Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

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 …

Editor's Introduction- Spring 2003, Charles A. Braithwaite

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this issue we introduce two new features to Great Plains Quarterly. In the past, the journal has focused almost exclusively on printing previously unpublished work written especially for Quarterly. This issue includes two articles that break from this tradition.

With the kind permission of the University of Nebraska Press, we are publishing an excerpt from Gary E. Moulton's The Lewis and Clark Journals: An Epic of Discovery, The Abridgment of the Definitive Nebraska Edition. For over twenty years, Professor Moulton has edited and annotated the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, producing the most …

Excerpts From The Lewis And Clark Journals: An Epic Of Discovery, The Abridgment Of The Definitive Nebraska Edition The Journey Across The Plains, Gary E. Moulton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Chapter 1
Expedition Underway
May 14-August 24, 1804

May 14, 1804
[CLARK] I Set out at 4 o'Clock P. M. in the presence of many of the Neighboring inhabitants, and proceeded on under a gentle brease up the Missourie to the upper Point of the 1st Island 4 Miles and Camped on the Island which is Situated Close on the right (or Starboard) Side, and opposit the mouth of a Small Creek called Cold water,¹ a heavy rain this after-noon. [Camped in St. Charles County, Missouri, near and across from Fort Bellefontaine, St. Louis County.]

May 15, 1804
[CLARK] …

Review Of How Should I Read These?: Native Women Writers In Canada By Helen Hoy, Dee Horne

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Helen Hoy opens with a quotation from Eden Robinson's short story "Queen of the North" in which a non-Native asks, "How should I eat these?" The response is, "With your mouth, asshole." Hoy poses challenges of reading and understanding Jeannette Armstrong's Slash, Maria Campbell and Linda Griffith's The Book of Jessica, Ruby Slipperjack's Honour the Sun, Beatrice Culleton's In Search of April Raintree, Beverly Hungry Walf's The Ways of My Grandmothers, Lee Maracle's Ravensong, and Eden Robinson's Traplines. She articulates her position carefully, presenting a scholarly argument that frequently cites the critical and theoretical perspectives …

Review Of Telling Stories, Writing Songs: An Album Of Texas Songwriters By Kathleen Hudson, Cary Ginell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On the surface, a book chronicling interviews with prominent and influential Texas songwriters would be quite welcome to students of regional American music styles. Many of the artists included are unfamiliar to the general public, but have contributed much to the development of folk, country, and rock styles in the past half-century.

Author Kathleen Hudson selected thirty four subjects to profile, from honky-tonk and western swing pioneer Floyd Tillman to TexMex chanteuse Tish Hinojosa. Unfortunately, Hudson chose to structure her book as a series of oral histories, her questions and her informants' responses transcribed verbatim in each chapter. Her un …

Review Of Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains And Removed Indians In Indian Territory By David Lavere, Willard Hughes Rollings

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Many are aware of Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal policy, which uprooted Native Americans from their homelands and drove them into Indian Territory. Few, however, are aware of the other side of removal, that is, the impact of the removed tribes on the Prairie and Plains peoples living in the region of the relocation. Removal crowded thousands of Indian people of diverse cultures onto land that could not adequately support them, resulting in bitter conflicts between the Native peoples of the Southern Plains and the invading eastern strangers.

Those of us who are members of the tribes involved as well as …

Review Of Willa Cather And The American SouthwestEdited By John N. Swift And Jospeh R. Urgo, Guy Reynolds

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Cather criticism has come a long way since Sharon O'Brien's 1987 biography, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. O'Brien had a singular take on Cather's trip to the Southwest in 1912, viewing this journey as a moment of psychological transformation, a tipping point when Cather became a creative rather than a merely professional writer. O'Brien emerged from a distinctive 1970s literary feminism, which placed the life-story of neglected writers within a psychoanalytical context. This new collection is, in contrast, a kaleidoscopic array of varied approaches to "Cather's Southwest."

A number of the essays are close readings of specific episodes, motifs, …

Notes And News- Spring 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News

Frederick C. Luebke Award

Native Perspectives on the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Call For Papers: Native American Perspectives Of The Lewis & Clark Expedition

Research Facilities: Museum of the Great Plains

Call For Papers: Missouri Valley History Conference

Review Of The Black Regulars, 1866-1898 By William A. Dobak And Thomas D. Phillips, Robert Wooster

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As part of its 1866 army reorganization bill, Congress, presuming that black troops would be less prone to desert than white soldiers, reserved six of the sixty regiments for black enlisted men. Although subsequent reductions allowed for only four such regiments in a forty-five- regiment army, the all-black units functioned as their sponsors had intended. Stationed largely in the West until 1898, the men of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry regiments deserted far less frequently and reenlisted far more often than their white comrades. Their story has often been told, but never with the comprehensiveness, …

Review Of Common And Contested Ground: A Human And Environmental History Of The Northwestern Plains By Theodore Binnema, James E. Sherow

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Theodore Binnema's engaging ethnohistorical account of the peoples who once lived upon the Northwestern Plains is an excellent study in human relationships. Organized in a straightforward manner, its first two chapters explore the ecosystems of the Northwestern Plains and how hunters developed their techniques over thousands of years. Next, Binnema recreates the trade systems and routes in the protohistorical period and offers a sensitive analysis of the evidence for warfare on the Plains prior to the appearance of horses. Based upon careful research in the archives of the Hudson's Bay Company, he recreates the economic and social intricacies of the …

