Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of Kill And Chill: Restructuring Canada's Beef Commodity Chain By Ian Maclachlan, Michael J. Broadway

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

Most North Americans are meat eaters but few care to ask where their meat comes from or how it is produced. Kill and Chill answers those questions from a Canadian perspective by chronicling the development of Canada's beef industry during the twentieth century.
Canadian beef processing shares many similarities with its US counterpart. At the beginning of the 1900s cattle were raised on the Plains and Prairies and shipped eastwards in railcars to be sold in stockyards, then slaughtered in multi-species packinghouses. Chicago became the prototypical meatpacking town with its sprawling stockyards and packinghouse district, a pattern later emulated in …

Review Of Saskatchewan Politics: Into The Twenty-First Century Edited By Howard A. Leeson, Joseph Garcea

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

Somewhat broader than its title suggests, the book focuses not merely on Saskatchewan politics, but also on the province's governing institutions, public policies, and political, economic, and social development. Its first half is devoted to key political institutions, including the legislature, the monarchy, the cabinet, the public service, the judiciary, and parts of the party and electoral systems. The other half addresses an array of political, social, and economic developments that have occurred primarily during the past two decades involving economic and financial management, elections, politics and the media, federal-provincial relations, and the role of First Nations in the province's …

Letters To The Editor, Ralph Grossi, William Parton, Myron Gutmann

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

Letters to the Editor

Review Of Harvest Wobblies: The Industrial Workers Of The World And Agricultural Laborers In The American West, 1905-1930 By Greg Hall, William G. Robbins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

America's most vibrant symbol of militant unionism in the twentieth century remains the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) , the radical labor organization whose renown was literally larger than life. The union's strikes, work slow-downs, and suspected sabotage frightened employers, worried conservative labor groups, and eventually convinced the federal government to crush the loosely structured organization shortly after the United States entered the European war in 1917. Greg Hall centers his argument on the union's remarkable, if short-lived, resurgence following the end of the First World War. The Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (AWIU), the IWW's strongest affiliate, enjoyed an …

Review Of Hidden Worlds: Revisiting The Mennonite Migrants Of The 1870s By Royden Loewen, Kimberly D. Schmidt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What Russian Mennonite child has not heard the stories of the massive migration from Russia to the New World? The oft-repeated tales recount how large congregations collectively moved from Russia's steppes to North America's Plains. According to the stories, great-grandparents were in search of religious freedom and good land. They brought turkey-red wheat, recreated their farmland villages, and transformed the Plains into a breadbasket, just as they had transformed Catherine the Great's steppes from a Cossack wilderness into villages and productive farmland. Why revisit this story so ingrained in the collective memory of a people? Even outsider historians, such as …

Review Of Brown V. Board Of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone And Its Troubled Legacy By James T. Patterson, Kristin Leigh Ahlberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Rendered during the postwar consensus period, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision struck at the core of de jure segregation. Recognizing the American educational system as a "great equalizer," Thurgood Marshall and other advocates insisted that the "separate but equal" doctrine codified by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case needed to be overturned to ensure opportunities for African Americans. Marshall found an ally in Chief Justice Earl Warren and his supporters on the Supreme Court who based their decision in the Brown case on the social science research of Kenneth and Mamie Clark and Gunnar Myrdal. Their findings …

"The Greatest Evil" Interpretations Of Indian Prohibition Laws, 1832-1953, Jill E. Martin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Highway 407 in Shannon County South Dakota crosses the Pine Ridge Reservation and, like the reservation, ends at the Nebraska border. When the road turns into Nebraska Highway 87 you enter the unincorporated town of Whiteclay. What also changes, besides the highway numbers, is the legal sale of alcohol. The Ogallala Sioux prohibit alcohol on their land, but this prohibition ends in Whiteclay. Seven liquor stores in this town of 30 residents, all of whom are Anglo-American, sell more than four million cans of beer each year. The two-mile stretch of road between Pine Ridge and Whiteclay is a path …

Title And Contents- Winter 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 23/ Number 1 / Winter 2003

CONTENTS

"AT THE HEAD OF THE ABORIGINAL REMNANT": CHEROKEE CONSTRUCTION OF A "CIVILIZED" INDIAN IDENTITY DURING THE LAKOTA CRISIS OF 1876 Paul Kelton

WAVING "A BOUGH OF CHALLENGE": FORESTRY ON THE KANSAS GRASSLANDS, 1868-1915 Brian Allen Drake

"THE GREATEST EVIL": INTERPRETATIONS OF INDIAN PROHIBITION LAWS, 1832-1953 Jill E. Martin

BOOK REVIEWS

Scott E. Casper and Lucinda M. Long, eds. Moving Stories: Migration and the American West, 1850-2000 By WALTER NUGENT

