International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of Next Year Country: Dust To Dust In Western Kansas, 1890-1940 By Craig Miner, Brian Cannon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this delightful book, historian Craig Miner of Wichita State University narrates the history of western Kansas, a sixty-county region lying west of Highway 81. Written as a sequel to his 1986 West of Wichita: Settling the High Plains of Kansas, 1865-1890, this volume traces the area's history up to 1940. Constructing a richly detailed, lively, and thoroughly engaging narrative, Miner draws on extensive research in thirty-five local newspapers and over twenty manuscript collections in the Kansas State Historical Society.

Newspaper reporters and editors were some of the most trenchant observers of life in their communities. But they often …

Review Of From Syria To Seminole: Memoir Of A High Plains Merchant By Ed Aryain, Philip Kayal

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

My uncles on my mother's side were peddlers. I often wondered how they managed this with no English skills, only a few dependable institutions, and a scattered number of informal commercial ties. From Syria to Seminole finally answers that question. Though a specialist on Arab-Americans, this is the second book I have reviewed on Syrians in the Plains and Southwest, and again I learned a great deal.

Literature on Arab-Americans is divided into two historical periods. Works written before 1975 were about the early, turn of the twentieth-century emigrants from Syria and Lebanon. Later on the field expanded to emigrants …

Review Of The Louisiana Purchase And American Expansion, 1803-1898 Edited By Sanford Levinson And Bartholomew H. Sparrow, Raymond D. Screws

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Editors Sanford Levinson and Bartholomew H. Sparrow are unequivocal about their book's mission: to use the territory of Louisiana, hence, much of the Great Plains, as a catalyst to study United States expansionism, particularly in regards to expansion's constitutionality.

With one exception, these essays were first presented at a symposium at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003 by scholars representing such diverse fields as constitutional law, history, sociology, government, and political science. Besides the editors' wonderful introduction, which clearly explains that the purchase of Louisiana served as an example for further American expansion during the nineteenth century, there …

Review Of Getting Away With Murder On The Texas Frontier: Notorious Killings And Celebrated Trials By Bill Neal, Paul N. Spellman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Courthouses are supposed to be temples of justice, places where disputes are peaceably resolved by reliance on reason, logic, and law, places where violent crimes are punished-not perpetrated." So begins one of Bill Neal's chapters, a reasonable definition of the American seat of jurisprudence. But not so, the author quickly reminds his reader, at least not on the Texas frontier of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only was there little resolution in a West Texas courtroom beyond a hung jury or a mismanaged trial and a killer set free, but often that room became the site of …

Introduction: From The Weight Of Gold To The Weight Of History In Hbo's Deadwood, David Holmberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the opening scene of the first episode of HBO's critically acclaimed historical drama Deadwood, an ordinary gold miner, Ellsworth (Jim Beaver), walks into the Gem Saloon, owned by Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), and proclaims: "I may 'a fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand before you today, beholden to no human cocksuckers. And workin' a payin' fuckin' gold claim." Ellsworth has established a gold claim in the Black Hills of the future South Dakota, and his proclamation of autonomy flows from the power and freedom gold delivers, even in the lawless town of Deadwood. …

Review Of Becoming Western: Stories Of Culture And Identity In The Cowboy State By Liza J. Nicholas, Eric J. Sandeen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Becoming Western presents representative moments in the development of Wyoming, among these the waging of the Johnson County War, the development of dude ranches, the memorialization of Buffalo Bill in his eponymous town site, the founding of an academic program at the University of Wyoming, and a campaign for state-wide office in the late 1970s. Along the way, we meet the writers, entrepreneurs, and artists one would expect to see in a cultural history of Wyoming. We see few of the contemporary scholars and critics, however, whose nuanced handling of the same material might have cautioned Liza Nicholas against the …

Review Of A Northern Cheyenne Album Photographs By Thomas B. Marquis. Edited By Margot Liberty, Jerry Mader

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When my copy of A Northern Cheyenne Album arrived, I was immediately taken back to a day more than thirty years ago when John Wooden legs handed a dirty shoebox filled with 497 negatives to me and Tom Weist and said, "Will you take care of these? I don't know what to do with old pictures." The collection, made by Thomas B. Marquis between 1926 and 1935, came to John as a gift for the Cheyenne people from Marquis's daughters. Soon thereafter it became my privilege to restore the collection for the Northern Cheyenne Research and Human Development Association. Over …

