Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Land Of Many Hands: Women In The American West By Harriet Sigerman, Margaret D. Jacobs

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Harriet Sigerman attempts to synthesize recent scholarship on women in the American West into a narrative history. The product of her efforts is a visually attractive book that will undoubtedly appeal to general readers. For scholars, however, it falls short of offering a new interpretation of women's history in the American West.

In her opening chapter Sigerman discusses Native American women's traditional roles, the arrival of the Spanish into the West and their effect on the Native population, and the impact of Anglo-American settlement on Native American and Spanish/Mexican women. With so much to cover in one chapter, she tends …

Title And Contents- Summer 1999

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 19/ Number 3/ Summer 1999

Contents

Introduction: The Prairie Fiction Of Margaret Laurence (1926-1987)

Margaret Laurence's "Album" Songs: Divining For Missing Links And Deeper Meanings

Poetic Redress: Her Body, Her House In The Fire-Dwellers

"A Town Of The Mind": Margaret Laurence's Mythical Microcosm Of Manawaka

Personal Essay: Margaret Laurence's Long Journey Home: "I Love The Damn Country, That's The Trouble"

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes And News

Review Of Indians In The United States And Canada: A Comparative History By Roger L. Nichols, Russel Lawrence Barsh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On the first page of this encyclopedic essay on North American Indian history, the reader learns that there were "no empires or kingdoms" among aboriginal Americans. This remark is difficult to reconcile with the growing archaeological evidence of regional territorial struggles among the Mississippian city-states that sheltered a majority of the continent's indigenous population. More importantly, it implies from the outset that history began when Europeans introduced complexity and conflict. Pre-Columbian ideologies, memories, and political alignments are therefore essentially irrelevant to an understanding of post-invasion events. Nichols's work is a minefield of similarly pat generalizations.

A comparative analysis of the …

Review Of Magic Lies-; The Art Of W.O. Mitchell Edited By Sheila Latham And David Latham, Ken Mitchell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Western Canadian novelist W. O. Mitchell died in March 1998, dramatically punctuating the appearance of this handsome book that sets out to determine the significance of his life's work. For fifty years W. O. "Bill" Mitchell has been a dominant icon of writing in Canada. This thick collection of literary essays, reminiscences, and anecdotes attempts to redress the relative absence of critical commentary the writer has received.

The book is uneven and often contradictory, as one might expect from an assembly of academics, relatives, former students, and theater colleagues. But as the Lathams say in their introduction, "The popularity of …

Review Of Challenging Territory: The Writing Of Margaret Laurence Edited By Christian Riegel, Jaqueline Mcleod-Rogers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I approached this book with the hope that my past interest in reading, teaching, and writing about Margaret Laurence, coupled with my current interests in rhetoric and composition, would enable me to respond to new critical perspectives. The "Introduction" to the volume encouraged this hope by profiling articles with familiar themes embedded in a postmodern context of open-minded pluralism.

Yet in explaining the volume's purpose, editor Christian Riegel tends to over-emphasize novelty at the expense of continuity, describing essays that go beyond revisionist readings to "stake out critical territory, charting critical space never before traced" (xvii). Much of his claim …

Review Of Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place By Louis Owens

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Mixedblood Messages, novelist and critic Louis Owens combines literary and film criticism with personal memoir and environmental writing. The "core subject in this book is writing by authors identified as mixedblood," he explains, and the collection "is concerned with two major issues: questions of mixed heritage ... and the way in which we relate to the natural world."

In the first of the book's four sections, Owens addresses some difficult questions, perhaps the most challenging of which deals with authenticity: if "the Indian must conform to an identity imposed from the outside" in order to be seen, what …

Review Of Wright Morris Revisited By Joseph J. Wydeven, Helen Winter Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A major American writer, author of thirty novels, Wright Morris is highly regarded by critics, but some readers find his work difficult. Morris himself felt that a full understanding of any of his novels required a thorough reading of them all. His style, too, is sometimes deliberately enigmatic; he did not believe in a tidy closure to the problems he introduced. Joseph J. Wydeven discusses these and other perplexities in Wright Morris Revisited, aptly titled, as the last Twayne study of Morris was published in 1964.

