Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Sedimentation Of Prairie Wetlands, Robert A. Gleason, Ned H. Euliss, Jr.

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

Many wetlands in the prairie pothole region are embedded within an agricultural landscape where they are subject to varying degrees of siltation. Cultivation of wetland catchment areas has exacerbated soil erosion; wetlands in agricultural fields receive more sediment from upland areas than wetlands in grassland landscapes and hence are subject to premature filling (i.e., they have shorter topographic lives). Associated impacts from increased turbidity, sediment deposition, and increased surface water input likely have impaired natural wetland functions. Although trapping of sediments by wetlands is often cited as a water quality benefit, sediment input from agricultural fields has potential to completely …

Review Of Native American Verbal Art: Texts And Contexts By William M. Clements, Paul G. Zolbrod

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

In addressing what its author calls "The Ethnopoetics Movement," this sensible, well-researched volume demonstrates that recording Native American verbal art is not a new enterprise, tracing it back to seventeenth-century Jesuit records and following it through the present-day. Nor has the task of converting tribal discourse to literature ever been easy. Along with the inevitable hazards of translation, cultural barriers intrude, especially in the transfer of oral performance to the silent page.

William Clements lays a clear foundation for a reasonable perspective. Earlier commentators, he writes, "uncritically assumed" that printed records of orally-based tribal material "provide absolutely reliable information about …

News And Notes

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

Contents:

Leslie Hewes Award (1997)
Calls for Papers
Conferences

Review Of Ruddy Ducks & Other Stifftails: Their Behavior And Biology By Paul A. Johnsgard And Montserrat Carbonell, John Faaborg

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

Paul Johnsgard seems to produce books the way other academicians turn out journal articles. In contrast to his recent work, which has surveyed large groups of birds, this one focuses on only eight species. It also varies because there is a co-author, Montserrat Carbonell, who did her doctoral research on this group of birds.

The book is divided into two sections. The first is a general summary of stifftail biology, while the second contains accounts of the eight species included in this taxonomic group by the authors. The volume begins with a survey of the history of stifftail taxonomy, emphasizing …

Review Of Paleoindian Geoarchaeology Of The Southern High Plains By Vance T. Holliday, Berkley Bailey

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

Written in a clear, concise manner and profusely illustrated, Vance Holliday's book introduces the serious student of geoarchaeology to the variety and complexity of twenty Paleoindian archaeological sites on the Southern High Plains. A logical sequence of chapters begins with an engaging regional history of Paleoindian geoarchaeological research, followed by comprehensive discussions of the geomorphology, stratigraphy, soils, Late Pleistocene paleoenvironments, and geochronology, jointly presenting Paleoindian archaeological sites as much more than collections of stone tools and extinct animal bones. Holliday includes good summaries of lithic and faunal data for each archaeological site discussed in the text.

Following the presentation of …

Review Of Buildings Of Colorado By Thomas J. Noel, Ted Ertl

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

This is the fifth in the ambitious Buildings of the United States series of guides to American architecture taken on by the Society of Architectural Historians and inspired by Nikolas Pevsner's classic series on the Buildings of England published between 1951 and 1974. Thomas Noel's fine if brief introductory overview of Colorado's historical and architectural legacy provides the context for understanding the selected buildings. The book is clearly organized into four sections based on the state's major river regions- South Platte, Arkansas, Rio Grande, and Colorado; each region is introduced with a description of its historical development and a key …

Review Of Collecting The Natural World: Legal Requirements And Personal Liability For Collecting Plants, Animals, Rocks, Minerals And Fossils By Donald Wolberg And Patsy Reinard, Gregory Brown

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

Collecting the Natural World is, in the authors' words, an attempt to "provide a practical guideline to the maze of regulations and possible liabilities which confront the collector" of natural objects in the United States. To achieve this lofty goal would require uncommon knowledge of multiple scientific disciplines, objectivity, and thorough research into myriad laws and regulations. Unfortunately, this work generally fails to meet its goal and suffers from a pervasive lack of objectivity.

Six paired chapters, the body of the book, review federal and state laws and agencies regulating collecting of three broad groups of natural objects: archeological; paleontological …

Wetland Policy In Canada: A Research Agenda For Policy Reform, Jonathan Scarth

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

Land use decisions that affect wetlands and wetland functions are influenced by a variety of factors, some of which arise from policies that directly or indirectly provide incentives for wetland drainage or conservation. Direct efforts to provide incentives for wetland conservation must be augmented by complementary policy reforms. This paper reviews the policy instruments that have the potential to influence land use on the Canadian Prairies, and suggests some research questions that should be addressed to promote reforms that would conserve wetlands.

