Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Tom Benton And His Drawings: A Biographical Essay And A Collection Of His Sketches, Studies, And Mural Cartoons, Richard W. Etulain

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This volume, which reproduces about two hundred of Thomas Hart Benton's more than two thousand works, is a valuable scholarly study as well as a handsomely produced book about one of the modern West's most significant artists. As such, it avoids the major limitation of many recent works on western art in which academic excellence is sacrificed to the larger-and less notable-aim of producing a visually appealing book with sales potential.

Navitism Or Not? Perceptions Of British Investments In Kansas, 1882-1901, Larry A. Mcfarlane

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A recurring topic in the historiography of Populism has been the extent to which the Populists and other agrarian radicals were nativist or anti..Semitic in the tenor of some of their reforms. In this article I trace the progress of legislation intended to restrict or eliminate absentee ownership of Kansas lands by aliens, particularly British landlords, from the first demand for such restriction in 1882 through the enactment of restrictive legislation in 1891 to its repeal in 1901. I parallel this study by following the currents of anti..alien rhetoric of the agrarian radicals who advocated the restrictions. While it is …

On The Nature Of The Horse Of The American West In Nineteenth Century Art, Martin E. Petersen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In nineteenth century America the horse was identified with the frontier and served as an image of independence and unrestrained freedom. Western travelers published in their diaries and journals accounts of sighting mustangs, the wild horses of the prairies. Washington Irving's vivid descriptions in his Tour on the Prairirs (1835) were among the earliest. In painting, literature's sister art, however, images of the western horse do not correspond with the written descriptions of the livestock that actually inhabited the area. The artists, rather, painted the ideal Arahian horse, a recognizable type developed throughout the century. The Arahian, considered the oldest …

The Transition From Farming To Ranching In The Kansas Flint Hills, Joseph V. Hickey, Charels E. Webb

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For more than a century the Flint Hills have been a stronghold of the livestock industry, an area of Kansas devoted almost exclusively to the feeding and breeding of cattle. One of the last large segments of tall grass prairie that once stretched from Canada to Texas and from Kansas to Indiana, the Flint Hills region covers some five thousand square miles of rolling hills and narrow valleys in east central Kansas. The Flint Hills embrace all or parts of thirteen counties: Butler, Chase, Chautauqua, Cowley, Elk, Geary, Greenwood, Lyon, Marion, Morris, Pottawatomie, Riley and Wabaunsee (fig. 1).¹

Cities Of The Prairie Revisited: The Closing Of The Metropolitan Frontier, John C. Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In a series of highly-regarded publications during the early 1970s, Daniel Elazar selected ten medium-sized communities he believed were representative of urban America, placed them in a broad historical context, and examined their ability to respond politically to the changes and problems confronting them in the years between World War II and the Kennedy administration. Elazar now returns to those same communities (predominantly in Illinois) and picks up the story where he left off, carrying it down through the Great Society, Vietnam, and Nixon's New Federalism.

At Home On The Range: Essays On The History Of Western Social And Domestic Life., Glenda Riley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John Wunder has performed a service to those interested in the social side of western life by bringing these useful and interesting essays together. Part of the Contributions in American History series, this volume contains perspectives on agricultural history that range from the analytical to first-person observation.

The Plains Indians Of The Twentieth Century., Thomas F. Schilz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Peter Iverson's The Plains Indians of the Twentieth Century is an attempt to document some of contemporary Plains Indian life. Iverson's collaborators include a number of well-known writers on Indian history and social issues, but their contributions are drawn from previously published works rather than being written for this anthology.

Nature In Don Segundo Sombra And The Virginian, John Donahue

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Environment and culture shape human beings, both as individuals and as societies. In all the vast plains of the Americas where a cattle industry developed, a human type evolved a distinct way of life: the gaucho in Argentina, the charro in Mexico, the llanero in Venezuela, the guaso in Chile, and the cowboy in the United States and Canada. ¹ Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an Argentine intellectual who was an avid reader of James Fenimore Cooper, was perhaps the first to state clearly in regard to the Americas that wherever a similar combination of geographical features occurs, parallel customs and occupations …

Notes & News (Great Plains Quarterly 7:1, Winter 1987)

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Eleventh annual conference 18-20 March 1987 on "Women's Culture in the Great Plains."

Enron Art Foundation has donated its Maximilian-Bodmer Collection to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska

CANPLAINS Data Base indexes all prairie relevant articles from over 140 periodicals

Montana Archaeological Society invites all interested readers to subscribe to Archaeology in Montana

1985 Don D. Walker award for the best article on western literature or culture has been presented to Roger Stein

1985 Robert Heizer award to Waldo Wedel and Douglas Parks

Review Of Indian Education In Canada: Volume 1: The Legacy, Dana Lawrence

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This eight-essay volume offers a historical and regional overview of Indian education in Canada and deals largely with very specific examples of the types of education provided to Canada's Indian people up to the decade of the 1970s. Of note, the essays are mostly written by non-Indian authors, although all appear to be knowledgeable about their topics.

