Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Book Review Of The War On Weeds In The Prairie West: An Environmental History By Clinton L. Evans, Ian Morrison

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

A book written by an environmental historian who proclaims that weeds are "more than vegetative shadows of capitalist farmers" but instead "both products of and participants in culture" is bound to stimulate an interest in and reaction to his work. The War on Weeds does just that. It is both informative and provocative in broaching a subject most people would easily dismiss as irrelevant to the settlement of the West.

Review Of The Nature Of Nebraska: Ecology And Biodiversity Paul A. Johnsgard, L. Lareesa Wolfenbarger

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

As a newcomer to Nebraska and someone learning the natural history of this place, I thoroughly enjoyed The Nature of Nebraska. More consequentially, the book will serve as a valuable resource for longtime naturalists, teachers, and others who want to learn about Nebraska's natural history.

Opening with a discussion of geology and ecology, Johnsgard offers a broad overview of Nebraska's ecological diversity, intertwining material on the natural forces that have historically dominated the Plains with a discussion of the anthropogenic forces currently altering the region's unique ecological nature. Approximately half of the book is devoted to more specific descriptions …

Bosnian Refugrees’ Adjustments To Resettlement In Grand Forks, North Dakota, Devon Hansen

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

Upheaval causes many people to flee intolerable conditions in their own countries and to seek better lives elsewhere. The United States plays a pivotal role in the resettlement of refugees uprooted by these crises. The refugee resettlement program in North Dakota primarily assists the refugees in making a better life, and it ultimately helps the state's quest for population growth, ethnic diversity, and economic development. This study deals with refugee resettlement in North Dakota communities, specifically Bosnian refugees in Grand Forks. Survey questionnaires and interviews were used to gain an understanding of the issues that the Bosnians face in adjusting …

Annual Index - Great Plains Research Vol. 13 No. 2, 2003

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

Annual Index

Review Of Tiger Beetles Of Alberta: Killers On The Clay, Stalkers On The Sand By John Acorn, Stephen Spomer, William Allgeier

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

John Acorn has taken a nontraditional, perhaps even a little eccentric, approach to this first volume in a series on Alberta insects. Well known for his television series Acorn: The Nature Nut, the author draws on his expertise to give us a colorful and informative examination of tiger beetles, masterfully expelling scientific jargon along the way and replacing it with more user-friendly terminology.

Acorn opens with a personal account of how he got involved in "tiger beetling," adding folklore-including colorful terms such as "chicken choker" (apparently a Southeastern US term for tiger beetles)-to his account as well as warnings …

Review Of Willard Cochrane And The American Family Farm By Richard A. Levins, Frederick Kirschenmann

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

This slim volume combines two compelling stories: a personal and touching introduction to Willard Cochrane, the man and the professional agricultural economist; and a thoughtful analysis of the politics and industrial intrigue that shaped American farm policy during the past eight decades. The theme that ties them together is the independent family farm in America. This double-faceted story puts a human face on a critical dilemma that has confronted America since the time of Thomas Jefferson: Americans have always embraced the family farm, but conversely they have never been able to create an enduring environment in which family farmers could …

Review Of Learning To Be An Anthropologist And Remaining "Native": Selected Writings By Beatrice Medicine, Edited With Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Thomas P. Myers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This engaging compendium of essays chronicles the professional contributions of Dr. Beatrice Medicine, a Lakota raised on the Standing Rock Reservation. She earned a B.S. degree from South Dakota State University in 1945 and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin- Madison in 1983 after many years as a professional anthropologist. She has served as an academic anthropologist at no less than ten universities since retiring in 1988 and also worked as an applied anthropologist during this time. As a Native American who remains an active participant in her Native culture, she brings to her work a cultural perspective infrequently …

Review Of The Indian Association Of Alberta: A History Of Political Action By Laurie Meijer Drees, Joe Sawchuk

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Native political organizations occupy a unique and important place in the Canadian political arena, whether on the national, provincial, or regional level. They offer a forum where both Native leaders and mainstream politicians can confer and, perhaps even more importantly, be seen to be conferring. This book is a study of one of the most influential of these organizations, the Indian Association of Alberta (IAA), from its beginning in 1939 as an organization devoted to regional and com~ unity issues to the 1960s, when it led the fight against the Trudeau government's "White Paper."

