United States History Commons^™

Tucked In: American Quilts And The Beds They Cover, 1790-1939, Madeleine Roberg

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examines the size of quilts to determine if changes in quilt size are a reflection of changes in bedstead size. To conduct this study 118 quilt publications and 304 furniture publications (including Sears, Roebuck and Co. retail catalogues). were examined for data on quilts and bedsteads. Using these sources the dimensions of 3299 surviving quilts and 1651 bedsteads were examined to determine whether or not changes in quilts sizes correlate with changes in bedstead dimensions. The study found that quilt size (mean area) steadily declined between 1800 and 1910 and increased in the 1920s and 1930s. The most …

Review Of Native America: A History By Michael Leroy Oberg, Roger L. Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this solid text Michael Oberg presents his version of American Indian history. From the start he works to avoid presenting just another encyclopedic narrative likely to leave readers "awash in a sea of facts and data disconnected from any coherent narrative." To this end he focuses on how eleven Indigenous communities dealt with the European invasions of North America. His list includes groups as disparate as the Chumash and Pueblo peoples in the West, the Potawatomis and Dakota Sioux in the North, the Crows, Kiowas, and Caddos in the Plains, and Eastern peoples such as the Mohegans, Powhatans, Cherokees, …

Review Of "Collecting Stamps Would Have Been More Fun": Canadian Publishing And The Correspondence Of Sinclair Ross, 1933-1986 Selected And With An Introduction By Jordan Stouck; Annotations By David Stouck, Andrew Lesk

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A book not just for completists, the Stoucks' effort succeeds in illuminating the publishing record of one of Canada's most secretive authors. For those who have not read much criticism on Ross, this book will aid in understanding one very representative mid-twentieth-century Canadian author's publishing and artistic struggles.

Most striking is Jordan Stouck's note-perfect introduction, one that is academically rigorous yet free of jargon and platitudes. Stouck begins at, well, the beginning, in noting that Ross's As For Me and My House is "an originary text in western Canadian literature," although Ross himself "perceived his literary career as a failure." …

Review Of Realigning America: Mckinley, Bryan, And The Remarkable Election Of 1896 By R. Hal Williams, Troy Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There is no universal agreement among historians regarding the number of presidential elections that should be defined as "critical" or "realigning." Yet the election of 1896 is almost always included in this small group. R. Hal Williams makes the reasons clear in Realigning America, a compelling account of the "Battle of the Standards" between William McKinley and William Jennirigs Bryan. The book is exhaustively researched and written with a storyteller's knack for moving the narrative forward and unearthing personal and colorful testimonies that buttress the history of the campaign.

Review Of The West And Beyond: New Perspectives On An Imagined Region Edited By Alvin Finkel, Sarah Carter, And Peter Fortna, Ryan C. Eyford

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From 1969 to 1990 the Western Canadian Studies conferences brought together researchers interested in the history of a region defined as "the Prairie West" or simply "the West," often at the University of Calgary. In large measure the conference was an outgrowth of the fractious regional politics of the late 1960s. The range of topics participants explored, however, ultimately went well beyond the limited theme of "western alienation" and made an important contribution to the regional historiography; fourteen volumes of conference papers, usually edited by University of Calgary scholars, were published between 1970 and 1993.

In June 2008 a group …

Review Of Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge In The American Indian Novel By Sean Kicummah Teuton, Penelope Kelsey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Red Land, Red Power, Cherokee scholar Sean Kicummah Teuton considers three Red Power novels by N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Leslie Marmon Silko with a methodology he terms tribal realism. Teuton defines tribal realism as a "'postpositivist realist' view, which allows for genuine debate and exchange across cultures, while still respecting how social location may grant special access to knowledge." Teuton finds the novels of the Red Power era especially significant for investigation in his forging of tribal realism because of "a new intellectual rigor that ... characterize[d] the Red Power movement," citing the proclamation by Indians …

Review Of Painting Indians And Building Empires In North America, 1710-1840 By William H. Truettner, John Hausdoerffer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Just when the problematic relationship between Indian portraits and the cultural politics of nineteenth- century America seemed thoroughly explored, William Truettner's new book adds vital detail to our understanding of "portrait diplomacy" and "artistic imperialism." Truettner opens with an insightful distinction between the "Noble Savage" of eighteenth-century British artists and the "Republican Indian" of artists in nineteenth-century America. British "Noble Savage" imagery depicted Mohawks as a "sovereign people" and as "visiting royalty." Truettner shows how artists such as William Hodges, Thomas Hardy, and Benjamin West portrayed Indian leaders as both active in the future of colonial politics and comfortable with …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 31/Number 3/ Summer 2011

