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Title And Contents- Fall 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains Quarterly

Volume 23/ Number 4/ Fall 2003

Contents

RELIGION, IDEALISM, AND AFRICAN AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE NORTHERN PLAINS: ERA BELL THOMPSON'S AMERICAN DAUGHTER Kevin L. Cole and Leah Weins

ANCIENT WAY IN A NEW LAND:BENEDICTINE EDUCATION IN THE GREAT PLAINS Marielle Frigge

FAIRY CASTLE OR STEAMER TRUNK?:

CREATING PLACE IN O. E. R0LVAAG'S GIANTS IN THE EARTH Diane Quantic

Book Reviews

Victor P. Lytwyn Muskekowuck Athinuwick: Original People of the Great Swampy Land By PETER GELLER

R. Douglas Hurt The Indian Frontier, 1763-1846 By VICTORIA SMITH

Ruth Spack America's Second Tongue: American Indian Education and the Ownership of …

Review Of Red Matters : Native American Studies By Arnold Krupat, James H. Cox

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A reviewer of Red Matters might reasonably expect a work with the post-colon title Native American Studies to foreground Native intellectual voices or the voices of Native and nonnative scholars who work in the field and publish in the field's journals and to privilege indigenous critical perspectives. The reviewer might have some apprehension, however, that Krupat would say he or she was provincial or a "back to the blanket" scholar. The title, nevertheless, is part of a broad deception, for though red matters in Red Matters, non-indigenous critical perspectives and Western and non-Native intellectual, cultural, and historical traditions matter …

Review Of Geometry In Architecture: Texas Buildings Yesterday And Today By Clovis Heimsath, Robert Duncan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Geometry in Architecture is really two books in one. The subtitle, Texas Buildings Yesterday and Today, provides the context for the theme of a book that is fundamentally a pictorial essay covering selected architectural elements of early Texas buildings. The original book, written in 1968 and titled Pioneer Texas Buildings: A Geometry Lesson, was an essay in two parts. The written section provided Heimsath's personal observations on the state of architecture as he perceived it in 1968. As a critique of architectural design, his views, though caustic, had some degree of validity. His major criticism was his concern …

Review Of Chasing The Glitter: Black Hills Milling, 1874- 1959 By Richmond L. Clow, Chris H. Lewis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the 1800s, the American Gold Rush shifted from California and Nevada to Colorado, and then to South Dakota. The search for gold, and the wealth and profits it brought, helped develop the American West. Richard Clow's Chasing the Glitter: Blacks Hills Milling, 1874-1959 tells the story of Black Hills gold mining in South Dakota. Drawn from successful mining ventures in California, Nevada, and Colorado, gold miners and investors hoped to strike it rich again in the Black Hills. But only by milling and extracting the gold trapped in tons of hard-rock ore could these companies and their investors make …

Guidelines For Finding Nests Of Passerine Birds In Tallgrass Prairie, Maiken Winter, Shawn E. Hawks, Jill A. Shaffer, Douglas H. Johnson

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

The productivity of birds is one of the most critical components of their natural history affected by habitat quality. Birds might occur at high densities in a given habitat patch but have low nesting success. Such "population sinks" would not be detected if observers relied solely on estimates of bird density. Therefore, it is essential to monitor nests and determine their outcomes. Although interest in grassland-nesting passerines has increased greatly during the last decade, we still know little about factors affecting their nesting success. To stimulate more research in this area, we summarize several methods for nest-searching and provide suggestions …

The United States In El Salvador: 1979-1992 Success Through The Eyes Of The Diplomats, David Jeffrey Mouritsen

Theses and Dissertations

The United States made El Salvador one of its top priorities in the 1980s as the communist threat from the Soviet Union made its way to El Salvador. The Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group, the Farabundo Martí­ National Liberation Front (FMLN), was supported by the Soviet Union via Cuba and became the target of the hard line politicians that ruled in El Salvador.