One of the volume's strengths is …

At The Head Of The Aboriginal Remnant: Cherokee Construction Of A "Civilized" Indian Identity During The Lakota Crisis Of 1876, Paul Kelton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1876 the bilingual Cherokee diplomat and lawyer William Penn Adair expressed great pride in the level of "civilization" that his nation had achieved. Defining civilization as commercial agriculture, literacy, Christianity, and republican government, Adair believed that his society had reached a sophistication that equaled and in certain areas surpassed that of the United States. Speaking before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Territories, the diplomat claimed that his people produced surpluses of "every agricultural product that is raised in the neighboring States of Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Texas." Schools in the Indian Territory, he added, produced a vast …

Native Weeds And Exotic Plants: Relationships To Disturbance In Mixed-Grass Prairie, Diane L. Larson

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

Disturbance frequently is implicated in the spread of invasive exotic plants. Disturbances may be broadly categorized as endogenous (e.g., digging by fossorial animals) or exogenous (e.g., construction and maintenance of roads and trails), just as weedy species may be native or exotic in origin. The objective of this study was to characterize and compare exotic and native weedy plant occurrence in and near three classes of disturbance – digging by prairie dogs (an endogenous disturbance to which native plants have had the opportunity to adapt), paved or gravel roads (an exogenous disturbance without natural precedent), and constructed trails (an exogenous …

Male Brown-Headed Cowbird Attacks And Kills A Nestling, Lawrence D. Igl

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

I observed a male Brown-headed Cowbird (Molothrus ater) attack and kill a nestling of an unidentified passerine in a grassland field in Day County, South Dakota, in June 2000. The killing or removal of nestlings by female cowbirds has been reported by others, but this behavior has not been documented previously in male cowbirds.

Evaluation Of Landscape Models For Wolverines In The Interier Northwest, United States Of America, Mary M. Rowland, Michael J. Wisdom, Douglas H. Johnson, Barbara C. Wales, Jeffrey P. Copeland, Frank B. Edelmann

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

The wolverine (Gulo gulo) is an uncommon, wide-ranging carnivore of conservation con- cern. We evaluated performance of landscape models for wolverines within their historical range at 2 scales in the interior Northwest based on recent observations (n = 421) from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. At the sub-basin scale, simple overlays of habitat and road-density classes were effective in predicting observations of wolverines. At the watershed scale, we used a Bayesian belief network model to provide spatially explicit estimates of relative habitat capability. The model has 3 inputs: amount of habitat, human population density, and road density. …

Sampling Designs For Carnivore Scent-Station Surveys, Glen A. Sargeant, Douglas H. Johnson, William E. Berg

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

Scent stations usually are deployed in clusters to expedite data collection and increase the number of stations that can be operated for a given cost. Presumed benefits of cluster sampling may not be realized, however, unless cluster sizes are chosen with respect to sampling variation within and among clusters. To encourage and facilitate the use of efficient designs and reporting standards, we used data collected in Minnesota, USA, during 1986-1991 to (1) compare the performance of survey designs with various numbers of stations/cluster; (2) estimate relations between required sample sizes and visitation rates, changes in visitation rates, and error rates; …

Effects Of Ungulates And Prairie Dogs On Seed Banks And Vegetation In A North American Mixed-Grass Prairie, Jace T. Fahnestock, Diane L. Larson, Glenn E. Plumb, James K. Detling

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

The relationship between vegetation cover and soil seed banks was studied in five different ungulate herbivoreprairie dog treatment combinations at three northern mixed-grass prairie sites in Badlands National Park, South Dakota. There were distinct differences in both the seed bank composition and the aboveground vegetation between the off-prairie dog colony treatments and the on-colony treatments. The three on-colony treatments were similar to each other at all three sites with vegetation dominated by the forbs Dyssodia papposa, Hedeoma spp., Sphaeralcea coccinea, Conyza canadensis, and Plantago patagonica and seed banks dominated by the forbs Verbena bracteata and Dyssodia papposa. The …

Context And Demonizing The I.R.A., Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article questions a consensus that the I.R.A. is largely responsible for the recent suspension of Northern Ireland’s home-rule government by the United Kingdom.

