Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of Wetland And Environmental Applications Of Gis Edited By John G. Lyon And Jack Mccarthy, Scott E. Richert

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

Wetlands are commonly defined as areas periodically or permanently inundated with water and typically characterized by vegetation requiring saturated soil for growth and reproduction. They have become increasingly important in environmental research as their benefits to environmental systems (wildlife habitat, flood control, for example) have become better understood. Wetland and Environmental Applications of GIS is an original contribution to the study of wetlands and other aquatic environments because it is the first book to address the inventory, monitoring, and management of wetlands and other surface waters by using geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, and computer modeling.

The volume is …

Table Of Contents - Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 1996

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

Contents:

Articles

News and notes

Five-year index

Review Of Future Harvest: Pesticide-Free Farming By Jim Bender, George E. Ham

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

Jim Bender provides the rationale for pursuing pesticide-free farming and a detailed model of conversion based on his experiences on his own 642 acre farm in southeast Nebraska. Reviewing such deeply ingrained characteristics of conventional agricultural systems in the Plains as separation of livestock from crop production, minimal crop diversity, and the lack of multi-year crop rotations, he recommends that conversion be undertaken gradually over several years as more experience is gained with pesticide-free systems.

In preparing for conversion from conventional to pesticide-free agriculture, one must learn to build terraces and waterways to control soil erosion, to rotate and diversify …

Fate Of Wetlands Associated With The Central Nebraska Irrigation Canal System, Jason D. Ekstein, Scott E. Hygnstrom

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

Changes in wetlands in the vicinity of the Phelps and £65 canals operated by Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District in South-central Nebraska were examined using aerial photographs taken on seven occasions from 1938 to 1981. According to previous research, nearly 90% of the original wetlands within the surrounding Rainwater Basin were destroyed or altered by draining and filling between 1900 and 1980. Within a zone extending 10 kilometers on each side of the Phelps and £65 canals, however, we observed an increase in the number and total area of wetlands, which we hypothesize to have been caused by …

Five-Year Index - Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 1996

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

five-year index

Leisure And Aging In Southern Saskatchewan, Ralph Nilson, David Weaver, Carlton Yoshioka

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

This study examined the psychological and socio-economic dimensions of the leisure experience patterns of the expanding older adult population in the Canadian Great Plains or Prairie region. Survey data were collected from a random sample of 2,969 of persons 65 years of age and older residing in southern Saskatchewan. Results indicated that older adults have a wide range of leisure activities with involvement in numerous individual and community related pursuits. However, when differentiated by season, winter activities tended to be passive, solitary, inexpensive, and home-based activities. Moreover, important psychological dimensions in perceived health and activity of older adults did not …

Review Of Atlas Of Oklahoma Climate By Howard L. Johnson And Claude E. Duchon, John A. Harrington Jr.

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

Thematic atlases depicting aspects of past weather events and climatic summaries are an important resource for researchers, educators, and the general public. The authors of the Atlas of Oklahoma Climate have produced an engaging text providing a good overview of a subject about which both are highly knowledgeable: Howard Johnson serves as an Assistant State Climatologist in the Oklahoma Climatological Survey; Claude Duchon is a Professor in the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma.

The atlas is divided into six major sections: an "Introduction"; "Geography and Oklahoma's Weather and Climate"; "Annual Climate"; "Seasonal Climate"; "Wind and Humidity"; and …

Review Of Anthropology, Public Policy, And Native Peoples In Canada Edited By Noel Dyck And James B. Waldram, Adrian Tanner

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

In their chapter in Anthropology, Public Policy, and Natives Peoples in Canada, John O'Neil et al. state that anthropology "has affected policy development in virtually every sector of northern community life except medicine" (p. 216). Despite this observation, the book generally tends to stress Canadian anthropology's overall difficulties in aboriginal policy-making. It examines some of anthropology's most sensitive and difficult issues in this area critically, suggesting an ambivalent relationship towards the policy-making process.