A number of Morris's books are set in Nebraska, where he was born. …

Poetic Redress Her Body, Her House In The Fire, Dwellers, Debra Dudek

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Canadian women's position of being a colony within a colony enables women writers to be both separate from and united to a larger Canadian identity. Margaret Laurence's Manawaka texts, and The Fire-Dwellers in particular, construct feminist and nationalist myths that provide women with versions of themselves so they might recognize, and therefore strategize, methods of empowerment. Furthermore, The Fire-Dwellers is a novel that is concerned with issues of modernity. This novel contains a modernist aesthetic that is based upon a rejection of dominant structures and is defined by stylistic and ideological features which share concerns with feminist aesthetics in their …

Margaret Laurence's ''Album'' Songs Divining For Missing Links And Deeper Meanings, Wes Mantooth

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While Margaret Laurence's artistic legacy rests primarily, and rightly so, on her output of novels, her memoirs and published letters reveal tantalizing glimpses into a much less known, and yet not unrelated, aspect of her artistic interests-a lifelong passion for music, which included a desire to explore song-writing as a creative outlet. Drawing on these memoirs and letters, along with my own primary research, I have tried to sketch a portrait of Laurence's musical life, with a particular focus on how her musical interests coalesced in The Diviners' "Album"-four songs included in the text of The Diviners, compiled …

Introduction The Prairie Fiction Of Margaret Laurence (1926,1987), Charlene Porsild

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I first read Margaret Laurence in secondary school in Gibbons, Alberta, a place similar in many ways to Margaret Laurence's hometown of Neepawa, Manitoba, the place she called Manawaka in her fiction and about which she wrote so much. I continued to read and to study Laurence as an undergraduate at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Later, I dragged along my dog-eared copies of A Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, and {my favorite} The Diviners as my life's journey took me to Ottawa, Ontario; Boulder, Colorado; Vancouver, British Columbia; and most recently, Lincoln, Nebraska.

The …

Japanese Brome Impacts On Western Wheatgrass In Northern Great Plains Rangelands: An Update, M. R. Haferkamp, R. K. Heitschmidt

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

Japanese brome (Bromus japonicas Thunb.) is an annual grass that has invaded thousands of hectares of Northern Great Plains rangelands. We studied the effect of Japanese brome on the current year's increase in biomass in a plant community in the Northern Great Plains dominated by western wheatgrass [Pascopyrum smithii Rydb. (Love)]. In our experiment, brome seedlings were either removed or left in place in replicated l-m² plots. Above-ground biomass of western wheatgrass increased (891 to 1,095 kg ha^-1 ) with the removal of Japanese brome. However, total above-ground biomass decreased (1,873 to 1,334 kg ha^{-1 …}

Core Competencies And The Learning Organization, Joan Giesecke, Beth Mcneil

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

Designing libraries that can thrive in changing, chaotic environments is a continuous challenge for today's managers. To succeed, libraries must now be agile, flexible, and able to adjust to a world that resembles an amusement park roller-coaster ride or white-water rafting.

One system that can help managers in today's environment is that of the learning organization. A learning organization is an organization that has an enhanced capacity to learn, adapt, and change, and is "skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge and insights." In these organizations, staff are encouraged to continuously learn new skills. For learning to be effective, however, …

A Great Teacher [Willie Morris], Will Norton Jr.

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

Although most of his friends think of Willie Morris as a successful writer and creative editor, to me he was a great teacher. His journalism classes at The University of Mississippi were not devoted to details of how to write. Rather he read examples of good writing and explained to students why the writing was good. He read samples of writing by students in the class, and his students improved by applying the techniques to their own writing. In his classroom on the Oxford, Miss., campus, Willie also demonstrated his great ability as an editor. He knew a good story, …

A Checklist Of Considerations For Writing A Book Proposal: Meeting Tenure Criteria, Paul G. Haschak

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

With an apparently increasing emphasis on research, writing and publication in tenure criteria for academic librarians who hold faculty status, illustrated in the study by Park and Riggs (1991), tenure-track academic librarians should not overlook book publication as a possible alternative to the publication of journal articles, as an outlet for their research.

Similarly, they should not overlook or minimize the importance of putting together an effective proposal package to sell their book ideas to publishers. While Buchman (1987) and others have acknowledged that there is not one way to put a proposal package together--and therefore no magic formula exists--there …

Drug, Pharmaceutical, And Pharmacy-Related Sites: A Webliography Of Core Sites, Paul G. Haschak

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

The World Wide Web (WWW) increasingly is becoming an important learning, teaching, and research tool for teachers and students, alike, who are seeking useful drug, pharmaceutical, and pharmacy-related sites on the Web, for their research. However, the seemingly inexhaustible number of WWW links can be daunting even to the most experienced Web user.

