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Review Of The Prairie Schoolhouse By John Martin Campbell, Sally Salisbury Stoddard

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John Martin Campbell, in this fine book consisting of sixty black and white, well conceived photographic plates and explicative text, has created an evocative picture of the prairie schoolhouses, the age from which they sprang, their environment, and the people for whom these formulaic structures fulfilled many functions. Older folks who grew up in the largely poor, rural areas of the vast American prairies will easily identify with Tony Hillerman's anecdote in the foreword, and they will surely experience a deep nostalgia and a profound sadness for the decay of the schoolhouse concept as well as the decay of the …

Title And Contents- Winter 1998

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

WINTER 1998 VOL. 18 NO.1

CONTENTS

THE LUBBOCK CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, THE NEW DEAL, AND THE ROPESVILLE RESETTLEMENT PROJECT William Clayson

THE GREAT DEPRESSION: TWO KANSAS DIARIES C. Robert Haywood

HUMANITARIANS ON THE FRONTIER: EXAMPLES FROM

NORTHEASTERN LOGAN COUNTY, OKLAHOMA TERRITORY Leslie Hewes

Book Reviews

Writings in Indian History, 1985-1990

Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost

The Oglala People, 1841-1879: A Political History ......... 48 Now the Wolf Has Come: The Creek Nation in the Civil War

Custer and the Cheyennes: George Armstrong Custer's Winter Campaign on the …

Giants On The Plains: Grain Elevators And The Making Of Enid, Oklahoma, Blake Gumprecht

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Driving west from Interstate 35 on US Highway 64, the grain elevators of Enid, Oklahoma, first become visible when the town is still twenty miles away. Disappearing and reappearing behind gently rolling hills, it is initially unclear what they might be. Even when they are little more than white specks on the horizon, they are plainly too large and numerous to represent some distant farmstead. They are too long to suggest the form of a far-off skyscraper. Little by little they grow larger in the windshield, and as the stony hills begin to give way to the wheat-covered plains of …

Index- Fall 1998

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Index pp. 361-368 (8 pages)

Notes And News- Fall 1998

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

1999 CATHER SYMPOSIUM

MISSOURI VALLEY HISTORY CONFERENCE

CLAY EXHIBITS

NEW FELLOWSHIP

RURAL WOMEN MEET

Table Of Contents- Fall 1998

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 18/ Number 4 / Fall 1998

CARNIVAL AND CEREMONY AT WRIGHT MORRIS'S LONE TREE HOTEL

GIANTS ON THE PLAINS: GRAIN ELEVATORS AND THE MAKING OF ENID, OKLAHOMA

SEXUALITY, GENDER, AND IDENTITY IN GREAT PLAINS HISTORY AND MYTH

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

INDEX

Review Of My Remembers: A Black Sharecropper's Recollections Of The Depression By Eddie Stimpson Jr., Alwyn Barr

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This volume recalls experiences during the 1930s and 1940s on farms in the Plano, Texas, area north of Dallas. Frances Wells, a local Plano historian, helped Eddie Stimpson organize into a book his written memories, intended originally for descendants. In the introduction James W. Byrd, a literary scholar, suggests the influence of African American folk culture on the writing style and on some activities described in the volume, such as yard sweeping. Popular culture phrases also appear occasionally, and the author's phonetic spelling has been retained throughout.

After an opening summary of his life, Stimpson presents short chapters on a …

Review Of For God And Mammon: Evangelicals And Entrepreneurs, Masters And Slaves In Territorial Kansas, 1854-1860 By Gunja Sengupta, Peter Knupfer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is the first detailed examination of conditions in Kansas Territory in almost forty years. Although library shelves are crowded with dramatic accounts of border warfare, until now few scholars have ventured into the manuscript and census materials to profile all the groups represented among migrants to the territory during this turbulent period. Gunja SenGupta has produced an intriguing and well researched portrait of life in the territory which will invite future scholars to delve even further into the subject.

