Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Book Review: Folk Furniture Of Canada's Doukhobors, Hutterites, Mennonites And Ukrainians, Ervin Beck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Folk Furniture makes a fine coffee-table book, with its oversize format and more than one hundred gorgeous color photographs by James A. Chambers. Leafing through it is a visual feast, with otherwise humble pieces of furniture dignified by dramatic lighting that discloses the texture, line, and form of historic everyday household items. But the book is an important contribution to material cultural studies, since it not only places furniture in its cultural context but also "reads" furniture like a "text" to discover how it expresses the history, psychology, and ideology of the people who made and used it.

Book Review: Scenes Of Visionary Enchantment: Refiections On Lewis And Clark, Carolyn Gilman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Historians all across the West have looked agog on the paroxysm of popular devotion that has erupted into the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, whispering to each other in quiet moments, "What is it about Lewis and Clark?"

This is the book that will answer their question.

Review Of Hope And Dread In Montana Literature By Ken Egan Jr., Sue Hart

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While the title of this perceptive study of hope and dread in Montana literature might seem to limit his audience, Ken Egan takes care to point out that the boom-and-bust cycle so well known to his fellow Montanans and so well documented by many of the state's authors is a familiar pattern throughout the Great Plains states whose economies and lifestyles have also depended on extractive industries and agricultural pursuits.

Egan makes this clear in his discussion of Joseph Kinsey Howard's Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome (1943). Howard's book of essays, Egan says, recapitulates the trends that Hope and Dread …

Book Review: Western Lives: A Biographical History Of The American West, Richmond L. Clow

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is an eclectic collection of short biographical essays from the American West grouped from contact to1850, from 1850 to 1900, and from 1900 through the end of the twentieth century. The editor defines the American West as beginning at the Mississippi River and ending on the Pacific coast. His guidelines for each contributor were simple: "to deal with the lives of notable westerners" and "to demonstrate how each of these lives broke from the main currents of the region's history."

Book Review: Reflections On Native-Newcomer Relations: Selected Essays, Robin Jarvis Brownlie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Reflections on Native-Newcomer Relations is a compilation of essays authored by one of the most prominent Canadian historians in the field of Native-newcomer relations. It contains twelve essays written between 1988 and 2004, four of them under the heading "Policy," and the others paired under the headings "Historiography," "Methodology," "The Crown," and "Academe." There is also an introduction that places each essay in its historical context and describes how it came about. Though the criteria of selection and the collection's overall goal are not explained, the essays effectively reflect the author's range of interests and include some of his more …

Book Review: Louis Owens: Literary Reflections On His Life And Work, Kimberly Roppolo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Beginning with poet Neil Harrison's outstanding "5 Canadas," this volume is a tribute to the late Choctaw/Cherokee/Irish novelist and theorist. Kilpatrick's introduction stresses Owens's academic accomplishments - which, though cut short by his suicide in July 2002, are impressive - and situates Owens's creative and critical work, positioning him with those mixed-blood critics, who, like Gerald Vizenor, work in a nexus of postcolonialism, postmodernism, and hybrid identity on the cultural "frontier." The volume also includes the last interview with Owens, "Outside Shadow: A Conversation with Louis Owens," the first in a series he had agreed to do with author A. …

Book Review: Windmill Tales: Stories From The American Wind Power Center, Tom White

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the 1850s a Connecticut mechanic named Daniel Halladay invented a windmill that could pump water from the ground without constant human attention. As the breeze changed direction, the Halladay Standard Windmill turned to face the wind and automatically regulated its speed of operation. His invention and the refined mills that followed were literally the wheels to Euro-American settlement on the Great Plains. By pumping groundwater, they allowed people to live in areas without running streams and springs.

