Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Black Enclaves Of Violence: Race And Homicide In Great Plains Cities, 1890-1920, Clare V. Mckanna Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

These killings, occurring three years apart in Coffeyville, Kansas, offer bookend images of interracial homicides in the Great Plains. In the first shooting, Charles Vann, a black man and the victim, had been drinking at Walnut and Eleventh Streets in the "tenderloin" district, a black neighborhood in Coffeyville. This region, near the railroad yards, provided entertainment for black customers and occasionally whites in saloons, brothels, and gambling parlors. William Rodecker, a white male horse trader, had just arrived from Missouri and started drinking heavily in this area. About 8 P.M. Rodecker accosted Vann at the corner of Twelfth and Walnut …

Review Of Germans And Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections Edited By Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemiinden, And Susanne Zantop, Peter Bolz, Ann Davis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

DO GERMANS REALLY LOVE INDIANS?

"Of all Europeans, the German has the greatest love for the Indian." This 1939 quote from a German novelist, reproduced in the book's introductory chapter by Christian Feest, could serve as the motto for the 1999 conference ("Germans and Indians/Indians and Germans: Cultural Encounters across Three Centuries") held at Dartmouth College, from which this book evolved. The idea that Germans have a special affinity with Indians is a long-standing conviction that is, nonetheless, difficult to prove. But the converse, that Indians might have a special affinity for Germans, was disproven by the conference itself: only …

Review Of Toward Defining The Prairies: Region, Culture, And History Edited By Robert Wardhaugh, Nina Van Gessel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Prair'ie n. a large treeless tract of level or undulating grassland esp. in N. America. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary)

"How does one define a place? How does one define a region?" asks editor Robert Wardhaugh. Postmodernism, post-structuralism, and post-colonialism have problematized the concept of definition in general and definition of place in particular. In this age of posts-, the dictionary becomes a site of misplaced signposts bent on leading one astray. No matter the limitations of "definition," the Prairies can no longer be defined solely in a narrow, physical sense. Rather, we must "move beyond the transparency of geography to …

Review Of Gold Rush: The Black Hills Story Compiled By John D. Mcdermott, John E. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Black Hills Gold Rush, instigated by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer's 1874 expedition to the Hills confirming that there was gold there "among the roots of the grass," was an event important to both the nation and the future state of South Dakota, not to mention to the Native Americans who had inhabited the area for centuries. Watson Parker's Gold in the Black Hills (1966) provided an excellent account of the gold rush, and John D. McDermott, the compiler and one of the authors of this volume, acknowledges his pioneering work on the subject. This collection of essays succeeds …

Willa Cather's Reluctant New Woman Pioneer, Reginald Dyck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1913 Willa Cather created a female protagonist who is single, independent, entrepreneurial, managerial, strong willed, wealthy and in love with the land of south-central Nebraska. This character offered a new vision for women at the turn of the twentieth century. Cather's fictional construction of gender, as well as her own experience, embody the contradictions present in the roles society offered women. One can read O Pioneers! as a cultural seismometer, one that picks up tremors along various social fault lines and then expresses them within a particular framework held by many people of her economic and social position. This …

Review Of Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, And Literary Appropriations Edited By Gretchen M. Bataille, Shari Huhndorf

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"The misrepresentation, commodification, and distortion of indigenous identities have existed from the moment of first contact" between Native peoples and Europeans, Editor Gretchen Bataille observes in the introduction to Native American Representations. The problems are familiar to literary scholars: power relations produced by colonization determine who has the authority to represent Native peoples in the broader culture, and these representations in turn tend to reinforce European dominance and to obfuscate the violence, and even the fact, of colonization. The questions of how Native peoples have been represented throughout the centuries of colonialism, by whom, and for what purposes comprise …

Review Of Jeannette Rankin: America's Conscience By Norma Smith, Sara Hayden

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Norma Smith's posthumously published biography of Jeannette Rankin offers a welcome addition to scholarship devoted to this early feminist, Congresswoman, and peace activist. Rankin's life story intersects with several major developments in Western politics and US public life. Rankin began her political career lobbying for woman's suffrage in Washington, eventually heading up the successful 1914 suffrage campaign in her home state of Montana. Rankin's suffrage work positioned her to run for national office; in 1916 she became one of Montana's two members of the House of Representatives and the first woman to serve in the United States Congress. Rankin ran …

Title And Contents- Summer 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains Quarterly

Summer 2003 Volume 23 Number 3

CONTENTS

BLACK ENCLAVES OF VIOLENCE: RACE AND HOMICIDE IN GREAT PLAINS CITIES, 1890-1920
Clare V. McKanna Jr.

