Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of Buffalo Bill On Stage. By Sandra K. Sagala, Robert Bonner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Of the twelve (!) serious historical or biographical studies devoted to Buffalo Bill Cody so far this century, two of them we owe to Sandra Sagala. The title under review here is a revision of her self-publish.ed book from 2002 titled Buffalo Bill, Actor, where she set out to follow Cody as he put together a career on theater stages across the country playing himself in a series of dramas and creating a name as an entertainer in the years prior to his famous Wild West show. This new book does not follow Cody's itineraries as closely as the …

Review Of Kiowa Humanity And The Invasion Of The State By Jacki Thompson Rand, Nathan Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Focusing on the Southern Plains in the nineteenth century, Jacki Rand proposes a study on Kiowa responses to military invasion and the reservation system as a colonized people reacting against a colonizing agent. Additionally, Rand alludes to her investigation yielding new insight as Kiowa reactions to colonialism were in essence covert strategies of adaptation and maintaining traditional cultural values in the face of repeated onslaught. For some, however, this argument will fall somewhat short of these goals.

One of the difficulties in assessing the contribution of Rand's study is determining its projected audience. She begins her narrative with a jargoned …

Review Of "William Clark: Indian Diplomat." By Jay H. Buckley., University Of California, Los Angeles And Autry Institute For The Study Of The American West Aron

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For decades, radio commentator Paul Harvey broadcast a program called "The Rest of the Story." Six times a week, Harvey recounted stories that put a surprising twist on familiar episodes. Often the rest of the story involved constructing epilogues that followed the careers of well-known persons after they had left the spotlight. In some ways Jay Buckley's study of William Clark can be seen as a contribution to Harvey's series. Although the book includes chapters on Clark's earlier life and his cocaptaincy of the Corps of Discovery, threequarters of it involves what Clark did after he came back from that …

Review Of The Great Plains During World War Ii By R. Douglas Hurt, Greg Hall

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The historiography of the American West during the Second World War is still largely dominated by the works of Gerald D. Nash. As impressive as his work is, it does have one Illajor flaw: its neglect of the Great Plains, a major sector of the West. In order to correct this imbalance, Douglas Hurt presents a multifaceted history of the region during the war. The Great Plains during World War II is a thorough analysis of the period from the war's beginning to its conclusion.

Hurt fills his study with the voices of the people of the shortgrass country as …

Review Of "Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonne." Edited By B. Byron Price., Joan Carpenter Troccoli

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

No one painted the majestic mountains of Montana more splendidly than Charles M. Russell, but most of the action in his art, played out among the cowboys of the open range and the Native peoples of the Northern Plains, unfolds on the flat. Thanks to the comprehensive electronic catalogue of Russell's paintings, drawings, watercolors, models in mixed mediums, and illustrated letters available with this print publication, the reader can verify these assertions without tipping a single book off the library shelf.

Catalogues raisonnes have always stimulated the discovery of lost works and the reattribution and redating of others, and such …

Review Of "The Choctaws In Oklahoma: From Tribe To Nation, 1855-1970." By Clara Sue Kidwell, Robert Keith Collins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Scholars of anthropology (particularly historical anthropology), history, and Native American studies interested in Choctaw history, cultural changes, everyday life choices, and contributions to American culture should find The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855-1970 and How Choctaws Invented Civilization and Why Choctaws Will Conquer the World important new contributions to the historical literature articulated by strong Choctaw voices. And readers interested in the complexities of Choctaw life in the Southern Plains, how Choctaws interacted with the region's other Indigenous groups (e.g., Kiowas and Comanches), and the inconsistencies between federal policies and Choctaw lived realities over time will be …

Review Of Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, The Battle To Save The Buffalo, And The Birth Of The New West. By Michael Punke., Phillip Drennon Thomas

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although the decline of the American bison is an often-told story, Michael Punke's meticulously researched work provides an engaging and careful delineation of George Bird Grinnell's singular role in marshaling the resources and support that led to the preservation and protection of the buffalo. -It's a story with many chapters, including the hunting and near extermination of the buffalo by hide hunters after the Civil War; the experiences of Grinnell in the lands beyond the Mississippi beginning in 1870 and his evolving interest in the region's wildlife and natural history; the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and the …

Review Of "Playing Ourselves: Interpreting Native Histories At Historic Reconstructions." By Laura Peers, Sandra Dudley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Based on research carried out over a decade into enactment at five North American reconstructed historic sites in the Great Plains and around the Great Lakes, this is essentially a book about encounters: encounters between Native interpreters and visitors at historic sites, of course-but also encounters between differing preconceptions of history, between ways of life, between people and things, and between the present and the past. Indeed, the chapters are interspersed with "vignettes" or snapshots of such encounters.

