Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Book Review: Discovering Lewis And Clark From The Air, Gary Huibregtse

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When acclaimed photo historian Beaumont Newhall published the fourth edition of The History of Photography in 1964, he included (in a chapter titled "The Quest of Form") an aerial photograph, made by a Royal Air Force photographer, that showed German forces plowing up a Libyan airfield to render it useless for advancing allied forces. This strange, abstract image, consisting largely of linear plowed patterns, though by no means the first example of a photograph made from an airplane, was most likely included in this largely aesthetic tracing of the medium's history as an illustration of the visual power potently available …

Book Review: Unaffected By The Gospel: Osage Resistance To The Christian Invasion, 1673-1906: A Cultural Victory, J. Frederick Fausz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As he did in his 1992 The Osage: An Ethno-historical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains, Willard Rollings expands and enhances our understanding of that historically significant, but often neglected, Native nation in this new study of Christian missions.

Book Review: Adventures With A Texas Humanist, Steve Davis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

An Alabaman by birth, James Ward Lee is well positioned to understand a basic fallacy about Texas's image as a "western" state. Despite popular notions of cowboys, cactus, and wide-open spaces, Lee reminds us that Texas was essentially "southern" for much of its history. Up until the 1950s, cotton far exceeded cattle as a measure of the Texas economy. The literary arts followed in those economic footsteps. While "western" writers such as Larry McMurtry and J. Frank Dobie are now seen as emblematic of the state, Lee argues that "the literary heart and soul of Texas used to be located …

Book Review: Weldon Kees And The Arts At Midcentury, Stephen C. Foster

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Weldon Kees as a person, the decentralization of artistic myths, and various issues involving the demography of the arts are some of the central concerns of this essay collection. Such inquiry suggests that Kees criticism could be productively pursued in the context of individuals such as Midwestern critic Gene Swenson and might help explain why the book's comparisons of Kees with many of his New York peers ends up being unproductive.

Book Review: "We're The Light Crust Doughboys From Burrus Mill": An Oral History, Kevin Coffey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As the millennium turned, Texas's Light Crust Doughboys approached seventy years of (almost) continuous existence. A '90s rejuvenation that culminated with the first of several Grammy nominations rescued them from museum-piece status, though celebrations were tempered by the death of the band's linchpin, banjo virtuoso Smokey Montgomery, a member from 1935, who lost a long battle with leukemia in 2001.

Book Review: Red River Rising: The Anatomy Of A Flood And The Survival Of An American City, Kathryn Sweney

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Red River Rising is a gripping read with all the tension and memorable characters of a good whodunit. The tale is the story of the 1997 flood that devastated a number of towns in the Northern Great Plains. Author Ashley Shelby chose to concentrate on Grand Forks, North Dakota, "because the story of the town's demise and recovery could be the story of any American community unexpectedly destroyed and then left to pick up the pieces and rebuild." Shelby said she learned from her journalist father "that the only way to tell the story is to talk to the people …

Book Review: Magic Off Main: The Art Of Esther Warkov, Eleanor Lazare

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Beverly J. Rasporich discusses the work of one of western Canada's most intriguing artists, placing it in a contemporary art context. Warkov's art is beautifully documented, offering the reader excellent illustrations of the detail, color, and fine technical workmanship of the original pieces. Dividing the book into three main sections-"An Artist's Life," in which Warkov's early influences are considered in terms of her family, art education, and life experiences; the "Early and Middle Years"; and the artist's "Mature Work"- Rasporich discusses the intricate and detailed narratives in Warkov's creations and relates them to both surrealism and the postmodern.

