the exhibition, Faces of the Frontier, in 2009, with travels to the San Diego Historical Society and the Gilcrease Museum in 2010. The book consists of essays by curator Frank H. Goodyear III and Richard White and the portraits themselves, accompanied by biographical captions.

Four thematic sections …

Review Of Indian Tribes Of Oklahoma: A Guide By Blue Clark, Ron Mccoy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Oklahoma's license plates, which formerly displayed an Osage shield, now depict a representation of Native son Allan Houser's evocative sculpture of a fellow Apache preparing to fire an arrow at the sky. The legend running across the bottom of the plate reads: "Native America." This is an apt statement about Oklahoma, site of pre-Columbian Indian settlements, westernmost extension of Mississippian mound building cultures, home for Kiowa and Comanche buffalo hunters, and adopted land of Cherokees and others forced to abandon familiar stomping grounds east of the Mississippi River. On a per capita basis, Oklahoma boasts the nation's largest Native American …

Review Of Charles Deas And 1840s America By Carol Clark, With Contributions By Joan Carpenter Troccoli, Frederick E. Hoxie, And Guy Jordan, Gail E. Husch

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

His known works are not many-ninety-eight paintings, drawings, and prints are listed in Carol Clark's catalogue at the end of this richly documented volume-and almost half have not been located. Most of the artist's extant paintings were produced between 1833 and 1849. By the age of thirty, Charles Deas (1818-1867) was disturbed enough to require institutionalization; he spent the rest of his days in one asylum or another. With a career of such apparently limited scope and scale, one might wonder whether the artist deserves the attention he is given in this book and in the exhibition at the Denver …

Review Of Lanterns On The Prairie: The Blackfeet Photographs Of Walter Mcclintock Edited By Steven L. Grafe, With Contributions By William E. Farr, Sherry L. Smith, And Darrell Robes Kipp, Brian W. Dippie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Walter McClintock (1870-1949) is principally known for two books, The Old North Trail; or Life, Legends and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians (1910) and Old Indian Trails (1923). Both are illustrated with McClintock's photographs, The Old North Trail generously so. They convey an idealized vision of the traditional Blackfeet culture that captivated McClintock when, as a Yale graduate aspiring to a career in forestry, he visited the Blackfeet reservation in Montana in 1896. On subsequent visits through 1912 his collection grew to over 2,000 photographs, and he established himself as an authority on the tribe, delivering lectures in America and …

"If The Lord's Willing And The Creek Don't Rise" Flood Control And The Displaced Rural Communities Of Irving And Broughton, Kansas, Robin A. Hanson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this case study, I examine how the residents of two displaced rural Kansas towns, and their descendants, exhibit a sense of identity common to small farm communities throughout the Great Plains, and how tenacious these ties are even after the physical reminder of their communal bonds no longer exists. By examining the struggles to survive faced by these two towns, Irving and Broughton, the resiliency of the people who called them home, and the continuing expression of community solidarity by the individuals associated with them, I propose that the individuals living within these communities created a transcendental identity similar …

Review Of "I Am A Man": Chief Standing Bear's Journey For Justice By Joe Starita, John M. Coward

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On the night of January 2, 1879, Standing Bear and thirty other Ponca men, women, and children slipped away from their disease-ridden new home in Indian Territory. Standing Bear was on a mission, leading his band back to the tribe's ancestral lands along the Nebraska-South Dakota border where he could honor his dying son's last wish, to be buried near the sacred chalk bluffs above the Missouri River.

As author Joe Starita explains, Standing Bear's journey was plagued by subzero temperatures and gales. When their Omaha Indian friends went out to meet them 600 miles and two months later, Starita …

Review Of He Was Some Kind Of A Man: Masculinities In The B Western By Roderick Mcgillis, John M. Clum

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It takes something of a masochist to watch close to two hundred B westerns, but Roderick McGillis claims to have done that in researching this book. For those of you who are not film history buffs, a B movie was a cheap, relatively short (sixty to seventy-five minutes), formulaic genre film made to be the second half of a double feature. A lot of B movies were westerns because they were cheap and popular, particularly with boys and young men. They had their own stars, many of whom moved on to television, which killed the B movie: Roy Rogers, Gene …

Wish List Wilderness Endgame In The Black Hills National Forest, Robert Wellman Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In January 1979 Dave Foreman loosened his tie, propped his cowboy boots up on his desk, and brooded awhile on RARE II. In a second try at Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE), the u.s. Forest Service had just spent two years deciding once and for all how much of its undeveloped land should be designated Wilderness. To Foreman, a Washington executive of the Wilderness Society, RARE II tasted of bitter defeat, and he lonesomely "popped the top on another Stroh's" as he brooded. The Forest Service had just recommended increasing its Wilderness acres from 18 million to 33 million, …

Review Of The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story By Elliott West, Dennis Baird

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Nez Perce people (who call themselves Nimiipuu) are ancient inhabitants of Idaho's Clearwater Valley and of the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon. Driven by both curiosity and economics, they have a rich history of travels to distant places, including California, the Rio Grande Valley, and across the Plains to Missouri. Buffalo drew large segments of the tribe to the Great Plains, where many leaders where born. They have an equally rich history of generosity to visitors, a category that included Lewis and Clark, fur traders and missionaries, and eventually the miners and settlers who helped various federal officials …

