Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of The History Of Texas Music. By Gary Hartman, Kent Blaser

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Texas encompasses a uniquely wide-ranging and diverse blend of ethnic and regional cultures that have in turn fostered an amazingly rich and creative musical environment. It has arguably contributed more, in both quality and variety, to the overall development of American music than any other single state. While much has been written about specific aspects of Texas music, this book is one of the first to attempt a comprehensive treatment of the subject.

Hartman's first major theme concerns "tejana" musical traditions, the blending of Spanish/Mexican with Anglo-American music in the Southwest borderlands. Mariachi, canciones, and corridos were the foundations for …

Review Of The Prairie West As Promised Land. Edited By R. Douglas Francis And Chris Kitzan, J. William Brennan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This collection of eighteen essays explores the "ways in which the Prairie West was identified as a Promised Land in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." In one variant, western Canada became a place where individuals could escape from the stresses of urban and industrial society in Europe or the United States and find a land of natural abundance, full of God's bountiful riches that would be bestowed on those worthy of living there, the "Chosen People." This imaginary construct, Doug Owram points out, was first advanced by those who lobbied successfully for Canada to acquire Rupert's Land from …

Review Of Transatlantic Voices: Interpretations Of Native North American Literatures. Edited By Elvira Pulitano, Laura Castor

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Transatlantic Voices represents some of the most recent critical studies of contemporary Native North American literature by fourteen European scholars. Drawing on Paul Gilroy's notion of the Atlantic as a site for cross-cultural exchange in our globalized era, editor Elvira Pulitano suggests that until now the Atlantic has not been sufficiently recognized as important for Native American studies. Transatlantic Voices seeks to fill this gap. Acutely aware of their strategic location as neither Natives nor Americans, the authors explore various kinds of "crossings": theoretical, geographical, thematic, and epistemological. Their essays present original contributions to current debates in Native North American …

Review Of Before The Country: Native Renaissance, Canadian Mythology. By Stephanie Mckenzie, Jo-Ann Episkenew

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Before the Country, Stephanie McKenzie examines Canadian literature of the 1960s and 1970s "to identify mythological patterns that are likely to become formulas when critics assume that Canada is like any other nation to have emerged since the breakdown of Charlemagne's empire." A time when Canadians were struggling to invent a collec~ tive identity, the years surrounding Canada's centennial were critical for the development of Canadian literature and culture.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Indigenous people, in contrast, were experiencing what McKenzie terms "the Native Renaissance," and their literary output caused a crisis for settlers: "a nationally inspired …

Review Of African Creeks: Estelvste And The Creek Nation. By Gary Zellar, Robbie Ethridge

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Estelvste, or "black people," in the Creek Indian language, are the subjects of this well-written, absorbing story of the people of African descent whose lot in life cast them with the Creek Indians of present-day Georgia and Alabama and, after Indian Removal, present- day Oklahoma. Gary Zellar refers to them as African Creeks, distinguishing this particular population from both African Americans, Euro-American Creeks, and Indian Creeks. Such distinctions are necessary to the history of the Creek Indians because, after European contact, Creek lives became irreversibly and forever blended with those of the immigrant populations, yet the Creeks themselves adhered …

Review Of Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics And Activism Since 1900. Edited By Daniel M. Cobb And Loretta Fowler, Donna Langston

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Despite the degree of American government domination, American Indian activists have managed to create a legacy of change. Beyond Red Power is a must-read for anyone wishing to explore the rich tradition of American Indian politics. The volume brings together historians, anthologists, and legal and media studies scholars. A number of pieces focus on northern and southern Great Plains tribes.

How has a small demographic group that lives in the midst of a dominant society with little commitment to treaty rights managed to ensure political survival and cultural revitalization? This text traces over fifty years of activist and tribal strategies …

Review Of Yard Art And Handmade Places: Extraordinary Expressions Of Home By Jill Nokes With Pat Jasper, Judith Mcwillie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Yard Art and Handmade Places, Jill Nokes collaborates with architect/photographer Krista Whitson and advisor/folklorist Pat Jasper to celebrate unique and resourceful Texans who enhance nature, honor personal and regional histories, and improvise in the midst of constant, sometimes cataclysmic, change. Nokes is a professional conservationist and landscape designer (she authored How to Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest with Kathryn Miller Brown in 2001) and, since most of the book's practitioners are avid gardeners as well as builders, her expertise makes for a rare and palpable synergy between author and subject. Early on, she lets the …

Review Of Imagined Homes: Soviet German Immigrants In Two Cities By Hans Werner, Anke Ortlepp

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his Imagined Homes, Hans Werner compares the acculturation experience of ethnic Germans from Poland and the Soviet Union who settled in two migration waves in what at first glance seem to be very different cities: Winnipeg, Canada, and Bielefeld, Germany. A closer look, however, reveals that the two cities had much in common. Both were medium-sized urban centers that had integrated newcomers before. The mentalities of their inhabitants were shaped as much by Cold War thinking as by a capitalistic outlook.