Book Review: Confronting Race: Women And Indians On The Frontier, Margaret Jacobs

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this update of her 1984 book, Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1825-1915, Glenda Riley has provided a new introduction and framework for her earlier research on white women's interactions with American Indians in the American West. Riley has copiously compared 150 European-American men's documents and 150 white women's sources to gain insight into how white men and women may have viewed and interacted with Indians differently. Riley originally argued that white women "saw Indians more clearly and related to them more intimately than most men." Having read recent work that emphasizes European-American women's complicity in colonialism, she …

Book Review: The Anguish Of Snails: Native American Folklore In The West, Raymond J. Demallie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For half a century Barre Toelken has studied Native American cultures in the West. In this volume he offers a perspective on how outsiders can approach the study of Native Americans using methods developed by the discipline of folklore. In doing so he displays a rare humility, exemplified by the book's title. The structure of its shell, he tells us, records "the ongoing responses of the living snail"; over time these form patterns whose meanings can be explored. Taking the snail shell as his metaphor for culture, he proposes that just as we can learn from studying the patterns in …

Book Review: Folk Furniture Of Canada's Doukhobors, Hutterites, Mennonites And Ukrainians, Ervin Beck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Folk Furniture makes a fine coffee-table book, with its oversize format and more than one hundred gorgeous color photographs by James A. Chambers. Leafing through it is a visual feast, with otherwise humble pieces of furniture dignified by dramatic lighting that discloses the texture, line, and form of historic everyday household items. But the book is an important contribution to material cultural studies, since it not only places furniture in its cultural context but also "reads" furniture like a "text" to discover how it expresses the history, psychology, and ideology of the people who made and used it.

Book Review: Scenes Of Visionary Enchantment: Refiections On Lewis And Clark, Carolyn Gilman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Historians all across the West have looked agog on the paroxysm of popular devotion that has erupted into the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, whispering to each other in quiet moments, "What is it about Lewis and Clark?"

This is the book that will answer their question.

Review Of Hope And Dread In Montana Literature By Ken Egan Jr., Sue Hart

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While the title of this perceptive study of hope and dread in Montana literature might seem to limit his audience, Ken Egan takes care to point out that the boom-and-bust cycle so well known to his fellow Montanans and so well documented by many of the state's authors is a familiar pattern throughout the Great Plains states whose economies and lifestyles have also depended on extractive industries and agricultural pursuits.

Egan makes this clear in his discussion of Joseph Kinsey Howard's Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome (1943). Howard's book of essays, Egan says, recapitulates the trends that Hope and Dread …

Book Review: Western Lives: A Biographical History Of The American West, Richmond L. Clow

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is an eclectic collection of short biographical essays from the American West grouped from contact to1850, from 1850 to 1900, and from 1900 through the end of the twentieth century. The editor defines the American West as beginning at the Mississippi River and ending on the Pacific coast. His guidelines for each contributor were simple: "to deal with the lives of notable westerners" and "to demonstrate how each of these lives broke from the main currents of the region's history."

Book Review: Reflections On Native-Newcomer Relations: Selected Essays, Robin Jarvis Brownlie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Reflections on Native-Newcomer Relations is a compilation of essays authored by one of the most prominent Canadian historians in the field of Native-newcomer relations. It contains twelve essays written between 1988 and 2004, four of them under the heading "Policy," and the others paired under the headings "Historiography," "Methodology," "The Crown," and "Academe." There is also an introduction that places each essay in its historical context and describes how it came about. Though the criteria of selection and the collection's overall goal are not explained, the essays effectively reflect the author's range of interests and include some of his more …

Book Review: Louis Owens: Literary Reflections On His Life And Work, Kimberly Roppolo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Beginning with poet Neil Harrison's outstanding "5 Canadas," this volume is a tribute to the late Choctaw/Cherokee/Irish novelist and theorist. Kilpatrick's introduction stresses Owens's academic accomplishments - which, though cut short by his suicide in July 2002, are impressive - and situates Owens's creative and critical work, positioning him with those mixed-blood critics, who, like Gerald Vizenor, work in a nexus of postcolonialism, postmodernism, and hybrid identity on the cultural "frontier." The volume also includes the last interview with Owens, "Outside Shadow: A Conversation with Louis Owens," the first in a series he had agreed to do with author A. …

Book Review: Windmill Tales: Stories From The American Wind Power Center, Tom White

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the 1850s a Connecticut mechanic named Daniel Halladay invented a windmill that could pump water from the ground without constant human attention. As the breeze changed direction, the Halladay Standard Windmill turned to face the wind and automatically regulated its speed of operation. His invention and the refined mills that followed were literally the wheels to Euro-American settlement on the Great Plains. By pumping groundwater, they allowed people to live in areas without running streams and springs.

