Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Influence Of Habitat On Distribution And Abundance Of The Eastern Woodrat In Kansas, Jon P. Beckmann, Glennis A. Kaufman, Donald W. Kaufman

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

Anthropogenic modification of native woodlands and grasslands in the Great Plains has altered the abundance and distribution of many species of mammals. To study habitat effects on the eastern woodrat (Neotoma floridana), we surveyed nests of the eastern woodrat in woodlands, grasslands, and croplands along 77 km of secondary roads in three counties in north-central Kansas. All nests were located in woodlands ( < 2 %of habitat), although grasslands and croplands constituted 36% and 62% of habitat surveyed, respectively. In our survey, nests were associated positively with shelterbelts (3.6 nests per 100 m of road edge) but not with shrub patches (1.1 nests per 100 m of road edge) or riparian woodlands (0.3 nests per 100 m of road edge). Consequently, we specifically censused nests in an additional 12 riparian woodlands and 12 shelterbelts. Nests of eastern woodrats were less dense in riparian woodlands (9.4 nests/ha) than in shelterbelts (55.5 nests/ha). Density of woodrat nests decreased as width of a wooded area increased. Further, nests per 100 m of length of woodland did not increase as the width of woodland increased. These patterns suggest that woodland edge, not woodland interior, is the primary factor in abundance of eastern woodrats in this region. Although the eastern woodrat has previously been considered a woodland species, our results suggest that this assessment is incorrect. Our observations demonstrate that anthropogenic modification of the Great Plains, in the form of planted shelterbelts and expanded riparian woodland, likely has increased the distribution and abundance of eastern woodrats, compared to the mid-1800s.

Review Of North America: A Geographical Mosaic Edited By Frederick W. Boal And Stephen A. Royle, William C. Johnson

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

Boal and Royle, geographers from Belfast's Queen's University, have assembled a volume consisting of twenty-four individually authored chapters (essays) organized into seven sections. Section A, an introduction by the editors, relates the geologic process of continental drift (collision) and accretion to social processes involved in the cultural history of North America. This enterprising chapter neatly sets the stage for the ensuing sections and chapters. “The Physical and Biotic Milieux” (Section B) consists of three chapters focusing on physiography and earth surface processes, weather and climate, and the relationship of culture to environment. The first of these chapters is a bit …

Social Values In The Assessment Of Livestock Grazing In The Great Plains, R. K. Heitschmidt, J. D. Johnson, K. D. Klement

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

We examined the sustainability of the livestock grazing industry in the Great Plains of North America relative to ecological processes, economic viability, and social acceptance. We conclude from the review that livestock grazing is an appropriate use of Great Plains grasslands and, when properly managed, ecologically sustainable. However, we also present evidence that the Great Plains grazing industry is not always economically sustainable or socially acceptable. We attribute this anomaly in large part to the consuming public's general lack of understanding and appreciation for the ecological linkages between current livestock grazing tactics and the evolutionary history of the Great Plains. …

Review Of Contested Classrooms: Education, Globalization, And Democracy In Alberta Edited By Trevor W. Harrison And Jerrold L. Kachur, Veronika Bohac Clarke

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

Contested Classrooms is a collaboration of fourteen authors, most of whom hold doctorates in either educational administration, sociology, political science, psychology, or the humanities. They represent a broad range of educational stakeholders-professors, leaders in the province-wide Alberta Teachers' Association, associates of research institutes, and administrators in the province's public school systems. Together, they contribute experience, expertise, and scholarship to the volume.

The editors' intent is "not only to increase public understanding of education and the deep social, political, and economic change occurring in Alberta, but to goad readers into action and to shape the future direction of public education." Cautioning …

Review Of Hog Ties: Pigs, Manure, And Mortality In American Culture By Richard P. Horwitz, John E. Ikerd

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

This book is "an attempt to track moral and practical connections among disparate things" concerning pigs, as Richard Horwitz finally points out in the last chapter. The first part dabbles with the role of pigs in American culture, but the author moves quickly to his personal experiences as a college professor with a part-time job on a hog farm, leading up to a key event in the book-an eyewitness account of a transmissible gastroenteritis (TGE) outbreak on a hog farm.