Early Fur Trade On The Northern Plains: Canadian Traders Among The Mandan And Hidatsa Indians, 1738-1818., James A. Hanson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The permanent villages of farming Indians on the Upper Missouri were a central focus for trade in prehistoric times. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, both French and Spanish traders had reach ed the area, and by the early nineteenth century, the Mandan- Hidatsa villages had come to be a Parisian entrepot for the buffalo hunting tribes, the St. Louis and Canadian traders, and the artists and explorers of young America. While the drive up the Missouri from St. Louis is well documented, Wood and Thiessen have unveiled for us an exciting story of the important and early Canadian …

Trails South: The Wagon-Road Economy In The Dodge City-Panhandle Region, Richard L. Lane

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Dodge City-Panhandle Region, as C. Robert Haywood defines it, encompassed a "ragged, imprecise triangle" with its base in the upper panhandle of Texas and its apex at Dodge City. Haywood persuasively argues that for two formative decades-1868 to 1888-this region was unified not only by "common physiographical and demographical characteristics" but by an economic interdependence that transcended state and territorial boundary lines. As a market, shipping point, and source of supply, Dodge City was the effective, if not political, capital of the region. Such remote and diverse locations as Tascosa, Texas, and Fort Supply, Oklahoma, were linked to Dodge …

Plains Indian Cultures: An Introduction, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In March 1986 more than 200 scholars and other participants came to a symposium entitled "Plains Indian Cultures: Past and Present Meanings." The six articles that follow represent a cross section of the conference. Two separate volumes of conference papers, on international perspectives and on policy issues, are to be published later. We thank Vernon Snow and the Snow Foundation for supporting all of these publications.

In The Land Of Th Indian Woslata: Plains Indian Influences On Reservation Whites, Timothy J. Kloberdanz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

If one climbs the high grassy hill that overlooks the town of Fort Yates on the Standing Rock Reservation in south-central North Dakota, the scene that gradually unfolds is an engaging one. Fort Yates is bordered on practically all sides by the expansive waters of Lake Oahe. Except for the fact that the community resembles a veritable island, it looks much like other Great Plains towns, with an assortment of generously spaced old and new structures. From the top of the hill to the north, one can sec for miles across the lake and the Missouri River to the rolling …

The Assault On Assimilation: John Collier And The Origins Of Indian Policy Reform, Henry E. Fritz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

About one quarter of this book is devoted to John Collier's interest in various kinds of social experiments before he discovered the American Indian. One learns a great deal about Collier's family background and his association with Mabel Dodge, Stella Atwood, Tony Luhan, Dr. John R. Haynes, and D. H. Lawrence. No additional research will be needed in reference to these aspects of Collier's reform impulse and orientation.

Plains Indian Sculpture: A Traditional Art From America's Heartland., George P. Horse Capture

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Many years ago as the beauty and importance of Plains Indian art and history became more essential to my life, I felt the impact of Dr. Ewers long before finally meeting him and his wonderful wife, Marge, in Cody at a Plains Indian seminar fish-fry. We soon made friends and this relationship endures to this day. Knowing of this upcoming work and the extensive research Dr. Ewers devoted to the relatively little-known topic of Plains Indian miniature sculpture, I am elated with this latest publication by a master of the field.

Solomon D. Butcher: Photographing The American Dream., Joanne Jacobson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John E. Carter has collected Solomon D. Butcher's photographs of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rural and small town Nebraska life in the most sharply detailed reproductions and the most generous format yet available. Cataloging the physical and social environment of farm families and ranchers, objects of work and leisure, the construction of prairie sod houses, the arrival of technology and urbane civilization on the frontier, Butcher's work provides an irreplaceable record of the establishment of white culture on the Plains.

After The Buffalo Were Gone: The Louis Warren Hill, Sr., Collection Of Indian Art., Richard W. Etulain

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This catalogue of the Louis W. Hill Collection of Indian art and crafts, evenly divided between the Museum of the Plains Indians in Browning, Montana, and the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, makes available to specialists and general readers a visual portrait of a notable collection. While nearly 170 of the book's 256 pages consist of brief descriptions alongside black-and-white illustrations of items contained in the Hill collection, the volume also includes an account of Louis W. Hill, Glacier Park, and the gathering of the Hill collection by Ann T. Walton; a very brief essay by noted ethnologist …

Review Of N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural And Literary Background By Matthias Schubnell, Kenneth C. Mason

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Despite the fact that Momaday's individual books have received a good deal of attention in the form of critical essays, this is the first book-length treatment of his work. It is a happy circumstance, then, for Momaday and for scholars of Native American literature, that Schubnell has written such a broad, penetrating, and extensively researched study. This book will doubtless be the standard Momaday critical text for some time to come.

Foreign Investment In The American And Canadian West, 1870-1914: An Annotated Bibliography, Larry A. Mcfarlane

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Anne Ostrye, head of reference in the William Coe Library at the University of Wyoming, has compiled a useful annotated bibliography of foreign investment in the North American West. This region includes the tier of states from Texas through the Dakotas and westward to the Pacific (with some information from farther east) and those provinces from Manitoba through British Columbia, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories. The foreign investments identified are primarily British, although some Dutch, French, and German ventures are also noted (and after 1900 American investments in Canada).