The following webliography is presented specifically for educators and students seeking a concise, annotated core list of WWW links on pharmaceutical, drug, and pharmacy-related topics.

The Quality Of Life Of Rural Nebraskans, John C. Allen, Rebecca Filkins, Sam Cordes

Publications from the Center for Applied Rural Innovation (CARI)

Nebraska’s economy has shown growth during recent years. However, the agricultural economy has been experiencing a decline in market prices for most commodities. How have these changes affected rural Nebraskans? How do they perceive their quality of life? Do their perceptions differ by the size of their community, the region in which they live, or their occupation?

This report details results of 3,036 responses to the 1999 Nebraska Rural Poll, the fourth annual effort to take the pulse of rural Nebraskans. Respondents were asked a series of questions about their general well-being and their satisfaction with specific aspects of well-being. …

Regime Type, Strategic Interaction, And The Diversionary Use Of Force, Ross A. Miller

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

This study explores the relative propensity of democratic and autocratic regimes to engage in diversionary behavior. Although previous research has focused on the willingness of leaders to engage in conflict, recent studies suggest an alternative explanation: the effect of strategic interaction opportunities. Previous studies suggest that even though democratic leaders may have an incentive to use foreign policy to manipulate domestic audiences, would-be adversaries limit their interaction opportunities. This article extends the analysis to a comparison of the behavior of democratic and autocratic regimes. Using three different indicators of the domestic political vulnerability of leaders—economic growth rates, protests, and rebellions—the …

Turning Points In The Development Of Blended Families, Leslie A. Baxter, Dawn O. Braithwaite, John H. Nicholson

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

A modified retrospective interview technique (RIT) was employed with members of 53 blended families to determine the types of turning points they reported experiencing and the developmental trajectories of their respective blended family’s first 4 years. Findings revealed 15 primary types of turning points, of which “Changes in Household Configuration,” “Conflict,” “Holidays/Special Events,” “Quality Time,” and “Family Crisis” were the most frequent. A cluster analysis revealed five basic trajectories of development for the first 48 months of family development: Accelerated, Prolonged, Stagnating, Declining, and High-Amplitude Turbulent. The trajectories differed in the overall positive-to-negative valence ratio, the frequency of conflict related …

Room To Maneuver: !Kung Women Cope With Men, Patricia Draper

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Among the !Kung San of Botswana, women are sometimes beaten by their husbands and coerced by other men, particularly their fathers. The factors that contribute to this form of aggression are various and are changing over time as a consequence of new economic and residential practices now seen among the !Kung as they have transformed themselves from mobile foragers to primarily sedentary food producers. The responses of women and their supporters to incidents of wife abuse are also changing. In this essay several episodes of wife beating that came to my attention during recent fieldwork among the !Kung will be …

How The Public Views The State Courts (1999 National Survey)

University of Nebraska Public Policy Center: Publications

Table of Contents:
A REPORT ON THE NATIONAL SURVEY by Frank A. Bennack, Jr., President & Chief Executive Officer, The Hearst Corporation
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
INTRODUCTION
RESEARCH METHODS
FINDINGS
TRUST, CONFIDENCE AND APPROVAL
Public Trust and Confidence in America’s Institutions
The Manner in Which Courts Handle Cases
INVOLVEMENT, KNOWLEDGE, INFORMATION SOURCES, AND THE MEDIA
Personal Involvement
Self-Rated Court Knowledge
Sources of Information Regarding News and the Courts
Media Portrayal of Courts
COURT PERFORMANCE: THE PUBLIC’S EVALUATION
Court Access
Timeliness of Courts
Equality and Fairness of Courts
Perceptions of Equal Treatment
Court Independence and Responsiveness
CONCLUSION

Wpa News 59 (1999), World Pheasant Association

Galliformes Specialist Group and Affiliated Societies: Newsletters

WPA News (May 1999), number 59

Published by the World Pheasant Association

The Blood Runs Through Every One Of Us And We Are Stronger For It: The Role Of Head Start In Promoting Cultural Continuity In Tribal Communities , Linda Mayo Willis, Carolyn P. Edwards

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

This multiple case study examined American Indian Program Branch Head Start directors' perceptions of the role their particular Head Start program plays preserving cultural integrity in tribal communities. Of specific research interest were the unique aspects of the tribal customs of child rearing and early childhood educational practices within each community. Another area of research focused on exploring each director's vision of how the Head Start experience contributes to the future of the children. Ten tribal Head Start directors from the Great Plains region were interviewed. The grand tour question addressed how participants described their perception of the role of …

April 1999 - Advisory Council Minutes

ALEC Committee Minutes

No abstract provided.