Review Of The Geography Of Manitoba: Its Land And Its People Edited By John Welsted, John Everitt, And Christoph Stadel, Paul Hackett

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

The Geography of Manitoba, a wide-ranging look at Canada's Keystone Province, comprises a collection of papers grouped into four sections dealing with the province's physical geography, people, resources and industries, and recreation. Supplementing the major essays are brief case studies (thirty-nine in all) that examine specific topics related to the sections within which they appear. The text is amply supported throughout by excellent black-and-white maps, as well as by illustrations, photographs, tables, and several color plates.

Review Of Wetlands Of The American Midwest: A Historical Geography Of Changing Attitudes By Hugh Prince, Sanford Sandy Kaplan

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

I wish I could recommend this book as a "must read" for anyone interested in the history and development of the Great Plains region; however, I cannot. For one thing, the Great Plains per se are rarely discussed in it, and the subject is certainly not a topic of universal interest. I can recommend the book, however, as a highly readable and well-documented study of the change in our perceptions of the wetlands of the Midwest over time. Hugh Prince has done a magnificent job of gathering a great deal of scattered information and using it to illustrate his idea …

Review Of Prairie Conservation: Preserving North America's Most Endangered Ecosystem Edited By Fred B. Samson And Fritz L. Knopf, Walter H. Fick

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

Prairie Conservation will interest anyone concerned about the current condition and preservation of grasslands, wetlands, and associated wildlife species in the Great Plains of North America. The book contains twenty chapters plus a summary by Paul G. Risser. Forty-four authors contributed to the book with over 700 literature citations. The well-written text is accompanied by forty-six figures and tables. A foreword by Nebraska Governor E. Benjamin Nelson discusses a program called the Great Plains Partnership (GPP), an experiment in environmental problem solving that will strive to bring all stakeholders together by working with and through private landowners.

Review Of Guide To Kansas Architecture By David H. Sachs And George Ehrlich, Jennifer Honebrink

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

Presenting the architecture of an entire state is a daunting task, given the profusion of potential pieces with something special to offer. This book admittedly does not contain all the structures most worthy of preservation or only the best designed. Instead it provides a representative sample of architectural styles and types across Kansas, giving equal coverage to cities and less populous areas. Structures were chosen for their architectural, historical, or cultural significance from those mentioned in previously published works, the Kansas State Register, and the Kansas section of the National Register, as well as from those suggested by the Kansas …

Nitrogen Transformation And Fate In Prairie Wetlands, William G. Crumpton, L. Gordon Goldsborough

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

Agricultural applications of fertilizers and pesticides have increased dramatically in the prairie pothole region since the middle 1960s, and agrochemical contamination of surface and groundwater has become a serious environmental concern. There is growing interest in the potential of prairie wetlands as sinks for excess nutrients in this agricultural landscape. As much as 50% of the fertilizer nitrogen applied to cultivated crops may be lost as nitrate in agricultural drainage water, and prairie wetlands may be especially effective as nitrate sinks. The effectiveness of prairie wetlands as sinks for nonpoint source nitrogen loads is likely to depend on the magnitude …

Effects Of Atmospheric Change And Agriculture On The Biogeochemistry And Microbial Ecology Of Prairie Wetlands, Richard D. Robarts, Marley J. Waiser

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

Relatively little is known about the factors which regulate in water biogeochemical processes and food chains in prairie wetlands. Climatic warming, increased UV-radiation and agricultural activities will have interacting effects on these wetlands. We examined the effects of these processes on prairie wetland functioning and productivity with particular emphasis on production and cycling of organic carbon, especially dissolved organic carbon (DOC). Autotrophic and heterotrophic production are temperature dependent and temperature increases or decreases could affect production under more extreme climate change scenarios. DOC concentrations could decrease with increasing bacterial production and photolysis, leading to increases in UV-radiation penetration. This is …

Checklist And ‘‘Pollard Walk’’ Butterfly Survey Methods On Public Lands, Ronald Royer, Jane Austin, Wesley Newton

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

Checklist and ‘‘Pollard Walk’’ butterfly survey methods were contemporaneously applied to seven public sites in North Dakota during the summer of 1995. Results were compared for effect of method and site on total number of butterflies and total number of species detected per hour. Checklist searching produced significantly more butterfly detections per hour than Pollard Walks at all sites. Number of species detected per hour did not differ significantly either among sites or between methods. Many species were detected by only one method, and at most sites generalist and invader species were more likely to be observed during checklist searches …

