Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of The Frederic Remington Studio By Peter H. Hassrick, Alexander Nemerov

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This short book concerns the Remington Studio Collection-a permanent installation at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, featuring the artifacts Remington displayed in his New Rochelle studio, as well as some of the paintings he made late in his career. The author noted Remington scholar Peter Hassrick, discusses the studio and argues that the Studio Collection paintings, many of them small landscapes, transcend Remington's time and place to achieve a universal significance. In making this argument, however, Hassrick neglects to consider how the very category of the universal, insofar as it refers to American art, is itself a …

Review Of The Myth Of The West: America As The Last Empire By Jan Willem Schulte Nordholdt And Herbert H. Rowen, Sheila Ruzycki O'Brien

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As an Americanist, I needed to adjust my perspective as I was reading Nordholdt's The Myth of the West. Much of this book by a Dutch scholar is about European views of Empire, particularly about the various permutations of the heliotropic view of empire-the belief that empires progress from east to west. The subtitle America as the Last Empire is somewhat misleading, since much of the book presents how the European literati throughout the centuries viewed various empires within and near their own continent, though naturally the heliotropic view does lead west over the Atlantic. (It also leads west over …

Review Of Reuben Snake, Your Humble Serpent: Indian Visionary And Activist By Jay Fikes, As Told To By Reuben Snake, Paul A. Olson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great Plains region has given us minority civil and cultural rights leaders out of all proportion to the minority population of the region: Crazy Horse, Quanah Parker, Gordon Parks, Dull Knife, Rudolpho Gonzales, Zitkala Sa, Suzette La Flesche, Earl Little (Malcolm X's father), Tomas Rivera, Ernie Chambers, and on and on. Biographical scholarship unfortunately has not given us many good accounts of these leaders. The gap is dramatized and at least partially filled by Fikes' book. Jay Fikes, working with Reuben Snake just before his death, has written a work that ultimately celebrates both the latter's humility and his …

Review Of New Westers: The West In Contemporary American Culture By Michael L. Johnson, Charles E. Rankin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

You will either love this book or, well, dislike it. As one of the jacket blurbs puts it, it's all here-"movies and fashion, historians and architects, chili eating and two-stepping." The blurbist might have added: "and kitsch, travelogue, literature, poetry, cartoons, and a lot of unbridled gee whiz." Broad in scope, New Westers won't be remembered for analytical depth (though it may itself become an artifact of its time). What is not here, and what this reviewer sorely missed, is more of the author. In just over four hundred pages, Michael Johnson reveals precious little about what he thinks is …

Review Of Home On The Range: A Century On The High Plains By James R. Dickenson, Dennis C. Williams

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

After reading the introduction to this book, I expected a quaint family history joined with some attempt at relating the specifics of the author's family and personal experience to the larger context of Kansas and US history. I found that and much more. The first chapters set up a good model for family history-much better than most local histories or genealogies prepared by enthusiastic amateurs. But then James Dickenson is an accomplished journalist with over thirty years of journalistic experience including staffing the Washington Post; what should I have expected? By the half-way point, I realized that this is …

Review Of Indian Territory And The United States, 1866- 1906: Courts, Government, And The Movement For Oklahoma Statehood By Jeffrey Burton, Raymond Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Attempts by state governments and the federal government to undermine Indian tribal sovereignty remain one of the major challenges Indian tribes face today. One of the best known attacks against Indian political and economic authority was the abolition of the tribal institutions of the Five Tribes in Indian Territory, which resulted in Oklahoma statehood.

Indian Territory and the United States, 1866- 1906, the first volume in the University of Oklahoma Press's Legal History of North America Series, is a detailed and fresh examination of the destruction of the Five Tribes' governments in Indian Territory resulting from federal judicial reforms …

The Lubbock Chamber Of Commerce, The New Deal, And The Ropesville Resettlement Project, William Clayson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

US Highway 62 crosses the town of Ropesville, population 480, between Lubbock and Brownfield on the South Plains of Texas. To the north and west of town, scattered among the suburban-style homes of contemporary farmers, stand several dozen small cottages of identical design. Some are still occupied, many nothing more than ruins, and a few have been added on to, stuccoed, or provided a screened porch. All are surrounded by cotton fields and most are accompanied by ramshackle outbuildings, rusted tractors, dormant windmills, and sealed irrigation wells. These farmsteads are the remains of a rural community project constructed by the …

Humanitarians On The Frontier Examples From Northeastern Logan County, Oklahoma Territory, Leslie Hewes

