Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Beloved Women: The Political Lives Of Ladonna Harris And Wilma Mankiller By Sarah Eppler Janda, Robert E. England

Great Plains Quarterly

In Beloved Women, Sarah Eppler Janda offers an important and provocative analysis of the political lives of two American Indian leaders in Oklahoma and national politics. Janda uses primary documents, interviews, and secondary sources to examine the nexus between race (Indianness) and gender (feminism) and the acquisition and use of political power by LaDonna Harris and Wilma Mankiller.

Janda organizes the book into three parts. The first devotes two chapters to developing the primary constructs used in the study (image, identity, political activism, and the intersection of feminism and Indianness) for LaDonna Harris. Chapters 3 and 4 (part 2) …

Nebraska’S Live Stock Sanitary Commission And The Rise Of American Progressivism, David Lee Amstutz

Great Plains Quarterly

In the years after the Civil War, the United States experienced tremendous economic growth. Entrepreneurs such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie built giant corporate businesses that dominated entire industries. The practice of vertical integration- in which a single business controlled all aspects of production and marketing-drew workers from different areas together under the same employers. Moreover, the corporations conducted interstate commerce, and they became powerful enough to drive competitors out of business. With their smaller rivals removed, the corporations were free to market their goods across the United States. As efforts to foster economic prosperity continued into the …

Review Of Upstream Metropolis: An Urban Biography Of Omaha And Council Bluffs By Lawrence H. Larsen, Barbara J. Cottrell, Harl A. Dalstrom, And Kay Calame Dalstrom., Heather Fryer

Great Plains Quarterly

Upstream Metropolis is an "urban biography" of the "Omaha-Council Bluffs NE-IA Metropolitan Statistical Area," the nation's sixtieth most populous urban center in 2005. The life-story approach draws from an impressive array of local primary and secondary sources to bring depth, complexity, and an updated chronology to the literature on Omaha's development.

Omaha-Council Bluff's childhood, familiar to many readers, was marked by rapid growth as railroad money, meatpacking plants, and a multiethnic laboring population made their way to the improvised settlements in the 1830s- 40s. As with most youngsters, the settlements showed glimmers of potential eclipsed by a need for discipline …

Review Of American Windmills: An Album Of Historic Photographs. By T. Lindsay Baker, Jim Hoy

Great Plains Quarterly

"I'm a lover and a fighter and a wild bull rider and a pretty fair kind of a windmill man," goes the old Plains-country brag. Along with barbed wire, windmills helped bring an end to the open range, and the cowboy had to add fence riding and windmill maintenance to his roping and riding skills. American Windmills, T. Lindsay Baker's latest volume on the topic of which he is the country's (and most likely the world's) leading authority, brought back a flood of memories as I turned its pages.

When I was growing up on a small Flint Hills …

Review Of Living Blue In The Red States Edited By David Starkey, Greg Kosmicki

Great Plains Quarterly

I swear I once read in one of my mother's Reader's Digests: "This is a book that all true Americans should be forced to read." Maybe that's a false memory from my youth, but Living Blue in the Red States certainly is one of those books.

Living Blue in the Red States should have a "No Spin Zone" warning on the cover-it could be dangerous for politicians to read. The pollsters and punsters would have us believe we live in the bowels of a Blue state/Red state monster, each political splinter group desperately clinging to its little wedge issue …

Review Of Marking The Land: Jim Dow In North Dakota Photographs And Narrative By Jim Dow, Robert Silberman

Great Plains Quarterly

It may not take special powers of observation to notice the sixty-ton concrete bison next to the interstate on the outskirts of Jamestown, North Dakota. But knowing how to photograph such a subject well demands skill-and Jim Dow has what it takes. Discovering the beauty of a giant coal-mining shovel or the brushwork pattern behind a stenciled "Going Out of Business" notice does require a sharp eye, and he has that, too. Originally invited by Laurel Reuter of the North Dakota Museum of Art to photograph folk art in the landscape in the early 1980s, Dow, during visits in 2000 …

Jewish Community In Wichita, 1920-1970 Same Wagon, New Horses, Jay M. Price

Great Plains Quarterly

For young Walter Katz, Wichita, Kansas, was a world away from his hometown of Jesberg, Germany. As the Third Reich consolidated power, the Katz family-mother, father, and three sons-decided to escape to the United States of America to make a new life among relatives near Stillwater, Oklahoma. With them came the Torah scroll from Jesberg's synagogue that Walter's brother had rescued from destruction. Although he had limited English skills and was unfamiliar with local customs, Walter found himself enrolled in school and on the local football team within weeks of his arrival. A few years later, Walter's cousin, Aaron Youngheim, …

Review Of White Man's Club: Schools, Race, And The Struggle Of Indian Acculturation By Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Michael C. Coleman

