Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

2007 Farm Bill Forums: Issues And Options, Bradley Lubben, Samuel Funk, Troy J. Dumler

Department of Agricultural Economics: Presentations, Working Papers, and Gray Literature

A Series of Farm Bill Educational Meetings for Producers and Interested Policy Stakeholders in Kansas and Nebraska.

The debate on the 2007 Farm Bill has begun in earnest in Washington. The new Congress has already convened several hearings on farm policy issues, including energy and conservation. The Administration has just released its policy recommendations for the new farm bill, opening up further discussion that will grow over the coming months. The current farm bill, passed in 2002, runs through September 2007 and includes programs covering the 2007-2008 crop year. Before it expires, Congress will need to reconcile the current discussion …

Climate Change And Farm Use Of Weather Information, Ikrom Artikov, Gary D. Lynne

Department of Agricultural Economics: Presentations, Working Papers, and Gray Literature

Rapid global climate change as represented by rising temperatures and more erratic and severe weather events has heightened the interest in how farmers use weather information. Due to the food supply being so essential, it behooves us to pay attention to this phenomenon, and especially to put effort into understanding how farmers will respond and adapt to information about climate generally and forecasts in particular. To reduce the negative effects of climate on crop production and enhance field operations, the best weather information needs to be influencing farmer decisions.

Living With Wikipedia: It’S Here To Stay, Charles W. Hayford

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

My name is Charles and I’m a Wikipedia addict.

I can’t help myself, but then, neither can 75,000 other “active contributors.” We don’t just look things up: we create articles, correct and introduce mistakes, send each other notes, and fuss over issues great and obscure. Anonymity lends a carnival air of freedom and community since, as the famous New Yorker cartoon had it, “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog” (and yes, the link is to a Wikipedia article).

Wikipedia is an internet galactic cloud of information. Nicholson Baker, who once crankily lamented the end of the library card …

In Case You Missed It: Tibet Special, Part 4, Robert J. Barnett

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There’s a nice thing about literature about modern Tibet, which is that it is wonderfully polemical. It’s not that I like polemic, which destroys lives and wreaks havoc with societies. But it does make it ever so easy to organize one’s books. So instead of tedious hours sorting them by topic or author, I can arrange my Tibet books according to two or three viewpoints, perhaps four at most. One case for the books with a China POV, some shelves for those from the exile perspective, a few for the “I was a Heroic Western Explorer and Discovered Totally Unknown …

China In Socal

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

We don’t usually do posts about upcoming events, but there are so many involving China Beat-related folks (either contributors or people we’ve reviewed or referred to recently) in Southern California in the next few weeks that we felt remiss not mentioning them.

First, tomorrow (nothing like starting with the present!) USC will be hosting a day-long symposium on “Hong Kong, China and the World Art System.” It features many speakers, including China Beat contributor Richard Kraus.

The UCI Center for Asian Studies, in cooperation with several other units, will be hosting Michael Meyer, author of Last Days of Old Beijing, …

Coming Distraction: Factory Girls

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

As faithful readers may recall, China Beat contributor Leslie T. Chang has a forthcoming book, Factory Girls: From Village to City in Changing China, which will be released October 7. The book has received positive reviews, such as this one at Publisher’s Weekly and this one from China Beat’s Jeff Wasserstrom writing in Newsweek. You can read the first chapter for the book as a preview at Amazon, but we wanted to share a short excerpt, from Chapter 4, with you as well. In this excerpt, Chang describes how a mobile phone is not just a desirable accessory for migrant …

National Days Past: Five Things To Read Or Look At

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

To complement the last post on revolutionary anniversaries, here are some places to turn to get a sense of how October 1 has been marked in China between 1949 and 2007.

1) Let’s start with National Day 1950: for an idealized vision of the celebrations held that day, look at this poster.

2) For a fascinating discussion of past National Days that combines memories of personal experience and analytical moves rooted in the discipline of art history, see Wu Hung’s excellent Remaking Beijing.

3) For a look back at National Day 1984, when the 35th anniversary of the founding of …

Most Downloaded Documents For September 2008, University Of Nebraska–Lincoln Digital Commons

Institutional Repository Information

The following pages show 2 reports:

1. The 225 documents downloaded 40 or more times during the month of September 2008, by descending order of downloads; with totals for the entire repository.