Review Of Waltzing With The Ghost Of Tom Joad: Poverty, Myth, And Low-Wage Labor In Oklahoma By Robert Lee Maril, Ginette Aley

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

The Great Plains is home to a range of economic experiences, yet little research has focused on the roles that poor people and poverty have played in society. Constantly, though, the ghost of Tom Joad, John Steinbeck's protagonist in The Grapes of Wrath, has reminded us of the status of the contemporary poor while also embodying the potential for social change. Robert Lee Maril, has produced the first comprehensive analysis of poverty in Oklahoma, the eighth poorest state in the nation, in which he explores myths about the poor and the "real" causes of poverty, especially low-wage labor. Maril …

Community Dynamics Of An Ecotonal Forest-Prairie Interface In Northeastern Kansas, Elizabeth Hane, Steven Hamburg

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

Climate change models predict that ecotones, which are boundaries between two biomes, are likely to be the first place we see the effects of climate change. However, very little baseline data exist for these areas and their current community structure. In order to better understand the community dynamics of an ecotonal forest, a 2.2 ha 60- year-old upland forest in northeastern Kansas was monitored for 10 years. This oak-hickory forest at the ecotone with the tallgrass prairie biome is growing more slowly than other forests of similar species composition farther east, possibly due to lower levels of available soil moisture …

Review Of Birds Of The Texas Panhandle: Their Status, Distribution, And History By Kenneth D. Seyffert, Mark Lockwood

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

Birds of the Texas Panhandle is the first book to focus on the avifauna of this region of Texas. Seyffert has been studying the Panhandle's birds for almost forty years, and no one is more qualified to provide a comprehensive overview of its bird life. His work concentrates on the twenty-six counties that make up the Panhandle, including habitats from two physiographic regions, the High Plains and the Rolling Plains. Seyffert details the occurrence of 406 avian species that have been satisfactorily documented in the study area and thirty-six others that have been reported without supporting details. Each species account …

Review Of Kansas Breeding Bird Atlas By William H. Busby And John L. Zimmerman, Paul A. Johnsgard

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

Kansas has now joined the expanding group of Midwestern states for which breeding bird atlases have recently been published, including South Dakota (1995), Iowa (1996), Missouri (1997), and Nebraska (200 I). Atlases are also in preparation or in press for Oklahoma and Texas, which will soon help fill out distributional knowledge of the Great Plains avifauna in a way unimaginable when I was assembling regional data for my Birds of the Great Plains: The Breeding Species and Their Distribution (1979).

Great Plains Research Volume 12, Number 2, Fall 2002 - Table Of Contents

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

Cover and table of contents

Review Of Freshwater Ecoregions Of North America: A Conservation Assessment By Robin A. Abell, David M. Olson, Eric Dinerstein, Patrick T. Hurley, Et Al., Arnold Van Der Valk

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

Defining ecogregions as "relatively large areas of land or water that contain a geographically distinct assemblage of natural communities," this book documents the efforts of the World Wildlife Fund-United States to identify areas with aquatic habitats in the United States, Canada, and Mexico that support "globally outstanding biological diversity." Public and private conservation groups can then focus their efforts on preserving the aquatic ecosystems of the most globally significant areas.

The book opens with its authors' discussion of their use of a biological distinctiveness index, focusing on fish, mussels, and crayfish species, to delineate the ecoregions of North America. Much …

Review Of Addictions And Native Americans By Laurence Armand French, Benson Tong

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

Notwithstanding the title, this short book focuses largely on health issues arising from alcoholism in the indigenous population of North America. The evidence overwhelmingly points to this particular substance abuse as the number-one killer among Native Americans, accounting for the four leading causes of death: accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, suicide, and homicide. Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), which plagues infants with physical and psychological problems, is another effect of Indian alcoholism.

Review Of F. P. Grove In Europe And Canada: Translated Lives By Klaus Martens, Irene Gammel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Canada's leading prairie author Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948) had a predilection for strong and silent heroes: the unforgettable Niels Lindstedt in Settlers of the Marsh (1925), Abe Spalding in Fruits of the Earth (1933), John Elliot in Our Daily Bread (1928). Grove's fictional landscape was a multicultural potpourri of immigrants from Sweden, Iceland, Germany, and Russia with new-world men and women transforming the prairie wilderness into fertile and flourishing settlements. Yet Grove, aka German author and translator Felix Paul Greve, was also a literary con man who led his audience down the garden path in a fictionalized autobiography, In Search …

Review Of Letters From The Dust Bowl By Caroline Henderson, Brian Q. Cannon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1907, Caroline Boa, a thirty-year-old school teacher and graduate of Mount Holyoke College, filed on a quarter section in the Oklahoma Panhandle. The following year she married Will Henderson, a one-time cowboy, well-digger, and would-be rancher. For the next fifty-seven years the couple farmed their homestead, although Caroline also taught school for three years in another community and later spent two years working on a master's degree.

