International and Area Studies Commons^™

Book Review Of Science At The American Frontier: A Biography Of Dewitt Bristol Brace By David Cahan And M. Eugene Rudd, Robinson Yost

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Though not among the most influential American physicists of the late 19th century, DeWitt Bristol Brace (1859-1905) played significant roles in creating the Department of Physics at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and in developing extremely sensitive instrumentation attempting to measure the motion of the hypothetical ether relative to the Earth (more commonly called "ether drift"). As the book's title suggests, another of its major themes is the transmission of scientific knowledge, physics in particular, from German and East Coast American universities to the remoteness of the Great Plains. It is within this contextual framework that Science at the American …

Book Review Of A People's Dream: Aboriginal Self-Government In Canada By Dan Russell, Ross Gordon Green

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The issue of achieving self-government has long been a concern of many Aboriginal people in Canada. Indian, Metis, and Inuit people were formally recognized in the Canadian constitution in 1982, when s. 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 proclaimed that the "existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal people of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed." But did this include the right to self-government?

Book Review Of Watershed: Reflections On Water By Grant Macewan, Lee Foote

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Watershed, the last of forty-eight books by Grant MacEwan, was completed in the year of his death and published posthumously. This work integrates his ninety-seven years as a keenly informed student of western Canadian water issues. Three attributes make it noteworthy. First, The Source: MacEwan was an excellent observer and student of water-related development, personal struggles, politics, and environmentalism in western Canada. Second, Voice: poetic yet spare prose embodies a voice of western scholarship free from romantic pandering. Third, Temporal Scope: Grant MacEwan renders a first-person account and commentary across a century of change.

Reverse Migration And Nonmetropolitan Employment In Four Great Plains States, 1970-1980, A. Olu Oyinlade

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

During the rural renaissance of the 1970s, the United States experienced a reverse migration pattern in which the flow of migration was predominantly urban to rural, unlike the traditional rural to urban flows. This migration phenomenon was equally experienced in the North Central Region, which includes the Great Plains states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas.

This study investigated the impact of the reverse migration phenomenon on employment in eight industry categories in three categories of counties in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. Findings show that net migration had differential impacts on employment by industry category …

Book Review Of Saving Migrant Birds: Developing Strategies For The Future John Faaborg, Kenneth Able

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The purported decline of populations of some of the most conspicuous and prized species of neotropical migrant birds has spawned something of a cottage industry. Beginning in the 1980s, many articles in the popular press, some of them wildly hyperbolic, predicted the imminent demise of much of North America's songbird fauna. One of the positive outcomes of this phenomenon has been a resurgence of research on migratory birds. In Saving Migratory Birds, John Faaborg takes a careful look at what we have learned in the two decades since the alarm was sounded and, just as important, what we still …

Review Of Birds Of Nebraska: Their Distribution And Temporal Occurrence By Roger S. Sharpe, W. Ross Silcock, And Joel G. Jorgensen, David L. Swanson

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Several books regarding the status and distribution of the birds of Nebraska have appeared since 1980, including annotated checklists (Paul Johnsgard, A Preliminary List of the Birds of Nebraska and Adjacent Great Plains States [1980]; Johnsgard, The Birds of Nebraska and Adjacent Plains States [1997]; T. E. Bray et al., The Birds of Nebraska: A Critically Evaluated List [1986]) and treatments of breeding birds (James E. Ducey and Johnsgard, Nebraska Birds: Breeding Status and Distribution [1988]), but none of these is a truly comprehensive account of the state's avifauna. The current volume is aimed at just such a niche and …

Review Of Science And Native American Communities: Legacies Of Pain, Visions Of Promise Edited By Keith James, Dave Pruett, Ernest Stromberg

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Science and Native American Communities, a provocative collection of essays from an unprecedented 1997 conference of Native American professionals in academia, science, engineering, and health sciences, explores "the uneasy meeting ground" between Western science and traditional wisdom.
Education, particularly in the sciences, is not value-neutral to Native peoples. Rather than education's poster children, many of the text's nineteen contributors are survivors of failed educational experiments: mission schools, boarding schools, externally imposed values, forced relocations. To editor Keith James (Onondaga), a professor of psychology, "Education has historically been associated with physical and sexual abuse and the emotional and cultural battery …

Review Of Water On The Great Plains: Issues And Policies Edited By Peter 1. Longo And David W. Yoskowitz, Alan R. Smith

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The centrality of water scarcity on the region's public agenda, the correlative need for preservation, and the policies and laws resulting from these circumstances are basic to the concerns of Water on the Great Plains. The book makes a valuable contribution to the study of equity in water rights, its ten chapters offering an accurate overview of the equity issue from several perspectives: geographical, historical, political, and cultural. A complex inquiry, the work provokes further thought-especially on the issue of negotiation and compromise.