Some Thoughts On The 25th Anniversary Of The Great Plains Quarterly, Charles A. Braithwaite

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the Winter of 1981, Frederick C. Luebke sent out a letter to accompany the first issue of the Great Plains Quarterly. In the letter, he stated that the purpose of the new journal was to publish new discoveries and understandings about the Great Plains, and to do so in a language that would appeal to the general reader. For these reasons, Luebke felt that "persons with a lively interest in the Great Plains region will find much to attract them to the Quarterly." Twenty-four volumes later, and after publishing three-hundred and sixty-one original essays, it is safe …

Book Review: Texas Literary Outlaws: Six Writers In The Sixties And Beyond, Tom Pilkington

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Throughout much of the twentieth century, Texas literature, like that of other Great Plains states, was largely rural in setting and perspective. The period from the 1920s through the 1950s has been dubbed, by one Texas critic, the "Age of Dobie," in reference to J. Frank Dobie, once the most famous litterateur in the state. Dobie wrote about ranching, lost mines and buried treasure, and the Southwestern folk tradition, and was much admired and much imitated by other Texas writers. That began to change in the early 1960s.

Book Review: Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King Of The Tulsa Bootleggers, Suzanne Jones Crawford

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Oklahoma Tough celebrates the life and career of Wayne Padgett, a thief, fence, arsonist, wife-beater, and alleged murderer. The author, his son Ron Padgett, designed this biography as a tribute to his father, whom he sees as a daring and cunning desperado who was "an extraordinary, generous, exciting, charismatic, man." Relying heavily on interviews with his father's associates, relations, and his own childhood memories, Padgett chronicles the length and breath of his father's criminal involvement as well as the gaudy but sordid way of life of small-time gangsters and their molls.

Book Review: Harm's Way: Disasters In Western Canada, Patricia E. Roy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Anthony Rasporich says that a "sense of struggle, of painful discovery, and loss of innocence" in the face of disasters is "embedded in the Canadian consciousness" with the same sense of urgency felt south of the border but with "a different collective sense." Some essays in this collection on the Prairie West do allude to that comparison. Hugh Dempsey shows that nineteenth-century smallpox epidemics did not respect the border and weakened the ability of the Native peoples to resist European settlement. Janice Dickin's analysis of the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918-19 in Calgary, however, only suggests that Canadians and Americans …

Review Of Western Places, American Myths: How We Think About The West Edited By Gary J. Hausladen, Frances Flavin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Western Places, American Myths is a collection of twelve essays covering a broad range of topics dealing with the myths, images, and perceptions associated with the American West and the region's historical geographyincluding ranches, national parks, Native American lands, the Spanish and Mexican Southwest, women in the West, Utah's Latter Day Saints, ghost towns, gambling, and the geography of Western films.

As in many essay collections, the quality is uneven. In his acknowledgments, editor Hausladen states that "the art of editing is to ask really good writers to contribute and then let them do what they do best." That may …

Review Of Frederic Remington: The Color Of Night By Nancy K. Anderson, Suzan Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Frederic Remington: The Color of Night, organized by Nancy K. Anderson, is a handsome volume. More important, this trailblazing study amply fulfills Anderson's ambition to provide a primary "reference source" for scholars and others interested in Remington's late career, particularly his night paintings. Notable are essays by three esteemed scholars at their best: William C. Sharpe, professor of English at Barnard College; Alexander Nemerov, professor of art history at Yale; and Anderson, associate curator of American and British painting at the National Gallery of Art. Sharpe places Remington's nocturnes in the context of nineteenth-century night painting, while Anderson speculates …

Book Review: Sheheke, Mandan Indian Diplomat: The Story Of White Coyote, Thomas Jefferson, And Lewis And Clark, Joseph C. Jastrzembski