Still, Werner shows that although the migrants who came to Winnipeg in the 1950s and to Bielefeld …

Review Of Trans.Can.Lit.: Resituating The Study Of Canadian Literature Edited By Smaro Kamboureli And Roy Miki, J'Nan Morse Sellery

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Encompassing an approach to the study of Canadian -literature that resulted in a conference held in Vancouver in 2005, this collection of a preface and thirteen chapters begins with Diana Brydon's keynote address setting up the "superordinates"-Literature, Institutions, and Citizenship-to explore a discourse on Canadian literature's future. That process leads toward "our national literature in global contexts and in dialogue with Indigenous concerns." In effect, Trans.Can.Lit. means translation, transcontinental railroad, travel, trance, and globalization.

Lee Maracle's chapter on Salish thinkers and orators who help their people to see "Ourselves Through Story vs. Western Models" criticizes the Institutions of the diaspora …

Review Of The Comanche Empire. By Pekka Hamalainen, Mariah F. Wade

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Comanche Empire is an important and well-researched book that traces the development of the Comanche nation in the eastern and western borders of the Greater Southwest from the early eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. Segmented into eight thematic chapters, this work explores the Comanches' sources of inward power and power over others, but privileges the Comanche perspective to place the author's conclusions within a historical context. Hamalainen's treatment of the complex relationships between the Comanches and other European and Native American societies is unique, particularly as it clarifies the social and trade mechanisms the Comanches established and nurtured …

Review Of Twentieth-Century Texas: A Social And Cultural History. Edited By John W. Storey And Mary L. Kelley, Tom Wagy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Given such a large body of scholarship," editors John W. Storey and Mary L. Kelley admit, "another study of Texas seems hardly necessary." Nevertheless, they contend, Twentieth Century Texas: A Social and Cultural History (a collection of fifteen essays) fills a weakness in the Lone Star State's history bibliography, arguing that social and cultural subjects have received "short shrift" in survey texts. Moreover, Storey and Kelly justify their volume because "it focuses solely on the past century, bringing the story up-to-date."

All students of Texas's past will enjoy this collection. Summary histories of Mexican Texans, blacks, women, literature, education, and …

Cultural Survival And The Omaha Way Eunice Woodhull Stabler's Legacy Of Preservation On The Twentieth,Century Plains, Elaine M. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the summer of 2004 I pulled into the rock and gravel driveway of a small blue home in Walthill, Nebraska, a community in the northern part of the Omaha Indian reservation. Feeling nervous about the large and unavoidable sign reading "BEWARE OF DOG," I knocked on the screen door. I was welcomed with wild barking from inside before I heard a man's voice yell, "Rambo! Hush up! Rambo, get down!" Startled, I nearly dropped my books and tape recorder. The door swung open. I expected to be faced with a Doberman/German shepherd/ pit bull mix; instead, I looked down …

Review Of Navigating The Missouri: Steamboating On Nature's Highway, 1819-1935 By William E. Lass, Ken Robison

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For more than forty years, William E. Lass's pathbreaking A History of Steamboating on the Upper Missouri served as the authoritative history of the Upper Missouri. Now, Lass has culminated his career by extending his important study to the entire Missouri River and its navigable tributaries, the premier river corridor in the trans-Mississippi West.

From St. Louis to Fort Benton, the Missouri River served as a natural highway into the vast North American West. Lass places the progress of steamboating on the Missouri River in the context of the western movement, fueled by the surge in American nationalism and the …

Review Of The Steamboat Montana And The Opening Of The West: History. Excavation, And Architecture. By Annalies Corbin And Bradley A. Rogers, Michael Allen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In recent decades, a group of maritime historical archeologists has, through meticulous examination of sunken ships, enhanced existing work by traditional archeologists and historians. Eastern Carolina University's History Department has built North America's strongest program in maritime archeology. It was an ECU team, supported by a score of public {and two} private groups, that gathered the data for this book about the nineteenth-century Missouri River steamboat Montana. Coauthors Annalies Corbin and Bradley A. Rogers write, "The Montana's history and subsequent archeological investigation can be utilized as a case study for understanding and appreciating the development of the trans-Mississippi …

