Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Naming A Place Nicodemus, Rosamond C. Rodman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Nicodemus, one of the first all-black settlements in Kansas, and the sole remaining western town founded by and for African Americans at the end of Reconstruction, has received a good deal of scholarly attention. Yet one basic matter about it remains unclear: how the town came by its unusual name. Most scholars now think that the name of the town derives from a legendary slave rather than the biblical character.

This essay challenges that consensus, contending the name Nicodemus indeed refers to the biblical character, and in doing so exemplifies the way that the dominated disguise their speech, making it …

Review Of Forging An American Identity: The Art Of William Ranney: With A Catalogue Of His Works. By Linda Bantel And Peter H. Hassrick, Kenneth Haltman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since the appearance of Francis S. Grubar's William Ranney, Painter of the Early West, a catalogue raisonne published to accompany the artist's 1962 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Ranney's reputation has revolved around the thirty-odd images of western trappers, hunters, and pioneers he worked up in New York {and later in an impressive two-story studio he kept across the river in West Hoboken} during the 1840s and early 1850s, at least in part from sketches dating to the time of his enlistment as a soldier in the Texan war for independence more than a decade earlier. The …

Review Of Writing The Trail: Five Women's Frontier Narratives By Deborah Lawrence, Sherry Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This slim volume offers literary analysis of five nineteenth-century women's narratives of their travels to and experiences in the American West. The central themes of the book are that women's narratives differed from men's, and, that in the course of their western experiences, these women shed traditional roles dictated by a patriarchal society and realized new possibilities for self-identity. Western historians, particularly those who have studied women's history, will find little new here. But if this book brings such material to the attention of other students and scholars, then it is clearly worthwhile.

Deborah Lawrence focuses her attention on Susan …

Review Of Contact Zones: Aboriginal And Settler Women In Canada's Colonial Past Edited By Katie Pickles And Myra Rutherdale, Anne Gagnon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The articles grouped in Contact Zones examine the racial, class, and gender power relations that developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English Canada in the spaces where contact between colonizers and colonized occurred. The repercussions of contact were far greater for Aboriginals since the balance of power between the two groups was rarely even and "[t]he process of 'forming a community' in the new land necessarily meant 'unforming' or re-forming the communities that existed already" (Ania Loomba, Colonialism/ Postcolonialism. 1998, #Z). Missionaries, government officials, and settlers attempted to transform Aboriginal women by imposing metropolitan ideals of domesticity, sexuality, and work. …

Review Of Saskatchewan: The Luminous Landscape By Courtney Milne, Terry Graff

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Saskatchewan: The Luminous Landscape is a compelling photographic anthology of the diverse and complex topography of the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan. Published to commemorate Saskatchewan's centenary in 2006, this handsome coffee-table book comprises 225 sumptuous full-color photographs by the internationally acclaimed master photographer Courtney Milne. Six chapters of stunningly beautiful imagery, combined with personal commentary, chronicle Milne's intimate relationship to his home place, which extends back to his childhood growing up on the bank of the South Saskatchewan River.

For Milne, landscape photography has served as a sustaining inspiration in a remarkable photographic and writing career that has taken …

Review Of Cather Studies 6: History, Memory, And War Edited By Steven Trout, Margaret Doane

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Steven Trout's engrossing History, Memory, and War, volume 6 of the acclaimed Cather Studies series, is a collection of essays showing how pervasively war appears in Cather's works: the "sheer number of armed conflicts evoked in her fiction is perhaps unprecedented in American literature." Trout's wide-ranging volume shows "the ubiquity of armed conflict . . . as a major theme or as a background feature in Cather's writing" as well as showing that she personally "thought of war on a regular basis."

The collection includes essays by fourteen Cather scholars and moves from the Civil War through World War …

Review Of The Force Of Vocation, By Adele Wiseman, Leslie Ianno

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Adele Wiseman's literary career began with the publication of her acclaimed first novel, The Sacrifice, in 1956. Public success and scholarly praise of the novel were followed by the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. Though Wiseman continued to write plays, fiction, memoirs, and essays throughout her career, she never again enjoyed the success of her earliest novel. In The Force of Vocation, the first booklength study of Wiseman's work, Ruth Panofsky attempts to account for the rise and fall of this Jewish Canadian woman of letters.

Responding to the lack of attention to the publishing side of …

Review Of John Graves, Writer Edited By Mark Busby And Terrell Dixon, Pete Gunter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A geographical accident, Texas lumps together High Plains and Gulf tropics, western deserts and eastern bayous. The writings of John Graves (chiefly known for Goodbye to a River) mirror these incompatibles, relentlessly probing their transitions and significance, including their human significance. His is a perpetually thoughtful prose.