Review Of Sculpture From The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery Edited By Karen O. Janovy, Joan M. Marter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The sculpture collection that is the subject of this book is worthy of priority consideration. This is a truly remarkable holding of major artists of the twentieth century. Although certain sculptors are missing from its stellar list, the overall quality of the works makes the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska a major center for the study of modern sculpture in the Great Plains. The visitor will find representative examples of Alexander Calder's sculptural innovations, a remarkable painted steel giant by Mark di Suvero, and a powerful outdoor sculpture in cor ten steel by Richard Serra. The …

Title And Contents- Fall 2007

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 27 / Number 4 / Fall 2007

Contents

Introduction: From the Weight Of Gold To The Weight Of History In Hbo's Deadwood

Deadwood and the English Language

No Law: Deadwood and the State

"Whores and Other Feminists": Recovering Deadwood's Unlikely Feminisms

"Gold Is Every Man's Opportunity": Castration Anxiety and the Economic Venture in Deadwood

Review Essay: Reviewing the Western

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Book Notes- Fall 2007

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Marching with the First Nebraska: A Civil War Diary. By August Scherneckau

The Life of Yellowstone Kelly. By Jerry Keenan

Washita Memories: Eyewitness Views of Custer's Attack on Black Kettle's Village. Compiled and edited by Richard G. Hardorff.

Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. By Donovin Arleigh Sprague

The Papers of Will Rogers. Volume Five: The Final Years August 1928-August 1935. Edited by Steven K. Gragert and M. Jane Johansson.

On the Drafting of Tribal Constitutions. By Felix S. Cohen

Road, River, and 01' Boy Politics: A Texas County's Path from Farm to Supersuburb. By Linda Scarbrough.

Literary Austin. Edited …

Review Of The National Grasslands: A Guide To America's Undiscovered Treasures By Francis Moul, Daniel S. Licht

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When one first opens a book one never quite knows what to expect (one of the joys of reading!). That was the case with The National Grasslands: A Guide to America's Undiscovered Treasures. The title suggests a field guide to the nooks and crannies of the national grasslands whereas the stunning photography suggests a coffee-table book. So I was surprised to find something much deeper. This book is also an excellent account of the history of the national grasslands and, more importantly, a discussion of their future.

In a style as refreshing as a prairie breeze, Moul begins by …

Review Of Out Of The West: The Gund Collection Of Western Art By Suzan Campbell, Anne Morand

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1985, the final year of its travels, the Gund Collection of Western Art was exhibited at the C. M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. Museum visitors still talk about the show more than twenty years later. I was fortunate enough to view it at several venues, including the Oklahoma Museum of Art in 1980, and was struck not only by the wealth of western art, but also by the vision and perseverance of collectors like George Gund. It is a great pleasure to know that his collection will reside in perpetuity for the public to enjoy along with …

Review Of Outside America: Race, Ethnicity, And The Role Of The American West In National Belonging By Dan Moos, Kalenda Eaton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Outside America offers a perceptive analysis of racial and ethnic undercurrents integral to the shaping of American western history. Its chapters revisit "rough riding" Theodore Roosevelt, African American narratives of homesteading and prosperity on the Great Plains and further West, Mormon literature, and the dubious position of Native American "performers" in Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows.

The opening chapter on Roosevelt places the president in the midst of burgeoning conversations about the mythical West and includes passages from Roosevelt's writings on his experiences as a hunter and rancher, often citing his frequent trips to the Dakotas and other locales in …

No Law: Deadwood And The State, Mark L. Berrettini

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Deadwood's final episode of season 3 opens with a monologue from theater operator Jack Langrishe (Brian Cox), a relative newcomer to the camp of Deadwood. Shown in a wide shot that spotlights him on the dark stage of his nascent theater, Langrishe ostensibly speaks to one of his companions, the actress Claudia (Cynthia Ettinger), shown in one medium reverse-shot. Yet Langrishe also speaks and performs beyond the theater to the residents of Deadwood and to the program's viewers extradiagetically as he sums up the tense state of affairs within the camp:

This camp is in mortal danger. The man …

Review Of Twilight Innings: A West Texan On Grace And Survival By Robert A. Fink, Paul Christensen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Twilight Innings is an interesting book of essays for reasons that may go beyond the intention of Robert Fink, a poet and creative writing teacher at Hardin-Simmons University, a small, religious school in West Texas. Fink writes glowingly of his faith, the baseball games he loves to watch, the students he teaches in his "open admissions" poetry writing seminars, his wife's accomplishments as a school counselor.

