Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Maps Of Texas And The Southwest, 1513-1900 By James C. Martin And Robert Sidney Martin, Robert K. Holz

Great Plains Quarterly

Frequently old maps are gathered and reproduced in folio volumes that have little scholarly value but that make handsome coffee table displays. In Maps of Texas and the Southwest, 1513-1900, James and Robert Martin have produced an excellent book on the history of cartography that will be of benefit to current and future collectors and students but that is much more than another coffee table volume. The book goes beyond a simple reproduction of old maps on Texas and the Southwest. The authors have done an admirable job of researching the historical record, not only for old maps, but …

Review Of A Tropical Plains Frontier: The Llanos Of Colombia 1531-1831 By Jane M. Rausch., Kristine L. Jones

Great Plains Quarterly

The strength of this monograph is evident in its solid documentation of three hundred years of Spanish and creole settlement in the tropical plains (llanos) frontier of Colombia, which extends east from the Andean cordillera into the greater llanos of Venezuela. Although speaking directly to a general historiographical and theoretical interest in the frontier, particularly in Latin America and specifically in Colombia, Jane Rausch also provides important background detail about rural history as it relates to political and economic development, especially for Latin America.' While limited to discussion of the Colombian llanos, Rausch's synthesis of parochial detail permits tantalizing comparative …

Review Of Plains Country Towns By John C. Hudson, Lawrence H. Larsen

Great Plains Quarterly

John C. Hudson's new book, Plains Country Towns, deals with the dynamics of town building in a 20,000 square-mile area of north central North Dakota. Between 1880 and 1920 railroad colonization agents and independent speculators platted over 500 town sites. Three railroads, the Soo Line, the Northern Pacific, and the Great Northern, planned towns at roughly ten-mile intervals along their main and branch lines. Sometimes, where tracks intersected, they built neighboring promotions. No one expected all the projects to succeed. They were a device used by the railroads to effectively dominate marketing activities. Hudson, a Northwestern University professor of …

Review Of A Buffalo Round-Up: A Selected Bibliography By George W. Arthur, Roy W. Meyer

Great Plains Quarterly

Compiling a bibliography of the buffalo might seem an impossible task, given the immense number of authors who have dealt with the subject. Certainly knowing what to leave out is as important as knowing what to put in. George W. Arthur has tried to set some limits to the scope of his "buffalo roundup" by excluding much (but not all) fiction and being highly selective about his inclusion of European sources. A large proportion of his titles comprise works of historical importance, either by nineteenth-century (and earlier) visitors to the North American Plains or by more recent historians. The fields …

Review Of Women And Indians On The Frontier, 1825-1915 By Glenda Riley, Darlis A. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly

Glenda Riley, professor of history at the University of Northern Iowa, has long been interested in documenting women's role in settling the West. Author of Frontierswomen, The Iowa Experience and numerous articles on western women's history, Riley breaks new ground in Women and Indians on the Frontier by focusing upon westering white women's attitudes toward and relationships with American Indians. Riley presents an interesting and controversial thesis, one that some western history scholars will challenge. After studying more than one hundred fifty westering women's diaries, log books, memoirs, and letters and an equal number of westering men's records, she concludes …

Review Of The History Of Prairie Theatre By E. Ross Stuart, Susan Minsos

Great Plains Quarterly

E. Ross Stuart's encyclopedic text, The History of Prairie Theatre-the development of theatre in Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan- is simply too short. Selectively chronicling theatrical events on the Canadian Prairies, stressing "facts rather than opinions," Stuart firmly refuses to evaluate the matters he records. But the man does set out to cover a vast, unexplored territory, a task he completes with admirable success. Stuart clinically divides his research into four areas: Pioneer Times, Amateur Theatre, Educational Theatre, and New Professional Theatre. Analysis focuses around major prairie centers, Winnipeg, Regina-Saskatoon, Edmonton- Calgary-Banff, and since their theatre histories in some cases …

Review Of Kit Carson: A Pattern For Heroes By Thelma S. Guild And Harvey L. Carter, Stephen Tatum

Great Plains Quarterly

Kit Carson fulfills its authors' hope of providing a readable and reliable biography of its subject. It has helpful maps and illustrations; for the most part it reads well, although the Fremont expedition narrative was the only series of chapters conveying any excitement or enthusiasm. It should appeal to Carson buffs and to history buffs interested in the American Southwest. If it had been more venturesome in speculating at key points on the man's motivations and intentions, and if it had offered intelligent insights on the sociocultural milieu which accorded this unlikely man fame, the biography perhaps would have even …

