International and Area Studies Commons^™

Regional Differences In Hiv Prevalence In The Light Of Prevailing Socio-Economic Conditions: A Preliminary Comparison Of Northeastern And Southern Africa, Lemma Merid

International Conference on African Development Archives

Preliminary investigation shows that HIV prevalence in most of the Northeast African countries is lower than the prevalence in their Southern Africa counterparts. This has led some in the Northeast to think that their situation is much better, and they should not be worrying as much. This however is a mistake. Since prevalence levels adjust through changes in new infections (incidence) and death, there is some indication that the latter may outweigh in the Northeast. The paper argues that given the much better economic and social welfare conditions in the South, the infected are likely to live longer than their …

Education And Economic Performance In Sub Sahara Africa, Paulos Gutema, Mekonnen Bekele

International Conference on African Development Archives

In Sub Sahara Africa, where the process of economic growth is almost enigmatic, schooling is being considered, in most parts of the region, as a factor that may help resolve the mystery. This paper aims at examining the degree of growth effect of schooling in this region. Following the endogenous growth model developed by Lucas (1988) that considers human capital as one factor of production and schooling as means of human capital accumulation, two results of schooling are explicitly stated: accumulation of privately owned and publically owned human capital. By developing a growth estimating equation containing these two types of …

Blending Of Traditional And Modern Technologies Through Science, Berhanu Gizaw

International Conference on African Development Archives

While the developed world benefits from the modern explosion in technology, countries such as Ethiopia are still reliant on the methods of there fore fathers for essential every day tasks like farming, cooling and provision of clean water. These tasks are often physically demanding, very costly in terms of time and energy, and, in many such societies, are often carried out by female members of the family. Additionally, they may cause damage to the local ecology and environment such as the deforestation and soil erosion arising from the use of trees for firewood. Western technologies are of little or no …

Ethiopian Macroeconomic Modeling In Historical Perspective: Bringing Gebre-Hiwot And His Contemporaries To Ethiopian Macroeconomics Realm, Alemayehu Geda

International Conference on African Development Archives

Much of the macroeconomic analysis in Ethiopia is hardly linked to the country’s pioneer development thinkers. The latter, however, articulated the Ethiopian development problems and what should be the appropriate policy direction to address them nearly a century ago. This articulated development thinkers of the early 20th century Ethiopia had captured the imagination of prominent Ethiopian historians and their students. Ethiopian economists seem to lag behind in appreciating the theoretical insight of these pioneer development thinkers. This article is aimed at bridging this gap. The paper will, first, reviews the economic ideas of theses reformer-intellectuals and then build a linear …

The Future Impact Of Adoption Of Soil Conservation Strategy At Family Level In The Highlands Of Ethiopia, Senait Regassa, Werner Doppler

International Conference on African Development Archives

In the highlands of Ethiopia, soil erosion is a bottleneck to maintain land productivity. In order to mitigate the problem of land degradation, the Soil Conservation Research Project (SCRP) developed and disseminated a number of soil conservation techniques. The studies done so far dealt with the impact of these techniques on yield and profitability of farming. However, poor farmers take not only yield and profitability into consideration but also many other factors. This study was initiated to assess the future impact of adoption of bund construction on family income, external labour requirement, cash balance, credit need, and dependence on purchased …

Land Tenure And Land Management Technology: A Case Study From The Central Ethiopia, Workneh Negatu

International Conference on African Development Archives

Land in Ethiopia is a public property. Farmers have use right to transfer or lease use rights of agricultural land. Thus, land tenure systems under the existing public ownership of land derive from official allocation by local government authorities and/or through transfer of land use rights. Farmers' practice of leasing agricultural land in the country is mostly limited to a few years, for instance to maximum of three years in one agreement. The common types of transaction of agricultural land include inheritance, cash renting, sharecropping and gift. The process and act of land transfer among land users, however, is often …

Land Tenure And Land Management In The Highlands Of Northern Ethiopia, Berhanu Gebremedhin, John Pender, Simeon Ehui

International Conference on African Development Archives

Land tenure security is important to encourage investment in land improvements as well as the development of efficient land markets. In Ethiopia, empirical analysis is required to find out the effect of the current land tenure system on farmers’ propensity to invest in land improvements, and the development and functioning of land markets. Data collected from 50 communities in the highlands of Tigray in 1998 was used to investigate the functioning of land markets, and determine the relationship between perceived land tenure security and land investments in the region. We found out that informal land markets (sharecropping and fixed rental) …