Review Of Kill And Chill: Restructuring Canada's Beef Commodity Chain By Ian Maclachlan, Michael J. Broadway

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Most North Americans are meat eaters but few care to ask where their meat comes from or how it is produced. Kill and Chill answers those questions from a Canadian perspective by chronicling the development of Canada's beef industry during the twentieth century.
Canadian beef processing shares many similarities with its US counterpart. At the beginning of the 1900s cattle were raised on the Plains and Prairies and shipped eastwards in railcars to be sold in stockyards, then slaughtered in multi-species packinghouses. Chicago became the prototypical meatpacking town with its sprawling stockyards and packinghouse district, a pattern later emulated in …

Review Of Saskatchewan Politics: Into The Twenty-First Century Edited By Howard A. Leeson, Joseph Garcea

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Somewhat broader than its title suggests, the book focuses not merely on Saskatchewan politics, but also on the province's governing institutions, public policies, and political, economic, and social development. Its first half is devoted to key political institutions, including the legislature, the monarchy, the cabinet, the public service, the judiciary, and parts of the party and electoral systems. The other half addresses an array of political, social, and economic developments that have occurred primarily during the past two decades involving economic and financial management, elections, politics and the media, federal-provincial relations, and the role of First Nations in the province's …

Letters To The Editor, Ralph Grossi, William Parton, Myron Gutmann

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Letters to the Editor

Review Of Harvest Wobblies: The Industrial Workers Of The World And Agricultural Laborers In The American West, 1905-1930 By Greg Hall, William G. Robbins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

America's most vibrant symbol of militant unionism in the twentieth century remains the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) , the radical labor organization whose renown was literally larger than life. The union's strikes, work slow-downs, and suspected sabotage frightened employers, worried conservative labor groups, and eventually convinced the federal government to crush the loosely structured organization shortly after the United States entered the European war in 1917. Greg Hall centers his argument on the union's remarkable, if short-lived, resurgence following the end of the First World War. The Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (AWIU), the IWW's strongest affiliate, enjoyed an …

Review Of Hidden Worlds: Revisiting The Mennonite Migrants Of The 1870s By Royden Loewen, Kimberly D. Schmidt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What Russian Mennonite child has not heard the stories of the massive migration from Russia to the New World? The oft-repeated tales recount how large congregations collectively moved from Russia's steppes to North America's Plains. According to the stories, great-grandparents were in search of religious freedom and good land. They brought turkey-red wheat, recreated their farmland villages, and transformed the Plains into a breadbasket, just as they had transformed Catherine the Great's steppes from a Cossack wilderness into villages and productive farmland. Why revisit this story so ingrained in the collective memory of a people? Even outsider historians, such as …

Review Of Brown V. Board Of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone And Its Troubled Legacy By James T. Patterson, Kristin Leigh Ahlberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Rendered during the postwar consensus period, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision struck at the core of de jure segregation. Recognizing the American educational system as a "great equalizer," Thurgood Marshall and other advocates insisted that the "separate but equal" doctrine codified by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case needed to be overturned to ensure opportunities for African Americans. Marshall found an ally in Chief Justice Earl Warren and his supporters on the Supreme Court who based their decision in the Brown case on the social science research of Kenneth and Mamie Clark and Gunnar Myrdal. Their findings …

"The Greatest Evil" Interpretations Of Indian Prohibition Laws, 1832-1953, Jill E. Martin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Highway 407 in Shannon County South Dakota crosses the Pine Ridge Reservation and, like the reservation, ends at the Nebraska border. When the road turns into Nebraska Highway 87 you enter the unincorporated town of Whiteclay. What also changes, besides the highway numbers, is the legal sale of alcohol. The Ogallala Sioux prohibit alcohol on their land, but this prohibition ends in Whiteclay. Seven liquor stores in this town of 30 residents, all of whom are Anglo-American, sell more than four million cans of beer each year. The two-mile stretch of road between Pine Ridge and Whiteclay is a path …

Title And Contents- Winter 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 23/ Number 1 / Winter 2003

CONTENTS

"AT THE HEAD OF THE ABORIGINAL REMNANT": CHEROKEE CONSTRUCTION OF A "CIVILIZED" INDIAN IDENTITY DURING THE LAKOTA CRISIS OF 1876 Paul Kelton

