Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Portraits Of Community: African American Photography In Texas By Alan Govenar, Melissa Rachleff

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries photography grew in popularity and accessibility. Better technology in film and processing, which made the medium more economical and easier for the amateur to execute, proved photography to be both a creative and enterprising activity appealing to an ambitious middle class. African Americans were among those who took up the camera, traversing rural communities in the developing South in search of steady work. The more successful photographers set up studios in towns and cities, basing their practice on portraiture and commemorative photography. Alan Govenar's Portraits of Community: African American Photography in Texas …

Review Of Plain Pictures: Images Of The American Prairie By Joni L. Kinsey, Joan Carpenter-Troccoli

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Plain Pictures, Joni Kinsey argues that the depiction of the Plains and prairies has been a matter of accommodation from the time that Euro-American artists first ventured into the West. The prairie's lack of trees, natural and man-made landmarks, and high places from which to view the landscape made it an almost impossible subject for early nineteenthcentury painters. They introduced compositional elements and stylistic conventions into their prairie pictures to make them conform to generally accepted notions of beauty, even as they struggled to find pictorial forms appropriate to the Plains' undifferentiated spaces and low horizons. This process …

Review Of One Nation Under God: The Triumph Of The Native American Church Compiled And Edited By Huston Smith And Reuben Snake, Christopher Vecsey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1990 the United States Supreme Court made "what some consider the most infamous ruling in its history" in the case of Employment Division of Oregon v. Smith. Alfred Leo Smith, a Klamath member of the Native American Church, had been fired from his job for ingesting peyote-the sacramental substance at the core of his religious faith, but a controlled substance in the eyes of drug prevention officials. The Supreme Court upheld the State's right to interfere with peyotists' freedom of religion even without proving a "compelling state interest" to do so. Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion called individual religious …

Review Of Desegregating Texas Schools: Eisenhower, Shivers, And The Crisis At Mansfield High By Robyn Duff-Ladino, William H. Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The author's thesis is that the school desegregation "crisis at Mansfield marked a significant milestone on the pathway to equality in the United States." She builds her argument through a painstaking reconstruction of the national, state, and local circumstances surrounding the failed attempt to integrate the Mansfield, Texas, high school in August 1956.

Nationally, the Supreme Court had issued its Brown desegregation ruling two years earlier, and President Dwight Eisenhower maintained his moderate attitude toward involving the federal executive in desegregation. In Texas, Governor Allan Shivers was determined to cripple desegregation. Shivers's powerful support of Eisenhower in 1952, which helped …

Review Of Bring Back The Buffalo!: A Sustainable Future For America's Great Plains By Ernest Callenbach, Ken Zontek

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"This book attempts to make a constructive contribution," writes Ernest Callenbach in Bring Back the Buffalo! The author hopes his work will assist in an unprecedented transformation of the Great Plains from "net-energy negative agriculture" to "net-energy-positive agriculture" that will produce a sustainable future for the area currently suffering from population loss, reliance on government subsidies, corporate consolidation of family farms, and environmental degradation. Such change remains contingent upon bison and wind power. Callenbach presents his argument in three parts. First, he recounts the remarkable productivity achieved on the bison-rich Plains prior to Euro-American intervention and its subsequent alteration. The …

Women Writing About Farm Women, Becky Faber

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I spent the first sixteen years of my life on Iowa farms. We lived in rural Adair County, Iowa, in an area that was remote, quietly tucked about halfway between Des Moines and Omaha. All I knew was rural life. My parents were farmers, my grandparents were farmers, and most of my uncles and aunts were farmers. The farm determined many elements of my life. We raised much of our own food, butchered our own beef and pork, raised chickens for eggs and meat, milked cows and sold the cream, wore clothes that defined our tasks such as overalls and …

A Cultural Duet Zitkala Ša And The Sun Dance Opera, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1913 Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala Ša, 1876-1938) collaborated with local Duchesne, Utah, music teacher William F. Hanson to produce and stage a spectacle that combined the musical style of operetta, a melodramatic love triangle, and traditional Plains Indian ritual. In regional performances, The Sun Dance Opera provided a stage for Bonnin and other Native American singers and dancers to participate in rituals whose practice was forbidden by the United States government. Twenty-five years later, just months after Bonnin's death in 1938, the opera was selected and presented by the New York Opera Guild as opera of the year.