Review Of America's Country Schools By Andrew Guilliford, Courtney Ann Vaughn-Roberson

Great Plains Quarterly

In Andrew Guilliford's view, many scholars have portrayed the history of American country schools in too narrow a fashionpresenting them as either pedagogical disasters or as images of the nation's success. Thus, the purpose of Guilliford's quite readable book, America's Country Schools, is to present a balanced interpretation of the historic educational setting, reconciling the beneficial elements of traditional education with some of its well-founded criticisms. Although his primary contribution to the literature is a large pictorial collection, Guilliford cites a wealth of scholarly works in his historical review. He takes into account the quality of curricula and teachers, …

Review Of The Great Father: The United States Government And The American Indians,The Great White Father: The United States Government And The American Indian, And In His American Indian Policy In The Formative Years: The Indian Trade And Intercourse Acts, 1790-1834 (1962) By Francis Paul Prucha, Wilcomb E. Washburn

Great Plains Quarterly

In The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, Prucha provides a capstone to the edifice he began with American Indian Policy in the Formative Years. During his life as a scholar (principally at Marquette University) and as a Jesuit (he was ordained in 1957), he has remained unflappably calm, even when, as in the 1960s, radical students were outraged at his apparent defense of Andrew Jackson. In 1302 pages of this two-volume work (and 426 pages of the abridged edition) there is lacking "sparkle and simplicity." The lack of "sparkle" in Prucha's work derives not …

Review Of Gennan-Russian Folk Architecture In Southeastern South Dakota By Michael Koop And Stephen Ludwig, Roger L. Welsch

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a modest but invaluable introduction for a larger research problem that should be attacked soon, before the artifacts are gone. The authors carefully describe architectural artifacts, providing historic and geographic contexts. There are drawings and photos that provide full detail of the items. Everyone who is interested in ethnic folklore, material culture, or German-Russians will want to have this book.

The Dust Bowl An Introduction, John Braeman

Great Plains Quarterly

In March 1985 the Center for Great Plains Studies of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln held its ninth annual symposium "Social Adaptation to Semiarid Environments." The relevance of that topic was evident alike to specialists and to the reader of daily newspaper stories about drought and accompanying starvation in Africa, recurring crop failures in Russia, China's struggle to feed its teeming population, out-of-control grassland fires in Australia, and depletion of ground water supplies and continued soil erosion in the North American Great Plains. Specialists in a broad range of disciplines explored the ways in which different societies have adjusted in the …

Who Was "Forest Man?" Sources Of Migration To The Plains, John C. Hudson

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the points of high drama in Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Plains is his description of forest man's entry into the grasslands: Let us visualize the American approach to the Great Plains by imagining ourselves standing on the dividing line between the timber and plain ... As we gaze northward we see on the right side the forested and well-watered country and on the left side the arid, treeless plain. On the right we see a nation of people coming slowly but persistently through the forests, felling trees, building cabins, making rail fences, ... advancing shoulder to shoulder, …

Federal Land Reclamation In The Dust Bowl, R. Douglas Hurt

Great Plains Quarterly

In the spring of 1932, dust clouds swept over portions of the southern Great Plains. For the next six years, drought and the prevailing winds wreaked havoc over fifty million acres across northeastern New Mexico, southeastern Colorado, western Kansas, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma-an area known by 1935 as the Dust Bowl. Much of that acreage was submarginal-land that, given the price of wheat, did not merit cultivation-and it was easily windblown. Tillage with one-way disk plows pulverized the powder-dry soil, and the nearly constant winds blew and drifted it across crop and grasslands. During the remainder of …

Dust Bowl Historiography, Harry C. Mcdean

Great Plains Quarterly

In the late 1930s, Undersecretary of Agriculture Milburn Lincoln Wilson organized "T ravelling Great Plains Schools," culminating three decades of research and reform work in the Great Plains. The schools brought hundreds of rural social scientists together with scores of federal and state policymakers. The schools were broken into two sections, one dedicated to the southern Plains and the other to the northern. Those who attended spent several weeks making their way through the Plains, with care taken to differentiate problems particular to each of the two regions. In the southern Plains, the school spent several days examining the problems …

Notes & News

Great Plains Quarterly

CENTER FOR GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

OTHER UPCOMING CONFERENCES

CALL FOR PAPERS

A PERSONAL NOTE

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

THE DUST BOWL: AN INTRODUCTION (John Braeman)

WHO WAS "FOREST MAN?" SOURCES OF MIGRATION TO THE PLAINS (John C. Hudson)