Great Plains Quarterly

So many studies have been published on nineteenth-century U.S. government Indian schools that I initially wondered about the need for another. (My book has been published in the same series as that under review). Jacqueline Fear-Segal, senior lecturer in American history at the University of East Anglia, England, acknowledges her debt to this literature. Yet she validly insists on the importance of her contribution. Believing that previous studies have not "fully unpacked" issues of race, Fear-Segal contrasts the overt egalitarian rhetoric of white educators with what she sees as covert racist agendas, while probing the complex responses of Indian children …

Review Of Alberta Art And Artists: An Overview By Patricia Ainslie And Mary-Beth Laviolette, Leslie Dawn

Great Plains Quarterly

Alberta Art and Artists is a modest book with large ambitions. It is first and foremost an introduction to the historic and contemporary visual arts within the western Canadian province. But it is also a declaration that this art supports a "confident difference," a unique provincial identity that distinguishes it from other regions.

The two authors are well positioned to undertake the volume's double task. Patricia Ainslie, who served as curator and vice president of collections at the Glenbow Museum and Archives in Calgary, contributes two historical sections. Following a sampling of First Nations productions, she directs the reader to …

Review Of New Indians, Old Wars By Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Bruce E. Johansen

Great Plains Quarterly

In New Indians, Old Wars, Elizabeth CookLynn delivers a sometimes scorching critique not only of the United States' pursuit of colonization through warfare (comparing it, in Iraq, to the Plains Indian wars), but also of superficial thinking and fuzzy argumentation that prevents scholars of Native American Studies from drawing a tight focus on the central issues of their discipline.

Cook-Lynn, professor emerita of Native American Studies at Eastern Washington University, argues that the central focus of study in Native law, history, and literature should be colonialism and exploitation of resources. Hailing from a warrior family that reaches to the Battle …

Review Of American Indians, The Irish, And Government Schooling: A Comparative Study By Michael C. Coleman, Katie Kane

Great Plains Quarterly

Michael Coleman's historical and comparative study represents the latest offering in a critical but still underdeveloped subfield of comparative colonialisms: Irish and Native American connections under the experience of colonization. The tradition of comparative work across the Atlantic Ocean, with its recognition of a fundamental similarity in the practical and ideological work of British and American colonialism in Ireland and Indian Country, has roots in the scholarship of such important intellectuals as Howard Mumford Jones (0 Strange New World! American Culture: The Formative Years), David Beers Quinn (The Elizabethans and the Irish), and Nicholas Canny ("The …

Review Of The Cherokee Trail Of Tears Essay By Duane King, James W. Parins

Great Plains Quarterly

Although the Cherokees were among a great number of Indian nations from all over the eastern half of the United States to be forced from their homeland by the 1830 Removal Act, in the popular imagination the term "Trail of Tears" refers to the exodus from their homes in present-day North Carolina, Tennessee, northern Alabama, and Georgia. In the decade before passage of the Removal Act, the Cherokees took defensive action, organizing their government along the lines of the American republic, and embracing some of the trappings of white civilization. However, this strategy failed; the Cherokees were left to follow …

Review Of Chickasaw: Unconquered And Unconquerable By Jeannie Barbour, Amanda Cobb, And Linda Hogan, Donna L. Akers

Great Plains Quarterly

This stunningly beautiful work by the Chickasaw Nation relates the fascinating story of the Chickasaw people, from ancient to contemporary times. Packed with simply gorgeous photographs and illustrations, it evokes the strength, endurance, courage, and determination of the Chickasaws in the face of relentless American colonization. The Chickasaw story of survival and persistence in the face of this aggression is an inspirational tribute to the ancestors, who not only endured dispossession and permanent exile but flourished in spite of the terrible tragedy of removal. This book addresses a popular audience, not an academic one, beginning with an overview of Chickasaw …

Review Of Rosie Sandifer: Language Of Art. By Rosie Sandifer., Peter S. Briggs

Great Plains Quarterly

Painter and sculptor Rosie Sandifer, native of Lubbock, Texas, past resident of Colorado, arid present resident of New Mexico, penned her own memoir, "Language of Art," the principal text of this book. Her modest eight-page autobiography skips from chronological outline to assessment of favored artists, teachers, and museums, to appreciation for parental lessons which, in the author's words, inspired her "discipline, drive, and direction." Two shorter opening essays by Tuck Langland, a sculptor, and Robin Salmon, curator of sculpture at Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina, carefully guide Sandifer into her artistic niche as a figurative sculptor. There is no independent …

Review Of Forty Years A Legislator: Elmer ThomasBy Elmer Thomas, Suzanne Jones Crawford

Great Plains Quarterly

Written between 1951 and 1954, this autobiography covers the career of Elmer Thomas as a state senator from 1907 to 1920, as a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1922 to 1928, and as a U.S. senator from 1928 to 1950. Editors Richard Lowitt and Carolyn Hanneman deserve a hearty round of applause for having converted Thomas's original, meandering four-hundred-page-plus manuscript to an intelligible, readable work. Especially valuable to the reader are the editors' end notes, identifying figures and issues whose political significance has dimmed and offering suggestions for further reading.

