Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

The 1992 Secession Movement In Southwest Kansas, Peter J. Mccormick

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In May of 1992 the Kansas state legislature approved and Governor Joan Finney signed into law a new school finance formula that adversely affected several southwest Kansas counties. The new bill provided for a blanket mill levy of 32 mills ($32 in taxes for every $1000 assessed valuation) to be spread across the state. It also restricted funding to a maximum of $3600 per student. The effects in the southwest were drastic. Many districts there, accustomed to setting their own tax rates and to retaining all monies collected, spent upward of $5000 per student on tax levies below 20 mills. …

Review Of The End Of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety From The Old West To The New Deal By David M. Wrobel, Kathleen A. Boardman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

More than a decade before the 1890 Census, some Americans began to perceive that the frontier was disappearing; they worried that, with the closing of the frontier, the country might lose its tough and resourceful individualism, its ability to assimilate foreigners and forge democratic institutions, its safety valve and its future hopes-in short, its uniqueness. Soon this "frontier anxiety" pervaded American writing, speech, and thought. David M. Wrobel traces the theme of frontier anxiety and its variations in American journalism, political rhetoric and policy, literature and popular culture, and academic discussions from the 1880s to the 1930s. He shows that …

Review Of Chasing Rainbows: A Recollection Of The Great Plains, 1921-1975 By Gladys Leffler Gist, Deborah Fink

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Chasing Rainbows is the first-person story of Gladys Leffler Gist, a farm woman who was born in Iowa in 1898 and moved to South Dakota five years after her 1921 marriage. Although Gladys and her husband Ray had hard times in their first twenty years of farming and remained tenant farmers almost all their lives, the story is a happy one of a family well integrated into the dominant religious, social and political milieu of rural South Dakota and Iowa. James Marten, whose wife Linda is a granddaughter of the couple, has lovingly but conscientiously edited the work, providing context …

Review Of Archaeology, History, And Custer's Last Battle By Richard Allen Fox, Jr., Vergil E. Noble

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It is important to note, however, that arechaeological knowledge is largely a product of interpretation, neither as certain nor as monolithic as Fox might have his readers believe. Indeed, some of his conclusions are sure to be disputed by fellow archaeologists with differing views, as well as by those historians he confronts directly in the book. Still, Fox deveolops a compelling argument that will serve as a point of departure for future debates on the enduring and ever-controversial subject. Accordingly, there is little doubt that his book will garner a vast audience among historians and archaeologists, students of military tactics, …

Review Of They Called It Prairie Light: The S Tory Of Chilocco Indian School By K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Matthew L. Jones

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

They Called it Prairie Light is the best book I have read recently about life in the boarding school system. The narration and interviews are interwoven into an easy readable style. Lomawaima has done an exceptional job of painting a very richly textured picture of Native peoples' undaunted spirit.

Review Of What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology At A Wahpeton Dakota Village By Janet D. Spector, Jennifer S. H. Brown

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Spector provides the basic information needed to help general readers understand the site and its people. She also does more, offering thoughtful reflections on issues that she has faced as a professional archaeologist and on the ethical problems that confront the field, given its past lack of communication and dialogue with the peoples whose histories it has excavated and appropriated.

This book may break the trail for a new genre of archaeological site report. Reading it, I was led to reflect on my own first summer field school experience, and on the report that our director ultimately published. I recall …

Review Of The Wealth Of Nature: Environmental History And The Ecological Imagination By Donald Worster, Andrew C. Isenberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On its surface, Donald Worster's collection of forceful and eloquent essays appears to revisit the subjects and themes he has explored in his previous books. There are sixteen essays in Wealth of Nature. The first three and the last one explore the concerns and practice of environmental history. Five essays investigate the ecological consequences of American agriculture, particularly in the Great Plains. Worster explored this subject in his Bancroft Prize-winning book, Dust Bowl. The next three essays primarily concern the economic and ecological irrationalities of irrigation in the West, a subject that Worster previously investigated in his book, …

Review Of Indian Water In The New West Edited By Thomas R. Mcguire, William B. Lord, And Mary G. Wallace, Lawrence C. Kelly

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There is not enough space in this brief review to comment adequately upon the various papers. Both the dangers and the advantages of negotiated settlements are explicated in this timely addition to the literature which is highly recommended to students of American Indians, the West, and water resource management.

