Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Ethnic Women Homesteading On The Plains Of North Dakota, H. Elaine Lindgren

Great Plains Quarterly

Women as well as men took advantage of government land policies that encouraged settlement on the Great Plains. Researchers have replaced earlier stereotypes that emphasized the reluctance of women to participate in the settlement process by more dynamic and realistic conceptualizations that portray women as courageous, enthusiastic, and adventuresome. ¹

Review Of The Female Frontier: A Comparative View Of Women On The Prairie And The Plains., Alice Hall Petry

Great Plains Quarterly

You've seen her in a hundred books, movies, and television programs: the "madonna of the prairie." But how much of the image of the frontier woman is accurate, and how much is the product of a curious alliance between Victorian ideals of womanhood and the public relations rhetoric of booster-minded Midwestern hamlets? In The Female Frontier, Glenda Riley seeks to unveil the true frontier woman of the prairies and the Great Plains; and although her book is not consistently satisfying, it does much to correct the most persistent myths of the frontier woman while pointing to areas for further …

Review Of The Way To Independence: Memories Of A Hidatsa Indian Family, 1840-1920 And A Coloring Book Of Hidatsa Indian Stories: Based On The Life And Drawings Of Edward Goodbird, Joseph C. Porter

Great Plains Quarterly

The Way to Independence exhibition and catalog appeared in 1987 to mark the centennial of the passage of the Dawes Indian Severalty Act of 1887, legislation intended to "civilize" American Indians by abolishing tribes as legal entities and allotting reservation lands to individuals. With the disappearance of the tribal land base, proponents of the Dawes Act assumed that Indians would be compelled to "assimilate" into the mainstream of American life.

Review Of From Pittsburgh To The Rocky Mountains; Major Stephen Long's Expedition, 1819-1820, John L. Allen

Great Plains Quarterly

The task of editing historical documents is a difficult one; the editor must tread a fine line between preserving the historical integrity of the original text while offering the fresh and insightful information on that text that makes the new edition valuable. The responsibility of the historical editor becomes even more challenging when much of the editorial work involves the condensation of a lengthy original into a shorter new edition. In this new edition of the chronicles of Stephen Long's expedition across the Central Plains to the Rockies, the editor has successfully negotiated the shoals and reefs of condensation, abridging …

Review Of An Atlas Of The Sand Hills, Bradley H. Baltensperger

Great Plains Quarterly

Although the goal of this "Resource Atlas" is to describe the largest region of sand dunes in the western hemisphere in a single, easily accessible volume, this well-illustrated narrative would more appropriately be labeled a natural history of the Sandhills. Half the book describes the region's physical environment, including climate, geology, and water supply, and another quarter treats flora and fauna.

Review Of Brandon: Geographical Perspectives On The Wheat City, Brenton M. Barr

Great Plains Quarterly

This valuable contribution to the regional literature on Canadian urban places was produced to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Brandon University's Department of Geography. The book demonstrates the depth, range, and degree of integration that a team of geographers can achieve. Brandon comprises eleven chapters, a preface by the three editors, and a foreword by one of Canada's most distinguished historical geographers, John Warkentin, who reminds us that in regional studies "it is absolutely vital to understand the experiences of the people who live there, and who have lived there in the past."

Review Of Puuing Leather: Being The Early Recollections Of A Cowboy On The Wyoming Range, 1884-1889, Lynn M. Cawthra

Great Plains Quarterly

In the early 1930s, dentist-physician Reuben Mullins decided to chronicle his youthful experiences as a cowpuncher on the Wyoming range. He was unable to secure a publisher for this work, however, and after his death in 1935, the manuscript was filed away for more than fifty years. Scholars Jan Roush and Lawrence Clayton discovered Mullins's narrative in 1986 and recognized its importance as a historical document. Their editorial support and Mullins's own articulate and entertaining style have assured Pulling Leather a place alongside such standard accounts of cowboy life as Adams's Log of a Cowboy and Siringo's A Texas Cowboy …