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Long before Lewis and Clark launched their journey of exploration up the Missouri, Native peoples used the river to penetrate and open the Northern Plains to settlement and trade. As a result, the American explorers came across people with sophisticated understandings of the social and geopolitical situation of the Northern Plains, people whose calculated agendas spoke to different and independent visions of the West than the vision advocated by Lewis and Clark. It was such calculation that led one man, Sheheke, or White Coyote, of the Mandan to embark on his own epic voyage of exploration down the river and …

Review Of Native North American Armor, Shields, And Fortifications By David E. Jones, Robert Fields

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

David Jones's purpose is to fill the curious gap in studies of the armor used in raids and warfare by the Native peoples of North America. Lacking iron and steel technology, Native Americans constructed their armor of "wood and bone (hard armor), leather (soft armor), and combinations of hard and soft materials."

The need for armor, Jones states in his introduction, preceded European contact, since "warfare was endemic among the North American Indians." He goes on to maintain that the superiority of European technology made Indian defeat inevitable, despite whatever improvements in armor production Indians might have made. "If Native …

Book Review: The Lewis And Clark Expedition: Then And Now, Barton H. Barbour

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

With the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition in full swing, books dealing with every aspect of the Corps of Discovery are appearing in profusion. Such a book is this one, which offers a collection of papers selected from several South Dakota history conferences spanning from 1998 to 2002. Eighteen authors have contributed articles dealing with a broad array of issues bearing upon the Corps of Discovery.

Alexandra's Dreams: "The Mightiest Of All Lovers" In Willa Cather's 'O Pioneers!', Maire Mullins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In her essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Audre Lorde writes, "There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling."l Lorde notes that women often deny the erotic within themselves because of the suspicion in which it is held by western society; she exhorts her readers to challenge the artificial dichotomy between the spiritual and the erotic and to recognize this connection in their lives. …

Book Review: The Old Iron Road: An Epic Of Rails, Roads, And The Urge To Go West, H. Roger Grant

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

David Haward Bain has written a different book. The author of the widely-acclaimed study of construction of the Central Pacific-Union Pacific, Empire Express: Building of the First Transcontinental Railroad (1999), took his wife and two children in the summer of 2000 on an extensive cross-country tour of more than 7,000 miles. His overall intention was to trace large sections of historic emigrant trails of the mid-nineteenth century that once hosted thousands of seekers after a better life. The family journey also involved following the first transcontinental rail route and the much later Lincoln Highway (U.S. 30), which at times shadowed …

Book Review: George Mcgovern: A Political Life, A Political Legacy, Jon K. Lauck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

George McGovern, the three-term South Dakota senator, transcends the two great political eras of the last half of the American century. He first succeeded in politics as an advocate of the New Deal order and Great Society liberalism. He was defeated in his 1980 reelection bid as the Reagan revolution undermined the era of Democratic dominance that began with FDR's New Deal.

Book Review: Indian Views Of The Custer Fight: A Source Book, Herman J. Viola

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Battle of the Little Big Horn, popularly known as Custer's Last Stand, retains its fascination for Custer buffs, historians, and scholars who continue to seek a satisfactory explanation of why Sioux and Cheyenne warriors were able to overwhelm the Seventh Cavalry on that fateful June day in 1876. Although the story has been told and retold with inexhaustible fascination focused on Custer and his doomed command, the Indian side of that story has been largely neglected. As Hardorff points out, scholars frequently discounted Indian testimony because of its apparent conflict with known facts and accepted theories about the battle. …

Review Of Gone To Texas: A History Of The Lone Star State By Randolph B. Campbell, Eugene Atkinson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Gone to Texas, Randolph B. Campbell has combined the best recent scholarship with thirty years of his own prodigious efforts to produce the best narrative account of Texas yet. Authoritative and engaging, a chronicle that is equal parts Spanish colonial period, revolution and republic, Civil War and Reconstruction, and twentieth-century politics, the work includes the usual cast of explorers, generals, ranchers, governors, and businessmen. It treats the standard controversies, the climactic battles, and the diverse populations that have created a complex state, if one not so unique as Texans would like to believe. It does all of this …