Habitat Fragmentation Effects On Birds In Grasslands And Wetlands: A Critique Of Our Knowledge, Douglas Johnson

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

Habitat fragmentation exacerbates the problem of habitat loss for grassland and wetland birds. Remaining patches of grasslands and wetlands may be too small, too isolated, and too influenced by edge effects to maintain viable populations of some breeding birds. Knowledge of the effects of fragmentation on bird populations is critically important for decisions about reserve design, grassland and wetland management, and implementation of cropland set-aside programs that benefit wildlife. In my review of research that has been conducted on habitat fragmentation, I found at least five common problems in the methodology used. The results of many studies are compromised by …

Evidence Of American Woodcock Nesting In Southeastern South Dakota, Felicia Y. Sargeant, Glen A. Sargeant

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

Generally, breeding-season observations of American woodcock in North Dakota have been considered noteworthy. Stewart (1975) compiled reports of two unconfirmed instances of breeding prior to 1923. He also reported observations of American woodcock during the breeding seasons of 1923, 1934, 1957, 1969, and 1972 and that a courtship territory was occupied by a displaying male in 1971 and 1972. Smith and Barclay (1978) surveyed individuals in wildlife agencies, universities, and ornithological societies for reports of breeding by American woodcock and obtained four reports of courtship displays in North Dakota, but none of nesting. Faanes and Andrew (1983) banded a male …

Weapons As Weapons: Another Northern Ireland Impasse, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article explores the psychology of weapons possession in the context of political conflict in Northern Ireland.

Review Of Larry Mcmurtry: A Critical Companion By John M. Reilly, Tom Pilkington

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his recent travel book, Roads: Driving America's Great Highways, Larry McMurtry declares himself a plainsman born and bred. He makes no bones about his preference for the American West-especially the Great Plains-over the East and the South. Certainly much of McMurtry's fiction implicitly suggests this preference. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove, for example, follows an epic nineteenth-century cattle drive from the tip of south Texas to Montana near the Canadian border, and the writer's feeling for the land comes through loud and clear in his descriptive prose.

That McMurtry was chosen as the subject of one …

A New Vision Of America Lewis And Clark And The Emergence Of The American Imagination, James P. Hendrix Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When Lewis and Clark awakened in St. Louis on 24 September 1806, one suspects that they felt quite well rested. They had just slept in regular beds for the first time in 864 days. As men who "had forgotten the use of chairs ... they must have had a way of standing and a look in their eyes," Bernard De Yoto imagines.¹ Now was the time for reverie, and celebration, as the capital of the Northern Louisiana Territory welcomed back explorers who had been given up as lost.

Two days later, as the initial fanfare began to subside, Clark …

Review Of Holding Stone Hands: On The Trail Of The Cheyenne Exodus By Alan Boye, John H. Monnett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1995 Alan Boye, an English professor at Lyndon State College in Vermont, began a thousand-mile journey on foot retracing the steps of Little Wolf's and Dull Knife's Northern Cheyennes in 1878-1879 that took them from Indian Territory to Montana. The Cheyennes were escaping from deplorable conditions on the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Indian Reservation at Darlington Agency near Fort Reno, Indian Territory. Troops from four federal military departments were eventually placed in the field to stop them.

Fighting their way through Indian Territory and Kansas, the Indians eventually split into two groups in Nebraska. Dull Knife's followers were captured …

Review Of Frontier Children By Linda Peavy And Ursula Smith, Susan Arrington Madsen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The last decade has seen an increasing number of publications dedicated to the history of young people in the American West. Frontier Children is a welcome addition to this genre. Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith have written a compelling and often emotional account of growing up in the American West, providing a comfortable blend of historical background, information, and hard-hitting personal accounts of young persons who witnessed the taming of the West firsthand.

The authors have dealt successfully with the challenge of representing the wide variety of lives pioneer children experienced. The book is well-organized into chapters dealing with such …

Review Of The Rapid City Indian School, 1898-1933 By Scott Riney, Amy M. Goodburn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book contributes to the growing canon of historical accounts of American Indian government boarding schools that operated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Focusing specifically on the thirty-five year history of the Rapid City Indian School, Riney analyzes interactions between school administrators and Northern Plains Indian parents and their children. Organized around such themes as curriculum, discipline, cycles of days and years, employees, and BIA influence, the book describes the Rapid City Indian School's regional importance to schooling on the Northern Plains and its relationship to the larger history of US Indian education.

The most groundbreaking chapter, …

Review Of The Frontier Army In The Settlement Of The West By Michael L. Tate, Richard Winders

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Readers conditioned to expect any book with "army" in its title to be filled with detailed descriptions of campaigns and battles will be disappointed with Michael L. Tate's Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West. Instead of focusing on the conquest of the West by force of arms, Tate describes the army's vital role as agent for economic and cultural development. An example of new military history, an approach that examines the social aspects of soldiering, his work is a significant contribution to our understanding of the American West.

