International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of Ogallala: Water For A Dry Land By John Opie, Stephen E. White

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

Ogallala is as much about the need for achieving sustainable agriculture in America as it is about the issues surrounding the depletion of groundwater in the High Plains. In some ways, the Ogallala region simply serves as the setting for describing the problems of the energy intensive, high-tech oriented agriculture pervasive throughout much of the U.S. today. Only a portion of the Ogallala, that most impacted during the dust bowl era and extending from about Lubbock, Texas through southwestern Kansas, is treated systematically.

Review Of Forgotten Places: Uneven Development In Rural America Edited By Thomas A. Lyson And William W. Falk, Karen Morin

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

The editors and authors of this fine collection of articles, though mostly sociologists, demonstrate how geography is in a sense destiny to the rural poor. By focusing on nine regions spanning the country from New England to the Rio Grande Valley to the Pacific Northwest, they show how social as well as spatial isolation has created common problems among a rural underclass that is "forgotten" by mainstream America.

Socio-spatial isolation may take many forms, but the outcome for all the places studied is the same: lack of full participation in American economic life. Educational isolation in the Black Belt of …

Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers And Government Policy, Todd Kerstetter

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

Until recently, prevailing wisdom in academic circles held that nomadic, buffalo hunting tribes on the Great Plains resisted all efforts to make them farmers. According to the old school, sedentary, regimented agricultural life on a reservation violated these noble hunters' culture. Sarah Carter says that the old school was dead wrong. Carter, a Canada Research Fellow with the Department of History and Rupert's Land Research Centre at the University of Winnipeg, argues that during the last quarter of the nineteenth century Indians in Canada's prairie provinces stood ready and willing to adopt an agricultural lifestyle. The Canadian government, however, despite …

Review Of Wagon Wheel Kitchens: Food On The Oregon Trail By Jacqueline Williams, Betsy Downey

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

By the end of her wagon journey west, Phoebe Judson recalled, "all of the little delicacies we brought ... from home were gone, ... the thought of a 'baked kidney' or 'pink-eyed' potatoes caused the tears to roll down my face" (p. 2). For Judson and other emigrants, daily life on the Oregon Trail revolved around food; the journey often took six months and meant more than seven hundred meals cooked out or eaten cold, in all kinds of weather. Food historian Jacqueline Williams sees these meals as a vital part of the history of the overland travelers. Her Wagon …

Table Of Contents - Volume 5, Number 1, February 1995

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

Contents: Articles

Book Reviews

News and Notes

Review Of On Turner's Trail: 100 Years Of Writing Western History By Wilbur R. Jacobs, Mark A. Eifler

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

The addition of another study assessing the legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner will surely elicit a few groans among western scholars. This is too bad, for Wilbur Jacobs' On Turner's Trail is a detailed, insightful, and richly rewarding trek that should be undertaken by all western historians.

Jacobs' book mixes the best of biography, historiography, and institutional history, while adding a good deal of personal reminiscence as well. As a biography, Jacobs paints a portrait of an ambitious and complex historian, a man struggling to synthesize a huge quantity of data, who retains a genuinely open mind regarding material and …

Review Of Confronting Sexual Assault: A Decade Of Legal And Social Change By Julian V Roberts And Renate M. Mohr, Cynthia Willis-Esqueda

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

In Confronting Sexual Assault Julian V Roberts and Renate M. Mohr have edited a collection of chapters written by various scholars and professionals on issues central to Canadian social change concerning legal conceptions of rape, as well as the legal ramifications of such change for Canada. The book also contains a reprint of 1992 legislation, Bill C-49, that provides tests for when judges may allow a complainant's sexual history to be admitted as evidence and provides a definition of "consent" for determining sexual assault. Moreover, the bill "... restricted the defense of mistaken belief in consent ... " (p. 11). …

Review Of Buffalo By John Foster, Dick Harrison, And I. S. Maclaren, Edmonton, Alberta, 1992, University Of Alberta Press, Alan J. Osborn

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

This volume contains 12 contributions that deal with North American bison in relation to paleontology, archaeology and cultural resource management, the fur trade, portrayal in art and literature, disease and population ecology, and Native American land tenure.

