Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Son Of Two Bloods By Vincent L. Mendoza, Domino Renee Perez

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Vincent Mendoza's Son of Two Bloods, the 1995 winner of the American Indian Prose Award, is an honest and at times heart-wrenching autobiography. The son of a Mexican father and Creek Indian mother, Mendoza conveys his struggle to locate himself within either community. When Vincent was a child, his father moved the family away from a predominately Mexican neighborhood, and his mother allowed the boy to attend Indian school. Both circumstances contribute to the author's feeling "lost" about who he was: not quite Mexican or Indian. He is moved by the Mariachi music his father and uncle play, and …

Gendered Landscapes Synergism Of Place And Person In Canadian Prairie Drama, Anne F. Nothof

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In an attempt to realize the relationship of character and landscape, recent Canadian Prairie drama has moved beyond the confines of theatrical space through a metaphysical evocation of place and time. The prairies are configured as an imaginative projection of the human psyche, expressed through images that are themselves a reflection of an interaction of human and elemental forces. In the works of three women playwrights in particular Gwen Pharis Ringwood's Mirage, Sharon Pollock's Generations, and Connie Gault's Sky and The Soft Eclipse, character has metonymic resonance: it is contiguous with place and time. The relationship with …

Review Of Winter Quarters: The 1846-1848 Life Writings Of Mary Haskin Parker Richards Edited By Maurine Carr Ward, Martha Peterson-Taysom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Winter Quarters, the first in the new Life Writings of Frontier Women series edited by Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, is the result of Maurine Carr Ward's excellent editing of the journal of Mary Haskin Parker Richards, who converted to Mormonism in Lancashire, England, in 1838 and joined other church members in Nauvoo, Illinois in 1843. Most of the journal, however, was written between 1846 and 1848, from the time she left Nauvoo until her husband, Samuel Richards, nephew of the better-known Willard Richards, returned from Britain to Winter Quarters.

The journal, in offering its richly detailed daily life of one …

Review Of Charles M. Russell: The Life And Legend Of America's Cowboy Artist By John Taliaferro, Elizabeth Dear

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For all the books written on Russell, an accurate, up-to-date biography has been lacking. Perhaps a definitive biography can never be fashioned since Russell left so little writing about himself. He and his wife Nancy did, however, leave many clues in letters to friends, in his fascinating tales, and in numerous other documents which, when pieced together, provide a credible portrayal of this complicated individual.

The first biography, published in 1948, twenty-two years after his death and eight after his wife's, was based on a manuscript commissioned by Nancy Russell which she deemed unsuitable for publication. Earlier autobiographies by some …

Review Of Mexicans In The Midwest, 1900-1932 By Juan R. Garcia, Ralph Grajeda

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is an important book on a significant and neglected topic: the immigration of Mexicans into the Midwest during the early decades of this century.

In contrast to the Southwestern US, the Midwest-with its distinctive Plains landscape and northern weather-would seem inhospitable to a predominantly working-class, Catholic, Spanish-speaking people accustomed to the desert regions and temperate weather of the central valley of Mexico. Mexican immigrants came, though-single men first and families later-"pushed" out from a Mexico in economic or civil strife and "pulled" in by the ready availability of US jobs. Using published materials, government documents, and archival sources, Juan …

Review Of Out Our Way: Gay And Lesbian Life In The Country By Michael Riordon, Ian C. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Michael Riordon, radio playwright and author of The First Stone: Homosexuality and the United Church (1990), is obviously a master interviewer. From meetings with some three hundred gay men and lesbians in rural Canada, he distills the personal narratives of subjects from the pseudonymous tightly closeted to local semi-acknowledged "characters" and internationally known figures such as writer Jane Rule or Jim Egan, recent challenger to the Canadian Charter of Rights. Quotable nuggets of wisdom and sharp human observation come from all, often marked by fear, loneliness, and bigotry. Overwhelmingly, story after story echoes the phrase, "I always knew I was …

Review Of The Black Hills Journals Of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge Edited By Wayne R. Kime, Paul L. Hedren

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Formal exploration of the Black Hills was long thwarted by their remoteness in northern Indian country and then by their inclusion in the Great Sioux Reservation created by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Changing national circumstances by 1874, however, led to Custer's well-publicized Black Hills survey where gold was discovered, as he reported, among the roots of the grass. Though several practical miners traveled with Custer, his expedition's pronouncements were not scientifically grounded, and doubt shrouded his discovery.