Policy Options For Improving Market Participation And Sales Of Smallholder Livestock Producers: A Case Study Of Ethiopia, Simeon Ehui, Samuel Benin, Zelekawork Paulos

International Conference on African Development Archives

Market access plays an essential role in assuring better income and welfare levels for smallholder livestock producers, and thus contributes to poverty alleviation. This is even more so in the Ethiopian context where livestock play an essential role in the economy. Making use of the Heckman estimation procedure, this paper identifies policy and technology options to increase participation and sales of smallholder producers in livestock markets in Ethiopia, based on data from 934 household surveys conducted between 1999 and 2001 in the highlands of Tigray and Amhara regions in northern Ethiopia. The analysis demonstrates that physical capital (ownership of different …

Rural Poverty, Food Insecurity And Environmental Degradation In Ethiopia: A Case Study From South Central Ethiopia, Sisay Asefa, Tesfaye Zegeye

International Conference on African Development Archives

This paper addresses the challenge of reducing poverty, food insecurity, and natural resource degradation, and abolishing recurrent famines in Ethiopia. With a population of about 65 million, Ethiopia is one of the largest and most populated countries in Africa. Ethiopia can be regarded as a microcosm of Africa due to its vast and diverse agro-ecology and population. Physically, it ranges from 200 meters to over 4000 meters above sea level. It has about 18 agro-ecological, zones and diverse population of some 85 ethnic or linguistic groups. The paper begins by addressing the conceptual relationship among food insecurity, poverty and natural …

Status And Prospects Of Farm Forestry Practices In Central Ethiopia, A Case Of Western Guraghe Highlands, Negussie Achalu, Holm Uibrig, Guido Weisshahn

International Conference on African Development Archives

The objective of the present study is to assess farm forestry decision-making strategies of smallholder farmers and to identify major choice constraints. It attempts to determine the potential of integrating multipurpose tree and shrub species into the existing land use units and its contribution to the objective of guaranteeing food self-sufficiency and sustainable livelihood. It also sheds some light on the deficiencies of current extension packages in helping farmers exploit the potentials of agroforestry innovations.

Farmers in the study area mainly employ eucalypt as major on-farm tree species both for meeting household wood demands and generating cash revenues. Farmers’ decisions …

Determinants Of Access To Credit And Loan Amount: Household-Level Evidence From Urban Ethiopia, Abi Kedir

International Conference on African Development Archives

Household level analysis of credit rationing is restricted to rural data sets collected mainly from South East Asia. In Africa, credit constraints are often investigated using firm level data. Empirical evidence on determinants of credit constraints and amount borrowed by urban households is almost non-existent from Sub-Saharan Africa. Using an extended direct approach, we analyzed the Fourth Round Ethiopian Urban Household Survey (2000) to separate households that do not have access to credit from those who do. We find a high percentage (i.e. 26.6%) of credit-constrained households, the majority of which constitute discouraged borrowers. A probit model and a tobit …

Pastoral Livelihoods In Urban And Peri-Urban Spaces Of Ethiopia: The Case Of Yabello, Borana Zone, Edlam Aberra

International Conference on African Development Archives

This paper outlines the emergence of pastoral settlements in urban and peri-urban spaces of Ethiopia focusing on Yabello, the present capital of Borana zone. By doing so, the paper seeks to contribute to ongoing debates on the manner in which pastoral livelihoods are changing in Ethiopia, and elsewhere in Africa. More specifically, a livelihoods approach is adopted to examine the wellbeing of Borana pastoralists in peri-urban spaces of Yabello in terms of their asset status and use of those assets to pursue various livelihood strategies. The conceptualization of assets goes beyond economic assets to incorporate social and human assets which …

Household’S Consumption Pattern And Demand For Energy In Urban Ethiopia, Samuel Faye Gamtessa

International Conference on African Development Archives

This study looks into the energy demand and consumption pattern of households in selected urban areas. The analysis indicates that the use of traditional fuels dominates households' consumption pattern. However, the extent of the dominance varies across cities/towns and across income groups. A multivariate analysis of the consumption pattern reveals that the probability of consuming traditional fuels in general declines with increase in income and prices of the traditional fuels where as it increases with the increase in the prices of the modern fuels. The probability of consuming modern fuels increases with increase in income and prices of the traditional …

Street Children In Egypt: Group Dynamics And Subcultural Constituents, Nashaat Hussein

Faculty Books

No abstract provided.