There are two general themes that dominate this book. First, two articles by Jack Brink and Ed Sponholz discuss the role of Native Americans in the interpretation and preservation of cultural resources. Both authors focus on the spectacular prehistoric Head-Smashed-In bison jump in southwestern Alberta. Head-Smashed-In is a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization World Heritage site that has been developed in …

News And Notes - Volume 5, Number 1, February 1995

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

Contents:

Great Plains Research Science Award

Calls for Papers

Conferences

Reports on Past Conferences

Review Of Not Room Enough: Mexicans, Anglos And Socioeconomic Change In Texas, 1850-1900 By Kenneth L. Stewart And Arnoldo De Leon, F. Arturo Rosales

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

The main conclusion of this concise work is that Mexicans had more economic parity with Anglos in 1850 than at the end of the nineteenth century. Even though both groups chased opportunities offered by Texas' entry into the capitalist world system, the fortunes of Mexicans did not keep pace. By 1900, Mexicans lagged behind Anglos in property ownership, in capital wealth, in political power retention, and in educational attainments. Such a course is predictable; the thesis has often been aired prior to the publication of this work, not just about Texas but about other areas of the Southwest.

Changing Employment Patterns On The Northern And Central Great Plains, Richard E. Lonsdale, J. Clark Archer

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

The Great Plains are sometimes characterized as an economically lagging region. To shed some light on the region’s prospects, the locational and structural changes in employment patterns in the northern and central Great Plains were examined for the 1980 to 1990 period. County-level data were drawn from CD-ROM census publications and matched with locational references using Atlas *GIS . Shift-share computations were undertaken for the region as a whole and for metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties. Employment declined sharply in agriculture and construction, but increased in the service sectors. Compared with the nation as a whole, the region competed poorly in …

Review Of Colorado: The Place Of Nature, The Nature Of Place By Thomas P. Huber, A. David Hill

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

Colorado contains profiles of twelve distinctive places, which like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, fit together to form a mosaic that helps describe and explain the state's natural and, to a lesser extent, human history. The opening chapter introduces the lay reader to the broad themes of the state's physical geography-geology, landforms, climate, and vegetation. These topics are then typically covered with specific reference to each of the place profiles that constitute the remaining twelve chapters.

The most intriguing aspect of the book is the selection of the twelve places. Huber said he chose them "to inform, tantalize, and …

Northern Great Plains Manufacturers: Assistance Needs And Potential Economic Contributions, F. Larry Leistritz

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

The past decade has been a period of turmoil for the manufacturing sector in both the US. and Canada, and rural manufacturing firms in both countries have been subjected to substantial competitive pressures. The purpose of this study was to identify the firms that comprise the manufacturing sector in North Dakota and in the Provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and to identify their needs in order to increase economic activity in the region. Data came from a survey of 333 firms conducted in 1991. Overall, the findings indicate that the firms comprising the manufacturing sector in Manitoba and Saskatchewan are …

Review Of Fort Union Fur Trade Symposium Proceedings, September 13-15,1990, Laurie A. Milne

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

The 13 papers in this volume derive from the Fort Union Fur Trade Symposium held in mid-September 1990 at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, the heartland of the 19th-century American fur trade. Conference organizers, intending this meeting to be reminiscent of the well known, periodic North American Fur Trade Conferences, had invited nearly two dozen preeminent scholars to offer their insights into the trade .and traders of the upper Missouri country. To this end the papers appearing in this publication cover such diverse topics as the geographic setting, the construction of Fort Union, the men of the …

The Nutritional Impacts Of European Contact On The Omaha: A Continuing Legacy, Christiana Miewald

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

For the majority of Native American tribes on the Great Plains, contact with Euro-Americans resulted in a number of changes in their lifeways. For the Omaha tribe, the introduction of both the horse and firearms meant a diversification in nutritional strategies and a florescence in their culture. After being confined to their reservation in 1855, the Omaha continued to remain largely self-sufficient in food production. During the early years of the reservation until the turn of the century, the Omaha were highly successful farmers, producing surpluses of cash• and garden variety crops. In this paper I argue that today the …

Review Of Restructuring Rural Saskatchewan: The Challenge Of The 1990s By Jack C. Stabler And M. R. Olfert, James Knotwell