The book's focus on anthropology's problems in contributing to aboriginal public policy is established in the editors' introduction, which examines several sources of these difficulties. A …

Western Meadowlark Impaled On Barbed-Wire Fence, Lawrence D. Igl

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

Recently, Allen and Ramirez (1990, Wilson Bull. 102:553-558) summarized known observations of bird mortality associated with barbed-wire fences. Most reported cases of bird mortality from barbed-wire fences were of non-passerine birds. On 16 June 1993 in Slope County in western North Dakota (NW 1/4, Sec. 10 T134N R103W), I found a dead western meadowlark (Sturnella neglecta) with its right wing impaled by a barb on the middle strand of a three-strand barbed-wire fence. Barbs on the wire were spaced about 12-15 cm apart. The bird was adult-sized, but plumage characteristics indicated that it was a young-of-the-year with well-developed …

Second Record Of White Ibis In North Dakota, Jennifer W. Marlow, Lawrence D. Igl, Melody R. Hartman

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

The breeding range of the white ibis (Eudocimus albus) in the United States is generally restricted to coastal regions along the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean north to Virginia (Frederick et al. 1996, Conserv. BioI. 10:203-216). During the breeding season, the white ibis is nomadic and highly opportunistic in its use of unpredictable food resources (Frederick et al. 1996; Bildstein 1993, White ibis: wetland wanderer. Smithsonian Inst. Press, Washington, D.C.). There is one previous record of a white ibis in North Dakota on 4 August 1954 (Gammell and Huenecke 1955, Audubon Field Notes 9:34-36; Lokemoen 1979, …

Review Of Willa Cather's Transforming Vision: New France And The American Northeast By Gary Brienzo, Richard Nielsen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Using a fine-tuned blend of textual criticism, biography, and primary research, Gary Brienzo sheds light on the importance of the American Northeast and New France on Willa Cather's life and art.

Brienzo sees Cather's artistic life as a search for a "quiet center," a unified, comforting vision, given focus by an appreciation she developed for the "domestic qualities that enhanced life." He credits Sarah Orne Jewett for providing Cather this "alternative literary tradition," which celebrated woman-centered communities and the power of domestic ritual. Brienzo details Cather's discovery of Quebec and the appeal of its French traditions, for there she recognized …

Review Of Soul In The Stone: Cemetery Art From America's Heartland By John Gary Brown, Robert Duncan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John Gary Brown, a professional photographer from Lawrence, Kansas, has collected over a period of time a variety of unique photographs documenting examples of cemetery art found in the central states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico. The author, through his photographs and to some degree his text, illustrates the rich mixture of personal efforts that stone sculptors and vernacular artists have developed in this special art form. While cemetery art is public, the photographs Brown presents, through his use of a multiplicity of artistic images, often suggest particularly private stories. Brown begins …

Mari Sandoz's Portrait Of An Artist's Youth: Robert Henri's Nebraska Years, Helen Winter Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Robert Henri's life story would have appealed to Mari Sandoz even if he were not an important early twentieth-century American artist. Robert Henri (born Robert Henry Cozad) came from a time, a place, and a family that at first glance seem unlikely to have produced an avant garde painter of landscapes, cityscapes, and portraits; it was the sort of paradox Sandoz liked to explore. That Henri had spent much of his youth in her native Nebraska in a family headed by a magnetic and dominating man not unlike her own father also interested her. That the family left Nebraska in …

Review Of The Way To The West: Essays On The Central Plains By Elliott West, A. Yvette Huginnie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In one delightful volume, Elliott West offers four engaging, far-ranging essays on the Central Plains. Originally presented in 1993 as the ninth annual Calvin Horn Lectures on Western History and Culture at the University of New Mexico, these expanded essays are now available to a wider audience. The Horn lectures enabled West, a distinguished social historian, to explore some new aspects of western American history, specifically environmental and Native American studies. Interweaving secondary materials from a multiplicity of disciplines-anthropology, ecology and environmental studies, history, literature, sociology-with ample primary materials, West 'presents engrossing essays from which we can all benefit. He …

Marl Sandoz's Slogum House Greed As Woman, Glenda Riley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In her 1937 novel, Slogum House, Mari Sandoz turned the usual stereotype of greed and cupidity on its head. Instead of presenting a voracious male rancher aggrandizing his land holdings to the detriment of hard-working homesteaders, Sandoz created Regula Haber Slogum, a grasping woman who eventually owns nearly an entire county, which she has managed to have named after her family. Although Gulla, as she is known, controls most of Slogum County, she continues brutally to foreclose mortgages and force sheriffs' sales, even during the depression years of the 1930s.