Review Of Standing On New Ground: Women In Alberta Edited By Catherine A. Cavanaugh And Randi R. Warne, Anita Clair Fellman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This intriguing collection of accessible essays focuses largely on aspects of the relationship that Alberta women have had with public institutions, both formal and informal, from 1904 to the present. While all the essays cover worthwhile topics, some have been developed in only rudimentary fashion, while others are comprehensive and contain sophisticated analyses.

Among the articles dealing with women's voluntary activities, the highlight is an essay by Michael Owen on the Methodist and United Church Women's Missionary Society's missions to Ukrainians in eastern Alberta between 1904 and 1940. Like many missionaries elsewhere, these women had their greatest successes, not in …

Review Of Earth And Sky: Visions Of The Cosmos In Native American Folklore Edited By Ray A. Williamson And Claire E. Farrer, Lee Irwin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a book for a wider audience than folklorists or anthropologists, though both will find substantive materials here for future research. It is a work that integrates a number of disciplinary perspectives-including ethnohistorical sources, archaeology, social theory, myth studies, religion and ritual, and astronomy- with remarkable economy and focus. The editors, Ray Williamson (from the United States Congress's Office of Technological Assessment) and Claire Farrer (an anthropologist at California State University at Chico), have illustrated the depth and complexities of Native American "Blue Archaeoastronomy" as a source for enhancing our understanding of diverse mythic worlds. The volume's essays range …

Review Of In The Kingdom Of Grass By Margaret A. Mackichan And Bob Ross, Bryan L. Jones

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bob Ross does not directly explicate MacKichan's photographs. Rather he confronts us with his own sense of place, a place nearer the eastern edge of the hills where he grew up. The best sections of these superb essays feature Uncle Ozro-a humorous fellow who nurtured and drove Ross to manhood while harboring a weakness for strong drink and an unrewarding relationship with money-and a long series of hired men who gave employers and their nephews full measure of work and patient tutorial devotion in between weeklong benders in town. Uncles can break down under the constant vagaries of markets and …

Review Of Whiskey Peddler: Johnny Healy, North Frontier Trader By William R. Hunt, Paul F. Sharp

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This biography successfully traces the career of an Irish immigrant whose colorful life defines the realities of pioneering while at the same time providing the stuff of Western dime novels, movies, campfire storytelling, and adventure yarns. His remarkable range of experiences as frontier soldier, whiskey trader to Canadian Indians, and finally as a major player on the Alaskan frontier gives the author an opportunity to write a fast moving history of Montana, the Northwest Territories of Can ada, and Alaska.

Review Of Ace Of Hearts: The Westerns Of Zane Grey By Arthur G. Kimball, Alan Wilkinson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a broad-ranging, thorough, relatively concise and useful book. It offers a reading of Grey that gets beyond the reputation-and beyond Riders of the Purple Sage. Moreover, it spells out what a serious reading of that most celebrated western suggests-a depth that belies Grey's rating as a "formulaic" writer. It also offers a direct response to a number of critics-Ann Ronald, Cynthia Hamilton, John G. Cawelti, among others-who have commented on Grey. Kimball finds much to disagree with but much to build on in his predecessors' work. He refutes their articulations of a Grey formula: if there is …

Contributions Of The Conservation Reserve Program To Populations Of Breeding Birds In North Dakota, Douglas H. Johnson, Lawrence Igl

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

Previous studies have shown that habitat provided by the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a feature of the 1985 farm bill, is used by many birds. The present study quantitatively assesses the importance of the CRP by estimating changes in breeding bird populations of North Dakota projected if CRP land would revert to cultivation. Of 18 species that were common in CRP or crop fields or both, 12 were more abundant in CRP habitats. Six of these species had suffered significant population declines during 1967-1990, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey. In contrast, none of the six species that …

