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2006

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Articles 6391 - 6420 of 8226

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Book Review: Powwow, Clifford E. Trafzer Jan 2006

Book Review: Powwow, Clifford E. Trafzer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Powwow invites readers into the dancing circle where a cornucopia of information, analysis, and interpretation vibrates, telling us about the popular intertribal celebration. The topic of American Indian powwows creates strong emotions and colorful stories, and the editors invite several authors into the "dance arena" of this book to share their research and experiences. As a result, readers will hear the drum, see traditional and fancy dancers, smell the sizzling fry bread, and feel the spirit that is the American Indian powwow. The editors point out that powwows vary in size from the larger Red Earth gathering on the Great …

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Review Essay: Encyclopedia Of The Great Plains, Andrew C. Isenberg Jan 2006

Review Essay: Encyclopedia Of The Great Plains, Andrew C. Isenberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The latest of the local encyclopedias is the University of Nebraska Press's Encyclopedia of the Great Plains. This work was long in the making: the idea for the encyclopedia emerged out of the University of Nebraska's Center for Great Plains Studies in the late 1980s.
Somewhere along the way, the editors of the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains decided to organize the entries not alphabetically but thematically. This thematic organization has its virtues, especially for readers interested in particular subjects. As editor David Wishart explains, the thematic chapters provide "an interpretive function which is lacking in purely alphabetical works." Yet …

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Book Review: Encyclopedia Of The Lewis And Clark Expeditions, Stephen S. Witte Jan 2006

Book Review: Encyclopedia Of The Lewis And Clark Expeditions, Stephen S. Witte

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In their preface, the authors hope "that this book will prove a valuable resource to students of the Lewis and Clark Expedition." Regrettably, numerous errors and contradictions drastically reduce its value.

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Book Review: The Oregon Trail: An American Saga, Howard Jablon Jan 2006

Book Review: The Oregon Trail: An American Saga, Howard Jablon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

David Dary's The Oregon Trail is a pleasant excursion on a well-traveled road. His hook is not a trail-blazing work of the stature of such classics as Francis Parkman's The California and Oregon Trail (1849) and Bernard De Voto's The Year of Decision, 1846 (1943), nor is it as erudite as John D. Unruh's The Plains Across (1979) nor as encyclopedic as Merrill J. Matte's Platte River Road Narratives (1988); however, it remains a useful introduction to the subject.

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Book Review: Childhood On The Farm: Work, Play, And Coming Of Age In The Midwest, Elizabeth Hampsten Jan 2006

Book Review: Childhood On The Farm: Work, Play, And Coming Of Age In The Midwest, Elizabeth Hampsten

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

By "Midwest," Pamela Riney-Kehrberg means the states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and the eastern half of Nebraska and Kansas, and by child, "any dependent son or daughter, generally twenty-one or younger, regardless of physical maturity, who remained subject to his or her parents' authority on the farm and in the home." She explains having "chosen 1870 as my starting date" to avoid the Civil War, and "1920 as an ending date because of upheavals occurring in the years that followed" (the automobile, radio, economic depression).

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Natural Areas, Regions, And Two Centuries Of Environmental Change On The Great Plains, David J. Wishart Jan 2006

Natural Areas, Regions, And Two Centuries Of Environmental Change On The Great Plains, David J. Wishart

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A careful reading of recent issues of the Natural Areas Journal, the publication of the Natural Areas Association, will leave you with the conclusion that humans are not a part of natural areas. When humans do appear, it is either as disturbing agents, disrupting the naturalness through, for example, the introduction of exotic plants and animals, or as managers, enhancing the naturalness through, for example, prescribed burning. This is an explicit and purposeful exclusion: "We can probably all agree," wrote the editor of the journal in 2004, "that 'natural' places are areas where human actions have minimally changed the …

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Book Review: Finding Sand Creek: History, Archeology, And The 1864 Massacre Site, Lincoln Faller Jan 2006

