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Notes And News- Winter 1982

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

NOTES & NEWS

1982 SYMPOSIUM: "INTERSECTIONS"

DONOR OF WESTERN ART COLLECTION DIES

COLLECTION RECEIVES ADDITIONAL GIFTS

Title And Contents- Winter 1982

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

WINTER 1982 VOL. 2 NO.1

CONTENTS

AMERICAN PIONEER LANDSCAPES: AN INTRODUCTION

THE PIONEER LANDSCAPE: AN AMERICAN DREAM David Lowenthal

LEARNING TO READ THE PIONEER LANDSCAPE: BRAUDEL, ELIADE, TURNER, AND BENTON John Opie

THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE OF THE PAWNEES Richard White

TOWNS OF THE WESTERN RAILROADS John C. Hudson

PLAINS LANDSCAPES AND CHANGING VISIONS John Milton

NOTES & NEWS

American Pioneer Landscapes: An Introduction, Brian W. Blouet

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The concept of landscape is inseparable from the history and life of the Great Plains region. The idea encompasses the character of the physical environment in relation to the social, economic, and cultural changes mankind has wrought upon the land.

In the past twenty-five years, and in several apparently disparate disciplines, there has been a convergence of interest in the concept of landscape as geographers, historians, art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and folklorists have worked to produce a much broader understanding of how landscapes are imagined, represented, created, and viewed by different cultures. Geographers in particular have studied the ways …

The Cultural Landscape Of. The Pawnees, Richard White

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In June of 1871, at the Pawnee village on the Loup River, the chiefs and soldiers of the four tribes of the Pawnee Nation met in council with their Quaker agent and superintendent. The council convened in the midst of the spring ceremonies; the women had already planted the fields and the priests had performed the Young Mother Corn ritual that ended the planting cycle. As it had for centuries, the attention of the Pawnees shifted to the mixed-grass plains hundreds of miles to the west where, in the first of their semiannual hunts, they would soon seek simultaneously to …

Towns Of The Western Railroads, John C. Hudson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From Chicago it is more than twenty-two hundred miles overland to any of the great cities of the Pacific Coast. For almost a century those who made this crossing traveled by train. If they chose to watch, and most did, they saw a three-day pageant of plain, mountain, and desert as it unfolded, hour after hour, across their view from the train window. The high point of the drama might have been an early evening view of Glacier Park, a crossing of the Great salt Lake at dawn, or a midday climb over Glorieta, but the thousands who saw the …

The Pioneer Landscape: An American Dream, David Lowenthal

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

To speak of pioneers, of the pioneer character, of the pioneer spirit, instantly brings vivid impressi~ns to mind. But what and where is the pioneer landscape? No more elusive or evanescent place exists. The pioneer landscape appears here, there, almost everywhere, for only a moment early in the chronicle of any locale; then it vanishes, never to return. Only once in its history is a place a pioneer country. Other pioneering efforts may follow-the extraction of some hitherto unknown or unusable resource, the creation of some new social orderbut these efforts do not occur in pioneer landscapes or circumstances. Lindbergh …

Plains Landscapes And Changing Visions, John Milton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The plains landscape has always been a dominant factor in the lives of those people who confront it daily. Our recognition of pioneer nineteenth-century landscapes is a fusion in the mind of what we remember from early reports and visual images and our own personal vision of the land as it looks today. That concept of the pioneer landscape remains in our minds even as we respond to the contemporary landscape or through the imagination create our own. One reason, then, that pioneer landscapes are still important to us is that they have influenced our perceptions of the plains in …

Learning To Read The Pioneer Landscape: Braudel, Eliade, Turner, And Benton, John Opie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Looking at different viewpoints about the landscape of middle America is like seeing the Japanese movie Rashomon: it all depends on who is telling the story. We tend to forget, for example, that American origins are intertwined with an agricultural world view. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the United States was predominantly a nation of farmers, and to all appearances it would continue so indefinitely. (It was not until the early twentieth century that more Americans lived in cities than on farms.) The future successful course of America seemed to depend upon vast and open tracts of good …

Review Of Ho For California! Women's Overland Diaries From The Huntington Library Edited And Annotated By Sandra L. Myres, Merrill J. Mattes