Jo Ella Powell Exley Frontier Blood: The Saga of the Parker Family By THOMAS W. KAVANAGH

Royden Loewen Hidden Worlds: …

Waving "A Bough Of Challenge" Forestry On The Kansas Grasslands, 1868-1915, Brian Allen Drake

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Kansas is legendary for geographical monotony, for a landscape allegedly so absent of trees and relief that the state has become the butt of national jokes and a cultural synonym for flat. Kansas is not really flat; tilted might be a better description, for the state rises some 3,300 feet in elevation along the 400-mile stretch between Kansas City and Kanorado. Kansas is lacking in substantial tree cover, though, especially in its western third. US Forest Service researchers noted in 1999 that forests covered slightly less than 3 percent of the state, concentrated mostly in the northeast and southeast corners. …

Review Of Moving Stories: Migration And The American West, 1850-2000. Edited By Scott E. Casper And Lucinda M. Long, Walter Nugent

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This well-written, well-illustrated anthology will gladden the hearts of students of the American West, not least because nine of the eleven authors are young-doctoral candidates or assistant professors. There is hope for Western studies. Five are historians, six trained in and teach literature, but most cross disciplinary boundaries quite easily. The geographical scope of the essays stretches well beyond the Great Plains, but the reader will land squarely between the Missouri and Montana in much of the volume.

Theresa Strouth Gaul introduces the writings of three Pennsylvania sisters named Stewart who crossed the Overland Trail to Oregon in 1853 and …

Notes And News- Winter 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News

Call For Papers

Textbook Seeking Great Plains Scholars

International Willa Cather Seminar

Mari Sandoz Center

Review Of Frontier Blood: The Saga Of The Parker Family By Jo Ella Powell Exley, Thomas W. Kavanagh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

These are the stories of four generations of one family that moved West with the frontier, and of one individual who emerged from the meeting of the frontier with the people who were already there. Elder John Parker, born in Maryland in 1758, had a son, Daniel, in Virginia in 1781. Daniel's son James W. was born in Georgia in 1797, and another, Silas, was born in Tennessee in 1804. James W.'s daughter, Rachel, was born in Illinois in 1819, as was Silas's daughter Cynthia Ann in 1826 and his son John in 1829. Cynthia Ann's son, Quanah, was born …

Review Of Riot And Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War And Its Legacy By James S. Hirsch, Hannibal B. Johnson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Riot and Remembrance, James S. Hirsch, an ace reporter formerly affiliated with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, adds his dispassionate voice to the swelling volumes on one of America's most obscure, ignominious racial conflicts: the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. As Hirsch points out, even many native Tulsans knew nothing of the Riot until recent years, the silence surrounding the catastrophe having been deafening. Not only did the Riot escape local civic discourse, it garnered only scant mention-if any mention at all-in state-mandated textbooks.

Why now? Why Tulsa? The answers to both questions turn …

Review Of The Middle Of Everywhere: The World's Refugees Come To Our Town By Mary Pipher, Rochelle L. Dalla

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Identity," writes Pipher, "is no longer based on territory. The world community is small and interconnected. We can learn from this to be kinder and more appreciative of life. And we can learn the importance of understanding the perspectives of all our neighbors in our global village." Philosophically poignant, The Middle of Everywhere presents rich, descriptive narratives of hope, courage, tragedy and resilience through the life-stories of refugees and immigrants, from Bosnia to the Sudan, struggling to create "home" in Lincoln, Nebraska. Significantly, although refugee experiences in one particular Midwestern city are highlighted, one can imagine that any community of …

Book Notes- Winter 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Book Notes

Niddrie of the North-West: Memoirs of a Pioneer Canadian Missionary

A Prairie Mosaic: An Atlas of Central Nebraska's Land, Culture and Nature

The Oregon Trail: A Photographic Journey

Canyons of the Texas High Plains

Dictionary of Midwestern Literature. Volume One: The Authors

The University of Manitoba: An Illustrated History

Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews

Review Of The Methodist Church On The Prairies, 1896- 1914 By George Emery, Sandra Beardsall

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mission efforts in Canada's Midwest played a major part in the development of both the mainline Protestant churches and the young Canadian nation itself. It was on the prairies that Protestants cut their teeth on the interdenominational cooperation that would eventually create Canada's largest Protestant church, The United Church of Canada. And it was in the multifarious ethnic stew of the Canadian Plains that the churches attempted most zealously to forge "Christian Canadian citizens" out of both First Nations populations and immigrants of all stripes. Despite this significant history, there has been no recent monograph focusing on Methodism in this …