The first section of John Graves, Writer contains discussions with friends and associates plus a long interview. The second is a "festschrift" celebrating his life and writings. An essay on his relations with Texas Monthly magazine appears here, backed up by a second essay on this topic in the next section, which …

Review Of Texas Women On The Cattle Trails. Edited By Sara R. Massey, Judy Alter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It's been almost twenty years since Patricia Limerick debunked myths of the Old West and forced us to look at the role of women, Native Americans, and minorities in the American West. But if the new history brought women to prominence, it was as stoic homemakers in difficult, almost impossible circumstances. We see them walking patiently beside wagon trains, collecting buffalo chips for fuel, hoeing rock-hard ground for a vegetable garden, but never on cattle drives, never on horseback. Men-Anglo men-drove those cattle north. This book demonstrates that many women in the Great Plains, specifically Texas, did indeed work and …

Review Of In The Days Of Our Grandmothers: A Reader In Aboriginal Women's History In Canada Edited By Mary-Ellen Keim And Lorna Townsend, Gillian Poulter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This collection of articles published since the early 1990s makes a welcome contribution to the range of texts available for both Native Studies and Women's Studies courses at the upper and graduate leveL In an excellent short introductory essay, Mary-Ellen KeIrn and Lorna Townsend provide a useful historiographic context for the collection and explain their desire to bring Aboriginal women "out of the shadows" by choosing essays that reflect contemporary scholarship and illustrate the diversity of Aboriginal women's histories. They take contributor Jean Barman at her word in turning the past on its head and making Aboriginal women rather than …

Table Of Contents- Winter 2008

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 28 / Number 1 / Winter 2008

THE PAGEANT OF PAHA SAPA: AN ORIGIN MYTH OF WHITE SETTLEMENT IN THE AMERICAN WEST

U.S. INDIAN POLICY, 1865-1890: AS ILLUMINATED THROUGH THE LIVES OF CHARLES A. EASTMAN AND ELAINE GOODALE EASTMAN

NAMING A PLACE NICODEMUS

REVIEW ESSAY: THE PERSISTENCE OF POPULAR MEMORY: THE CINEMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of "Injuns!": Native Americans In The Movies By Edward Buscombe Killing The Indian Maiden: Images Of Native American Women In Film. By M. Elise Marubbio, S. Elizabeth Bird

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

THE PERSISTENCE OF POPULAR MEMORY: THE CINEMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

These two books, while having significant subject matter in common, are very different in style. Buscombe's small volume serves as an effective review of much that has already been written about cinematic representation of "Injuns," offering some useful new interpretations, but apparently not primarily with a scholarly audience in mind. Marubbio's book is very much a specialized work of scholarship, with a much narrower focus, being essentially the first full-length treatment of the cinematic representation of Native American women.

Buscombe is known for his works in film criticism, …

Review Of Taking Charge: Native American Self-Determination And Federal Indian Policy, 1975-1993 By George Pierre Castile., Larry Burt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Taking Charge George Pierre Castile extends his earlier work, To Show Heart: Native American Self-Determination and Federal Indian Policy, 1960-1975 (1998), and carries the story of federal Indian policy through the presidency of George H. W. Bush. Castile begins with how President Jimmy Carter's efforts to streamline federal government bureaucracy led to the creation of a new office, Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs. Carter continued self-determination, but his delegating nearly all Indian matters disappointed most Indians. Issues given most attention involved land and fishing claims, the claims of several eastern tribes for federal recognition, and the …

Review Of By His Own Hand?: The Mysterious Death Of Meriwether Lewis Edited By John D. W. Guice, Robert Carriker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It was at the 1994 Western History Association (WHA) meeting that Dr. John Guice, then teaching at the University of Southern Mississippi, launched his campaign to clear Meriwether Lewis of the stigma of suicide and prove that a terrible murder had taken place at Grinder's Stand in the early morning hours of October 11, 1809. Guice titled his session "A Reconsideration," and he came armed with more complex evidence than had been earlier gathered by Vardis Fisher in 1962 or by Richard Dillon in 1965. But the testimony was all one sided. Co-presenting with Guice was James E. Starrs, a …

Review Of 900 Miles From Nowhere: Voices From The Homestead Frontier. By Steven R. Kinsella, Thomas Isern

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Steven R. Kinsella's work is an uneasy admixture. On the one hand it is fresh, because it goes to the grassroots, sampling the writings of settlers up and down the Plains. On the other it's stale, stereotypical. The documents, stirring as individual pieces, are arranged into categories and schema as predictable as they are questionable.