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Scholars have studied the frontier of Euro-North American settlement from a number of perspectives. James C. Malin and Allen G. Bogue, for example, have examined the turnover of population in the newer parts of the United States. Walter Prescott Webb considered the Great Plains a strange kind of country for most of its pioneers, branding them as woodsmen out of place in the western part of the great interior grassland. Paul W. Gates has emphasized speculation and an incongruous land system as marking the American new lands, while James K. Hastings has recognized cooperative endeavor, a kind of sharing, as …

Mallard Duckling Growth And Survival In Relation To Aquatic Invertebrates, Robert R. Cox, Mark A. Hanson, Christianne C. Roy, Ned H. Euliss Jr., Douglas H. Johnson, Malcolm G. Butler

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

Identification and assessment of the relative importance of factors affecting duckling growth and survival are essential for effective management of mallards on breeding areas. For each of 3 years (1993-95), we placed Fl-generation wild mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) females on experimental wetlands and allowed them to mate, nest, and rear broods for 17 days. We manipulated invertebrate densities by introducing fathead minnows (Pimephales promelas) at high densities in half of the wetlands on which broods were confined. Day- 17 body mass of surviving ducklings (n = 183) was greater for ducklings that were heavier at hatch; the …

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

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

The scent-station survey method has been widely used to estimate trends in carnivore abundance. However, statistical properties of scent-station data are poorly understood, and the relation between scent- station indices and carnivore abundance has not been adequately evaluated. We assessed properties of scent- station indices by analyzing data collected in Minnesota during 1986-93. Visits to stations separated by < 2 km were correlated for all species because individual carnivores sometimes visited several stations in succession. Thus, visits to stations had an intractable statistical distribution. Dichotomizing results for lines of 10 stations (0 or ≥ 1 visits) produced binomially distributed data that were robust to multiple visits by individuals. We abandoned 2-way comparisons among years in favor of tests for population trend, which are less susceptible to bias, and analyzed results separately for biogeographic sections of Minnesota because trends differed among sections. Before drawing inferences about carnivore population trends, we reevaluated published validation experiments. Results implicated low statistical power and confounding as possible explanations for equivocal or conflicting results of validation efforts. Long-term trends in visitation rates probably reflect real changes in populations, but poor spatial and temporal resolution, susceptibility to confounding, and low statistical power limit the usefulness of this survey method.

Review Of The Carrion Beetles (Coleoptera: Silphidae) Of Nebraska By Brett C. Ratcliffe, Stephen Trumbo

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

Until the 1970s the carrion beetles were appreciated by only a handful of entomologists who knew where to locate the scattered pertinent information buried within the scientific literature. Summaries of the natural history of the only social genus (Nicrophorus) within the family Silphidae by E. O. Wilson (1971) and Milne and Milne (1976) seem to have attracted biologists of diverse interests to investigate these odoriferous beetles. At present, nearly a dozen papers are published yearly on the ecology, behavior, evolution, physiology, conservation, and molecular biology of the silphids. The Carrion Beetles of Nebraska, a handsome and well-written …

Review Of Native Americans And Wage Labor: Ethnohistorical Perspectives Edited By Alice Littlefield And Martha C. Knack, Ronald L. Trosper

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

The ten essays in Native Americans and Wage Labor provide an excellent source for information regarding the participation of Native Americans in labor markets in the United States from colonial times to the present. The editors' introductory essay reviews the literature showing that wage labor by Native Americans is not a recent phenomenon. It was crucial to the survival of some Native groups when other means of sustenance were removed. At particular times and places, Native labor was also crucial to settlers who needed to harvest crops, construct railroads, or build mines. Many of these examples are furnished by essays …

A Great Plains Presidential Primary?, James L. Mcdowell

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

This paper examines the feasibility of establishing a regional presidential primary for the Great Plains States. It reviews the introduction of primaries for selecting national convention delegates, and the slowness of these states to adopt this method. Further, it surveys the use of the primary in the region, noting the independence of Great Plains voters in both the prereform and post-reform periods. Finally, the paper recommends that Great Plains States adopt a regional primary; suggests they select the earliest possible date in order to enhance their influence on the selection of presidential nominees; and offers several alternative proposals, depending upon …

Depopulation Of The Rural Great Plains Counties Of Texas, Charlene R. Nickels, Frederick A. Day

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

The counties of the Texas Great Plains have been part of a depopulation of the rural "heartland" of the United States. This paper traces the loss of population in these counties since 1910 and tries to account for the reasons underlying the trend. Four major groups of variables are analyzed through stepwise regression to determine their relative conceptual importance: demographic factors (age-structure and percent Hispanic), environmental factors (annual rainfall, percent irrigated land, and amount of oil production), geographic factors (distance to an urban central place and population size of a county's central place) and socioeconomic factors (lack of diversification of …

