Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Book Review: Down And Out On The Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation In The Great Plains, 1929-1945, Paula M. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Anyone who loves the Great Plains and the life that took root there in the nineteenth century has had to face in recent years the decline and disappearance of that rural world. The Great Depression and the drought years of the 1930s were a key turning point in the evolution of farming on the Plains and helped set the stage for the long-term restructuring of farm life that has gone on there ever since. In Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation in the Great Plains, 1929-1945, Michael Grant provides a clear and concise economic history of …

Book Review: One Woman's Political Journey: Kate Barnard And Social Reform, 1875-1930, Linda Edmondson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Kate Barnard was elected Oklahoma's first commissioner of charities and corrections in 1907. The first woman in the country elected to a major statewide office, she remains Oklahoma's most famous woman politician. Lynn Musslewhite and Suzanne Jones Crawford have written a definitive biography of this western progressive and her reform efforts.

Book Review: Taking Indian Lands: The Cherokee (Jerome) Commission, 1889-1893, Sally Ann Cummings

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

William T. Hagan's latest book examines the negotiations between the federal government and specific tribes in Indian Territory for the sale of tribal lands and the allotment of land to individual Indians. Encroachment by white settlers presented a major incentive for the federal government to complete these transactions expeditiously. Settlers as well as speculators applied significant pressure to organize Oklahoma into a territory and open the Cherokee Outlet. In response, on March 2, 1889, Congress passed an act creating the Cherokee Commission to negotiate the sale of lands by the Cherokees, Iowas, Pawnees, Poncas, T onakawas, Wichitas, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Sac …

Book Review: Bienfait: The Saskatchewan Miners' Struggle Of '31, Craig Heron

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A strike is a privileged moment for the historian. Floodlights get shone on the working lives of wage earners that would otherwise get little public attention. Issues of collective working-class organization and politics stand out vividly. The relative power of contending forces in capitalist society is starkly clear. And the events of the confrontation typically provide plenty of high drama. Stephen Endicott has taken hold of these elements in a well-remembered miners' strike on the Canadian Prairies and given us a fascinating, beautifully written account of working-class struggle in the depths of the Depression.

Book Reviews And Notes & News, Fall 2004, Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Book Reviews & Notes and News in the Fall 2004 issue of Great Plains Quarterly.

The New Negro Arts And Letters Movement Among Black University Students In The Midwest, 1914-1940, Richard M. Breaux

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were an exciting time for black artists and writers in the United States. Much of the historical literature highlights the so-called Harlem Renaissance or its successor, the Black Chicago Renaissance. Few studies, however, document the influence of these artistic movements outside major urban cities such as New York, Chicago, or Washington, DC. In his 1988 essay on black education, historian Ronald Butchart argued that the educational effects of black social movements such as the Harlem Renaissance on black schooling are unclear and underexplored. This article explores the influence of the New Negro arts and letters …

Book Review: Morning Star Dawn: The Powder River Expedition And The Northern Cheyennes, 1876, William Bauer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In November 1876, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie led a successful attack on a Northern Cheyenne village in the Bighorn Mountains. In military historian Jerome Greene's rendering, this often overlooked battle and the ephemeral Powder River Expedition became a seminal event in ending the Sioux Wars of 1876-77. "The attack on the encampment and its subsequent destruction," Greene writes, "not only compelled the Cheyennes' eventual surrender but also influenced many of their Lakota compatriots, including the war leader Crazy Horse, to do likewise."

Book Review: Margaret Laurence: Critical Reflections, Sheryl Allen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

David Staines's collection of essays by twelve distinguished scholars, critics, and writers illuminates the accomplishments of one of Canada's most acclaimed and beloved authors. like the volume's cover photo of a young and attractive Margaret Laurence, an image unfamiliar to readers accustomed to the round face and over-sized glasses of her later years, the essays themselves, and the editor's introduction, offer fresh perspectives on Laurence's work, challenging us to view it in new ways.

Book Review: On Fire, John Pultz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Larry Schwarm grew up on a farm in south-central Kansas, received an M.F.A. degree from the University of Kansas, and since 1988 has taught photography in the art department at Emporia State University, located in the Flint Hills of east-central Kansas, a remarkable geographical and topographical feature, where rolling hills extend for miles at a time, with no trees, fences, roads, or structures to impede them. On these hills is the largest remaining stand of the tallgrass prairie that once covered the eastern Great Plains. This land is now used for grazing, and each spring ranchers light fires to the …

Book Review: Buffalo Bill And Sitting Bull: Inventing The Wild West, John H. Monnett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bobby Bridger has written a lively paced biography of Buffalo Bill Cody. Although the subtitle, Inventing the Wild West, promises much, Bridger's emphasis is strictly on interpretation of Cody's personality rather than a revision of the scout's significance to Great Plains history or the presentation of new material. This theme fits well into Bridger's avocation as an entertainer, producing and presenting A Ballad of the West, a trilogy of one-man shows depicting America's frontier period. The book covers Cody's early years through the Indian Wars, the days of his Wild West extravaganza, and his last years.