WILLA CATHER'S RELUCTANT NEW WOMAN PIONEER
Reginald Dyck

THE CUPS OF BLOOD ARE EMPTIED: PIETISM AND CULTURAL HERITAGE IN TWO DANISH IMMIGRANT SCHOOLS ON THE GREAT PLAINS
John Mark Nielsen

REVIEW ESSAY: DO GERMANS REALLY LOVE INDIANS?
Peter Bolz and Ann Davis
A review of Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK NOTES

NOTES AND NEWS

Notes And News- Summer 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Research Fellowships

Great Plains Symposium

Call For Papers: Southern Humanities Council

Book Notes- Summer 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Book Notes

The Definitive10urnals of Lewis and Clark: Seven Volume Set

The Diaries of John Gregory Bourke: Volume One, November 20, l872-July 28, 1876

A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather

Westward Expansion

Chinese on the American Frontier

Bravo of the Brazos: John Larn of Fort Griffin, Texas

The Human Tradition in Texas

A Thousand Miles of Prairie: The Manitoba Historical Society and the History of Western Canada

Museums and Historic Sites of the American West

Edmonton: Stories from the River City

Guide to the Photographs in the Western History Collections of the University of Oklahoma

Building for the …

Review Of Sacagawea's Nickname: Essays On The American West By Larry Mcmurtry, Shirley A. Leckie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In these essays, originally published in the New York Review of Books, Larry McMurtry examines Western writers as mythmakers. Overall, however, his most interesting pieces are those in which he pays tribute to authors who have influenced his own work or have left behind literary treasures he finds moving and wise.

One of the essays is devoted to historian Angie Debo and her influence on McMurtry's development as a writer. As a youth he accidentally found The Road to Disappearance (1941), her history of the Creek Indians, and discovered that Debo, from neighboring Oklahoma, had made for herself a …

Review Of Feathering Custer By W. S. Penn, Joshua B. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

William S. Penn (Nez Perce) has compiled a series of essays that twirl through problems concerning Native American studies in academia. In "Paving with Good Intentions" and elsewhere, Penn takes aim at popular critical theory that cannot adequately conceptualize Native thought, identity, or writing. Throughout, he advocates careful scrutiny of elements of identity arising from forces outside of Indian culture.

In Kenneth Burke's metaphor comparing the field of cultural criticism to a parlor discussion, Penn sees much of what limits the study: the conversation quashes dissent and honors hegemony; the conversers privilege the written over the oral and are almost …

Review Of Once Upon A Town: The Miracle Of The North Platte Canteen By Bob Greene, Charles A. Peek

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bob Greene interweaves narratives of sojourns in North Platte, local history, and stories of the Canteen culled from interviews (often tearful, one calling him to go on record the day before surgery) with those who served there and those who were served, a distinction that in the end blurs.

The story of the Canteen itself captures folks from a hundred and twenty-five communities in Nebraska and eastern Colorado, "Some ... you can't even find on a map, sixty years later," meeting up to 8,000 troops a day, carried on up to thirty-two trains a day, each stopping "as long as …

Review Of The American Midwest: Essays On Regional History Edited By Andrew R. L. Cayton And Susan E. Gray, Paula Petrik

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While the South, West, and New England have always possessed distinctive regional identities, the Middle West has been either a substitute for national character or described variously as "dull," "ordinary," or just plain "nice." Yet, as the essayists point out, the Midwest is both homogenous and diverse. Beginning with an excellent introduction that summarizes the historiography of the idea of the Middle West as a region, the ten essays in the collection seek both to explore more deeply the idea and construction of the Middle West as a region and to provide case studies in the development of the concept. …

Review Of The Nature Of Home By Lisa Knopp, Jonathan Ritz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this collection of personal essays, Lisa Knopp creates a constellation of various nonfiction forms, including memoir, social and natural history, biography, and travel writing, around the central subject of "home"-"what home is, how one might find it, what it means to be at home or away from home or homeless .... " Brief lexicon entries, consisting of an OED definition of a particular word along with the writer's musings on the word's relation to her central subject, serve as interludes between each of the book's twenty-two essays. The combination of lexicon entries and essays creates a rich and resonant …

Review Of Local Wonders: Seasons In The Bohemian Alps By Ted Kooser, Judith Sorenberger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It's no wonder that the title of Ted Kooser's first book of nonfiction prose should share the word "local" with his first volume of poems, A Local Habitation and a Name (1974), for place is always central in Kooser's writing. The locale of Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps is Kooser's land north of the village of Garland, Nebraska, where he lives with his wife; two dogs, and an indeterminate number of chickens.