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes and News

New Deal Experimentation And The Political Economy Of The Yankton Sioux, 1930-1934, Teresa M. Houser

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's election to the presidency in 1932 signaled a mandate for sweeping reform at the federal level to lift the nation out of the economic turbulence of the Great Depression. Under Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) joined other agencies in launching policies to rebuild economic stability. Much of the scholarship on the Indian New Deal to date necessarily focuses on the centerpiece of Collier's reform efforts: the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). But prior to tribal consideration of the IRA, the Roosevelt administration undertook a series of steps in an attempt to …

Dean Of The Range: George Edward Lemmon, Open Range Cattle Ranching And The Development Of The Northern Great Plains, Nathan B. Sanderson

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

George Edward Lemmon (1857-1945) lived a life full of significant achievements and played an integral role in the growth and settlement of the northern Great Plains.  A renowned cowboy and cattleman, Lemmon saddle-handled more cattle than any man who ever lived, bossed one of the nation’s largest roundups, operated an 865,000-acre lease on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and later became an inaugural member of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.  Part of his early success came as a result of trespassing—illegally grazing thousands of cattle—on the Great Sioux Reservation.  Due to his unparalleled cattle-handling skills and reputation as one …

Empire Of The Young: Missionary Children In Hawai'i And The Birth Of U.S. Colonialism In The Pacific, 1820–1898, Joy Schulz

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Hawaiian by birth, white by race, and American by parental and educational design, the children of nineteenth-century American missionaries in Hawai‘i occupied an ambiguous place in Hawaiian culture.  More tenuous was the relationship between these children and the United States where many attended college before returning to the Hawaiian Islands.  The supposed acculturation of white missionary children in Hawai‘i to American cultural, political and religious institutions was never complete, nor was their membership in Hawaiian society uncontested.  The tenuous roles these children played in both societies influenced the trajectories of each nation in surprising ways.  Similarly, the children’s cultural experiences …

Review Of In The Remington Moment By Stephen Tatum, Brian Rusted

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Stephen Tatum's study is motivated by two objectives. One is to read Remington's painterly gestures in the light of their production. His second takes up a question Brian Dippie posed a decade ago when reflecting on the lack of critical and academic respect that dogs western art. Can the work of an artist like Remington-nostalgic even in his time-be considered as more than a relic in ours? Might it still have an affecting presence a century after Remington's passing? Tatum's book is a palpable affirmation.

Review Of Life At The Kiowa, Comanche, And Wichita Agency: The Photographs Of Annette Ross Hume By Kristina L. Southwell And John R. Lovett, Joanna Cohan Scherer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book presents the photographs of Annette Ross Hume (1858-1933), a pioneer of Oklahoma and one of many amateur women photographers historians have neglected who took important photos documenting the life and times of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century America. The Annette Hume collection, part of the Western History collection at the University of Oklahoma Library, consists of 738 images, including many glass plate negatives. It is gratifying to see this collection of her work published with such care by the authors and the University of Oklahoma Press.

Review Of Women Elders' Life Stories Of The Omaha Tribe: Macy, Nebraska, 2004-2005 By Wynne L. Summers, Karen M. Morin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I'm not sure that I've ever read such a light volume that carries such heavy contents. This book's dramatic core encompasses the life stories of three women from the Omaha Tribe in Macy, Nebraska: Eleanor Baxter, the first woman elected tribal chairperson; and Alice Saunsoci and Hawate (Wenona Caramony), language teachers and educators. Their stories collectively describe mid to late twentieth-century experiences of American Indian women, each of whom grew up learning, living, and working on the Omaha reservation and off it in what they describe as "multicultural societies" such as in Lincoln, Nebraska. Each returned to the reservation later …

Review Essay: Packing, Unpacking, And Repacking The Cinema Of Guy Maddin, George Melnyk

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Guy Maddin is Canada's most unusual filmmaker. He also happens to have a global cult following for his retro b&w films. His stature as a cult filmmaker began almost a quarter of a century ago, when his sophomore film, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), was launched at a midnight screening in New York that drew audiences for a year. A Winnipegger by birth, he has become that city's most famous filmmaker and one of the few Canadian film directors with an international following. His New York debut led to a regular stint in the 1990s as a film commentator …

Review Of Here You Have My Story: Eyewitness Accounts Of The Nineteenth-Century Central Plains Edited By Richard E. Jensen, Adam R. Hodge

