Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of "Banned In Kansas: Motion Picture Censorship, 1915-1966," By Gerald R. Butters Jr., Thomas Fox Averill

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From 1915 to 1966, Kansas maintained an active film censorship board, empowered by BOOK REVIEWS 73 the legislature to review each film that might be shown in the state. The board could accept the film, remove scenes or titles (and, when pictures began to talk, objectionable language), or reject the film entirely-hence the title of Butters's book.

In 1920, the Kansas Board of Review first published its official standards. These included the positive: a film should be wholesome, and should not ridicule any religious sect or race of people. But the "shall nots" quickly asserted themselves: no debasing of morals, …

Review Of Voices From Haskell: Indian Students Between Two Worlds, 1884-1928 By Myriam Vuckovic, Michael C. Coleman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"I did not send Her there to be an Irish washerwoman," wrote the angry Indian father of a student forced to work in the Haskell school laundry in 1888. Such expressive words-especially striking to an Irish reviewer-characterize this major study of the Indian boarding school at Lawrence, Kansas. Founded in 1884, it is the only such institution to evolve into a four-year university, Haskell Indian Nations University. Myriam Vuckovic draws wonderfully well on Indian evidence: letters and other texts by students, reminiscences by ex-students, and contemporaneous correspondence by kin. Opinions of educators are not ignored either. The result is an …

Review Of Reclaiming Charles Weidman (1901-1975): An American Dancer's Life And Legacy By Jonette Lancos, Ronald J. Zank

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Through her extensive study, Jonette Lancos rectifies the historical neglect of modern dance pioneer and Nebraska native Charles Weidman. Perhaps overshadowed by the greater attention accorded his partner and collaborator Doris Humphrey, with whom Weidman established the Humphrey-Weidman Company and School, Weidman has not been the focus of a critical biography until now. Without denying the importance of Humphrey's influence, Lancos seeks to examine other influences on Weidman's work and to explore his individual achievements.

Lancos begins with an overview of Weidman's career, framed by excerpts from his essay written as a ninth-grader in Lincoln, Nebraska. Then Weidman's family history …

Review Of A Call To Action: An Introduction To Education, Philosophy, And Native North America By Curry Stephenson Malott, Malia Villegas

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In A Call to Action, Curry Stephenson Malott appeals to North American educators to acknowledge their essential role in the ongoing struggle for sustainable and ethical ways of living as humans. Malott joins a rising chorus of scholars who warn about a singular focus on the conflict between Indigenous and Western epistemologies (e.g., Glen Aikenhead's "Integrating Western and Aboriginal Sciences: Cross-Cultural Science Teaching" in Research in Science Education, 2001; Ray Barnhardt and A. O. Kawagley's "Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Alaska Native Ways of Knowing" in Anthropology and Education Quarterly 2005; and Ladislaus Semali and J. L.Kincheloe's editors' …

Review Of The Long Journey Of A Forgotten People: Metis Identities And Family Histories Edited By Ute Lischke And David T. Mcnab; The Western Metis: Profile Of A People Edited By Patrick C. Douaud, Mike Evans

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The recent publication of Long Journey and Western Metis is indicative of the burgeoning interest in Metis studies; there are a remarkable number of scholars, new and old, now publishing in the area. It seems likely that this burst of activity is related to the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Powley, 2003, S.c.c. 43 (http://www.canliLorg/en/ca/scc/ doc/2003/2003scc43/2003scc43.html) dealing with the complex issues of Metis identity and rights.

Though the impetus for the publications might be linked to a common legal event, the publications themselves are very different: The Western Metis is a collection well rooted in an …

Review Of John Steuart Curry's "Hoover And The Flood": Painting Modern History. By Charles C. Eldredge, Wendy Jean Katz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this multidimensional study of a single painting, Hoover and the Flood, art historian Charlie Eldredge asks, "Why was [John Steuart] Curry, an artist generally associated with midwestern landscape and genre subjects drawn from his Kansas upbringing, depicting a subject from the Mississippi Delta? Why was he tackling a subject of national rather than regional or simply personal consequence?" He finds answers in politics, in Curry's artistic ambitions and sense of social responsibility, and in popular and literary interest in the enduring power of the nation's rivers. The result will interest scholars of 1930s regionalism, whatever their discipline.