Time And Vision In Wright Morris's Photographs Of Nebraska, Joanne Jacobson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Wright Morris is better known as a writer than as a photographer, but his photographs of Nebraska deserve more attention than they have received. Morris's work in the 1930s never achieved the fame of the Farm Security Administration photographs. And he himself cut short his photographic work of the 1940s when he and his publishers became frustrated with the expense and the aesthetic strain of his early books' photo-text format. But Morris's images of a premodern Nebraska, taken from the 1930s to the early 1950s, form an impressive body of work that is especially acute for its rendering of a …

Harvest Of Grief: The Grasshopper Plagues And Public Assistance In Minnesota, 1873-78, Gary D. Olson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From 1873 to 1878 there occurred one of the worst economic depressions in this country. The western frontier also experienced a second calamity that, with cruel irony, recurred each year for the duration of the depression. This calamity, the grasshopper infestation, is the subject of this book. The author has focused her attention upon the "grasshopper plagues and public assistance in Minnesota" from 1873-1878. It is her purpose to study "the response to the plagues personally, locally, and at the state and national levels" in order to understand attitudes, and to examine the relationship between farm people and their government. …

Tribal Dispossession And The Ottawa Indian University Fraud., Thomas Burnell Colbert

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The story is complex with many actors-- white missionaries, church officials, land speculators, town boosters, government officials, and Ottawa Indian leaders from opposing factions. Good intentions are mixed with deceit. And in the final chapter, there is neither a happy nor a tragic ending, only a belated settlement. William E. Unrah and H. Craig Miner, two highly capable historians at Wichita State University, have produced this case study of the chicanery associated with the creation of Ottawa University in Ottawa, Kansas. They expose how the desire of Baptist missionaries to create a college for Ottawa Indians became entangled with land …

Climate Of The Great Plains Region Of The United States, Norman J. Rosenberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The climate of the Great Plains is extreme and variable. A wide range of weather conditions can occur within the period of a day, from one day to the next, from season to season, and from year to year. There are two key reasons for this situation: (1) the greatest portion of the Plains is remote from any major body of water and (2) air masses of differing characteristics alternate frequently in their dominance of the region.

Farm Consolidation In The Northern And Central States Of The Great Plains, Bradley H. Baltensperger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the past half century, American agriculture has been revolutionized and rural America has been dramatically transformed. The industrial revolution had arrived in American agriculture in the 1840s when machines and animal power began replacing some hand tools wielded by humans. But not until the 1930s, when petroleum-driven machines rapidly displaced both animal and human power, did this revolution intensify sufficiently to have significant impacts on rural life and farm numbers. Since that time, reliance on farm-produced inputs-fertilizer, seed, energy-has given way to dependence on purchased factors of production. The commercial aspects of farming have nearly obliterated the subsistence components. …

Adobe Walls: The History And Archeology Of The 1874 Trading Post, Anne M. Wolley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

With the ever increasing public interest in archaeology, especially in historic archaeology, books such as this one are in great demand. Adobe Walls is a good example of how historic archaeology should be done and how it can be presented to the general public as well as to the academic community. The format of the book allows the general reader to become involved in the history of the Adobe Walls Trading Post as well as the actual archaeological work that took place at the site. At the same time the book provides concise information useful to other historians and archaeologists.

Prohibition And The Kansas Progressive Example, Patrick G. O'Brien

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Wets and drys freely exchanged epithets as Kansas began the twentieth century. They agreed only upon the fact of mass violations of prohibition. Kansas was dry in law and had local option in reality; and cities like Wichita, Kansas City, and Leavenworth had open saloons that conducted business on main streets in full public view. Kansas had a vast amount of "wet" territory, but estimates varied on exactly how much. One report of the Kansas Temperance Union stated that two thirds of the 129 cities and towns surveyed in 1900 ignored prohibition laws.¹

Review Of The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism., Paul Comeau

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism is a valuable and compelling addition to Cather criticism. Working from the late eighteenth century definition of romanticism-the process whereby the creative imagination locates meaning in the material world-Susan Rosowski demonstrates convincingly how the central tenets of romanticism informed the progress of Willa Cather's artistic vision as exemplified both in individual works and in the pattern of her canon. Accordingly, the possibility of discovering value in external objects is addressed in the optimistic early novels, of which Alexander's Bridge constitutes a romantic allegory of creativity, The Song of the Lark, Cather's Prelude, and A …

Notes And News For Vol.7 No.3

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

No abstract provided.

Review Of Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, Patricia L. Yongue

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I remain unconvinced that Willa Cather led even the emotional life of a lesbian. Cather, I think, communicates a sympathy for heterosexuality, an increasing remoteness from sexuality altogether, and a valuing of woman "unnatural" because "unAmerican." Cather early suspected-and regretted-that her intimidating reserve about sexuality, moderated by Victorian and Southern gender polity, prohibited the flowering of intimacy. Instead of the risky intimacies, Cather sought what an intellectually strong but sexually reticent woman might seek: stimulating or "useful" friendships-with women and with men. Her major characters repeat the pattern. They experience intense excitements; often they transform obvious sexual emotion into other …