Some Thoughts On The 25th Anniversary Of The Great Plains Quarterly, Charles A. Braithwaite

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the Winter of 1981, Frederick C. Luebke sent out a letter to accompany the first issue of the Great Plains Quarterly. In the letter, he stated that the purpose of the new journal was to publish new discoveries and understandings about the Great Plains, and to do so in a language that would appeal to the general reader. For these reasons, Luebke felt that "persons with a lively interest in the Great Plains region will find much to attract them to the Quarterly." Twenty-four volumes later, and after publishing three-hundred and sixty-one original essays, it is safe …

Book Review: Texas Literary Outlaws: Six Writers In The Sixties And Beyond, Tom Pilkington

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Throughout much of the twentieth century, Texas literature, like that of other Great Plains states, was largely rural in setting and perspective. The period from the 1920s through the 1950s has been dubbed, by one Texas critic, the "Age of Dobie," in reference to J. Frank Dobie, once the most famous litterateur in the state. Dobie wrote about ranching, lost mines and buried treasure, and the Southwestern folk tradition, and was much admired and much imitated by other Texas writers. That began to change in the early 1960s.

Book Review: Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King Of The Tulsa Bootleggers, Suzanne Jones Crawford

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Oklahoma Tough celebrates the life and career of Wayne Padgett, a thief, fence, arsonist, wife-beater, and alleged murderer. The author, his son Ron Padgett, designed this biography as a tribute to his father, whom he sees as a daring and cunning desperado who was "an extraordinary, generous, exciting, charismatic, man." Relying heavily on interviews with his father's associates, relations, and his own childhood memories, Padgett chronicles the length and breath of his father's criminal involvement as well as the gaudy but sordid way of life of small-time gangsters and their molls.

Book Review: Harm's Way: Disasters In Western Canada, Patricia E. Roy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Anthony Rasporich says that a "sense of struggle, of painful discovery, and loss of innocence" in the face of disasters is "embedded in the Canadian consciousness" with the same sense of urgency felt south of the border but with "a different collective sense." Some essays in this collection on the Prairie West do allude to that comparison. Hugh Dempsey shows that nineteenth-century smallpox epidemics did not respect the border and weakened the ability of the Native peoples to resist European settlement. Janice Dickin's analysis of the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918-19 in Calgary, however, only suggests that Canadians and Americans …

Review Of Western Places, American Myths: How We Think About The West Edited By Gary J. Hausladen, Frances Flavin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Western Places, American Myths is a collection of twelve essays covering a broad range of topics dealing with the myths, images, and perceptions associated with the American West and the region's historical geographyincluding ranches, national parks, Native American lands, the Spanish and Mexican Southwest, women in the West, Utah's Latter Day Saints, ghost towns, gambling, and the geography of Western films.

As in many essay collections, the quality is uneven. In his acknowledgments, editor Hausladen states that "the art of editing is to ask really good writers to contribute and then let them do what they do best." That may …

Review Of Frederic Remington: The Color Of Night By Nancy K. Anderson, Suzan Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Frederic Remington: The Color of Night, organized by Nancy K. Anderson, is a handsome volume. More important, this trailblazing study amply fulfills Anderson's ambition to provide a primary "reference source" for scholars and others interested in Remington's late career, particularly his night paintings. Notable are essays by three esteemed scholars at their best: William C. Sharpe, professor of English at Barnard College; Alexander Nemerov, professor of art history at Yale; and Anderson, associate curator of American and British painting at the National Gallery of Art. Sharpe places Remington's nocturnes in the context of nineteenth-century night painting, while Anderson speculates …

Book Review: Sheheke, Mandan Indian Diplomat: The Story Of White Coyote, Thomas Jefferson, And Lewis And Clark, Joseph C. Jastrzembski

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Long before Lewis and Clark launched their journey of exploration up the Missouri, Native peoples used the river to penetrate and open the Northern Plains to settlement and trade. As a result, the American explorers came across people with sophisticated understandings of the social and geopolitical situation of the Northern Plains, people whose calculated agendas spoke to different and independent visions of the West than the vision advocated by Lewis and Clark. It was such calculation that led one man, Sheheke, or White Coyote, of the Mandan to embark on his own epic voyage of exploration down the river and …

Review Of Native North American Armor, Shields, And Fortifications By David E. Jones, Robert Fields

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

David Jones's purpose is to fill the curious gap in studies of the armor used in raids and warfare by the Native peoples of North America. Lacking iron and steel technology, Native Americans constructed their armor of "wood and bone (hard armor), leather (soft armor), and combinations of hard and soft materials."