In …

Review Of The Cherokee Nation And The Trail Of Tears By Theda Perdue And Michael D. Green, Rowena Mcclinton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Past chief of the Cherokee Nation (1985-1995) and social activist Wilma Mankiller remarked, "We are still here." Facing rampant racism, a fraudulent treaty, and then dislocation from their homelands in the southeast, Cherokees not only survived but prevailed. Reflectively, Theda Perdue and Michael Green have summarized the complexity and cunning complicity surrounding the 1838-9 infamous Cherokee displacement known as the Trail of Tears, adding to the scholarship of Tim Garrison, Gary Moulton, Walter Conser, Mary Young, and the late William G. McLoughlin.

They juxtapose the remarkable lives of two adversarial Cherokee figures, Major Ridge (along with his son John Ridge, …

Review Of "Cather Studies 7: Willa Cather As Cultural Icon," Edited By Guy Reynolds, Susan Kress

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since its founding in 1990, Cather Studies has offered seven occasions for the publication of a volume devoted to Willa Cather scholarship. Of late, the series's editors have focused on a theme; in volume 7, editor Guy Reynolds, director of the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, offers an introduction and twenty essays by both established Cather scholars and relative newcomers relating directly or indirectly to the matter of Willa Cather as cultural icon. Several essayists provide

Several essayists provide provocative definitions of what it means to have reached the status of icon. For Elsa Nettels, "Writers become icons …

Review Of Working Girls In The West: Representations Of Wage-Earning Women. By Lindsey Mcmaster, Judy Fudge

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Lindsey McMaster provides a lively account of how the working girl was "imagined, represented, and constructed as a figure within the cultural narratives of Canada, the West, and the empire" during the period of rapid economic growth and profound social transformation from the late 1800s to the early 1920s. She examines a range of different types of textsnewspaper reports, reform and social-purity discourse, official reports on labor, women's travel accounts of Canada, and Canadian literature and poetry-for common themes and tropes. Her goal is to see how social narratives of the working girl in the West, that vast imaginary from …

Review Of The Nebraska-Kansas Act Of 1854. Edited By John R. Wunder And Joann M. Ross, Gary L. Cheatham

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the most important actions affecting the settlement of the Plains was the passage of the Nebraska-Kansas Act, which created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. In examining the passage of the bill and its aftermath, The Nebraska-Kansas Act of 1854 brings into clear focus many of the events related to this legislation. Although the law was officially called "An Act to Organize the territories of Nebraska and Kansas," it was often referred to as "the Nebraska bill."

Collectively, the eight essays in this slender volume look at the national debate over the passage of the Nebraska-Kansas Act, the …

Review Of "Mary Martin, Broadway Legend." By Ronald L. Davis, John M. Clum

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mary Martin has not been as well treated in biographies as her sometime colleague Ethel Merman, the subject of two fine books in the past year. So Ronald L. Davis's volume is a welcome addition to lore about the stars of the Golden Age of the Broadway Musical.

Ronald Davis got interested in Martin in part because of her Texas connections {she was born and raised in Weatherford, Texas}. A historian with interests in oral history and show business {he has written books on John Wayne, John Ford, and Linda Darnell}, Davis interviewed Martin before her death as well as …

Review Of "Frontier Farewell: The 18705 And The End Of The Old West," By Garrett Wilson, Ted Binnema

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

You might just want to buy two copies-one for yourself, and one for a friend. This book by a Regina lawyer turned writer tells the story of the Canadian prairie West from the arrival of the first European explorers to 1881, although most of the book deals with the period beginning in 1869, and five of the twenty-two chapters deal with the events surrounding the time that Sitting Bull and several thousand other Sioux spent in Canada. The book was obviously written with a popular audience in mind, but it makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the history of …

Review Of Inkpaduta: Dakota Leader. By Paul N. Beck, John H. Monnett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Inkpaduta, the renowned Dakota leader, has for years been viewed by history in a negative light, a savage who wantonly perpetuated the infamous Spirit Lake Massacre in 1857. Following the Dakota War in Minnesota in 1862, Inkpaduta made his way west among Nakota and finally Lakota brethren and in so doing became the scourge of the Plains, gaining a dark reputation wherever he went. Inkpaduta ended his career of resistance at the Battle of the Little Bighorn at either the age of sixty-one or seventy-six, depending on which disputed birth date one chooses.