Review Of Buffalo Bill On Stage. By Sandra K. Sagala, Robert Bonner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Of the twelve (!) serious historical or biographical studies devoted to Buffalo Bill Cody so far this century, two of them we owe to Sandra Sagala. The title under review here is a revision of her self-publish.ed book from 2002 titled Buffalo Bill, Actor, where she set out to follow Cody as he put together a career on theater stages across the country playing himself in a series of dramas and creating a name as an entertainer in the years prior to his famous Wild West show. This new book does not follow Cody's itineraries as closely as the …

Review Of Does People Do It?: A Memoir. By Fred Harris, Kenny L. Brown

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

U.S. Senator Robert S. Kerr-often called the "uncrowned king of the Senate"-died in 1963. In a special election the next year, Fred Harris, a Democratic state senator, surprisingly defeated highly popular football coach Bud Wilkinson to serve out the rest of Kerr's term. Reelected in 1966 and remaining a senator until 1973, the young and energetic Harris allied with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program. As senator, he pushed legislation to aid agricultural interests in Oklahoma and the Southern Plains, called for reforms to alleviate racism, introduced bills supporting various American Indian groups, and served on the Kerner Commission, which studied …

Review Of The Importance Of Being Monogamous: Marriage And Nation Building In Western Canada To 1915 By Sarah Carter, Jean Friesen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Sarah Carter's The Importance of Being Monogamous is a timely study of Canada's efforts at the turn of the twentieth century to impose monogamy on its western frontier in communities long used to fur trade marriage by the custom of the country. Today the status of plural marriages is a contentious issue facing some jurisdictions in North America, including British Columbia. Some European societies have also struggled with the legal issues stemming from migration from regions where polygamy is firmly grounded in both faith and law. Carter's new book offers a rich, well-documented historical context for those involved in such …

Review Of The Great Plains During World War Ii By R. Douglas Hurt, Greg Hall

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The historiography of the American West during the Second World War is still largely dominated by the works of Gerald D. Nash. As impressive as his work is, it does have one Illajor flaw: its neglect of the Great Plains, a major sector of the West. In order to correct this imbalance, Douglas Hurt presents a multifaceted history of the region during the war. The Great Plains during World War II is a thorough analysis of the period from the war's beginning to its conclusion.

Hurt fills his study with the voices of the people of the shortgrass country as …

Review Of Bertram Goodhue: His Life And Residential Architecture. By Romy Wyllie, Benet Haller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Romy Wyllie's Bertram Goodhue is a richlyillustrated and well-researched exploration of Goodhue's architectural work. Using a large number of historic and current photos, floor plans, and architectural renderings, Wyllie covers much of the same ground as Richard Oliver in his 1983 Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, but with a greater emphasis on his residential work. Oliver's book covers nearly all of Goodhue's nonresidential projects and five completed and five proposed residences. Wyllie describes twenty of Goodhue's completed residential projects and six of his unbuilt home designs in great detail. She discusses some of his significant nonresidential projects, particularly as they affected …

Review Of The Line From Here To There: A Storyteller's Scottish West Texas By Rosanna Taylor Herndon, Allan O. Kownslar

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Memoirs are very popular these days, and this is a good one. Rosanna Taylor Herndon, a retired communications professor from Hardin-Simmons University and a professional storyteller, combines her storytelling with a collection of eighteen anecdotes about her Scottish family members in West Texas primarily during the Great Depression. She reveals the poverty people endured and the compassion they exhibited toward one another and others in similar situations. Each story comprises a unique setting, character development, and action regarding life during that time in the southern Great Plains.

Among the examples Herndon offers is "The Panhandle Is Coming," which recounts the …

Review Of Exiles And Pioneers: Eastern Indians In The Transmississippi West. By John P. Bowes, Tracy Neal Leavelle

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Exiles and Pioneers, John Bowes examines the dynamic histories of the nineteenth-century Shawnees, Delawares, Potawatomis, and Wyandots as they struggled to find a stable place in an aggressively expanding nation. Bowes acknowledges their status as exiles forced from cherished homelands during the era of Indian removal, but he also argues that members of these Native communities acted as pioneers in the Trans-Mississippi West. Already in motion before passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, they traveled west-sometimes voluntarily, often by force-where they built and rebuift their communities in Missouri, Kansas, and Indian Territory. Bowes contends that "the …

Review Of The Nez Perces In The Indian Territory: Nimiipuu Survival. By J. Diane Pearson, Alan Marshall

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Nimiipuu are most associated with the Columbia Basin rather than the Great Plains. Yet some Nimiipuu groups and their western allies lived for a year or more in the Northern Plains during the early to mid-1800s. There they followed a bison-hunting life and linked the region to the Columbia River trading network. Nimiipuu were so much a part of the region that they were signatories to the United States' 1855 Treaty with the Blackfeet negotiated by Isaac I. Stevens.