Review Of We Are All Treaty People: Prairie Essays By Roger Epp. Edmonton, J. William Brennan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the aftermath of the 1996 release of the massive report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and Canada's subsequent official statement of regret for the "Indian policies" that successive governments have pursued down to our own day, "We Are All Treaty People: History, Reconciliation and the 'Settler Problem'" is arguably this book's most provocative essay. Roger Epp begins by asserting that the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Euro-Canadian settlers who came afterward "constitutes a ... powerful common history, inherited, not chosen, whose birthright we can either disavow, because its burdens are too great, or else make our …

Review Of Under The Big Sky: A Biography Of A. B. Guthrie Jr. By Jackson J. Benson, Capper Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On the Web site of a major bookseller, a "customer reviewer" claims that A. B. Guthrie Jr.'s 1947 novel The Big Sky "is really about freedom." Jackson Benson acknowledges the romanticism of Guthrie's writing, but he argues more convincingly that the novel is actually about how "man always destroys the thing he loves." Benson applies this idea to all of Guthrie's work, describing the writer as a Western environmentalist, saddened and angered by his region's history of damage and depredation.

Benson places Guthrie (1901-1991) in the pantheon of writers who have "tried to refute Western myth, to tell it as …

Review Of Agnes Lake Hickok: Queen Of The Circus, Wife Of A Legend By Linda A. Fisher And Carrie Bowers, Kim Warren

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Agnes Lake Hickok rode horses, walked on slack wires, and trained various animals. If that was not enough, she was also a smart, diligent entrepreneur who became the first woman to own and operate a circus in the United States. The circus business brought her a busy schedule, some profitable opportunities, and wide acclaim as an entertainer who traveled with legendary performers P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill Cody. Although Agnes Lake Hickok did not necessarily invent circus shows, she certainly helped to popularize this form of entertainment in the nineteenth century and prepared the next generation of performers, including …

Review Of Braiding Histories: Learning From Aboriginal Peoples' Experiences And Perspectives By Susan Dion, Lynne Davis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In its final report in 1996, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples observed that Canadians have little knowledge of Aboriginal people, the issues of importance to them, and the history that underlies Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relationships today. How can this be changed? In Braiding Histories, Susan Dion takes up the complexities of transforming the consciousness of non-Aboriginal people through education.

The book is organized around three focal points. First, the author and her brother Michael Dion {re)write and {re}tell the life stories of several Aboriginal people, including Beothuk survivor Shanawdithit, the Plains Cree leader Mistahimaskwa, and the writers' mother, Audrey Dion, …

Review Of The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, And Transculturation In American Art, 1890-1915 By Elizabeth Hutchinson, Linda M. Waggoner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Elizabeth Hutchinson's The Indian Craze examines the trend that was not merely "fad or fancy" but "a significant artistic phenomenon with lasting effects on both American art history and U.S. Indian policy." Although the origin of Native American art as art is commonly associated with the Santa Fe movement of the 1920s and 1930s, Hutchinson declares that "this cross-cultural conversation," fueled by progressive primitivism, began at least two decades earlier.

Enhanced by historical images and informed by Janet C. Berlo's anthology, The Early Years of Native American Art History (1992), The Indian Craze revives a politically charged and artistically productive …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 30/ Number 3 / Summer 2010 -- Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes and News

Bringing The War Home The Patriotic Imagination In Saskatoon, 1939-1942, Brendan Kelly

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War, noted historian Gerald D. Nash argued that the war, more than any other event in the West's history, completely altered that region.1 There is as yet no equivalent of Nash's fine study for the Great Plains north of the forty-ninth parallel, or what Canadians call the "prairies."² This gap notwithstanding, historians of western Canada have begun to explore at least one key aspect of Nash's research: the war's impact on cities. Since 1995 there have been three histories of urban centers in wartime: Red Deer (Alberta), Lethbridge …

Review Of Charles Fritz: 100 Paintings Illustrating The Journals Of Lewis And Clark: The Complete Collection By Charles Fritz, Rock Hushka

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The traditional Lewis and Clark buff will find much enjoyment in Charles Fritz: 100 Paintings Illustrating the Journals of Lewis and Clark: The Complete Collection. Fritz's delineation gives accurate impressions of the majesty of diverse topographies, ranging from the low-slung prairies of Nebraska to the rugged mountain chains at the Great Divide. His depictions of the North Dakota winter convey the special quality of light produced only by the frigid stillness of the High Plains. Fritz has an extraordinary ability to paint water, from the slow grace of the Missouri River to the thundering falls on the Columbia to …

Narrative Mappings Of The Land As Space And Place In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Karen E. Ramirez

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

At the conclusion of Willa Cather's 1913 novel O Pioneers!, Alexandra Bergson muses about landownership, and more broadly about the human-land relationship, by reflecting on the transience of the county plat map, one of the most popular forms of mapping rural America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These maps were not only housed at the county clerk's office; by the 1880s and 1890s, while Cather was living in Nebraska, commercialized survey maps periodically were collected and published in large, colorful county atlases, also called plat books, becoming among the most widely circulated maps of rural areas …

Review Of Music Of The First Nations: Tradition And Innovation In Native North America Edited By Tara Browner, Anna Hoefnagels

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This collection of nine essays examines diverse traditions and issues in contemporary Native American music from a variety of perspectives. The anthology also covers a wide geographic span, ranging from the Inuits of northern Canada to the Choctaws of Mississippi, and the Passamaquoddies of New Brunswick in eastern Canada to the Coast Salish of western Washington. Many of these chapters highlight the movement of Aboriginal people and their music, as well as the transformations and retentions that characterized these movements and interactions with other Aboriginal groups and European settlers. An article addressing intertribal powwow music and another on country music …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

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

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

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

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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