2. The 105 series with 250+ total downloads during the month of September 2008, by descending order of total downloads.

Some highlights:

• Total downloads rose by 11,672 (13%) over the total for August, to 104,975.
• 14,242 of 18,443 (77%) of available open-access documents were downloaded at least once during the month. The average number of downloads per document was 5.69.
• Downloads were furnished to more …

The Effect Of Marketing Cooperatives On Innovation, Kyriakos Drivas, Konstantinos Giannakas

Cornhusker Economics

Cooperative organizations constitute an integral part of the increasingly industrialized agri-food system, accounting for 25 to 30 percent of total farm supply and marketing expenditures. When compared to profit-maximizing investor-owned firms (IOFs), a distinguishing feature of cooperatives (co-ops) is that the owners are also the users of the services provided by the organization. With members as both owners and users of its services, a co-op is typically assumed to focus on maximizing member welfare rather than profits.

The economic ramifications of the different objective functions of the cooperative organization have received considerable attention in the relevant literature, with the main …

Nebraska’S Live Stock Sanitary Commission And The Rise Of American Progressivism, David Lee Amstutz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the years after the Civil War, the United States experienced tremendous economic growth. Entrepreneurs such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie built giant corporate businesses that dominated entire industries. The practice of vertical integration- in which a single business controlled all aspects of production and marketing-drew workers from different areas together under the same employers. Moreover, the corporations conducted interstate commerce, and they became powerful enough to drive competitors out of business. With their smaller rivals removed, the corporations were free to market their goods across the United States. As efforts to foster economic prosperity continued into the …

Review Of Chickasaw: Unconquered And Unconquerable By Jeannie Barbour, Amanda Cobb, And Linda Hogan, Donna L. Akers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This stunningly beautiful work by the Chickasaw Nation relates the fascinating story of the Chickasaw people, from ancient to contemporary times. Packed with simply gorgeous photographs and illustrations, it evokes the strength, endurance, courage, and determination of the Chickasaws in the face of relentless American colonization. The Chickasaw story of survival and persistence in the face of this aggression is an inspirational tribute to the ancestors, who not only endured dispossession and permanent exile but flourished in spite of the terrible tragedy of removal. This book addresses a popular audience, not an academic one, beginning with an overview of Chickasaw …

Review Of Axes: Willa Cather And William Faulkner By Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Ed Folsom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Merrill Skaggs explains in her introduction that we are to hear her provocative title, Axes, in at least two ways: as the intersecting axes of these two writers' very different careers (as when Joseph R. Urgo termed Cather and Faulkner as "the horizontal and vertical axes of American literature"), but also as actual weapons, "battle-axes." Skaggs reads these authors' novels and stories as word-weapons they wielded at one another, hoping to wound. They may ultimately have judged each other worthy opponents, but they never laid down their arms, remaining combative until Cather's death and even after (her posthumously published story …

Review Of Diaspora In The Countryside: Two Mennonite Communities And Mid~Twentieth~Century Rural Disjuncture. By Royden Loewen, Hans Werner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Royden Loewen's recent book displays all the insights and delicious ironies we have come to expect from him. In this study, Loewen compares the Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites of the Rural Municipality of Hanover, Manitoba, with those of Meade, Kansas, during a time of dramatic change in rural life. Loewen begins with an analysis of what historian John L. Shover termed "the Great Disjuncture" itself, the fragmentation and scattering between the 1930s and 1980s of a once unified rural society, followed by a chapter focusing more specifically on the environment: the image of the snowdrift for Manitoba and the dust bowl …

Notes And News- Fall 2008

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

CALL FOR PAPERS

CALL FOR PAPERS

MISSOURI VALLEY HISTORY CONFERENCE

Review Of Living Blue In The Red States Edited By David Starkey, Greg Kosmicki

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I swear I once read in one of my mother's Reader's Digests: "This is a book that all true Americans should be forced to read." Maybe that's a false memory from my youth, but Living Blue in the Red States certainly is one of those books.

Living Blue in the Red States should have a "No Spin Zone" warning on the cover-it could be dangerous for politicians to read. The pollsters and punsters would have us believe we live in the bowels of a Blue state/Red state monster, each political splinter group desperately clinging to its little wedge issue …

Title And Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 28 / Number 4 / Fall 2008

CONTENTS

NEBRASKA'S LIVE STOCK SANITARY COMMISSION AND THE RISE OF AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM

CONTRADICTORY SUBTEXTS IN WILLA CATHER'S 0 PIONEERS! AND THOMAS HARDY'S FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

JEWISH COMMUNITY IN WICHITA, 1920-1970: SAME WAGON, NEW HORSES

REVIEW ESSAY: THE SPINNING OF THE WEST

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of Beyond Madness: The Art Of Ralph Blakelock, 1847-1919 By Norman A. Geske, Abraham A. Davidson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

