Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of Better Red: The Writing And Resistance Of Tillie Olsen And Meridel Le Sueur By Constance Coiner & Three Radical Women Writers: Class And Gender In Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, And Josephine Herbst By Nora Ruth Roberts, Linda Ray Pratt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

HARVEST SONGS AND ELEGIAC NOTES

"Writing about living subjects, especially those with whom one feels political and personal solidarity, is a touchy, even painful business," begins Constance Coiner in the introduction to her book on Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. Contemporary directions in scholarship have recognized that interaction and opened up the personal voice in the scholarly study. Putting aside the dream of disinterestedness, the scholar herself may become part of the subject. The traditions of an objective scholarship are especially hard to fulfill, even to honor, when the research is done in cooperation with a living author who …

Review Of The Fatal Confrontation: Historical Studies Of American Indians, Environment, And Historians By Wilbur Jacobs, Patrick Goines

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Throughout his long, distinguished career Wilbur Jacobs has been a fervent and consistent advocate for a more inclusive approach to the study of American history. Using the implements of the ethnographer, demographer, and environmentalist, he has not simply painted our historical landscape with a broader brush; more importantly, he has added clarity and texture to the canvas.

The ten essays reprinted here show the breadth and depth of Jacobs's scholarship and remind us of his profound influence on the succeeding generation of historians. Spanning almost forty years, they not only trace Jacobs's intellectual development, but also show our historiographical evolution. …

Review Of Ritual Ground: Bent's Old Fort, World Formation, And The Annexation Of The Southwest By Douglas C. Comer, Leo E. Oliva

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Douglas Comer, archaeologist with the National Park Service, offers unique interpretations about the relationships among Anglo, Hispanic, and Indian Americans at Bent's Fort on the north bank of the Arkansas River during the 1830s and 1840s in southeastern Colorado. Long on theory and short on fact, much of this volume is developed from speculation rather than solid evidence. It is more about the importance of ritual than the history of Bent's Fort.

Comer argues that various rituals, including those traditional to the cultures involved and those developed to enhance their trade relations, help explain Bent & St. Vrain Company's economic …

Review Of The Mormon Trail: Yesterday And Today By William E. Hill, James B. Allen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From 1839 to the beginning of 1846, the Mormons made their headquarters in Nauvoo, Illinois. Continuing persecution, however, forced them to leave, seeking a refuge in the West. By the end of 1846 migrating Mormons found themselves scattered across Iowa and other parts of the country, with headquarters at Winter Quarters, now Florence, Nebraska. On 5 April 1847, under the leadership of Brigham Young, the vanguard company set out from Winter Quarters, arriving in the Salt Lake Valley on 22 July.

The Mormon Trail: Yesterday and Today appeared, significantly, in 1996, just a year before the sesquicentennial anniversary of that …

Review Of American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters And Continental Conquest By Gregory H. Nobles, Kirk Bane

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Gregory H. Nobles has produced a thoughtful, clearly written, thoroughly researched survey offering "an interpretive synthesis of recent [frontier] scholarship." Using the studies of such scholars as J ames Axtell, Alfred W. Crosby, John Mack Faragher, Julie Roy Jeffrey, Robert M. Utley, and Patricia Limerick, Nobles proposes "to summarize and synthesize this remarkable new research, to connect the frontier histories of the East and West ... and, above all, to put it all into a coherent, accessible narrative." The author admirably accomplishes his aim.

His introduction provides an excellent discussion of Frederick Jackson Turner and the frontier thesis. While the …

Review Of Visions And Voices: Native American Painting From The Philbrook Museum Of Art. Edited By Lydia L. Wyckoff, Janet Catherine Berlo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Philbrook Museum in Tulsa has long been recognized as one of the major forces in the shaping of twentieth-century Native American painting, as well as one of the major repositories of such paintings, many of them winning entries in the well-known Philbrook Annual juried exhibit, which began in 1946. With the publication of the lavishly illustrated Visions and Voices, reproductions of 484 pieces from the collection, most of them painted by artists of Plains or Southwestern tribes, are now readily available, many in color. In works by such well-known figures as James Auchiah, Tonita Pena, Joe Herrera, and …

Review Of Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner And Other Essays: A Tribal Voice, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is a Dakota who, born and raised to adulthood on the Crow Creek Indian Reservation near Fort Thompson, South Dakota, became a successful academic and a writer. On her departure from Eastern Washington University where she taught for nineteen years, she was described by her colleagues as "one of Indian Studies' secondary founders and also, in many ways, its conscience."