Across the nation the prospect of a new El Dorado grew irresistible, and the federal government soon authorized a formal scientific study …

Notes And News- Spring 1998

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Images Of The Northern Great Plains

Visiting Scholar Program, University Of Oklahoma

Mid-American Studies

Communities And Traditional Knowledge

Western History Conferences

Review Of Farm Boys: Lives Of Gay Men From The Rural Midwest Collected And Edited By Will Fellows, John Gilgun

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Dear Will Fellows:

Thank you for collecting and editing Farm Boys. I have already found a use for it. Today, in one of my classes, a student, Ed Grimes, read a poem he had written. I have asked Ed if I can use some of it here:

Jeremiah, twenty-two years old, great looking, great personality, yet he is so damn alone, trying to bust out of the prison which is his closet of sexuality.

He sees fear, he senses despair, he sees facing family, friends and life of such blackness that he cannot comprehend all of the changes it …

Review Of Hawk Flies Above: Journey To The Heart Of The Sandhills By Lisa Dale Norton, Brenda Doxtator

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"I realize that I am being seduced by memories," Lisa Dale Norton informs us, "that the task at hand has slipped behind the mirage of the past .... This place is lined with my stories. It has the power of home, and any tale I can tell is woven with knowledge I carry from a childhood spent exploring sandy prairie."

There are moments of loss in our lives when an unexpected song on the radio replays haunting fragments of our past. There are moments of joy when the scent of melting snow in spring rises like black earth freshly plowed, …

Review Of After Wounded Knee: Correspondence Of Major And Surgeon John Vance Lauderdale While Serving With The Army Occupying The Pine Ridge Reservation, 1890-1891 Edited By Jerry Green, Michael D. Berndt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When scholars have covered events like the Wounded Knee Massacre comprehensively, the record of an unlikely observer or indirect participant can provide a fresh and valuable perspective. The correspondence of John Vance Lauderdale offers the views of one surgeon at the Pine Ridge Reservation whose participation in the Native American stereotypes of the time is complicated by his involvement in the aftermath of the Massacre and his personal interaction with individual Lakota.

To reconstruct Lauderdale's situation, Jerry Green offers an extensive introduction divided into three sections dealing with the surgeon's personal background, the medical department's practices, and the conditions on …

Review Of A Cowboy Writer In New Mexico: The Memoirs Of John L. Sinclair By John Sinclair, Ben E. Pingenot

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John Sinclair was the author of four unique grassroots novels: In Time of Harvest; Death in the Claimshack; Cousin Drewey and the Holy Twister; and The Night the Bear Came off the Mountain. In addition he published numerous articles and short stories in the New Mexico Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and other journals. Throughout all his writings runs the thread of his love of the land and the simple, earthy people native to it.

Sinclair was born in New York City in 1902. His father was the son of a wealthy and aristocratic family in northern Scotland. …

Review Of Bust To Boom: Documentary Photographs Of Kansas, 1936-1949 Edited By Constance B. Schulz, Drake Hokanson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Despite its quiet and broad landscape, Kansas has endured a history that runs from antebellum violence, through buffalo slaughter and dust bowl despair, to wartime boom. Perhaps no time in Kansas history has seen more flux than the depression 1930s and the wartime 1940s; and doubtless no time has been better documented by able photographers. Thanks to Kansas-born Roy Stryker and the three documentary photography projects he headed during the period (for the Farm Security Administration, the Office of War Information, and Standard Oil of New Jersey), Kansans and the world have a sharper idea of what life was like …

Review Of All Over The Map: Rethinking American Regions By Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, And Peter S. Onuf, Thomas D. Isern

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"People will think spatially and historically," observes Ayers in his essay on Southern identity for this book. "But we can be more self-conscious about the way we think in these dimensions." His remarks offer a good rationale for this collection of essays on American regions, originally a series of lectures delivered at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to Ayers on the South, the volume includes Onuf on the origins of American sectionalism, Nissenbaum on New England, and Limerick on the West.

For the student of Great Plains regionalism, every essay offers insights, either theoretical or comparative. Onuf, for instance, works …

Review Of The Fort That Became A City: An Illustrated Reconstruction Of Fort Worth, Texas, 1849- 1853 By Richard F. Selcer, Robert Duncan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Fort Worth, the northern most outpost west of Dallas and part of a chain of forts establishing a general line from the Rio Grande north constructed during the 1850s, is the subject of this book. The forts included in the line Graham, Gates, Croghan, Martin Scott, Inge, and Merrill-covered some three hundred miles from north to south and were built as a defensive system to control the interior of Texas and promote settlement. Fort Worth's origins were at best "humble." It began as an "outpost" for Fort Graham and was named after the estimable General William Jenkins Worth. Its garrison, …

Literatures Of The Great Plains An Introduction, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What really happened? A meaningless question. But one I keep trying to answer, knowing there is no answer.¹