The need for armor, Jones states in his introduction, preceded European contact, since "warfare was endemic among the North American Indians." He goes on to maintain that the superiority of European technology made Indian defeat inevitable, despite whatever improvements in armor production Indians might have made. "If Native …

Book Review: The Lewis And Clark Expedition: Then And Now, Barton H. Barbour

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

With the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition in full swing, books dealing with every aspect of the Corps of Discovery are appearing in profusion. Such a book is this one, which offers a collection of papers selected from several South Dakota history conferences spanning from 1998 to 2002. Eighteen authors have contributed articles dealing with a broad array of issues bearing upon the Corps of Discovery.

Alexandra's Dreams: "The Mightiest Of All Lovers" In Willa Cather's 'O Pioneers!', Maire Mullins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In her essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Audre Lorde writes, "There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling."l Lorde notes that women often deny the erotic within themselves because of the suspicion in which it is held by western society; she exhorts her readers to challenge the artificial dichotomy between the spiritual and the erotic and to recognize this connection in their lives. …

Book Review: The Old Iron Road: An Epic Of Rails, Roads, And The Urge To Go West, H. Roger Grant

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

David Haward Bain has written a different book. The author of the widely-acclaimed study of construction of the Central Pacific-Union Pacific, Empire Express: Building of the First Transcontinental Railroad (1999), took his wife and two children in the summer of 2000 on an extensive cross-country tour of more than 7,000 miles. His overall intention was to trace large sections of historic emigrant trails of the mid-nineteenth century that once hosted thousands of seekers after a better life. The family journey also involved following the first transcontinental rail route and the much later Lincoln Highway (U.S. 30), which at times shadowed …

Book Review: George Mcgovern: A Political Life, A Political Legacy, Jon K. Lauck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

George McGovern, the three-term South Dakota senator, transcends the two great political eras of the last half of the American century. He first succeeded in politics as an advocate of the New Deal order and Great Society liberalism. He was defeated in his 1980 reelection bid as the Reagan revolution undermined the era of Democratic dominance that began with FDR's New Deal.

Book Review: Indian Views Of The Custer Fight: A Source Book, Herman J. Viola

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Battle of the Little Big Horn, popularly known as Custer's Last Stand, retains its fascination for Custer buffs, historians, and scholars who continue to seek a satisfactory explanation of why Sioux and Cheyenne warriors were able to overwhelm the Seventh Cavalry on that fateful June day in 1876. Although the story has been told and retold with inexhaustible fascination focused on Custer and his doomed command, the Indian side of that story has been largely neglected. As Hardorff points out, scholars frequently discounted Indian testimony because of its apparent conflict with known facts and accepted theories about the battle. …

Review Of Gone To Texas: A History Of The Lone Star State By Randolph B. Campbell, Eugene Atkinson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Gone to Texas, Randolph B. Campbell has combined the best recent scholarship with thirty years of his own prodigious efforts to produce the best narrative account of Texas yet. Authoritative and engaging, a chronicle that is equal parts Spanish colonial period, revolution and republic, Civil War and Reconstruction, and twentieth-century politics, the work includes the usual cast of explorers, generals, ranchers, governors, and businessmen. It treats the standard controversies, the climactic battles, and the diverse populations that have created a complex state, if one not so unique as Texans would like to believe. It does all of this …

Book Review: Cities On The Plains: The Evolution Of Urban Kansas, James E. Sherow

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains geographer James R. Shortridge has added another soundly researched study to his impressive list of works. He asks some rather simple questions, and, like all simple questions, they demand elaborated, intelligent answers. Shortridge first asks what caused some urban dreamers to realize their goals and others not. Second, he delves into how the current hierarchy of cities emerged in Kansas. Why and how, for example, did Wichita arise as a regional powerhouse when at the same time other cities failed to become dominant even though they may have been better situated at one time? Or, why isn't there …

Review Of Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite The American West Edited By Linda M. Hasselstrom, Douglas Werden

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This wonderful collection of prose and poetry rewrites the West first by focusing on community, not on the individual, and second by using the works of one hundred and fifty-three women writers. These short pieces-all under five pages-are primarily positive snapshots with an emotional core and devotional quality demanding reflection, which makes them best read intermittently.