She dedicates her book to "the indigenous writer in the modern world" and declares it to be "designed to raise and discuss issues that are some of the most central and crucial questions in the field of American …

Review Of Till Freedom Cried Out: Memories Of Texas Slave Life Edited By T. Lindsay Baker And Julie P. Baker, Barry A. Crouch

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As the Civil War's last shot was fired, Texas held one-tenth of the slave population of all the Confederate States: four hundred thousand- an increase of almost a quarter of a million souls from the beginning of hostilities. That this forced migration did not lead to continuous and prolonged upheaval is rather remarkable. Also remarkable is the number of narratives collected from former slaves residing in Texas in the 1930s regardless of where they had been born. These recollections comprise six of the forty-one volumes in the collection of slave narratives edited by George P. Rawick. Now, in a beautiful …

Review Of Field Of Vision By Lisa Knopp, Donald B. Cunningham

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Field of Vision, Lisa Knopp, like many nature essayists, explores and explicates both interior and exterior landscapes; unlike many less skillful writers, she negotiates the difficult terrain between the two, with its uncertain borders, tangled undergrowth, and hidden precipices, with delicate balance and a sure step. The sixteen essays in the collection, written between 1989 and 1995, range over a wide variety of subjects-a possum's tail, a heron's eye, the plover's name, a cricket's chirp, the crumpled wings of the mayfly nymph-but share a common theme: the naturalist's search for the boundary-or for some assurance that there is …

Review Of High Plains Farm Photographs And Text By Paula Chamlee, Bill Ganzel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great Plains is a unique, difficult landscape, and those who live here have to learn to adapt to it. Paula Chamlee grew up on a farm on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle near Adrian. She left "less than a month after high school graduation" and became a fine art photographer. Three decades later, she returned to photograph the farm "while my parents are still active." What she has produced is a beautiful book that quietly tells the story of lives lived on the edge of possibility. Yet, for me, the story is incomplete.

If you have traveled …

Review Of Water, Land, And Law In The West: The Limits Of Public Policy, 1850-1920 By Donald J. Pisani, Robert Irvine

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Donald Pisani's collection of ten articles published between 1982 and 1994 and four section introductions discuss the evolution of public policy and resource development in the West. Unlike some collections, this is an internally consistent examination of the complicated and interrelated history of water, land, and law.

The first section, "Water Law," explores the importance of prior appropriation in raising capital and transforming the landscape. Pisani cautions against environmental determinism, arguing that water laws resulted from case specific economic concerns rather than simple aridity. He also reasserts, his thesis that prior appropriation and water developments in the West were consistent …

Review Of The Texas Military Experience: From The Texas Revolution Through World War Ii Edited By Joseph Dawson Iii, Charles Kenner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Texas Military Experience is primarily a compilation of papers read at a symposium sponsored by the Military Studies Institute at Texas A & M. The quality and scope of the essays, needless to say, vary greatly. Several, such as Paul Hutton's "The Alamo as Icon," Thomas W. Cutrer's piece on Ben McCullough, and especially Joseph c. Porter's meticulously researched study of Captain John G. Bourke's tour of duty on the Rio Grande, are especially well written and thought provoking. Hutton's sardonic but gentle dissection of the defenders of Alamo mythology alone would make the book worthwhile for most Texas …

Review Of Kit Carson: Indian Fighter Or Indian Killer? Edited By R. C. Gordon-Mccutchan, Robert S. Mcpherson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The five essays in this slim volume set out to answer the question asked in the title what was Kit Carson's attitude toward the Navajos he helped defeat during the 1860s. All five authors agree that Carson has been badly abused by other historians writing-often poorly-in the spirit of their own times without sympathetically understanding those of their topic. There is no hung jury on this verdict-Carson deserved better.

The defense's strategy is as follows. Darlis A. Miller lays the foundation by examining the role of dime store novels in creating a thrilling but fabricated reputation for a man who …

Review Of The Making Of Sacagawea: A Euro-American Legend By Donna}. Kessler, Gary E. Moulton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The basis for this book is a good idea: to discover the factors that have made Sacagawea a legend and then examine the ways in which the legend has evolved. Indeed, the author has done an excellent job in tracing Sacagawea's changing image, but a series of missteps detract from her laudable intent. The book suffers from repetitiveness, questionable literary devices, and lengthy accounts of the obvious. Squeezing out the superfluous would have yielded a sturdier essay of appropriate proportions.

