Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of Geologic Field Trips In Nebraska And Adjacent Parts Of Kansas And South Dakota Edited By Robert F. Diffendal, Jr. And Charles A. Flowerday, James E. Martin

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

This guidebook was published in conjunction with the Geological Society of America's North-Central and South-Central sectional meeting held in Lincoln during the spring of 1995. As a result, the diversity of the field trips mirrors the wide geological interests represented at such a gathering. Subjects range from paleontology and stratigraphy to engineering geology. All of the articles provide important geological data often unobtainable in print elsewhere. Eleven field trips were presented during the GSA meeting; two are not included in the guidebook and are available separately, although the source of these materials is not apparent.

Field sites and road logs …

Review Of Peopling The Plains: Who Settled Where In Frontier Kansas By James Shortridge, D. Aidan Mcquillan

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

Kansas was born in the bloody prelude to the Civil War, a contested territory between North and South. The settlement frontier had penetrated only the eastern third of the state before war broke out; the western two-thirds saw the frontier push westward for several decades after the war, from 1865 to 1885. In the state's extreme western parts the frontier expanded and contracted several times between 1890 and 1930. James Shortridge sets out to explore the origins of Kansas cultural geography with such questions as: Who were these "first effective" settlers on the Kansas frontier? Where did they come from? …

Review Of Politics In The Postwaramerican West Edited By Richard Lowitt, Clive S. Thomas

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

This volume is a welcome addition to the sparse literature on western politics. Its approach is threefold. First, it views postwar western politics from a historical perspective as opposed to that of political science or economics; and editor Richard Lowitt has gathered together mostly historians to write the chapters. Second, instead of examining western politics comparatively by themes or by major events affecting political developments, the book unfolds state by state. There are a total of nineteen chapters coinciding with the volume's definition of the West as the nineteen states from the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean, including Alaska …

Review Of A Time To Lose: Representing Kansas In Brown V. Board Of Education By Paul E. Wilson, Anna Shavers

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

The fortieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education became for many a time to reflect on the wisdom of the Court's decision and to critique its success in desegregating America's public schools. Paul E. Wilson, a law professor at the University of Kansas, has written A Time to Lose not so much to address those issues but a more personal question: why had he argued before the Supreme Court on the wrong side? In his dedication, Wilson sets forth the book's tone and goal: "For Harriet and our children, who believe I was on …

Review Of Rural Development In The United States: Connecting Theory, Practice, And Possibilities By William A. Galston And Karen J. Baehler, Don Macke

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

William Galston and Karen Baehler provide an excellent comprehensive overview of rural development policy and approaches. Their book is enriched by Galston's perspective as a Clinton White House domestic policy advisor and the Who's Who of rural development experts who reviewed and contributed to it.

Part one offers a progressive, expansive panorama of rural development in the United States in the 1990s. Particularly fine is the first chapter's review of critical trends and policy choices. The balance of the work is a textbook approach to seven fundamental sectors within the rural economy: natural resources, manufacturing, services, tourism, the elderly, high …

Review Of Anthropology, Public Policy, And Native Peoples In Canada Edited By Noel Dyck And James B. Waldram, Adrian Tanner

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

In their chapter in Anthropology, Public Policy, and Natives Peoples in Canada, John O'Neil et al. state that anthropology "has affected policy development in virtually every sector of northern community life except medicine" (p. 216). Despite this observation, the book generally tends to stress Canadian anthropology's overall difficulties in aboriginal policy-making. It examines some of anthropology's most sensitive and difficult issues in this area critically, suggesting an ambivalent relationship towards the policy-making process.

The book's focus on anthropology's problems in contributing to aboriginal public policy is established in the editors' introduction, which examines several sources of these difficulties. A …

Review Of Future Harvest: Pesticide-Free Farming By Jim Bender, George E. Ham

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

Jim Bender provides the rationale for pursuing pesticide-free farming and a detailed model of conversion based on his experiences on his own 642 acre farm in southeast Nebraska. Reviewing such deeply ingrained characteristics of conventional agricultural systems in the Plains as separation of livestock from crop production, minimal crop diversity, and the lack of multi-year crop rotations, he recommends that conversion be undertaken gradually over several years as more experience is gained with pesticide-free systems.