Title And Contents- Spring 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains Quarterly

Spring 2003 Vol. 23 No.2

CONTENTS

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION Charles A. Braithwaite

EXCERPTS FROM THE LEWIS AND CLARK JOURNALS; AN EPIC OF DISCOVERY, THE ABRIDGMENT OF THE Definitive NEBRASKA EDITION; THE JOURNEY ACROSS THE PLAINS Gary E. Moulton

"A PRAIRIE CHILDHOOD" BY EDITH ABBOTT: AN EXCERPT FROM THE CHILDREN'S CHAMPION, A BIOGRAPHY OF GRACE ABBOTT John Sorensen

COME TO THE "CHAMPAGNE AIR": CHANGING PROMOTIONAL IMAGES OF THE KANSAS CLIMATE, 1854-1900 Karen De Bres

BOOK REVIEWS

Theodore Binnema Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains By JAMES E. SHEROW

Gerald Betty Comanche Society: …

Review Of Heartbeat Of The People: Music And Dance Of The Northern Pow-Wow By Tara Browner, Clyde Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Powwows have been a powerful expression of cultural identity in Indian country for much of the past century. Adaptive and innovative, they are good examples of how some Native people simultaneously maintain connections to tradition and embrace new trends, but their history and meaning have received relatively limited attention. In this slim volume, Tara Browner combines an insider's perspective with a scholarly bent to give readers an informative account of Northern Plains powwow ways.

Browner begins by situating Northern Plains powwows in a broad historical context, but her interpretation will likely raise some eyebrows. Unlike virtually every other scholar who …

Book Notes- Spring 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Dictionary of Midwestern Literature. Volume One: The Authors

The University of Manitoba: An Illustrated History

Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews

Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education

Petticoat Prisoners of Old Wyoming

Minister to the Cherokees: A Civil War Autobiography

''A Prairie Childhood" By Edith Abbott An Excerpt From The Children's Champion, A Biography Of Grace Abbott, John Sorensen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Grace Abbott (1878-1939) is, perhaps, the greatest champion of children's rights in American history. She was a woman of intriguing contradictions: a life-long Republican Party member and a life-long liberal activist; a native of the Nebraska frontier who spent much of her life in the poorest immigrant quarters of urban Chicago; an unmarried woman who was nicknamed "the mother of America's forty-three million children."

Grace Abbott was a public figure who was both much adored and bitterly, sometimes vehemently, attacked. She was a born and bred pioneer: the first woman nominated for a Presidential cabinet post {secretary of labor for …

Review Of Comanche Society; Before The Reservation By Gerald Betty, Daniel J. Gelo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While the merging of historical and anthropological outlooks has been a productive trend in Plains Indian studies, there are pitfalls. For one, the authority inherent in an accurate chronology or lively narrative can mask basic errors in social analysis. Sometimes historians have difficulty in properly employing the terms and principles of social organization so carefully wrought in the neighbor discipline. Readers get an epic infused with mistaken ethnology, resulting in a setback rather than advance in understanding.

So it is with Gerald Betty's Comanche Society. The work attempts to recast the history of Comanche expansion via chapters on kinship, …

Review Of Studies In American Indian Art: A Memorial Tribute To Norman Feder Edited By Christian F. Feest, Bill Anthes

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Norman Feder (1930-1995), a pioneer in the field of Native American art history and material culture, began his career in a community of amateur collectors and "artifakers" (Feder's term for serious hobbyists who produced high-quality reproductions of Indian crafts). His periodical, American Indian Hobbyist (begun in 1954 and renamed American Indian Tradition in 1960), spawned many careers in anthropology and Native American history. Later, Feder's professional experience included positions at the Denver Art Museum, the Heye Foundation Museum of the American Indian, and major exhibitions and catalogs at the Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Feder served …

Review Of The Nature Of Native American Poetry By Norma C. Wilson, Andrew Wiget

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For the reader new to the field, perhaps attracted by an encounter with an individual poem or poet, Wilson's book offers genuine insights into the relationship among history, biography, and Native American poetry. Readers more familiar with contemporary Native American poetry will find good thematic readings that fall somewhere between an overview and appreciation on the one hand, and hard academic criticism on the other.

The book's introduction attempts to locate the emergence of Native American poetry in English as an articulation of a special relationship to the land and a partial response to the traumas of Native American history. …

Review Of Dreams And Thunder: Stories, Poems, And The Sun Dance Opera By Zitkala-Sa, Susan Bernardin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This new collection of previously unpublished writing by Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin) marks a milestone in the scholarship of this crucial figure in Native literary and intellectual history. Meticulously researched, editor Jane Hafen's compilation advances our understanding of this Yankton Sioux writer, activist, and artist, about whom little has been documented. Hafen located a range of her writings in a variety of archives, from early poems written at Earlham College to Iktomi stories and the opera she created in collaboration with William Hanson in 1913.

In her introduction, Hafen provides the most accurate biographical overview of Gertrude Bonnin to date, showing …

Review Of Performing The American Frontier, 1870-1906 By Roger A. Hall, Sarah J. Blackstone

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Roger Hall's engagingly written study of frontier drama provides a good overview of the topic. Covering the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of cinema, the book surveys how eastern audiences reacted to frontier depictions, examining these reactions against the backdrop of contemporary debates about national policies affecting the settlement of the West. Hall has limited his discussion to plays produced in New York, which allows him to take advantage of a wealth of theatrical documents, including reviews printed in New York newspapers and trade papers of the day. He takes into account the often …