Review Of The Professor's House By Willa Cather, Steven Trout

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although less familiar to most readers than O Pioneers!, My Antonia, or Death Comes the Archbishop, The Professor's House (1925) is arguably Willa Cather's most important novel of the 1920s. Thematically, the book is exceptionally far ranging. As Cather's closest approach to a novel of the Jazz Age, The Professor's House offers a portrait of conspicuous consumption occasionally reminiscent of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. As a portrait of post-World-War-I disillusionment, the novel bears comparison with Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. And then there is the narrative's timely concern with the health of American higher education, especially the Liberal …

Review Of Willa Cather Remembered Edited By Sharon Hoover, Mark Madigan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This welcome addition to Willa Cather scholarship is composed of forty-five reminiscences of the author by friends and professional associates documenting key stages of her personal life and literary career. While there is little here that has not been published before, Cather specialists will nonetheless want to add Willa Cather Remembered to their libraries. What makes the volume so appealing is that it collects important biographical material previously available only in miscellaneous sources. The legal restriction on publishing or even quoting excerpts from Cather's letters makes scholarship such as this all the more important. General readers with an interest in …

Black Enclaves Of Violence: Race And Homicide In Great Plains Cities, 1890-1920, Clare V. Mckanna Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

These killings, occurring three years apart in Coffeyville, Kansas, offer bookend images of interracial homicides in the Great Plains. In the first shooting, Charles Vann, a black man and the victim, had been drinking at Walnut and Eleventh Streets in the "tenderloin" district, a black neighborhood in Coffeyville. This region, near the railroad yards, provided entertainment for black customers and occasionally whites in saloons, brothels, and gambling parlors. William Rodecker, a white male horse trader, had just arrived from Missouri and started drinking heavily in this area. About 8 P.M. Rodecker accosted Vann at the corner of Twelfth and Walnut …

Review Of Germans And Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections Edited By Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemiinden, And Susanne Zantop, Peter Bolz, Ann Davis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

DO GERMANS REALLY LOVE INDIANS?

"Of all Europeans, the German has the greatest love for the Indian." This 1939 quote from a German novelist, reproduced in the book's introductory chapter by Christian Feest, could serve as the motto for the 1999 conference ("Germans and Indians/Indians and Germans: Cultural Encounters across Three Centuries") held at Dartmouth College, from which this book evolved. The idea that Germans have a special affinity with Indians is a long-standing conviction that is, nonetheless, difficult to prove. But the converse, that Indians might have a special affinity for Germans, was disproven by the conference itself: only …

Review Of Toward Defining The Prairies: Region, Culture, And History Edited By Robert Wardhaugh, Nina Van Gessel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Prair'ie n. a large treeless tract of level or undulating grassland esp. in N. America. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary)

"How does one define a place? How does one define a region?" asks editor Robert Wardhaugh. Postmodernism, post-structuralism, and post-colonialism have problematized the concept of definition in general and definition of place in particular. In this age of posts-, the dictionary becomes a site of misplaced signposts bent on leading one astray. No matter the limitations of "definition," the Prairies can no longer be defined solely in a narrow, physical sense. Rather, we must "move beyond the transparency of geography to …

Review Of Gold Rush: The Black Hills Story Compiled By John D. Mcdermott, John E. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Black Hills Gold Rush, instigated by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer's 1874 expedition to the Hills confirming that there was gold there "among the roots of the grass," was an event important to both the nation and the future state of South Dakota, not to mention to the Native Americans who had inhabited the area for centuries. Watson Parker's Gold in the Black Hills (1966) provided an excellent account of the gold rush, and John D. McDermott, the compiler and one of the authors of this volume, acknowledges his pioneering work on the subject. This collection of essays succeeds …

Willa Cather's Reluctant New Woman Pioneer, Reginald Dyck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1913 Willa Cather created a female protagonist who is single, independent, entrepreneurial, managerial, strong willed, wealthy and in love with the land of south-central Nebraska. This character offered a new vision for women at the turn of the twentieth century. Cather's fictional construction of gender, as well as her own experience, embody the contradictions present in the roles society offered women. One can read O Pioneers! as a cultural seismometer, one that picks up tremors along various social fault lines and then expresses them within a particular framework held by many people of her economic and social position. This …

Review Of Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, And Literary Appropriations Edited By Gretchen M. Bataille, Shari Huhndorf

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"The misrepresentation, commodification, and distortion of indigenous identities have existed from the moment of first contact" between Native peoples and Europeans, Editor Gretchen Bataille observes in the introduction to Native American Representations. The problems are familiar to literary scholars: power relations produced by colonization determine who has the authority to represent Native peoples in the broader culture, and these representations in turn tend to reinforce European dominance and to obfuscate the violence, and even the fact, of colonization. The questions of how Native peoples have been represented throughout the centuries of colonialism, by whom, and for what purposes comprise …