Kooser claims this land as his place in several ways. First, he does a lot of looking: at old buildings, wild roses, animals, people. And he …

The Cups Of Blood Are Emptied Pietism And Cultural Heritage In Two Danish Immigrant Schools On The Great Plains, John Mark Nielsen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Following the American Civil War, the vast sweep of the Great Plains exerted a powerful force on the imagination of Americans and Northern European immigrants, resulting in a period of rapid settlement. Immigrant communities in particular attempted to establish institutions through which their language, beliefs and cultural heritage might be preserved. The history of these immigrant institutions mirrors the challenges immigrant communities faced in confronting not only the vicissitudes of climate and evolving economic conditions but also the pressures of assimilation.

Numerous works of both fiction and nonfiction explore the broader challenges of life in the Great Plains; none captures …

Editor's Introduction- Spring 2003, Charles A. Braithwaite

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this issue we introduce two new features to Great Plains Quarterly. In the past, the journal has focused almost exclusively on printing previously unpublished work written especially for Quarterly. This issue includes two articles that break from this tradition.

With the kind permission of the University of Nebraska Press, we are publishing an excerpt from Gary E. Moulton's The Lewis and Clark Journals: An Epic of Discovery, The Abridgment of the Definitive Nebraska Edition. For over twenty years, Professor Moulton has edited and annotated the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, producing the most …

Excerpts From The Lewis And Clark Journals: An Epic Of Discovery, The Abridgment Of The Definitive Nebraska Edition The Journey Across The Plains, Gary E. Moulton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Chapter 1
Expedition Underway
May 14-August 24, 1804

May 14, 1804
[CLARK] I Set out at 4 o'Clock P. M. in the presence of many of the Neighboring inhabitants, and proceeded on under a gentle brease up the Missourie to the upper Point of the 1st Island 4 Miles and Camped on the Island which is Situated Close on the right (or Starboard) Side, and opposit the mouth of a Small Creek called Cold water,¹ a heavy rain this after-noon. [Camped in St. Charles County, Missouri, near and across from Fort Bellefontaine, St. Louis County.]

May 15, 1804
[CLARK] …

Review Of How Should I Read These?: Native Women Writers In Canada By Helen Hoy, Dee Horne

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Helen Hoy opens with a quotation from Eden Robinson's short story "Queen of the North" in which a non-Native asks, "How should I eat these?" The response is, "With your mouth, asshole." Hoy poses challenges of reading and understanding Jeannette Armstrong's Slash, Maria Campbell and Linda Griffith's The Book of Jessica, Ruby Slipperjack's Honour the Sun, Beatrice Culleton's In Search of April Raintree, Beverly Hungry Walf's The Ways of My Grandmothers, Lee Maracle's Ravensong, and Eden Robinson's Traplines. She articulates her position carefully, presenting a scholarly argument that frequently cites the critical and theoretical perspectives …

Review Of Telling Stories, Writing Songs: An Album Of Texas Songwriters By Kathleen Hudson, Cary Ginell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On the surface, a book chronicling interviews with prominent and influential Texas songwriters would be quite welcome to students of regional American music styles. Many of the artists included are unfamiliar to the general public, but have contributed much to the development of folk, country, and rock styles in the past half-century.

Author Kathleen Hudson selected thirty four subjects to profile, from honky-tonk and western swing pioneer Floyd Tillman to TexMex chanteuse Tish Hinojosa. Unfortunately, Hudson chose to structure her book as a series of oral histories, her questions and her informants' responses transcribed verbatim in each chapter. Her un …

Review Of Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains And Removed Indians In Indian Territory By David Lavere, Willard Hughes Rollings

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Many are aware of Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal policy, which uprooted Native Americans from their homelands and drove them into Indian Territory. Few, however, are aware of the other side of removal, that is, the impact of the removed tribes on the Prairie and Plains peoples living in the region of the relocation. Removal crowded thousands of Indian people of diverse cultures onto land that could not adequately support them, resulting in bitter conflicts between the Native peoples of the Southern Plains and the invading eastern strangers.