Plains pioneers were, the title says, 900 miles from nowhere. They were "sturdy and determined people" who battled a "harsh, inhospitable landscape," a place of "loneliness and homesickness." The "constant roar" of the wind "drove some settlers mad" on a day-today basis, while the "troublesome …

Review Of War Dance At Fort Marion: Plains Indian War Prisoners. By Brad D. Lookingbill, Michael Jordan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Fort Marion in San Augustine, Florida, 'may seem far removed from the Great Plains, but as Brad Lookingbill ably demonstrates the events that transpired there between 1875 and 1878 form an important chapter in the history of several Plains Indian communities. In April 1875, thirty-three Cheyenne, twenty-seven Kiowa, nine Comanche, two Arapaho, and one Caddo prisoners departed Fort Sill, Indian Territory, destined for imprisonment in Florida. Captain Richard Henry Pratt, a staunch proponent of forced Indian assimilation, was placed in charge of them. At Fort Marion he implemented a regimen designed to erase any vestiges of the prisoners' Indian identities …

Notes And News- Winter 2008

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

SYMPOSIUM ON THE AMERICAN INDIAN

CALL FOR PAPERS

VISITING SCHOLARS PROGRAM

CALL FOR PAPERS

CALL FOR PAPERS

U.S. Indian Policy, 1865-1890 As Illuminated Through The Lives Of Charles A. Eastman And Elaine Goodale Eastman, Gretchen Cassel Eick

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Rapid change, passionate convictions, acute regional differences, ethnic conflict, and an army looking for a mission characterized the United States from 1865 to 1890. The Civil War was over and most of the soldiers had mustered out and gone home. The others were assigned either to the South to oversee reconstruction or, the larger number of them, to the area between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains-the Great Plains. The U.S. Army's new mission was to "pacify" the Great Plains, to protect the thousands of migrants enticed there by Congress's offer through the Homestead Act of 160 acres-free, contingent upon …

Review Of Katherine Anne Porter: The Life Of An Artist By Darlene Harbour Unrue, Thomas Austenfeld

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In contradistinction to earlier biographies- Joan Givner's groundbreaking work (1982, second edition 1991), Thomas Walsh's narrowly focused book on Porter and Mexico (1992), and Janis Stout's account of Porter's intellectual growth (1995)-this book provides primarily a fact-filled narrative of an artist's life shaped into elegant prose. Engaging and readable, Unrue's book documents her subject's entire life, but it is exceptionally strong and informative on the early childhood years notoriously difficult to research. In particular, Porter's religious formation and the disaster of her first marriage have never before been so well documented. Her youth in Texas and her brief but important …

Deadwood And The English Language, Brad Benz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In "The New Language of the Old West," Deadwood's creator and executive producer David Milch offers an extended exposition of the television show's language:

Language-both obscene and complicated- was one of the few resources of society that was available to these people .... It's very well documented that the obscenity of the West was striking, but the obscenity of mining camps was unbelievable, and there was a reason for that which had to do with the very fundamental quality of their behavior. They were raping the land. They weren't growing anything. They weren't respecting the cycles of nature. They …

Review Of Elias Cornelius Boudinot: A Life On The Cherokee Border By James W. Parins, Brad Agnew

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Few Native Americans are more enigmatic than Elias Cornelius Boudinot, a nineteenth century Cherokee mixed-blood who championed policies opposed by most members of his tribe. The motivation of this complex individual whose actions undercut tribal sovereignty continues to intrigue those familiar with his life. James Parins, professor of English and associate director of the Sequoyah Research Center at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, traces the life of Boudinot and explores influences that shaped his character in a well written and carefully researched biography.

Controversy, a continuing theme in Boudinot's life, swirled around the interracial marriage of his parents in …

Review Of The Life And Times Of The Steamboat Red Cloud, Or, How Merchants, Mounties, And The Missouri Transformed The West By Annalies Corbin, Ken Robison

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From St. Louis to Fort Benton, the Missouri River served as a natural highway into the vast North American West. The Life and Times of the Steamboat Red Cloud extends our understanding of the upper Missouri during the decisive period of settlement and trade in the steamboat era from 1859 to the arrival of railroads in the mid- 1880s. This important book views the development of the American and Canadian Rockies from a maritime perspective.

Journalist-historian Joel Overholser earlier emphasized the importance of the Canadian trade to Fort Benton. Corbin develops that theme through the great St. Louis-Fort Benton trading …

Review Of Next Year Country: Dust To Dust In Western Kansas, 1890-1940 By Craig Miner, Brian Cannon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this delightful book, historian Craig Miner of Wichita State University narrates the history of western Kansas, a sixty-county region lying west of Highway 81. Written as a sequel to his 1986 West of Wichita: Settling the High Plains of Kansas, 1865-1890, this volume traces the area's history up to 1940. Constructing a richly detailed, lively, and thoroughly engaging narrative, Miner draws on extensive research in thirty-five local newspapers and over twenty manuscript collections in the Kansas State Historical Society.