SenGupta argues that the free state and slave state forces in Kansas acted out of mixed motives with mixed results. …

Review Of Sixty Miles From Contentment: Traveling The Nineteenth-Century American Interior By M. H. Dunlop, Jon Lauck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the last unexplored areas of the globe, Dunlop explains, was the American interior. Unable to make the exotic journey to unexplored areas like the polar icecaps, world travelers set out for America. What they saw-what their impressions were-is the subject of Dunlop's book. She uses 300 travel records, most written by Europeans, as representative of the travelers' impressions. The study is thematically organized around such issues as impressions of Native Americans and reactions to the food and food service of the interior; it is rich in synecdoche and benefits from Dunlop's masterful weaving together of various similar and …

Review Of Dutch Farmer In The Missouri Valley: The Life And Letters Of Ulbe Eringa, 1866-1950 By Brian W. Beltman, Royden Loewen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

How large should an immigrant community be to shed light effectively on the wider immigrant experience? This is a subject of frequent debate. Here is an excellent study of immigration to the American Midwest based on a single person, a Dutch farmer, Ulbe Eringa. And for the better part of the book, Eringa himself speaks through memoir and letter, translated from the Dutch by a daughter.

The narration and reproduced texts recreate Eringa's life story. It begins with his birth in 1866 to a dairy farming family in western Friesland and continues through his early formative years in Calvinist schools …

Review Of Like A Hurricane: The Indian Movement From Alcatraz To Wounded Knee By Paul Chaat Smith And Robert Allen Warrior, Akim D. Reinhardt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The intense pan-Indian activism of the 1960s- 70s, most notably the work of the American Indian Movement (AIM), represents a crucial stage in the political development of Native America in this century. Yet it has received only minimal investigation by scholars. One reason for this is the uncertainty of some historians over when material ceases to be "current events" and evolves into a specimen inhabiting their domain. Consequently, Paul Chaat Smith and Paul Allen Warrior have broken new ground with their book, perhaps in part because neither is a historian and neither obsesses over such artificial pigeonholing. Warrior teaches English …

Review Of A Force Upon The Plain: The American Militia Movement And The Politics Of Hate. By Kenneth S. Stern, Catherine Mcnicol-Stock

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Nine days before the 19 April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Kenneth Stern, an expert on hate groups for the American Jewish Committee (AJC), warned of just such an attack. In a Washington, D.C., press conference, Stern and other AJC professionals presented a six hundred page report entitled Militias: A Growing Danger warning of the "cauldron of disaffection, hate, conspiracy and violence brewing" around the country. They documented murders of federal workers and "anyone perceived as opposing the militia and therefore seen as doing 'the work of the government.'" Moreover, they suggested that …

Review Of U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Historical And Contemporary Perspectives Edited By Oscar J. Martinez, Robert R. Alvarez

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

U.S.-Mexico Borderlands is an addition to the Jaguar Books on Latin America Series coedited by W.H Beezley and C.M Maclachlan. In this volume, Oscar J. Martinez pulls together important essays written by outstanding US-Mexico Border scholars and journalists. Official and personal documents enhance the scholarly renditions that span border history and sociology beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and take the reader into current interpretations of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Significantly the book is written in a bilateral-border spirit, its contributors hailing from both Mexico and the United States.

Writing from a lifetime of work on the …

Review Of Now The Wolf Has Come: The Creek Nation In The Civil War By Christine Schultz White And Benton R. White, Rebecca Bales

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Opothleyahola, one of the most revered Muskogee leaders from the Upper Creek town of Tuckabatchee, led his people through many hardships during his lifetime. His people revered him for his wisdom, courage, and insight. Christine Schultz White and Benton R. White, authors of Now The Wolf Has Come: The Creek Nation in the Civil War, describe Opothleyahola as the Creeks' spokesman and their "shield against the outside world." Opothleyahola tried to maintain his people's traditional beliefs at a time when outside influence threatened the social structures and customs of all Native Americans. He led his people during the 1830s …

Review Of Town Life: Main Street And The Evolution Of Small Town Alberta, 1880-1947 By Donald G. Wetherell And Irene R.A. Kmet, David Breen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Town Life is the first in a series of provincial centennial commemorative volumes intended to explore neglected aspects of Alberta history. It greatly expands the focus of Wetherell and Kmet's previous Alberta centered studies on the symbiotic relationship between leisure and provincial culture and on the evolution of domestic architecture. The authors justify their current study on the solid ground that town life is an important topic much neglected by historians and others hitherto preoccupied with urban and farm experiences. As they point out, the town, after all, has been "a meeting point for urban and farm lives," playing an …

Review Of A Hundred Years Of Heroes: A History Of The Southwestern Exposition And Livestock Show By Clay Reynolds With Marie-Madeleine Schein, Mark Busby

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book by noted Texas novelist Clay Reynolds (with assistance by researcher Marie-Madeleine Schein) fulfills its subtitle's function and provides much more. Reynolds traces the famous show in Fort Worth from its beginning in 1896 through a series of changes including the addition of meat packing giants Armour and Swift in 1903, the new Livestock Exchange Building in 1908, the first indoor rodeo in 1918, the responses to the vicissitudes of the Depression, the flood and gasoline rationing of the 1940s, the move from the north to the west side of Fort Worth, the change from corporate to city sponsorship, …