In preparing for conversion from conventional to pesticide-free agriculture, one must learn to build terraces and waterways to control soil erosion, to rotate and diversify …

Review Of Wetland And Environmental Applications Of Gis Edited By John G. Lyon And Jack Mccarthy, Scott E. Richert

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

Wetlands are commonly defined as areas periodically or permanently inundated with water and typically characterized by vegetation requiring saturated soil for growth and reproduction. They have become increasingly important in environmental research as their benefits to environmental systems (wildlife habitat, flood control, for example) have become better understood. Wetland and Environmental Applications of GIS is an original contribution to the study of wetlands and other aquatic environments because it is the first book to address the inventory, monitoring, and management of wetlands and other surface waters by using geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, and computer modeling.

The volume is …

Western Meadowlark Impaled On Barbed-Wire Fence, Lawrence D. Igl

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

Recently, Allen and Ramirez (1990, Wilson Bull. 102:553-558) summarized known observations of bird mortality associated with barbed-wire fences. Most reported cases of bird mortality from barbed-wire fences were of non-passerine birds. On 16 June 1993 in Slope County in western North Dakota (NW 1/4, Sec. 10 T134N R103W), I found a dead western meadowlark (Sturnella neglecta) with its right wing impaled by a barb on the middle strand of a three-strand barbed-wire fence. Barbs on the wire were spaced about 12-15 cm apart. The bird was adult-sized, but plumage characteristics indicated that it was a young-of-the-year with well-developed …

Second Record Of White Ibis In North Dakota, Jennifer W. Marlow, Lawrence D. Igl, Melody R. Hartman

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

The breeding range of the white ibis (Eudocimus albus) in the United States is generally restricted to coastal regions along the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean north to Virginia (Frederick et al. 1996, Conserv. BioI. 10:203-216). During the breeding season, the white ibis is nomadic and highly opportunistic in its use of unpredictable food resources (Frederick et al. 1996; Bildstein 1993, White ibis: wetland wanderer. Smithsonian Inst. Press, Washington, D.C.). There is one previous record of a white ibis in North Dakota on 4 August 1954 (Gammell and Huenecke 1955, Audubon Field Notes 9:34-36; Lokemoen 1979, …

Survival Of Radiomarked Canvasback Ducklings In Northwestern Minnesota, Carl E. Korschgen, Kevin P. Kenow, William L. Green, Douglas H. Johnson, Michael D. Samuel, Louis Sileo

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

Duckling survival, an important factor affecting annual recruitment, has not been determined adequately for canvasbacks (Aythya valisineria). We investigated the magnitude, timing, and causes of mortality of canvasback ducklings from hatch to fledging at the Agassiz National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) in northwestern Minnesota during 1987-90. During the 4 years, 217 day-old ducklings were radiomarked and released in 52 broods. Another 141 ducklings were radiomarked at > 4 weeks of age. Survival was estimated with the Kaplan-Meier nonparametric estimator and the Weibull parametric model. Most mortalities occurred within 10 days after hatch. Total brood loss occurred in 18 (35%) of …

Long-Term Declines In Nest Success Of Prairie Ducks, Wendy D. Beauchamp, Rolf R. Koford, Thomas D. Nudds, Robert G. Clark, Douglas H. Johnson

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

Increased predation on nests of ducks in prairie uplands, as a result of habitat alteration, has been hypothesized to cause decreased nest success and population sizes. We tested whether, and by how much, nest success declined using data compiled from 37 studies conducted between 1935 and 1992 at 67 sites in the Prairie Pothole Region of Canada and the United States. Nest success declined (P = 0.0002) over time, but time explained only 10% of the variation; precipitation (P = 0.79) did not account for additional variation in nest success. Nest success declined at similar (P = 0.13) rates among …

Review Essay:The Way West Written And Directed By Ric Burns, Martin Blythe, Mia Graeffe, Sanna Heinsalo, Ossi Heinänen, Ari Helo, Kari Hirvinen, Piia Kiviniemi, Vello Ruus, John Wright, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Way West, scripted and directed by Ric Burns, is advertised as the story of United States expansion into the American West from 1845 to 1893. Burns sets the series' temporal boundaries arbitrarily from a New York editor's first use of the term "manifest destiny" in 1845 to Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 address on the significance of the frontier and his announcement of its close. The documentary's episodes actually focus on the struggle for control of the Great Plains, pitting the U.S. Army against the Sioux nation and its allies. Largely forsaking the challenge of providing a sure overview of …

