Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Lethal Legacy: Current Native Controversies In Canada By J. R. Miller, Nathalie Kermoal

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Apart from being from Western Canada, what do Louis Riel and Peter Lougheed have in common? According to J. R. Miller, the two have a shared heritage: both are Metis. Yet, in the eyes of Canadians, one is always identified as Metis while the other is not. This interesting parallel helps the author grapple with the complicated question of Native identity in the first chapter of Lethal Legacy: Current Native Controversies in Canada.

The reasons for writing a book with such a title are clearly indicated in the preface. Miller-professor of history and Canada Research Chair in Native-newcomer Relations at …

Review Of The University Of Oklahoma: A History. Volume I, 1890-1917 By David W. Levy, Patricia Loughlin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A research project fifteen years in the making, David W. Levy's first volume in a series of three on the institutional history of the University of Oklahoma invites the reader to think about the origins of higher education on the barren Southern Plains during the territorial days. Established in 1890 by the territorial legislature, the University of Oklahoma held its first classes in September 1892 with four instructors and fifty-seven students (half were women) and grew to 2,516 students, 154 faculty members (almost exclusively men) and two campuses by 1917. David Ross Boyd, the university's first president, provided stability and …

Review Of L. A. Huffman: Photographer Of The American West By Larry Len Peterson, Carl Mautz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Visual history is gaining respect as a portal to the past, and one individual who stands out in depicting life on the northern Great Plains of the American West is Laton Alton Huffman. This book is a splendid celebration of Huffman's life work, first as post photographer at Fort Keogh in 1879 where he made portraits of Indians near the end of the Indian Wars, and later as a professional photographer in Miles City, Montana, where he recorded life on the frontier, including buffalo, cattle ranching, hunting, small town life, western personalities, reservation life, and the beginning of the end …

Review Of A Western Legacy: The National Cowboy And Western Heritage Museum Foreword By Charles P. Schroeder, James D. Mclaird

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City is the subject of this inaugural volume in the University of Oklahoma Press's Western Legacies Series. The museum was the brain child of Chester Arthur Reynolds who in 1955 suggested there should be a hall of fame for cowboys. After a decade of planning and fund raising, the institution opened its doors. Now, fifty years later, the museum houses more than 30,000 historical objects and works of art. This book commemorates the museum's founding and details its history, activities, collections, and exhibits. It is a beautiful work, including eighty full-page …

Review Of General James G. Blunt: Tarnished Glory By Robert Collins, William Garrett Piston

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

James G. Blunt's name is obscure except among those who specialize in the Trans-Mississippi theater of the Civil War. In that neglected region he was a major personage in both political and military affairs. A native of Maine, an abolitionist, and a Republican, he moved to the Kansas Territory in 1856 and was an active player in the Free State cause. He became one of the most important supporters of Free State politician James H. Lane, and to a significant degree his fortunes rose or fell with those of the "Grim Chieftain." Partly due to Lane's wartime patronage, Blunt served …

Review Of Wild Prairie: A Photographer's Personal Journey By James R. Page, Larry Schwarm

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The landscape of the prairie is often overlooked in favor of more dramatic mountain ranges and wild forests, yet it is an ecosystem teaming with life and beauty. Grasslands are the backbone of our planet, but to appreciate the prairie takes time. Photographer James R. Page immersed himself in the prairie to observe and understand its vastness and subtleties, using his camera to record his vision. He shares these photographs, and thoughtfully written observations, in his US-page book, Wild Prairie: A Photographer's Personal Journey.

Early in the text, Page states that "Everything on the prairie seems either" huge or …

Review Of Chasing The Rodeo: On Wild Rides And Big Dreams, Broken Hearts And Broken Bones, And One Man's Search For The West By W. K. Stratton, Wayne S. Wooden

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Chasing the Rodeo involves one man's year-long search for himself, his father, and both the rodeo of his childhood past (during the classical period of the 1950s) and of today.

W. K. Stratton skillfully weaves what might look like disparate themes into a riveting, coherent book of introspection and renewal. In part, the book focuses on his personal chase to explore the ways of a shiftless father who left the family in the author's childhood to follow dreams of booze, bulls, and bucks. In part, it is a story of the author at midlife coming to terms with this haunt …

Notes And News- Winter 2007

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News

Call For Papers

Call For Papers

Larom Summer Institute In Western American Studies

50th Annual Missouri Valley History Conference

11th International Cather Seminar

Mormon History Association 41st Annual Meeting

Centennial Meeting Of Organization Of American Historians

Homestead Conference

Book Review: Prairie Gothic: The Story Of A West Texas Family, Paul H. Carlson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The upper West Texas area is a huge region of the southern Great Plains. Including the Rolling Plains, the South Plains, the Texas Panhandle, and more, it is, except for Amarillo and Lubbock, mostly an empty country, characterized by cattle raising and wheat and cotton growing. Big operations with extensive fields and large pastures seem to dominate the agricultural economy. Partly as a result, rural populations, except for the big cities, are in decline, railroads are shutting down, county governments are going broke, and school districts are consolidating.