The diverse communities evoked are what will keep you reading: a group of Quaker women who make a quilt for a PhD student wrestling with her dissertation; Hutterite women and their cooperative life in a malecentered society; the sheriff who stapled notices for a …

Review Of The Fate Of The Corps: What Became Of The Lewis And Clark Explorers After The Expedition By Larry E. Morris, Roger Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book is yet another result of the Lewis and Clark mania that has swept across much of the West and through the scholarly publishing community with interests in that region. It approaches the topic from an unexplored angle by looking at what members of the expedition did after their 1806 return to St. Louis. To do so, Larry Morris tries to focus on what he describes as "fascinating events" rather than merely giving the reader a string of mini-biographies. This approach allows him to range widely in time and place as he follows events in people's lives. At the …

"Her Heritage Is Helpful": Race, Ethnicity, And Gender In The Politicization Of Ladonna Harris, Sarah Eppler Janda

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"What is it like to live in a tent?" asked Robert Kennedy's five-year-old daughter, Kerry, when she met LaDonna Harris for the first time in 1965. LaDonna assured her that Indians no longer lived in "tents" and Kerry's mother, Ethel, jokingly told LaDonna not to disillusion the child. LaDonna insisted that she wanted Kerry to have an accurate understanding of what Indians were like, to which Kerry responded by asking if she shot a bow and arrow. The exchange speaks volumes about the ignorance through which mainstream society viewed Native Americans, and mirrored many of Harris's other experiences with the …

"Men Alone Cannot Settle A Country": Domesticating Nature In The Kansas-Nebraska Grasslands, Chad Montrie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

W h e n she traveled to Kansas from New York in November 1875 to join a husband who had gone west six months earlier, Sarah Anthony faced bitter disappointment. Her daughter, who made the journey as well, remembered that her mother often cried during the first few months. "[T]hese pioneer women [were] so suddenly transplanted from homes of comfort in the eastern states," wrote the daughter, "to these bare, treeless, wind swept, sun scorched prairies - with no conveniences - no comforts, not even a familiar face. Everything was so strange and so different from the life they had …

Gendering The Frontier In O. E. Rölvaag's Giants In The Earth, John Muthyala

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Translated from the Norwegian into English, O. E. Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth narrates the saga of pioneer life on the American prairies. It is a saga that has the sanction of official ideology and the authority of a religious edict: to go on an "errand into the wilderness," explore and subdue the frontier, which was the "basic conditioning factor" of American experience, and, in so doing, cultivate a new civilization. Indeed, it is hard not to read the novel as dramatizing the power of Turner's frontier thesis because it seems to unabashedly affirm the frontier as the great American …

Book Review: Finding Lewis And Clark: Old Trails, New Directions, David Bernstein

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the introduction to Finding Lewis and Clark, co-editor James Rhonda articulates four questions that drive this collection of essays: what is the story of the legendary expedition from 1803-1806 all about?; who were the actors in this drama?; which moments shaped the journey?; and what were the consequences of Lewis and Clark's march across the continent? While aspects of the first three questions inspire such varied pieces as William Foley's biography of William Clark and a description of Joseph Mussulman's online "hyperhistory" of the expedition, it is in responding to the final question that this collection finds the …

Book Review: Rock Beneath The Sand: Country Churches In Texas, William E. Montgomery

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On the southern apron of the Great Plains, in McLennan and surrounding counties in Central Texas, a handful of country churches stand as relics of a long-ago time of family farms, tiny crossroads towns, and dynamic ethnic and racial diversity. Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Cumberland Presbyterian, Church of Christ, Evangelical, and Catholic congregations provided spiritual and worldly comfort for white, old-stock settlers who arrived before the Civil War, African Americans who came as slaves and remained as free people, Germans, Czechs, and Norwegians who followed, and Hispanics who, in many cases, sought refuge from the Mexican Revolution. They all looked to …

Book Review: Red Earth: Race And Agriculture In Oklahoma Territory, Jere W. Roberson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Of all the ways in which history can be written and remembered, human based environmental change is often a 'winner's' history told by the people who remain." The essence of Bonnie Lynn-Sherow's thesis is probably captured in this quote from Red Earth. Her mission, it seems, is to raise our consciousness and issue a call for historians and ecologists to begin building a new history and a less disturbing relationship with the environment.