Review Of Girl On A Pony By La Verne Hanners, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This small book is written in a straightforward, unassuming, conversational style with the result that it's deceptively simple, seeming at first to be just another reminiscence of pioneer days, although in a somewhat unusual place. It's the story of La Verne Hanners's childhood and young womanhood in the Valley of the Dry Cimarron of New Mexico, only a few miles from the border of the Oklahoma Panhandle and just south of the Colorado border. Here is a landscape of grandeur, of severe drought, of sudden, fierce hail and wind and snow storms, of walls of water unexpectedly racing down dry …

Review Of Go West Young Man! Horace Greeley's Vision For America By Coy Cross Ii, Michael Allen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Coy Cross's book is a well-written, focused, solidly documented study of an absorbing and important topic. Unlike some of the "new" western historians, Cross analyzes manifest destiny and expansionism in historical context; he avoids the pitfalls of ideological polemics through evenhanded, analytical narrative prose. Moreover, he provides an important assessment and qualification of Greeley's (and Turner's) safety valve theory, concluding that while New York City's poor may not have heeded Greeley's call to "Go West!" millions of others in fact did. "And the Homestead Act, the absence of slavery, the information on the latest developments in agriculture, and the transcontinental …

Review Of Soul In The Stone: Cemetery Art From America's Heartland By John Gary Brown, Robert Duncan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John Gary Brown, a professional photographer from Lawrence, Kansas, has collected over a period of time a variety of unique photographs documenting examples of cemetery art found in the central states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico. The author, through his photographs and to some degree his text, illustrates the rich mixture of personal efforts that stone sculptors and vernacular artists have developed in this special art form. While cemetery art is public, the photographs Brown presents, through his use of a multiplicity of artistic images, often suggest particularly private stories. Brown begins …

Review Of Stephen Long And American Frontier Exploration By Roger L. Nichols And Patrick L. Halley, Seppo Tamminen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Stephen Long and American Frontier Exploration is an excellent narrative of early nineteenth- century expeditions. It is enjoyable reading, and its information is particularly valuable for those interested in early westward expansion. The volume is also of importance to scholars studying other members of Long's expeditions, including Titian Peale, since it gives the historical context in which their work was done.

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIUM

FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD (Frederick C. Luebke)

CALL FOR PAPERS

IN MEMORIAM (James Sinclair Ross)

Review Of Cowboys And Kansas: Stories From The Tallgrass Prairie By Jim Hoy, Timo Heiskanen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Do you think of cowboys when you think of Kansas? Few people do, but Jim Hoy, English professor and Kansas native and patriot, has set out to give the Kansas cowboy his rightful place in the history, arguably, of America's greatest folk hero. Hoy's main concern in Cowboys and Kansas is the real working cowboy, though he also touches upon the importance of the mythic cowboy on the American psyche. Both are genuine articles, although the two have little in common.

Review Of Lone Wolf V. Hitchcock: Treaty Rights And Indian Law At The End Of The Nineteenth Century By Blue Clark, Ramona Skinner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Clark's unique approach in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock allows him to go beyond the initial examination oflegal precedent to reveal a story of human dignity and a people's survival. The book presents an authoritative account of Kiowa band chief Lone Wolf's relentless attempts, through various legal channels, to halt the selection and assignment of his own allotment. In the end, he joined the Elk Creek Baptist church and lived on his allotment with his family. What Lone Wolf and his tribe hoped to gain from the lawsuit, how the Court bestowed on Congress unlimited power over Indian affairs, and the …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

VISITING SCHOLARS PROGRAM

CALLS FOR PAPERS

Review Essay: Environmental History, Donald Worster

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A summer ago I canoed down the Missouri River, along the wild pristine White Cliffs of Montana, with the Lewis and Clark journals in hand (the De Voto abridged edition). Like many others, I have felt strongly the pull of that famous expedition, the nostalgia for a lost West without cities, dams, or overgrazed pastures, when Indians still defined the place. But I was not prepared to like this retelling of the story, with its hagiographical and militaristic title spliced to its Wallace Stegner-ish subtitle. Was this to be Meriwether Lewis as the Colin Powell of another day? Or as …

Review Of O Little Town: Remembering Life In A Prairie Village By Harlo L. Jones, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

O Little Town is competently written in clear, concise prose which, despite some masterful description, on the whole doesn't quite reach the level of art. All of this makes for many of us a pleasant, undemanding read, but for others-historians, people of the future, and those who remember with fondness and nostalgia their childhoods in small town North America of the first half of this century-it is something much more: a valuable document of a-by this rendering, anyway-sweeter time, forever lost.