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Huntington Library, located in an exclusive suburb of Pasadena, is less famous than the Rose Bowl and is probably even less wellknown than its companion, the marvelous Huntington Botanical Gardens. In the scholarly world of English literature and American history, however, the Huntington Library is distinguished for its collection of rare books and manuscripts, which place it among the foremost research libraries in the world. Included in its collections are more than 150 original manuscript diaries and letters of persons who traveled from "the States" to the Pacific Coast before the railroad revolution. From them Sandra Myres has selected …

Review Of Progressive Oklahoma: The Making Of A New Kind Of State By Danney Goble, John Braeman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

At the time of its adoption, the Oklahoma state constitution of 1907 was widely regarded as the epitome of advanced progressivism. Yet that auspicious beginning has scarcely been matched by the state's later history, in which leading motifs have been corruption, demagoguery, and control-not always unchallenged, but largely successfully maintained-by vested private interests. The virtue of the present work lies in its providing clues to explain this apparent paradox. Its defect is Goble's failure to grapple with this question-or even to recognize that a problem exists.

In part, the difficulty is a result of the book's chronological limits. Goble focuses …

The New Rural History: Defining The Parameters, Robert P. Swierenga

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the last ten years the "new social history" and its stepchild the "new urban history" have become the dominant sub field s within the history discipline; but the "new rural history" remains an orphan child with little recognized place as yet in academic curricula or historical writings.¹ Unlike urban history, which is studied as a coherent whole, aspects of rural history are usually discussed under such rubrics as the westward movement, agricultural history, land history, frontier development, Indian history, and so forth.

The implicit assumption behind this disjointed scholarly perception is that rural history is an incongruity in …

The Immigrant Church As A Symbol Of Community And Place In The Upper Midwest, Robert C. Ostergren

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There can be little doubt that the church as an institution played a major role in the organization and development of community on nineteenth-century American frontiers, especially in the Middle West. Zealous missionary activity was characteristic of American Protestantism in the nineteenth century, and a good portion of that effort was expended on midwestern frontier populations. Thus the region emerged as a locus of fierce competition between the established American denominations. In addition, the Midwest was fertile ground for the establishment of new denominations. Many who settled the region were immigrants who came directly from Europe. Their uprooting severed ties …

Index- Fall 1981

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Index (7 pages)

Fall 1981

Review Of The Kansas Beef Industry By Charles L. Wood, R. Douglas Hurt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From the mid-nineteenth century until today, the beef cattle industry has played a major role in the economic development of Kansas. Before the late 1890s, however, the harsh environment of the central Great Plains and depressed economic conditions prevented this frontier livelihood from becoming a stable beef-producing industry. Furthermore, by the late nineteenth century, the open range had disappeared, and the days when cattlemen grazed their stock on the Kansas grasslands and herded their cattle to the railhead were long in the past. With decreased mobility, cattlemen were forced to improve their managerial skills to maintain efficient beef production and …

Review Of The Explorations Of The La Verendryes In The Northern Plains, 1738-43 By G. Hubert Smith, Abraham P. Nasatir

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The La Verendrye family, father and sons, took an active part during the 1730s and 1740s in the movement of the French from Canada toward the West in the interest of the Indian fur trade, international rivalry, and the search for the Western Sea. Excellent fur traders and explorers, they moved south and west from their headquarters north of Lake Superior and pushed the line of French-Canadian posts toward the Rocky Mountains. They were the first Europeans to explore the northern plains area and to leave a record of their passage.

In 1950 the National Park Service appointed G. Hubert …

Review Of William Robinson Leigh: Western Artist By D. Duane Cummins, Robert Spence

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1979 the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art, in collaboration with the University of Oklahoma Press, published Mildred Ladner's useful study of the Montana painter Olaf C. Seltzer, one of Charlie Russell's proteges. Gilcrease director Fred Myers, in a foreword, described this venture as "a harbinger of Gilcrease participation in the maturation of American art and art awareness."

