Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of The Life And Legacy Of Annie Oakley By Glenda Riley, Donald Arthur Clark

Great Plains Quarterly

Riley proves an excellent writer, adeptly disclosing the personality of this private woman. Poverty ridden as a child, Oakley learned to hunt and became an expert markswoman. She married the first man she beat in a shooting competition, Frank Butler. Frank, perhaps the ideal husband, managed Annie and their engagements with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Throughout the years they maintained high moral standards; neither smoked, drank or cursed. Annie, ever the Victorian lady, always wore a dress and always rode side-saddle while proving herself a worldclass sharpshooter. She never forgot those less fortunate than herself, providing gifts to orphanages …

Review Of On Turner's Trail: 100 Years Of Writing Western History By Wilbur R. Jacobs, Mary Young

Great Plains Quarterly

When Frederick Jackson Turner retired, he took up residence at the Huntington Library in California. Turner left his papers to the Huntington, thus assuring that the Turner industry would flourish there. Wilbur Jacobs is among the resident senior scholars who have tended the flame. Jacobs is a long-time critic of Turner's imperialist celebrations of progress, dichotomous views of savagism and civilization, and anti-environmentalism. Turner ignored much of the development of social science in his own time and confused ruling theory with multiple working hypotheses. Jacobs repeats these criticisms in several contexts in the present volume, but champions Turner as a …

Review Of The End Of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety From The Old West To The New Deal By David M. Wrobel, Kathleen A. Boardman

Great Plains Quarterly

More than a decade before the 1890 Census, some Americans began to perceive that the frontier was disappearing; they worried that, with the closing of the frontier, the country might lose its tough and resourceful individualism, its ability to assimilate foreigners and forge democratic institutions, its safety valve and its future hopes-in short, its uniqueness. Soon this "frontier anxiety" pervaded American writing, speech, and thought. David M. Wrobel traces the theme of frontier anxiety and its variations in American journalism, political rhetoric and policy, literature and popular culture, and academic discussions from the 1880s to the 1930s. He shows that …

Review Of Owning Western History: A Guide To Collecting Rare Documents, Historical Letters, And Valuable Photographs From The Old West By Warren B. Anderson, Warren W. Caldwell

Great Plains Quarterly

As the reader will have surmised, this volume is about collecting. It might well have been titled, "Western History: Via Waste Paper, Photographs and Other Ephemera." Be warned, it is not concerned with literary debris, but rather the remains of defunct stock companies, failed businesses, "wanted posters," and seemingly an infinity of other secular paper.

There is little to review here. The book is unabashedly descriptive, anecdotal, and largely non-critical. None the less, it has the virtue of directing the scholar to many documents of "western" society that otherwise might be neglected, and the pay-off can be interesting.

"Same Horse, New Wagon" Tradition And Assimilation Among The Jews Of Wichita, 1865,1930, Hal Rothman

Great Plains Quarterly

Despite the emphasis on ethnicity and crosscultural contact that permeates the New Western History, western historians have neglected the Jews of the American West. Often mislabeled as German ethnics because of their surnames or ignored altogether, Jews of the interior West in particular have been left out of the intellectual revolution sweeping the field. Their modern demographic distribution in coastal and urban areas has been mistaken for their historic presence, and their contribution to local and regional culture has been overlooked. As a result, the Jews of large urban areas in the West have received the vast majority of scholarly …

Review Of Chasing Rainbows: A Recollection Of The Great Plains, 1921-1975 By Gladys Leffler Gist, Deborah Fink

Great Plains Quarterly

Chasing Rainbows is the first-person story of Gladys Leffler Gist, a farm woman who was born in Iowa in 1898 and moved to South Dakota five years after her 1921 marriage. Although Gladys and her husband Ray had hard times in their first twenty years of farming and remained tenant farmers almost all their lives, the story is a happy one of a family well integrated into the dominant religious, social and political milieu of rural South Dakota and Iowa. James Marten, whose wife Linda is a granddaughter of the couple, has lovingly but conscientiously edited the work, providing context …

Review Of What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology At A Wahpeton Dakota Village By Janet D. Spector, Jennifer S. H. Brown

Great Plains Quarterly

Spector provides the basic information needed to help general readers understand the site and its people. She also does more, offering thoughtful reflections on issues that she has faced as a professional archaeologist and on the ethical problems that confront the field, given its past lack of communication and dialogue with the peoples whose histories it has excavated and appropriated.