Despite this depiction of what Katharine Mason has called …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

AN INTRODUCTION (Barbara Rippey; John R. Wunder)

"SHE DOES NOT WRITE LIKE A HISTORIAN": MARl SANDOZ AND THE OLD AND NEW WESTERN HISTORY (Betsy Downey)

MARl SANDOZ'S SLOGUM HOUSE: GREED AS WOMAN (Glenda Riley)

RECASTING EPIC TRADITION: THE DISPOSSESSED AS HERO IN SANDOZ'S CRAZY HORSE AND CHEYENNE AUTUMN (Lisa R. Lindell)

MARl SANDOZ'S PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST'S YOUTH: ROBERT HENRI'S NEBRASKA YEARS (Helen Winter Stauffer)

BOOK REVIEWS

Prairie University: A History of the University of Nebraska

Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas

Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains: Years of Readjustment , 1920,1990

Lakol Wokiksuye: …

Marl Sandoz Nebraska Sandhills Author A Centennial Recognition, Barbara Rippey, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

1996 marks the centennial year of Mari Susette Sandoz's birth to Swiss immigrant parents, Mary and Jules Sandoz, on a homestead in Sheridan County, Nebraska. Mari, the oldest of the six children in the Sandoz family, was shaped and hardened by her father's temper and by bearing the brunt of hard physical work both outdoors on the homestead and as her mother's helper. The people of her neighborhood were the kind of people who not only witnessed but made history, the kind of people whose lives and stories could be transformed into literature. Red Cloud, Robert Henri, Crazy Horse, "Gulla …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

REVIEW ESSAYS

CALLS FOR PAPERS

Review Of The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities In The Modern West By Carl Abbott, Robert B. Fairbanks

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This important book initiates a new series on The Modern American West edited by Gerald D. Nash. In it the author not only documents the critical role cities have played in the development of the West since World War II, but claims that those cities really personify the three mythic images of the West as locus of democracy, opportunity, and individual fulfillment. Defining the West as all of the Great Plains and Pacific States, Carl Abbott examines mid-size cities as well as large, but concentrates on the impact of metropolises like Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston …

Review Of A Dose Of Frontier Soldiering: The Memoirs Of Corporal E. A. Bode, Frontier Regular Infantry, 1877-1882 Edited By Thomas T. Smith, Markku Henriksson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For anyone interested in the "big picture" of what happened in the American West ten or fifteen years after the Civil War, Bode's memoirs will prove disappointing: he was not involved in any of the major campaigns in any meaningful way and reveals nothing not already known. If one is interested in a soldier's-although an exceptional one'sviews of some of his superior officers, or Indians, or mostly about the daily duties of an infantryman, Bode offers a good dose of "frontier soldiering." There is also useful primary material here on the 1870s and the social history of the military. Although …

"With One Mighty Pull" Interracial Town Boosting In Nicodemus, Kansas, Claire O'Brien

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One steamy July day in 1887, a young American of African descent named H. R. Cayton arrived in the little northwestern Kansas town of Nicodemus in Graham County. He had traveled from Wyandotte to try his luck in the real estate and loan business, for he had heard that Nicodemus, a town founded by former slaves a decade earlier, was the place to be for an ambitious young black man like himself. Cayton's arrival was enthusiastically noted by one of the town's two newspapers, the Western Cyclone: "Mr. C. is a promising young man and has got 'git up …

Review Of Looking For History On Highway 14 By John E. Miller, Mark Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John E. Miller, a history professor at South Dakota State University, employs a blend of history, journalism, and travelogue in this enlightening book. He takes the reader on a tour of discovery across South Dakota's historic Highway 14, visiting fifteen roadside towns before ending in the Black Hills at Mt. Rushmore. Included in the tour are trips to Brookings (home to South Dakota's land grant university), De Smet (the "little town on the prairie" made famous by Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels), and Ft. Pierre (originally home to many Native American groups). Other towns visited include Elkton, Arlington, Manchester, Iroquois, Huron, …

Review Of Stephen Long And American Frontier Exploration By Roger L. Nichols And Patrick L. Halley, Seppo Tamminen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Stephen Long and American Frontier Exploration is an excellent narrative of early nineteenth- century expeditions. It is enjoyable reading, and its information is particularly valuable for those interested in early westward expansion. The volume is also of importance to scholars studying other members of Long's expeditions, including Titian Peale, since it gives the historical context in which their work was done.

