Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of Historians And The American West Edited By Michael P. Malone, Dick Harrison

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The seventeen essays in this volume are intended, as Michael Malone says, "to describe what has been done, how well it has been done, and what needs to be done" in western American history. Historians will no doubt approach them as a comprehensive assessment of western historiography, but many Great Plains Quarterly readers will come to them as I have, in search of a research tool for the nonspecialist with a limited range of questions to which the historians may have answers.

Together the essays provide an invaluable guide for the nonspecialist, but some offer clearer guidance than others. While …

Notes And News- Spring 1985

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

NOTES & NEWS

UPCOMING SYMPOSIA

PUBLISHING OPPORTUNITIES

NEBRASKA NOTES

Women On The Great Plains Recent Developments Research, Glenda Riley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the past dozen years or so, scholars have become increasingly involved in researching the lives and experiences of women on the Great Plains. At the same time, interest in learning more about the lives of all types of western, frontier, farm, and rural women has burgeoned. As a result, researchers now devote their careers to these topics, national conferences convene to disseminate and refine this increasing scholarship, and journals commit theme issues to presenting research results.

This essay is a survey of research developments concerning plainswomen between the early 1970s and the present day. The purpose of such an …

Western Women And True Womanhood Culture And Symbol In History And Literature, June O. Underwood

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

History cannot happen," says Henry Nash Smith, "that is, men cannot engage in purposive group behavior without images which simultaneously express collective desires and impose coherence." Although Smith does not mention it, women too engaged in purposive group behavior. They too had images that organized their experiences and gave impetus to action. And since women were part of the great western migration, the images that made sense to them and engaged them in action within the westering experience were formative in their history.¹

This article will look at nineteenth-century western women and the symbols that formed their particular history …

Evaluation Of Mark-Recapture For Estimating Striped Skunk Abundance, Raymond J. Greenwood, Alan B. Sargeant, Douglas H. Johnson

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

The mark-recapture method for estimating striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis) abundance was evaluated by systematically live-trapping a radio-equipped population on a 31.4-km2 study area in North Dakota during late April of 1977 and 1978. The study population was 10 females and 13 males in 1977 and 20 females and 8 males in 1978. Skunks were almost exclusively nocturnal. Males traveled greater nightly distances than females (3.3 vs. 2.6 km, P < 0.05) and had larger home ranges (308 vs. 242 ha) although not significantly so. Increased windchill reduced night-time activity. The population was demographically but not geographically closed. Frequency of capture was positively correlated with time skunks spent on the study area. Little variation in capture probabilities was found among trap-nights. Skunks exhibited neither trap-proneness nor shyness. Capture rates in 1977 were higher for males than for females; the reverse occurred in 1978. Variation in individual capture rates was indicated among males in 1977 and among females in 1978. Ten estimators produced generally similar results, but all underestimated true population size. Underestimation was a function of the number of untrapped skunks, primarily those that spent limited time on the study area. The jackknife method produced the best estimates of skunk abundance.

An Evaluation Of Condition Indices For Birds, Douglas H. Johnson, Gary L. Krapu, Kenneth J. Reinecke, Dennis G. Jorde

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

A Lipid Index, the ratio of fat to fat-free dry weight, is proposed as a measure of fat stores in birds. The estimation of the index from field measurements of live birds is illustrated with data on the sandhill crane (Grus canadensis) and greater white-fronted goose (Anser albifrons). Of the various methods of assessing fat stores, lipid extraction is the most accurate but also the most involved. Water extraction is a simpler laboratory method that provides a good index to fat and can be calibrated to serve as an estimator. Body weight itself is often inadequate …

Quick Estimates Of Success Rates Of Duck Nests, Douglas H. Johnson, Albert T. Klett

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

Waterfowl investigators are now generally convinced that the usual way of estimating nest success, dividing the number of nests from which eggs hatch by the number of nests found, may be highly biased and misleading. The bias is caused by the greater chance of finding a successful nest (which persists for a rather long time) than an unsuccessful one (which might be present for only a few days). Hammond and Forward (1956) mentioned problems with this apparent rate of nest success, but the deficiencies were widely ignored by waterfowl biologists until Miller and Johnson (1978) brought attention to them again …

Review Of The Indian Arts And Crafts Board: An Aspect Of New Deal Indian Policy By Robert Fay Schrader, C. Adrian Heidenreich

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In fourteen chapters and thirty-nine pages of notes Schrader chronicles the Indian Arts and Crafts Board during its development from the late 1920s to the passage of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board Act in 1935 and its work until 1945. Placing it within the general sociopolitical context of New Deal policies, including those of the Indian office, he provides a careful, detailed, chronological account of the background, activities, accomplishments, and, above all, the struggles of the board.