In order to combat the guerrilla movement, the United States structured its policy around national security to justify intervention in El Salvador. The three main points of the policy were to prevent a left-wing takeover by the communist-backed FMLN, …

Review Of The Professor's House By Willa Cather, Steven Trout

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although less familiar to most readers than O Pioneers!, My Antonia, or Death Comes the Archbishop, The Professor's House (1925) is arguably Willa Cather's most important novel of the 1920s. Thematically, the book is exceptionally far ranging. As Cather's closest approach to a novel of the Jazz Age, The Professor's House offers a portrait of conspicuous consumption occasionally reminiscent of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. As a portrait of post-World-War-I disillusionment, the novel bears comparison with Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. And then there is the narrative's timely concern with the health of American higher education, especially the Liberal …

Review Of Willa Cather Remembered Edited By Sharon Hoover, Mark Madigan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This welcome addition to Willa Cather scholarship is composed of forty-five reminiscences of the author by friends and professional associates documenting key stages of her personal life and literary career. While there is little here that has not been published before, Cather specialists will nonetheless want to add Willa Cather Remembered to their libraries. What makes the volume so appealing is that it collects important biographical material previously available only in miscellaneous sources. The legal restriction on publishing or even quoting excerpts from Cather's letters makes scholarship such as this all the more important. General readers with an interest in …

Black Enclaves Of Violence: Race And Homicide In Great Plains Cities, 1890-1920, Clare V. Mckanna Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

These killings, occurring three years apart in Coffeyville, Kansas, offer bookend images of interracial homicides in the Great Plains. In the first shooting, Charles Vann, a black man and the victim, had been drinking at Walnut and Eleventh Streets in the "tenderloin" district, a black neighborhood in Coffeyville. This region, near the railroad yards, provided entertainment for black customers and occasionally whites in saloons, brothels, and gambling parlors. William Rodecker, a white male horse trader, had just arrived from Missouri and started drinking heavily in this area. About 8 P.M. Rodecker accosted Vann at the corner of Twelfth and Walnut …

Review Of Germans And Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections Edited By Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemiinden, And Susanne Zantop, Peter Bolz, Ann Davis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

DO GERMANS REALLY LOVE INDIANS?

"Of all Europeans, the German has the greatest love for the Indian." This 1939 quote from a German novelist, reproduced in the book's introductory chapter by Christian Feest, could serve as the motto for the 1999 conference ("Germans and Indians/Indians and Germans: Cultural Encounters across Three Centuries") held at Dartmouth College, from which this book evolved. The idea that Germans have a special affinity with Indians is a long-standing conviction that is, nonetheless, difficult to prove. But the converse, that Indians might have a special affinity for Germans, was disproven by the conference itself: only …

Review Of Toward Defining The Prairies: Region, Culture, And History Edited By Robert Wardhaugh, Nina Van Gessel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Prair'ie n. a large treeless tract of level or undulating grassland esp. in N. America. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary)

"How does one define a place? How does one define a region?" asks editor Robert Wardhaugh. Postmodernism, post-structuralism, and post-colonialism have problematized the concept of definition in general and definition of place in particular. In this age of posts-, the dictionary becomes a site of misplaced signposts bent on leading one astray. No matter the limitations of "definition," the Prairies can no longer be defined solely in a narrow, physical sense. Rather, we must "move beyond the transparency of geography to …

Review Of Gold Rush: The Black Hills Story Compiled By John D. Mcdermott, John E. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Black Hills Gold Rush, instigated by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer's 1874 expedition to the Hills confirming that there was gold there "among the roots of the grass," was an event important to both the nation and the future state of South Dakota, not to mention to the Native Americans who had inhabited the area for centuries. Watson Parker's Gold in the Black Hills (1966) provided an excellent account of the gold rush, and John D. McDermott, the compiler and one of the authors of this volume, acknowledges his pioneering work on the subject. This collection of essays succeeds …

Willa Cather's Reluctant New Woman Pioneer, Reginald Dyck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1913 Willa Cather created a female protagonist who is single, independent, entrepreneurial, managerial, strong willed, wealthy and in love with the land of south-central Nebraska. This character offered a new vision for women at the turn of the twentieth century. Cather's fictional construction of gender, as well as her own experience, embody the contradictions present in the roles society offered women. One can read O Pioneers! as a cultural seismometer, one that picks up tremors along various social fault lines and then expresses them within a particular framework held by many people of her economic and social position. This …

Review Of Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, And Literary Appropriations Edited By Gretchen M. Bataille, Shari Huhndorf

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"The misrepresentation, commodification, and distortion of indigenous identities have existed from the moment of first contact" between Native peoples and Europeans, Editor Gretchen Bataille observes in the introduction to Native American Representations. The problems are familiar to literary scholars: power relations produced by colonization determine who has the authority to represent Native peoples in the broader culture, and these representations in turn tend to reinforce European dominance and to obfuscate the violence, and even the fact, of colonization. The questions of how Native peoples have been represented throughout the centuries of colonialism, by whom, and for what purposes comprise …