THE FUTURE OF THE GREAT PLAINS RE-VISITED (Gilbert F. White)

FEDERAL LAND RECLAMATION IN THE DUST BOWL (R. Douglas Hurt)

THE DIRTY THIRTIES: A STUDY IN AGRICULTURAL CAPITALISM (Donald Worster)

DUST BOWL HISTORIOGRAPHY (Harry C. McDean)

THE DUST BOWL: HISTORICAL IMAGE, PSYCHOLOGICAL ANCHOR, AND ECOLOGICAL TABOO (William E. Riebsame)

BOOK REVIEWS

Struggle and Hope: The Hungarian-Canadian Experience

NOTES & NEWS

The Future Of The Great Plains Re-Visited, Gilbert F. White

Great Plains Quarterly

The Future of the Great Plains came in the mid- 1930s at the culmination of a great drought and a festering worldwide economic depression as new, ambitious Washington agencies sought to redress the accumulated wounds to people and soil. Following a series of more narrow reports, this comprehensive study presented the prevailing judgments as to what had gone wrong on the Great Plains. And it outlined a widely shared vision of what the future might hold if its social prescriptions were heeded. 1 Sceptics of the time wryly remarked that the animal on its front cover (a large bull, fig. …

The Dirty Thirties A Study In Agricultural Capitalism, Donald Worster

Great Plains Quarterly

"The history of any land begins with nature, and all histories must end with nature," J. Frank Dobie once wrote.' He was eloquently right, but until very recently such a view was not regarded seriously by academic historians, who commonly took nature for granted, beginning and ending their studies with an air of human omnipotence. That attitude, however, is becoming harder to maintain in innocence, as a group of ecologically informed historians challenge it. It is now more acceptable to say, with Dobie, that nature has played a stage-center role in the making of history the making of its setbacks …

Review Of Struggle And Hope: The Hungarian-Canadian Experience By N. F. Dreisziger With M. L. Kovacs, Paul Body, And Bennett Kovrig, Linda Dégh

Great Plains Quarterly

This book appears in the government sponsored series A History of Canada's Peoples, aiming at the general public's interest in the ethnic dimension of Canadian society. "Most Canadians belong to an ethnic group, since to do so is simply to 'have a sense of identity rooted in a common origin ... whether this common origin is real or imaginary' ... all have traditions and values that they cherish and that now are part of the cultural riches that Canadians share." Despite the reference to such subjective concepts as "identity," "tradition," and "values," the authors of ethnic extraction were instructed to …

The African Experience Drought And Famine In The Dry Zone, Randall Baker

Great Plains Quarterly

This paper concerns the changing climate in the semiarid regions of Africa and the technological response to it. Often the central issue in physical and social change in Africa seems to be interpreting a sketchy but rapidly evolving base of "evidence" and trying to decide the process that the evidence would suggest is at work. This is a far from easy task, requiring inspired guesswork as much as proof, but clearly it is absolutely central to formulating an appropriate policy response.

River Conservancy And Agricultural Development Of The North China Plain And Loess Highlands Strategies And Research, Huang Bingwei

Great Plains Quarterly

The North China Plain is the Chinese counterpart to the North American Great Plains. This largest plain in China suffers frequently from drought. Although agricultural production has been significantly increased in recent years, it is still far too low and too unstable to compensate for population growth and the demands of a rising standard of living. One of the major factors limiting agricultural development on the North China Plain is drought. A complication is that not only have surface and underground water resources been utilized almost to their limits for agrarian needs but also water shortages due to rapidly mounting …

Rural Social Organization In A Semiarid African Country The Case Of Botswana, Louise Formann

Great Plains Quarterly

Environmental determinism has long been discredited in explaining the social organization of pastoral and agro-pastoral peoples. I Today the effect of climate on social organization is recognized as mediated by social, economic, and political factors. 2 Thus, social organization in Botswana reflects the influence of a wide variety of factors, among them Christian missionaries, interethnic warfare, past and continuing aggression of South Africa, introduction of the iron plow, British colonialism, Boer traders, discovery of minerals (most recently diamonds), international donor aid, and so on. Over the past century there have been substantial changes in a number of important trends: life …

Drought Mitigation In Australia Reducing The Losses But Not Removing The Hazard, R. L. Heathcote

Great Plains Quarterly

In Australia technology has reduced but not eliminated the impact of drought and seems set to do the same for the foreseeable CO2-induced climate change. To document this claim, I wish here to consider first a brief history of drought in Australia-pointing up some parallels and contrasts with the North American experience; second, to outline the various strategies (technological and nontechnological) that have been adopted to try to mitigate drought; third, to review the current thinking on the effect of increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 on the Australian climate and their releva9ce to agricultural and pastoral activities through possible modification …