Nimiipuu knowledge of the northern Great Plains decided the "escape" route from their homelands that was the Nez Perce War …

Review Of Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study Of Her Complete Writings By Nora Foster Stovel, Lyall H. Powers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Neil Besner is right to judge Nora Foster Stovel's Divining highly: it "ranges across all of Laurence's work ... intelligently and accessibly," as he says on the jacket. Before I augment his praise I must note a couple of blemishes, if Stovel will accept the soft impeachment of an admirer. Malcolm Ross did not teach the future Margaret Laurence or anyone else at United College (now the University of Winnipeg): I was a student with Peggy Wemyss in Ross's stunning "Seventeenth-Century Thought" on the Fort Garry campus of the University of Manitoba (and in spite of the uncorrected typo of …

Review Of The Wide Open: Prose, Poetry, And Photographs Of The Prairie. Edited By Annick Smith And Susan O'Connor, Jim Reese

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There's a postcard you can buy at a lot of gas stations in Wyoming that shows a man holding onto a fence post for dear life as he's about to be blown into the great wide open. I believe it says, "Welcome to Wyoming. We grow a lot of wind here!" It's a funny postcard, but also a serious reminder of the climatic vagaries one experiences on the prairie. "It's this ache of the wind blowing over open land," as M. L. Smoker writes in The Wide Open, that continues to call us back or hold us here in …

Review Of A Texas Journey: The Centennial Photographs Of Polly Smith By Evelyn Barker, Carol Roark

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Polly Smith showed her love for Texas through the lens of her Graflex camera. The photographs Smith made to publicize the state for the 1936 Centennial Exposition portray a positive image of Texas's business and industry, everyday life, and natural scenes. Although she began her work in late 1935, about the same time the Farm Security Administration photographers started to document the United States during the Great Depression, Smith's photographs sought to entice people to come to Texas, not to document the plight of those suffering from the economic disaster or benefiting from Roosevelt's government programs. Yet, even though they …

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Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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"Daughters Of British Blood" Or "Hordes Of Men Of Alien Race" The Homesteads-For-Women Campaign In Western Canada, Sarah Carter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In May 1910 Mildred Williams, a young teacher in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, made headlines across Western Canada for her pluck and stamina as she waited for twelve days and nights on a chair on the stairs outside the door of the land office in Saskatoon to claim a homestead (see Fig. 1). She was determined to file on a half-section (320 acres) of valuable land near Kindersley. Williams put up with a great deal of inconvenience during her days and nights on the stairs. On the second day she was challenged by a man who wanted the same property and who …

Ecology Of Small Mammals, Vegetation, And Avian Nest Survival On Private Rangelands In Nebraska, Kent A. Fricke, Silka L.F. Kempema, Larkin A. Powell

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

Small mammals can be an important bioindicator of ecosystem health. They serve as both predator and prey in many ecosystems. By means of live trapping and nest monitoring, we studied the ecological relationships between small mammals, avian nest survival, and vegetation composition and structure on six private ranches in the Sandhills of Nebraska during 2004. Our study documented six species (132 captures) of small mammals, and we monitored 139 bird nests. Pastures with high small-mammal populations did not suffer higher nest mortality, indicating that small-mammal abundance does not predict avian productivity. We found several vegetation characteristics that influenced small-mammal abundance …

Precipitation Event Size Controls On Long-Term Abundance Of Opuntia Polyacantha (Plains Prickly-Pear) In Great Plains Grasslands, William K. Lauenroth, R. L. Dougherty, J. S. Singh

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

Opuntia polyacantha Haw. (plains prickly-pear) is a common cactus in the Great Plains of North America. We used two data sets, from Montana and Colorado, to test the hypothesis that there is a range of precipitation event sizes upon which O. polyacantha specializes. Events smaller than this range (>2 to ≤6 mm) do not moisten sufficient soil to be utilized, and larger events have negative effects on the status of O. polyacantha because they favor the development of taller and denser grass canopies. Multiple regressions of either green cladode density (northern mixed prairie) or O. polyacantha frequency (shortgrass steppe) …

Near-Surface Soil-Water Monitoring For Water Resources Management On A Wide-Area Basis In The Great Plains, K. G. Hubbard, J. You, V. Sridhar, E. Hunt, S. Korner, G. Roebke

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

In the Great Plains, soil water is one of the most critical factors related to sustainable production on cropland and rangeland, while the need for better water management grows in the face of increasing water demand during dry years. Soil water is also an important factor related to flood modeling and quantification of the boundary conditions in atmospheric models such as global circulation models. The objectives of this study were to install a wide-area automated soil-monitoring network, determine effective calibration procedures, and develop new products to illustrate the status of soil water. Soil-monitoring sensors were established at 51 sites across …