Review Of Jeannette Rankin: America's Conscience By Norma Smith, Sara Hayden

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Norma Smith's posthumously published biography of Jeannette Rankin offers a welcome addition to scholarship devoted to this early feminist, Congresswoman, and peace activist. Rankin's life story intersects with several major developments in Western politics and US public life. Rankin began her political career lobbying for woman's suffrage in Washington, eventually heading up the successful 1914 suffrage campaign in her home state of Montana. Rankin's suffrage work positioned her to run for national office; in 1916 she became one of Montana's two members of the House of Representatives and the first woman to serve in the United States Congress. Rankin ran …

Title And Contents- Summer 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains Quarterly

Summer 2003 Volume 23 Number 3

CONTENTS

BLACK ENCLAVES OF VIOLENCE: RACE AND HOMICIDE IN GREAT PLAINS CITIES, 1890-1920
Clare V. McKanna Jr.

WILLA CATHER'S RELUCTANT NEW WOMAN PIONEER
Reginald Dyck

THE CUPS OF BLOOD ARE EMPTIED: PIETISM AND CULTURAL HERITAGE IN TWO DANISH IMMIGRANT SCHOOLS ON THE GREAT PLAINS
John Mark Nielsen

REVIEW ESSAY: DO GERMANS REALLY LOVE INDIANS?
Peter Bolz and Ann Davis
A review of Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK NOTES

NOTES AND NEWS

Notes And News- Summer 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Research Fellowships

Great Plains Symposium

Call For Papers: Southern Humanities Council

Book Notes- Summer 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Book Notes

The Definitive10urnals of Lewis and Clark: Seven Volume Set

The Diaries of John Gregory Bourke: Volume One, November 20, l872-July 28, 1876

A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather

Westward Expansion

Chinese on the American Frontier

Bravo of the Brazos: John Larn of Fort Griffin, Texas

The Human Tradition in Texas

A Thousand Miles of Prairie: The Manitoba Historical Society and the History of Western Canada

Museums and Historic Sites of the American West

Edmonton: Stories from the River City

Guide to the Photographs in the Western History Collections of the University of Oklahoma

Building for the …

Review Of Sacagawea's Nickname: Essays On The American West By Larry Mcmurtry, Shirley A. Leckie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In these essays, originally published in the New York Review of Books, Larry McMurtry examines Western writers as mythmakers. Overall, however, his most interesting pieces are those in which he pays tribute to authors who have influenced his own work or have left behind literary treasures he finds moving and wise.

One of the essays is devoted to historian Angie Debo and her influence on McMurtry's development as a writer. As a youth he accidentally found The Road to Disappearance (1941), her history of the Creek Indians, and discovered that Debo, from neighboring Oklahoma, had made for herself a …

Review Of Feathering Custer By W. S. Penn, Joshua B. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

William S. Penn (Nez Perce) has compiled a series of essays that twirl through problems concerning Native American studies in academia. In "Paving with Good Intentions" and elsewhere, Penn takes aim at popular critical theory that cannot adequately conceptualize Native thought, identity, or writing. Throughout, he advocates careful scrutiny of elements of identity arising from forces outside of Indian culture.

In Kenneth Burke's metaphor comparing the field of cultural criticism to a parlor discussion, Penn sees much of what limits the study: the conversation quashes dissent and honors hegemony; the conversers privilege the written over the oral and are almost …

Review Of Once Upon A Town: The Miracle Of The North Platte Canteen By Bob Greene, Charles A. Peek

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bob Greene interweaves narratives of sojourns in North Platte, local history, and stories of the Canteen culled from interviews (often tearful, one calling him to go on record the day before surgery) with those who served there and those who were served, a distinction that in the end blurs.

The story of the Canteen itself captures folks from a hundred and twenty-five communities in Nebraska and eastern Colorado, "Some ... you can't even find on a map, sixty years later," meeting up to 8,000 troops a day, carried on up to thirty-two trains a day, each stopping "as long as …

Review Of The American Midwest: Essays On Regional History Edited By Andrew R. L. Cayton And Susan E. Gray, Paula Petrik

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While the South, West, and New England have always possessed distinctive regional identities, the Middle West has been either a substitute for national character or described variously as "dull," "ordinary," or just plain "nice." Yet, as the essayists point out, the Midwest is both homogenous and diverse. Beginning with an excellent introduction that summarizes the historiography of the idea of the Middle West as a region, the ten essays in the collection seek both to explore more deeply the idea and construction of the Middle West as a region and to provide case studies in the development of the concept. …