Regional Socioeconomic And Sociocultural Differences Among U.S. Latinos: The Effects Of Historical And Contemporary Latino Immigration/Migration Streams, Ed A. Munoz, Suzanne T. Ortega

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

In this paper we explore two potential sources of variation in the life experiences of Latinos in the United States: region of the country in which a group resides and national origin. Although scholars have recognized the theoretical importance of these two variables, few studies have empirically examined the relationship of region of the country and national origin to socioeconomic variables such as occupation, education, and income or to cultural variables such as bilingualism and English language proficiency. Data from the 1990 U.S. Census 5% Public Use Micro Sample show that both the social structural and cultural experiences of Latinos …

Annual Index

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

index

Review Of The Texas Challenge: Population Change And The Future Of Texas Edited By Steve H. Murdock, Nazrul Hoque, Martha Michael, Steve White, And Beverly Pecotte, Robert K. Holz

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

Steve H. Murdock, in collaboration with four secondary authors, has produced an intriguing but somewhat puzzling book on population change and the future of Texas. While population studies are certainly within the authors' domain of Rural Sociology, Texas is no longer a "rural" state based on population. Over eighty percent of the state's population now resides in urban areas, although Texas laws, traditions, and attitudes still honor and project a rural mystique. This might have been emphasized as part of the Texas Challenge.

Throughout the text the authors emphasize four major trends in Texas population: the changing rate of …

Review Of Prairie Voices: Process Anthropology In Family Medicine By Howard F. Stein, Charles B. Hennon

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

Prairie Voices is a volume full of surprises. From the Foreword and Preface I was expecting a deep narrative on how the author lives in and experiences the prairie world and found instead a drawn-out discussion about how the author uses poetry in his medical school practice.

Each of eleven chapters gives some glimpse of the author's understanding of the prairie and its culture. Through his poetry and stories Stein attempts to provide the reader with an appreciation of the essence of the prairie, offering a more holistic understanding. We learn about day, night, weeds, drinking coffee, functioning, dependency, weather, …

Review Of Beyond Subsistence: Plains Archaeology And The Postprocessual Critique Edited By Philip Duke And Michael C. Wilson, Alan J. Osborn

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

Philip Duke and Michael Wilson have compiled a well-written, well-organized book designed to "demonstrate the potential of postprocessualism to Plains archaeologists." It contains an editors' introduction, eleven scholarly contributions, as well as two commentaries. The editors suggest that the success of this "new paradigm or research strategy" will be assessed on the basis of its "second-generation scholars" and what they contribute to the "intellectual hybridization" of postprocessualism.

The reader must be aware that postprocessual archaeology does not consist of a coherent body of theory, models, concepts, or robust methods for data collection and analysis. Instead, it is a postmodern response …

Review Of From Fort Laramie To Wounded Knee: In The West That Was By Charles W. Allen, John Husmann

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

Charles Wesley Allen witnessed episodes of late nineteenth-century western American history through the eyes of a "soldier, freighter, rancher, clerk, blacksmith, contractor, editor, war correspondent, Pine Ridge postmaster, philosopher, and poet" (p. viii). Allen's good friend, Addison E. Sheldon, wrote this description of Allen's career in his foreword to the unpublished 1938 manuscript of Allen's reminiscences located at Nebraska State Historical Society. Richard E. Jensen, the Senior Research Anthropologist at the Society has produced an edited version of the manuscript, making it available to a wider audience for the first time. The book, as an edited volume, presents the reader …

Review Of Grazing On Public Lands, Kathleen H. Keeler

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

The CAST (Council on Agricultural Science and Technology) report "Grazing on Public Lands" is a pamphlet. The mission statement inside the front cover leads one to expect an objective look at the impact of grazing on public lands. The topic may be so controversial that an objective look is impossible, and this idea is certainly supported by the Task Force Report. This report argues that the current management of grazing on public lands is sustainable, promotes biodiversity and that any change (such as increases in federal grazing fees) will adversely affect western communities.