Comp Ara Tive Drought Strategies The Soviet Union, Paul E. Lydolph

Great Plains Quarterly

Background. It cannot be emphasized enough that the Soviet Union is a highlatitude country. Odessa on the Black Sea coast, one of Russia's southern cities, lies at a latitude of 46°N, comparable to that of Billings, Montana, and in fact is cooler in summer than Billings (Lydolph 1977b). Krasnodar in the Kuban District of the North Caucasus, probably the most productive region in the Soviet Union, compares latitudinally and climatically to St. Paul, Minnesota. Kharkov, in the northeastern Ukraine, compares to Winnipeg, Canada; in fact, Winnipeg experiences higher maximum temperatures in summer than Kharkov does. The central black earth region …

Notes & News

Great Plains Quarterly

CENTER FOR GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

CALLS FOR PAPERS

GEORGE IRA HANSON TRUST

LECTURE SERIES

Adapting The Environment Ranching, Irrigation, And Dry Land Farming In Southern Alberta, 1880-1914, A. A. Den Otter

Great Plains Quarterly

For centuries the nutritious grasses of the southwestern fringe of the Canadian prairies supported an abundance of game, providing ample food for its nomadic peoples. Not until the middle of the nineteenth century did anyone look to this area as a farming frontier. By the 1850s, however, the curiosity of Canadians about it was increased by a need for new territories for investment, scientific estimates that the land was more favorable for agriculture than had previously been believed, and the fiery rhetoric of expansionist journalists. The need for more accurate knowledge prompted the Canadian and British governments to send scientific …

Abideth Forever? Global Use Of Semiarid Lands In The Interwar Years, J. M. Powell

Great Plains Quarterly

I have undertaken a highly selective Cook's Tour in this article, attempting to integrate our understanding of semiarid lands around the globe. The focus is concentrated on the period between the two great wars when new nationalisms, old imperial networks, and the burgeoning ambitions of scientists combined to create new systems of land use in the semiarid regions, but a few sorties have been made into earlier and later periods to assist the interpretation of specific projects. My own country, Australia, is used as the starting point for the tour, but the influence of American Donald Worster's Dust Bowl (1979) …

Adaptations To Adversity Agriculture, Climate And The Great Plains Of North America, Norman J. Rosenburg

Great Plains Quarterly

The climate of the Great Plains of the United States and Canada has presented a challenge to agrarians throughout the centuries. In this paper I discuss some of the major climatological hazards to agriculture in the plains and some of the technological defenses that North Americans have so far used to adapt to adverse weather and climate. I conclude with a consideration of the implications for Great Plains agriculture of a likely man-induced (or anthropogenic) climatic change following the expected further increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. For the purposes of this paper, I have defined agricultural drought as …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

INTERNATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION: AN INTRODUCTION (Donald A. Wilhite)

ABIDETH FOREVER? GLOBAL USE OF SEMIARID LANDS IN THE INTERWAR YEARS (]. M Powell)

ADAPTING THE ENVIRONMENT: RANCHING, IRRIGATION, AND DRY LAND FARMING IN SOUTHERN ALBERTA, 1880-1914 (A. A. den Otter)

RURAL SOCIAL ORGANIZATION IN A SEMIARID AFRICAN COUNTRY: THE CASE OF BOTSWANA (Louise Fortmann)

ADAPTATIONS TO ADVERSITY: AGRICULTURE, CLIMATE AND THE GREAT PLAINS OF NORTH AMERICA (Norman J. Rosenberg)

RIVER CONSERVANCY AND AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE NORTH CHINA PLAIN AND LOESS HIGHLANDS: STRATEGIES AND RESEARCH (Huang Bingwei)

DROUGHT MITIGATION IN AUSTRALIA: REDUCING THE LOSSES BUT NOT REMOVING THE HAZARD (R. L. …

International Drought Mitigation An Introduction, Donald A. Wilhite

Great Plains Quarterly

This special issue of Great Plains Quarterly includes the papers from the international sessions of the symposium, beginning with the keynote address by J. M. Powell, "Abideth Forever?" Global Use of Semiarid Lands in the Interwar Years." Powell's thesis is that the new nationalisms, old imperial networks, and burgeoning successes and ambitions of scientists combined between the two world wars to create new systems of land use in semiarid regions. In his introduction, Powell poses an interesting question: Were decisions about the management of these fragile ecosystems developed within the region as a result of experience, or outside the region …