Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

"She Had Never Humbled Herself" Alexandra Bergson And Marie Shabata As The "Real" Pioneers Of O Pioneers!,/I>, Douglas W. Werden

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913) has traditionally been read within the twin contexts of Cather's pioneering childhood and her nostalgic reminiscences that glorify the lives of prairie settlers. These critics interpreted the novel in light of Walt Whitman's poem of the same name in Leaves of Grass, which celebrates the conquering American pioneer who "civilizes" the land for production.¹ More recent critics have contextualized it within her family history, agricultural history, domestic plots, American migration, and women leaving the home.² However, if we consider O Pioneers! in relation to the gender role redefinitions of Cather's adult life, …

"Private" Lives And "Public" Writing Rhetorical Practices Of Western Nebraska Women, Charlotte Hogg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The library in the western Nebraska town of Paxton (population approximately 500) is small, and my grandmother was president of the library board for many years. When I was younger, I learned about the history of the library from her research and writing published in the local county newspaper. In write-ups for both the library's twenty-fifth and fiftieth anniversaries, she described how women "were found to be very handy with hammer and saw" when starting the library.¹ I saw my grandma frequently and had been hearing her stories for years, but here were her words in a newspaper, which …

Review Of Mackenzie King And The Prairie West By Robert A. Wardhaugh, Allen Mills

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

William Lyon Mackenzie King was prime minister of Canada almost continuously between 1921 and his retirement in1948. The main exception was the Conservative government of R. B. Bennett between 1930 and 1935. Yet at the very same time, in all sorts of ways, the Prairie West was, apparently, not part of this victorious parade. The Prairie West instead chose to go a-whoring after strange, sectional, political gods of its own invention: first the Progressive farmers movement after 1921; then Social Credit after 1935; and finally the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, which formed, if we are to believe Seymour Martin Lipset, the …

Review Of Finding The West: Explorations With Lewis And Clark By James P. Ronda, Greg O'Brien

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Amid the hype over the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, University of Tulsa history professor James Ronda has written a work of eminent common sense that provides an antidote to the myth-making surrounding the journey of the Corps of Discovery. A prolific scholar of the West and the Lewis and Clark expedition, Ronda here presents seven "stories" and a map essay examining the wider context, the cultural and political assumptions, and the impact of the trek. "Such a reconsideration," Ronda insists, "might reveal not one voyage but many, not one band of explorers but whole congregations of the …

Review Of Governmentality And The Mastery Of Territory In Nineteenth-Century America By Matthew G. Hannah, Christine Pappas

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This contribution to historical geography maps the idea of governmentality in the nineteenth- century United States through the career of Frances Walker, director of the 1870 and 1880 Census, social commentator, and educator. Drawing on Foucault, Hannah explores Walker's life and work, pinpointing the essential but subtle "moments" in the emergence of governmentality.

Walker's work with the national Census was pivotal, Hannah claims, to increasing governmental control of America's people since it was one of the ways to "internally colonize" a territory. Governmentality, in short, is the "logic of social regulation that consistently blends the principles of freedom and regulation." …

Review Of Ed Ruscha By Neal Benezra And Kerry Brougher, With A Contribution By Phyllis Rosenzweig, Daniel A. Siedell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book, intended to accompany an international traveling retrospective exhibition, is a welcome contribution to understanding Ed Ruscha's important but underappreciated role in the complex and diverse history of postwar American art. Although he has long been regarded as one of the "important" contemporary artists who came to aesthetic maturity in the mid-1960s, why he is important has not been sufficiently demonstrated. This publication points the way.