All the sites discussed in the book depict the people, activity, and material culture associated with missions and fur trading. They were …

Review Of "White Man's Paper Trail: Grand Councils And Treaty-Making On The Central Plains." By Stan Hoig, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a strange book, in part because the author does not seem to recognize the massive amount of scholarship available on the topic of Indian treaties that has accumulated in the last thirty years. Mostly limited to works published before 1970, its bibliography highlights the problems arising from minimal familiarity with recent research.

The book itself claims to be a unique narrative about the treaty councils of the Central Plains. In reality, it is not unique, and its coverage spans an area from Texas to Montana. The Southern Plains are a particular emphasis and fit the author's expertise. The …

Review Of Violence, The Arts, And Willa Cather. Edited By Joseph R. Urgo And Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Karsten H. Piep

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This compilation of twenty-three essays proves that contemporary scholarship has moved beyond trite debates about Cather's alleged propensity to romanticize violence. Accordingly, the volume's editors have assembled a series of nuanced readings that reconsider Willa Cather's artistic uses of violence as well as her appropriations of various art forms before the backdrop of World War I, modernist aesthetics, Nativism, and 1920s feminism. Approaching their subject through the lenses of biographical, historical, aesthetic, psychoanalytical, and gender criticism, the contributors paint Cather as a sometimes generous, sometimes severe critic of American culture, whose insistence on the inescapability of violence is attended by …

Review Of The Steamboat Montana And The Opening Of The West: History. Excavation, And Architecture. By Annalies Corbin And Bradley A. Rogers, Michael Allen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In recent decades, a group of maritime historical archeologists has, through meticulous examination of sunken ships, enhanced existing work by traditional archeologists and historians. Eastern Carolina University's History Department has built North America's strongest program in maritime archeology. It was an ECU team, supported by a score of public {and two} private groups, that gathered the data for this book about the nineteenth-century Missouri River steamboat Montana. Coauthors Annalies Corbin and Bradley A. Rogers write, "The Montana's history and subsequent archeological investigation can be utilized as a case study for understanding and appreciating the development of the trans-Mississippi …

Review Of Does People Do It?: A Memoir. By Fred Harris, Kenny L. Brown

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

U.S. Senator Robert S. Kerr-often called the "uncrowned king of the Senate"-died in 1963. In a special election the next year, Fred Harris, a Democratic state senator, surprisingly defeated highly popular football coach Bud Wilkinson to serve out the rest of Kerr's term. Reelected in 1966 and remaining a senator until 1973, the young and energetic Harris allied with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program. As senator, he pushed legislation to aid agricultural interests in Oklahoma and the Southern Plains, called for reforms to alleviate racism, introduced bills supporting various American Indian groups, and served on the Kerner Commission, which studied …

Review Of Russell Lee Photographs; Images From The Russell Lee Photograph Collection At The Center For American History. By Russell Lee, Connie Todd

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Russell Lee, more than any of his compadres in the Farm Security Administration (FSA), created the visual history and thus our collective memory of the Great Depression; and it is fitting that the University of Texas Press in its "Focus on American History Series" has published a long-overdue book of Lee's images from the Russell Lee photography collection at the University of Texas at Austin's Center for American History, particularly since the Art Department at UT hired Lee in the mid-1960s to be its first professor of photography.

The late John Szarkowski, legendary director of photography at the Museum of …

Review Of "Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space." Edited By Susan Kollin, Donna Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Postwestern Cultures addresses "the highly charged and continually shifting meanings" of a space that occupies an outsized, even mythic place in the national imaginary: the American West. The essays in this collection do not focus on this myth or its deconstruction in recent history, criticism, and media; rather, they set out to question, through approaches ranging from ecocriticism and critical regionalism through theories of space and gender, the viability, potency, and destructive power of its iconography. By calling into question the fixed positioning of the West in the national imagination-its history, its material culture, and its status as a "pre-lapsarian, …

Review Of Yard Art And Handmade Places: Extraordinary Expressions Of Home By Jill Nokes With Pat Jasper, Judith Mcwillie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Yard Art and Handmade Places, Jill Nokes collaborates with architect/photographer Krista Whitson and advisor/folklorist Pat Jasper to celebrate unique and resourceful Texans who enhance nature, honor personal and regional histories, and improvise in the midst of constant, sometimes cataclysmic, change. Nokes is a professional conservationist and landscape designer (she authored How to Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest with Kathryn Miller Brown in 2001) and, since most of the book's practitioners are avid gardeners as well as builders, her expertise makes for a rare and palpable synergy between author and subject. Early on, she lets the …