William Mckinley Holt And The Indian Claims Commission, Francis Moul

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When the bill to create the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) was signed by President Harry Truman on 13 August 1946, he said it would provide "a final settlement of all outstanding claims" by the Indians against the United States. The process would foster the policy of assimilation, he said: "Indians can take their place without special handicaps or special advantages in the economic life of our nation and share fully in its progress." These hopes were not realized, however, as tribes faced three decades of difficult litigation, narrow opinions that reduced monetary claims, and many years when termination of tribes …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIUM

IN MEMORIAM (Erwin H. Goldenstein)

CALLS FOR PAPERS

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ASSOCIATIONS

RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS

Sacramental Language Ritual In The Poetry Of Louise Erdrich, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As an intensely personal genre, poetry intimately reveals Louise Erdrich's voice as her well-known fiction does not. Evident in that voice are elements of the mosaic of cultural experiences that comprise Erdrich's life: Catholicism, German ancestry, working class, university education, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa. Erdrich's poetry is her first published work, her own writing without the collaborative effort and editing of her husband, Michael Dorris (Modoc). While some of Erdrich's poems garner their cultural rhetoric from differing points of view and values, most exhibit the variety of experiences that result from marginalization inherent in the omnipresence of race in North …

Frompin' In The Great Plains Listening And Dancing To The Jazz Orchestras Of Alphonso Trent 1925~44, Marc Rice

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This paper focuses on one of the most popular and influential of the territory band leaders, Alphonso Trent. From 1925 to the mid 1940s, his groups were acknowledged by listeners and by other musicians as among the very best of the jazz bands performing in the Southwest and Great Plains. In the cities and towns that they visited, their performances were always a special event, particularly in the African American communities. Trent's orchestras played an important role as musicians and entertainers of African Americans in the Great Plains States in the 1920s and 1930s.

Workers, Unions, And Historians On The Northern Plains, William C. Pratt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Labor history has corne of age over the past three decades. Today two national journals, Labor History and Labor's Heritage, focus on this subject in the United States, and many others, including the Journal of American History, publish articles in the field. In fact, much of what is called new social history often treats labor history topics, and many western historians have had an extended interest in labor history. Numerous recent examples, including the work of Carlos Schwantes, Michael Kazin, Vicki Ruiz, and others have been well received.

Review Of Rooted In Dust: Surviving Drought And Depression In Southwestern Kansas By Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Thomas R. Wessel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Few environmental disasters match the drought years of the 1930s. Drought extended well beyond the Great Plains for most of the decade, but was particularly intense in southwestern Kansas. Fiction writers and historians have generally concentrated on those who fled the drought stricken Plains, or written accounts condemning farmers and government programs for converting the southern Plains into a dust bowl.

Pamela Riney-Kehrberg transforms farmers from villains in a man-made environmental disaster into stubborn optimists with heroic perseverance. She acknowledges that many avoided the economic depression in Kansas, or at least the drought, by simply abandoning the state, but notes …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

SACRAMENTAL LANGUAGE: RITUAL IN THE POETRY OF LOUISE ERDRICH (P. Jane Hafen)

THE FRONTIER MEDICAL COMMUNITY OF LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS (Charles R. King)

WILLIAM McKINLEY HOLT AND THE INDIAN CLAIMS COMMISSION (Francis Moul)

THE MISSOURI RIVER BASIN ON THE 1795 SOULARD MAP: A CARTOGRAPHIC LANDMARK (W. Raymond Wood)

REVIEW ESSAYS

Stephan E. Ambrose. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (John L. Allen; Clara Sue Kidwell; Donald Worster)

BOOK REVIEWS

The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains

The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt and Other Blackfoot Stories

Stephen Long and American Frontier …