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The history of the central Great Plains is at its heart a vast collection of stories about the complex interactions between humans and the grasslands. When American settlers during the nineteenth century ventured into what had hitherto been Indian country, they found that their fortunes were inextricably bound to the whims of the often harsh Plains environment. In Here You Have My Story: Eyewitness Accounts of the Nineteenth-Century Central Plains, readers have the opportunity to view the challenges and triumphs of settling the Plains of present day Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming through the eyes of those who were …

Review Of Like No Other Place: The Sandhills Of Nebraska Photographs And Text By David A. Owen, Drake Hokanson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Our collective understanding of place benefits greatly from the work of careful observers/ interpreters/writers/photographers who ultimately blend narrative and photographs into an explication of the nature of a region, a county, a town, a neighborhood, or a highway into a book of substance. Such books can bring us far more than straight geography, journalism, sociology, anthropology, or history can alone. Done right, the very cut of the wind and timbre of voices come through, making the place not only clear, but real.

Like No Other Place combines Owen's narrative about time, people, and place in the Nebraska Sandhills with his …

Horacepoolaw Photographer,Mentor,Grandfather, Thomas Poolaw

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There are at least 2,000 silver nitrate negatives in the Horace Poolaw collection, and as many stories to go along with them. If you begin to talk about one image, it leads from that story to the next, and the next, and pretty soon two or three hours have gone by. Rather than discussing in detail the images in the Horace Poolaw collection, I would like to discuss Horace Poolaw the man-a complex yet loving individual who was much more than just a photographer. It is still difficult for me to talk about a person whose influence helped shape my …

Modernity, Multiples, And Masculinity Horace Poolaw's Postcards Of Elder Kiowa Men, Laura E. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Many Indians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century commodified aspects of their cultures in order to make a living and sometimes present their identities, history, and artworks in ways that were satisfying to them. Ten vintage postcards from the Oklahoma Historical Society by Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw (1906-1984) indicate that he recognized popular tastes for Plains Indian male imagery while both participating in that production and working independently of it. Poolaw printed some of his photographs on postcard stock to sell at local fairs in the early to mid twentieth century. In order for the postcards to appeal …

Review Of Wyoming Range War: The Infamous Invasion Of Johnson County By John W. Davis, Ross F. Collins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book offers a thorough indictment of Wyoming Plains cattlemen at the end of the nineteenth century. It is worth asking if we really need another thorough indictment of a group so thoroughly indicted that one more thorough indictment seems like taking yet another swing at a worn-out punching bag. Yes, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association in 1892 was controlled by bad men whose arrogance was reflected in a ridiculous scheme doomed to failure. Asa Shinn Mercer told us that in Banditti of the Plains, published only two years after the Johnson County War. And much of his account …

Review Of American Indians And The Fight For Equal Voting Rights By Laughlin Mcdonald, Matthew L. M. Fletcher

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The continuing relevance of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act in the Deep South is an open question for many people, but the importance of the Act in Indian Country cannot seriously be questioned. Laughlin McDonald's powerful book provides a frontline view of the cases brought by American Indians in Nebraska, South Dakota, Montana, and elsewhere. McDonald, the head of the ACLO's Voting Rights Project, himself litigated these cases to successful conclusion on behalf of his Native clients.

In parts of the United States, many state and local governments quietly excluded Indian people from the suffrage until after World War …

Using Euro-American Hunting Data To Assess Western Great Plains Biogeography, 1806-35, Cody Newton

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Historic accounts from the 19th-century western Great Plains contain significant information on Plains ungulates and other animals, particularly as they relate to provisioning the Euro-American travelers. Using data derived from these accounts, a quantitative assessment of the hunting success of the Pike, Long, Glenn, and Dodge expeditions of the early 19th century is presented to ascertain the conditions of these species in the region. These data are then used to assess historiographic models of bison overhunting. This analysis indicates that the western Southern Plains and western Central Plains had differing trajectories of overhunting explained by temporally variable human and environmental …

Review Of The Color Of The Land: Race, Nation, And The Politics Of Landownership In Oklahoma, 1832-1929 By David A. Chang, Jacob Sherman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Power is often tied to who controls the economic capital, and whoever has it will delineate terms of membership within that society. Oklahoma's and the Great Plains' greatest capital is land. The Color of the Land effectively examines how Creek Nation lands defined membership along racial lines both inside and outside of the tribe. David Chang skillfully pieces together the fluctuation of racial complexities as lands transferred from communal to wealthy private ownership.