Open To Horror The Great Plains Situation In Contemporary Thrillers By E. E. Knight And By Douglas Preston And Lincoln Child, A. B. Emrys

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From the agoraphobic prairie where the father of Willa Cather's Antonia kills himself, to the claustrophobic North Dakota town of Argus devastated by storm in Louise Erdrich's "Fleur," to Lightning Flat, the grim home of Jack Twist in Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," much Great Plains literature is situational, placing human drama in the context of historicalor contemporary setting. Isolation, fierce weather, and inherent pressures on survival remain primary, and the Plains is a character in itself that appears as a presence, whether foregrounded or ghostly, in works that cannot help but evoke the Great Plains then and now. The Plains' …

Review Of Memory And Vision: Arts, Cultures, And Lives Of Plains Indian People. By Emma Hansen, Bill Anthes

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This publication-based on the award-winning reinterpretation and reinstallation in 2000 of the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming-is much more than a catalog of that institution's collections. Founded with the clothing and adornments of the Plains performers who toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, the museum has since grown with the acquisition of major private collections, and most recently by collecting the work of living Plains artists. Illustrated with color photographs of objects and archival images and illuminated by quotes from interviews, ethnographies, and oral histories, Hansen's volume surveys the cultures of Plains …

Review Of The American Far West In The Twentieth Century. By Earl Pomeroy., Carl Abbott

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

After publishing his path breaking study The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada in 1965, Earl Pomeroy embarked on the even larger task of writing a history of the American West in the twentieth century. The present volume is the result, deeply researched by Pomeroy over four decades and completed after his death in 2005 by his student and friend Richard Etulain.

The book is a fascinating mix of carefully presented details and wide-ranging topical coverage. Pomeroy expanded his "Pacific Slope" vision to include Alaska, Hawaii, the rest of the Rocky Mountain states, and …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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Review Of The History Of Texas Music. By Gary Hartman, Kent Blaser

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Texas encompasses a uniquely wide-ranging and diverse blend of ethnic and regional cultures that have in turn fostered an amazingly rich and creative musical environment. It has arguably contributed more, in both quality and variety, to the overall development of American music than any other single state. While much has been written about specific aspects of Texas music, this book is one of the first to attempt a comprehensive treatment of the subject.

Hartman's first major theme concerns "tejana" musical traditions, the blending of Spanish/Mexican with Anglo-American music in the Southwest borderlands. Mariachi, canciones, and corridos were the foundations for …

Review Of Going West!: Quilts And Community By Roderick Kiracofe And Sandi Fox, Janneken Smucker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Located at the convergence of three major overland trails, Nebraska became the new home to many settlers and the quilts they carried westward in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Generations later, some of these settlers' descendants gifted surviving quilts to local historical societies and museums. Drawing on information collected as part of the Nebraska State Quilt Guild's "Quilt Preservation Project," independent curator Sandi Fox researched the quilts tucked away in these cultural institutions. The Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery hosted the resulting exhibit, "Going West: Quilts and Community," from October 2007 through January 2008. The exhibit's catalog, Going …

Review Of Historic Native Peoples Of Texas By William C. Foster, Michael L. Tate

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Texas has traditionally been viewed as an expansive landscape occupied by a relatively small and widely scattered Indigenous population. Modern studies by Todd Smith, Robert Ricklis, Nancy Hickerson, Mariah Wade, MartIn Salinas, and Morris Foster have questioned this simplistic view by focusing upon the larger stories of Caddo, Wichita, Jumano, Tonkawa, Coahuiltecan, Karankawa, Comanche and other groups who occupied parts of Texas for a long period of time. Now William Foster attempts to synthesize the broader picture for all Indigenous peoples who lived within the state boundaries between 1528 and 1728. This long period, beginning with Narvaez's beleaguered expedition landing …

Deathscapes, Topocide, Domicide The Plains In Contemporary Print Media, Christina E. Dando

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The American print media are a powerful mechanism for communicating information about places and environment to the American public. When it comes to a landscape such as the Great Plains, experienced by many Americans as either sleep-through land in a car or flyover land in a plane, the print media may be their only real source of information about this landscape, excluding 30 second soundbites which occasionally appear in electronic media. Often perceived as monotonous or dull, the Plains has been overlaid with powerful images, of garden or desert, of Dust Bowl or Buffalo Commons. But recent media coverage of …

