Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of The Chouteaus; First Family Of The Fur Trade By Stan Hoig, B. Pierre Lebeau

Great Plains Quarterly

The importance of Saint Louis French merchants in the fur trade and the expansion of the American West during the first half of the nineteenth century is little known in spite of articles and monographs from the 1930s to the 1980s by historians such as John Francis McDermott, William E. Foley, and C. David Rice. A small number of articles by different authors have appeared in journals and anthologies. Shirley Christian published Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America's Frontier in 2004, a work addressed to the general public.

Stan Hoig, …

Review Of Native America, Discovered And Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, And Manifest Destiny. By Robert J. Miller, Jenry Morsman

Great Plains Quarterly

In recent decades, scholars have reshaped our understanding of conquest, and as a result the idea of conquest is an unsettling one. Robert J. Miller's original and important work should launch a similar transformation for the idea of discovery. Associate Professor at the Lewis & Clark Law School and Chief Justice, Court of Appeals, Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde Community of Oregon, Miller persuasively argues that the principle of international law known as the Doctrine of Discovery provided the legal rationale and framework for the westward expansion of the United States. It, too, he argues, accounts for …

Review Of Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties To Contemporary Times. By Neal Mcleod, Bret Nickels

Great Plains Quarterly

Within contemporary Aboriginal discourse, there is a growing tendency to ignore the multilayered histories of various Aboriginal communities in favor of a more simplified discourse based on tribal specific nationalism. Cree Narrative Memory, an important new book, ignores this movement towards essentialism and tackles the multilayered histories of the nehiyawak (Cree People) of western Canada. The author contributes a detailed, visionary study of Cree discourse, exploring the little considered ambiguous genealogy and narrative irony of Plains Cree identity, a central factor in the book's fresh perspectives, analysis, and conclusions.

Though many books draw upon oral history and storytelling, few have …

Review Of Defamiliarizing The Aboriginal: Cultural Practices And Decolonization In Canada. By Julia V. Emberley., Laura Peers

Great Plains Quarterly

This book examines how "representational technologies," including photography and archival material, were used to establish colonial control over Aboriginal families in Canada. Case studies include a critique of photographer Mary Schaffer's images of Aboriginal people in the Rocky Mountains, an analysis of an RCMP file concerning the disappearance of an Inuit woman and children, and a discussion of prairie writer Rudy Wiebe's retelling of Yvonne Johnson's life. Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal is a subtle addition to literature on the mechanisms of cultural representation and their dynamics within colonialism, placing these issues especially well within the framework of postcolonial and feminist politics. …

Review Of Violence, The Arts, And Willa Cather. Edited By Joseph R. Urgo And Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Karsten H. Piep

Great Plains Quarterly

This compilation of twenty-three essays proves that contemporary scholarship has moved beyond trite debates about Cather's alleged propensity to romanticize violence. Accordingly, the volume's editors have assembled a series of nuanced readings that reconsider Willa Cather's artistic uses of violence as well as her appropriations of various art forms before the backdrop of World War I, modernist aesthetics, Nativism, and 1920s feminism. Approaching their subject through the lenses of biographical, historical, aesthetic, psychoanalytical, and gender criticism, the contributors paint Cather as a sometimes generous, sometimes severe critic of American culture, whose insistence on the inescapability of violence is attended by …

Review Of William F. Cody's Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows. By Robert E. Bonner, Jack R. Preston

Great Plains Quarterly

Robert Bonner's book provides wonderful insight into Cody's promotional activities outside of Madison Square Garden. The tale of his sponsorship of the Shoshone irrigation projects and the formation of the town of Cody aptly illustrates that even in the business world William Cody was still the showman promoter.

The book is very well documented, based on an abundance of correspondence found in the files of the participants of the Shoshone project. It tells how Cody, always the man in charge, badgered, cajoled, and saw things through rose-colored glasses. He used his power and "vision" on his friends and business associates …

Review Of Carol Shields And The Extra-Ordinary. Edited By Marta Dvorak And Manina Jones, Alex Ramon

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection, which emerges from papers given at the Carol Shields colloquium held at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in March 2003, ranks alongside Edward Eden and Dee Goertz's Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction (2003) as a significant addition to Shields scholarship. As its title suggests, the focus of the volume is Shields's multifarious engagement with-and subversion of-categories of "ordinariness" and "extraordinariness" in her fiction, although some of the thirteen essays address this theme rather tangentially.