Henderson is best known for her "Letters from the Dust Bowl," published by Atlantic Monthly in 1936, one of dozens of articles she wrote for popular magazines between 1913 and 1937. In …

Review Of Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions By Joseph Epes Brown With Emily Cousins, Kathleen Danker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This volume passes on to readers some of the teachings of the late scholar and educator Joseph Epes Brown. In consultation with Brown's wife Elenita Brown and daughter Marina Brown Weatherly, writer and editor Emily Cousins has produced a clear and succinct synthesis of what Brown taught his classes at the University of Montana about Native American concepts of the sacred. She accomplishes this through the complex task of blending some of his class lecture notes, published articles, and conference talks with recollections from his students and quotations from published Native American sources.

Following Brown's example in his lectures, Cousins …

Review Of Plain Speaking: Essays On Aboriginal Peoples And The Prairie Edited By Patrick Douaud And Bruce Dawson, L. Brooks Hill

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Primarily derived from a March 2001 conference held in Regina, Saskatchewan, these essays present diverse perspectives on various connections between First Nations and Metis peoples and the Canadian Plains. Designed to create a more holistic perspective, the conference and this companion book used a wide variety of presentational formats to capture the diversity of past and present connections between Aboriginal Peoples and the prairies. The twelve articles range from traditional academic reports to autobiographical commentaries, photo essays, and transcribed interviews from an Elders' roundtable.

Essential to this collection is the confrontation of modernism with traditionalism. In his article Neal McLeod …

Review Of Rebirth Of The Blackfeet Nation, 1912-1954 By Paul C. Rosier, Darrell Robes Kipp

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a Blackfeet tribal member researching my tribe for over twenty-five years through the medium of its language, I read Paul Rosier's book with trepidation because accurate accounting is not a hallmark of most historical analysis done on the tribe. Too often I detect research flaws based on notions contrary to our oral tradition, and I marvel at the distorted interpretations. Rosier's book is excruciatingly revealing, honest, and important. Not just to me, despite my hardened edge, but for the uninformed reader as well. The chronicle is powerfully laced with pages of stark reality, and wanton subterfuge. One of the …

Review Of Orphan Trains: The Story Of Charles Loring Brace And The Children He Saved And Failed By Stephen O' Connor, Marilyn Irvin Holt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Charles Loring Brace, who began working among the poor as a city missionary and became the force behind the New York Children's Aid Society (CAS), is best remembered as the architect of the orphan trains, a placement program that sent thousands of orphaned, destitute, and abandoned children to new homes, including those in the Plains states. This biography of Brace places him within the context of his times and renders a more extensive view of the man and his beliefs than found in other publications. The volume offers insights into CAS programs for the poor in New York City and, …

A Longitudinal Approach To Great Plains Migration, John C. Hudson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Students of population and regional studies are familiar with the demographic "accounting" equation,

Population _t+x = Population _t + Births _x

-Deaths _x + Immigration _x

- Emigration _x

In other words, the size of the population at time t + x is equal to the population at time t plus the births, minus the deaths, plus the immigrants, minus the emigrants, during the interval of time x. This simple formula can be used to derive a variety of rates and statistics describing population change. The equation's main application is to describe short-term change in a population in terms …

Review Of A Flowering Of Quilts Edited By Patricia Cox Crews, Joe Cunningham

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A Flowering of Quilts comes to us from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s International Quilt Study Center, created by Robert and Ardis James, who donated their magnificent collection of quilts to the university. The book is the catalogue of a two-year exhibition at the Center called "Fanciful Flowers: Botany and the American Quilt" focusing on the connection between American women's love of floral designs in quilts and their affinity for botany in the nineteenth century.

The book itself is like a great walled garden of flowers. Before you can get to the gorgeous photographs of the fifty-three quilts, you must scale …