Book Review: The Fred Jones Jr. Museum Of Art At The University Of Oklahoma: Selected Works, Gary Hood

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In an effort to outline the depth of the collections of the University of Oklahoma Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Selected Works is a genuine mix of many varying styles and media. After gifts of Asian art formed the beginnings of the OU art collection in the 1930s, a significant acquisition was made by founding director Oscar Jacobson in 1948 consisting of 117 American paintings from the "Advancing American Art" exhibition organized by the u.s. Department of State. Many of the works are illustrated. The paintings cover the gamut of American Modernism, including work by Georgia O'Keeffe, Romare Bearden, …

Book Review: Keeping Heart On Pine Ridge: Family Ties, Warrior Culture, Commodity Foods, Rez Dogs, And The Sacred, Harvey Markowitz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For most outsiders to South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation, the subtitle of Vic Glover's book will probably seem little more than an odd (and slightly blasphemous) melange of disassociated categories. For the Oglala Lakota residents of Pine Ridge, however, these categories are bound together by a cultural and spiritual logic embedded in their daily experiences. It is a testimony to Glover's status as a participant in and keen observer of Pine Ridge life that readers of the forty-four vignettes comprising his collection will come away with a deep appreciation of the strengths, weaknesses, tragedies, and joys that characterize this American …

Book Review: Flood Stage And Rising, Shiela Coghill

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Jane Varley's Flood Stage and Rising opens with what becomes the haunting echo of the narrative, "how far north should we go?" The "north" of the Great Plains impresses itself on Varley's consciousness immediately when she observes, "the land was flat. So flat it looked bizarre." In order to begin her PhD studies, she and her husband Gary move from one landscape (the lush greenery and hills of Virginia) to the rich diluvian river bed of Grand Forks, North Dakota. A Great Plains town that inspires tall tales, Grand Forks is built on the edge of the Red River, the …

Book Review: The Making Of A Lynching Culture: Violence And Vigilantism In Central Texas, 1836-1916, Alwyn Barr

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This Volume focuses on extralegal violence and its Causes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, The author is especially interested in the role of historical memory in sustaining the use of violence for a seven-county region in Central Texas on the edge of the Great Plains.

Great Plains Quarterly Editorial Matter, Summer 2006

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Table of Contents, Notes and News.

Review Essay: Encyclopedia Of The Great Plains, Linda M. Hasselstrom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains is a terrific soapbox for Plains historians, teachers, writers, and residents. I'm not referring only to its size-though standing on it would elevate one nicely for fervent speechmaking.
No, I mean it's the best advertisement I've seen lately for Great Plains reality. The nation's central region has been ignored, abused, misunderstood, and trampled. This collection represents the ardent efforts by the finest scholars in the country to analyze it with respect-even affection-and portray it without the romanticism that has colored too many views.

Book Review: Goodbye, Judge Lynch: The End Of A Lawless Era In Wyoming's Big Horn Basin, Stephen J. Leonard

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Goodbye, Judge Lynch, John W. Davis details two early twentieth-century murder cases and their aftermaths in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin. In 1902, Jim Gordon killed his older brother, Thomas, supposedly because Jim coveted Thomas's wife, Margaret. The jury found Jim innocent of first- and second-degree murder, but convicted him of manslaughter. Jim demanded a new trial. The second jury convicted him of first-degree murder, a capital offense. Jim's attorney appealed to the Wyoming Supreme Court arguing that conviction of a greater offense in the second trail violated the U.S. Constitution's prohibition against double jeopardy.

Book Review: 6666: Portrait Of A Texas Ranch, Luther Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a coffee-table book about a two-parcel ranch in the Plains of the Texas Panhandle owned by businesswoman and philanthropist Anne Marion. The 6666 ranch occupies 290,000 acres of Texas prairie. The informative text, which includes a foreword by Red Steagall and an afterword by Mike Gibson, the ranch foreman, contains a brief history of the ranch from its purchase in pieces in 1898 by legendary pioneer, businessman, and rancher Burk Burnett to its current stewardship by his great-granddaughter Anne Marion.

Book Review: Shadows On The Rock, Steven Trout

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As James Woodress, Willa Cather's foremost biographer, remarks, "An historical novel laid in Quebec in the seventeenth century seems an unlikely product from the pen of Willa Cather." Unlikely and unwelcome, some readers might add. Indeed, Shadows on the Rock (1931) is perhaps the most forbidding of Cather's works. Plotless, slowly paced, and indifferent to the conventions of standard historical fiction, the novel focuses on a single year in the lives of two fictional characters-Euclide Auclair, an apothecary who has left his practice in Paris for the wilds of French Canada, and Cecile, his twelve-year-old daughter. Real-life figures, such as …