This book may break the trail for a new genre of archaeological site report. Reading it, I was led to reflect on my own first summer field school experience, and on the report that our director ultimately published. I recall …

Bluestem And Tussock Fire And Pastoralism In The Flint Hills Of Kansas And The Tussock Grasslands Of New Zealand, James F. Hoy, Thomas D. Isern

Great Plains Quarterly

The ghost of Lady Barker haunts public discourse on the question of burning tussock grassland in New Zealand. The image of this gentle English woman, author of the Canterbury classic Station Life in New Zealand, transformed into a pastoral pyromaniac professing "the exceeding joy of 'burning,'" is compelling. She contests with friends over who can set the most magnificent blaze, exults at solitary cabbage trees exploding into flame, and regrets that she was not there to see the first blaze rage across the plains. Of this ritual, she says, she and her friends "never were allowed to have half …

Review Of A Generation Of Boomers: The Pattern Of Railroad Labor Conflict In Nineteenth-Century America By Shelton Stromquist, James W. Ely Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

Stromquist concentrates on the western railroads, where labor conflict was most acute, saying little about eastern and southern lines. He perceptively treats the sometimes overlooked role of the railroads in promoting western settlement and in establishing a string of railroad towns to service trains. Carefully researched and persuasively argued, this volume would be of value to readers interested in railroad labor history, the settlement of the west, or the growth of industrial America.

Review Of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town: Where History And Literature Meet By John E. Miller, William Holz

Great Plains Quarterly

The Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder have many devoted readers, and the TV program based loosely on the books has generated many more enthusiasts who have never even read the books. One measure of such fans' interest has been their pilgrimages to the sites and settings of the books, and around these locations has grown up a considerable tourist industry of museums, pageants, and historical reconstruction. Here the faithful or the merely curious can find a certain kind of ratification of their fictional experience: the "fiction" is raised toward "history" and hence toward "truth" by conflating the stories …

Review Of A Reader's Companion To The Fiction Of Willa Cather By John March, Kari Ronning

Great Plains Quarterly

Literary archaeologists of the future may be able to reconstruct the outlines and many of the details of Cather's fiction just from this comprehensive and readable guide. John March spent nearly forty years compiling the materials, while editors Arnold and Thornton and their team spent nearly six more editing, verifying, and documenting. Easily obtained information is generally omitted; what remains, as Arnold's introduction emphasizes, is March's personal selection, and the length and emphasis of most of the notes reflect his interpretations.

Review Of Into The Wilderness Dreams: Exploration Narratives Of The American West, 1500-1805 Edited By Donald A. Barclay, James H. Maquire, And Peter Wild, William J. Sheick

Great Plains Quarterly

Although some readers may wish for annotations to help with occasional obscure moments in the passages, over all they will find this well-produced book to be at once entertaining and instructive. Moreover, Into the Wilderness Dream provides academic specialists in early American studies with a substantial resource for furthering their current interest in appreciating better the cultural diversity of colonial encounters with North America. In many respects, then, the editors have compiled an exemplary anthology.

Review Of Painting Texas History To 1900 By Sam Deshong Ratcliffe, Pamela Walker

Great Plains Quarterly

In discussing paintings about the Texas Revolution, Ratcliffe is at his most analytic. Generally, his text is more descriptive than analytic, reading much like an exhibit guide on a museum wall. Still, the work is interesting and informative, and it provides a basis for more comprehensive and critical studies of the relation between a particular period of Texas history and its art.

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE LABOR FORCE OF THE CANADIAN RANCHING FRONTIER DURING ITS GOLDEN AGE, 1882-1901 (Simon M. Evans)

THE FRONT -GABLED LOG CABIN AND THE ROLE OF THE GREAT PLAINS IN THE FORMATION OF THE MOUNTAIN WEST'S BUILT LANDSCAPE (Jon T. Kilpinen)

SMALL HISTORIC SITES IN KANSAS: MERGING ARTIFACTUAL LANDSCAPES AND COMMUNITY VALUES (Cathy Ambler)

BOOK REVIEWS

Isolation and Masquerade: Willa Cather's Women

Willa Cather

Cather, Canon, and the Politics of Reading

Preserving the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains A Naturalist in Indian Territory: The Journals of S. W. Woodhouse, 1849-50

Earth and Sky: Visions of the Cosmos in …

Review Of Kansas: A Pictorial History By Robert W. Richmond, Virgil W. Dean

Great Plains Quarterly

Like the first, which has been enjoyed and valued by students of Kansas history for more than three decades, this new and improved edition of Kansas: A Pictorial History is a must for the home or school library. We should be grateful to have it available once again.