Like Narrative Hunger, the collection opens with a previously unpublished essay written by Shields herself, in this case ''A View from …

Review Of Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, The Battle To Save The Buffalo, And The Birth Of The New West. By Michael Punke., Phillip Drennon Thomas

Great Plains Quarterly

Although the decline of the American bison is an often-told story, Michael Punke's meticulously researched work provides an engaging and careful delineation of George Bird Grinnell's singular role in marshaling the resources and support that led to the preservation and protection of the buffalo. -It's a story with many chapters, including the hunting and near extermination of the buffalo by hide hunters after the Civil War; the experiences of Grinnell in the lands beyond the Mississippi beginning in 1870 and his evolving interest in the region's wildlife and natural history; the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and the …

Review Of Russell Lee Photographs; Images From The Russell Lee Photograph Collection At The Center For American History. By Russell Lee, Connie Todd

Great Plains Quarterly

Russell Lee, more than any of his compadres in the Farm Security Administration (FSA), created the visual history and thus our collective memory of the Great Depression; and it is fitting that the University of Texas Press in its "Focus on American History Series" has published a long-overdue book of Lee's images from the Russell Lee photography collection at the University of Texas at Austin's Center for American History, particularly since the Art Department at UT hired Lee in the mid-1960s to be its first professor of photography.

The late John Szarkowski, legendary director of photography at the Museum of …

Review Of The Seminole Freedmen: A History. By Kevin Mulroy, Murray Wickett

Great Plains Quarterly

One is dumbstruck, upon completing Kevin Mulroy's The Seminole Freedmen: A History that it took more than thirty years after the publication of Daniel Littlefield's Africans and Seminoles: From Removal to Emancipation to bring new light to this fascinating saga of race in the Great Plains region. Mulroy's book is sure to become the definitive account of the Seminole Freedmen experience, and his interpretation challenges long- held myths concerning black,. Indian relations in the American West.

Mulroy portrays a society in which Seminole Freedmen enjoyed far greater privileges than blacks in other regions of the United States. They were able …

Review Of Reclaiming Charles Weidman (1901-1975): An American Dancer's Life And Legacy By Jonette Lancos, Ronald J. Zank

Great Plains Quarterly

Through her extensive study, Jonette Lancos rectifies the historical neglect of modern dance pioneer and Nebraska native Charles Weidman. Perhaps overshadowed by the greater attention accorded his partner and collaborator Doris Humphrey, with whom Weidman established the Humphrey-Weidman Company and School, Weidman has not been the focus of a critical biography until now. Without denying the importance of Humphrey's influence, Lancos seeks to examine other influences on Weidman's work and to explore his individual achievements.

Lancos begins with an overview of Weidman's career, framed by excerpts from his essay written as a ninth-grader in Lincoln, Nebraska. Then Weidman's family history …

Open To Horror The Great Plains Situation In Contemporary Thrillers By E. E. Knight And By Douglas Preston And Lincoln Child, A. B. Emrys

Great Plains Quarterly

From the agoraphobic prairie where the father of Willa Cather's Antonia kills himself, to the claustrophobic North Dakota town of Argus devastated by storm in Louise Erdrich's "Fleur," to Lightning Flat, the grim home of Jack Twist in Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," much Great Plains literature is situational, placing human drama in the context of historicalor contemporary setting. Isolation, fierce weather, and inherent pressures on survival remain primary, and the Plains is a character in itself that appears as a presence, whether foregrounded or ghostly, in works that cannot help but evoke the Great Plains then and now. The Plains' …

Review Of A Terrible Glory: Custer And The Little Bighorn-The Last Great Battle Of The American West By James Donovan; The Day The World Ended At Little Bighorn: A Lakota History By Joseph M. Marshall; Custerology: The Enduring Legacy Of The Indian Wars And George Armstrong Custer By Michael A. Elliott, Robert W. Larson

Great Plains Quarterly

During the last few years a number of books on the Indian wars fought in the upper Great Plains have been published. The three under review here are among the best. Donovan's A Terrible Glory, the most ambitious, is a study of epic proportions involving the life of George Armstrong Custer and his military career, starting with his rather humble birth in Ohio and ending with his death at the Little Bighorn. Donovan does more than just focus on Custer and his tumultuous years with the U.S. Army, however. His first chapter, for instance, deals with the long and …

Death, Murder, And Mayhem Stories Of Violence And Healing On The Plains, Susan Naramore Maher

Great Plains Quarterly

12,000,000 years afo: On the grassy plains of what is now northeast Nebraska, the ordinary circumstances of life buckled under the sudden, steady fall of volcanic ash, abrasive and glassy, that was the harbinger of catastrophe. An eruption much farther west in Idaho had spewed ash up into the upper atmosphere where winds carried the particles eastward. Seventeen species of prehistoric animals would meet their death near a watering hole. The smallest animals succumbed first, their lungs quickly overcome by the cutting particles; the larger animals lived on up to five weeks before the ash killed them. When the event …

