Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, And The Making Of The Alberta-Montana Borderlands. By Sheila Mcmanus, Lissa Wadewitz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Drawing upon the writings of post-structuralists, cultural geographers, and feminist post-colonial scholars, Sheila McManus illustrates that although the West was critical to American and Canadian nation building, the late nineteenth-century Alberta-Montana border remained tenuous and challenged national consolidation on both sides of the line. Three pairs of chapters outline how Canada and the United States tried to incorporate their respective Wests into larger visions of nationhood and make the forty-ninth parallel a meaningful marker for regional residents.

The first two chapters illustrate how both governments sought to know and manage their western regions through surveys, maps and land policies. The …

"Young Poets Write What They Know" William Reed Dun Roy, Poet Of The Plains, Carrie Shipers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In a column for the Lincoln Courier, a newspaper that actively covered the city's political and artistic scenes in the mid-1890s, William Reed Dunroy writes, "Young poets write what they know; what life has taught them." If his own poetry and imaginative prose are any indication, what Dunroy himself knew best, and cared about most deeply, is the Great Plains region-its weather, landscape, and the lives of its people. Dunroy's career as a poet and a reporter began in Nebraska, and his work is most remarkable when he is writing about the place he loved.

Dunroy has not been overlooked …

Review Of Captain Lack And The Dalton Gang: The Life And Times Of A Railroad Detective By John J. Kinney, Paul T. Hietter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The evening of July 14, 1892, a train carrying a heavily-armed posse passed slowly through Adair, Indian Territory. Also on board was John J. "Captain Jack" Kinney Jr, who headed the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas {"Katy"} Railroad detectives. Their presence resulted from a tip that the Dalton gang planned to rob the Katy near Pryor Creek. Perhaps as a result of this apparent false alarm, the posse was unprepared as the train passed through Adair. It was here that the gang successfully robbed the Katy. It was also here that Kinney became "a part of history-a parenthetical person, a human …

Review Of An Opportunity Lost: The Truman Administration And The Farm Policy Debate By Virgil W. Dean, Kristin L. Ahlberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

America's second "agricultural revolution" had unintended consequences as a result of postwar prosperity. Virgil Dean offers a clear and straightforward examination of the Truman administration's attempts to devise a new farm policy and situate it within the larger context of the Fair Deal, analyzing the extent to which these attempts often complemented and challenged solutions proposed by Congress and agricultural organizations. Federal officials possessed a limited time frame during the postwar era within which to institute an agricultural program that secured fairer prices for producers, protected natural resources, minimized rural and urban conflict, and avoided the scourge of surpluses. Partisan …

Notes And News- Summer 2007

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News

Frederick C. Luebke Award

Conference Announcement

Travel Fellowships For Teachers

Call For Papers

Theodore Roosevelt Symposium

Review Of The World We Used To Live In: Remembering The Powers Of The Medicine Men By Vine Deloria Jr., Tink Tinker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This potent volume was Deloria's final gift to his readers. He completed the final editing during a stay in the hospital a few days before his passing into the spirit world of his ancestors. He had made a career out of demonstrating the greater plausibility of Indian traditions and historical memories over against the usually dismissive explanations offered by colonial white academics, missionaries, and government officials. This volume carries on that work with aplomb.

Here Deloria has collecled stories from a wide variety of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographies, stories of the wonderful accomplishments of Indian medicine men from …

Review Of Jay Cooke's Gamble: The Northern Pacific Railroad, The Sioux, And The Panic Of 1873 By M. John Lubetkin, Carroll Engelhardt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Jay Cooke's Gamble engagingly chronicles the banker's failure in financing a transcontinental railroad built through northern forests and Plains largely unsettled by Europeans. The book details how negative publicity constricted bond sales at a critical juncture. News of construction difficulties, cost overruns, and suspected chicanery spread after 1870 as the Northern Pacific edged westward from Duluth, Minnesota, to Bismarck, Dakota Territory. Survey expeditions into the Yellowstone Valley, escorted by the United States Army, sparked Lakota Sioux resistance. George Armstrong Custer's exaggerated press accounts of these skirmishes further eroded investor confidence and frightened Cooke's partners. They forced the closure of Jay …

Review Of Between Heaven And Texas Photographs By Wyman Meinzer, Roy Flukinger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Colors, textures, lines, shapes, and forms are all rich visual elements-and, perhaps, no more honestly open to discovery than in the seeming infinity of the heavens above. But if one stares at the sky uninterruptedly for a long time, things may seem to start to come unbuttoned. No matter what riches nature provides for the human eye or the camera lens, it is always important to recognize the human perspective in the process. By paying heed to the horizon line and constantly referencing the fact that one's feet (or the camera's tripod) are planted firmly upon the earth, Wyman Meinzer …