The …

The Corporate Farming Debate In The Post -World War Ii Midwest, Jon Lauck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ben Hogan balanced a mix of milk cows, corn, soybeans, sheep, and turkeys, avoided borrowing too much, invented his own machinery, and maintained an orderly farm, keeping his fences "horse high, bull strong and hog tight." Above all, he worked hard: "He worked and never slowed. He bulled his way through the house before sunrise each morning, growling to his sons to get out of bed and do the chores." He motivated the sons, who worked as hard as he did, by telling them "You're the laziest damned rednecks I ever laid eyes on. You're the weakest goddamned mollycoddles I …

Sexuality, Gender, And Identity In Great Plains History And Myth, Peter Boag

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Within just the last few years there has been an explosion in the interest in, and the publication of, gay and lesbian studies. One of the most vibrant fields in the discipline of history today is the history of sexuality. But with all the effort expended in this area of scholarship, there has not been much of an attempt to integrate gay, lesbian, and sexual history into regional history and regionalism. This essay is an attempt to introduce regional history to sexual history. It takes as its subject "non-heterosexuals" and tries to make sense of their history within the context …

Review Of Yellow Woman And A Beauty Of The Spirit: Essays On Native American Life Today By Leslie Marmon Silko, Alanna Kathleen Brown

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit is a surprising pastiche of Leslie Marmon Silko's non-fiction. The work offers the reader a diverse range in the quality of thought, substance, and polish. As she, herself, notes: "As a child, I loved to draw and cut paper and paste things together. ... " This essay collection is an example of just that. Although subtitled Essays on Native American Life Today, the book is less a discussion of pan-Indian concerns than it is a reflection on Leslie Marmon Silko's processes as a writer, her need to have outsiders understand the …

Review Of The Devil Knows How To Ride: The True Story Of William Clarke Quantrill And His Confederate Raiders By Edward E. Leslie, James E. Sherow

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Edward E. Leslie has written a provocative book about one of the most notorious characters of the American Civil War. He has certainly achieved his goal of offering "an anecdotal history of William Clarke Quantrill, the guerrilla band he led, the enemies he fought, and the war they waged on the KansasMissouri border." This is one of the fullest treatments of Quantrill yet. Leslie's research is impressive; and he does an admirable job of shredding past myths about his subject. The first four chapters cover the ground of "Bleeding Kansas," a time when this "quiet schoolteacher" from Ohio came to …

Review Of Sod And Stubble: The Unabridged And Annotated Edition By John Ise, Craig Miner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Sod and Stubble is a classic of Kansas and western history. It ranks with Giants in the Earth and O Pioneers! in readability and memorability, but has the added feature of being an only slightly fictionalized version of the reality of the lives of the author's parents in Osborne County, Kansas. Filled with striking stories, it is only a question of whether one is moved most by the baby dying after Rosie scalds her nipples, the drama of the grasshopper invasion, Henry's slow death by cancer and Rosie's tender goodbye, her farewell to the farm and to childbearing, or the …

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 (through 2013)

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 …

Carnival And Ceremony At Wright Morris's Lone Tree Hotel, Reginald Dyck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Gordon Boyd, a central character in Morris's Ceremony in Lone Tree, is a self-fashioning failure at American dreaming. He presents himself this way: "In the middle of life, Morgenstern Boyd had everything to live for, everything worth living for having eluded him. He was that rare thing, a completely selfunmade man." Failed writer among other failures, Boyd in many ways contrasts with, and is defined by, his friend and nemesis Walter McKee, a man who "like Babbitt, keeps faith; he does not question anything, especially his own life. " Set in the 1950s Midwest culture of respectability, Ceremony in …

Review Of Unionizing The1ungles: Labor And Community In The Twentieth-Century Meatpacking Industry Edited By Shelton Stromquist And Marvin Bergman, Laura Lacasa

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Hacking through meatpacking's mass production jungle, historians Shelton Stromquist and Marvin Bergman gather nine essays addressing twentieth-century Midwestern unionization and its impact on industrial and social relations within and beyond factory walls.

The work details the historical struggles inherent to the meatpacking labor movement. Racial, gender, and ideological differences, compounded by guarantees that all workers benefit equally from union membership, have been the most serious traditional obstacles to uniting employees. Wilson Warren's essay, for instance, argues that whites in the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) declined initiating anti-discrimination programs after World War II intentionally to limit African American advancement.