Review Of In The Kingdom Of Grass By Margaret A. Mackichan And Bob Ross, Bryan L. Jones

Great Plains Quarterly

Bob Ross does not directly explicate MacKichan's photographs. Rather he confronts us with his own sense of place, a place nearer the eastern edge of the hills where he grew up. The best sections of these superb essays feature Uncle Ozro-a humorous fellow who nurtured and drove Ross to manhood while harboring a weakness for strong drink and an unrewarding relationship with money-and a long series of hired men who gave employers and their nephews full measure of work and patient tutorial devotion in between weeklong benders in town. Uncles can break down under the constant vagaries of markets and …

Review Of Alberta's Petroleum Industry And The Conservation Board By David H. Breen, Mary L. Mcroberts

Great Plains Quarterly

Anyone wanting to learn the fundamentals of how the oil and natural gas industry actually operated should read this book. Nevertheless, in some places the amount of detail exceeds the analysis provided to justify its inclusion. And in arguing that the PNGCB members maintained an effective balance among the demands of large integrated and small independent companies for attractive profit margins, government desire for economic growth, and scientific conservation measures designed to protect the public interest, Breen minimizes evidence that suggests a less laudatory evaluation. Moreover, the role of the board in the interplay among the Alberta, Canadian, and American …

Review Of Great Lakes Lumber On The Great Plains: The Laird, Norton Lumber Company In South Dakota By John N. Vogel, John E. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly

The publication in 1991 of William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West established a useful model for blending economic and environmental history. The book focused on three commodities grain, lumber, and meat-as they were harvested, transported and channeled through Chicago, processed, and marketed to consumers in the hinterlands. Looking at a different locale, Vogel takes the second of these commodities and shows how it was transformed from the abundant white pine stands of Wisconsin's Chippewa Valley to sawed boards ready for sale in lumber yards along the railroad in a dozen-and-a-half towns in Dakota Territory that sprang up …

Review Of Revolt Of The Provinces: The Regionalist Movement In America, 1920-1945 By Robert L. Dorman, C. Elizabeth Raymond

Great Plains Quarterly

Since its brief flowering in the third and fourth decades of this century, regionalism has been generally dismissed as insignificant by students of American culture. While the U.S. intellectual mainstream rushed off toward both modernism and the movies, regionalists remained determined denizens of their various backwaters. Painter Thomas Hart Benton's rejection of New York abstraction for heartland folk murals in Missouri is both well known and emblematic. In his book, Revolt of the Provinces, Robert Dorman has reopened the subject of regionalism in thought-provoking fashion. Dorman claims for regionalism a wider significance than has been granted by many critics. …

Review Of Whiskey Peddler: Johnny Healy, North Frontier Trader By William R. Hunt, Paul F. Sharp

Great Plains Quarterly

This biography successfully traces the career of an Irish immigrant whose colorful life defines the realities of pioneering while at the same time providing the stuff of Western dime novels, movies, campfire storytelling, and adventure yarns. His remarkable range of experiences as frontier soldier, whiskey trader to Canadian Indians, and finally as a major player on the Alaskan frontier gives the author an opportunity to write a fast moving history of Montana, the Northwest Territories of Can ada, and Alaska.

Review Of Ogallala: Water For A Dry Land: A Historical Study In The Possibilities For American Sustainable Agriculture By John Opie, James E. Sherow

Great Plains Quarterly

Opie presents a compelling story of maladapt ion on the Great Plains, along with great sympathy and understanding of the region's people. He draws his conclusions from a keen understanding of those who have used, and presently use, the aquifer, of the land and aquifer themselves, and of the economics and ecology encompassing and enveloping the regior His thoroughly researched book will stand as model for others to emulate and expand upor,

Review Of A Funny Bone That Was: Humor Between The Wars Edited By David C. Jones, Jeremy Wild

Great Plains Quarterly

Jones provides useful historical contexts for Terril's humor; painful details about the Depression, for example, explain why most of the "jokes" about it are subdued. As Ma Joad says, however, "We're the people that live ... we go on," and they did so, partly through laughter. "The reason there were fewer wrecks in the old horse-and-buggy days was because the driver didn't depend wholly upon his own intelligence." "Fifteen percent of school children are below normal mentally, we are told. That's too high a figure. We don't need that many members of Parliament." In giving "new edges to old saws," …