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

Stabler and Olfert have contributed a well-conceived empirical analysis of a truly rural economic region (about 18% of the Saskatchewan population is employed in primary sectors, overwhelmingly agriculture). This book tends to support most of the same phenomena postulated in Central Place Theory literature, and observable in similar case studies of similar regions. Great Plains development and planning agencies should find in Stabler and Olfert's methods a rich harvest of easily applicable approaches to analyzing their respective economic spaces, provided they have access to a large, diverse database, or can compile it themselves with a minimal expenditure. Unfortunately, the theoretical …

Review Of Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion And Environmental Politics By R. Mcgreggor Cawley, Francis Moul

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

The public policy issue this book explores is a continuing one, especially after the Republican take-over of Congress in 1994. In a sense, then, this study of the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s is incomplete. It seems clear that the issue, governmental control and use of the public lands of twelve western states, will change-perhaps radically.

Yet, the book is an important study of a highly volatile public issue in the West, and gives us an understanding of its dimensions no matter what turn policy or public indignation will take. A crucial part of that understanding is the …

Review Of Flooding The Courtrooms: Law And Water In The Far West By M. Catherine Miller, Linda S. Parker

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

The arid but fertile San Joaquin Valley yielded fortunes for whoever owned the water that trickled down from the neighboring Sierra Nevada Mountains. Landowners avidly brought lawsuits seeking rulings that would favorably define stream flows, property boundaries, and economic uses of water. Oddly, California courts followed the legal doctrine of the eastern rather than neighboring western states, upholding the "riparian" claims of those who owned land bordering a river rather than "prior appropriators" who discovered and first used the water. Riparian law laid the foundation for the enormous cattle company, Miller and Lux. During its heyday between 1870 and 1930 …

Review Of Forgotten Places: Uneven Development In Rural America Edited By Thomas A. Lyson And William W. Falk, Karen M. Morin

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

The editors and authors of this fine collection of articles, though mostly sociologists, demonstrate how geography is in a sense destiny to the rural poor. By focusing on nine regions spanning the country from New England to the Rio Grande Valley to the Pacific Northwest, they show how social as well as spatial isolation has created common problems among a rural underclass that is "forgotten" by mainstream America.

Socio-spatial isolation may take many forms, but the outcome for all the places studied is the same: lack of full participation in American economic life. Educational isolation in the Black Belt of …

Review Of Trials And Triumphs: A Colorado Portrait Of The Great Depression With Fsa Photographs By Stephen J. Leonard, Liston Leyendecker

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

Stephen J. Leonard has written a book about Colorado during the depression. He portrays an economically and politically conservative state whose failed attempts at local relief forced its officers to seek solutions offered by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Both Colorado officials and residents resented federal assistance believing that it threatened their state's independence. Leonard sets the scene by summarizing the final years of the 1920s in Colorado before describing how the crash affected the state and its dwellers. After commenting on its devastation in urban areas, he turns to rural sections particularly the agricultural Plains, the San Luis Valley and …

Drought Evolution Patterns In The U.S.A. During Great Plains-Centered Droughts, Peter T. Soule

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

This study examines the spatial evolution of drought severity within the contiguous United States during the first six months of average Great Plains-centered drought events. It identifies Great Plains-centered drought events from 1895-1989 based on the drought history of the North Central, South Dakota and Low Rolling Plains, Texas climatic divisions. Time series of warm- and cold-season average drought severity based on Great Plains drought for all United States' climatic divisions are calculated and spatially analyzed.

Mapped patterns show spatial teleconnections in drought development. Cold-season drought patterns based on the North Central, South Dakota climatic division are clearly in-phase with …

Neotropical Migrant Birds, Douglas H. Johnson

United States Geological Survey, Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center: Publications

The latest vogue in bird conservation is concern over species that breed in the United States and Canada but winter mostly south of the United States-Mexico border. Many neotropical migrant birds have declined in number recently (although many have not). It is perhaps convenient to blame deforestation and other environmental abuses in the tropics for the declines in "our" birds, rather than to look inward at the abuses we in the United States have inflicted. Nonetheless, the concern about neotropical migrants, institutionalized by the Partners in Flight program, has served several purposes. For one, biologists are taking a broader view …