Sacagawea may be the best known member of the Corps of Discovery after Lewis and Clark. Although she served in …

Review Of Indian Depredation Claims, 1796-1920 By Larry C. Skogen, Roger L. Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Hoping to avoid violent incidents and possible warfare along its frontiers, the fledgling United States government established in 1796 a system for dealing with depredation claims. It provided the machinery through which both Indians and pioneers could apply for indemnity for losses incurred as a result of their dealings with each other. Despite such benign goals, the machinery seldom operated as envisioned. The claims process, too slow to prevent recurring violence, was so fraud-ridden that even honest claimants had to run a gauntlet of suspicious officials to have their cases considered. As a result, Larry Skogen states, throughout its entire …

Review Of Women And Warriors Of The Plains; The Pioneer Photographs Of Julia E. Tuell By Dan Aadland, Richard Pearce-Moses

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Julia Ethel Toops Tuell was the wife of a schoolmaster on reservation schools where she taught home economics, served as a field nurse, and raised four children. She began taking photographs in 1906 on the Northern Cheyenne reservation at Lame Deer, Montana, and continued when she lived with the Sioux Indians on the Rosebud Reservation east of the Black Hills in South Dakota. Although a sideline, she made numerous photographs of Native American life for more than two decades.

Tuell used an eight-by-ten-inch glass-plate camera, an unusual choice given its bulk, heavy weight, and cumbersomeness. Smaller cameras had been around …

Review Of Shingwauk's Vision: A History Of Native Residential Schools By J. R. Miller, Jennifer Pettit

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Historian J. R. Miller takes us on a long awaited journey in Shingwauk's Vision. The study, based on over a decade of research, is the first scholarly comprehensive history of residential schools in Canada from their beginnings to their demise in the 1960s. Miller deserves praise for examining the motivations and experiences of all three of the parties involved-the federal government, the various churches, and the students themselves. Using both government and missionary archives and extensive interviews with former students, Miller reveals not only the policies that shaped the schools, but the internal workings of the institutions as well. …

Review Of Portraits Of Community: African American Photography In Texas By Alan Govenar, Melissa Rachleff

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries photography grew in popularity and accessibility. Better technology in film and processing, which made the medium more economical and easier for the amateur to execute, proved photography to be both a creative and enterprising activity appealing to an ambitious middle class. African Americans were among those who took up the camera, traversing rural communities in the developing South in search of steady work. The more successful photographers set up studios in towns and cities, basing their practice on portraiture and commemorative photography. Alan Govenar's Portraits of Community: African American Photography in Texas …

Review Of Plain Pictures: Images Of The American Prairie By Joni L. Kinsey, Joan Carpenter-Troccoli

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Plain Pictures, Joni Kinsey argues that the depiction of the Plains and prairies has been a matter of accommodation from the time that Euro-American artists first ventured into the West. The prairie's lack of trees, natural and man-made landmarks, and high places from which to view the landscape made it an almost impossible subject for early nineteenthcentury painters. They introduced compositional elements and stylistic conventions into their prairie pictures to make them conform to generally accepted notions of beauty, even as they struggled to find pictorial forms appropriate to the Plains' undifferentiated spaces and low horizons. This process …

Review Of One Nation Under God: The Triumph Of The Native American Church Compiled And Edited By Huston Smith And Reuben Snake, Christopher Vecsey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1990 the United States Supreme Court made "what some consider the most infamous ruling in its history" in the case of Employment Division of Oregon v. Smith. Alfred Leo Smith, a Klamath member of the Native American Church, had been fired from his job for ingesting peyote-the sacramental substance at the core of his religious faith, but a controlled substance in the eyes of drug prevention officials. The Supreme Court upheld the State's right to interfere with peyotists' freedom of religion even without proving a "compelling state interest" to do so. Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion called individual religious …

Review Of Desegregating Texas Schools: Eisenhower, Shivers, And The Crisis At Mansfield High By Robyn Duff-Ladino, William H. Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The author's thesis is that the school desegregation "crisis at Mansfield marked a significant milestone on the pathway to equality in the United States." She builds her argument through a painstaking reconstruction of the national, state, and local circumstances surrounding the failed attempt to integrate the Mansfield, Texas, high school in August 1956.

Nationally, the Supreme Court had issued its Brown desegregation ruling two years earlier, and President Dwight Eisenhower maintained his moderate attitude toward involving the federal executive in desegregation. In Texas, Governor Allan Shivers was determined to cripple desegregation. Shivers's powerful support of Eisenhower in 1952, which helped …

Review Of Bring Back The Buffalo!: A Sustainable Future For America's Great Plains By Ernest Callenbach, Ken Zontek

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"This book attempts to make a constructive contribution," writes Ernest Callenbach in Bring Back the Buffalo! The author hopes his work will assist in an unprecedented transformation of the Great Plains from "net-energy negative agriculture" to "net-energy-positive agriculture" that will produce a sustainable future for the area currently suffering from population loss, reliance on government subsidies, corporate consolidation of family farms, and environmental degradation. Such change remains contingent upon bison and wind power. Callenbach presents his argument in three parts. First, he recounts the remarkable productivity achieved on the bison-rich Plains prior to Euro-American intervention and its subsequent alteration. The …

