Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Book Review: Cities On The Plains: The Evolution Of Urban Kansas, James E. Sherow

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains geographer James R. Shortridge has added another soundly researched study to his impressive list of works. He asks some rather simple questions, and, like all simple questions, they demand elaborated, intelligent answers. Shortridge first asks what caused some urban dreamers to realize their goals and others not. Second, he delves into how the current hierarchy of cities emerged in Kansas. Why and how, for example, did Wichita arise as a regional powerhouse when at the same time other cities failed to become dominant even though they may have been better situated at one time? Or, why isn't there …

Review Of Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite The American West Edited By Linda M. Hasselstrom, Douglas Werden

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This wonderful collection of prose and poetry rewrites the West first by focusing on community, not on the individual, and second by using the works of one hundred and fifty-three women writers. These short pieces-all under five pages-are primarily positive snapshots with an emotional core and devotional quality demanding reflection, which makes them best read intermittently.

The diverse communities evoked are what will keep you reading: a group of Quaker women who make a quilt for a PhD student wrestling with her dissertation; Hutterite women and their cooperative life in a malecentered society; the sheriff who stapled notices for a …

Review Of The Fate Of The Corps: What Became Of The Lewis And Clark Explorers After The Expedition By Larry E. Morris, Roger Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book is yet another result of the Lewis and Clark mania that has swept across much of the West and through the scholarly publishing community with interests in that region. It approaches the topic from an unexplored angle by looking at what members of the expedition did after their 1806 return to St. Louis. To do so, Larry Morris tries to focus on what he describes as "fascinating events" rather than merely giving the reader a string of mini-biographies. This approach allows him to range widely in time and place as he follows events in people's lives. At the …

"Her Heritage Is Helpful": Race, Ethnicity, And Gender In The Politicization Of Ladonna Harris, Sarah Eppler Janda

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"What is it like to live in a tent?" asked Robert Kennedy's five-year-old daughter, Kerry, when she met LaDonna Harris for the first time in 1965. LaDonna assured her that Indians no longer lived in "tents" and Kerry's mother, Ethel, jokingly told LaDonna not to disillusion the child. LaDonna insisted that she wanted Kerry to have an accurate understanding of what Indians were like, to which Kerry responded by asking if she shot a bow and arrow. The exchange speaks volumes about the ignorance through which mainstream society viewed Native Americans, and mirrored many of Harris's other experiences with the …

"Men Alone Cannot Settle A Country": Domesticating Nature In The Kansas-Nebraska Grasslands, Chad Montrie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

W h e n she traveled to Kansas from New York in November 1875 to join a husband who had gone west six months earlier, Sarah Anthony faced bitter disappointment. Her daughter, who made the journey as well, remembered that her mother often cried during the first few months. "[T]hese pioneer women [were] so suddenly transplanted from homes of comfort in the eastern states," wrote the daughter, "to these bare, treeless, wind swept, sun scorched prairies - with no conveniences - no comforts, not even a familiar face. Everything was so strange and so different from the life they had …

Gendering The Frontier In O. E. Rölvaag's Giants In The Earth, John Muthyala

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Translated from the Norwegian into English, O. E. Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth narrates the saga of pioneer life on the American prairies. It is a saga that has the sanction of official ideology and the authority of a religious edict: to go on an "errand into the wilderness," explore and subdue the frontier, which was the "basic conditioning factor" of American experience, and, in so doing, cultivate a new civilization. Indeed, it is hard not to read the novel as dramatizing the power of Turner's frontier thesis because it seems to unabashedly affirm the frontier as the great American …

Book Review: Finding Lewis And Clark: Old Trails, New Directions, David Bernstein

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the introduction to Finding Lewis and Clark, co-editor James Rhonda articulates four questions that drive this collection of essays: what is the story of the legendary expedition from 1803-1806 all about?; who were the actors in this drama?; which moments shaped the journey?; and what were the consequences of Lewis and Clark's march across the continent? While aspects of the first three questions inspire such varied pieces as William Foley's biography of William Clark and a description of Joseph Mussulman's online "hyperhistory" of the expedition, it is in responding to the final question that this collection finds the …

Book Review: Rock Beneath The Sand: Country Churches In Texas, William E. Montgomery

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On the southern apron of the Great Plains, in McLennan and surrounding counties in Central Texas, a handful of country churches stand as relics of a long-ago time of family farms, tiny crossroads towns, and dynamic ethnic and racial diversity. Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Cumberland Presbyterian, Church of Christ, Evangelical, and Catholic congregations provided spiritual and worldly comfort for white, old-stock settlers who arrived before the Civil War, African Americans who came as slaves and remained as free people, Germans, Czechs, and Norwegians who followed, and Hispanics who, in many cases, sought refuge from the Mexican Revolution. They all looked to …