Review Of Opera Houses Of The Midwest, Ronald L. Davis

Great Plains Quarterly

During the last third of the nineteenth century opera houses sprang up across the midwestern frontier in every town and village that had any pretense of becoming a city. Some were elegant structures of three to five stories, constructed with the hope of actually staging grand opera there; others were small theaters, often located on the second floor of a business establishment, with little chance of presenting anything grander than an occasional play; still others were simply community halls that from time to time served the function of a playhouse. All were multi-purposed facilities that became viewed as the social …

Review Of Northern Prairie Wetlands, Jack Deforest

Great Plains Quarterly

Evidence of human disruption of ecosystems often generates a "crisis response," but fortunately we are finally learning that a base of solid scientific information is crucial for effective policymaking. This useful book provides such information for a type of wetland that is little known and poorly understood, the prairie pothole region. It developed out of a 1985 symposium in North Dakota that aimed to review the "state of knowledge" concerning various elements of the region's wetland ecology. Because of the subject's complexity, the book's content is limited to select areas: geology and hydrology, water chemistry, fauna and flora, food chains, …

Opera Houses In Kansas, Nebraska, And The Dakotas: 1870-1920, Ronald L. Davis

Great Plains Quarterly

As the last frontier approached an end, nearly every town of any distinction on the Plains boasted an opera house. The term "opera house" was preferred over "theater" since opera was considered a highly respected art form rather than mere popular amusement, even though grand opera itself was seldom actually performed in the Great Plains. What the management offered on its stage depended primarily on the town's proximity to a railroad, which in the late nineteenth century served as the major link to the outside world. Whether or not opera troupes ever sang for local audiences, a town's opera house----on …

Review Of Garden City: Dreams In A Kansas Town, Michael Broadway

Great Plains Quarterly

Unlike many other small towns in the Great Plains, Garden City, located in southwest Kansas, has experienced a rapid increase in population over the past ten years. Iowa Beef Packers opened the world's largest beef packing plant in Holcomb, seven miles west of Garden City, resulting in an influx of newcomers to the town, most notably more than two thousand Southeast Asian refugees.

The Daughters Of Shiphrah: Folk Healers And Midwives Of The Great Plains, Timothy J. Kloberdanz

Great Plains Quarterly

Prairie folk healers and midwives seldom have been the focus of scholarly investigation, despite the crucial role they played in the settlement of countless Euro-American communities in the Great Plains. These individuals, a majority of whom were women, brought with them to the American and Canadian grasslands a wealth of folk medical knowledge and a variety of health-oriented, traditional skills.

Review Of Heartland: Comparative Histories Of The Midwestern States, John C. Hudson

Great Plains Quarterly

Twelve authors, one per state, working independently of one another, assigned the common task of compressing their state's history, culture, politics, and geography into a single, brief essay-it could be a formula for disaster, but under the able, guiding hand of historian James H. Madison it turns out to be a successful achievement. Heartland is an enjoyable book, informative without making claims of authority, less comparative than its subtitle promises, but relentlessly sincere in presenting the diversity of pasts that collectively form a regional history of the Middle West.

Review Of Lubbock Lake: Late Quaternary Studies On The Southern High Plains, Warren W. Caldwell

Great Plains Quarterly

During the decade following the first verification of humankind in the New World, Early Man, or Paleo-Indian remains, as they were variously called, were eagerly sought. Such archeological sites, in Late Quaternary deposits, were by no means numerous. Yet persistent search revealed them, and in some numbers, particularly in the fringes of the westernmost Plains. Nowhere were they more abundant than in the southern High Plains of northwestern Texas and adjacent New Mexico. Among them is the Yellowhouse Draw site, perhaps best known as the Lubbock Lake site, at Lubbock, Texas. The occupation area, extensive by American standards (ca. …

Freedon And Control In Laura Ingalls Wilder's De Smet, John E. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly

Faith in the future, the virtues of persistence and hard work, the beneficence and occasional destructiveness of nature, the centrality of family, and the search for community are dominant themes of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books for children; one more theme is freedom. ¹ But this freedom is never conceived of as absolute; rather, it is subject to a variety of constraints-external and internal-that interact with it in uneasy tension. The Ingalls family moved west to Dakota Territory in 1879 because of Pa's quest for freedom from the constrictions hemming him in on the more settled frontier. Farther west, he believed, …

Review Of Among The Sleeping Giants: Occasional Pieces On Lewis And Clark, Gary E. Moulton

Great Plains Quarterly

The preeminent Lewis and Clark scholars of the latest generation are gone. Thus ends the era that spanned from the 1950s to the present and produced outstanding students of the expedition like Bernard DeVoto, Paul Russell Cutright, and Donald Jackson. Cutright, Lewis and Clark's naturalist-historian, died in March 1988, and Jackson, the expedition's most recent editor, passed away in December 1987. The work reviewed here is vintage Jackson, a mixture of lightness and substance, with an eye for the previously unnoticed and a flair for the appropriate word and arresting phrase.

Notes And News For Vol.9 No.1

Great Plains Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Review Of Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden: Agriculture Of The Hidatsa Indians And Indian Agriculture In America, Paul A. Olson

Great Plains Quarterly

The study of Native American agriculture has been revived recently by Gary Nabhan's Gathering the Desert, which concerns Southwestern Indian agriculture. The two books reviewed here deal more with plains agriculture. Wilson's book is an account of Hidatsa gardening practice in the nineteenth century as told to Wilson by Buffalo Bird Woman, a lady who continued to practice traditional ways long after most Hidatsa had adopted Western agriculture; the book gives a picture of traditional Hidatsa practices regarding com, sunflowers, squash, beans, tobacco, the tools used to grow them, their storage, their field culture, and the like. Hurt's book, …

Review Of Sacred Language: The Nature Of Supernatural Discourse In Lakota, Douglas R. Parks

Great Plains Quarterly

As early as 1851 the missionary Stephen Return Riggs remarked in the introduction to his grammar and dictionary of Dakota (eastern Sioux) that the shamans used a sacred language unknown to the common people. At the tum of the century the Pine Ridge Reservation physician James R. Walker, a dedicated student of Oglala Sioux ethnography, also referred to a ceremonial language known only to shamans. He, like Riggs and others who have mentioned it, gave only a small number of examples, all common words in the language that had been given different, or occult, meanings in order to obfuscate the …

Women's Contribution To The Family Farm, Richard W. Rathge

Great Plains Quarterly

Our recognition of women's involvement in Great Plains agriculture is frequently linked to stereotyped images and a romanticized perspective on farmers. These notions have been cultivated over time in the absence of careful research or historical documents that realistically detail women's work on the family farm. Except for collections of oral histories, letters, and diaries, we have relatively few written records of rural women's agricultural heritage in the Great Plains. Traditional images of women and girls on farms show them as helpmates whose labor is only indirectly related to agriculture. ¹ Their activities center predominantly on family and domestic chores. …

Review Of Stories Of The House People, Ahab Spence

Great Plains Quarterly

These stories are told from the heart. Both elders have much historic background-as a matter of fact both are direct descendants of the House People.

Review Of Willa Cather: A Literary Life, Karen Vierneisel

Great Plains Quarterly

James Woodress wanted to create a life-size portrait of Willa Cather. But his own assessment of the work sums up its limitation. "[His] present view of Cather does not change in any basic way the image of her contained in [his] earlier book." Since then, he may have read Cather's letters to Louise Pound, the new interpretations of Sharon O'Brien, Doris Grumbach, and Susan Rosowski, and Bernice Slote's copious materials to which he had access. But none of this new information teased his imagination

Attentional Focus And Causal Attributions In Social Phobia: Implications From Social Psychology, Debra A. Hope, David A. Gansler, Richard G. Heimberg

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

This article reviews the social psychological literature on attentional focus and causal attributions as they apply to social phobia. Excessive self-focused attention is increased by physiological arousal, interferes with task performance under some conditions, increases the probability of internal attributions, and intensifies emotional reactions. Social anxiety is also associated with a reversal of the self-serving bias for causal attributions. Implications of these findings for the maintenance and treatment of social phobia are discussed.

