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Great Plains Pragmatist: Aaron Douglas And The Art Of Social Protest, Audrey Thompson

Great Plains Quarterly

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Title And Contents- Fall 2000

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 20/ Number 4 / Fall 2000

CONTENTS

THE PICTURE CHANGES: STYLISTIC VARIATION IN SITTING BULL'S BIOGRAPHIES Barbara Risch

CONTESTING TRADITION AND COMBATING INTOLERANCE: A HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT IN KANSAS Aaron K. Ketchell

"drainage, drainage, DRAINAGE": CREATING NATURAL DISASTERS IN SOUTHEASTERN NEBRASKA William Keith Guthrie

GREAT PLAINS PRAGMATIST: AARON DOUGLAS AND THE ART OF SOCIAL PROTEST Audrey Thompson

Book Reviews

John M. Coward The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press By BARBARA CLOUD

Paul Reddin Wild West Shows By ANDREW GULLIFORD

Douglas Waitley William Henry Jackson: Framing the Frontier By PETER BACON HALES

John Warfield …

Review Of The Politics Of Hallowed Ground: Wounded Knee And The Struggle For Indian Sovereignty By Mario Gonzalez And Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Rolland Dewing

Great Plains Quarterly

This is an insider's account of the attempt of the Oglala and Minneconjou tribes to establish the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre as a national American monument. The preface states, "This book is neither historiography, biography nor autobiography. It is what might be called a mixed genre, informal anecdotal writing of social and political history." The authors suggest this format is an attempt to present history in a more conversational and anecdotal way, allowing the story to be told against a background of federal laws and historical events that will give the reader a better understanding of Sioux …

Review Of A National Crime: The Canadian Government And The Residential School System, 1879-1986 By John S. Milloy, Agnes Grant

Great Plains Quarterly

The recent proliferation of commentary on residential schools leaves one question unanswered: Did no one know what was happening? The assumption is that if someone had known, it would have been prevented.

Milloy's book answers this question, clearly and unequivocally. Federal bureaucrats knew what was happening. They knew that children were being mistreated; they knew that no real education was taking place, and they understood the impact this system was having on its survivors. The daily horrors the children experienced can justly be laid at the door of the churches, but the ultimate responsibility lies with the federal government which …

Review Of Wild West Shows By Paul Reddin

Great Plains Quarterly

The latest historian to chronicle the phenomenon, Paul Reddin postulates a wild west show continuum from the artist George Catlin to Buffalo Bill, and then from the Miller Brothers' 101 Wild West Show to the early silent cowboy films of Tom Mix. With clear, precise writing, impeccable research in several languages, and voluminous endnotes, Reddin has produced a Wild West tour de force that sets a standard for interpretive history of the public presentation of the frontier, Native Americans, and the Great Plains to enthusiastic American and European audiences.

Wild West Shows is the work of a mature, contemplative historian …

Review Of No More Free Markets Or Free Beer: The Progressive Era In Nebraska, 1900-1924 By Burton W. Folsom Jr., Harl A. Dalstrom

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1920 German Catholic voters in Saint Helena, Cedar County, cast seventy percent of their ballots for Marie Weekes, the Nonpartisan League candidate for Congress and a supporter of prohibition. What had driven beer-loving, anti-woman suffrage German-Americans to vote for the female candidate of an agrarian radical organization? Such major changes in Nebraska's political life are the subject of this book.

As its title suggests, Burton Folsom emphasizes the triumph of governmental socio-economic intervention over the principles of laissez faire. In a well-balanced, highly readable narrative, he analyzes the values of]. Sterling Morton, William Jennings Bryan, and George W. Norris-the …

Review Of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women On Texas Cotton Farms, 1900 - 1940 By Rebecca Sharpless, Barbara Handy-Marchello

Great Plains Quarterly

The examination of farm women's experiences offers new perspectives on American agricultural communities. Rebecca Sharpless adds to our knowledge with this book on the women who worked the cotton fields of the east Texas Blackland Prairies in the first four decades of the twentieth century. The six chapters about family relations, housekeeping, food production, field work, communities, and the decline of the rural population spare no detail of poverty, racial discrimination, or the hopeful but constant and unrewarding migration of tenant families. Written with warmth, Sharpless's account is not at all romantic or sentimental. The organization suggests patterns that framed …

Review Of Celluloid Indians: Native Americans And Film By Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Michael Hilger

Great Plains Quarterly

So far as I know, Jacquelyn Kilpatrick is the first person of American Indian heritage to write a book about the portrayal of Indians in film. Her special commitment to the American Indian community manifests itself in her careful analysis of American Indian historical issues in the chapters on film history and in her attention to parallel images in literature, especially literature by Native Americans. Complementing her unique perspective is a strong knowledge of contemporary film theory and criticism, which enables her to read selected films in ways that diverge from readings found in previous books on this topic.