Book Review: One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis And Clark, W. Raymond Wood

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is the first of a projected six-volume "History of the American West" to be published by the University of Nebraska Press and edited by Richard W. Etulain, a specialist in the history and literature of the west.

Book Review: Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, And The Creation Of The American West, James R. Shortridge

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Powerful mythologies have always blocked people's understanding of the American West. This book provides important insights into this issue by juxtaposing the literatures of boosterism and reminiscence. The author reminds us that both sentiments were central to the creation of regional identity. One looked to a future where sophisticated cities and irrigated fields would replace alkali and coyotes. The other reshaped the past through stories of how hardship and sacrifice underlaid modern luxury.

Book Review: Texas Trilogy: Life In A Small Texas Town, Jean A. Boyd

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

That music has the power to captivate the human imagination and propel individuals into new areas of research is beautifully illustrated by Craig D. Hillis's Texas Trilogy: Life in a Small Texas Town. Inspired by the content of three songs composed by folksinger Steven Fromholz, Hillis first interviewed Fromholz, then visited the small Texas town Fromholz immortalized in his "Texas Trilogy." What Hillis found in Kopperl, in Bosque County, Texas, was not some unique and special place, but rather the very bedrock of the American people and their dreams. Kopperl and its residents exemplify the quintessential small-town American experience. …

Book Review: The Invention Of Native American Literature, Lori Burlingame

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Through the lens of historical interpretation, Robert Dale Parker presents a controversial, deconstructionist argument that the field of Native American literature has been invented by Native writers who have drawn on Indian and literary traditions in order "to theorize an Indian aesthetic" that links artistic and cultural identity.

Book Review: Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life, Susan Naramore Maher

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

At the end of her memoir, Moving Out, Polly Spence assesses all the little ironies of her life and concludes, "[each] time everything seemed just right, each time I thought I'd found it all-the work, the love, and the ideal way to live-something brought change to me." Change is a central motif in her narrative, reflected in a title that underscores movement and mobility, not settlement. Spence's Nebraska life provides a toehold on the slippery surface of twentieth-century culture in America. The many changes in her life reflect the changeable decades from the 1920s to the 1970s in which …

Book Review: On Teaching And Writing Fiction, Jackson J. Benson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There have been several collections of essays by and about Wallace Stegner, but this one takes in new territory, his ideas about the teaching of creative writing and about the art of fiction . He was a teacher of writing for most of his life, first at Utah, at Wisconsin, and then at Harvard. He went to Stanford in 1945 where he founded and directed the Writing Program, a workshop format modeled after his student experience at Iowa (the only graduate writing program in the country at that time) and his summers teaching at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

Book Review: The American Statehouse: Interpreting Democracy's Temples, Robert C. Ripley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Employing three conceptual frameworks or lenses, Charles Goodsell provides an illuminating examination of the singular American architectural creation called the statehouse. He uses these lenses to offer a social interpretation of the architecture of our fifty state capitols. The first lens seeks concepts or values embedded within the building proper. The second looks at the impact of a statehouse on current political behavior. Finally, his third lens provides the broader impressions these buildings have on society in general.

Book Review: The Lewis And Clark Journals: An American Epic Of Discovery, Richard Littlebear

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

All my life, I had consciously chosen not to read about Lewis and Clark - until i read the abridged edition of The Lewis and Clark Journals. What a load of dung that turned out to be.

Book Review: The Word Rides Again: Rereading The Frontier In American Fiction, Eric Heyne

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The method of The Word Rides Again is straightforward. J. David Stevens first constructs a model of the popular Western novel or "frontier narrative," complete with standard genealogy and a concise review of fifty years of critical response, and then uses that template to demonstrate that some "mainstream" novels (Hobomok, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Death Comes for the Archbishop) are actually frontier fiction in disguise, while some frontier fiction (by Bret Harte, Owen Wister, and Frank Waters) is actually more complex or problematic than the stereotype would suggest.

Book Review: A Companion To The Regional Literatures Of America, Kathleen A. Boardman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What difference would it make if literary regionalism were taken seriously? We would have an ambitious, readable collection of essays, written by well-known scholars, that would critique as well as defend regional literary movements, re-examine the social implications of local color and Depression-era regionalism, trace the shifting borders of regionalism's connections with nationalism, study regional issues not only in narratives of village and countryside but also in Gidget novels and L.A. detective stories, and use current theories to recontextualize past work and predict the future. Here is that collection.