Chang notes that Creek lands were primarily communal based upon clan loyalties. Clans had no racial distinctions. Racial definitions developed as Creeks began owning slaves by the …

Review Of Literary Life: A Second Memoir By Larry Mcmurtry, Tom Pilkington

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Literary Life is the second entry of Larry McMurtry's projected trilogy of memoirs. The first, Books (2008), recalls his lifelong avocation as book scout, dealer, and eventually bookstore owner. The yet-to-be-published third, Hollywood, will relate his experiences as a screenwriter. Literary Life takes as its subject McMurtry's career as prolific writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove (1985).

Let it be said right off the bat that this slim volume is a mess, a lazy, sloppy collection of random memories that lacks anything resembling a coherent structure. Though it begins at the beginning-with the young McMurtry reading boys' …

Review Of Patrick Connor's War: The 1865 Powder River Indian Expedition By David E. Wagner, John H. Monnett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Patrick Connor's War is the late David E. Wagner's second book in the past year dealing with the military operations against Lakotas and Cheyennes in the Powder River country of today's Wyoming and environs in 1865. Like his previous work, Powder River Odyssey, dealing with Nelson Cole's wing of an expensive army offensive operation against the Plains tribes in the wake, some contend, of raids on the Overland Trail avenging the Sand Creek Massacre, the current book relies heavily on campaign records, personal recollections, and diaries of the officers, civilian contractors, and enlisted men involved in the campaign. The …

Smoke And Mirrors: A History Of Nagpra And The Evolving U.S. View Of The American Indian, Lindee R. Grabouski

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

While paintings of Native Americans and Europeans exchanging goods and cultural values adorn the walls of museums around the United States, actual Native/non-Native interaction over the past 500 years has been one of illusion, not cooperation. Until recently, legislation “protecting” Native Americans appeared altruistic on the surface, but, instead, served only as a facade for keeping Native artifacts in the hands of scientists and collectors. Even the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), the most recent legislative attempt to reconcile the past mistreatment of Native Americans, is riddled with obstacles and optical illusions.

Certainly, NAGPRA demonstrates the most …

Review Of The Seminole Nation Of Oklahoma: A Legal History. By L. Susan Work. Foreword By Lindsay G. Robertson., Andrew K. Frank

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

In this fascinating and well-documented account, L. Susan Work illustrates how a myriad of federal laws and legal rulings limited tribal self-government and otherwise sought to dissolve the modern Seminole Nation. Along the way, the former attorney general of the Seminole Nation and a member of the Choctaw Nation explores the legal peculiarities of Seminole history and the ways that the federal government frequently chose to homogenize the Five Tribes into a single legal standard. Dissolution, of course, did not occur, and Work carefully reconstructs the process by which the Seminole Nation capitalized on changes in federal policies and various …

A Memory Forgotten: Representation Of Women And The Washington D.C. Arsenal Monument, Melissa Sheets

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

The Arsenal Monument in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington D.C. commemorates the twenty-one women who died while working as cartridge makers in the Washington Arsenal on June 17th, 1864. It utilizes both traditional and idealized memorial imagery, represented by an allegorical figure of Grief who stands atop the Monument’s shaft, as well as a realistic representation of the Arsenal explosion carved into the base. Erected only a year after the incident, the Monument can be interpreted as commemorating all twenty-one women by the inclusion of their names on the sides of the base. From this listing of names and the …

Review Of The Frontier Newspapers And The Coverage Of The Plains Indian Wars By Hugh J. Reilly, Kyle Carsten Wyatt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a community of scholars, we need to ask more from books like this. Despite a topic ripe with fruitful and compelling potential, Reilly's approach to newspaper coverage of the Plains Indian Wars lacks rigor, nuance, and engagement with contemporary critical conversations.

Reilly, a communications professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, discusses eight "watershed events," from the Great Sioux Uprising in 1862 to the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1891. Newspapers throughout the United States, indeed the world, reported on these conflicts. The coverage that appeared in national publications, such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune …

Review Of Native American Drama: A Critical Perspective By Christy Stanlake, Julie Pearson-Little Thunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Understanding Native American drama requires a critical perspective often lacking in theater and academia. Christy Stanlake's book helps remedy this problem with a two-fold strategy. First, she identifies four Native-authored discourses generated in part by the study of American Indian fiction and poetry. Then she applies these discourses to readings from nine Native plays, showing how Native philosophies shape Native drama on the page and in performance. Stanlake explains that place, or "platiality," in western theater assumes new dimensions in Native drama, expressing complex relationships among character, language, and landscape. She examines the historical and political aspects of Native storytelling …