Beginning …

Review Of The Indian Southwest: 1580-1830: Ethnogenesis And Reinvention By Gary Clayton Anderson, David La Vere

Great Plains Quarterly

This is the most lucid and detailed examination of the political economy of the Southern Plains. At the center of that economy roamed the buffalo; but once Europeans arrived, horses, cattle, firearms, captives, and manufactured goods helped power it. Bonds of kinship and reciprocity drew all peoples in and around the Southern Plains into it, including Pueblos and Spaniards in New Mexico; Spaniards and Mexicans in Texas; Jumanos, Apaches, Wichitas, and Comanches on the Plains; and Caddos and the French in Louisiana. Still, the Plains could be a hard environment, with long droughts and epidemics of European diseases, both of …

Review Of Roadside History Of Montana By Don Spritzer, Michael Malone

Great Plains Quarterly

Historians tend not to take "roadside histories" very seriously, even while the literate public appreciates them for their ready vantages on the accessible past. This volume, however, merits the attention of historians as well as "buffs" for its multifaceted insights based upon a broad array of state and local histories. It is, in short, a serious work.

Traversing the Highline region of the far north at the start, Don Spritzer moves into the mountain valleys of the west, then the more open valleys and plateaus of the southwestern and central areas, and concludes with a run eastward down the broad …

Review Of Crazy Horse By Larry Mcmurtry, Joseph C. Porter

Great Plains Quarterly

Our finest living novelist of the American West, Larry McMurtry, portrays one of the West's most notable historic figures in Crazy Horse. Two commemorations frame this readable survey biography: one, the Korczak Ziolkowski mountain sculpture of Crazy Horse; the other, a medallion struck by the government rewarding Little Big Man's apparent complicity in killing him. Who was this "American Sphinx, the loner who inspired the largest sculpture on Planet Earth?" McMurtry further asks what Crazy Horse meant "to his people in his lifetime, and also what he has come to mean to generations of Sioux in our own century …

Review Of Winnipeg: A Prairie Portrait By Martin Cash, Geoffrey C. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

The purpose of this attractively produced book, a 125th anniversary project of the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, is to celebrate the city at the threshold of the new millennium. Its author, a business writer for a local newspaper, is supported by a collaborative team that includes two writer-reporters and two photographers. The text, snappy and essentially journalistic in character, is organized into two main parts. The first ten chapters offer brief overviews of Winnipeg's history and contemporary aspects of the city's business activities, financial services, communications, arts, educational resources, healthcare facilities, recreational opportunities, and wider social fabric. The second part …

Review Of Visions Of Paradise: Glimpses Of Our Landscape's Legacy By John Warfield Simpson, Robert Thacker

Great Plains Quarterly

In this book's first pages, Simpson dissects its title and says his use of "glimpses" there "indicates that this is not the complete story of the landscape. Instead, it is a set of snapshots of formative forces over the past two hundred years that ... most shaped our contemporary setting." Readily conceding that "other academics provide the original scholarship" he offers here, Simpson holds nonetheless that his "snapshots synthesize that scholarship across many disciplinary boundaries to clarify and find general meaning in the landscape story .... " Simpson is as good as his word. Visions of Paradise is a lucid …

"Drainage, Drainage, Drainage" Creating Natural Disasters In Southeastern Nebraska, William Keith Guthrie

Great Plains Quarterly

In May 1950 the Little Nemaha River valley in the southeastern quadrant of Nebraska suffered a record-breaking flood. For a short time at the town of Syracuse, the Little Nemaha River, which drained a watershed of 218 square miles, had an estimated discharge of 225,000 cubic feet per second. This was larger than any flood recorded since 1928 on the Missouri River at Omaha, which drained a watershed of 322,000 square miles! During this storm and flood twenty-three people lost their lives, fourteen in the Little Nemaha Valley. As night came on, floodwaters swept a commercial bus off a highway …

Review Of Landscapes Of The New West: Gender And Geography In Contemporary Women's Writing By Krista Comer, Brigitte Georgi-Findlay

Great Plains Quarterly

Claiming the New Western History as its most enabling context, Comer's study traces the genealogy of recent female regionalist writing, locating its roots in the civil rights movement, feminism, and postmodernism. This is an obvious challenge to those who claim Western regionalism as the very antidote to postmodernism. Moreover, by including writers of color in her discussion, Comer questions the idea that Western regionalism is only a "white thing."

