Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of Talking Up A Storm: Voices Of The New West By Gregory L. Morris, Gerald Shapiro

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Morris's subjects include a handful of very well-known writers: Amy Tan, Thomas McGuane, Ron Hansen, and Richard Ford, winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize. Mixed in with these are interviews with lesser known western writers such as James Crumley, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Mary Clearman Blew, and Ralph Beer. For readers interested in Western literature, an especially useful feature of Talking Up a Storm is the bibliography following each interview. As with any collection like this one, a reader is likely to be left with some questions: Why is this author included but that one left out? Why is the West seemingly …

Review Of Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns Of Kansas By Daniel C. Fitzgerald, James R. Shortridge

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Kansas State Historical Society maintains a file on about six thousand failed towns in the state, a figure large almost beyond comprehension in this modern age of one town per county. Dan Fitzgerald helps to put urban development in proper perspective by offering thumb-nail sketches of one hundred and six of these nearly forgotten communities. It is history from the grass roots, well done, and written in an unpretentious style that should appeal to scholarly and general audiences alike. The sketches range in length from one to seven pages, usually accompanied by an old photograph or plat map, and …

Review Of Go West Young Man! Horace Greeley's Vision For America By Coy Cross Ii, Michael Allen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Coy Cross's book is a well-written, focused, solidly documented study of an absorbing and important topic. Unlike some of the "new" western historians, Cross analyzes manifest destiny and expansionism in historical context; he avoids the pitfalls of ideological polemics through evenhanded, analytical narrative prose. Moreover, he provides an important assessment and qualification of Greeley's (and Turner's) safety valve theory, concluding that while New York City's poor may not have heeded Greeley's call to "Go West!" millions of others in fact did. "And the Homestead Act, the absence of slavery, the information on the latest developments in agriculture, and the transcontinental …

Review Of O Little Town: Remembering Life In A Prairie Village By Harlo L. Jones, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

O Little Town is competently written in clear, concise prose which, despite some masterful description, on the whole doesn't quite reach the level of art. All of this makes for many of us a pleasant, undemanding read, but for others-historians, people of the future, and those who remember with fondness and nostalgia their childhoods in small town North America of the first half of this century-it is something much more: a valuable document of a-by this rendering, anyway-sweeter time, forever lost.

Review Of The Amazing Death Of Calf Shirt And Other Blackfoot Stories By Hugh A. Dempsey, Gregory R. Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Every Native American society has elders who recount the traditions of their people. Some of these traditions are purely religious in nature, explaining their universe and their place in it. Other oral traditions often impart life's lessons, providing a cultural road map for living in a particular society. Still other accounts concern historical events involving prominent men and women. These traditions provide each member of a society with a sense of his or her own collective history and cultural identity. The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt and Other Blackfoot Stories is such a collection of historical accounts, a compilation of …

Review Of An Indian In White America By Mark Monroe, David Murray

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mark Monroe's autobiography, edited from his tape-recorded memories by Carolyn Reyer, joins a sizable body of Indian autobiographies resulting from a collaboration between white editors and Indian narrators. Where earlier accounts often catered to white fascination with traditional Indian life, the title here indicates different concerns. After a traditional childhood in North Dakota, Monroe moves ro Alliance, Nebraska, where he experiences small town racial prejudice. Unable to find work, he enlists and is wounded in Korea. Initially successful as a baker when he returns, he drifts into a gruelingly portrayed alcohol addiction, which wrecks many years of his life. On …

Review Of The Limits Of Agrarian Radicalism: Western Populism And American Politics By Peter H. Argersinger, David F. Prindle

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The book consists mainly of a collection of reworked articles that appeared in various journals from 1967 to 1992. At the level of analysis, the author's meta-argument is that the Populists were ultimately unsuccessful because they failed politically. That is, they both failed to manage the ideological tensions within their movement, and failed to overcome various structural impediments placed in their path by the established parties. He elaborates this argument with a series of case studies, following in close detail a number of state conventions and elections. The documentation in these studies is impressive, and the studies themselves are convincingly …

Review Of Critical Spaces: Margaret Laurence And Janet Frame By Lorna M. Irvine, Robert L. Ross

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Critical Spaces, Lorna M. Irvine presents a complex body of material in clear prose and organizes that material in an accessible manner. Irvine not only examines the critical reaction to the fiction of Canadian Margaret Laurence and New Zealander Janet Frame but also reflects on the ways the writers' work and the response to it mirror the growing nationalism in the two countries.

"She Does Not Write Like A Historian" Marl Sandoz And The Old And New Western History, Betsy Downey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When Mari Sandoz's The Cattlemen was published in 1958 a reviewer for The Christian Science Monitor commented that Sandoz "does not write like a woman." He admitted that his observation was "not all compliment." Reviewer Horace Reynolds might well have said "Sandoz does not write like a historian." Such re-phrasing, with its implications of both compliment and criticism, is a good place to begin examining Sandoz as historian. Mari Sandoz called herself a historian by training and vocation. She is best remembered for her historical works, particularly her Great Plains series: Old Jules (1935), Crazy Horse (1942), Cheyenne Autumn (1953), …

Review Of Lakol Wokiksuye: La Memoire Visuel Des Lakota By Helga Lomosits And Paul Harbaugh, Olive Patricia Dickason

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A principal problem with this presentation is the technical quality of the pictorial reproductions, which is somber indeed. Moreoever, the world shown here is almost entirely male: the crowd scenes include comparatively few women, and only one woman's portrait (Annie Red Shirt's) is admitted. What does this reflect-the bias of the photographers, the realities of the age, or perhaps a combination of both? The presentation of the material, well organized and clear as it is, also would have profitted from numbered pages.