No one has studied the art of the American painter Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847-1919) for as many years and as intensely as Norman A. Geske. After a telephone call from the artist's great-grandson in 1966, Geske was on board. In 1969, while Director of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, he launched the Nebraska Blakelock Inventory. This was to hold all known information on the artist-photographs of paintings and drawings, previous ownerships, prices paid, letters of family members and others, publications of scholars and notations of collectors, and so on. In 1969 and 1974 Geske directed four examination seminars to separate …

Review Of American Indians, The Irish, And Government Schooling: A Comparative Study By Michael C. Coleman, Katie Kane

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Michael Coleman's historical and comparative study represents the latest offering in a critical but still underdeveloped subfield of comparative colonialisms: Irish and Native American connections under the experience of colonization. The tradition of comparative work across the Atlantic Ocean, with its recognition of a fundamental similarity in the practical and ideological work of British and American colonialism in Ireland and Indian Country, has roots in the scholarship of such important intellectuals as Howard Mumford Jones (0 Strange New World! American Culture: The Formative Years), David Beers Quinn (The Elizabethans and the Irish), and Nicholas Canny ("The …

Review Of Beloved Women: The Political Lives Of Ladonna Harris And Wilma Mankiller By Sarah Eppler Janda, Robert E. England

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Beloved Women, Sarah Eppler Janda offers an important and provocative analysis of the political lives of two American Indian leaders in Oklahoma and national politics. Janda uses primary documents, interviews, and secondary sources to examine the nexus between race (Indianness) and gender (feminism) and the acquisition and use of political power by LaDonna Harris and Wilma Mankiller.

Janda organizes the book into three parts. The first devotes two chapters to developing the primary constructs used in the study (image, identity, political activism, and the intersection of feminism and Indianness) for LaDonna Harris. Chapters 3 and 4 (part 2) …

Review Of American Windmills: An Album Of Historic Photographs. By T. Lindsay Baker, Jim Hoy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"I'm a lover and a fighter and a wild bull rider and a pretty fair kind of a windmill man," goes the old Plains-country brag. Along with barbed wire, windmills helped bring an end to the open range, and the cowboy had to add fence riding and windmill maintenance to his roping and riding skills. American Windmills, T. Lindsay Baker's latest volume on the topic of which he is the country's (and most likely the world's) leading authority, brought back a flood of memories as I turned its pages.

When I was growing up on a small Flint Hills …

Review Of Forty Years A Legislator: Elmer ThomasBy Elmer Thomas, Suzanne Jones Crawford

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Written between 1951 and 1954, this autobiography covers the career of Elmer Thomas as a state senator from 1907 to 1920, as a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1922 to 1928, and as a U.S. senator from 1928 to 1950. Editors Richard Lowitt and Carolyn Hanneman deserve a hearty round of applause for having converted Thomas's original, meandering four-hundred-page-plus manuscript to an intelligible, readable work. Especially valuable to the reader are the editors' end notes, identifying figures and issues whose political significance has dimmed and offering suggestions for further reading.

Despite his popularity among Oklahoma Democrats …

Review Of Gall: Lakota War Chief By Robert W. Larson, Herman Viola

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Dubbed the "Fighting Cock of the Sioux" by the U.S. soldiers he confronted, the Hunkpapa warrior Gall has at last found his rightful place on the book shelves of Great Plains history. A major challenge for any biographer is the lack of primary source material about Gall's early life, a typical problem for anyone attempting a scholarly study about someone who flashes in and out of the historical record the way Gall does. Given the challenge he faced, Robert W. Larson has done a commendable job in compiling a plausible account of Gall's movements and actions before he took up …

Review Of Upstream Metropolis: An Urban Biography Of Omaha And Council Bluffs By Lawrence H. Larsen, Barbara J. Cottrell, Harl A. Dalstrom, And Kay Calame Dalstrom., Heather Fryer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Upstream Metropolis is an "urban biography" of the "Omaha-Council Bluffs NE-IA Metropolitan Statistical Area," the nation's sixtieth most populous urban center in 2005. The life-story approach draws from an impressive array of local primary and secondary sources to bring depth, complexity, and an updated chronology to the literature on Omaha's development.