Review Of Custer And The Cheyennes: George Armstrong Custer's Winter Campaign On The Southern Plains By Louis Kraft, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Few western figures have received the attention George Armstrong Custer has. Since his death in 1876, his name and fame have alternately been attacked and defended by writers. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, Louis Kraft's recent monograph falls into the latter camp. As Volume Five of the Custer Trail Series, Custer and the Cheyennes incorporates alternating points-of-view of both whites and natives, using extensive quotes to let the actors speak for themselves. In this manner, Kraft presents a chronological narrative of Custer's frontier beginnings on the Southern Plains of Kansas, Texas, and Indian Territory (Oklahoma) against the …

Review Of Journal Of An Expedition To The Grand Prairies Of The Missouri 1840 By William Fairholme, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

William Fairholme (1819-1868), a twenty-year-old Lieutenant of the British army, and six fellow officers shared a sporting expedition to hunt buffalo on the Kansas Plains in the summer and fall of 1840. They made one of only five parties to travel the Santa Fe Trail that year, its lowest incidence between 1822 and 1843. Fairholme's journal, therefore, provides an important record of the Great Plains for the year 1840 from a British officer's perspective, particularly in its vivid descriptions of cities and towns between lower Canada and the Missouri settlements.

Fairholme tells us a lot about traveling in the 1840s. …

Review Of Chief Red Fox Is Dead: A History Of Native Americans Since 1945 By James J. Rawls, James H. Cox

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the second chapter of God Is Red: A Native View of Religion(1973), Vine Deloria Jr. notes the dominant culture's persistent consumption of either villianized or romanticized images of Native Americans present in disputed histories such as The Memoirs of Chief Red Fox (1971). In Chief Red Fox Is Dead: A History of Native Americans Since 1945, James J. Rawls writes for primarily non-Indian readers who accept images such as Chief Red Fox as authentic representations of Native America and, therefore, "who may have some difficulty accepting Indians as contemporary beings." Rawls intends to reveal the falsity of …

Review Of Lost Bird Of Wounded Knee: Spirit Of The Lakota By Renee Sansom Flood, Joe Starita

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Most writers would be hard pressed to encounter a better story line, a deeper, richer vein of raw material, than the one in Sansom Flood's book: a baby girl miraculously found alive beneath the frozen corpse of her Lakota mother four days after the massacre at Wounded Knee; adopted as a "souvenir" of the battle by a brigadier general, later the assistant US attorney general, who initially ignored her, then sexually abused her, and finally disowned her; raised by a doting mother, a tireless, world-famous suffragist, who steadfastly refused to abandon either her deeply troubled Indian daughter or her philandering, …

Review Of Re-Imagining The Modern American West: A Century Of Fiction, History, And Art. By Richard W. Etulain, Stacey Short

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Retrospectives on the twentieth century are becoming more and more common the closer we get to this century's close. The task of summing up an entire century's worth of ideas and art is daunting, to say the least, and while many of the works that attempt the task fall short, Richard Etulain's Re-Imagining the Modern American West manages to be comprehensive and inclusive, as well as fascinating. The book's quality and scope are not surprising: Etulain, director of the Center for the American West at the University of New Mexico, is well-known through his numerous studies of the American West …

Review Of Wild Bill Hickok: The Man And His Myth By Joseph G. Rosa, Thomas Dunlay

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

James Butler Hickok, better known as Wild Bill, became one of the great representative mythological figures of the American West in his own lifetime and remains so today, well over a hundred years after his death. Some decades ago Joseph G. Rosa wrote the definitive biography of the famous gunfighter and peace officer. His present book, not so much a biography as an examination of the myths that have grown up around the man, compares the different facets of the legendary Hickok with the facts so far as they are known.

Hickok first gained fame for his exploits as a …

Review Of The Prairie Winnows Out Its Own: The West River Country Of South Dakota In The Years Of Depression And Dust By Paula M. Nelson, Jean Choate

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a story of a dream that died. Between 1900 and 1915 over one-hundred thousand people moved into western South Dakota, the area west of the Missouri River, hoping to settle the land and develop it so that it would become a thriving area of small farms and prosperous communities.