Duane Cummins's William Robinson Leigh now follows quickly as the second volume in this series and attests to the seriousness of the Gilcrease commitment-if not to the maturation of American art, then at least to the enhanced understanding and …

Title And Contents- Fall 1981

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

FALL 1981 VOL. I NO.4

CONTENTS

THE NEW RURAL HISTORY: DEFINING THE PARAMETERS Robert P. Swierenga

THE IMMIGRANT CHURCH AS A SYMBOL OF COMMUNITY AND PLACE IN THE UPPER MIDWEST Robert C. Ostergren

BEYOND THE BORDERLANDS: MEXICAN LABOR IN THE CENTRAL PLAINS, 1900-1930 Michael M. Smith

ROL VAAG, GROVE, AND PIONEERING ON THE AMERICAN AND CANADIAN PLAINS Dick Harrison

BOOK REVIEWS

Community on the American Frontier 263

The Explorations of the La Verendryes in the Northern Plains, 1738-43

Ho for California! Women's Overland Diaries from the Huntington Library

The Jews in Oklahoma

The Germans from Russia in …

Review Of The Czechs In Oklahoma By Karel D. Bicha, Bruce M. Garver

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This booklet, one of ten in the Newcomers in a New Land series, not only addresses a popular audience but offers scholars some new information and a thoughtful examination of many aspects of the Czech-American experience in Oklahoma. Recognizing the typical American reader's unfamiliarity with the history of Czechs in Europe and the United States, Karel Bicha of Marquette University devotes the first two of his nine chapters to a survey of that history. The third chapter, organized chronologically, tells how several thousand Czechs settled in Oklahoma from 1889 to 1910. Each of the next four chapters is organized topically …

Review Of Community On The American Frontier By Robert V. Hine, Robert Dykstra

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This appears to be a very "personal" book. Robert V. Hine's motive in writing it evidently stemmed not from any historiographical issuea gap in the literature, for example-but simply out of a fascination with the commune movement of the 1960s and 1970s. What was there of the true communal impulse, he asked himself, in the westward movement? His answer: not much. This apparently will surprise today's "commune people," who look to the American pioneer experience for community models. One suspects that it will surprise few historians.

But I could be wrong, and for those who find the question of interest, …

Review Of Panhandle Cowboy By John R. Erickson, Nellie Snyder Yost

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book is a valuable contribution to the history of the working cowboy and the ranches that brought him into being. The twentieth century has furnished a wealth of books, both historical and fictional, delineating the cowboy and his way of life. Most have dealt with the old-time cowboy who followed cattle up the long trails from Texas and carved out his livelihood on the open ranges of the West. Few have been written on the modern cowboy, living within fences and under vastly changed conditions.

John Erickson has provided this modern version. An excellent writer, Erickson has spiced his …

Review Of The Jews In Oklahoma By Henry J. Tobias, Moses Rischin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book is one of ten brief volumes published in the Newcomers to a New Land series. These carefully researched volumes analyze and detail the histories of ethnic groups in a state that has not been notably associated with traditions of ethnic pluralism. In Oklahoma, where even the Indians have been immigrants, Blacks, Czechs, Germans, Indians, Italians, Jews, Mexicans, Poles, and Germans from Russia are each allotted separate treatment, while the British and Irish are joined together in a single volume

. In five succinct chapters, Henry J. Tobias of the University of Oklahoma outlines the story of Jewish immigration …

Review Of The Germans From Russia In Oklahoma By Douglas Hale, Norman Saul

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This small, compact volume is one of the Newcomers to a New Land series, which describes the roles of the major ethnic groups in the settlement and development of Oklahoma. The contribution of the Germans from Russia Mennonites of Dutch and Swiss ancestry from the Ukraine and Protestant and Catholic Volga Germans-to the social and economic life of the Great Plains is now better known, thanks to the activities of many local historical societies, the publications and collections of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia based in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the efforts of veteran scholars such as Karl …

Beyond The Borderlands: Mexican Labor In The Central Plains, 1900-1930, Michael M. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The northern and central plains states, lying well beyond the Spanish borderlands and containing no great urban metropolises, have received scant attention in published studies of Mexican migration to and Mexican labor in the United States. Although this region did not attract Mexican immigrants in large numbers, compared to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado and such cities as Chicago or Detroit, there was a dramatic increase in the number of Mexican immigrants to the plains states between 1900 and 1930. These persons filled a vital, yet generally ignored, role in the economic life of the region.¹

This …

Review Of Law For The Elephant By John Phillip Reid, Stephanie E. Kalish

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Most Americans in the mid-nineteenth century lived within a society of laws. There are at least two opposed views with respect to what American attitudes and actions were like outside of such a lawful society. On the one hand, some historians have speculated that frontier life was lawless and violent. Might entailed right, according to this view. On the other hand, others have suggested that frontier life was natural and good. Americans, freed of the restraints of law, intuitively acted justly.