Omaha-Council Bluff's childhood, familiar to many readers, was marked by rapid growth as railroad money, meatpacking plants, and a multiethnic laboring population made their way to the improvised settlements in the 1830s- 40s. As with most youngsters, the settlements showed glimmers of potential eclipsed by a need for discipline …

Review Of Rosie Sandifer: Language Of Art. By Rosie Sandifer., Peter S. Briggs

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Painter and sculptor Rosie Sandifer, native of Lubbock, Texas, past resident of Colorado, arid present resident of New Mexico, penned her own memoir, "Language of Art," the principal text of this book. Her modest eight-page autobiography skips from chronological outline to assessment of favored artists, teachers, and museums, to appreciation for parental lessons which, in the author's words, inspired her "discipline, drive, and direction." Two shorter opening essays by Tuck Langland, a sculptor, and Robin Salmon, curator of sculpture at Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina, carefully guide Sandifer into her artistic niche as a figurative sculptor. There is no independent …

Review Of White Man's Club: Schools, Race, And The Struggle Of Indian Acculturation By Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Michael C. Coleman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

So many studies have been published on nineteenth-century U.S. government Indian schools that I initially wondered about the need for another. (My book has been published in the same series as that under review). Jacqueline Fear-Segal, senior lecturer in American history at the University of East Anglia, England, acknowledges her debt to this literature. Yet she validly insists on the importance of her contribution. Believing that previous studies have not "fully unpacked" issues of race, Fear-Segal contrasts the overt egalitarian rhetoric of white educators with what she sees as covert racist agendas, while probing the complex responses of Indian children …

Review Of Alberta Art And Artists: An Overview By Patricia Ainslie And Mary-Beth Laviolette, Leslie Dawn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Alberta Art and Artists is a modest book with large ambitions. It is first and foremost an introduction to the historic and contemporary visual arts within the western Canadian province. But it is also a declaration that this art supports a "confident difference," a unique provincial identity that distinguishes it from other regions.

The two authors are well positioned to undertake the volume's double task. Patricia Ainslie, who served as curator and vice president of collections at the Glenbow Museum and Archives in Calgary, contributes two historical sections. Following a sampling of First Nations productions, she directs the reader to …

Review Of Texas Quilts And Quilters: A Lone Star Legacy By Marcia Kaylakie With Janice Whittington, Virginia Gunn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This beautiful book showcases thirty-four Texas quilts, selected by Marcia Kaylakie from the hundreds she saw in public and private collections during a decade of documenting quilts throughout the state of Texas. It is a visual delight that adds to the body of work on Texas quilts and quiltmakers. Marion Ann Montgomery's foreword helps set the book in context. Janice Whittington worked with Kaylakie to shape the interesting human stories behind the quilts. We learn that a simple Dutch Doll quilt became known as "The Sick Quilt," as a mother entertained her ill children with stories about each doll. We …

Review Of Policing The Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, And The North American Frontier, 1875-1910 By Andrew R. Graybill, Michael Hogue

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

At opposite ends of the Great Plains, the North-West Mounted Police and the Texas Rangers emerged in the mid-1870s as key instruments in the extension of state power over distant frontiers. Policing the Great Plains reveals how these famous rural constabularies implemented policies designed in Ottawa and Austin to promote the settlement and economic development of the Great Plains. Andrew Graybill argues that these shared political and economic goals ensured that Mounties and Rangers, despite their many differences, helped bring about strikingly similar transformations in Texas and the Canadian Prairies.

By placing Mounties and Rangers in this common history of …

Review Of New Indians, Old Wars By Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Bruce E. Johansen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In New Indians, Old Wars, Elizabeth CookLynn delivers a sometimes scorching critique not only of the United States' pursuit of colonization through warfare (comparing it, in Iraq, to the Plains Indian wars), but also of superficial thinking and fuzzy argumentation that prevents scholars of Native American Studies from drawing a tight focus on the central issues of their discipline.

Cook-Lynn, professor emerita of Native American Studies at Eastern Washington University, argues that the central focus of study in Native law, history, and literature should be colonialism and exploitation of resources. Hailing from a warrior family that reaches to the Battle …

Review Of The Cherokee Trail Of Tears Essay By Duane King, James W. Parins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although the Cherokees were among a great number of Indian nations from all over the eastern half of the United States to be forced from their homeland by the 1830 Removal Act, in the popular imagination the term "Trail of Tears" refers to the exodus from their homes in present-day North Carolina, Tennessee, northern Alabama, and Georgia. In the decade before passage of the Removal Act, the Cherokees took defensive action, organizing their government along the lines of the American republic, and embracing some of the trappings of white civilization. However, this strategy failed; the Cherokees were left to follow …