Book Review: Finding Sand Creek: History, Archeology, And The 1864 Massacre Site, Lincoln Faller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Metal detritus of war and an old map, recently discovered in Chicago helped an interdisciplinary team of historians, archeologists, geomorphologists, ethnographers, remote imagers, and descendants of the victims of the Sand Creek Massacre to find the exact site where that atrocity was enacted; so this book reports,

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Book Review: Black Earth And Ivory Tower: New American Essays From Farm And Classroom, Doug Werden Jan 2006

Book Review: Black Earth And Ivory Tower: New American Essays From Farm And Classroom, Doug Werden

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What does agriculture have to do with the humanities? The integration of these seemingly antithetical worlds is essential for these agriculture-rooted authors who articulate their connection to rural life and labor they have maintained despite performing academic work. While several of the authors present their childhood experiences, they avoid nostalgia by exploring the forces that have made them return to the farm in their lives and research. There is a valorization of agricultural values coupled with the paradoxical recognition that the life of labor-intensive family farms is waning, the very trend that propelled many of these writers into off-farm careers. …

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Book Review: Manifest And Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions Of The Nineteenth-Century United States, Bethany Schneider Jan 2006

Book Review: Manifest And Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions Of The Nineteenth-Century United States, Bethany Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Stephanie LeMenager's Manifest and Other Destinies is a beautifully researched, elegantly written, authoritative and long-needed reexamination of the fictions that girded American expansion. It is also a model of inventive and interventative scholarship. Across three sections, entitled "Desert," "Ocean," and "River," LeMenager's revelatory readings of Cooper, Melville, Irving, Twain, and dozens of other nineteenth-century novelists, journalists, memoirists, and political commentators explore representations of environments that actively resisted or transformed white agrarian settlement. This is a literary history of the nineteenth-century United States that radically rewrites received understandings of the force and direction of expansionist ideologies across the century.

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Writing Red: A Tribute To Vine Deloria, Jr. (1933-2005), Holly Boomer Jan 2006

Writing Red: A Tribute To Vine Deloria, Jr. (1933-2005), Holly Boomer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mention the word vine in Indian country and most people know that you are talking about a writer rather than talking about gardening. Easily identified by only his first name, Vine Deloria, Jr., has achieved iconic status in the American Indian community. He wasn't the first American Indian writer, but he was the most prolific and enduring writer of Indian issues. Vine was not afraid to tackle Indian issues. He was a warrior who used words as weapons.

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Book Review: Learning To Write "Indian": The Boarding-School Experience And American Indian Literature, Bruce E. Johansen Jan 2006

Book Review: Learning To Write "Indian": The Boarding-School Experience And American Indian Literature, Bruce E. Johansen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In a twist on assimilation, many boarding-school students used the English language, a primary tool of colonization, to "talk back" to the system. As surely as the boarding-schools' inventors understood that language is the vessel of culture, none of them gave much thought to the ways in which Native Americans would use English to critique the schools into which many of them had been unwillingly enrolled.
Their writings, examined by Amelia Katanski, indicate that the boarding-school students were unwilling to surrender as victims. Learning English describes how Native American students in boarding schools often forged new identities, taking a degree …

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Book Review: Where Custer Fell: Photographs Of The Little Bighorn Battlefield Then And Now, Herman J. Viola Jan 2006

Book Review: Where Custer Fell: Photographs Of The Little Bighorn Battlefield Then And Now, Herman J. Viola

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On the morning of June 25, 1876, soldiers of the famed U.S. Seventh Cavalry led by the flamboyant George Armstrong Custer attacked a large Indian encampment on the banks of the Little Bighorn River. By day's end, Custer and more than two hundred of his men lay dead. More than a century later, the battle still remains a subject of controversy, debate, and fascination.