John Phillip Reid here examines countless diaries and letters of American emigrants on the Overland Trail at mid-century. In …

Review Of The Germans In Oklahoma By Richard C. Rohrs, Lavern Rippley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This small but competent book correctly concludes that the German experience in Oklahoma was extremely limited, primarily because the settlement of Germans there was sparse. In addition, the Germans, like most white settlers in the state, arrived only after periods of time spent in other states, notably in the Midwestern states of Nebraska, Wisconson, Iowa, and Illinois. In Oklahoma the Germans were concentrated near the center of the state in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, and Blaine counties.

One in a series of small books treating the newcomer ethnic groups to Oklahoma, this volume contains a bibliographical essay and footnotes for each of …

Review Of The Mexicans In Oklahoma By Michael M. Smith, Ralph H. Vigil

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Because so little is known about the Mexican-American population living outside the Spanish-Mexican borderlands, this short introductory survey of the Mexican experience in Oklahoma adds to our knowledge of one state's "invisible minority." The book comprises nine chapters, a bibliographical essay, and four pages of notes. An index is lacking, but the ten photos illustrating the text add to the attractiveness of the work. Sources used by the author include secondary works, interviews, census reports and other U.S. government publications, newspaper articles, and three theses.

The first chapter is a readable and interesting summary of the distant relationship between Oklahoma …

Title And Contents- Summer 1981

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains Quarterly

Summer 1981 Vol. I No.3

CONTENTS

FRIENDS AND ALLIES: THE TONKAWA INDIANS AND THE ANGLO-AMERICANS, 1823-1884 Thomas W. Dunlay

IMMIGRANT VOTERS AND THE NONPARTISAN LEAGUE IN NEBRASKA, 1917-1920 Burton W. Folsom, Jr.

AGRICULTURAL PIONEERING IN DAKOTA: A CASE STUDY Gilbert C. Fite

LAWRENCE GOODWYN AND NEBRASKA POPULISM: A REVIEW ESSAY Robert W. Cherny

BOOK REVIEWS

Comparative Frontiers: A Proposal for Studying the American West

The Great Plains: Environment and Culture

The Peace Chiefs of the Cheyennes

William H. Ashley: Enterprise and Politics in the Trans-Mississippi West

Law for the Elephant

The British and Irish in oklahoma The …

Review Of The Italians In Oklahoma By Kenny L. Brown, George E. Pozzetta

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This volume is part of a Newcomers to a New Land series design led to analyze the major ethnic groups of Oklahoma. Kenny L. Brown has studied the experience of Italians in the state and provides many interesting details on this little known topic.

Though few in number, Italians concentrated heavily in the coal mining districts of Oklahoma and contributed importantly to the communities in which they lived. As miners, they moved early into the labor unions of the coal fields and participated fully in the recurrent strikes that characterized this region in the period 1890-1925. Like their counterparts elsewhere, …

Immigrant Voters And The Nonpartisan League In Nebraska, 1917-1920, Burton W. Folsom Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Many people have wondered why socialism never came to America. Some think that life in the factories and on the farms was often so poor that Americans should have been ripe for a socialist government. Political historians have recently shown that radical movements in America had two insurmountable hurdles: strong ethnic loyalties and religious ties. During America's age of capitalist expansion, cultural divisions prevailed when waves of immigrants poured into urban factories and onto Midwestern farms. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, immigrants and natives fought intense local battles over prohibition, woman suffrage, and compulsory school laws. The economic …

Friends And Allies: The Tonkawa Indians And The Anglo-Americans, 1823-1884, Thomas W. Dunlay

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Historical models of Indian-white contact on the frontier emphasize conflict and hostility, yet historians are not unaware that whites and Indians interacted in many different ways in different regions and time periods. Even in cases of Indian-white conflict, it was not at all uncommon to find Indians fighting beside the whites against other Indians, often greatly enhancing the capabilities of the white forces. Some tribes were notable for their long-standing alliance with whites against other Indian tribes; examples include the Catawbas of South Carolina, the Pawnees of Nebraska, the Wyoming Shoshonis led by Chief Washakie, and the Crows of Montana. …