Women Writing About Farm Women, Becky Faber

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I spent the first sixteen years of my life on Iowa farms. We lived in rural Adair County, Iowa, in an area that was remote, quietly tucked about halfway between Des Moines and Omaha. All I knew was rural life. My parents were farmers, my grandparents were farmers, and most of my uncles and aunts were farmers. The farm determined many elements of my life. We raised much of our own food, butchered our own beef and pork, raised chickens for eggs and meat, milked cows and sold the cream, wore clothes that defined our tasks such as overalls and …

A Cultural Duet Zitkala Ša And The Sun Dance Opera, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1913 Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala Ša, 1876-1938) collaborated with local Duchesne, Utah, music teacher William F. Hanson to produce and stage a spectacle that combined the musical style of operetta, a melodramatic love triangle, and traditional Plains Indian ritual. In regional performances, The Sun Dance Opera provided a stage for Bonnin and other Native American singers and dancers to participate in rituals whose practice was forbidden by the United States government. Twenty-five years later, just months after Bonnin's death in 1938, the opera was selected and presented by the New York Opera Guild as opera of the year.

The …

The Corporate Farming Debate In The Post -World War Ii Midwest, Jon Lauck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ben Hogan balanced a mix of milk cows, corn, soybeans, sheep, and turkeys, avoided borrowing too much, invented his own machinery, and maintained an orderly farm, keeping his fences "horse high, bull strong and hog tight." Above all, he worked hard: "He worked and never slowed. He bulled his way through the house before sunrise each morning, growling to his sons to get out of bed and do the chores." He motivated the sons, who worked as hard as he did, by telling them "You're the laziest damned rednecks I ever laid eyes on. You're the weakest goddamned mollycoddles I …

Review Of Common Flora Of The Playa Lakes By David A. Haukos And Loren M. Smith, Kelly W. Allred

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

Common Flora of the Playa Lakes is a photo-guide to the common plants of the playa wetlands of the Southern Great Plains (southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, western Oklahoma, eastern New Mexico, and northwest Texas). The authors state their objectives are to provide "a quick, accurate, photographic guide to common plant species found in playa wetlands," as well as "a comprehensive list of plant species found in playas," and a "baseline dataset that researchers can use to evaluate future changes in playa floral communities." They have succeeded on all three counts.

Functions And Values Of Prairie Wetlands: Economic Realities, Jay A. Leitch, Patrick Fridgen

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

Land and water resources of the Prairie Pothole Region support important economic and ecologic activities. Scarce resources, such as wetlands, should be allocated among these activities such that society's well being is enhanced. Such allocation requires knowledge of the relative values of resources, something that has been largely missing in the wetland literature. This paper describes the practical realities of wetland economics, using the Prairie Pothole Region as an example. Ongoing human and economic activities in the PPR are presented as an introduction to the economy of the area. The purpose for economic valuation of wetlands-achieving the "greatest good"-is briefly …

Hydrologic Functions Of Prairie Wetlands, James W. Labaugh, Thomas C. Winter, Donald O. Rosenberry

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

Wetlands in the prairie known as potholes or sloughs represent an ever-changing mosaic of surface waters interacting with the atmosphere, groundwater, and each other in a variety of ways. Studies of groups of adjacent wetlands in different parts of the glaciated North American prairie have enabled some connections to be made between hydrologic processes, biological communities, and use of these wetlands by wetland-dependent wildlife. Understanding controls on variability in water levels, water volume, and salinity in these wetlands sets the stage for understanding controls on biological communities utilizing these wetlands. The role that natural variability in water and salinity plays …

Review Of Bless The Pure & Humble: Texas Lawyers And Oil Regulation, 1919-1936 By Nicholas George Malavis, Patrick L. Cox

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

At the turn of the century, Texas maintained its nineteenth-century character as a rural, Southern, agriculture-based economy and society. The massive oil booms in the first half of this century propelled the state into a more modern, industrial, and urban role, breaking the old agricultural society's once dominant hold. In Bless the Pure &Humble, Nicholas George Malavis, focusing on the public and private sector functions of the petroleum business, has contributed significantly to the study of an important era in the evolution of modern Texas.

Freshwater Functions And Values Of Prairie Wetlands, Henry R. Murkin

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

To date, wetland conservation programs and policies have focused on wetlands primarily as wildlife habitat. In spite of the extensive efforts of wildlife interest groups, wetlands continue to be lost. Successful wetland conservation in North America will require that society, as a whole, perceives broader and more significant values of freshwater wetlands than simply their role as wildlife habitat. Identifying and quantifying the functions of wetlands to the maintenance and renewal of critical freshwater resources are important steps toward expanding the base of support for wetland conservation/restoration programs throughout the continent. This paper introduces the functions and values of prairie …