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Book Review: Promise: Bozeman's Trail To Destiny, Michael Cassity Jan 2006

Book Review: Promise: Bozeman's Trail To Destiny, Michael Cassity

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The transformation of the area along the Bozeman Trail through Wyoming and Montana in the 1860s provides a key to understanding the larger forces at work reshaping the American West in the late nineteenth century. The complex dynamics at work within the Native American cultures in the area and between them and the intruders hold a great potential for substantive historical inquiry. The present volume is a broad collection, a miscellany, of historical documents, personal reminiscences, and oral histories, as well as observations by professional historians; it even contains some fictional narratives drawing on the events at hand. Not surprisingly, …

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Alexandre Hogue's Passion: Ecology And Agribusiness In The Crucified Land, Mark Andrew White Jan 2006

Alexandre Hogue's Passion: Ecology And Agribusiness In The Crucified Land, Mark Andrew White

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1939, Texas artist Alexandre Hogue completed The Crucified Land (Fig. 1), a striking comparison of water erosion on a Denton, Texas, wheat farm to the martyrdom of Jesus of Nazareth. The Crucified Land was originally intended as the final canvas of Hogue's Erosion series, which the artist began in 1932 as a condemnation of the careless agricultural practices that had produced wind and water erosion in his home state. When Hogue exhibited The Crucified Land that year at the Carnegie International, the painting's provocative religious overtones drew the notice of one critic, who referred to it as the latest …

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Book Review: Calamity Jane: The Woman And The Legend, Herbert T. Hoover Jan 2006

Book Review: Calamity Jane: The Woman And The Legend, Herbert T. Hoover

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

No scholar might be better qualified to write a biography of Calamity Jane than James McLaird. During a protracted career as a professor of history at Dakota Wesleyan University, he prepared a grassroots bibliography for South Dakota and published articles about exploration west of the Missouri River while he collected and marketed rare books about the history of the northern Great Plains. He makes the point that had Calamity Jane never existed, substantive themes in either state or regional history would not have been affected but western folklore would have diminished.

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Book Review: The Bar U And Canadian Ranching History, A. A. Den Otter Jan 2006

Book Review: The Bar U And Canadian Ranching History, A. A. Den Otter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Located almost directly south of Calgary, Alberta, the North West Cattle Company, or Bar U, is one of the longest surviving large ranches on the Canadian Prairies, Founded in 1881 during a land rush, it was one of several to acquire large leases on government land, Under the management of Fred Stimson, an experienced farmer from Quebec, the Bar U prospered, partly because of cheap land hut mainly because of solid management and good marketing and transportation strategies,

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Review Essay: The Making Of Margaret Laurence's Epic Voice, David Stouck Jan 2006

Review Essay: The Making Of Margaret Laurence's Epic Voice, David Stouck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

George Woodcock, international man of letters, once referred to Margaret Laurence as Canada's Tolstoy. To some the comparison seems far-fetched, out of scale, but for others it has substance. Certainly, both writers were from continental plains and were drawn to large events in their country's history; they wrote at length about the relations of the sexes, about injustice and the harsh impact of war, and about the plight of poor people. One could also note they both turned away from writing fiction in midcareer, feeling they had lost the gift, and instead addressed with moral authority the pressing issues of …

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Book Review: Myself And Strangers: A Memoir Of Apprenticeship, Mark Busby Jan 2006

Book Review: Myself And Strangers: A Memoir Of Apprenticeship, Mark Busby

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Over the years John Graves, Texas's most noted environmental writer, has lamented time wasted on trying to produce a major work of fiction, a subject that becomes especially clear in Graves's memoir, Myself and Strangers, where he suggests that he should have produced more but was too often distracted.