Review Of Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty And Federal Law By David E. Wilkins And K. Tsianinia Lomawaima, Blake A. Watson

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

In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Chief Justice John Marshall declared that Indian tribes should be acknowledged "as nations, ... having territorial boundaries, within which their authority is exclusive .... " Justice John McLean, however, questioned whether Indians would always exercise the power of self-government, suggesting that Indian tribes would "become amalgamated in our political communities."
Justice McLean did not dispute that Indian tribes were sovereign; he questioned whether they would-and should-remain sovereign. Some people continue to raise this question. David Wilkins and Tsianinia Lomawaima, in Uneven Ground, begin with the premise that American Indian tribes remain sovereign nations, but …

Review Of Consumers In The Country: Technology And Social Change In Rural America By Ronald R. Kline, Barbara Handy-Marchello

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

Ronald Kline examines the acquisition and use of automobiles, electricity, telephones, and radios among farm families from the early twentieth century to 1960. He builds his argument around the tension between farm folk and the forces of urbanization in cities and towns, federal agencies such as REA and Extension Services, and corporations that manufactured and sold various technologies. While purveyors of machines and energy expected they would initiate urbanization of rural social and economic relationships, and that farm families who adopted them would therefore become modern, farmers resisted both the technologies and the assumptions of urbanization until they found the …

Review Of Rare Vascular Plants Of Alberta By Linda Kershaw, Joyce Gould, Derek Johnson, And Jane Lancaster, Donna Cherniawsky

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

This book is a marvelous addition to the literature on rare vascular plants of Alberta and certainly the most comprehensive. It is itself rare through its inclusion of descriptions, illustrations, photographs, and distribution maps with species lists of rare vascular plants. The editors and many contributors have done magnificent work demonstrating that rare plant information is not static, but always changing as the status of rare plants is continually reviewed with new documentation. An appeal is even made to readers to enhance their awareness and assist with documentation of new rare plant sightings for subsequent status review and conservation. Clearly, …

High Plains Regional Aquifer Study Revisited: A 20-Year Retrospective For Western Kansas, Jeffrey Peterson, Daniel Bernardo

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

The most comprehensive water policy analysis conducted on the High Plains region to date was the High Plains Ogallala Regional Aquifer Study completed in 1982. Twenty years later, we had a unique opportunity to compare the projections from this study with the changes that actually occurred over the past two decades. Specific comparisons were made for the area of western Kansas overlying the High Plains Aquifer. These comparisons revealed some significant differences in the status of the aquifer and in the region's economic development, relative to the predictions of the study. Most notably, contrary to the study's predictions, irrigated area …

Review Of Writing Off The Rural West: Globalization, Governments, And The Transformation Of Rural Communities Edited By Roger Epp And Dave Whitson, K. K. Klein

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

Emerging from a conference on globalization and rural communities held in Edmonton in 1997, Writing Off the West's seventeen chapters (plus a short afterword by prominent rural activist Nettie Wiebe) focus on the decline of rural communities in western Canada and the difficulties some rural people face when adapting to socioeconomic changes caused by globalization and freer international markets.

Most of the volume's twenty-four authors specialize in sociology, geography, political science, and history. Curiously, not one of them has any background in agricultural economics, a discipline that has studied issues pertaining to family farms, rural economies, and globalization intensively throughout …

Book Review Of Crossing The 49th Parallel: Migration From Canada To The United States, 1900- 1930 By Bruno Ramirez, John Lehr

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

The boundary of Canada and the United States is celebrated as the longest undefended border in the world. Despite its length and seeming prominence in North American history, only recently has the border received more than passing attention from historians and geographers. In his insightful and carefully documented book, Bruno Ramirez contends that this is partly because migrants from the United States to Canada, and from Canada to the United States passed through a porous border until the 1900s. With the exception of French Canadians migrating from Quebec to New England, Canadian immigrants did not create the kinds of ethnic …

Review Of On The Backroad To Heaven: Old Order Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish And Brethren By Donald B. Kraybill And Carl F. Bowman, Royden Loewen

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

This is a model ethnography of four pacifist, Christian sectarian groups, each refusing to conform to the urbanizing, consumption-driven, individualistic society of modern times. The groups are European in origin, historically self-conscious, and descended, either directly or indirectly, from the sixteenth-century radical wing of the Reformation, the Anabaptists. They are the progeny of "old immigrants" who arrived in North America in various migration waves between 1711 and 1874. Their frequent censure of modern technology, use of non-conformist plain dress, and life in close-knit and self-sufficient communities have made them highly noticeable. Adding to their visibility, they have become romanticized as …