WAVING "A BOUGH OF CHALLENGE": FORESTRY ON THE KANSAS GRASSLANDS, 1868-1915 Brian Allen Drake

"THE GREATEST EVIL": INTERPRETATIONS OF INDIAN PROHIBITION LAWS, 1832-1953 Jill E. Martin

BOOK REVIEWS

Scott E. Casper and Lucinda M. Long, eds. Moving Stories: Migration and the American West, 1850-2000 By WALTER NUGENT

Jo Ella Powell Exley Frontier Blood: The Saga of the Parker Family By THOMAS W. KAVANAGH

Royden Loewen Hidden Worlds: …

Waving "A Bough Of Challenge" Forestry On The Kansas Grasslands, 1868-1915, Brian Allen Drake

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Kansas is legendary for geographical monotony, for a landscape allegedly so absent of trees and relief that the state has become the butt of national jokes and a cultural synonym for flat. Kansas is not really flat; tilted might be a better description, for the state rises some 3,300 feet in elevation along the 400-mile stretch between Kansas City and Kanorado. Kansas is lacking in substantial tree cover, though, especially in its western third. US Forest Service researchers noted in 1999 that forests covered slightly less than 3 percent of the state, concentrated mostly in the northeast and southeast corners. …

Review Of Moving Stories: Migration And The American West, 1850-2000. Edited By Scott E. Casper And Lucinda M. Long, Walter Nugent

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This well-written, well-illustrated anthology will gladden the hearts of students of the American West, not least because nine of the eleven authors are young-doctoral candidates or assistant professors. There is hope for Western studies. Five are historians, six trained in and teach literature, but most cross disciplinary boundaries quite easily. The geographical scope of the essays stretches well beyond the Great Plains, but the reader will land squarely between the Missouri and Montana in much of the volume.

Theresa Strouth Gaul introduces the writings of three Pennsylvania sisters named Stewart who crossed the Overland Trail to Oregon in 1853 and …

Notes And News- Winter 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News

Call For Papers

Textbook Seeking Great Plains Scholars

International Willa Cather Seminar

Mari Sandoz Center

Review Of Frontier Blood: The Saga Of The Parker Family By Jo Ella Powell Exley, Thomas W. Kavanagh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

These are the stories of four generations of one family that moved West with the frontier, and of one individual who emerged from the meeting of the frontier with the people who were already there. Elder John Parker, born in Maryland in 1758, had a son, Daniel, in Virginia in 1781. Daniel's son James W. was born in Georgia in 1797, and another, Silas, was born in Tennessee in 1804. James W.'s daughter, Rachel, was born in Illinois in 1819, as was Silas's daughter Cynthia Ann in 1826 and his son John in 1829. Cynthia Ann's son, Quanah, was born …

Review Of Riot And Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War And Its Legacy By James S. Hirsch, Hannibal B. Johnson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Riot and Remembrance, James S. Hirsch, an ace reporter formerly affiliated with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, adds his dispassionate voice to the swelling volumes on one of America's most obscure, ignominious racial conflicts: the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. As Hirsch points out, even many native Tulsans knew nothing of the Riot until recent years, the silence surrounding the catastrophe having been deafening. Not only did the Riot escape local civic discourse, it garnered only scant mention-if any mention at all-in state-mandated textbooks.

Why now? Why Tulsa? The answers to both questions turn …

Review Of The Middle Of Everywhere: The World's Refugees Come To Our Town By Mary Pipher, Rochelle L. Dalla

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Identity," writes Pipher, "is no longer based on territory. The world community is small and interconnected. We can learn from this to be kinder and more appreciative of life. And we can learn the importance of understanding the perspectives of all our neighbors in our global village." Philosophically poignant, The Middle of Everywhere presents rich, descriptive narratives of hope, courage, tragedy and resilience through the life-stories of refugees and immigrants, from Bosnia to the Sudan, struggling to create "home" in Lincoln, Nebraska. Significantly, although refugee experiences in one particular Midwestern city are highlighted, one can imagine that any community of …

Book Notes- Winter 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Book Notes

Niddrie of the North-West: Memoirs of a Pioneer Canadian Missionary

A Prairie Mosaic: An Atlas of Central Nebraska's Land, Culture and Nature

The Oregon Trail: A Photographic Journey

Canyons of the Texas High Plains

Dictionary of Midwestern Literature. Volume One: The Authors

The University of Manitoba: An Illustrated History

Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews

Review Of The Methodist Church On The Prairies, 1896- 1914 By George Emery, Sandra Beardsall