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Great Plains Quarterly

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Coronado And Aesop Fable And Violence On The Sixteenth-Century Plains, Daryl W. Palmer

Great Plains Quarterly

In the spring of 1540, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led an entrada from present-day Mexico into the region we call New Mexico, where the expedition spent a violent winter among pueblo peoples. The following year, after a long march across the Great Plains, Coronado led an elite group of his men north into present-day Kansas where, among other activities, they strangled their principal Indian guide, a man they called El Turco. In the pages that follow, I focus on the events leading up to and including the execution of this Indian guide. Although Coronado, his chroniclers, and modern historians have …

Review Of The American Far West In The Twentieth Century. By Earl Pomeroy., Carl Abbott

Great Plains Quarterly

After publishing his path breaking study The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada in 1965, Earl Pomeroy embarked on the even larger task of writing a history of the American West in the twentieth century. The present volume is the result, deeply researched by Pomeroy over four decades and completed after his death in 2005 by his student and friend Richard Etulain.

The book is a fascinating mix of carefully presented details and wide-ranging topical coverage. Pomeroy expanded his "Pacific Slope" vision to include Alaska, Hawaii, the rest of the Rocky Mountain states, and …

Review Of Memory And Vision: Arts, Cultures, And Lives Of Plains Indian People. By Emma Hansen, Bill Anthes

Great Plains Quarterly

This publication-based on the award-winning reinterpretation and reinstallation in 2000 of the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming-is much more than a catalog of that institution's collections. Founded with the clothing and adornments of the Plains performers who toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, the museum has since grown with the acquisition of major private collections, and most recently by collecting the work of living Plains artists. Illustrated with color photographs of objects and archival images and illuminated by quotes from interviews, ethnographies, and oral histories, Hansen's volume surveys the cultures of Plains …

Review Of Nebraska Moments. By Donald R. Hickey, Susan A. Wunder, And John R. Wunder, Kent Blaser

Great Plains Quarterly

The original version of Nebraska Moments, authored by Don Hickey in 1992, admirably filled an important niche as an accessible, eminently readable introduction to many of the highlights of Nebraska history. Susan and John Wunder have thoroughly revised and updated this delightful book for a new generation of readers. The changes to the earlier edition are substantial, including a number of entirely new chapters. The book opens with one of them, on the ill-fated Spanish Villasur expedition, which allows the Wunders to explore the preLouisiana Purchase era of Nebraska history. All five final chapters-on the Kearney Arch, the rape …

Review Of The History Of Texas Music. By Gary Hartman, Kent Blaser

Great Plains Quarterly

Texas encompasses a uniquely wide-ranging and diverse blend of ethnic and regional cultures that have in turn fostered an amazingly rich and creative musical environment. It has arguably contributed more, in both quality and variety, to the overall development of American music than any other single state. While much has been written about specific aspects of Texas music, this book is one of the first to attempt a comprehensive treatment of the subject.

Hartman's first major theme concerns "tejana" musical traditions, the blending of Spanish/Mexican with Anglo-American music in the Southwest borderlands. Mariachi, canciones, and corridos were the foundations for …

Review Of The Prairie West As Promised Land. Edited By R. Douglas Francis And Chris Kitzan, J. William Brennan

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection of eighteen essays explores the "ways in which the Prairie West was identified as a Promised Land in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." In one variant, western Canada became a place where individuals could escape from the stresses of urban and industrial society in Europe or the United States and find a land of natural abundance, full of God's bountiful riches that would be bestowed on those worthy of living there, the "Chosen People." This imaginary construct, Doug Owram points out, was first advanced by those who lobbied successfully for Canada to acquire Rupert's Land from …

Review Of Transatlantic Voices: Interpretations Of Native North American Literatures. Edited By Elvira Pulitano, Laura Castor

Great Plains Quarterly

Transatlantic Voices represents some of the most recent critical studies of contemporary Native North American literature by fourteen European scholars. Drawing on Paul Gilroy's notion of the Atlantic as a site for cross-cultural exchange in our globalized era, editor Elvira Pulitano suggests that until now the Atlantic has not been sufficiently recognized as important for Native American studies. Transatlantic Voices seeks to fill this gap. Acutely aware of their strategic location as neither Natives nor Americans, the authors explore various kinds of "crossings": theoretical, geographical, thematic, and epistemological. Their essays present original contributions to current debates in Native North American …