The number and quality of reproductions of Rusch a's work are the book's most important contribution. The images alone demonstrate the sheer diversity and energy of Ruscha's aesthetic vocabulary, a vocabulary that is …

Congressman Usher Burdick Of North Dakota And The "Ungodly Menace" Anti-United Nations Rhetoric, 1950-1958, Bernard Lemelin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the rare studies dealing with American post-World War II isolationism, the state of North Dakota always holds a special place, as it has acquired the reputation of having been "the nation's most isolationist state during [the] postwar decade."¹ To a large extent, this reputation can be ascribed to the attitude of some of its prominent members on Capitol Hill, such as Senators William Langer, who voted against the United Nations Charter in 1945, and his colleague Milton Young, an opponent of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949.² Representative Usher Burdick, who sat between 1949 and 1959, also …

Robertson Davies: Narrative Structure And The Search For A Canadian Identity, Angela M. Busboom

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Book Review: Reimagining Indians: Native Americans Through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940 By Sherry L. Smith, Lincoln Faller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Without Indians-or, rather, their imaginings of them-white Americans would hardly know how to define themselves. This well-researched and clearly written book offers biographical sketches of six men and four women who, writing about Native Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, seem to have done as much if not more to reimagine themselves.

Book Review: Telling Tales: Essays In Western Women's History, Jane Reid Thompson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This new collection of essays is a welcome contribution to the literature on women in the Canadian West from 1880 to 1940. It continues the fine work the editors started in their 1993 collection Standing on New Ground: Women in Alberta. Both the essays themselves and the editors' cogent and insightful introduction "show the diversity of newcomer women's experiences while highlighting common themes in the construction and reshaping of gender relationships during the colonization and settlement of western Canada." This volume will be of interest not just to scholars of Canadian women's history but of women in the North …

Book Review: Tent Show: Arthur Names And His "Famous" Players By Donald W. Whisenhunt, Terry Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tent shows traveled throughout much of the United States, achieving their greatest success prior to the 1920s and gradually disappearing by the 1950s. Small towns in areas like the Great Plains looked forward with great anticipation to their form of entertainment tailored specially for rural audiences.

Tent Show is the story of Art Names and how he and his partner William Whisenhunt managed to maintain a traveling tent show until Names's death in 1945. Donald W. Whisenhunt, through research in Names's papers and interviews with his family members and friends, gives an …

Book Review: The Urban Indian Experience In America By Donald L. Fixico, Liz Grobsmith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Donald Fixico's study of urban Indians may seem at first to be a review of a well-known and well-documented period: the shift from reservation life to urban relocation as a result of the US government's deliberate assimilationist policies of the 1950s. Surely the historical attitudes regarding reservation termination and urban relocation have been amply documented in the last half century. But Fixico takes us beyond the historical realities to an in-depth look at Indian life in urban America, focusing on the variety of concerns with which these populations have had to cope: economic viability; employment and financial stability; access to …

Book Review: General Crook And The Western Frontier By Charles M. Robinson Iii, Michael L. Tate

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Few frontier military officers could claim a more varied and significant combat career during the second half of the nineteenth century than George Crook. Beginning with service as a young lieutenant in the Rogue River War and the Yakima War of the 1850s, he learned quickly about the weaknesses of an army that suffered from underfunding, congressional neglect, low morale, and petty bickering among its officer corps. Despite his commanding troops during the next three decades in some of the most celebrated Indian wars of the Great Plains and Southwest, he also developed an empathy for his adversaries who suffered …

Book Review: Wild Stone Heart: An Apprentice In The Fields By Sharon Butala, Bill Draper Finlaw

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the aftermath of September 11th, the recommendation of a book by what the Toronto Star called "one of this country's true visionaries" may seem an ill-afforded luxury. Butala's odyssey may become all the more suspect when we realize that her book centers on walking in a field in southwest Saskatchewan. How might such a book address the smell of burning metal and flesh?

Actually, quite well. Wild Stone Heart asks us to descend into an underworld of both grief and possibility which works in, with, and under the land upon which Butala traverses. She envisions "layers of presence" where …

Book Review: Âh-Âyîtaw Isi Ê-Kî-Kiskêyihtahkik Maskihkiy . They Knew Both Sides Of Medicine: Cree Tales Of Curing And Cursing. Told By Alice Ahenakew, Rory M. Larson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Linguists and students of reservation-period Indian lore should welcome this finely crafted book. The heart of the work is a series of recordings of Alice Ahenakew, a prominent elderly Plains Cree woman from northern Saskatchewan. These are the memoirs of her life, lived in a haunted half-way world between a subarctic foraging culture and the twentieth- century industrial West.