What we learn is how this part of the Southern Plains hammers people into the same shape in its tiny oasis, Abilene. They share in common the Baptist religion, patriotism, a hard-edged conservative outlook, …

Review Of One Of Ours By Willa Cather, Becky Faber

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Published in 1922, One of Ours proved to be pivotal in Willa Cather's career. Although she had already penned four novels and gained increasing critical acclaim, One of Ours won Cather the Pulitzer Prize, elevating her to the highest rank of twentieth-century American authors.

One of Ours is sometimes referred to as a "war story," but Cather's intent was to portray a young man from the Plains who came to France in World War I and found himself. This character, Claude Wheeler, was based on Cather's cousin, G. P. Cather, who was killed in France in May 1918. Richard Harris …

Review Of The Midwestern Pastoral: Place And Landscape In Literature Of The American Heartland By William Barillas, Sarah Jayne Hitt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Critical studies on the importance of place and landscape in Midwestern literature are not uncommon, but as William Barillas traces the trajectory of the pastoral tradition he provides a fresh perspective on how it has evolved through time and continues to influence contemporary writers. This analysis emphasizes ecology as well as landscape, making the book valuable for ecocritics as well as for scholars of the Midwest and Great Plains.

Barillas effectively argues that there is not one version of the Midwestern pastoral; rather, writers define the pastoral according to their individual artistic, cultural, and environmental concerns. Here Willa Cather is …

Review Of Not Without Our Consent: Lakota Resistance To Termination, 1950-59 By Edward Charles Valandra, Patrice H. Kunesh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the vein of Vine Deloria Jr., the preeminent American Indian intellectual who in 1969 forced a raw consciousness about the tragic history and political status of Native peoples with Custer Died for Our Sins, Edward Valandra reminds us in Not Without Our Consent of the continuing importance of documenting twentieth- century American Indian history lest the Indian story be forgotten. Deloria, whose Lakota heritage and national leadership in Indian affairs significantly informed Valandra's work, contributed the foreword, setting the backdrop for one of the book's main themes, the federal government's "Indian Problem" in the 1950s and its imprudent plan …

Review Of Kansas Murals: A Traveler's Guide By Lora Jost And Dave Loewenstein, Karal Ann Marling

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a perfectly amazing little book-part toss-it-in-the-backseat tourist's guide and part scholarly tome filled with amazing facts and trenchant observations about some ninetyodd works of art embellishing various public walls, silos, grain elevators, and culverts scattered from one end of Kansas to the other. The authors, who paint murals themselves, have a delightfully catholic taste in art, too. The examples illustrated in all their luscious, technicolor glory run the gamut from community projects involving school kids and senior citizens to Beaux Arts maidens in cheesecloth borrowed from World's Fairs of the nineteenth century, to earnest New Deal paeans to …

Review Of From Prairie Farmer To Entrepreneur: The Transformation Of Midwestern Agriculture By Dennis S. Nordin And Roy V. Scott, Kimberly Porter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Students of agricultural history should be familiar with the works of Roy Scott (railroads, extension) and Dennis Nordin (the Grange). Similarly, students of agricultural history will find no immediate challenges to the familiar narrative of twentieth-century American agriculture in From Prairie Farmer to Entrepreneur. Indeed, chapters devoted to the story of the Great Depression and the rise of agricultural technology provide few if any challenges to the traditional canon.