Effects Of Climate On Numbers Of Northern Prairie Wetlands, Diane Larson

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

The amount of water held in individual wetland basins depends not only on local climate patterns but also on groundwater flow regime, soil permeability, and basin size. Most wetland basins in the northern prairies hold water in some years and are dry in others. To assess the potential effect of climate change on the number of wetland basins holding water in a given year, one must first determine how much of the variability in number of wet basins is accounted for by climatic variables. I used multiple linear regression to examine the relationship between climate variables and percentage of wet …

Ecological Genetics For The 21st Century, Bonnie S. Bowen

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

In the spring of 1991, the University of North Carolina hosted a series of seminars on the topic of ecological genetics. Five distinguished researchers, Montgomery Slatkin, Sara Via, Michael Lynch, Janis Antonovics, and Joseph Travis, were each invited to present two talks: one a general overview of a research area in contemporary ecological genetics, and a second on a specific research topic. The ten chapters of Ecological Genetics are based on those presentations.

A Noteworthy Record And The Breeding Distribution Of The Blue Grosbeak In North Dakota, Lawrence D. Igl

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

The northern limit of the blue grosbeak's (Guiraca caerulea) breeding distribution occurs in southern North Dakota. Records of the blue grosbeak in North Dakota are uncommon. Here, I report my observation of a blue grosbeak at a site where the species was recorded 25 years earlier. A summary of the species' distribution and records in North Dakota are provided.

Dramatic Increase Of Le Conte's Sparrow In Conservation Reserve Program Fields In The Northern Great Plains, Lawrence D. Igl, Douglas H. Johnson

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

During a continuing investigation in the northern Great Plains, we documented substantial increases of the Le Conte's Sparrow (Ammodramus Leconteii) in Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) fields in 1994 compared with 1990-93. The most dramatic increases occurred in Eddy County, North Dakota, and Sheridan County, Montana. The changes in habitat associated with the drought from 1989 to early 1993 and above-normal precipitation from mid-1993 through mid-1994 likely produced favorable breeding conditions for this species in CRP fields in 1994.

Review Of The Loner: Three Sketches Of The Personal Life And Ideas Of R. B. Bennett, 1870-1947 By P. B. Waite, Dale Jacobs

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The task of rehabilitating the reputation of former Canadian Prime Minister R. B. Bennett is a formidable one. Nevertheless, that is P. B. Waite's goal in The Loner, a set of three "sketches" of Bennett's life. Originally given as the Joanne Goodman Lectures at the University of Western Ontario in 1991, these sketches encompass Bennett's earliest years at Hopewell Cape and the Miramichi, his years as a lawyer and rising politician in Calgary, and his years in Ottawa. The Loner is not, however, another biography of R. B. Bennett, according to Waite, but an attempt to explain "the personal …

Review Of Redefining The American Dream: The Novels Of Willa Cather By Sally Peltier Harvey, Evelyn I. Funda

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Harvey's book will be of interest not only to Cather scholars, but to an audience more widely concerned with literature as an expression of culture. By citing some of Cather's contemporaries (Andrew Carnegie's exegesis of the "Gospel of Wealth" and William James's identification of success as the country's "bitch-goddess," for instance) as well as her literary peers (Howells, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck among them), then complementing this with more recent cultural studies of the early twentieth century (such as Jackson Lears's examination of intellectual transformation and Warren Sussman's study of the changing perceptions of the individual), Harvey gives us a …

Review Of Soils In Archaeology: Landscape Evolution And Human Occupation Vance T. Holliday, William C. Johnson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Soils in Archaeology consists of papers representing the proceedings of the Fryxell Symposium held at the annual meetings of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in Phoenix during April 1988. This is a volume that deals with soil science applications to archaeology: the various papers discuss the application of soils science to reconstruction of past landscapes and their evolution, estimation of surface age and depositional episodes, and provide physical and chemical indications of human presence. The volume provides good examples of archaeological geology (geoarchaeology) as executed by four physical geographers, two geologists, an archaeologist and a soil scientist.

Review Of The Political Economy Of North American Indians Edited By John H. Moore, Larry Burt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book consists primarily of essays that were first delivered before the Twelfth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences held in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in 1988. Billed as Marxist in perspective, it seeks to show that Indian history should be seen more as economic conflict than cultural clash.