Sexuality, Gender, And Identity In Great Plains History And Myth, Peter Boag

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Within just the last few years there has been an explosion in the interest in, and the publication of, gay and lesbian studies. One of the most vibrant fields in the discipline of history today is the history of sexuality. But with all the effort expended in this area of scholarship, there has not been much of an attempt to integrate gay, lesbian, and sexual history into regional history and regionalism. This essay is an attempt to introduce regional history to sexual history. It takes as its subject "non-heterosexuals" and tries to make sense of their history within the context …

Review Of Yellow Woman And A Beauty Of The Spirit: Essays On Native American Life Today By Leslie Marmon Silko, Alanna Kathleen Brown

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit is a surprising pastiche of Leslie Marmon Silko's non-fiction. The work offers the reader a diverse range in the quality of thought, substance, and polish. As she, herself, notes: "As a child, I loved to draw and cut paper and paste things together. ... " This essay collection is an example of just that. Although subtitled Essays on Native American Life Today, the book is less a discussion of pan-Indian concerns than it is a reflection on Leslie Marmon Silko's processes as a writer, her need to have outsiders understand the …

Review Of The Devil Knows How To Ride: The True Story Of William Clarke Quantrill And His Confederate Raiders By Edward E. Leslie, James E. Sherow

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Edward E. Leslie has written a provocative book about one of the most notorious characters of the American Civil War. He has certainly achieved his goal of offering "an anecdotal history of William Clarke Quantrill, the guerrilla band he led, the enemies he fought, and the war they waged on the KansasMissouri border." This is one of the fullest treatments of Quantrill yet. Leslie's research is impressive; and he does an admirable job of shredding past myths about his subject. The first four chapters cover the ground of "Bleeding Kansas," a time when this "quiet schoolteacher" from Ohio came to …

Review Of Sod And Stubble: The Unabridged And Annotated Edition By John Ise, Craig Miner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Sod and Stubble is a classic of Kansas and western history. It ranks with Giants in the Earth and O Pioneers! in readability and memorability, but has the added feature of being an only slightly fictionalized version of the reality of the lives of the author's parents in Osborne County, Kansas. Filled with striking stories, it is only a question of whether one is moved most by the baby dying after Rosie scalds her nipples, the drama of the grasshopper invasion, Henry's slow death by cancer and Rosie's tender goodbye, her farewell to the farm and to childbearing, or the …

Review Of Writings In Indian History, 1985-1990 Compiled By Jay Miller, Colin G. Calloway, And Richard A. Sattler, Joseph B. Herring

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Students of North American Indian history should applaud Miller, Calloway, and Sattler for producing this splendid reference guide. The volume extends the work of Francis Paul Prucha, who edited two bibliographies referencing thousands of books, journals, news articles, governmental documents, and other sources on Indian history and Indian-white relations. The tremendous growth in scholarship regarding the American Indian past would have been far less impressive without Prucha's contribution. The compilers of this new volume, working under the aegis of the Newberry Library's D'Arcy McNickle Center, have made it possible for that growth in scholarship to continue.

Increasingly, as the compilers …

Carnival And Ceremony At Wright Morris's Lone Tree Hotel, Reginald Dyck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Gordon Boyd, a central character in Morris's Ceremony in Lone Tree, is a self-fashioning failure at American dreaming. He presents himself this way: "In the middle of life, Morgenstern Boyd had everything to live for, everything worth living for having eluded him. He was that rare thing, a completely selfunmade man." Failed writer among other failures, Boyd in many ways contrasts with, and is defined by, his friend and nemesis Walter McKee, a man who "like Babbitt, keeps faith; he does not question anything, especially his own life. " Set in the 1950s Midwest culture of respectability, Ceremony in …

Review Of Unionizing The1ungles: Labor And Community In The Twentieth-Century Meatpacking Industry Edited By Shelton Stromquist And Marvin Bergman, Laura Lacasa

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Hacking through meatpacking's mass production jungle, historians Shelton Stromquist and Marvin Bergman gather nine essays addressing twentieth-century Midwestern unionization and its impact on industrial and social relations within and beyond factory walls.

The work details the historical struggles inherent to the meatpacking labor movement. Racial, gender, and ideological differences, compounded by guarantees that all workers benefit equally from union membership, have been the most serious traditional obstacles to uniting employees. Wilson Warren's essay, for instance, argues that whites in the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) declined initiating anti-discrimination programs after World War II intentionally to limit African American advancement.