Despite his popularity among Oklahoma Democrats …

Review Of Beyond Madness: The Art Of Ralph Blakelock, 1847-1919 By Norman A. Geske, Abraham A. Davidson

Great Plains Quarterly

No one has studied the art of the American painter Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847-1919) for as many years and as intensely as Norman A. Geske. After a telephone call from the artist's great-grandson in 1966, Geske was on board. In 1969, while Director of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, he launched the Nebraska Blakelock Inventory. This was to hold all known information on the artist-photographs of paintings and drawings, previous ownerships, prices paid, letters of family members and others, publications of scholars and notations of collectors, and so on. In 1969 and 1974 Geske directed four examination seminars to separate …

Review Of Axes: Willa Cather And William Faulkner By Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Ed Folsom

Great Plains Quarterly

Merrill Skaggs explains in her introduction that we are to hear her provocative title, Axes, in at least two ways: as the intersecting axes of these two writers' very different careers (as when Joseph R. Urgo termed Cather and Faulkner as "the horizontal and vertical axes of American literature"), but also as actual weapons, "battle-axes." Skaggs reads these authors' novels and stories as word-weapons they wielded at one another, hoping to wound. They may ultimately have judged each other worthy opponents, but they never laid down their arms, remaining combative until Cather's death and even after (her posthumously published story …

Review Of Texas Quilts And Quilters: A Lone Star Legacy By Marcia Kaylakie With Janice Whittington, Virginia Gunn

Great Plains Quarterly

This beautiful book showcases thirty-four Texas quilts, selected by Marcia Kaylakie from the hundreds she saw in public and private collections during a decade of documenting quilts throughout the state of Texas. It is a visual delight that adds to the body of work on Texas quilts and quiltmakers. Marion Ann Montgomery's foreword helps set the book in context. Janice Whittington worked with Kaylakie to shape the interesting human stories behind the quilts. We learn that a simple Dutch Doll quilt became known as "The Sick Quilt," as a mother entertained her ill children with stories about each doll. We …

Review Of Policing The Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, And The North American Frontier, 1875-1910 By Andrew R. Graybill, Michael Hogue

Great Plains Quarterly

At opposite ends of the Great Plains, the North-West Mounted Police and the Texas Rangers emerged in the mid-1870s as key instruments in the extension of state power over distant frontiers. Policing the Great Plains reveals how these famous rural constabularies implemented policies designed in Ottawa and Austin to promote the settlement and economic development of the Great Plains. Andrew Graybill argues that these shared political and economic goals ensured that Mounties and Rangers, despite their many differences, helped bring about strikingly similar transformations in Texas and the Canadian Prairies.

By placing Mounties and Rangers in this common history of …

Review Of Lakotas, Black Robes, And Holy Women: German Reports From The Indian Missions In South Dakota, 1886-1900 Edited By Karl Markus Kreis, Joshua M. Rice

Great Plains Quarterly

The literature on Native American dispossession grows with every year, and there are times when the historiography of the American West seems in danger of becoming repetitive. Lakotas, Black Robes, and Holy Women addresses this problem by revealing untapped sources and new perspectives on the West as the Great Plains increasingly fell under US. control.

This monograph focuses on the Catholic missions in South Dakota-the Holy Rosary Mission on the Pine Ridge Reservation and the St. Francis Mission on the adjoining Rosebud Reservation-during the critical years of 1886-1900. Staffed by a handful of Jesuits and Franciscan sisters, many of whom …

Review Of Gall: Lakota War Chief By Robert W. Larson, Herman Viola

Great Plains Quarterly

Dubbed the "Fighting Cock of the Sioux" by the U.S. soldiers he confronted, the Hunkpapa warrior Gall has at last found his rightful place on the book shelves of Great Plains history. A major challenge for any biographer is the lack of primary source material about Gall's early life, a typical problem for anyone attempting a scholarly study about someone who flashes in and out of the historical record the way Gall does. Given the challenge he faced, Robert W. Larson has done a commendable job in compiling a plausible account of Gall's movements and actions before he took up …

Review Of Diaspora In The Countryside: Two Mennonite Communities And Mid~Twentieth~Century Rural Disjuncture. By Royden Loewen, Hans Werner

Great Plains Quarterly

Royden Loewen's recent book displays all the insights and delicious ironies we have come to expect from him. In this study, Loewen compares the Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites of the Rural Municipality of Hanover, Manitoba, with those of Meade, Kansas, during a time of dramatic change in rural life. Loewen begins with an analysis of what historian John L. Shover termed "the Great Disjuncture" itself, the fragmentation and scattering between the 1930s and 1980s of a once unified rural society, followed by a chapter focusing more specifically on the environment: the image of the snowdrift for Manitoba and the dust bowl …