Paul Beck has written the most complete …

Review Of The Seminole Freedmen: A History. By Kevin Mulroy, Murray Wickett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One is dumbstruck, upon completing Kevin Mulroy's The Seminole Freedmen: A History that it took more than thirty years after the publication of Daniel Littlefield's Africans and Seminoles: From Removal to Emancipation to bring new light to this fascinating saga of race in the Great Plains region. Mulroy's book is sure to become the definitive account of the Seminole Freedmen experience, and his interpretation challenges long- held myths concerning black,. Indian relations in the American West.

Mulroy portrays a society in which Seminole Freedmen enjoyed far greater privileges than blacks in other regions of the United States. They were able …

"Rejoicing In The Beauties Of Nature" The Image Of The Western Landscape During The Fur Trade, Kerry R. Oman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While traveling along the Platte River on May 18, 1834, William Marshall Anderson stopped to pick up a human skull bleaching in the prairie sunlight. Anderson was from Louisville, Kentucky, and had been sent west by his physician to accompany a fur-trade caravan to the Rocky Mountains in hopes of regaining lost physical strength. He came west not as a typical trader or trapper, but as an attentive observer. What Anderson lacked in physical strength and fortitude, he made up for with a commanding vernacular and lively imagination. Later in the day, after carrying the skull for several miles, he …

Review Of Chevato: The Story Of The Apache Warrior Who Captured Herman Lehmann. By William Chebahtah And Nancy Mcgown Minor, Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This fascinating book foregrounds the oral history of Chevato (Billy Chiwat), a Lipan Apache who in May 1870 captured eleven-yearold Herman Lehmann near Fredericksburg, Texas. Orphaned when young, Chevato joined the Mescalero Apaches, who were the ones actually responsible for the kidnapping of Herman and his brother Willie. In middle age, through the influence of the powerful Comanche Quanah Parker, Chevato became a Comanche and moved to Oklahoma where he lived until his death in 1931.

Non-Native captivity narratives, which have been a familiar part of American culture for centuries, usually focus on the crystallizing events of captivity and do …

Review Of The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories By Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Margaret Jacobs

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this fascinating, ambitious, and wellresearched book, dance scholar Jacqueline Shea Murphy analyzes three main topics. First she compares the history of U.S. and Canadian government attempts to suppress or transform Indigenous dance between the 1880s and the 1930s and charts the persistence of Native American dance in the face of such pressures. In the second section, she examines how modern dance pioneers such as Ted Shawn and Martha Graham infused modern dance with Indigenous themes. Although Shawn and Graham visited Indian peoples and observed their dance traditions, they ultimately made primitivist use of Indian materials for their own purposes …

Review Of Stricken Field: The Little Bighorn Since 1876 By Jerome A. Greene, Thomas R. Buecker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Interest in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, commonly known as Custer's Last Stand, has not abated over the last century. It is said that the only other battle in American history with more written about it is Gettysburg. True to form with other historic sites, the history of the Little Bighorn battlefield after the battle ended forms a compelling part of its total story.