No reader should lay this book aside, however, before arriving at its conclusion. For, according to Nordin and Scott, "Painful as the tragedies of failure were for individuals, their net …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Review Of Hollywood's West: The American Frontier In Film, Television, And History Edited By Peter C. Rollins And John E. O'Connor & Making The White Man's Indian: Native Americans And Hollywood Movies By Angela Aleiss, Armando Jose Prats

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Western, yet again, lies dormant. The revival that began in the late eighties with the greatest of adventures on the Great Plains, Lonesome Dove, and peaked some years later with Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (followed closely by George Cosmatos's Tombstone), announced that the gente had reclaimed its luminous moral core, even if it would henceforth cast its light in chiaroscuros of regret and remorse. Released in late 1990, Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves revitalized the Indian Western, though in doing so it also revived the rancid myth of the Vanishing American. Whatever else may be said about it, …

"Whores And Other Feminists" Recovering Deadwood's Unlikely Feminisms, Anne Helen Petersen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The very first vision of the female form in Deadwood is one of ultimate despair: the woman sits alone in the corner of a room, hysterically weeping, her face swollen and bruised with beating. A man sits across the room, a bullet through the temple, barely alive. He was beating her; she responded with a Derringer shot to the head. Moments later, the woman is on the ground in her pimp's office, his boot square on her neck. She writhes beneath him, nearly strangling to death before whispering through bloodied lips: "I'll be good." Meanwhile, the other prominent female character …

"Gold Is Every Man's Opportunity" Castration Anxiety And The Economic Venture In Deadwood, Kyle Wiggins, David Holmberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In one of the most famous and quoted passages from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx observes, "Men make their own history, but not spontaneously, under conditions they have chosen for themselves; rather on terms immediately existing, given and handed down to them." While the historical conditions that engendered the Black Hills gold rush of the mid-1870s were more "forced" by and upon the participants than "handed" to them, Marx's argument resonates loudly with the anti-romantic project of HBO's critically acclaimed Western, Deadwood. Series creator David Milch makes a similar point about the town of Deadwood: …

Introduction To Li Ka Shing Library And Creation Of A Digital Library, Ruth Pagell

Research Collection Library

The presentation gave the history of the Li Ka Shing Library at Singapore Management University and the creation of the digital library.

Giving Voice To The Religious, Seow Hon Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The relevance of moral values endorsed by religious persons in public decision-making has often been debated. The issue comes to the fore again in relation to the debate on Section 377A of the Penal Code dealing with acts of gross indecency between males. With the flourishing of diverse viewpoints that is a natural consequence of a liberal democratic society, and with greater participation by an increasingly sophisticated citizenry online and in the media, particularly in a nation in which those without religious affiliations make up only 15 per cent of the population, the ground rules of public discourse must be …

Expectativas De Alumnos De La Enseñanza Media: Un Análisis Del Nivel E Influencias De Las Expectativas De Estos Estudiantes En La Comuna De Quinchao, Chilé, Jennifer Mcnally

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This field study investigation analyzes student expectations in two different high schools located in the municipality of Quinchao, province of Chiloé, Chile. The main objective of the study attempts to confirm or negate that the principal influences that can motivate or unmotivate a student to continue studying in higher education reside in the culture, actors, and relationships of both school and family. Observations and personal interviews are used as qualitative measures, and two different surveys directed at both the students and teachers of each school are used and analyzed for the existence of statistical differences between different groupings of students. …

Ziya Gökalp On Modernity And Islam: The Origins Of An Uneasy Union In Contemporary Turkey, Üner Daglier

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Iraqi Resettlement: Why Congress Won't Act, Daniel J. Whelan

Human Rights & Human Welfare

After making an excellent case for the plight of Iraqi asylum seekers who have served as valuable allies to the United States in Iraq, Joseph Huff-Hannon’s article suggests that Congress should play a stronger role in developing a resettlement policy to allow Iraqis, who have been on “our side,” to come to the U.S. Given the current political climate on Iraq—and with Congressional Democrats desperate to score some kind of victory in its battle with the Bush White House—what exactly is holding them back?

Will Refuge Continue To Be Elusive, Katherine Gockel

Human Rights & Human Welfare

According to U.N. estimates, if current trends continue, the number of Iraqi asylum seekers by year-end could reach between 40,000 to 50,000. The influx of Iraqis into states such as Syria and Jordan also threatens to be a destabilizing force in those countries. Therefore, it is unreasonable to expect these states to individually cope with migration flows of this magnitude.