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Book Review: The Cambridge Companion To Willa Cather, Mary R. Ryder Jan 2006

Book Review: The Cambridge Companion To Willa Cather, Mary R. Ryder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this collection of thirteen essays Lindemann successfully meets her goal of offering recent criticism that recenters Cather as a writer who responded fully to the "changing social and demographic conditions" of her time. The essays indeed encourage reading "against the grain of Cather's escapism" in a range of "interpretative possibilities." Particularly useful are essays exploring little-examined areas of Cather scholarship, including the late Susan Rosowski's study of the comic sense of self in Cather's works and Lisa Marcus's discussion of Cather and the "geography of Jewishness." Rosowski resituates Claude Wheeler's yearning for something splendid in One of Ours within …

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Book Review: Blackfoot Ways Of Knowing: The Worldview Of The Siksikaitsitapi, Patricia A. Mccormack Jan 2006

Book Review: Blackfoot Ways Of Knowing: The Worldview Of The Siksikaitsitapi, Patricia A. Mccormack

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Betty Bastien's ambitious goal is no less than the decolonization of Blackfoot ways of knowing as a vehicle to regaining independence, promoting personal and cultural healing, and providing a basis fur a new educational system, It is a "transformational pedagogy" that she has undertaken, employing traditional methods of teaching that involve looking inwardly and using personal experience as a primary source of knowledge. She has worked closely in this project with a small number of elders or "grandparents," men and women who are ceremonial specialists and fluent in the Blackfoot language. Her primary audiences are fellow Siksikaitsitapi - Blackfoot-speakers - …

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Book Review: Viet Cong At Wounded Knee: The Trail Of A Blackfeet Activist, Tom Holm Jan 2006

Book Review: Viet Cong At Wounded Knee: The Trail Of A Blackfeet Activist, Tom Holm

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Woody Kipp's life story is a reflection of a new generation of Native writers and activists. His autobiography has nothing to do with trying to save the white world from itself or to explain Indians to a curious and perhaps even sympathetic white audience. The white world literally and figuratively took aim at Woody Kipp (and a number of other American Indian Vietnam veterans) for daring to oppose the injustices he saw in Indian life. He became, as the title of his book indicates, the then-current enemy of the American state. He was, ironically, a domestic version of the Viet …

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Book Review: Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, And The Trial That Forged A Nation, Matthew L. M. Fletcher Jan 2006

Book Review: Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, And The Trial That Forged A Nation, Matthew L. M. Fletcher

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations (MHA Nation), Raymond Cross has carried out unparalleled work as an Indian lawyer, a tribal advocate, and an Indian law scholar. Coyote Warrior chronicles Cross's incredible journey from youngest child of a prominent Indian family to American Indian rights crusader, to his two triumphant appearances before the United States Supreme Court, to his lobbying efforts to secure compensation for the lost homelands of his nations. Paul VanDevelder's journalistic style lends much to these tales that appeared before only in the oft-stale pages of the United States Reporter and Congressional hearing transcripts.

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Book Review: As For Sinclair Ross, Peter Dickinson Jan 2006

Book Review: As For Sinclair Ross, Peter Dickinson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Long admired by academics and fellow writers for his finely wrought portraits of small-town prairie life in Canada between the wars, and of the restless, complex, desiring souls contained within and by this landscape, Sinclair Ross was an intensely private man who nevertheless craved a wider popular audience for his work. It is thus somewhat ironic that his greatest public notoriety should have come as a result of his posthumous outing by Keath Fraser in As for Me and My Body (1997), a memoir documenting Fraser's twenty-seven-year friendship with the author that was affectionately written but rather salaciously reviewed. Even …

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Book Review: America's Agatha Christie: Mignon Good Eberhart, Her Life And Works, Leroy L. Panek Jan 2006

Book Review: America's Agatha Christie: Mignon Good Eberhart, Her Life And Works, Leroy L. Panek

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mignon Eberhart occupies a singular place in the history of American crime fiction. She began writing in 1923, at the beginning of what would become known as the "golden age" of detective fiction. The age was golden both because of the quality of some of the writers who took up and reshaped the form and because publishers discovered that marketing detective stories could make them a lot of money. Eberhart became one of the best-known mystery writers of her times. H. R. F. Keating called her a "star writer" and Gertrude Stein described her as one of the "best mystifiers …