Tate's thesis is that the army provided civilians in …

Notes And News- Summer 2001

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Frederick C. Luebke Award 2001

Great Plains Migrations (7-9 March 2002)

75th Anniversary Of Prairie Schooner

New Director For Emporia State University's Center For Great Plains Studies

Great Plains Restoration Council

National Cowgirl Museum And Hall Of Fame

Review Of New Moon At Batoche: Reflections On The Urban Prairie By George Melnyk, Birk Sproxton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his latest book of cultural analysis, George Melnyk deplores the fact that although the great majority of Prairie Canadians live in urban areas, the dominant iconography of the region celebrates the land and denigrates the city. Melnyk asks how such a huge number of people (more than seven in ten) could be "excluded from the region's imagination?" "This is only possible," he says, answering his own question, "because city life has not been associated with the region's identity in any major way." Imagining the city is the role of artists and intellectuals, and in the nine essays that make …

Review Of Sing With The Heart Of A Bear: Fusions Of Native And American Poetry, 1890~ 1999 By Kenneth Lincoln, William M. Clements

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the North American Review for 1815, Walter Channing suggested that America could compensate for its lack of a literary heritage distinct from Europe by attending to the "oral literature of its aborigines." Though probably not the first to propose this idea, Channing was among the earliest to call upon writers in the United States to found an indigenous belletristic tradition upon Native American models. The call has been periodically taken up by commentators on American literature ever since; William Gilmore Simms, Mary Austin, and now Kenneth Lincoln have all found the roots of a truly American literature in American …

Review Of The Family Farmers' Advocate: South Dakota Farmers Union, 1914-2000 By Lynwood E. Oyos, Herbert T. Hoover

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Two themes stand out in this extraordinary analysis of decline in family farm population on the Northern Great Plains since the 1930s. One is the organization of farmers and ranchers as a reaction to economic colonialism and inhospitable natural conditions. Lynwood Oyos properly portrays the Farmers Union as the largest rural organization with a politically liberal disposition in the history of his state. Its leaders, representing as many as 21, 600 members (in 1949), fashioned "a triangle" of functions to include cooperative services, education of members, and lobbying for assistance from both state and national governments. Oyos chronicles the Farmers …

Review Of Will Rogers: A Biography By Ben Yagoda, James M. Smallwood

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ben Yagoda has produced an excellent biography of Oklahoma's Will Rogers, the "All American Common Man" who spoke for the dispossessed and lowly, while poking fun at the rich and powerful. Yet what helps make Yagoda's study a good one may well cause controversy. Most of the previous works on Will Rogers, perhaps even my own, have tended to let him evolve into a legendary, almost mythical, character, glorifying his saintly virtues and ignoring his vices.

Will represented an old West where manly virtues abounded. Born the son of an Indian rancher, he grew up in the Cattle Kingdom that …

Review Of Hard Travelin'; The Life And Legacy Of Woody Guthrie Edited By Robert Santelli And Emily Davidson, Timothy E. Scheurer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a Midwesterner, I was always proud that Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan may have been the two musicians most responsible for making popular music a viable instrument for raising social consciousness in the twentieth century. So it was with great anticipation that I opened Hard Travelin' : The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie. Happily, the book lived up to all my expectations.

Its major strengths are its wonderful combination of contributors and the scope of subjects covered. Divided into three sections, "Ramblin' Round," "Pastures of Plenty," and "This Land Is Your Land," the collection opens with a …

Review Of Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong By James W. Loewen, Thomas D. Isern

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Fairness demands confession of a certain chronology in my preparing this review. I read the work under discussion and then, before writing about it, began reading The Use and Abuse of Australian History (2000) by Graeme Davison. Lies Across America suffers by comparison to the masterly Australian work. My yellow-pad notes document, however, that before reading Davison I had already recorded my disappointments with James W. Loewen's work.

To give it its due, the book is entertaining and thought-provoking. Where Loewen finds fault, there generally is fault, and the accumulation of such faults in perceptible patterns gives pause. It is …

Review Of Aboriginal People And Colonizers Of Western Canada To 1900 By Sarah Carter, Olive Patricia Dickason

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This critical survey of Western Canadian history seeks to set the record straight. Sarah Carter takes issue with prevalent versions, much of which she sees as distorted because of inadequate or suppressed information, as well as from biases and misconceptions. As she points out, in some cases there have been actual misrepresentations: the accounts of explorer Samuel Hearne (1745-92), who reached the Arctic Ocean overland, and artist Paul Kane (1810- 71), who recorded Plains Indian life in his paintings while keeping a diary, were altered by publishers with an eye to sales. A consistent underestimation of the role of Indians …

Review Of Waiting On The Bounty: The Dust Bowl Diary Of Mary Knackstedt Dyck Edited By Pamela Rineykehrberg, Brian Q. Cannon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Thanks to Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, the University of Iowa Press, and the daughters of Mary Knackstedt Dyck, we have a wonderful new resource for studying farm life on the Southern Plains: Mary Dyck's edited diaries from 1936 to 1941. A farm woman in southwestern Kansas, Mary Dyck began keeping a detailed diary sometime during the 1930s. Although her earliest journals have been lost, her writings stretching over nearly two decades from 1936 to 1955 have been preserved by her family. Based upon the entries' historical value and their depiction of core elements of Mary Dyck's world, Riney-Kehrberg carefully selected roughly one-third …

Title And Contents- Summer 2001

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 21/ Number 3 / Summer 2001

CONTENTS

"THE WORST FLOODS IN HISTORY": FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND THE FLOODS OF 1944 IN THE ELKHORN RIVER BASIN Todd Kerstetter

THE NEW DEAL'S LAND UTILZATION PROGRAM IN THE GREAT PLAINS Geoff Cunfer

A NEW VISION OF AMERICA: LEWIS AND CLARK AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION James P. Hendrix Jr.