Storytelling, narrative, seems to be hardwired into humans as a way of comprehending emotional truths about ourselves and others, our history and our cultures. Through the stories we tell, over and over, circling through different kinds of truths, we make our approaches to the question of "what really happened," and somehow we find a few answers that suit our private and public nows. The conference on literatures of the Great Plains, presented by the Center for Great Plains Studies in Lincoln, …

Review Of White Man's Wicked Water: The Alcohol Trade And Prohibition In Indian Country, 1802-1892 By William E. Unrau, Maril Hazlett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book examines how the federal government and private capital, through interlocking agendas, used the alcohol trade in nineteenth-century Indian country to achieve the removal and dispossession of Native peoples from their remaining lands. William E. Unrau argues that federal Indian land cession policies influenced the increase in the region's alcohol trade, thereby ensuring the failure of Indian prohibition. His analysis, challenging the racist view that Indians are by nature disposed to alcohol, claims instead that whites in Indian country "set the standard" for Indian drinking.

Unrau proves that poorly drafted prohibition legislation, conflicting court decisions, and non-enforcement of treaty …

Review Of Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example By D. Michael Quinn, H. Wayne Schow

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

That cultural and temporal contexts continually reshape our perception of sexual reality is made abundantly clear in Michael Quinn's revealing contrast between the same sex dynamics of nineteenth-century America and those currently prevailing. Homosexuality (and consequently heterosexuality) as a concept of intrinsic personal identity has only relatively recently established itself in European and American cultural consciousness. Previously, the focus was simply on sex acts that were or weren't approved. Without "categories to define 'sexuality,'" Quinn asserts, "nineteenth-century Americans ... responded to homo-eroticism in ways that often seem restrained, even tolerant, today."

But homoeroticism was only one strand of a complexly …

Review Of Texas Wanderlust: The Adventures Of Dutch Wurzbach By Douglas V. Meed, Cary D. Wintz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Eight-year-old Emil Frederick "Dutch" Wurzbach arrived with his family in Galveston in early 1846 as one of the hundreds of German immigrants who sailed to Texas that year. He spent his childhood in central Texas, first at Fredericksburg, then in Austin, and finally on a farm outside Austin. At the age of eleven Wurzbach began a series of frontier jobs, largely with the army, herding livestock or working as a teamster supplying the scattered frontier posts south and west of San Antonio; he also served a brief stint in the Texas Rangers. He encountered legendary frontiersmen, fought Comanches and Apaches, …

Review Of Frederic Remington And Turn-Of-The-Century America By Alexander Nemerov, H.W. Brands

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Readers of this book will learn a great deal about contemporary art criticism, a modest although unquantifiable (and mostly unverifiable) amount about Frederic Remington, and very little about the American West. The author, an art historian, applies a postmodernist, Freudian analysis to the work of the popular painter, sculptor, and illustrator. He concedes that the multiple meanings he reads into Remington's work probably escaped the consciousness of the artist himself. But not to worry: "The meanings of which the artist is not conscious are often those that are most powerfully revelatory of the work's historical moment."

Readers who can get …

Review Of Homeland To Hinterland: The Changing Worlds Of The Red River Metis In The Nineteenth Century By Gerhard J. Ens., D.N. Sprague

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Studies of the Red River Settlement, the Metis people, and their buffalo hunt are so numerous that historians in the wider fields of Aboriginal or western Canadian studies have become increasingly impatient with this phenomenon of "Red River myopia." The question a reader must ask of this book is what new perspective Gerhard Ens brings to the existing material.

According to Ens, Homeland to Hinterland situates the local experience in a "broader process of economic change." Authors of previous works, he claims, were political historians writing about "the rise of a 'new nation' without adequately explaining the social and economic …

Review Of Garth Brooks: The Road Out Of Santa Fe By Matt O'Meilia, Kent Blaser

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Garth Brooks has been a musical phenomenon. By various counts, admittedly unreliable and difficult to verify, his record sales between 1989 and 1996 topped sixty million, surpassing those of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson and making him the best selling solo musical act ever. Brooks not only dominated the country music genre; he is often credited with being the main force behind the country music revival of the 1990s, even with being a key factor in the overall growth of the popular music industry early in the decade.

Brooks is an important figure for students of the American West and …

Review Of Better Red: The Writing And Resistance Of Tillie Olsen And Meridel Le Sueur By Constance Coiner & Three Radical Women Writers: Class And Gender In Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, And Josephine Herbst By Nora Ruth Roberts, Linda Ray Pratt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

HARVEST SONGS AND ELEGIAC NOTES

"Writing about living subjects, especially those with whom one feels political and personal solidarity, is a touchy, even painful business," begins Constance Coiner in the introduction to her book on Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. Contemporary directions in scholarship have recognized that interaction and opened up the personal voice in the scholarly study. Putting aside the dream of disinterestedness, the scholar herself may become part of the subject. The traditions of an objective scholarship are especially hard to fulfill, even to honor, when the research is done in cooperation with a living author who …

Review Of The Fatal Confrontation: Historical Studies Of American Indians, Environment, And Historians By Wilbur Jacobs, Patrick Goines

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Throughout his long, distinguished career Wilbur Jacobs has been a fervent and consistent advocate for a more inclusive approach to the study of American history. Using the implements of the ethnographer, demographer, and environmentalist, he has not simply painted our historical landscape with a broader brush; more importantly, he has added clarity and texture to the canvas.

