Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Native Americans In The News: Images Of Indians In The Twentieth Century Press By Mary Ann Weston, Gary Garrison

Great Plains Quarterly

As a lay historian of the American Indian and a television producer specializing in programs dealing with Native American subject matter, I've lectured frequently at high schools and colleges on stereotypical images of Native Americans in film, television, and popular literature and on how these media have shaped and reinforced such images throughout our turbulent history of contact. Focusing only on entertainment in the past, I found Native Americans in the News: Images of Indians in the Twentieth Century Press singularly informative in how the news media have also molded and solidified the general public's perceptions of Native Americans.

Mary …

Review Of No End Of Grief: Indian Residential Schools In Canada By Agnes Grant, Celia Haig-Brown

Great Plains Quarterly

Agnes Grant's work is a useful and interesting addition to the literature on residential schools in Canada. As a clearly written synthesis of a selection of existing works, it provides an introduction to the schools which would be useful as an undergraduate class reading. The book's thirteen chapters are divided into four sections: Introduction, History, Conditions, and Consequences. Each section is introduced with a tantalizing photograph of the former Birtle Residential School taken in 1990. These prompted me to make comparisons to schools that I know and left me wanting to know more about Birtle.

The text follows the increasingly …

Review Of Writings In Indian History, 1985-1990 Compiled By Jay Miller, Colin G. Calloway, And Richard A. Sattler, Joseph B. Herring

Great Plains Quarterly

Students of North American Indian history should applaud Miller, Calloway, and Sattler for producing this splendid reference guide. The volume extends the work of Francis Paul Prucha, who edited two bibliographies referencing thousands of books, journals, news articles, governmental documents, and other sources on Indian history and Indian-white relations. The tremendous growth in scholarship regarding the American Indian past would have been far less impressive without Prucha's contribution. The compilers of this new volume, working under the aegis of the Newberry Library's D'Arcy McNickle Center, have made it possible for that growth in scholarship to continue.

Increasingly, as the compilers …

Review Of The Frederic Remington Studio By Peter H. Hassrick, Alexander Nemerov

Great Plains Quarterly

This short book concerns the Remington Studio Collection-a permanent installation at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, featuring the artifacts Remington displayed in his New Rochelle studio, as well as some of the paintings he made late in his career. The author noted Remington scholar Peter Hassrick, discusses the studio and argues that the Studio Collection paintings, many of them small landscapes, transcend Remington's time and place to achieve a universal significance. In making this argument, however, Hassrick neglects to consider how the very category of the universal, insofar as it refers to American art, is itself a …

Review Of American Politics In The Gilded Age, 1868-1900 By Robert W. Cherny, Jeffrey Ostler

Great Plains Quarterly

Robert W. Cherny's lively and economical survey of Gilded Age politics is a welcome addition to Harlan Davidson's American History series. American Politics in the Gilded Age will be especially valuable to undergraduate and graduate students and will also be of interest to general readers and to scholars. Cherny provides a very readable narrative of key political events and personalities, and he employs an array of useful concepts that are based on the most current scholarship.

American Politics in the Gilded Age is neatly divided into three chapters. In the first, "The Domain and Power of Party," Cherny begins by …

Review Of Larry Mcmurtry And The West: An Ambivalent Relationship By Mark Busby, Clay Reynolds

Great Plains Quarterly

In this thorough look at McMurtry's canon through 1995, Mark Busby asserts that the novelist deliberately escaped from his southwestern roots and Texas's mythic past, then made a spiritual and triumphant return to them. But Busby insists that the novelist's return to western themes and stories represents not a "coming home" but rather a continuing ambivalence that is worked out to some degree in every work he has completed, regardless of setting.

Beginning with McMurtry's youth in Archer City, Busby explores McMurtry's attempts to break out of the "minor regional novelist" mold. Busby begins with McMurtry's earliest writings, then searches …

Review Of Ghost Settlement On The Prairie: A Biography Of Thurman, Kansas By Joseph V. Hickey, James R. Shortridge

Great Plains Quarterly

To label a book as local history is often to discredit it as solid scholarship. No one should make this mistake in the case of Joseph Hickey's fine study of a tiny settlement in the Flint Hills of Kansas. Hickey, in fact, displays here a remarkable combination of deep local knowledge and theoretical underpinnings. His work sheds important light on what William Least Heat-Moon has called "the perils of excessive individualism," that most American of processes in which community life is gradually undermined by the forces of large-scale capitalism. Concurrently, Hickey also provides critical new information on the evolution of …

Review Of Fort Worth's Legendary Landmarks By Carol Roark, James Wright-Steely

Great Plains Quarterly

Few substantial cities in the United States can boast of such an impressive aggregate of preserved pre-Second World War architectural wealth as Fort Worth, Texas. Downtown "Cow town" is largely intact, featuring block after block of continuous shop fronts, brick streets, and terra cotta details scraping the sky. Business and nightlife abound in this vintage precinct, whose century-old courthouse still houses county courts. A secondary downtown at the Stockyards Historic District is past its prime as a sprawling slaughterhouse but today is the thriving destination for herds of tourists. Even close-in historic neighborhoods remain vibrant, although their occupants long ago …

Review Of Home On The Range: A Century On The High Plains By James R. Dickenson, Dennis C. Williams

Great Plains Quarterly

After reading the introduction to this book, I expected a quaint family history joined with some attempt at relating the specifics of the author's family and personal experience to the larger context of Kansas and US history. I found that and much more. The first chapters set up a good model for family history-much better than most local histories or genealogies prepared by enthusiastic amateurs. But then James Dickenson is an accomplished journalist with over thirty years of journalistic experience including staffing the Washington Post; what should I have expected? By the half-way point, I realized that this is …