Book Review: Red Earth: Race And Agriculture In Oklahoma Territory, Jere W. Roberson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Of all the ways in which history can be written and remembered, human based environmental change is often a 'winner's' history told by the people who remain." The essence of Bonnie Lynn-Sherow's thesis is probably captured in this quote from Red Earth. Her mission, it seems, is to raise our consciousness and issue a call for historians and ecologists to begin building a new history and a less disturbing relationship with the environment.

Book Review: Lewis And Clark, Tailor Made, Trail Worn: Army Life, Clothing, And Weapons Of The Corps Of Discovery, Mark J. Reardon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For readers seeking historically accurate images of the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition, look no further. Every possible curiosity you could have regarding their clothing, equipment, and weapons will be satisfied by Lewis and Clark, Tailor Made, Trail Worn: Army Life, Clothing, and Weapons of the Corps of Discovery. National Park historian Robert J. Moore Jr. and artist Michael Haynes have combined their formidable talents to produce the definitive visual account of the expedition, focusing not only on Lewis and Clark, but also on the soldiers they led, the French-Canadian contract boatmen who accompanied the Corps as …

Book Review: Rivers Of Change: Trailing The Waterways Of Lewis And Clark, Robert K. Schneiders

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Rivers of Change: Trailing the Waterways of Lewis and Clark is Tom Mullen's account of his five-month-long journey from St. Louis, Missouri, to the mouth of the Columbia River at Astoria, Oregon. Mullen's book is large-part quirky travelogue, small-part history, and even smaller-part personal philosophy. Its bulk contains Mullen's observations while traveling along the banks of the Missouri River from St. Charles, Missouri, to Three Forks, Montana. As a matter of fact, approximately two hundred and fifty of the book's three hundred and eighteen pages are devoted to the Missouri River's past, present, and tentative future. The other rivers of …

Book Review: Heads Above Water: Gender, Class, And Family In The Grand Forks Flood, F. Richard Ferraro

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Alice Fothergill has performed a great service by reporting about events often overlooked, glossed over, or discounted as fiction that resulted from the 1997 Grand Forks, North Dakota, flood and its impact on local women. Women of all backgrounds, income levels, sexual orientations, and beyond were, and have continued to be, challenged by the events prior to, during, and following the flood.

Book Review: Peacekeeping On The Plains: Army Operations In Bleeding Kansas, Samuel Watson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Bleeding Kansas, the u.s. Army was "the key instrument" in "the territorial governor's peacekeeping arsenal." There are many articles on the use of the Regular Army in domestic law enforcement, and a couple of books that treat several different case studies (Durwood Ball's Army Regulars [2001] and my own forthcoming work), but Peacekeeping on the Plains, the only book-length study of a single peacekeeping campaign during the nineteenth century, provides invaluable context and detail. As an Air Force officer, Mullis has brought the tools of today's doctrinal frameworks and language to his analysis, thereby strengthening his work by …

Book Review: The Strange Career Of Bilingual Education In Texas, Elaine K. Horwitz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Arriving in Texas as a recently graduated Title VII Bilingual Education Doctoral Fellow in the latter part of 1980, I was particularly eager to learn more about the history of bilingual education in the state, especially the strange career alluded to in this volume's title. Before my arrival, I had worked in bilingual education in Illinois and western New York. Was the history of bilingual education in Texas stranger than in other states?

Review Of Going Native Or Going Naive? White Shamanism And The Neo-Noble Savage By Dagmar Wernitznig, S. Elizabeth Bird

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this slim volume, Wernitznig addresses the New Age phenomenon of "white shamanism"- the appropriation of Native American traditions by white self-help gurus who draw heavily on Plains Indian lore, with a sprinkling of everything from Buddhism to Celtic mythology for good measure.