BOOK REVIEWS

Michael L. Tate The Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West By RICHARD BRUCE WINDERS

Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith Frontier Children By SUSAN ARRINGTON MADSEN

Larry Sklenar To Hell With Honor: Custer and the Little …

Review Of Sam Bass & Gang By Rick Miller, Larry D. Ball

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since his death in 1878, outlaw Sam Bass has inspired a considerable body of "Wild West" literature, much of it unreliable. Rick Miller's Sam Bass & Gang is a useful corrective.

Sam Bass's foray into crime was short and inglorious. Born in Indiana in 1851, he wandered into Texas in the 1870s. Largely unschooled and having no trade, Bass worked at odd jobs until the sporting life attracted him. With a partner, he purchased a fast horse and followed the racing circuit. In 1876 Bass joined Joel Collins, a saloon man and cattle dealer, to drive a herd to the …

Review Of Voices In The Wind: A Waterton-Glacier Anthology Edited By Barbara Grinder, Valerie Haigbrown, And Kevin Van Tighem, Pamela Banting

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Voices in the Wind is a diverse collection of personal essays, anecdotes, profiles, and journalism contributed by some of the participants in the three Waterton-Glacier International Writers' Conferences held in 1995, 1997, and 1999. Offering three days of writing, editing, and publishing workshops, the conference also includes field trips with local experts and encourages participants to write and publish articles about issues relating to the ecology of the region. Voices in the Wind collects some of these articles by both Canadian and American conferees. Several are full-time journalists, editors, or photographers, but the majority work as biologists, wildlife technicians, range …

Review Of Contemporary American Indian Writing: Unsettling Literature By Dee Horne, Susan Bernardin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (1998), Louis Owens critiques a formative study of post-colonial literature, The Empire Writes Back (1990), because it "ignores entirely the impressive body of literature written by American Indian authors." Such an "omission," he suggests, is symptomatic of American Indian literature's marginalization even within marginalized literary studies. Dee Horne's Contemporary American Indian Writing: Unsettling Literature seeks to remedy this omission by reading selected First Nations authors through the lens of post-colonial theory. Horne's overarching goal is to explore the ways in which American Indian writers, to borrow Audre Lorde's formulation, use the "master's" linguistic …

Review Of To Hell With Honor: Custer And The Little Bighorn By Larry Sklenar, Thomas R. Buecker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Battle of the Little Bighorn is seen as one of the paramount events in the long struggle between whites and Native peoples on the Great Plains. Consequently, new studies of the battle and the personalities involved regularly appear each year. To Hell With Honor is one of the best recent works to join the steady stream of Little Bighorn literature.

Author Larry Sklenar, in his own words "an analyst by inclination and by experience," could not resist trying to untangle the puzzle of what happened that fateful day. Sklenar examined the vast array of reports, testimony, recollections, and previous …

Review Of Rudolfo A. Anaya: A Critical Companion By Margarite Fernandez Olmos, Bruce Allen Dick

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Rudolfo Anaya is one of today's leading Chicano writers. Since the release of Bless Me, Ultima, his groundbreaking first novel in 1972, Anaya has published eight additional novels, a collection of short stories, a travel journal, an epic poem, and several plays. Over the years his work has received widespread praise throughout the Latino literary community, earning him such laudatory epithets as "Godfather and guru of Chicano literature," "the most acclaimed and universal Chicano writer," and "our poet of the llano and the barrio."

Margarite Fernandez Olmos discusses how Anaya garnered this standing-and more-in Rudolfo A. Anaya: A Critical …

Review Of Black Cowboys Of Texas Edited By Sara R. Massey, Chiyuma Elliott

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is one of those rare books that truly push the boundaries of the extant primary source material. Black Cowboys of Texas is the collaborative work of twenty-seven professional and amateur historians. The majority of the book's twenty-five chapters are biographical sketches of individual African American cowboys or cowgirls. Most chapters successfully weave the scant information available about individuals into short, engaging profiles. The collection focuses on Texas, but also details cattle drives to Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota.

The work is divided into three sections. Part one, "The Early Cowboys," deals with the establishment and …