Review Of The Prairie West As Promised Land. Edited By R. Douglas Francis And Chris Kitzan, J. William Brennan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This collection of eighteen essays explores the "ways in which the Prairie West was identified as a Promised Land in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." In one variant, western Canada became a place where individuals could escape from the stresses of urban and industrial society in Europe or the United States and find a land of natural abundance, full of God's bountiful riches that would be bestowed on those worthy of living there, the "Chosen People." This imaginary construct, Doug Owram points out, was first advanced by those who lobbied successfully for Canada to acquire Rupert's Land from …

Review Of "Memories Of The Branch Davidians: The Autobiography Of David Koresh's Mother," By Bonnie Haldeman, W. Michael Ashcraft

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1993 federal government agents besieged and then attacked the compound of buildings at Mount Carmel, outside of Waco, Texas, that housed members of a religious movement called the Branch Davidians (a splinter group of the Seventh-day Adventists), led by Vernon Howell, who renamed himself David Koresh. Catherine Wessinger, a noted scholar of cults or new religions, has produced much of the essential scholarship that has appeared in the wake of the Waco disaster. This book is part of her ongoing contribution to our understanding of Waco.

Wessinger interviewed Bonnie Haldeman extensively in 2004, resulting in the present volume, which …

Review Of Reclaiming Charles Weidman (1901-1975): An American Dancer's Life And Legacy By Jonette Lancos, Ronald J. Zank

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Through her extensive study, Jonette Lancos rectifies the historical neglect of modern dance pioneer and Nebraska native Charles Weidman. Perhaps overshadowed by the greater attention accorded his partner and collaborator Doris Humphrey, with whom Weidman established the Humphrey-Weidman Company and School, Weidman has not been the focus of a critical biography until now. Without denying the importance of Humphrey's influence, Lancos seeks to examine other influences on Weidman's work and to explore his individual achievements.

Lancos begins with an overview of Weidman's career, framed by excerpts from his essay written as a ninth-grader in Lincoln, Nebraska. Then Weidman's family history …

Review Of The Wide Open: Prose, Poetry, And Photographs Of The Prairie. Edited By Annick Smith And Susan O'Connor, Jim Reese

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There's a postcard you can buy at a lot of gas stations in Wyoming that shows a man holding onto a fence post for dear life as he's about to be blown into the great wide open. I believe it says, "Welcome to Wyoming. We grow a lot of wind here!" It's a funny postcard, but also a serious reminder of the climatic vagaries one experiences on the prairie. "It's this ache of the wind blowing over open land," as M. L. Smoker writes in The Wide Open, that continues to call us back or hold us here in …

Review Of "Lynching To Belong: Claiming Whiteness Through Racial Violence," By Cynthia Skove Nevels, Alwyn Barr

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From the Civil War to the early twentieth century the growing population of Brazos County, Texas included about equal numbers of white and black southerners. That division contributed to tense political campaigns between Democrats and Republicans as well as acts of political and racial violence. Among new settlers came Bohemian, Irish, and Italian immigrants. Anglos did not immediately accept them as white because of cultural differences. The immigrants sought white status in several ways, including racial violence.

In 1896 a mob seized three African Americans from jail and hanged them. Two had been accused of assaulting a white girl. The …

Review Of John Steuart Curry's "Hoover And The Flood": Painting Modern History. By Charles C. Eldredge, Wendy Jean Katz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this multidimensional study of a single painting, Hoover and the Flood, art historian Charlie Eldredge asks, "Why was [John Steuart] Curry, an artist generally associated with midwestern landscape and genre subjects drawn from his Kansas upbringing, depicting a subject from the Mississippi Delta? Why was he tackling a subject of national rather than regional or simply personal consequence?" He finds answers in politics, in Curry's artistic ambitions and sense of social responsibility, and in popular and literary interest in the enduring power of the nation's rivers. The result will interest scholars of 1930s regionalism, whatever their discipline.

In …

"You Have To Be Involved ... To Play A Part In It" Assessing Kainai Attitudes About Voting In Canadian Elections, Yale D. Belanger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Two days prior to the federal election on June 28, 2004, the Lethbridge Herald ran an article in which the renowned Cree leader and former Member of Parliament Elijah Harper (Churchill electoral district in Manitoba, 1993-97) publicly implored First Nations people in Canada to participate in the forthcoming vote. Citing the recent demographic shift showing a dramatic increase in the number of young First Nations people nationally and their potential ability to influence provincial and federal electoral results, Harper proclaimed that "Native people have a positive role to play in this process." Referring to the endemic lack of voter turnout …