The central argument of this book is that the board, one of the major Roosevelt-Collier "Indian New Deal" programs, was the most …

Birger Sandzén: A Painter And His Two Worlds, Emory Lindquist

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Birger Sandzén, Swedish-born painter and lithographer, achieved a national reputation during the more than half a century that he was associated with Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas. His place in the mainstream of American landscape painting is readily apparent if one considers the vast number of exhibitions of his paintings, which ranged from hand-carried portfolios in a school or church to one-man shows in major galleries in the United States and Europe.

Although Sandzén's paintings had been exhibited before, his national reputation really began in 1922 with a showing of his work at the Babcock Galleries in New York City. …

Title And Contents- Winter 1985

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains Quarterly

Winter 1985 Volume 5 Number 1

CONTENTS

EUROPEAN INFLUENCE ON THE VISUAL ARTS OF THE GREAT PLAINS: AN INTRODUCTION Jon Nelson

PACKAGING THE GREAT PLAINS: THE ROLE OF THE VISUAL ARTS Roger B. Stein

ORIGINALITY AND INFLUENCE IN GEORGE CALEB BINGHAM'S ART Stephen C. Behrendt

COWBOY KNIGHTS AND PRAIRIE MADONNAS: AMERICAN ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE PLAINS AND PRE-RAPHAELITE ART Kirsten H. Powell

BIRGER SANDZEN: A PAINTER AND HIS TWO WORLDS Emory Lindquist

BOOK REVIEWS

REVIEW ESSAY: RECENT INTERPRETATIONS OF WESTERN AMERICAN ART

The Rocky Mountains: A Vision for Artists in the Nineteenth Century and Karl Bodmer's America Richard …

Packaging The Great Plains The Role Of The Visual Arts, Roger B. Stein

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

To consider the influence of Europe upon the visual arts of the Great Plains is to engender not only a new body of information but also some complex methodological questions of concern not only to the specialist but to the student of the region more generally. How does a regional perspective focus one's investigation? How does "influence" work within a culture and how, specifically, that of Europe upon American and western culture? Finally, how do the visual arts function to shed light on these broader questions? It is the last of these questions that I will address here, not as …

Notes And News- Winter 1985

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News

GRANT AWARDED

ART ACQUISITIONS

CENTER FOR GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

CONFERENCES IN RELATED FIELDS

Review Of John Steuart Curry And Grant Wood: A Portrait Of Rural America By Joseph S. Czestochowski, Robert Spence

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This catalogue was assembled to coincide with an exhibition of "the best works" (p. 5) of two of our most famous American scene painters, Grant Wood (1892-1942) of Iowa and John Steuart Curry (1897-1946) of Kansas. The exhibition traveled, fittingly, to museums in Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas, and was very well received.

Make no mistake about it, the Midwestern Regionalists are "in": the bellwether artistsCurry, Wood, and their friend Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri-have been rescued from the obscurity to which they were consigned during the heyday of abstractionism after world War II. Mr. Czestochowski, an established museum professional and …

Originality And Influence In George Caleb Bingham's Art, Stephen C. Behrendt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The work of "the Missouri artist," George Caleb Bingham (1811-79), offers us a good opportunity for considering the broad subject of originality and influence in the arts. The combination of originality and convention in paintings such as Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, The Jolly Flatboatmen, and The County Election can tell us much about the dynamics of that branch of American art which sought to reconcile the inherited traditions of formal, academic European art with the often strikingly unconventional reality of a New World.