Review Of The Limits Of Agrarian Radicalism: Western Populism And American Politics By Peter H. Argersinger, David F. Prindle

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The book consists mainly of a collection of reworked articles that appeared in various journals from 1967 to 1992. At the level of analysis, the author's meta-argument is that the Populists were ultimately unsuccessful because they failed politically. That is, they both failed to manage the ideological tensions within their movement, and failed to overcome various structural impediments placed in their path by the established parties. He elaborates this argument with a series of case studies, following in close detail a number of state conventions and elections. The documentation in these studies is impressive, and the studies themselves are convincingly …

Workers, Unions, And Historians On The Northern Plains, William C. Pratt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Labor history has corne of age over the past three decades. Today two national journals, Labor History and Labor's Heritage, focus on this subject in the United States, and many others, including the Journal of American History, publish articles in the field. In fact, much of what is called new social history often treats labor history topics, and many western historians have had an extended interest in labor history. Numerous recent examples, including the work of Carlos Schwantes, Michael Kazin, Vicki Ruiz, and others have been well received.

Mari Sandoz's Portrait Of An Artist's Youth: Robert Henri's Nebraska Years, Helen Winter Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Robert Henri's life story would have appealed to Mari Sandoz even if he were not an important early twentieth-century American artist. Robert Henri (born Robert Henry Cozad) came from a time, a place, and a family that at first glance seem unlikely to have produced an avant garde painter of landscapes, cityscapes, and portraits; it was the sort of paradox Sandoz liked to explore. That Henri had spent much of his youth in her native Nebraska in a family headed by a magnetic and dominating man not unlike her own father also interested her. That the family left Nebraska in …

The Left And Labor On The Plains An Introduction, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This issue of Great Plains Quarterly is given up to two long articles that probe different facets of the history of the Left on the Great Plains. In "Workers, Unions, and Historians on the Northern Plains," William C. Pratt surveys unions in Nebraska and the Great Plains with an eye to what historians have written about them, what stories remain to be told, and what sources are available for the telling. Certainly he finds no dearth of material, though he is disappointed not to find integrative texts in the school of the "new labor history" for the northern Plains, the …

Review Of Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader On The Northern Plains By Rachel Calof, H. Elaine Lindgren

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Along with the original narrative this volume provides an epilogue by Jacob Calof, Rachel's youngest child, and two essays, one by J. Sanford Rikoon, the other by Elizabeth Jameson. Jacob Calof's comments confirm the strength and courage we find in his mother's words.

The essays lend significant context to the narrative. Rikoon gives a concise and informative explanation of the history of Jewish families that left Russia and eastern Europe to settle on farms in the Heartland. Jameson's analysis places Rachel's narrative in historical perspective and emphasizes the importance of recognizing diversities of ethnicity, class, and gender in the interpretation …

Review OfLinoleum, Better Babies, And The Modern Farm Woman, 1890-1930 By Marilyn Irvin Holt, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Marilyn Irvin Holt describes Linoleum, Better Babies, and the Modern Farm Woman, 1890- 1930 as a study of "the domestic economy movement and the rural women it targeted." Focusing on the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, she examines the many ways in which reformers worked to improve life on American farms through education and uplift programs for American farm women and their children. These efforts included the establishment of home extension programs, home economics education, and 4-H programs, among others. Their goals were the physical improvement of the farm home and the farm child, with the intent of keeping …

Marl Sandoz Nebraska Sandhills Author A Centennial Recognition, Barbara Rippey, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

1996 marks the centennial year of Mari Susette Sandoz's birth to Swiss immigrant parents, Mary and Jules Sandoz, on a homestead in Sheridan County, Nebraska. Mari, the oldest of the six children in the Sandoz family, was shaped and hardened by her father's temper and by bearing the brunt of hard physical work both outdoors on the homestead and as her mother's helper. The people of her neighborhood were the kind of people who not only witnessed but made history, the kind of people whose lives and stories could be transformed into literature. Red Cloud, Robert Henri, Crazy Horse, "Gulla …