The ten essays reprinted here show the breadth and depth of Jacobs's scholarship and remind us of his profound influence on the succeeding generation of historians. Spanning almost forty years, they not only trace Jacobs's intellectual development, but also show our historiographical evolution. …

Review Of Ritual Ground: Bent's Old Fort, World Formation, And The Annexation Of The Southwest By Douglas C. Comer, Leo E. Oliva

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Douglas Comer, archaeologist with the National Park Service, offers unique interpretations about the relationships among Anglo, Hispanic, and Indian Americans at Bent's Fort on the north bank of the Arkansas River during the 1830s and 1840s in southeastern Colorado. Long on theory and short on fact, much of this volume is developed from speculation rather than solid evidence. It is more about the importance of ritual than the history of Bent's Fort.

Comer argues that various rituals, including those traditional to the cultures involved and those developed to enhance their trade relations, help explain Bent & St. Vrain Company's economic …

Review Of The Mormon Trail: Yesterday And Today By William E. Hill, James B. Allen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From 1839 to the beginning of 1846, the Mormons made their headquarters in Nauvoo, Illinois. Continuing persecution, however, forced them to leave, seeking a refuge in the West. By the end of 1846 migrating Mormons found themselves scattered across Iowa and other parts of the country, with headquarters at Winter Quarters, now Florence, Nebraska. On 5 April 1847, under the leadership of Brigham Young, the vanguard company set out from Winter Quarters, arriving in the Salt Lake Valley on 22 July.

The Mormon Trail: Yesterday and Today appeared, significantly, in 1996, just a year before the sesquicentennial anniversary of that …

Review Of American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters And Continental Conquest By Gregory H. Nobles, Kirk Bane

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Gregory H. Nobles has produced a thoughtful, clearly written, thoroughly researched survey offering "an interpretive synthesis of recent [frontier] scholarship." Using the studies of such scholars as J ames Axtell, Alfred W. Crosby, John Mack Faragher, Julie Roy Jeffrey, Robert M. Utley, and Patricia Limerick, Nobles proposes "to summarize and synthesize this remarkable new research, to connect the frontier histories of the East and West ... and, above all, to put it all into a coherent, accessible narrative." The author admirably accomplishes his aim.

His introduction provides an excellent discussion of Frederick Jackson Turner and the frontier thesis. While the …

Review Of Visions And Voices: Native American Painting From The Philbrook Museum Of Art. Edited By Lydia L. Wyckoff, Janet Catherine Berlo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Philbrook Museum in Tulsa has long been recognized as one of the major forces in the shaping of twentieth-century Native American painting, as well as one of the major repositories of such paintings, many of them winning entries in the well-known Philbrook Annual juried exhibit, which began in 1946. With the publication of the lavishly illustrated Visions and Voices, reproductions of 484 pieces from the collection, most of them painted by artists of Plains or Southwestern tribes, are now readily available, many in color. In works by such well-known figures as James Auchiah, Tonita Pena, Joe Herrera, and …

Review Of Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner And Other Essays: A Tribal Voice, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is a Dakota who, born and raised to adulthood on the Crow Creek Indian Reservation near Fort Thompson, South Dakota, became a successful academic and a writer. On her departure from Eastern Washington University where she taught for nineteen years, she was described by her colleagues as "one of Indian Studies' secondary founders and also, in many ways, its conscience."

She dedicates her book to "the indigenous writer in the modern world" and declares it to be "designed to raise and discuss issues that are some of the most central and crucial questions in the field of American …

Review Of Till Freedom Cried Out: Memories Of Texas Slave Life Edited By T. Lindsay Baker And Julie P. Baker, Barry A. Crouch

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As the Civil War's last shot was fired, Texas held one-tenth of the slave population of all the Confederate States: four hundred thousand- an increase of almost a quarter of a million souls from the beginning of hostilities. That this forced migration did not lead to continuous and prolonged upheaval is rather remarkable. Also remarkable is the number of narratives collected from former slaves residing in Texas in the 1930s regardless of where they had been born. These recollections comprise six of the forty-one volumes in the collection of slave narratives edited by George P. Rawick. Now, in a beautiful …