Review Of Jeannette Rankin: America's Conscience By Norma Smith, Sara Hayden

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Norma Smith's posthumously published biography of Jeannette Rankin offers a welcome addition to scholarship devoted to this early feminist, Congresswoman, and peace activist. Rankin's life story intersects with several major developments in Western politics and US public life. Rankin began her political career lobbying for woman's suffrage in Washington, eventually heading up the successful 1914 suffrage campaign in her home state of Montana. Rankin's suffrage work positioned her to run for national office; in 1916 she became one of Montana's two members of the House of Representatives and the first woman to serve in the United States Congress. Rankin ran …

Title And Contents- Summer 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains Quarterly

Summer 2003 Volume 23 Number 3

CONTENTS

BLACK ENCLAVES OF VIOLENCE: RACE AND HOMICIDE IN GREAT PLAINS CITIES, 1890-1920
Clare V. McKanna Jr.

WILLA CATHER'S RELUCTANT NEW WOMAN PIONEER
Reginald Dyck

THE CUPS OF BLOOD ARE EMPTIED: PIETISM AND CULTURAL HERITAGE IN TWO DANISH IMMIGRANT SCHOOLS ON THE GREAT PLAINS
John Mark Nielsen

REVIEW ESSAY: DO GERMANS REALLY LOVE INDIANS?
Peter Bolz and Ann Davis
A review of Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK NOTES

NOTES AND NEWS

Notes And News- Summer 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Research Fellowships

Great Plains Symposium

Call For Papers: Southern Humanities Council

Book Notes- Summer 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Book Notes

The Definitive10urnals of Lewis and Clark: Seven Volume Set

The Diaries of John Gregory Bourke: Volume One, November 20, l872-July 28, 1876

A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather

Westward Expansion

Chinese on the American Frontier

Bravo of the Brazos: John Larn of Fort Griffin, Texas

The Human Tradition in Texas

A Thousand Miles of Prairie: The Manitoba Historical Society and the History of Western Canada

Museums and Historic Sites of the American West

Edmonton: Stories from the River City

Guide to the Photographs in the Western History Collections of the University of Oklahoma

Building for the …

Review Of Sacagawea's Nickname: Essays On The American West By Larry Mcmurtry, Shirley A. Leckie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In these essays, originally published in the New York Review of Books, Larry McMurtry examines Western writers as mythmakers. Overall, however, his most interesting pieces are those in which he pays tribute to authors who have influenced his own work or have left behind literary treasures he finds moving and wise.

One of the essays is devoted to historian Angie Debo and her influence on McMurtry's development as a writer. As a youth he accidentally found The Road to Disappearance (1941), her history of the Creek Indians, and discovered that Debo, from neighboring Oklahoma, had made for herself a …

Review Of Feathering Custer By W. S. Penn, Joshua B. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

William S. Penn (Nez Perce) has compiled a series of essays that twirl through problems concerning Native American studies in academia. In "Paving with Good Intentions" and elsewhere, Penn takes aim at popular critical theory that cannot adequately conceptualize Native thought, identity, or writing. Throughout, he advocates careful scrutiny of elements of identity arising from forces outside of Indian culture.

In Kenneth Burke's metaphor comparing the field of cultural criticism to a parlor discussion, Penn sees much of what limits the study: the conversation quashes dissent and honors hegemony; the conversers privilege the written over the oral and are almost …

Review Of Once Upon A Town: The Miracle Of The North Platte Canteen By Bob Greene, Charles A. Peek

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bob Greene interweaves narratives of sojourns in North Platte, local history, and stories of the Canteen culled from interviews (often tearful, one calling him to go on record the day before surgery) with those who served there and those who were served, a distinction that in the end blurs.

The story of the Canteen itself captures folks from a hundred and twenty-five communities in Nebraska and eastern Colorado, "Some ... you can't even find on a map, sixty years later," meeting up to 8,000 troops a day, carried on up to thirty-two trains a day, each stopping "as long as …

Review Of The American Midwest: Essays On Regional History Edited By Andrew R. L. Cayton And Susan E. Gray, Paula Petrik

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While the South, West, and New England have always possessed distinctive regional identities, the Middle West has been either a substitute for national character or described variously as "dull," "ordinary," or just plain "nice." Yet, as the essayists point out, the Midwest is both homogenous and diverse. Beginning with an excellent introduction that summarizes the historiography of the idea of the Middle West as a region, the ten essays in the collection seek both to explore more deeply the idea and construction of the Middle West as a region and to provide case studies in the development of the concept. …