Review Of Governor Lady: The Life And Times Of Nellie Tayloe Ross By Teva J. Scheer, Jennifer Pierce

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Nellie Tayloe Ross, governor of Wyoming from January 5, 1925-January 3, 1927, was sworn into office fifteen days before Miriam Ferguson in Texas, a precedence that earned the former a lasting legacy as the nation's first woman governor. The novelty of her status and her elegant charm won Ross the attention of her contemporaries. A series of autobiographical essays titled "Governor Lady," published in 1927 by Good Housekeeping, fed the interests of an admiring public. A more recent tribute is Teva Scheer's Governor Lady: The Life of Times of Nellie Tayloe Ross. "How should history evaluate the nation's …

Review Of New Perspectives On Native North America: Cultures, Histories, And Representations Edited And With An Introduction By Sergei A. Kan And Pauline T Umer Strong, Ralph Salisbury

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Justice writes well, and I recall someone's observing once that Sigmund Freud became influential not only for his theories but for the passionate, compelling prose with which he delivered them. Justice's passages about Nanye'hi (Nancy Ward) and Tsiyu Gansini (Dragging Canoe) are good examples of this. In terms of Justice's articulating the dichotomy between the Chicamaugua (War Chief) tradition and the Beloved Path (Peace Chief) tradition, the portraits of Tsiyu Gansini and Nanye'hi are crucial. The stories of these two important Cherokee historical figures are compelling, and Justice's prose brings the stories to life.

Justice divides Cherokee literature into that …

Review Of Voices Of The American West, Volume 1: The Indian Interviews Of Eli. S. Ricker, 1903-1919 By Eli Ricker & Voices Of The American West, Volume 2: The Settler And Soldier Interviews Of Eli. S. Ricker, 1903-1919 By Eli Ricker, Mary Jane Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The ending decades of the nineteenth century brought many Americans to the realization that the people who had witnessed the creation of a new country were passing on. Historical societies, newspapers, and enthusiastic individuals began recording their own experiences and collecting biographical information and reminiscences of others. Some of these were published, others archived for posterity. The interviews conducted by Eli S. Ricker are a classic example of the process.

Ricker moved to Chadron, Nebraska, in 1885. He had various careers, but it was probably his editorship of the Chadron Times that developed his interest in Indians. By 1903 he …

Review Of Our Fire Survives The Storm: A Cherokee Literary History By Daniel Heath Justice, Paul D. Travis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"American history is false for the most part, because historians prosper by presenting a positive view. The true history of the U.S.A. is in its literature." Thus spoke an American historian, some years ago, at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Daniel Heath Justice's book brings to mind the historian's words. Justice focuses on the historical Significance of Cherokee writing, past and present. Literature and its context, that is the dualism which his book unites. This unification involves reference to historians and anthropologists of the past and reference to contemporary scholars. The recapitulation of information and theories articulated by others …

Review Of Farmers Vs. Wage Earners: Organized Labor In Kansas, 1860-1960 By R. Alton Lee, Margaret Wood

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Farmers vs. Wage Earners, R. Alton Lee seeks to uncover the hidden history of organized labor in his native state of Kansas. Historians of the sunflower state have long valorized the agricultural roots of Kansas while largely overlooking the contributions of working men and women to the region's history. In this thorough and well-researched study, Lee attempts to redress this gap in historical knowledge and trace the development of the political, cultural, and economic boundaries that came to divide farmers from wage earners. The volume admirably documents the development of this antagonistic relationship while also providing a detailed …

Review Of From Dominance To Disappearance: The Indians Of Texas And The Near Southwest, 1786-1859 By F. Todd Smith, William Meadows

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

F. Todd Smith's work provides the first detailed history of the Indians of Texas and the Near Southwest, an area encompassing parts of present day Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma over a seventy-four year period.

Foremost, it highlights the competing efforts of the Spanish, French, American, and later Texan governments to control and maintain boundaries in the region, much of which depended on the ability of colonial powers to provide trade goods to tribes, and to supply assistance in the form of protection against then-existing enemy tribes. The Spanish inability consistently to provide trade goods and the growing intercession of …

Review Of The Encyclopedia Of Saskatchewan: A Living Legacy, Patrick Brennan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Saskatchewan celebrated its centennial as a Canadian province in 2005, and the Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan resulted from the admirable desire to make a lasting commemoration of that milestone. When one considers that the project had a tortured history of chronic underfunding, and, as a result, failed to engage many in the scholarly community, the final product, flawed though it might be, is still a remarkable success.