Reviews Of Hunger For The Wild: America's Obsession With The Untamed West By Michael L. Johnson And Frontiers: A Short History Of The American West By Robert V. Hine And John Mack Faragher, Karl Jacoby

Great Plains Quarterly

Whither the grand narrative in historical scholarship? For years, critics have cautioned us that narratives are, in Hayden White's words, little more than a form of "emplotment" whose order and coherence oversimplify the inherent messiness of the past. Yet the inconvenient fact remains that human beings are unparalleled storytelling creatures. Whether or not events occur in a narrative format, with a clear beginning, middle, and end, we tend to perceive them in this way-and to relate them in this structure to one another.

Still, not all narratives are created equal. In keeping with the postmodern turn, historians have been increasingly …

Notes And News- Fall 2008

Great Plains Quarterly

CALL FOR PAPERS

CALL FOR PAPERS

MISSOURI VALLEY HISTORY CONFERENCE

Title And Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 28 / Number 4 / Fall 2008

CONTENTS

NEBRASKA'S LIVE STOCK SANITARY COMMISSION AND THE RISE OF AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM

CONTRADICTORY SUBTEXTS IN WILLA CATHER'S 0 PIONEERS! AND THOMAS HARDY'S FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

JEWISH COMMUNITY IN WICHITA, 1920-1970: SAME WAGON, NEW HORSES

REVIEW ESSAY: THE SPINNING OF THE WEST

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Contradictory Subtexts In Willa Cather's O Pioneers! And Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd, Grace Wetzel

Great Plains Quarterly

An independent and strong-minded woman gains control of a farm and determines to effect its fruition. Though many doubt her capacity, the female landowner trumps her male counterparts when the farm flourishes under her effective management. In the end, she marries- but on extremely unconventional terms. Rejecting romantic love, she instead weds a devoted friend. Camaraderie hence privileged over passion, the novel ends. This summary outlines the story of not one but two major literary heroines-Bathsheba Everdene of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Alexandra Bergson of Willa Cather's 0 Pioneers! (1913). Critics have analyzed these texts …

Review Of A Great Restlessness: The Life And Politics Of Dorise Nielsen By Faith Johnston, Valerie Korinek

Great Plains Quarterly

For years, we've known little about Dorise Nielsen, other than the curious fact that she holds the distinction of being the first federally elected communist in Canada. What, one wonders, caused a prairie farm wife and mother to run successfully as the United Progressive candidate for North Battleford, Saskatchewan, in 1940? The answers are multifaceted according to Faith Johnston's award-winning biography. Partly, Johnston attributes Nielsen's motivation to culture shock at her transformation from a middle-class urban English existence to the isolation, poverty, and deprivation of life on a central Saskatchewan farm during the Depression. Secondly, and equally significantly, Nielsen's personality, …

Why The Homesteading Data Are So Poor (And What Can Be Done About It), Richard Edwards

Great Plains Quarterly

Data available to scholars on homesteading are of very poor quality-inconsistent, unreliable, inaccessible, incomplete-and surprisingly, they haven't been getting any better. Even basic questions such as how much homesteaded land was "proved up," how much land was commuted, or how many actual farms were created by homesteading cannot be answered with any assurance. Moreover, the answers given today mostly depend on quantitative studies completed forty or more years ago.

Why should this be? After all, we have witnessed in recent decades a staggering increase in the capacity and convenience of data handling by using computers. The publication of the Historical …

Review Of True Tales Of The Prairies And Plains By David Dary, Benjamin T. Arrington

Great Plains Quarterly

The cover of True Tales of the Prairies and Plains notes that author David Dary is a past winner of the Cowboy Hall of Fame Award and the Western Writers of America Spur Award. One must assume that his previous books made better contributions to the scholarship of the American West than does this one. Fine for a casual reader or one interested in entertaining vignettes about the West, this work has little to offer the serious scholar.

The book is broken into several sections with such titles as "Over the Trails and Rails," "Buried Treasure Legends" (so much for …

Land, Speculation, And Manipulation On The Pecos, Stephen Bogener

Great Plains Quarterly

The Pecos River of the nineteenth century, unlike its faint twenty-first century shadow, was a formidable watercourse. The river stretches some 755 miles, from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains northeast of Santa Fe to its eventual merger with the Rio Grande. Control over the public domain of southeastern New Mexico came from controlling access to the Pecos, its tributaries and springs. In the arid environment of New Mexico's Pecos Valley, corporate accumulation of land through manipulation of federal land laws followed the removal of Native Americans, the displacement of Mexican American communities, and the departure of major players in the …