Wernitznig distinguishes between "white shamans" and "plastic medicine men." Unlike the latter, white shamans do not claim Indian identity. Instead, popular writers like Lynn Andrews, Marie Herbert, and Michael Bromley claim to have been instructed by Indian mentors. They advocate "easy-fix" enlightenment through painless, pleasant initiations, such as Herbert's Healing Quest, which involved "spending three days …

Review Of Kansas Charley: The Story Of A Nineteenth-Century Boy Murderer By Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Sarah Bohl

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Kansas Charley: The Story of a Nineteenth Century Boy Murderer, Joan Jacobs Brumberg analyzes the issues involved in capital punishment of juvenile offenders through the case study of Charley Miller, a teenager who committed a double murder and was executed in Wyoming in 1892. Brumberg portrays Miller as the pitiable product of a consumerist society that drew harsh distinctions between haves and have-nots. The media, fascinated by violence resulting from the abuse of alcohol and weapons, helped shape public perceptions of how to punish youthful offenders. While Miller's case was far from typical, it still reflects problems with …

Review Of Gambling And Survival In Native North America By Paul Pasquaretta, James Fenelon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Indian gaming throughout the United States has become a forum in which much of America reveals and works out its perspectives on American Indians, historical struggle, cultural survival, gambling, reciprocity, and the matter of choice. California is in the throes of an advertising war over more, or possibly less, gambling in the state, even as new casinos are going up in New York, Florida, and many other states. The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation runs Foxwoods in Connecticut, the Shakopee Mdewakanton (Dakota) Sioux Community runs Mystic Lake in Minnesota, and there are many other extremely successful Indian gaming enterprises, such as …

Review Of What's The Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won The Heart Of America By Thomas Frank, Donald Haider-Markel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his latest book, Thomas Frank takes a sweeping look at the current state of American politics by using the conservative revolution in Kansas as a microcosm of what conservative Republicans have done nationally. Frank directs our attention to the highly effective myths, language, and tactics developed by conservatives over the past forty years that have convinced many citizens apparently to vote against their own economic interests.

Frank's central thesis is that conservatives have remade the American political landscape and captured the hearts and minds of middle America by focusing their rhetoric and (mostly unattainable) policy goals on culture war …

Review Of Epic Wanderer: David Thompson And The Mapping Of The Canadian West By D'Arcy Jenish, Derek Hayes

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

David Thompson, often known as "the great mapmaker," spent twenty-five years traveling the entire West and Northwest of North America, covering 75,000 miles by canoe, horseback, and foot, and in the process produced the first comprehensive map of this vast region of about 1.2 million square miles. He then spent many years surveying the new 49th parallel boundary between the United States and Canada.

D'Arcy Jenish has produced, according to his publisher, the first full-length biography of Thompson-in that previous works have not given much consideration to his early and declining years-and has done a creditable job of following and …

Review Of Road Trip: Conversations With Writers By Shelly Clark And Marjorie Saiser, Jonathan Ritz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the opening of this collection of interviews, authors Shelly Clark and Marjorie Saiser layout a clear agenda for their project: to traverse their home state of Nebraska and meet with a number of noteworthy writers to talk about writing. This plan is revealed in an informal interview between the authors which nicely defines the occasion of the book and casts Clark and Saiser as not only interviewers but also subtle yet discernible characters, a pair of literary devotees on the road. The result is an inviting collection of conversations with a dozen Nebraska writers, including Jonis Agee, Hilda Raz, …

Review Of Window On The West: Chicago And The Art Of The New Frontier, 1890~1940 By Judith A. Barter, Sascha Scott

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This catalogue, published in conjunction with a 2003 exhibition at the Art Institute, aims to demonstrate that Chicago artists and patrons fostered a unique way of understanding and representing the great American West. Judith A. Barter, field-McCormick Curator of American Art at the Institute, offers insights into Chicago's artistic ties to America's "new frontier." This refreshingly multifaceted catalogue provides readers with a nuanced discussion of the exhibition's objects while contextualizing them in the social, political, and cultural environment of Chicago, and America at large, from 1890 to 1940.

Barter's narrative begins with Chicago's World Columbian Exposition (1893), which coincided with …

Review Of Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty In The Civil War Era By Nicole Etcheson, Gunja Sengupta

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Scholars have debated the meaning of "Bleeding Kansas" for generations. What impulses shaped the mid-1850s mayhem in Kansas Territory that came to be thought of as a "rehearsal" for the Civil War? Did the Kansas wars signify irreconcilable sectional differences over slavery? Or were the parties to the conflict driven chiefly by economic competition over claims, railroads, and towns? Neither, Nicole Etcheson argues, in her wide-ranging study of politics and personalities in Civil War era Kansas. Rather, "Bleeding Kansas" must be understood as a contest over the "political liberties of whites." While other historians of sectional conflict have dealt with …