Review Of Medicine Ways: Disease, Health, And Survival Among Native Americans Edited By Clifford E. Trafzer And Diane Wiener, Benjamin Kracht

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

At first glance, the articles in this anthology appear to be a motley assortment of readings pertaining to Native American health issues, past and present. Upon further examination, however, the essays-written by American Indian and non-Indian historians, anthropologists, and health care professionals-weave a theme relating sociopolitical and socioeconomic variables to historic epidemiology, demonstrating that the processes of colonialism and neocolonialism continue to affect Native American health and health care. A major tenet of the book is that definitions of disease, illness, health, and well-being constructed by non-Indian scholars and health care personnel do not consider Native voices at the individual …

Book Review Of Prairie Wetland Ecology: The Contribution Of The Marsh Ecology Research Program Edited By Henry R. Murkin, Arnold G. Van Der Valk, And William R. Clark, Gary Krapu

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

Developing a thorough understanding of how prairie wetlands function is a daunting challenge. The Marsh Ecology Research Program (MERP) was initiated in response to the recommendation of Milt Weller that a team of specialists develop an experimental multidisciplinary research program to advance marsh management theory. Through the efforts of Bruce Batt, Pat Caldwell, Henry Murkin, and others, a research team was assembled and a long-term project carried out that ultimately led to nearly a hundred scientific papers, sixteen theses and dissertations, and this book.

Review Of The Agricultural Revolution Of The 20th Century By Don Paarlberg And Philip Paarlberg, Lowell Hardin

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

This perceptive, richly illustrated yet compact book is a real jewel. Its span is broad, briefly reaching back to the turn of the century, then carefully documenting the development of modern industrial agriculture. It does not stop there, however. After showing us how the unprecedented scientific and technological advances of the twentieth century triggered the agricultural revolution, it moves on to international dimensions and the functioning of US public agricultural policies. Then, against this storybook background, the authors share their gaze into the twenty-first century.

Book Review Of Cranes The Noblest Flyers: In Natural History And Cultural Lore By Alice Lindsey Price, Felipe Chavez-Ramirez

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

This book is one of several dealing with cranes in recent years. Most offer general information and are not intended to be technical. As someone deeply interested in the plight of cranes, I applaud these efforts for increasing the general public's awareness of cranes and their conservation problems. It is well known that cranes in general have held important connections with human cultures in various parts of the world. Cranes the Noblest Flyers is an effort to explore and present some of those connections, intertwined with information on the family members and the situation of their representatives in current-day North …

Book Review Of Plains Indian Rock Art By James D. Keyser And Michael A. Klassen, Jack Steinbring

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

While its title purports the work to cover the North American Plains, it is, in fact, almost entirely restricted to the northwest Plains. There is a constant effort to attempt iconographic relationships with other areas, including the Columbia Plateau, the Eastern Woodlands, and Precambrian Shield, with inevitably debatable conclusions. Its basic contribution is its highly ambitious effort to synthesize and integrate the full body of northwestern Plains rock art both culturally and chronologically. Although the approach to cultural determinations in the archaeological past and their continuity into identifiable groups in historic times is probably more explicit and definitive than the …

Book Review Of Geoarchaeology In The Great Plains Edited By Rolfe D. Mandel, John Wyckoff

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

This volume emerged from the 1992 symposium "Geoarchaeological Research in the Great Plains: A Historical Perspective" held in conjunction with the fiftieth annual meeting of the Plains Anthropological Society in Lincoln, Nebraska. Edited by the symposium's organizer, it includes an introduction and summary by Mandel and seven chapters covering portions of the Great Plains. Areas identified and contributing authors include the Southern High Plains (Vance T. Holliday), the Southern Osage Plains (C. Reid Ferring), Kansas and Northern Oklahoma (Rolfe D. Mandel), Eastern Plains and Prairies (E. Arthur Bettis), Nebraska (David W. May), the Northwestern Plains (John Albanese), and the Northern …

Review Of Toxic Plants Of North America By George E. Burrows And Ronald J. Tyrl, James Pfister

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

During the spring of 1884 the livestock industry in Kansas was faced with financial ruin when a veterinarian diagnosed foot and mouth disease (FMD). The highly contagious FMD was widespread in parts of the US, and an outbreak in Kansas would have resulted in quarantine for the state's beef, swine, and sheep herds. Experts later determined that the correct diagnosis was non-infectious ergotism, caused by ingestion of prairie hay (primarily Elymus spp.). The panic and turmoil surrounding the ergotism incident launched subsequent investigations into poisonous plants by the newly-formed Bureau of Animal Industry within the Department of Agriculture.