Review Of Settling The Canadian-American West, 1890- 1915: Pioneer Adaptation And Community Building By John W. Bennett And Seena B. Kohl, Catherine Cavanaugh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Settling the Canadian-American West, anthropologists John W. Bennett and Seena B. Kohl focus on the common cultural legacy of what they describe as the "Canadian-American West Heartland"-an area roughly conforming to Paul Sharp's "Whoop-up Country" in southeastern Alberta, southwestern Saskatchewan, and the northern "Montana Hi-Line." The authors' question concerning the enduring influences of the frontier is an important one, and there are historiographical reasons for uniting the region. Unfortunately, this study ultimately disappoints.

The book's title is misleading since the study itself is less a binational approach to settlement than an exploration of the shared heritage of a …

Review Of Hired Hands: Labour And The Development Of Prairie Agriculture, 1880-1930 By Cecilia Danysk, Joe Cherwinski

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The argument is a tidy one indeed. By concentrating on the reactions of farm workers to changing labor-capital relations Danysk contends that the tens of thousands of people who came to toil in the farm fields of prairie Canada over half a century can be conveniently divided into two groups. The first, those who worked in agriculture during the homestead stage before World War I, worked primarily to learn agricultural practices and to acquire sufficient capital to apply to their own quarter section once they acquired it. With labor in short supply they were able to control their relationship with …

Review Of A Guide To Kansas Architecture By David H. Sachs And George Ehrlich, Robert I. Duncan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A Guide to Kansas Architecture by David H. Sachs and George Ehrlich selects representative examples of the built environment and landscape forms in each of Kansas's one hundred and five counties. This first-ever comprehensive guide book offers architectural examples in both the urban and rural areas of the state. Using a broad-based definition of architecture, the authors have included not only well-known buildings, but also vernacular elements such as bridges, dams, power stations, cemeteries, and fence posts. Such a selection provides a reasonable overview of what one might expect to see while traveling in Kansas. Both historical and architectural significance …

Review Of Living Landscapes Of Kansas Text By O.J. Reichman, Robert Duncan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Co-authors O.J. Reichman (text) and Steve Mulligan (photography) have produced a book illustrating the natural beauty of Kansas. This prairie state known to many through its rich history of outlaws and cattle towns has an equally rich but sometimes overlooked natural landscape. To the casual observer the landscape may appear "relatively flat and uniform," but Reichman has an appreciation for this "midrange" scale, more accessible perhaps than the monumentality of mountains or coasts. Reichman and Mulligan have surveyed the state selecting natural sights formed through a combination of earth, fire, wind, and water. Through Reichman's visual perception and impressive linguistic …

Review Of Native Americans In The News: Images Of Indians In The Twentieth Century Press By Mary Ann Weston, Gary Garrison

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a lay historian of the American Indian and a television producer specializing in programs dealing with Native American subject matter, I've lectured frequently at high schools and colleges on stereotypical images of Native Americans in film, television, and popular literature and on how these media have shaped and reinforced such images throughout our turbulent history of contact. Focusing only on entertainment in the past, I found Native Americans in the News: Images of Indians in the Twentieth Century Press singularly informative in how the news media have also molded and solidified the general public's perceptions of Native Americans.

Mary …

Review Of Native American Perspectives On Literature And History Edited By Alan R. Velie, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the introduction to this volume, Alan Velie and Gerald Vizenor claim that these essays, by both native and non-native authors, represent "American Indian perspectives." By making this claim they indicate that particular American Indian perspectives exist while acknowledging that they are not limited to tribal members. The volume brings together articles previously published in the journal Genre and Volume 19 of the University of Oklahoma's American Indian Literature and Critical Studies. This fine collection of essays presents scholarship that is sympathetic to Native experiences and foregrounds problems of American identity.

The essays cover a range of contemporary Native …

Review Of The Ranch: A Modern History Of The North American Cattle Industry By Sherm Ewing, James Hoy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although the title of this book might be somewhat misleading-it has little to do with daily ranch life and is certainly not a systematic historical study-nevertheless its idiosyncrasies convey a wealth of fascinating information in an extremely readable format. The author, a former Canadian rancher who has since retired to the sunny south of Montana, spent three years traveling, discussing ranching with old friends and new acquaintances, taping interviews, and collecting his research into two thousand pages of single spaced typing.