Review Of Custer And The Cheyennes: George Armstrong Custer's Winter Campaign On The Southern Plains By Louis Kraft, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Few western figures have received the attention George Armstrong Custer has. Since his death in 1876, his name and fame have alternately been attacked and defended by writers. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, Louis Kraft's recent monograph falls into the latter camp. As Volume Five of the Custer Trail Series, Custer and the Cheyennes incorporates alternating points-of-view of both whites and natives, using extensive quotes to let the actors speak for themselves. In this manner, Kraft presents a chronological narrative of Custer's frontier beginnings on the Southern Plains of Kansas, Texas, and Indian Territory (Oklahoma) against the …

Review Of Journal Of An Expedition To The Grand Prairies Of The Missouri 1840 By William Fairholme, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

William Fairholme (1819-1868), a twenty-year-old Lieutenant of the British army, and six fellow officers shared a sporting expedition to hunt buffalo on the Kansas Plains in the summer and fall of 1840. They made one of only five parties to travel the Santa Fe Trail that year, its lowest incidence between 1822 and 1843. Fairholme's journal, therefore, provides an important record of the Great Plains for the year 1840 from a British officer's perspective, particularly in its vivid descriptions of cities and towns between lower Canada and the Missouri settlements.

Fairholme tells us a lot about traveling in the 1840s. …

Review Of Chief Red Fox Is Dead: A History Of Native Americans Since 1945 By James J. Rawls, James H. Cox

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the second chapter of God Is Red: A Native View of Religion(1973), Vine Deloria Jr. notes the dominant culture's persistent consumption of either villianized or romanticized images of Native Americans present in disputed histories such as The Memoirs of Chief Red Fox (1971). In Chief Red Fox Is Dead: A History of Native Americans Since 1945, James J. Rawls writes for primarily non-Indian readers who accept images such as Chief Red Fox as authentic representations of Native America and, therefore, "who may have some difficulty accepting Indians as contemporary beings." Rawls intends to reveal the falsity of …

Review Of Lost Bird Of Wounded Knee: Spirit Of The Lakota By Renee Sansom Flood, Joe Starita

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Most writers would be hard pressed to encounter a better story line, a deeper, richer vein of raw material, than the one in Sansom Flood's book: a baby girl miraculously found alive beneath the frozen corpse of her Lakota mother four days after the massacre at Wounded Knee; adopted as a "souvenir" of the battle by a brigadier general, later the assistant US attorney general, who initially ignored her, then sexually abused her, and finally disowned her; raised by a doting mother, a tireless, world-famous suffragist, who steadfastly refused to abandon either her deeply troubled Indian daughter or her philandering, …

Review Of Re-Imagining The Modern American West: A Century Of Fiction, History, And Art. By Richard W. Etulain, Stacey Short

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Retrospectives on the twentieth century are becoming more and more common the closer we get to this century's close. The task of summing up an entire century's worth of ideas and art is daunting, to say the least, and while many of the works that attempt the task fall short, Richard Etulain's Re-Imagining the Modern American West manages to be comprehensive and inclusive, as well as fascinating. The book's quality and scope are not surprising: Etulain, director of the Center for the American West at the University of New Mexico, is well-known through his numerous studies of the American West …

Review Of Wild Bill Hickok: The Man And His Myth By Joseph G. Rosa, Thomas Dunlay

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

James Butler Hickok, better known as Wild Bill, became one of the great representative mythological figures of the American West in his own lifetime and remains so today, well over a hundred years after his death. Some decades ago Joseph G. Rosa wrote the definitive biography of the famous gunfighter and peace officer. His present book, not so much a biography as an examination of the myths that have grown up around the man, compares the different facets of the legendary Hickok with the facts so far as they are known.

Hickok first gained fame for his exploits as a …

Review Of The Prairie Winnows Out Its Own: The West River Country Of South Dakota In The Years Of Depression And Dust By Paula M. Nelson, Jean Choate

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a story of a dream that died. Between 1900 and 1915 over one-hundred thousand people moved into western South Dakota, the area west of the Missouri River, hoping to settle the land and develop it so that it would become a thriving area of small farms and prosperous communities.

These settlers-farmers, ranchers, storekeepers, bankers, doctors, and lawyers-were pounded and buffeted by adversity, not once but three times in three separate periods. They faced a severe drought in 1910 and 19l1. Many settlers left then but those who stayed believed that "next year" things would be better. Encouraged by …

Review Of Views From Fort Battleford: Constructed Visions Of An Anglo-Canadian West By Walter Hildebrandt, J.R. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Walter Hildebrandt, a former Parks Canada historian, explains that his interest in telling the story of the Battleford area in west-central Saskatchewan originated in the unease he felt beginning work with the federal agency in the 1970s at its tendency to diminish the role of aboriginal groups and valorize non-Native "pioneers," such as the mounted police, at the Fort Battleford historic site. Views from Fort Battleford provides a case study of the way in which public history, especially at historic sites, is contested terrain on which different groups vie to have their story told, or sometimes to have it dominate …