The Presentation Of The City On ‘Fat-Letter’ Postcards, Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Media-constructed rituals are cultural products. Unlike participatory rituals, my focus thus far, media-constructed rituals have more stability, higher internal order and consistency, and greater potential to reach people over time. Cultural artifacts from the past can reach people in their own era, the present, and the future, and in this way they provide a source of continuity even for rapidly changing societies. We begin this section of the book by examining a small artifact in an interaction ritual, the presentation of the city on a particular style of postcard.

Cities are complex human environments that are frequently symbolized in the …

What It Means To Be A Humanist Sociologist: A Socioautobiographical Perspective, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

I am delighted to speak to you as a representative of the Association for Humanist Sociology. It is my purpose today to acquaint you with the Association for Humanist Sociology, to prompt your queries about the Association, and to answer your questions concerning the ways in which our organization supports the humanist values and professional interests of students and practicing sociologists across the country. Prior to talking about the “nuts and bolts” of the Association’s history and member services, however, I turn to my central topic for today: a socioautobiographical perspective on what it means to be a humanist sociologist.

The Transition From Infancy To Early Childhood: A Difficult Transition, And A Difficult Theory, Carolyn P. Edwards

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

The transition from infancy to early childhood was observed in households in rural Zinacanteco households in the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, in 1968-1969, and found to be a fairly lengthy period of upset, disturbance, listlessness, and apathy for the children, leading eventually to their accepting a new position in the family. The transition involved three abrupt and harsh changes: (1) abrupt weaning from the mother’s breast; (2) simultaneous change in sleeping arrangements from lying next to the mother to sleeping with siblings; and (3) more gradual transfer of the child’s primary care from the mother to older siblings or courtyard …

American Charities As The Herald To A New Age, Mary Jo Deegan

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The publication of American Charities in 1894 signaled the start of a new age. It crystallized the views of men and women working in economics, sociology, history, and philanthropy. Massive social changes-in urbanization, industrialization, immigration, the roles of women, and the relation between the home and the marketplace-generated social strains that could not be accommodated by traditional world views. Social problems in this new situation, particularly poverty, were perceived increasingly as secular instead of religious issues. Solutions to these social problems were needed urgently, and Amos G. Warner, the author of American Charities, articulated a new vision amidst the …

Farming Systems Research/Extension And The Concepts Of Sustainability, Charles A. Francis, Peter E. Hildebrand

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

Farming Systems Research and Extension (FSR/E) has strongly influenced the direction of agricultural development over the past two decades. Involving farmers, change agents and researchers, this participatory approach to technological improvement has evolved as an efficient means to develop individual components and more integrated systems that are uniquely suited to specific biophysical and socioeconomic conditions. Farmers with similar conditions and for whom specific recommendations are appropriate are grouped, in FSR/E, into identifiable Recommendation Domains. The technologies recommended conform with the biophysical and socioeconomic constraints that create environments within the domains, based on the philosophy that new technologies must conform with …

Balancing Endangered Species Protection And Irrigation Water Rights: The Platte River Cooperative Agreement, J. David Aiken

Department of Agricultural Economics: Faculty Publications

This article discusses Platte basin water right disputes involving endangered species, the development of the Platte Cooperative Agreement as a method for resolving such conflicts, and the framework within which such conflicts will now be addressed.

Least Squares Estimation Of Avian Molt Rates, Douglas H. Johnson

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

A straightforward least squares method of estimating the rate at which birds molt feathers is presented, suitable for birds captured more than once during the period of molt. The date of molt onset can also be estimated. The method is applied to male and female mourning doves.