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Book Review: God's Country, Uncle Sam's Land: Faith And Conflict In The American West, Charles H. Lippy Jan 2006

Book Review: God's Country, Uncle Sam's Land: Faith And Conflict In The American West, Charles H. Lippy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Most studies linking region and religion have looked at New England, because of Puritanism's impact, or the South, because of the "Bible belt" image. A few have examined the Southwest, mostly to analyze Spanish influence in the age of colonial conquest. Kerstetter's work, however, joins an increasing number that focus on how region and religion are intertwined in the West. That alone makes it valuable.

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Book Review: Poets Talk: Conversations With Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Moure, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen, And Fred Wah, Alison Calder Jan 2006

Book Review: Poets Talk: Conversations With Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Moure, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen, And Fred Wah, Alison Calder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Reading Poets Talk is like overhearing an interesting conversation in a café: you eat up the discussion, but you also want to jump in and ask your own questions. The poets would be fascinating tablemates: diverse in terms of sexuality and race, they are united by how they understand language's relation to social power structures, and how they challenge the "rules" of language to subvert or expose other, often implicit, social rules. They're also united by what I'll call, not condescendingly, generationality: they're established writers with long personal and political histories. The result is a collection of interviews that are …

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Book Review: The First Sioux War: The Grattan Fight And Blue Water Creek, 1854-1856, Mark R. Ellis Jan 2006

Book Review: The First Sioux War: The Grattan Fight And Blue Water Creek, 1854-1856, Mark R. Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1855, General William S. Harney's Sioux Expedition smashed into Little Thunder's Lakota village along Blue Water Creek (Ash Hollow) in western Nebraska. The attack was in retaliation for the killing of Lt. John Grattan and twenty-nine soldiers near Fort Laramie the year before. When the shooting stopped, at least eighty-six Lakotas, including many women and children, lay dead or dying. The violence at Blue Water Creek was part of what both R. Eli Paul and Paul N. Beck call "The First Sioux War." While Red Cloud's War, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the Wounded Knee Massacre are …

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Book Review: Locust: The Devastating Rise And Mysterious Disappearance Of The Insect That Shaped The American Frontier, Ken Baake Jan 2006

Book Review: Locust: The Devastating Rise And Mysterious Disappearance Of The Insect That Shaped The American Frontier, Ken Baake

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Locust is a hybrid academic study and popular science mystery that tells of the locust plague that swept out of the Rocky Mountains to eviscerate much of the Great Plains' fledgling agriculture in the late nineteenth century.

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Book Review: When Skins Were Money: A History Of The Fur Trade, Peter Bleed Jan 2006

Book Review: When Skins Were Money: A History Of The Fur Trade, Peter Bleed

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When Skins Were Money: A History of the Fur Trade is James A. Hanson's grand synthesis of the trade in furs and skins that is the focus of the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska. Like the museum itself, When Skins Were Money has a worldwide scope and a long view as it seeks to describe the evolution and impacts of the fur trade. Its basic premise, that the fur trade has been important to world history but underappreciated and misunderstood, is advanced in a well-produced volume filled with wonderful things. Most pages have handsome illustrations that support …

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Relief For Wanderers: The Transient Service In Kansas, 1933-35, Peter Fearon Jan 2006

Relief For Wanderers: The Transient Service In Kansas, 1933-35, Peter Fearon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Located at the crossroads of America, Kansas had long experience of interstate migrants. For many decades armies of workers had entered the state to pursue the harvest of a number of crops, or to pick up whatever work was available on their way west in pursuit of a more rewarding life. The U.S. population was highly mobile and migration played an essential role in a vigorously expanding economy. Ailing transients, especially tubercular cases, had as their destination the pure, dry air of the Southwest. To these we can add indeterminate numbers of seasonal workers, ex-veterans, homeless boys, peddlers, beggars, and …

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