Research And Evaluation Priorities For Distance Education In Nebraska: A Delphi Study, S. Kay Rockwell

Nebraska Network 21: Publications

To provide a strong philosophical and policy basis for developing distance education opportunities, distance educators across Nebraska identified and ranked future research and evaluation needs/issues for distance education. In the area of planning, major interests focused on identifying ways to promote better cooperation among institutions so both technology utilization and distance education programming can be coordinated more effectively. As the coordination and cooperation for programming and technology use improve, it is important to identify the impact the improved strategy has on learners. In the area of structuring, major interests appear to concentrate on effective strategies for successful distance learning experiences; …

The Structure And Properties Of Methylenetetrahydrofolate Reductase From Escherichia Coli Suggest How Folate Ameliorates Human Hyperhomocysteinemia, Brian D. Guenther, Christal A. Sheppard, Pamela Tran, Rima Rozen, Rowena G. Matthews, Martha L. Ludwig

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

Elevated plasma homocysteine levels are associated with increased risk for cardiovascular disease and neural tube defects in humans. Folate treatment decreases homocysteine levels and dramatically reduces the incidence of neural tube defects. The flavoprotein methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) is a likely target for these actions of folate. The most common genetic cause of mildly elevated plasma homocysteine in humans is the MTHFR polymorphism A222V (base change C677→T). The X-ray analysis of E. coli MTHFR, reported here, provides a model for the catalytic domain that is shared by all MTHFRs. This domain is a β₈α₈ barrel that binds FAD …

Greater Prairie-Chicken Harvest In Kansas: Early Vs. Regular Seasons, Francis E. Durbian, Iii, Elmer J. Finck, Roger D. Applegate

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

Remnant populations of the greater prairie chicken (Tympanuchus cupido pinnatus) in Kansas are managed to maintain population size while providing recreational hunting potential. Our aim in this study was to evaluate the effect of adding an early hunting season (late September-October) to the regular season (November-late January). We compared the hunting methods used and the harvest of greater prairie chickens during early and regular hunting seasons for 1990-91 and 1991-92. The use of dogs and walkup hunting techniques were emphasized in early season, whereas pass shooting in feeding fields was emphasized in the regular season. During early season, …

Nonagricultural Benefits Of Windbreaks In Kansas, Ted T. Cable

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

This paper reviews the evidence for nonagricultural benefits of windbreaks in the Great Plains. Windbreaks may provide recreational opportunities, scenic beauty, fuelwood, and wildlife habitat in addition to agricultural benefits. Quantitative studies demonstrate that windbreaks on the Great Plains provides important wildlife habitat for woodland edge species, substantial opportunities for recreation, a potentially important source of fuelwood, and enhanced scenic beauty.

Book Notes

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

Books:

Americans View Their Dust Bowl Experience
Averting Extinction: Reconstructing Endangered Species Recovery
Common Fossil Plants of Western North America
Gender in Archaeology: Analyzing Power and Prestige
Reading and Writing the Lakota Language: Lakota Iyapi Un Wowapi Nahan Yawapi
The Student's Dictionary of Literary Plains Cree Based on Contemporary Texts

Review Of Western Visions: Perspectives On The West In Canada By Roger Gibbons And Sonia Arrison, Michael D. Behiels

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

In the 1997 Canadian election, Preston Manning's Reform Party emerged as Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition with 60 seats in the House of Commons. The Liberal Governing Party of Prime Minister Jean Chretien would have been reduced to a minority had Liberals not won 101 of Ontario's 103 seats. Why and how did this development occur? What are some of its probable consequences? Western Visions provides a timely and revealing set of answers to these questions so closely related to Canada's perennial national unity crisis. Most academics and interested citizens think about that crisis primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of …

Great Plains Research Awards

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

Contents:

Leslie Hewes Award (1998)
Great Plains Research Science Award (1999)