Those of us who are members of the tribes involved as well as …

Review Of Willa Cather And The American SouthwestEdited By John N. Swift And Jospeh R. Urgo, Guy Reynolds

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Cather criticism has come a long way since Sharon O'Brien's 1987 biography, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. O'Brien had a singular take on Cather's trip to the Southwest in 1912, viewing this journey as a moment of psychological transformation, a tipping point when Cather became a creative rather than a merely professional writer. O'Brien emerged from a distinctive 1970s literary feminism, which placed the life-story of neglected writers within a psychoanalytical context. This new collection is, in contrast, a kaleidoscopic array of varied approaches to "Cather's Southwest."

A number of the essays are close readings of specific episodes, motifs, …

Notes And News- Spring 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News

Frederick C. Luebke Award

Native Perspectives on the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Call For Papers: Native American Perspectives Of The Lewis & Clark Expedition

Research Facilities: Museum of the Great Plains

Call For Papers: Missouri Valley History Conference

Review Of The Black Regulars, 1866-1898 By William A. Dobak And Thomas D. Phillips, Robert Wooster

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As part of its 1866 army reorganization bill, Congress, presuming that black troops would be less prone to desert than white soldiers, reserved six of the sixty regiments for black enlisted men. Although subsequent reductions allowed for only four such regiments in a forty-five- regiment army, the all-black units functioned as their sponsors had intended. Stationed largely in the West until 1898, the men of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry regiments deserted far less frequently and reenlisted far more often than their white comrades. Their story has often been told, but never with the comprehensiveness, …

Review Of Common And Contested Ground: A Human And Environmental History Of The Northwestern Plains By Theodore Binnema, James E. Sherow

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Theodore Binnema's engaging ethnohistorical account of the peoples who once lived upon the Northwestern Plains is an excellent study in human relationships. Organized in a straightforward manner, its first two chapters explore the ecosystems of the Northwestern Plains and how hunters developed their techniques over thousands of years. Next, Binnema recreates the trade systems and routes in the protohistorical period and offers a sensitive analysis of the evidence for warfare on the Plains prior to the appearance of horses. Based upon careful research in the archives of the Hudson's Bay Company, he recreates the economic and social intricacies of the …

Title And Contents- Spring 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains Quarterly

Spring 2003 Vol. 23 No.2

CONTENTS

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION Charles A. Braithwaite

EXCERPTS FROM THE LEWIS AND CLARK JOURNALS; AN EPIC OF DISCOVERY, THE ABRIDGMENT OF THE Definitive NEBRASKA EDITION; THE JOURNEY ACROSS THE PLAINS Gary E. Moulton

"A PRAIRIE CHILDHOOD" BY EDITH ABBOTT: AN EXCERPT FROM THE CHILDREN'S CHAMPION, A BIOGRAPHY OF GRACE ABBOTT John Sorensen

COME TO THE "CHAMPAGNE AIR": CHANGING PROMOTIONAL IMAGES OF THE KANSAS CLIMATE, 1854-1900 Karen De Bres

BOOK REVIEWS

Theodore Binnema Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains By JAMES E. SHEROW

Gerald Betty Comanche Society: …

Review Of Heartbeat Of The People: Music And Dance Of The Northern Pow-Wow By Tara Browner, Clyde Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Powwows have been a powerful expression of cultural identity in Indian country for much of the past century. Adaptive and innovative, they are good examples of how some Native people simultaneously maintain connections to tradition and embrace new trends, but their history and meaning have received relatively limited attention. In this slim volume, Tara Browner combines an insider's perspective with a scholarly bent to give readers an informative account of Northern Plains powwow ways.

Browner begins by situating Northern Plains powwows in a broad historical context, but her interpretation will likely raise some eyebrows. Unlike virtually every other scholar who …

Book Notes- Spring 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Dictionary of Midwestern Literature. Volume One: The Authors

The University of Manitoba: An Illustrated History

Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews

Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education

Petticoat Prisoners of Old Wyoming

Minister to the Cherokees: A Civil War Autobiography

''A Prairie Childhood" By Edith Abbott An Excerpt From The Children's Champion, A Biography Of Grace Abbott, John Sorensen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Grace Abbott (1878-1939) is, perhaps, the greatest champion of children's rights in American history. She was a woman of intriguing contradictions: a life-long Republican Party member and a life-long liberal activist; a native of the Nebraska frontier who spent much of her life in the poorest immigrant quarters of urban Chicago; an unmarried woman who was nicknamed "the mother of America's forty-three million children."

Grace Abbott was a public figure who was both much adored and bitterly, sometimes vehemently, attacked. She was a born and bred pioneer: the first woman nominated for a Presidential cabinet post {secretary of labor for …