In the introductory piece the editor provides an excellent overview of the history of political economy in general and its use in anthropology in particular. The articles that follow vary widely in length, scope, and quality. All somehow explain the motivation behind governmental policy, as well as developments within Indian communities, as …

Review Of Painting Texas History To 1900 By Sam Deshong Ratcliffe, Pamela Walker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In discussing paintings about the Texas Revolution, Ratcliffe is at his most analytic. Generally, his text is more descriptive than analytic, reading much like an exhibit guide on a museum wall. Still, the work is interesting and informative, and it provides a basis for more comprehensive and critical studies of the relation between a particular period of Texas history and its art.

Review Of A Guide To Kansas Mushrooms By Bruce Horn, Richard Kay, And Dean Abel, Wendell Gauger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One hundred fifty species of Kansas macrofungi are described in this welcome Guide. Each described species is accompanied by a photograph, a feature which, along with the authors' attempt to restrict the number of species included, adds greatly to the usefulness of this book. The quality of the photographs is uniformly excellent. The written descriptions are engaging, yet informative. Technical "jargon" is kept to a minimum. I found the book easy to read. For example the authors tell us that "Reports on the edibility of this species [Laccaria laccata] vary from mediocre to superb, which tells us …

Review Of The Lance And The Shield: The Life And Times Of Sitting Bull By Robert M. Utley, Roger L. Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the past decade biography as a field within American history has made a strong comeback, and Robert M. Utley's study of the Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux) leader Sitting Bull is an excellent contribution to the field. Writing the life story of an Indian leader who died more than one hundred years ago is difficult at best. For example, even the birth date of the subject is open to question. Nevertheless, the author has written a thorough, balanced, and informed book. In it Sitting Bull emerges as a rational person living within his culture, having recognizable goals, and experiencing both success …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

CHEROKEE NATION PAPERS

CALLS FOR PAPERS

JOINT CONFERENCE

Review Of Great Lakes Lumber On The Great Plains: The Laird, Norton Lumber Company In South Dakota By John N. Vogel, John E. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The publication in 1991 of William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West established a useful model for blending economic and environmental history. The book focused on three commodities grain, lumber, and meat-as they were harvested, transported and channeled through Chicago, processed, and marketed to consumers in the hinterlands. Looking at a different locale, Vogel takes the second of these commodities and shows how it was transformed from the abundant white pine stands of Wisconsin's Chippewa Valley to sawed boards ready for sale in lumber yards along the railroad in a dozen-and-a-half towns in Dakota Territory that sprang up …

Review Of Yanktonai Sioux Water Colors: Cultural Remembrances Of John Saul By Martin Brokenleg And Herbert T. Hoover, Mary Jane Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Unfortunately Yanktonai Sioux Water Colors is not what it could be. People unfamiliar with Plains Indian culture will not know how to interpret the water colors and the comments are not sufficiently detailed to overcome this problem. In 1971 James Howard published descriptions of some of the water colors in the Oklahoma Anthropological Society Newsletter. Howard combined a thorough knowledge of traditional Plains Indian culture with interviews with John Saul to give the average reader a good understanding of the paintings. Some other problems will be noticeable only to the professional. Although several people are given credit for the book …

Notes & News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

BOOK AWARDS (David Wishart; John Wunder)

CALLS FOR PAPERS

CANADIAN STUDIES GRANT PROGRAMS, 1996-97

FROM THE ARCHIVES (Richard Popp)

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ASSOCIATIONS

Review Of Alberta's Petroleum Industry And The Conservation Board By David H. Breen, Mary L. Mcroberts

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Anyone wanting to learn the fundamentals of how the oil and natural gas industry actually operated should read this book. Nevertheless, in some places the amount of detail exceeds the analysis provided to justify its inclusion. And in arguing that the PNGCB members maintained an effective balance among the demands of large integrated and small independent companies for attractive profit margins, government desire for economic growth, and scientific conservation measures designed to protect the public interest, Breen minimizes evidence that suggests a less laudatory evaluation. Moreover, the role of the board in the interplay among the Alberta, Canadian, and American …