The goal of the Encyclopedia, publisher David Gauthier informs readers in an introductory preamble, was to create "a substantial memorial to the people of Saskatchewan that highlights their achievements and provide a comprehensive …

The Militarization Of The Prairie Scrap Drives, Metaphors, And The Omaha World-Herald's 1942 "Nebraska Plan", James J. Kimble

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Some of the most unusual weapons deployed by the United States in World War II hailed from Phelps County, Nebraska. For over thirty years, two cannons had flanked the entrance to the county courthouse, serving as a memorial to the Civil War. In July 1942, county officials directed that the cannons be removed; they were again to serve as munitions in an American conflict. From Washington, President Roosevelt himself lauded the county's sacrifice and suggested that others might consider making a similar contribution to the war effort.

Not even the president was certain, of course, that the cannons would still …

The Good, The Bad, And The Ignored Immigrants In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Renee M. Laegreid

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Willa Cather's move to Nebraska as a child, the people she met there, and the seemingly endless prairie around her captured her imagination and became the inspiration for her novel O Pioneers! In this work, Cather introduces her readers to the diversity of immigrants who settled in the area around her home in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Cather's novel represents the age-old appeal of the West-hope, optimism, mystery-as well as the Janus-face dilemma of acculturation: the longing to partake in all that the new land has to offer and the reluctance to give up a rich and comforting cultural heritage.

While …

Review Of A Godly Hero: The Life Of William Jennings Bryan By Michael Kazin, Troy Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan represents the first major biography of Bryan published in almost forty years. Michael Kazin's well-written and engaging book complements Edward Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods (1997), in providing another useful corrective to the misguided yet common understanding of Bryan that emerged from popular histories of the Scopes trial. Kazin successfully illustrates why Bryan belongs in the "top rank of American leaders" of the reform era, arguing that only Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had a greater impact on politics and political culture in the …

Review Of This Is Not A Peace Pipe: Towards A Critical Indigenous Philosophy By Dale Turner. Toronto, Dennis Mcpherson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

By his own admission, Wittgenstein's famous imperative "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" can be paralyzing for Dale Turner. Turner says "I am indigenous, yet I am not an indigenous philosopher; and therefore I ought not to place myself in the privileged position of explaining the meaning of indigenous spirituality." Dale feels that "In a European philosophical context, having invoked a term like 'spirituality' [he] must then explain how this normative term is to be used in its rightful place and do so in the English language." Why must Wittgenstein's imperative be paralyzing? You cannot know what …

Review Of One West, Two Myths: A Comparative Reader Edited By Carol Higham And Robert Thacker, Keith Thor Carlson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Collectively the eight essays in One West, Two Myths provide readers with a solid introduction to the comparative approach to historical study. The forty-ninth parallel serves as the volume's focus. And though the surrounding region has had, and retains, certain social, cultural, and economic commonalities, the book clearly argues that the international border is real and meaningful-despite its geographical arbitrariness.

The lead essays, by three senior historians of the Canadian and American Great Plains (Elliot West, Donald Worster, and Gerald Freisen) provide what are essentially historiographical engagements with the region as viewed through the prisms of social geography, the myth …

Review Of Saskatchewan: A New History By Bill Waiser, Max Foran

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bill Waiser's sweeping narrative of the history of Canada's most identifiable agricultural province was published as part of Saskatchewan's centennial celebrations. Wonderfully written in an authoritative but engaging style, Waiser's "Saskatchewan" is a story of challenge where buoyant hopes and dashed dreams were acted out by generations of people whose origins and backgrounds were as diverse as the physical environment they settled.

Two dominant themes underpin Waiser's narrative. The first is the enduring presence of a rural order built around "King Wheat," one that through the years, in both good times and bad, became the focus around which Saskatchewan defined …

Review Of Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward By Charlyne Berens, Peter Longo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There is little doubt that Chuck Hagel will be remembered as one of the leading statesmen in the domestic and global political scene. Indeed, Senator Hagel should be of keen interest to students, scholars, lawmakers, and citizens in general. Charlyne Berens's Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward is therefore a timely read for concerned onlookers. Yet, as Berens illustrates, the Chuck Hagel story is more than an account of a beltway career.

Berens offers a fine journalistic account of Hagel's life, including his upbringing, and how Nebraska's political and environmental variables helped mold his character. She tells us, for example, that

in …

Title And Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 27 / Number 2 / Spring 2007

Contents

The Militarization Of The Prairie: Scrap Drives, Metaphors, And The Omaha World-Herald's 1942 "Nebraska Plan"

The Good, The Bad, And The Ignored: Immigrants In Willa Cather's 0 Pioneers!