Factors Associated With Duck Nest Success In The Prairie Pothole Region Of Canada, Raymond J. Greenwood, Alan B. Sargeant, Douglas H. Johnson, Lewis M. Cowardin, Terry L. Shaffer

United States Geological Survey, Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center: Publications

Populations of some dabbling ducks have declined sharply in recent decades and information is needed to understand reasons for this. During 1982-85, we studied duck nesting for 1-4 years in 17 1.6 by 16.0-km, high-density duck areas in the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) of Canada, 9 in parkland and 8 in prairie. We estimated nest-initiation dates, habitat preferences, nest success, and nest fates for mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), gadwalls (A. strepera), blue-winged teals (A. discors), northern shovelers (A. clypeata), and northern pintails (A. acuta). We also examined the relation of mallard …

Contributions Of The Conservation Reserve Program To Populations Of Breeding Birds In North Dakota, Douglas Johnson, Lawrence Igl

United States Geological Survey, Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center: Publications

Previous studies have shown that habitat provided by the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a feature of the 1985 farm bill, is used by many birds. The present study quantitatively assesses the importance of the CRP by estimating changes in breeding bird populations of North Dakota projected if CRP land would revert to cultivation. Of 18 species that were common in CRP or crop fields or both, 12 were more abundant in CRP habitats. Six of these species had suffered significant population declines during 1967-1990, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey. In contrast, none of the six species that …

Review Of Schoolwomen Of The Prairies And Plains: Personal Narratives From Iowa, Kansas, And Nebraska, 1860-1920 By Mary Hurlbut Cordier, Sylvia Hunt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The book is disappointing, however, in at least two respects. Although Cordier asserts that the women in her study both conformed to and challenged expectations of their gender, she fails to provide supporting evidence. The threads of autonomy for women, demands for equality (at the early date of 1860), and activism toward those ends are evidenced by these school women throughout the work, but they are not woven together into a coherent argument. It is difficult, therefore, to assess the contribution women teachers from the heartland might have made to the women's movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Review Of Yanktonai Sioux Water Colors: Cultural Remembrances Of John Saul By Martin Brokenleg And Herbert T. Hoover, Mary Jane Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Unfortunately Yanktonai Sioux Water Colors is not what it could be. People unfamiliar with Plains Indian culture will not know how to interpret the water colors and the comments are not sufficiently detailed to overcome this problem. In 1971 James Howard published descriptions of some of the water colors in the Oklahoma Anthropological Society Newsletter. Howard combined a thorough knowledge of traditional Plains Indian culture with interviews with John Saul to give the average reader a good understanding of the paintings. Some other problems will be noticeable only to the professional. Although several people are given credit for the book …

Notes & News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

BOOK AWARDS (David Wishart; John Wunder)

CALLS FOR PAPERS

CANADIAN STUDIES GRANT PROGRAMS, 1996-97

FROM THE ARCHIVES (Richard Popp)

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ASSOCIATIONS

Review Of "A Funnie Place, No Fences": Teenagers' Views Of Kansas, 1867-1900 Edited By C. Robert Haywood And Sandra Jarvis, Carol Miles Petersen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For some time we have had accounts written by men of the early years in a new state; then women's diaries began to be discovered recording events from a woman's perspective. With this book, we now have a sense of what it was like to be a teenager who had moved from New York or Iowa into a prairie land with little broken ground and "no fences." "A Funnie Place" adds an important dimension to both our historical and sociological understanding of daily life on the Kansas Plains.

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 Isolation And Masquerade: Willa Cather's Women By Frances W. Kaye And Willa Cather By Sharon O'Brien, Lillian Faderman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In her introduction to Isolation and Masquerade Frances Kaye immediately establishes her disagreement with Sharon O'Brien's views of Willa Cather as they appear in O'Brien's 1987 work, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. O'Brien's 1995 book was written for the Chelsea House young adult Gay Men and Lesbians series, but though this work, unlike the 1987 book, takes the writer into her last days, O'Brien's perspective on Cather's accomplishments is essentially no different from what she has already revealed; so, we can be certain that Kaye's disagreements would also apply to O'Brien's more recent efforts. Two more different views of …