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mission efforts in Canada's Midwest played a major part in the development of both the mainline Protestant churches and the young Canadian nation itself. It was on the prairies that Protestants cut their teeth on the interdenominational cooperation that would eventually create Canada's largest Protestant church, The United Church of Canada. And it was in the multifarious ethnic stew of the Canadian Plains that the churches attempted most zealously to forge "Christian Canadian citizens" out of both First Nations populations and immigrants of all stripes. Despite this significant history, there has been no recent monograph focusing on Methodism in this …

Review Of Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty And Federal Law By David E. Wilkins And K. Tsianinia Lomawaima, Blake A. Watson

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Chief Justice John Marshall declared that Indian tribes should be acknowledged "as nations, ... having territorial boundaries, within which their authority is exclusive .... " Justice John McLean, however, questioned whether Indians would always exercise the power of self-government, suggesting that Indian tribes would "become amalgamated in our political communities."
Justice McLean did not dispute that Indian tribes were sovereign; he questioned whether they would-and should-remain sovereign. Some people continue to raise this question. David Wilkins and Tsianinia Lomawaima, in Uneven Ground, begin with the premise that American Indian tribes remain sovereign nations, but …

Review Of Consumers In The Country: Technology And Social Change In Rural America By Ronald R. Kline, Barbara Handy-Marchello

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Ronald Kline examines the acquisition and use of automobiles, electricity, telephones, and radios among farm families from the early twentieth century to 1960. He builds his argument around the tension between farm folk and the forces of urbanization in cities and towns, federal agencies such as REA and Extension Services, and corporations that manufactured and sold various technologies. While purveyors of machines and energy expected they would initiate urbanization of rural social and economic relationships, and that farm families who adopted them would therefore become modern, farmers resisted both the technologies and the assumptions of urbanization until they found the …

Review Of Rare Vascular Plants Of Alberta By Linda Kershaw, Joyce Gould, Derek Johnson, And Jane Lancaster, Donna Cherniawsky

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

This book is a marvelous addition to the literature on rare vascular plants of Alberta and certainly the most comprehensive. It is itself rare through its inclusion of descriptions, illustrations, photographs, and distribution maps with species lists of rare vascular plants. The editors and many contributors have done magnificent work demonstrating that rare plant information is not static, but always changing as the status of rare plants is continually reviewed with new documentation. An appeal is even made to readers to enhance their awareness and assist with documentation of new rare plant sightings for subsequent status review and conservation. Clearly, …

High Plains Regional Aquifer Study Revisited: A 20-Year Retrospective For Western Kansas, Jeffrey Peterson, Daniel Bernardo

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The most comprehensive water policy analysis conducted on the High Plains region to date was the High Plains Ogallala Regional Aquifer Study completed in 1982. Twenty years later, we had a unique opportunity to compare the projections from this study with the changes that actually occurred over the past two decades. Specific comparisons were made for the area of western Kansas overlying the High Plains Aquifer. These comparisons revealed some significant differences in the status of the aquifer and in the region's economic development, relative to the predictions of the study. Most notably, contrary to the study's predictions, irrigated area …

Review Of Writing Off The Rural West: Globalization, Governments, And The Transformation Of Rural Communities Edited By Roger Epp And Dave Whitson, K. K. Klein

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Emerging from a conference on globalization and rural communities held in Edmonton in 1997, Writing Off the West's seventeen chapters (plus a short afterword by prominent rural activist Nettie Wiebe) focus on the decline of rural communities in western Canada and the difficulties some rural people face when adapting to socioeconomic changes caused by globalization and freer international markets.

Most of the volume's twenty-four authors specialize in sociology, geography, political science, and history. Curiously, not one of them has any background in agricultural economics, a discipline that has studied issues pertaining to family farms, rural economies, and globalization intensively throughout …

Book Review Of Crossing The 49th Parallel: Migration From Canada To The United States, 1900- 1930 By Bruno Ramirez, John Lehr

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The boundary of Canada and the United States is celebrated as the longest undefended border in the world. Despite its length and seeming prominence in North American history, only recently has the border received more than passing attention from historians and geographers. In his insightful and carefully documented book, Bruno Ramirez contends that this is partly because migrants from the United States to Canada, and from Canada to the United States passed through a porous border until the 1900s. With the exception of French Canadians migrating from Quebec to New England, Canadian immigrants did not create the kinds of ethnic …