For a short report, this one is …

Review Of Ordinary Life, Festival Days: Aesthetics In The Midwestern County Fair By Leslie Prosterman, Georgia L. Stevens

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

Prosterman graphically describes and idealizes traditional midwestern life as it focuses and culminates in the county fair by connecting food production to the harvest bounty. Her account of these American "festivals" began as a dissertation with data gathered in 1981-82. She visited twenty-four fairs, studied six in depth and conducted more than one hundred ethnographic interviews in two states. As a cultural anthropologist, Prosterman defines the county fair and its system of thought processes as folklore intimately connected to a small group people within a community. To the student of family and community sustainability, the book supplies a rich history …

Review Of "Toil And Peaceful Life": Doukhobor Village Settlement In Saskatchewan, 1899-1918 By Carl J. Tracie, Hans B. Werner

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

The Doukhobor story has had an abiding interest for students of group settlement on the Canadian Prairies. Doukhobors were pacifist Russian peasants and some of the more exotic of Clifford Sifton's sturdy immigrant farmers. The 7,400 Doukhobors who came to Canada established some fifty-seven villages on three reserved blocks of prairie and parkland in Saskatchewan. By 1918 the original villages were abandoned and the reserved lands were lost. Carl Tracie's study of Community Doukhobor settlement in Saskatchewan seeks to explain "past cultural landscapes-the distinctive marks on the land which people of differing cultures make in the process of occupying and …

Review Of Social Policy And Social Justice: The Ndp Government In Saskatchewan During The Blakeney Years Edited By Jim Harding, Allen Seager

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

Long a fixture on the Canadian political landscape, and best known outside province for a dogged defense of provincial rights in pursuit of its state entrepreneurial agenda, the three-term NDP government of Saskatchewan's Allan Blakeney (1979-1982) is beginning to attract a more critical and systematic attention, centered around the traditional paradox of populism on the Great Plains: the admixture of conservative community values with a more or less radical economic view. Jim Harding, a left NDP activist and Regina city Councilor as well as an academic sociologist-a narrow cross section of the social science community, exclusive of history and political …

The Politics Of Elementary Schools In A German-American Roman Catholic Settlement In Canada’S Province Of Saskatchewan, 1903-1925, Clinton O. White

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

Scholars who have studied the political behavior of residents of Canada's province of Saskatchewan conclude that members of minority groups such as Roman Catholics and people of Central and Eastern European background voted Liberal much more frequently than Conservative, at least prior to the 1930s. There is no reason to question this conclusion when voting throughout the province by a specific minority is considered. However, the same is not always found to be true when the voting behavior of a particular minority group in a single constituency is examined. This paper discusses the German Catholics of the Humboldt Constituency of …

Contents - Volume 7, Number 2, Fall 1997

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

Contents:

Articles

Book Reviews

News and Notes

Annual Index

Growth Of A Natural History Museum On The Prairie: The University Of Nebraska State Museum, 1871-1996, Thomas P. Myers

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

Since its founding in 1871, the University of Nebraska State Museum has been a leader in the study of the natural history of the plains and prairies of the central United States. Its history can be divided into three eras: 1)founding and first steps in a struggling new university (1871-1891); 2) the Barbour-Schultz era (1891-1970) when research focused on vertebrate paleontology and exhibition became a major focus; and 3) recent history (1970-present) beginning with the consolidation of university collections in 1970, the professionalization of museum staff, and increased access through computerization. Research and public exhibits have been prominent components throughout …

Microclimate Of An Aboriginal Winter Campsite At Wanuskewin Heritage Park, Saskatoom, E. A. Ripley, O. W. Archibold, C. Jackson, E. J. Walker

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

The microclimate of an aboriginal winter campsite, set in an incised, south-facing meander of a small creek, is compared to the conditions on the adjacent open prairie at Wanuskewin Heritage Park, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Maximum and minimum temperatures and wind speeds were measured daily, on the prairie and in the valley, along with temperatures in a modern canvas tipi erected in the valley. Maximum temperatures tended to be about 1 °C higher in the valley, and 2 °C higher in the tipi, than on the prairie, while minima were 1-2 °C lower. Wind speeds were reduced to about 50% in the …

Review Of Changing Rural Institutions: A Canadian Perspective Edited By Richard C. Rounds, Paul H. Gessaman

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

In seventeen independently-developed chapters this book provides a multi-dimensional examination of the restructuring of rural institutions and institutional systems in Canada. Though not stated in the book narrative, it appears the chapters were written for the Seventh National Canadian Rural Restructuring Foundation/Canadian Agricultural and Rural Restructuring Group Conference held in the City of Grande Prairie, Alberta. No information on the conference dates or other circumstances is provided. The editor acknowledges financial support by a relatively large number of organizations, public sector units, and private sector businesses, as well as the efforts of the conference staff and volunteers. The latter are …

News And Notes - Volume 7, Number 2, Fall 1997

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

Content:

Call for papers

Conferences