Newspaper reporters and editors were some of the most trenchant observers of life in their communities. But they often …

Review Of From Syria To Seminole: Memoir Of A High Plains Merchant By Ed Aryain, Philip Kayal

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

My uncles on my mother's side were peddlers. I often wondered how they managed this with no English skills, only a few dependable institutions, and a scattered number of informal commercial ties. From Syria to Seminole finally answers that question. Though a specialist on Arab-Americans, this is the second book I have reviewed on Syrians in the Plains and Southwest, and again I learned a great deal.

Literature on Arab-Americans is divided into two historical periods. Works written before 1975 were about the early, turn of the twentieth-century emigrants from Syria and Lebanon. Later on the field expanded to emigrants …

Review Of The Louisiana Purchase And American Expansion, 1803-1898 Edited By Sanford Levinson And Bartholomew H. Sparrow, Raymond D. Screws

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Editors Sanford Levinson and Bartholomew H. Sparrow are unequivocal about their book's mission: to use the territory of Louisiana, hence, much of the Great Plains, as a catalyst to study United States expansionism, particularly in regards to expansion's constitutionality.

With one exception, these essays were first presented at a symposium at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003 by scholars representing such diverse fields as constitutional law, history, sociology, government, and political science. Besides the editors' wonderful introduction, which clearly explains that the purchase of Louisiana served as an example for further American expansion during the nineteenth century, there …

Review Of Getting Away With Murder On The Texas Frontier: Notorious Killings And Celebrated Trials By Bill Neal, Paul N. Spellman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Courthouses are supposed to be temples of justice, places where disputes are peaceably resolved by reliance on reason, logic, and law, places where violent crimes are punished-not perpetrated." So begins one of Bill Neal's chapters, a reasonable definition of the American seat of jurisprudence. But not so, the author quickly reminds his reader, at least not on the Texas frontier of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only was there little resolution in a West Texas courtroom beyond a hung jury or a mismanaged trial and a killer set free, but often that room became the site of …

Introduction: From The Weight Of Gold To The Weight Of History In Hbo's Deadwood, David Holmberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the opening scene of the first episode of HBO's critically acclaimed historical drama Deadwood, an ordinary gold miner, Ellsworth (Jim Beaver), walks into the Gem Saloon, owned by Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), and proclaims: "I may 'a fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand before you today, beholden to no human cocksuckers. And workin' a payin' fuckin' gold claim." Ellsworth has established a gold claim in the Black Hills of the future South Dakota, and his proclamation of autonomy flows from the power and freedom gold delivers, even in the lawless town of Deadwood. …

Review Of Becoming Western: Stories Of Culture And Identity In The Cowboy State By Liza J. Nicholas, Eric J. Sandeen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Becoming Western presents representative moments in the development of Wyoming, among these the waging of the Johnson County War, the development of dude ranches, the memorialization of Buffalo Bill in his eponymous town site, the founding of an academic program at the University of Wyoming, and a campaign for state-wide office in the late 1970s. Along the way, we meet the writers, entrepreneurs, and artists one would expect to see in a cultural history of Wyoming. We see few of the contemporary scholars and critics, however, whose nuanced handling of the same material might have cautioned Liza Nicholas against the …

Review Of A Northern Cheyenne Album Photographs By Thomas B. Marquis. Edited By Margot Liberty, Jerry Mader

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When my copy of A Northern Cheyenne Album arrived, I was immediately taken back to a day more than thirty years ago when John Wooden legs handed a dirty shoebox filled with 497 negatives to me and Tom Weist and said, "Will you take care of these? I don't know what to do with old pictures." The collection, made by Thomas B. Marquis between 1926 and 1935, came to John as a gift for the Cheyenne people from Marquis's daughters. Soon thereafter it became my privilege to restore the collection for the Northern Cheyenne Research and Human Development Association. Over …

Review Of Sculpture From The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery Edited By Karen O. Janovy, Joan M. Marter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The sculpture collection that is the subject of this book is worthy of priority consideration. This is a truly remarkable holding of major artists of the twentieth century. Although certain sculptors are missing from its stellar list, the overall quality of the works makes the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska a major center for the study of modern sculpture in the Great Plains. The visitor will find representative examples of Alexander Calder's sculptural innovations, a remarkable painted steel giant by Mark di Suvero, and a powerful outdoor sculpture in cor ten steel by Richard Serra. The …