Cultural History Commons^™

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 …

The National Imagination (Spring 2010), Robert D. Tobin, Belen Atienza, Alice Valentine

Syllabi

What images make people think of the United States of America? Cowboys? The flag? And are there similar icons in other cultures that help define cultural identity? The National Imagination explores the concept of a national community as constructed and critiqued through literary and cinematic narratives, as well as other cultural texts.

Our underlying premise is that national languages and cultures promote the identity of particular communities. We are interested in examining those subjective expressions of culture—images, symbols, narratives—that lead people to feel that they are members of the communities we call nations. We are also interested in discovering points …

Sexuality And Human Rights (Fall 2010), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

What happens when we think of sexuality, with all of its transgressive and individualistic energies, in terms of rationally established universal human rights? Literary texts that focus on individual cases in the context of larger cultural and social traditions with a particular attention to the power of language can help us sort through some of the complex ideas that emerge from a discussion of sexual rights. In this class, we will focus on controversial issues--like sadism, masochism, male homosexuality, lesbianism, age of consent, prostitution, polygamy and transsexuality—that bring rights conflicts to the forefront.

A photo of this Fall 2010 class …

'A Little Bit Of Love For Me And A Murder For My Old Man': The Queensland Bush Book Club, Robin Wagner

All Musselman Library Staff Works

This paper addresses rural book distribution in an era before free public libraries came to Australia. Well-to-do, city women established clubs, which solicited donations of “proper reading matter” and raised funds for the purchase of books for their “deprived sisters” in the Outback. They took advantage of a well-developed rail system to deliver book parcels to rural families. In New South Wales and Queensland they were known as Bush Book Clubs.

Testimonials found in the Clubs’ annual reports provide a snapshot of the hard scrabble frontier life and the gratitude with which these parcels were received. This paper looks at …

John Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette (1834-6), Francis Place, And The Pragmatics Of The Unstamped Press, Edward Jacobs

English Faculty Publications

John Cleave (c.1790-c.1847) was the editor and publisher of, among other works, Cleaves Weekly Police Gazette (1834-6; hereafter WPG), which was by most accounts the best-selling unstamped newspaper of the so-called "War of the Unstamped Press" in the 1830s, one of the first unstamped papers to adopt a broadsheet format like stamped papers, and one of the first to mix political news with coverage of non-political events like sensational crimes and strange occurrences. As Joel Wiener and Patricia Hollis note, less is known about Cleave than about most of the other major figures in the unstamped movement, like William Carpenter, …

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 …

The Winding Stair Sample Christmas Dinner Menu, 2010, Winding Stair Restaurant

Menus of the 21st Century

The Winding Stair Restaurant is located at 40, Lower Ormond Quay Dublin on the north side of the river Liffey beside the Ha’penny Bridge. The proprietor is Elaine Murphy. The Winding Stair started life as a bookshop and café which was a popular meeting spot in Dublin during the 1970s and 1980s. The café closed in 2005 and in 2006 the current proprietor re-opened it as a restaurant.

“The bookshop, located on the ground floor, was retained as were many of the old bookshelves, photos and memories. The room retains its timeless charm with stripped wood tables and floors, and …

Review Of Venice, Cita Excelentissima: Selections From The Renaissance Diaries Of Marin Sanudo. E, Brian Maxson

ETSU Faculty Works

This fascinating new book, Venice, Cita Excelentissima, contains a series of translated excerpts from the diaries of the Venetian patrician Marin Sanudo (1466-1536). Sanudo wrote his vast diaries between 1496 and 1533. As early as Sanudo's own lifetime, historians used the richness and variety of these diaries as an unparalleled evidentiary source for early modern Venice. The depth of the diaries derives from Sanudo's personal access to govern ment records and, perhaps even more, his attention to detail and the wide range of topics that he deemed worthy of record. The importance of the diaries prompted a group of Italian …

From Disco To Electronic Music: Following The Evolution Of Dance Culture Through Music Genres, Venues, Laws, And Drugs., Ambrose Colombo

CMC Senior Theses

Electronic dance music is a genre that has been long in the making. Starting with disco in the 1970s, dance culture genres evolved into house, acid house, techno, garage, 2-step, hardcore, gabba, san frandisco, electro, and many others. This paper studies the transformation of electronic sound, and the contributing/impeding factors involved. Drug use is heavily related to the creation and enjoyment of music, and features prominently in the history of dance culture. Starting with the use of acid in the 1960s and progressing to the use of acid, Quaaludes, poppers, speed in the 1970s, with MDA featured in clubs toward …

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.

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 …

Mandarins And Martyrs Of Shanxi In Late-Imperial China, Anthony E. Clark

History Faculty Scholarship

Ricci Institute Series: Sowing the Field of Christian Missions

Tianjin Report 2, Anthony E. Clark

History Faculty Scholarship

Research report on the Roman Catholic Vincentian Library in Tianjin, China. Closed in 1951 by the Chinese government.

La Vida Sexual De Chopin, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Resumen:

La historiografía musical y la cultura popular nos han legado una imagen de Chopin como un ser débil y asexual. Este tópico incluso ha marcado la obra de pensadores como Sartre en su obra La náusea. Sin embargo, la lectura de la correspondencia del compositor nos brinda el perfil de un ser humano con unas inquietudes sexuales bastante “normales”. En su juventud, Chopin mantuvo una estrecha relación, que algunos definirían como homosexual, con Titus Woyciechowski y años más tarde frecuentó el círculo de Altolphe de Custine, erudito aristócrata de prestigio y reconocido homosexual. La correspondencia –posiblemente fraudulenta– entre Chopin …