Although some statements here and there in the text are questionable-that the cost of the frontier wars, for …

Review Of Cowboys And Kansas: Stories From The Tallgrass Prairie By Jim Hoy, Timo Heiskanen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Do you think of cowboys when you think of Kansas? Few people do, but Jim Hoy, English professor and Kansas native and patriot, has set out to give the Kansas cowboy his rightful place in the history, arguably, of America's greatest folk hero. Hoy's main concern in Cowboys and Kansas is the real working cowboy, though he also touches upon the importance of the mythic cowboy on the American psyche. Both are genuine articles, although the two have little in common.

Review Of "That Man Partridge": E. A. Partridge, His Thoughts And Times By Murray Knuttila, Mary Higginbotham

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Effectively demonstrating the interconnections between biography and history, Murray Knuttila introduces readers to E. A. Partridge, who played a pivotal role in the development of agrarian society, economy, and politics in Canada's prairie provinces during the early twentieth century. Edward Alexander Partridge, writes Knuttila, "was part of an historic transformation of an entire region through settlement and then what might be called 'unsettlement'" (p. 85). Knuttila focuses on Partridge's life during the tumultuous decades between 1900 and 1930, exploring how Partridge both affected and was affected by his historical context.

Review Of Elizabeth Bacon Custer And The Making Of A Myth By Shirley A. Leckie, Kimberly Jensen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Throughout the book's detailed accounts of the campaigns, career, and posthumous reputation of George Armstrong Custer, Elizabeth Custer virtually disappears. At other times Leckie presents glimpses of Custer's life beyond her role of wife and professional widow that would, if explored in more detail, enrich the study considerably. A broader analysis throughout the chronological narrative-with the inclusion of a greater portion of recent work on the complexity of gender roles in the nineteenth century, the relationship of women to war and the military, women's paid work roles, the women's club movement, women as writers and readers, and the relationship between …

Review Of Dry Farming In The Northern Great Plains: Years Of Readjustment, 1920-1990 By Mary W. M. Hargreaves, David C. Jones

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There can be few quibbles with this masterwork. Perhaps the maps might be crisper; perhaps a few pictures might enhance the presentation, and a few more graphs might lay out complex and often serpentine trends. Possibly a few more farmers might speak so that in the end one knows that certainly behind the statistics dwell real people with real dreams. Generally, the more pleasing the presentation, the wider the audience-and this scholarship deserves a wide audience. Dry Farming is a superlative history of farm policy on the northern Plains by one of the most meticulous students of the phenomenon in …

Review Of Prairie University: A History Of The University Of Nebraska By Robert E. Knoll, Paul F. Sharp

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Institutional histories are often dull and lifeless- but not this one. From its preface to its final chapter celebrating the university's 125th year, this impressive history of the University of Nebraska entertains with colorful vignettes of its facuity, staff, and administrative leaders. With candor, curmudgeons are called curmudgeons, the less than able are identified, and the irascible remain irascible in the story's able telling.

Students of higher education will find this a rich study. Nebraska alumni will respond to its anecdotes with vivid memories, and many readers will enjoy the lively, sometimes opinionated analyses. All will find it a detailed …

Review Of We Are A People In This World: The Lakota Sioux And The Massacre At Wounded Knee By Conger Beasley, Jr, Joe Starita

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

To tell the group's story, Beasley has employed a kind of literary double helix-juxtaposing chapters which alternately flash back to summarize the massacre of 1890, then flash forward to chronicle the memorial ride of 1990. Occasionally tedious, the device fulfills one vital function: it provides a superb context while poignantly illuminating similarities between two events separated by a century. Beasley, a poet, is often at his best describing the almost unimaginable cold (temperatures of 40 below, wind chills approaching 80 below) endured by the group.

Review Essay: Native American Studies, Clara Sue Kidwell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Being asked to review a book from a Native American perspective raises a basic question about the peer review process for academic journals. What constitutes historical objectivity in the review? Will a review identified as representing a particular perspective be received in the same way as a review by a historian who writes about American history?

Given that very few Indian voices are recorded in the journals that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark kept during their epic western explorations, and that Ambrose can record only snatches of their thoughts, we cannot recover fully the many different ways that people of …

Long-Term Declines In Nest Success Of Prairie Ducks, Wendy D. Beauchamp, Rolf R. Koford, Thomas D. Nudds, Robert G. Clark, Douglas H. Johnson

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

Increased predation on nests of ducks in prairie uplands, as a result of habitat alteration, has been hypothesized to cause decreased nest success and population sizes. We tested whether, and by how much, nest success declined using data compiled from 37 studies conducted between 1935 and 1992 at 67 sites in the Prairie Pothole Region of Canada and the United States. Nest success declined (P = 0.0002) over time, but time explained only 10% of the variation; precipitation (P = 0.79) did not account for additional variation in nest success. Nest success declined at similar (P = 0.13) rates among …

Survival Of Radiomarked Canvasback Ducklings In Northwestern Minnesota, Carl E. Korschgen, Kevin P. Kenow, William L. Green, Douglas H. Johnson, Michael D. Samuel, Louis Sileo

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

Duckling survival, an important factor affecting annual recruitment, has not been determined adequately for canvasbacks (Aythya valisineria). We investigated the magnitude, timing, and causes of mortality of canvasback ducklings from hatch to fledging at the Agassiz National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) in northwestern Minnesota during 1987-90. During the 4 years, 217 day-old ducklings were radiomarked and released in 52 broods. Another 141 ducklings were radiomarked at > 4 weeks of age. Survival was estimated with the Kaplan-Meier nonparametric estimator and the Weibull parametric model. Most mortalities occurred within 10 days after hatch. Total brood loss occurred in 18 (35%) of …