Book Review: Edward S. Curtis And The North American Indian Project In The Field, Joanna Cohan Scherer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mick Gidley is without a doubt the primary advocate of Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) . As a photographer of North American Indians in the early twentieth century, Curtis produced work that needs an advocate since it is often viewed today as fake, exploitative, and thus controversial. Curtis's magnum opus, The North American Indian (1907-1930), is a remarkable collection of images, some posed, some manipulated, some art, some ethnographic, some nostalgic, some realistic, but always compelling. Because of the widespread interest in Curtis, Gidley's current publication, drawing on an assortment of unpublished reports, letters, field notes, and little known newspaper and …

Refining Rural Spaces: Women And Vernacular Gentility In The Great Plains, 1880-1920, Andrea G. Radke

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1887 the Plains photographer Solomon Butcher met the David Hilton family in Custer County, Nebraska. Mrs. Hilton desired a photograph to send to relatives back East, but felt embarrassed by the family's sod dwelling. She insisted that Butcher not take a photo of the house, but asked the men to drag the Hiltons' beautiful new pump organ out into the field, where the family could pose around the instrument. The sod house remained outside the photograph, and after the session the men returned the organ to the house. To Mrs. Hilton, the organ became her personal symbol of aspirations …

Book Review: Teaching Places, Catherine Mackie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Audrey Whitson reaches down and stirs something deep in the soul. Her love of the land is respectful, serious, irresistible. The terrain she captures so vividly on paper as a record of her Alberta pilgrimage moves the heart of any reader who has known and loved the prairies. "The land is calling you, no matter who you are, calling you home." This book truly does call the prairie soul back to its home. Whitson's is a journey that is deeply spiritual, without being orthodox. Her spirituality is articulated as understandable and embodied; it is felt through her language and use …

Book Review: The Coronado Expedition From The Distance Of 460 Years, David J. Weber

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The remarkable descriptions of places and people produced by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado's expedition constitute the verbal baseline for measuring historical change in southwestern America. Those descriptions are most useful, however, when linked to modern locations. Many of the writers in this essential volume have set themselves to that task.

Book Review: Genocide Of The Mind: New Native American Writing, Thomas C. Gannon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Genocide of the Mind is hardly the happiest of titles. Not only is the metaphor itself a muddle impossible to imagine, but the collection's dominant tone is more about cultural survival, not cultural genocide, as the editor herself indicates in explaining the title: "This anthology is a testament to American Indian consciousness continuing to circulate, regardless of past or present genocidal attempts, whether cerebral, endemic, systematic, or otherwise." Confusing, too, is the book's ostensible focus on the "urban Indian" and the sad history of Relocation as government policy. This is what Vine Deloria Jr.'s foreword would have us believe, and …

Wintering Canada Geese Along The Platte Rivers Of Nebraska, 1960-2000, Mark Vrtiska, Nick Lyman

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

The Platte rivers and associated habitats are major wintering areas for Canada geese (Branta Canadensis) in Nebraska. The objective of this study was to examine changes in abundance and distribution of Canada geese along the Platte River system during 1960-2000. We used counts of Canada geese based on aerial surveys from the annual Mid-Winter Survey (MWS). The entire lengths of the North and South Platte rivers and the Platte River were surveyed, and counts of Canada geese were made by visual estimation. We examined changes in goose numbers for the North and South Platte rivers, and divided the …

Review Of Fighting For The Farm: Rural America Transformed Edited By Jane Adams, John C. Allen

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

Fighting for the Family Farm brings together the contributions of scholars from several disciplines to provide an overview of political processes within North American agriculture.
Beginning in the Imperial Valley of California, Alan Rudy provides a well-documented snapshot of state and federal governments' roles in changing the face of agricultural support of industrial food and fiber production models. Rudy illustrates how ecological damage and state policies converge to shape new agricultural policies, arguing that a spatio-temporal construct is necessary for determining responses to the many forms of ecological, social, and infrastructural crisis as well as fir more fully understanding how …

Seed Dynamics Of Eastern Redcedar In The Mixed-Grass Prairie, Susan Tunnell, James L. Stubbendieck, Julie Huddle, Jennifer Brollier

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

We sampled the soil seed bank underneath and surrounding eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana L.) trees at two mixed-grass prairie sites in Nebraska. Our objectives were to investigate the seed bank for seed number and seed viability in various directions and distances from individual trees. Additionally, we planted seeds to determine seed longevity and viability in the soil seed bank. Six female trees were selected at each site. At each tree, 16 soil samples were collected using a lax 10 cm quadrant at four distances (inside the canopy and 0.5, 2, and 5 m from the canopy) in each of …

Matthew S. Weinert On Genocide In Cambodia: Documents From The Trial Of Pol Pot And Ieng Sary Edited By Howard Denike, John Quigley, And Kenneth Robinson. Philadelphia: University Of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. 559pp., Matthew S. Weinert

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Genocide in Cambodia: Documents from the Trial of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary edited by Howard Denike, John Quigley, and Kenneth Robinson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. 559pp.

Nutritional Condition Of Northern Yellowstone Elk, Rachel Cook, John G. Cook, L. David Mech

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

We estimated nutritional condition for 96 female northern Yellowstone elk (Cervus elaphus nelson) during mid-to late winter 2000, 2001, and 2002. Neither year nor capture location significantly influenced any measure of condition (body fat, body mass, and longissimus dorsi thickness; P ≥ 0.14). Overall, age = 8.9 years ± 0.4 SE, body fat = 9.5% ± 0.4, body mass = 235.1 kg ± 2.2, and longissimus dorsi muscle thickness = 5.6 cm ± 0.1. Despite an age segregation pattern across the winter range (P = 0.016), we found no evidence of bias in our estimates of nutritional condition …