Book Review: Western Subjects: Autobiographical Writing In The North American West, Larry Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Prior to the middle of the twentieth century, North American autobiography was defined largely by chronological, full-life narratives written by and about "great men." Since then, the canons of "self-lifewriting" have expanded to include not only memoir, diary, and correspondence, but also genres as far afield as autoethnography, oral tradition, and pictography. In Western Subjects: Autobiographical Writing in the North American West, editors Kathleen A. Boardman and Gioia Woods chart contemporary theoretical and critical approaches to North American autobiography in an anthology of intriguing, cogent essays that explore how autobiographers construct, communicate, and perform self in relation to its …

Book Review: Stepping Twice Into The River: Following Dakota Waters, Gary Totten

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During his year-long journey along North Dakota's Sheyenne River, Robert King travels not merely for pleasure or personal fulfillment but to share "local truth true in general," in the process discovering how North Dakota's "Nowhere" becomes "Everywhere." The book's title and controlling metaphor come from Heraclitus, who insisted that one cannot step into the same river twice. King, however, seeks to do just that, claiming that he intends to "step into the same river" as did French geograpJoseph Nicollet, who crossed the Sheyenne in the 1830s while mapping the Mississippi waterway.

Book Review: The Railroad And The State: War, Politics, And Technology In Nineteenth-Century America, James A. Ward

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Angevine's book is a thought-provoking new look at how the railroads affected the United States. Among other things, it promotes a fresh understanding of why the government took over the railways in 1917 to unsnarl traffic at eastern ports.

Book Review: Tell Me, Grandmother: Traditions, Stories, And Cultures Of Arapaho People, Loretta Fowler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Organized as a series of "imagined conversations" between Virginia Sutter and her great-grandmother Goes In Lodge (1830-76), Tell Me, Grandmother presents in alternating chapters Goes In Lodge's and Sutter's recollections of their life experiences.

Book Review: One Soldier's Story: A Memoir, Burdett A. Lewis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bob Dole's story is a familiar one, by dint of his long political career and three attempts to win the presidency. The Depression-era Kansas boy grows up in the Heartland and heads to the state university to pursue sports, academics, and ultimately a medical career. Drafted into the army, he's grievously wounded in the waning days of World War Two. After a remarkable and agonizing recovery, he enters politics and climbs the ladder to lead the Senate and come within a hairbreadth of the Oval Office.

Book Review: A Common Humanity: Kansas Populism And The Battle For Justice And Equality, 1854-1903, Jeffrey A. Johnson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Across the landscape of modern American politics, the "Populist moment," as Lawrence Goodwyn's 1976 study labeled it, has fascinated scholars. Indeed, late nineteenth-century Populism posed a vocal and effectual political voice for Gilded Age America's discontented. Since his original 1969 study, Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men, O. Gene Clanton has meticulously examined the fundamental role of Kansa, Populists in shaping local and national politics. A Common Humanity, with great efficacy, revisits and reinterprets Kansas's Populism as a fight for fundamental working-class rights and agrarian values, amidst industrialization gone awry.

Book Review: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story Of Those Who Survived The Great American Dust Bowl, Pamel Riney-Kehrberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Egan's The Worst Hard Time is a literary and journalistic treatment of the Dust Bowl's impact on the southern Great Plains. He follows the history of the region from the agricultural development of the early twentieth century through the events of the 1930s, focusing on the states of Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Book Review: Horizons West: Directing The Western From John Ford To Clint Eastwood, Joanna Hearne

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

First published in 1969, Horizons West was one of the early structuralist treatments of a Hollywood genre and a pivotal text in American writing on the Western. Borrowing from anthropological studies of myth, Kitses outlined a series of binary oppositions between the individual and the community, nature and culture, the West and the East, and wedded this thematic outline to a stylistic exploration of three directors: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, and Sam Peckinpah. The book signaled serious academic consideration of Westerns not only as a legitimate art form but also as a complex and meaningful expression of American cultural history. …

Volume 26, Number 4 Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Table of Contents, News, and Notes.

Which Place, What Story?: Cultural Discourses At The Border Of The Blackfeet Reservation And Glacier National Park, Donal Carbaugh, Lisa Rudnick

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Among every known people, places are named, and in every known place, stories are told. Yet as one place, Jerusalem, makes so abundantly clear, the meanings of the place and the variety of stories attached to it can derive from a variety of traditions and can lead in many different directions. Just as various pilgrims are drawn to some sacred places, so do all people, in all places, come to know the meanings of at least some places through names, with the stories about them capturing their deeper significance, from the sacred to the mundane. Yet for each such place, …

Book Review: At Home On This Moveable Earth, David R. Pichaske

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this third of a projected four-book memoir, William Kloefkorn examines his late high school and early college years, a time of physical growth and intellectual exploration, of redefining relationships with parents and community, and of laying the foundation for his career as a teacher, scholar, and Nebraska State Poet. Adolescence is the time for what Robert Bly aptly calls "the road of ashes," a period of metaphorical "basement work in the kitchen" (Iron John: A Book About Men). Kloefkorn's reminiscences focus on basement and earth and tedious physical exertion: excavating a foundation for the Zenda Co-op Grain …

Great Plains Quarterly Spring 2006 Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains Quarterly Spring 2006 Editorial Manner, Table of Contents, and Book Notes.