Vengeance Without Justice, Injustice Without Retribution: The Afro-American Council's Struggle Against Racial Violence

Review Essay: Centennial Saskatchewan

Book Reviews

Notes And News

Review Of Flint Hills Cowboys: Tales Of The Tallgrass Prairie By Jame F. Hoy, Richard W. Slatta

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Jim Hoy, professor of English at Emporia State University, has ridden and written about the Flint Hills region of east-central Kansas since the 1970s. His earlier works include The Cattle Guard: Its History and Lore (1982), Prairie Poetry: Cowboy Verse of Kansas, with Vada Snider (1995), and a prequel to the present book, Cowboys and Kansas: Stories from the Tallgrass Prairie (1997). Hoy aptly describes his work as "part memoir, part history, part ethnography." Moreover, "this paean to the Flint Hills is my thanks to the land that has nurtured my life and nourished my soul."

After introducing the …

Vengeance Without Justice, Injustice Without Retribution The Afro-American Council’S Struggle Against Racial Violence, Shawn Leigh Alexander

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

wr 1 he Negro's friend has dwindled to a Smith & Wesson pistol, a Repeating Rifle, 50 rounds of ammunition for each, a good, strong nerve, a lesson in good marksmanship, and then use." That was the call from the editors of the Wichita Searchlight on January 19, 1901, just one week after the streets of Leavenworth, Kansas, witnessed the burning of Fred Alexander, a twenty-two-year-old black Spanish-American war veteran. The brutal murder of Alexander horrified many African Americans throughout the region, who decided that it was time to stand up and let their grievances be heard by argument and …

Review Of With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian And Aboriginal Relations In Colonial Canada Edited By Celia Haig-Brown And David A. Nock, C. L. Higham

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This collection of essays focuses on a specific group of Euro-Canadians: those who "recognized injustices" and "allied themselves with Aboriginal people who also saw the injustices and were actively resisting them, and worked in a variety of ways to address them." Yet the authors approach their subjects with a critical eye, realizing many of these efforts were concentrated on aboriginal peoples who missionaries thought adopted "appropriate and/or useful aspects of Christianity, European dress, and settlement into farming villages or business ventures." Additionally, the authors realize some of the actors in the book "struggle[d] to reconcile their Christian morality with their …

Review Of Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving The West Through Women's History Edited By Sarah Carter, Wendee Kubik

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West Through Women's History arose out of the same-named conference held at the University of Calgary in 2002. This edited collection brings together a broad spectrum of contributors and a variety of "modes of expression." The incorporation of region and gender is an ongoing theme; it is, as well, the "glue" that holds everything together throughout all of the articles. The major contribution of the book is the connection among gender, place, and the processes that shaped the diversity of women's experiences in the settlement of the Canadian West.

There is a broad range of articles, …

Review Of Going Indian By James Hamill, Todd Leahy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since the publication of Hazel Hertzberg's The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements (1971), scholars have struggled to understand the development of an ethnic Indian identity among the nation's Indian population. Anthropologist James Hamill's work comes as close as any to explaining how an ethnic Indian identity can supplant a tribal one. In exploring the dynamics of creating culture and identity, Hamill focuses his investigation on the state of Oklahoma, which holds over seventy distinct Indian groups. The shaping forces for identity, Hamill explains, are not broad culturally based principles, but rather shared historical experiences. As Hamill …

Review Of America's 100th Meridian: A Plains Journey Photographs And Text By Monte Hartman, David Mcmillan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Photographs come in many guises: tools of advertising, personal mementos, scientific data, reportage, self-expression. A tree can be photographed as a representative of a specific species in a field guide, a casualty of a lightning strike in a newspaper, a symbol of strength for an insurance company, or an object of beauty interpreted by an artist. Each manner of photography reflects a different relationship the photographer has to both subject matter and form. The photojournalist, for example, has an obligation to appear neutral, to be the unbiased eyewitness to the subject matter depicted, which is usually an editorial assignment. The …

Review Of A New South Dakota History Edited By Harry F. Thompson, Paula Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In some academic circles today the study of governmental units-nations or states-is passe. Race, class, and gender, categories of analysis that are "stateless," rule the discourse. That is unfortunate for the study of history. Politics and political designations matter. They shape the lives of the individuals who live within them and create or limit the possibilities for individual achievement within their borders. Herbert T. Hoover and John E. Miller, both scholars of South Dakota and its peoples, have collaborated to write portions and edit the entire anthology of substantial chapters and thoughtful essays. Harry Thompson, archivist at the Center for …