Through issues of gender, landscape, and geography, Comer focuses in each of her chapters on a different kind of landscape-urban, wild, erotic, national. The Great Plains do not seem to fit …

Index- Fall 2000

Great Plains Quarterly

Index

Great Plains Quarterly Fall 2000

A-Z (8 pages)

Contesting Tradition And Combating Intolerance A History Of Free Thought In Kansas, Aaron K. Ketchell

Great Plains Quarterly

Diversity is the hallmark of freethought in Kansas, for freethinkers were never a homogeneous body. The movement was not only religious, or for that matter, anti-religious, although the majority of social and political issues that it addressed had religious grounding. No one specific organized group dominated historical Kansas freethinking. Instead, individuals in the form of editors of various newspapers, journals, and book series became the landmarks by which the course of the movement's history may be most easily traced. Although the attitudes of freethinkers toward religion are the primary concern of this essay, it must be remembered that freethinkers had …

Message From The Director- Fall 2000, James Stubbendieck

Great Plains Quarterly

MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR

The Center for Great Plains Studies recently completed moving into its new building located between the south edge of the University of Nebraska campus and downtown Lincoln. For the first time in many years, all of the faculty, staff, and programs of the Center are in the same physical structure. The galleries of our Great Plains Art Collection are expanded in size and in a much more accessible location. Center office and work space are more than tripled providing many opportunities for new programs. Plains Song Review, an interdisciplinary undergraduate literary journal, will be published …

The Picture Changes Stylistic Variation In Sitting Bull's Biographies, Barbara Risch

Great Plains Quarterly

Until the 1800s Indian warriors of the Plains recorded significant heroic events from their adventures and pursuits in pictographs, on hide. Then, during the nineteenth century, these pictographs began to be produced on paper as well. About the same time that paper was coming into use, canvas and muslin became available, and the drawings that had formerly been composed on hide began to appear on these new materials. Typically, Indian men made use of discarded or captured ledgers, memorandum books, or rosters to render their exploit narratives; the representation of such events on these materials is referred to as ledger …

Great Plains Pragmatist Aaron Douglas And The Art Of Social Protest, Audrey Thompson

Great Plains Quarterly

Like most of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, its leading visual artist, Aaron Douglas, was not himself a product of Harlem.¹ Although Winold Reiss and Alain Locke were to guide Douglas in the development of his artistic vision once he arrived in Harlem, his early years in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska gave rise to both the communal values and the artistic sense of isolation that were to lead him to Harlem. It was in the black church and in Topeka's "cohesive and politically active" African-American community that Douglas first experienced black solidarity and embraced "the values of education …

Notes And News- Fall 2000

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes And News

Politics And Values On The Plains

Missouri Valley History Conference

Internet Resources On The Great Plains

Bibliography On North American Indians, For K-12

Call For Papers: "Rhetoric On The Great Plains"

Review Of Displays Of Power: Memory And Amnesia In The American Museum By Steven C. Dubin, Willard L. Boyd

Great Plains Quarterly

Displays of Power describes the movement of museums from mausoleums to centers of controversy during the period from 1969 to 1999. In his prologue and epilogue, Steven Dubin gives his general observations about the nature of this paradigm shift and the reasons for it, in essence attributing the transformation to the coming of the culture wars to museum exhibits. The younger culture warriors of the 1960s are now the older curators, educators, and exhibit designers in museums. Claiming expertness, they are the anonymous voice of power behind the museum oracle. Nowadays, however, oracles are questioned. In an increasingly democratic society, …

Review Of The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity In The Press, 1820-90 By John M. Coward, Barbara Cloud

Great Plains Quarterly

John M. Coward's study of newspapers and Native Americans could have been just another "how the press covered" description of newspaper content. Fortunately, Coward has produced an expert analysis of the complex interactions among reality, culture, and the newspapers that influenced public perceptions of Native Americans in the nineteenth century.