From this mass of information he has crafted an overview of twentieth-century ranching, most of it in the words …

Review Of Prayer To The Great Mystery: The Uncollected Writings And Photography Of Edward S. Curtis Text Edited By Gerald Hausman, Margaret A. Mackichan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Most Americans today are familiar with at least a few of the bold yet intimate portraits of Native Americans made by Edward S. Curtis near the turn of the century. Aside from the many publications that have gleaned images from his massive twenty-volume The North American Indian, his work has been reproduced as posters, used in documentaries, and copied by amateur artists into every medium. The authors of Prayer to the Great Mystery have set out to bring photographs other than those they deem his "hit parade" to light. What is unusual about this collection is that ninety-three of …

Review Of The Frederic Remington Studio By Peter H. Hassrick, Alexander Nemerov

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This short book concerns the Remington Studio Collection-a permanent installation at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, featuring the artifacts Remington displayed in his New Rochelle studio, as well as some of the paintings he made late in his career. The author noted Remington scholar Peter Hassrick, discusses the studio and argues that the Studio Collection paintings, many of them small landscapes, transcend Remington's time and place to achieve a universal significance. In making this argument, however, Hassrick neglects to consider how the very category of the universal, insofar as it refers to American art, is itself a …

Review Of The Myth Of The West: America As The Last Empire By Jan Willem Schulte Nordholdt And Herbert H. Rowen, Sheila Ruzycki O'Brien

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As an Americanist, I needed to adjust my perspective as I was reading Nordholdt's The Myth of the West. Much of this book by a Dutch scholar is about European views of Empire, particularly about the various permutations of the heliotropic view of empire-the belief that empires progress from east to west. The subtitle America as the Last Empire is somewhat misleading, since much of the book presents how the European literati throughout the centuries viewed various empires within and near their own continent, though naturally the heliotropic view does lead west over the Atlantic. (It also leads west over …

Review Of Reuben Snake, Your Humble Serpent: Indian Visionary And Activist By Jay Fikes, As Told To By Reuben Snake, Paul A. Olson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great Plains region has given us minority civil and cultural rights leaders out of all proportion to the minority population of the region: Crazy Horse, Quanah Parker, Gordon Parks, Dull Knife, Rudolpho Gonzales, Zitkala Sa, Suzette La Flesche, Earl Little (Malcolm X's father), Tomas Rivera, Ernie Chambers, and on and on. Biographical scholarship unfortunately has not given us many good accounts of these leaders. The gap is dramatized and at least partially filled by Fikes' book. Jay Fikes, working with Reuben Snake just before his death, has written a work that ultimately celebrates both the latter's humility and his …

Review Of New Westers: The West In Contemporary American Culture By Michael L. Johnson, Charles E. Rankin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

You will either love this book or, well, dislike it. As one of the jacket blurbs puts it, it's all here-"movies and fashion, historians and architects, chili eating and two-stepping." The blurbist might have added: "and kitsch, travelogue, literature, poetry, cartoons, and a lot of unbridled gee whiz." Broad in scope, New Westers won't be remembered for analytical depth (though it may itself become an artifact of its time). What is not here, and what this reviewer sorely missed, is more of the author. In just over four hundred pages, Michael Johnson reveals precious little about what he thinks is …

Review Of Home On The Range: A Century On The High Plains By James R. Dickenson, Dennis C. Williams

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

After reading the introduction to this book, I expected a quaint family history joined with some attempt at relating the specifics of the author's family and personal experience to the larger context of Kansas and US history. I found that and much more. The first chapters set up a good model for family history-much better than most local histories or genealogies prepared by enthusiastic amateurs. But then James Dickenson is an accomplished journalist with over thirty years of journalistic experience including staffing the Washington Post; what should I have expected? By the half-way point, I realized that this is …

Review Of Indian Territory And The United States, 1866- 1906: Courts, Government, And The Movement For Oklahoma Statehood By Jeffrey Burton, Raymond Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Attempts by state governments and the federal government to undermine Indian tribal sovereignty remain one of the major challenges Indian tribes face today. One of the best known attacks against Indian political and economic authority was the abolition of the tribal institutions of the Five Tribes in Indian Territory, which resulted in Oklahoma statehood.

Indian Territory and the United States, 1866- 1906, the first volume in the University of Oklahoma Press's Legal History of North America Series, is a detailed and fresh examination of the destruction of the Five Tribes' governments in Indian Territory resulting from federal judicial reforms …