These settlers-farmers, ranchers, storekeepers, bankers, doctors, and lawyers-were pounded and buffeted by adversity, not once but three times in three separate periods. They faced a severe drought in 1910 and 19l1. Many settlers left then but those who stayed believed that "next year" things would be better. Encouraged by …

Review Of Views From Fort Battleford: Constructed Visions Of An Anglo-Canadian West By Walter Hildebrandt, J.R. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Walter Hildebrandt, a former Parks Canada historian, explains that his interest in telling the story of the Battleford area in west-central Saskatchewan originated in the unease he felt beginning work with the federal agency in the 1970s at its tendency to diminish the role of aboriginal groups and valorize non-Native "pioneers," such as the mounted police, at the Fort Battleford historic site. Views from Fort Battleford provides a case study of the way in which public history, especially at historic sites, is contested terrain on which different groups vie to have their story told, or sometimes to have it dominate …

Notes And News- Winter 1998

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Frederick C. Luebke Award

West River History

Western Literature In The Canadian Rockies

Defining The Prairies

Francophones In Western Canada

The American West, Promise And Prospect

Manuscripts For The Millennium

Manuscripts On The Indian Wars

Errata

Review Of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers: A Ledgerbook History Of Coups And Combat By Jean Afton, David Fridtjof Halaas, Andrew E. Masich, With Richard N. Ellis, James Briscoe

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On 11 July 1869, the Fifth Cavalry attacked and destroyed Tall Bull's camp at Summit Springs, Colorado. A ledger book of Cheyenne drawings found in the village depicts a number of Cheyenne Dog Soldier exploits during the 1860s. The book passed from one of the troopers to a railroad surveyor named Ira LaMunyon. In 1903 LaMunyon donated the book, as part of his personal library and collections, to the Colorado Historical and Natural History Society, where it remained, mostly unnoticed, for the next ninety years.

Jean Afton, wife of LaMunyon's great grandson, took an interest in the ledger book and …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 Rooted In The Land: Essays On Community And Place Edited By William Vitek And Wes Jackson, Tisha Gilreath-Mullen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Let me begin by stating that Rooted in the Land is not an anthology that deals exclusively with the Great Plains. It includes new and previously published essays dealing with a sense of place and community in states as far away from the Plains as Massachusetts, Vermont, and Kentucky. Nevertheless, as a work of environmental literature, Rooted in the Land should serve Great Plains scholars as an exemplary text, offering a variety of perspectives on dealing with the environmental impact of a consumptive society.

William Vitek and Wes Jackson are clear in their volume's goals: first, to address the assumption …

Review Of Women Of The First Nations: Power, Wisdom, And Strength Edited By Christine Miller And Patricia Chuchryk, With Maria Smallface Marule, Brenda Manyfingers, And Cheryl Deering, Jo-Ann Archibald

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book fulfills one of two purposes emerging from the first National Symposium on Aboriginal Women of Canada: Past, Present, and Future, held in 1989 at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta: to bring together a collection of talks-as oral texts-and academic papers about various aspects of Aboriginal women's lives written by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women. Even though Aboriginal women point out the importance of traditional teachings about land, family, and community, they also raise economic, academic, social, and identity issues that spring from traditional and colonial frameworks. Emma LaRocque says it better:

Weare being asked to confront some of our …

Review Of Homicide, Race, And Justice In The American West, 1880-1920 By Clare V. Mckanna Jr, Lawrence Larsen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Clare McKanna concludes in Homicide, Race, and Justice in the American West that based on homicide statistics the West was more violent than the East. As defined by coroners, "homicide" means any killing of one human being by another not clearly identified as accidental. For comparative purposes, McKanna has rigorously and meticulously researched homicide records for what he considers three representative counties: urban Douglas, of which Omaha is the county seat, in Nebraska, and the rural mining counties of Las Animas in Colorado and Gila in Arizona.

Western homicides occurred for a wide variety of reasons, ranging all the …

Review Of The Buffalo Hunters By Charles M. Robinson Iii, Ken Zontek

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bison history captures the American imagination. Robinson capitalizes on this interest here with an entertaining narrative about buffalo hunters. The book begins with a synopsis of Native American bison hunting practices both before and after the acquisition of the horse, an animal whose impact dramatically transformed and increased indigenous dependence on the buffalo. The author moves on to address the role Native Americans played in supplying bison beef to British-Canadian fur companies and buffalo robes to their American counterparts. The story then quickly moves on to Euro-American sport hunting which reached its heyday with the completion of the transcontinental railroad. …