Book Review: The Native American Oral Tradition: Voices Of The Spirit And Soul By Lois J. Einhorn, Randall A. Lake

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This excellent, albeit imperfect, book reexamines indigenous North American oral traditions as alternatives to mainstream Western discourses. Neither a literary anthology of Native myths nor an oral history of storytellers, it treats these traditions as persuasive messages addressed to audiences. Einhorn, rhetoric professor at Binghamton University, combines "transtextual" analysis of metaphor and symbol with "contextual" considerations of time, place, and cultural assumptions in an ambitious study of indigenous rhetoric spanning myriad speakers, nations, regions, and periods.

Casting The Buffalo Commons: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Print Media Coverage Of The Buffalo Commons Proposal For The Great Plains, Mary L. Umberger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

T hey filed into the auditorium and found seats, waiting politely for what they expected to be a preposterous talk. The featured speaker rose and began his prepared speech. The audience took note of his attire, his educated vocabulary, his "eastern" ways. Their scrutiny became vocal as he proposed his dream for the Great Plains.

Book Review: Contested Territory: Whites, Native Americans, And African Americans In Oklahoma, 1865- 1907. By Murray R. Wickett, Linda W. Reese

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Many historians have recognized the tripartite nature of race relations in the Great Plains region and the aggressive negotiation for power this created in the post Civil War period, but each has selected a manageable portion of the story to interpret. Murray Wickett deserves recognition for intertwining the central issues affecting all three races into a meaningful analysis. The choice of Oklahoma as the site of interaction is rich with possibilities but fraught with complexity. Acculturated and non-acculturated Indians, mixed-bloods and full-bloods, Indian freedmen and southern migrant freedmen, Twin Territories, Democrats and Republicans, white entrepreneurs and white tenant farmers- each …

Book Review: Spirit Beings And Sun Dancers: Black Hawk’S Vision Of The Lakota World By Janet Catherine Berlo, James D. Keyser

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1880 the Lakota warrior Black Hawk drew a series of seventy-six ledger drawings in exchange for credit at William Caton’s Cheyenne River Reservation trade store. In 1994, these drawings were purchased for the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Working with Sioux elders, Janet Berlo has analyzed Black Hawk’s drawings in a beautiful book that will interest Plains scholars. As an artist, Black Hawk drew seventeen typical ledger art warfare scenes, but probably more valuable are the drawings of his visions, Sioux cosmology and ceremonies, and even enemy Crow warriors. He also drew seventeen natural history studies showing …

Book Review: Willa Cather's Southern Connections: New Essays On Cather And The South, Marcia Robertson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The cover of Willa Cather's Southern Connections reproduces one square of what is Known as the Robinson-Cather quilt, an image that testifies to a communal-and female-artistic tradition in which Cather's Back Creek, Virginia, kinswomen participated and with which her often heroic literary fictions seem to have little relation. Ann Romines participates in a quilting process of her own, piecing together seventeen revised essays from the seventh of a series of international conferences on Willa Cather held in 1997. Both conference and volume recontextualize a writer so often seen as Nebraskan or Western within a Southern matrix, asking Cather's readers to …

Book Review: Alberta Society Of Artists: The First Seventy Years By Kathy E. Zimon, Colleen Skidmore

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Kathy E. Zimon, Fine Arts Librarian Emeritus at the University of Calgary, has launched a new career as a researcher on Alberta art and artists. Her first major work, on the Alberta Society of Artists, is a valuable accounting of names, dates, issues, and images of an important aspect of the history of art in Alberta and a timely contribution to the study of art institutions in Canada.