Review Of The Nature Of Home By Lisa Knopp, Jonathan Ritz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this collection of personal essays, Lisa Knopp creates a constellation of various nonfiction forms, including memoir, social and natural history, biography, and travel writing, around the central subject of "home"-"what home is, how one might find it, what it means to be at home or away from home or homeless .... " Brief lexicon entries, consisting of an OED definition of a particular word along with the writer's musings on the word's relation to her central subject, serve as interludes between each of the book's twenty-two essays. The combination of lexicon entries and essays creates a rich and resonant …

Review Of Local Wonders: Seasons In The Bohemian Alps By Ted Kooser, Judith Sorenberger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It's no wonder that the title of Ted Kooser's first book of nonfiction prose should share the word "local" with his first volume of poems, A Local Habitation and a Name (1974), for place is always central in Kooser's writing. The locale of Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps is Kooser's land north of the village of Garland, Nebraska, where he lives with his wife; two dogs, and an indeterminate number of chickens.

Kooser claims this land as his place in several ways. First, he does a lot of looking: at old buildings, wild roses, animals, people. And he …

The Cups Of Blood Are Emptied Pietism And Cultural Heritage In Two Danish Immigrant Schools On The Great Plains, John Mark Nielsen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Following the American Civil War, the vast sweep of the Great Plains exerted a powerful force on the imagination of Americans and Northern European immigrants, resulting in a period of rapid settlement. Immigrant communities in particular attempted to establish institutions through which their language, beliefs and cultural heritage might be preserved. The history of these immigrant institutions mirrors the challenges immigrant communities faced in confronting not only the vicissitudes of climate and evolving economic conditions but also the pressures of assimilation.

Numerous works of both fiction and nonfiction explore the broader challenges of life in the Great Plains; none captures …

Brown-Headed Cowbirds In Grasslands: Their Habitats, Hosts, And Response To Management, Jill A. Shaffer, Christopher M. Goldade, Meghan F. Dinkins, Douglas H. Johnson, Lawrence D. Igl, Betty R. Euliss

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

The brown-headed cowbird (Molothrus ater) is an obligate brood parasite whose numbers have increased in recent decades to the potential detriment of the species that they parasitize. Thus, most management efforts focus on discouraging brown-headed cowbird parasitism or controlling brown-headed cowbird populations. Keys to discouraging brown-headed cowbird parasitism or controlling populations of brown-headed cowbirds in the Great Plains are maintaining large expanses of grassland, eliminating foraging areas (e.g., feedlots) and perch sites, and reducing the extent of overgrazed pastures.

American Avocet Nesting On Constructed Islands In North Dakota, Ann L. Dahl, Douglas H. Johnson, Lawrence D. Igl, Kathy L. Baer, Terry L. Shaffer, Michael A. Johnson, Ronald E. Reynolds

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

We related American avocet (Recurvirostra americana) nesting on 30 earthen constructed islands in wetlands of the Prairie Pothole Region of North Dakota to characteristics of the islands and the surrounding landscape. We found 174 American avocet nests on 10 of the 30 islands; eight islands had four or more nests each. Most (85.9%) clutches contained four eggs. The majority of nests were found in upland graminoids (57.9%) or on unvegetated ground (31.6%). We found little evidence of nest predation or abandonment and concluded that most (84.5%) clutches hatched. Islands with beaches had a higher nest density (mean number …

Pheasants Of The World . . . Again, Brent E. Jamison

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

The newest edition of Johnsgard's overview of the pheasants of the world is arranged in two parts, as was the first edition. Part One is entitled Comparative Biology and is divided into eight chapters: relationships and classification, hybridization and zoogeographic patterns, growth and behavioral development, general and social behavior, ecology and population biology, comparative mating systems and social signaling devices, reproductive biology, and aviculture and conservation. Part Two, Taxonomic Keys and Species Accounts, forms the bulk of the text. Part Two begins with keys to subfamilies, tribes, and the 16 genera. An account for each species follows the generic key. …

Great Plains Research – Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2003

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

No abstract provided.

Geography Of Population Change And Redistribution Within The Post-Frontier Great Plains, J. Clark Archer, Richard Lonsdale

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

The popular vision of the Great Plains as a region of ongoing population decline is only partly appropriate. In a fundamental transformation of the population geography previously set in the late 19th century, there is an emerging divide between growing metropolitan centers concentrated along the region's periphery and a vast interior struggling to hold its traditional rural population. The size and geographical distribution of population within the Great Plains region is examined over time with the aid of cartographic and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) techniques. Intercensal net migration rates estimated using the vital statistics-based residual method are mapped by county …