Often condescendingly labeled "regional" art because of its frequently eclectic emphasis upon the local and the …

Cowboy Knights And Prairie Madonnas American Illustrations Of The Plains And Pre-Raphaelite Art, Kirsten H. Powell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1911, Dorothy Canfield's short story "The Westerner" appeared in Scribner's Magazine.¹ The story describes the chauvinism of Joanna, a young lady from Kansas who, when sent East to attend college, tries to convince her friends that eastern notions of the West are misconceptions. "You think all Western men are long haired cowpunchers!" she cries to her Maineborn roommate. "Let me tell you that they are not, but a great deal better-dressed, and more up-to-date and-and cultivated than these silly Eastern boys!" She takes her crusade to Hillsboro, Vermont, where she informs her elderly cousins that there is no …

Review Of The Rocky Mountains: A Vision For Artists In The Nineteenth Century By Patricia Trenton And Peter H. Hassrick & Karl Bodmer's America Introduction By William H. Goetzmann, Richard W. Etulain

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Historians have generally paid less attention to western art than to other facets of western American cultural history such as literature, religion, and education. Perhaps this lacuna results from historians' lack of knowledge about art history or from their reluctance to venture into the tangled thickets of art criticism. At any rate, except for the useful book length studies of John C. Ewers and Robert Taft (both non-historians) and the less extensive but probing commentaries of William Goetzmann and two of his students, Brian Dippie and Joseph C. Porter, historians only occasionally discuss artistic treatments of the American West.^{1 …}

European Influence On The Visual Arts Of The Great Plains An Introduction, Jon Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From colonial times, American art has been subject to European stylistic influences, but art historians have not heretofore devoted much attention to the effect of such influences on the visual art of the Great Plains. Thus this topic seemed a fruitful theme for the 1984 annual symposium of the Center for Great Plains Studies, as was proved by the variety of proposals elicited by a call for papers. Many of the submitted papers concerned the various manifestations of Romanticism and its effects on painting in and of the region. Romanticism, an imprecise term, covers a multitude of feelings, philosophies, and …

Notes & News- Fall 1984

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News

CENTER FOR GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

QUERIES & ACQUISITIONS

RELATED SYMPOSIA

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

Cather's Last Three Stories A Testament Of Life And Endurance, Marilyn Arnold

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Near the end of her career-and her life-in the conclusion to the story "Before Breakfast," Willa Cather described the "first amphibious frog-toad" who, when he "found his water-hole dried up behind him," undauntedly "jumped out to hop along till he could find another" and in doing so, "started on a long hop."l At first glance, this little parable might appear to be a misplaced curiosity in a story by a Midwesterner about a frazzled businessman seeking refuge on an island off the North Atlantic sea coast. Closer scrutiny reveals it to be essential to the meaning of the story and …

Willa Cather And The Swedes, Mona Pers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Willa Cather's immigrant characters, almost a literary anomaly at the time she created them, earned her widespread critical and popular acclaim, not least in the Scandinavian countries, a market she was already eager to explore at the beginning of her literary career. Sweden, the first Scandinavian country to "discover" her books, issued more translations of Cather fiction than any other European country. In fact, Sweden was ten years ahead of any other Scandinavian country in publishing the translation of a Cather novel (see table). This article will investigate the publication and reception of Willa Cather's books in Sweden, compare that …

Willa Cather Today, James E. Miller Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From 1947, the year Willa Cather died, until today, Cather studies have expanded from a Nebraska cottage craft to an international industry. During this time the number of publications about her life and work has become formidable. Recently I made an assault on the ever taller mountain of Cather material, and although I have not reached the peak, I have spent considerable time slogging up some treacherous slopes. What I present here is a bundle of my own biases, selective in nature, without any pretense of comprehensiveness. I would like first to take a brief look at three works on …

Review Of Labyrinths Of Voice: Conversations With Robert Kroetsch By Shirley Neuman And Robert Wilson, George E. Wolf

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Some years ago, in an interview with fellow praine writer Margaret Laurence, Robert Kroetsch remarked, "You and I, because we are western Canadians, are involved in making a new literature out of a new experience." Kroetsch's published works (seven novels, a volume of collected poems, a book on Alberta, and a host of stories, critical essays, and interviews) are now a vital part of this new literature, and anyone interested in the life of the imagination in prairie Canada must read and savor-and sometimes contend with-Robert Kroetsch.