Using the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre, Sitting Bull, and other case studies, Coward illustrates how Native Americans were disadvantaged by the intersection of Euro-American community attitudes with the development of journalistic practices. He shows how white settlers' love-hate relationship with Indians was both reinforced and exacerbated by …

Review Of William Henry Jackson: Framing The Frontier By Douglas Waitley, Peter Bacon Hales

Great Plains Quarterly

Certain markers have traditionally distinguished the professional from the amateur historian, prominent among them a quality of skepticism about the nature of sources and the facts they might reveal. In the National Archives reading rooms, one will still see women and men opening boxes with an air of anticipation restrained by severity of manner; they may remove the yellowed diary-book from the archival case with shaking hands, but they will almost immediately subject its paper, its vellum cover, and even the handwriting within, to a certain suspicious inspection before turning to the content. At the largest and most critical level …

Review Of The Cherokees And Their Chiefs: In The Wake Of Empire By Stanley W. Hoig, Daniel Heath Justice

Great Plains Quarterly

A popular history of the Cherokees, Hoig's book recounts, through vivid prose and detailed research from Euro-American records and scholarly sources, the diverse and troubled relationships between the Cherokee people and varied agents of colonialist expansion. Those who are largely unfamiliar with the voluminous number of academic texts about the history of British/US/Cherokee interaction will find the volume quite compelling. Those looking for more contemporary research, however, or for a strong Cherokee presence among the sources chosen will find The Cherokees and Their Chiefs something of a disappointment.

Hoig's greatest strength is as a dynamic storyteller. Writing with clarity and …

Review Of Community Music In Alberta: Some Good Schoolhouse Stuff! By George W. Lyon, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly

If you have any Alberta connections, you will not be able to resist paging through this engaging, photo-full book looking for people and places you know. I found my grandfather on page 43, but still can't make out if my grandmothers are in the background of some of the other scenes.

Most of Community Music in Alberta is given over to photographs of a stunning variety of music groups from the 1880s to the present. Not only are there the fiddlers, dance bands, brass bands, pipers, CFCN and CKUA radio groups, cowboy singers (including Wilf Carter), powwow drums, little theater …

Review Of Charles M. Russell, Legacy: Printed And Published Works Of Monwna's Cowboy Artist Text By Larry Len Peterson, Martha H. Kennedy

Great Plains Quarterly

Larry L. Peterson has for many years collected art by Charles M. Russell (1865-1926) as well as printed and published works of the "cowboy artist." A native of Montana where the artist lived most of his life, Peterson is highly knowledgeable about Russell's work and has published numerous articles on the subject in Russell's West, a periodical of the C. M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. As Peterson traces examples of the printed appearances of Russell's work in varied forms, he underscores how the artist's vision of the American West was not limited in its appeal to an …

Review Of The Power Of Kiowa Song: A Collaborative Ethnography By Luke E. Lassiter, Victoria Lindsay Levine

Great Plains Quarterly

In his informative and innovative exploration of Kiowa music, Luke Lassiter focuses on intersubjective, phenomenological, and experiential aspects of Kiowa song. Employing collaborative ethnography, a method that "fully embraces dialogue in both ethnographic practice and ethnographic writing," he discloses the ways in which his own social interactions with Kiowa consultants have informed his ethnography.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, "Experience, Dialogue, and Ethnography," recounts Lassiter's early impressions of Plains Indians and the gradual transformation of his understanding. The second, "Powwows, the Gourd Dance, and Kiowa Song," offers his interpretation of the social worlds in which Kiowa …

Review Of State Of Mind: Texas Literature And Culture By T Om Pilkington, Jose E. Limon

Great Plains Quarterly

Those of us who teach college courses in Texas literature have need of a scholarly study-a critical survey-that would closely attend to its subject in a learned, critical, and theorize well-written manner; deal with this literature in an ample historical and cultural context; and the connection between literature and context in a manner that would at least gesture in the direction of recent developments in literary critical theory. Pilkington's book is superb in the first instance, disappoints in the second, and is almost wholly unresponsive in the third.

This is a clearly written, intelligent, and relatively comprehensive account of the …

The Musical Landscape Of Sinclair Ross's As For Me And My House, Philip R. Coleman-Hull

Great Plains Quarterly

In his essay "Sinclair Ross in Letters and Conversation," David Stouck recounts Ross's humble reactions to the array of criticism given to his first and most famous novel, As For Me and My House:

"You understand the [Bendeys] perhaps better than I do, or at least did when I was writing. For when I was writing I was participating and when you participate you often don't understand or see. More was coming I suppose than I knew." In this same vein he has often remarked that critical articles about the novel amaze him-discuss ions of Chopin and George Sand, …