Child Labor In The Early Sugar Beet Industry In The Great Plains, 1890-1920, Mary Lyons-Barrett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Children working in agriculture have always been a part of the rural culture and work ethos of the United States, especially on the Great Plains. Many teenagers still detassel corn or walk the beans in the summer months to earn spending money or money for college. But what about the children who work as migrant laborers in commercialized agriculture? These children, even today, typically go untracked by governmental agencies. The children may lag behind in school because of their family's migrations and their frequent absences from school to work in the crops. Unlike the child who works during the summer …

Deep Mapping The Biome: The Biology Of Place In Don Gayton's The Wheatgrass Mechanism And John Janovy Jr.'S Dunwoody Pond, Susan Naramore Maher

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his influential review, "Deep Maps in Ecoliterature," scholar Randall Roorda argues that the deep map deserves status as an "incipient genre of environmental literature," noting its "ambitious ... self-reflexive" nature and its innovative narrative architecture. The term "deep map" itself is the invention of writer William Least Heat-Moon, whose extended essay PrairyErth (a deep map) has given definition to this form. Deep-map writing is marked by its intertextual, interdisciplinary, and multivocal nature. It is also self-consciously cartographic, presenting maps, following maps, and redrawing maps. Deep mappers "both distrust maps and rely on them," or as Heat-Moon puts it, …

A Tribute To Sue Rosowski, Charles Braithwaite

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Susan J. Rosowski, Adele Hall Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln, died November 2, 2004. Sue has been an important voice in the Great Plains Quarterly since the beginning. In addition to publishing a half-dozen essays in the Quarterly, Sue reviewed manuscripts, wrote book reviews, and served as a guest editor on multiple occasions.

As one of the foremost scholars on Willa Cather, Sue served as General Editor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition, University of Nebraska Press, and was the founding editor of the Willa Cather Archive. Additional examples of her contribution …

Book Review: Western Rider: Views From A Car Window, David Taylor

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The history of the American West and its unique American-ness is intimately associated with our advances in mobility. Foot travel, wagon and ox, railroad, and, finally, automobile. Nothing has come to symbolize the vastness of the West more than a stretch of two-lane highway racing arrow-straight toward the distant horizon. Robert Frank codified that image in his book The Americans (1959), the first photographic meditation on, among other things, postwar car culture.

The Buffalo Commons: Great Plains Residents' Responses To A Radical Vision, Amanda Rees

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The American Great Plains has gained and shed various regional meanings since Euro-American exploration began. From a desert to a garden to a dust bowl to a breadbasket, this region's identity has shifted radically and dramatically over the last 200 years. In Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas, he argues that this Plains state can be understood as empty and bare: "The blank landscape prompted dreams of a blank-slate society, a place where institutes might be remade as humans saw fit." Authors such as Jonathan Raban have characterized the Great Plains as a whole in this manner. Raban …

Book Review: Indigenizing The Academy: Transforming Scholarship And Empowering Communities, William D. Demmert, Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Indigenizing the Academy is a thought-provoking collection of articles by Native American scholars regarding the intellectual and psychological environments they encountered as students, university faculty, researchers, and authors. It reviews whether their knowledge, their scholarship, their professional understandings, and their personal priorities were understood, accepted, ignored, or trivialized by faculty with whom, and institutions in which, they were associated. The authors also address issues of colonialism, ethnic fraud, research, university curricula, international partnerships, and sovereignty.

Book Review: On The River With Lewis And Clark, Carol Medlicott

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Verne Huser, a lifelong professional guide on western rivers, provides an interesting addition to the Lewis and Clark literature by aiming to reveal "how rivers figured in every aspect of the journey." His familiarity with running rivers in hand-powered craft well equips him to provide authoritative background for anyone wishing to interpret Lewis and Clark's journey as "essentially a river trip." Huser's strength is his ability to enliven the expedition journals' accounts of daily struggles with handling the various watercraft, with river conditions, and with the broader natural environments the expedition encountered in various river ecosystems. A substantial portion of …

"We Will Talk Of Nothing Else": Dakota Interpretations Of The Treaty Of 1837, Linda M. Clemmons

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During treaty negotiations with federal Indian agents in 1851, Taoyateduta (Little Crow), a Dakota representative, warned that the council members would "talk of nothing else" until conflicts related to the previous Treaty of 1837 had been resolved. His statement is surprising, given that government officials at the time, as well as subsequent historians, have interpreted the Treaty of 1837 as an uncontroversial, even positive, event for both the Dakota and the federal government. However, Taoyateduta and the other Dakota did not view the Treaty of 1837 in the same way. Instead, Taoyateduta's words illustrate the continued Dakota disillusionment and anger …