Any site that holds such a prominent place in the American {and international} psyche warrants both an informative and accurate history. In Stricken Field, Jerome A. Greene, retired National Parks Service research historian, rises …

Review Of "Jazz Mavericks Of The Lone Star State." By Dave Oliphant, Jean A. Boyd

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Jazz Mavericks of the Lone Star State is a collection of sixteen essays that can be read according to interest rather than order. They cover a wide range of jazz-related topics, from important jazz musicians to important jazz discographies; Dave Oliphant is emphatic throughout about the important contributions of Texas-born jazz musicians to every phase of jazz. I have the same concern now that I did when reading Oliphant's earlier book, Texan Jazz (1996), namely that he deals less with jazz in Texas than with Texas-born jazz musicians who left the state to work in top bands. Nevertheless, this collection …

A Prairie Parable The 1933 Bates Tragedy, Bill Walser

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It was one of the more harrowing episodes of the Great Depression. Ted and Rose Bates had failed in business in Glidden, Saskatchewan, in 1932 and again on the west coast of Canada the following year. When they were subsequently turned down for relief assistance twice, first in Vancouver and then in Saskatoon, because they did not meet the local residency requirements, the couple decided to end their lives in a remote rural schoolyard, taking their eightyear- old son, Jackie, with them rather than face the shame of returning home to Glidden as a relief case. But it was only …

Review Of "Choctaw Nation: A Story Of American Indian Resurgence." By Valerie Lambert, James Taylor Carson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Choctaw Nation fits nicely into two recent trends in the development of Native American history. First, Valerie Lambert draws interpretive threads into the twenty-first century explored for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Circe Sturm's Blood Politics (2002), Donna L. Akers's Living in the Land of Death (2004), and Fay A. Yarbrough's Race and the Cherokee Nation (2008). For Lambert the past thirty years or so have comprised a renewal of the Choctaw Nation that is at the same time part of a larger "cycle of rupture and rebirth" that reaches back at least to the 1500s. Second, Lambert is …

Review Of "Charles Goodnight: Father Of The Texas Panhandle," By William T. Hagan, West Texas A&M University Hunt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In tackling Charles Goodnight, William Hagan successfully condenses an epic life story into a concise form-one of the requirements of University of Oklahoma Press's Western Biographies Series. Hagan's biography is wellpaced, smoothly written, and engaging. It's a story well told, but not a revisionist history. Even as he points out the way in which Goodnight has reached Western hero status, Hagan does not question or challenge the grand narrative of the pioneer West that provides the basis for Goodnight's iconic position.

In the course of telling Goodnight's story, however, Hagan corrects a number of legendary errors-notably that Goodnight was first …

Review Of Behind The Man: John Laurie, Ruth Gorman, And The Indian Vote In Canada. By Ruth Gorman., Laurie Meijer Drees

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ruth Gorman was a powerful person. When I encountered her in the early 1990s at her home in Calgary I was immediately impressed with her indomitable spirit. At that time she was engrossed in writing a biography of her dear friend John Laurie. Her writing task was complex, and yet she was clearly driven to complete it. The end result of her tremendous effort is Behind the Man, part biography of John Laurie, part personal memoir, and part history of midcentury Alberta and Laurie and Gorman's work advocating civil rights for Canada's Indian peoples. Frits Pannekoek and his editorial …

Review Of Willa Cather: New Facts, New Glimpses, Revisions Edited By John J. Murphy And Merrill Maguire Skaggs, John N. Swift

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 2005 Drew University's Library opened its newly developed Willa Cather Collection to a national Colloquium of Cather scholars. At the request of the Colloquium's organizer, the late Merrill Maguire Skaggs, each selected some interesting object-a manuscript fragment, an exchange of letters, an illustrationas the point of departure for further research, analysis, or speculation. Willa Cather: New Facts, New Glimpses, Revisions, a set of twenty brief essays and a meticulously annotated "Willa Cather Collection Finding Aid," is the project's result.

Unsurprisingly, the essays present a broad, disorderly range of approach and subject matter. They include few very startling discoveries: …

Review Of Women In Texas Music: Stories And Songs By Kathleen Hudson, Gail Folkins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Women musicians take center stage in Women in Texas Music, from the gender barriers they've broken as performers and artists to the growing recognition and musical territory they claim. Through a series of personal interviews, Kathleen Hudson depicts more than thirty women musicians' journeys in Texas, the Southwest, and in many cases beyond. The author's lively exchange with songwriters and performers invites readers deeper into the conversation, as if they've snuck backstage themselves to listen in.

One of the more engaging themes in Women in Texas Music is the various paths traveled by these artists, each road distinct and none …