Index

Great Plains Quarterly

Index 294-301 (8 pages)

Index

Great Plains Quarterly

Index 279-286 (8 pages)

Review Of The Lance And The Shield: The Life And Times Of Sitting Bull By Robert M. Utley, Roger L. Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly

In the past decade biography as a field within American history has made a strong comeback, and Robert M. Utley's study of the Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux) leader Sitting Bull is an excellent contribution to the field. Writing the life story of an Indian leader who died more than one hundred years ago is difficult at best. For example, even the birth date of the subject is open to question. Nevertheless, the author has written a thorough, balanced, and informed book. In it Sitting Bull emerges as a rational person living within his culture, having recognizable goals, and experiencing both success …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

"SAME HORSE, NEW WAGON": TRADITION AND ASSIMILATION AMONG THE JEWS OF WICHITA, 1865-1930 (Hal Rothman)

BREAKING THE SILENCE: HYMNS AND FOLK SONGS IN O. E. RØLVAAG'S IMMIGRANT TRILOGY (Philip R. Coleman-Hull)

SENSE OF PLACE IN THE PRAIRIE ENVIRONMENT: SETTLEMENT AND ECOLOGY IN RURAL GEARY COUNTY, KANSAS (Nina Veregge)

HUNT, CAPTURE, RAISE, INCREASE: THE PEOPLE WHO SAVED THE BISON (Ken Zontek)

BOOK REVIEWS

The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture

Soils in Archaeology: Landscape Evolution and Human Occupation

The Loner: Three Sketches of the Personal Life and Ideas of R. B. Bennett, 1870-1947

The Sioux and Other Native …

Review Of The Loner: Three Sketches Of The Personal Life And Ideas Of R. B. Bennett, 1870-1947 By P. B. Waite, Dale Jacobs

Great Plains Quarterly

The task of rehabilitating the reputation of former Canadian Prime Minister R. B. Bennett is a formidable one. Nevertheless, that is P. B. Waite's goal in The Loner, a set of three "sketches" of Bennett's life. Originally given as the Joanne Goodman Lectures at the University of Western Ontario in 1991, these sketches encompass Bennett's earliest years at Hopewell Cape and the Miramichi, his years as a lawyer and rising politician in Calgary, and his years in Ottawa. The Loner is not, however, another biography of R. B. Bennett, according to Waite, but an attempt to explain "the personal …

Review Of Pioneer Woman Educator: The Progressive Spirit Of Annie Webb Blanton By Debbie Mauldin, Claudine Barnes

Great Plains Quarterly

Debbie Mauldin Cottrell has written a meticulously researched biography of the first woman to hold statewide office in Texas. Serving as state superintendent of public instruction from 1918-22, as well as President of the Texas State Teachers Association, Vice-president of the National Education Association, and a professor of education at the University of Texas at Austin, Annie Webb Blanton focused her life's work on the reform of rural education. She also labored tirelessly to promote the advancement and equality of women throughout professional education. By building on their traditional role as teachers, she opened new opportunities for women.

Review Of The Flag In American Indian Art By Toby Herbst And Joel Kopp, Russel Lawrence Barsh

Great Plains Quarterly

The public appetite for American Indian crafts and artistic motifs can be traced back to the early part of this century, the same period of American cultural nativism that inspired the Arts and Crafts movement in midwestern industrial cities and a flight of young painters and sculptors to fledgling artists' colonies in the American Southwest. Before the Depression put an end to this bonanza for nativeborn talent, American Indians had been able to stake a large claim in media as diverse as miniature totem poles, beadwork, and basketry. While museums scoured the countryside for medicine bundles, pipes, and headdresses, the …

Review Of The Wealth Of Nature: Environmental History And The Ecological Imagination By Donald Worster, Andrew C. Isenberg

Great Plains Quarterly

On its surface, Donald Worster's collection of forceful and eloquent essays appears to revisit the subjects and themes he has explored in his previous books. There are sixteen essays in Wealth of Nature. The first three and the last one explore the concerns and practice of environmental history. Five essays investigate the ecological consequences of American agriculture, particularly in the Great Plains. Worster explored this subject in his Bancroft Prize-winning book, Dust Bowl. The next three essays primarily concern the economic and ecological irrationalities of irrigation in the West, a subject that Worster previously investigated in his book, …