It is good, therefore, to have Labyrinths of Voice available in the Western …

Review Of Critical Essays On Willa Cather Edited By John J. Murphy, Bruce P. Baker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John J. Murphy's volume in G. K. Hall's series Critical Essays on American Literature is a significant contribution to Cather studies. In a substantial introduction, Murphy, who presently contributes the annual bibliographical essay "Fiction: 1900-1930" to American Literary Scholarship, has collaborated with Kevin Synnott in surveying Cather scholarship over the years. Both negative and positive reviews as well as important articles and books are chronologically presented and succinctly characterized. Murphy and Synnott give considerably more attention to the reviews than did Bernice Slote's fine bibliographical contribution to Sixteen Modern American Authors (1973); in so doing, they call attention to …

Light And Shadow In The Cather World A Personal Essay, Lucia Woods

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I want to explore with you my feelings about the polarity of light and shadow in Willa Cather's world and in my own experience as illuminated by that world. Carl Jung said, "Evil needs to be pondered just as much as good, for good and evil are ultimately nothing but ideal extensions and abstractions of doing, and both belong to the chiaroscuro of life. In the last resort there is no good that cannot produce evil and no evil that cannot produce good."

I won't take on evil as much as the deeper greys. I became more aware of them …

Willa Cather's American Gothic Sapphira And The Slave Girl, Susan J. Rosowski

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Willa Cather's plains novels provide the lens through which readers approach her canon. Starting with O Pioneers!, My Àntonia, A Lost Lady, and the other Nebraska novels, critics have identified her major themes (the noble pioneer, the frontier, the creative imagination) and described her development (generally some version of an initial optimism over the frontier period followed by an elegiac lament for the pioneer past). From such a viewpoint, Cather's last book, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, seems an aberration, which, if treated at all, is seen as an escape into a pre-Civil War southern setting, remote …

Nebraska Naturalism In Jamesian Frames, John J. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

So much has been written about Willa Cather and the influence of the classics and later European literature that one sometimes forgets the American literary climate in which she developed. It was a postromantic age of realism, epitomized by William Dean Howells's attempt to limit fiction to normal characters in commonplace situations, which would make of it, as Cather complained, a "sort of young lady's illusion preserver." But the new breed of "naturalists," Cather's contemporaries, were in revolt against Howells and his more accomplished contemporary, Henry James, and advocated a return to romance without the chivalric trappings of Walter Scott …

Review Of Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher Of The Plains By Helen Winter Stauffer, Robert Gish

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Invariably the name of Mari Sandoz is associated with the Great Plains and more particularly with Nebraska. As Helen Winter Stauffer's comprehensive biography, Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains, makes clear, such an association had both its advantages and disadvantages in Sandoz's life and in her career as a writer. Like other authors who for better or worse come to be known as regional, Sandoz had to reconcile knowing her home intimately and being inspired by the "spirit" of that place with the need to transcend and universalize her home and her life stories through the very form …

Review Of Farm Women On The Prairie Frontier: A Sourcebook For Canada And The United States By Carol Fairbanks And Sara Brooks Sundberg, Vernon R. Lindquist

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a book divided-almost against itself. The first half consists of a series of brief essays, the second half a series of annotated bibliographies. The early essays seem caught between a chatty informality and serious scholarship. Added to this apparent indecision about style is a lack of collaboration on focus so that Sundberg's essay, "Early Agricultural Settlement on the Interior Grasslands of North America," seems without significant connection to Fairbanks's essay, "Women and their Visions: Perspectives from Fiction." More importantly, the authors seem confused about the book's purpose. It is called a "sourcebook," which implies a detailed bibliography (which …

Willa Cather's Nebraska Priests And Death Comes For The Archbishop, L. Brent Bohlke

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When Willa Cather returned to the prairies of her childhood as a locale for her fiction in O Pioneers! in 1913, she returned to a number of other things as well. Among these were the religious faith and practice of her old neighbors and the importance of this faith to their lives. Cather's experience of rediscovery, struggle, and assimilation of the Christian faith is reflected throughout her Nebraska books and is particularly evident in Death Comes for the Archbishop, written after she, along with her parents, had been confirmed into the Episcopal Church at Grace Church, Red Cloud. Although …

Index- Fall 1984

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains Quarterly- Fall 1984

Index (8 Pages)