Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Bust To Boom: Documentary Photographs Of Kansas, 1936-1949 Edited By Constance B. Schulz, Drake Hokanson

Great Plains Quarterly

Despite its quiet and broad landscape, Kansas has endured a history that runs from antebellum violence, through buffalo slaughter and dust bowl despair, to wartime boom. Perhaps no time in Kansas history has seen more flux than the depression 1930s and the wartime 1940s; and doubtless no time has been better documented by able photographers. Thanks to Kansas-born Roy Stryker and the three documentary photography projects he headed during the period (for the Farm Security Administration, the Office of War Information, and Standard Oil of New Jersey), Kansans and the world have a sharper idea of what life was like …

Review Of Water, Land, And Law In The West: The Limits Of Public Policy, 1850-1920 By Donald J. Pisani, Robert Irvine

Great Plains Quarterly

Donald Pisani's collection of ten articles published between 1982 and 1994 and four section introductions discuss the evolution of public policy and resource development in the West. Unlike some collections, this is an internally consistent examination of the complicated and interrelated history of water, land, and law.

The first section, "Water Law," explores the importance of prior appropriation in raising capital and transforming the landscape. Pisani cautions against environmental determinism, arguing that water laws resulted from case specific economic concerns rather than simple aridity. He also reasserts, his thesis that prior appropriation and water developments in the West were consistent …

Review Of The Texas Military Experience: From The Texas Revolution Through World War Ii Edited By Joseph Dawson Iii, Charles Kenner

Great Plains Quarterly

The Texas Military Experience is primarily a compilation of papers read at a symposium sponsored by the Military Studies Institute at Texas A & M. The quality and scope of the essays, needless to say, vary greatly. Several, such as Paul Hutton's "The Alamo as Icon," Thomas W. Cutrer's piece on Ben McCullough, and especially Joseph c. Porter's meticulously researched study of Captain John G. Bourke's tour of duty on the Rio Grande, are especially well written and thought provoking. Hutton's sardonic but gentle dissection of the defenders of Alamo mythology alone would make the book worthwhile for most Texas …

Review Of Contented Among Strangers: Rural German Speaking Women And Their Families In The Nineteenth- Century Midwest By Linda Schelbitzki Pickle, Royden Loewen

Great Plains Quarterly

Here is an important study that joins the growing number of histories of rural American women. Its strengths are many. First, it uncovers the complex and multi-layered worlds of German-speaking immigrants; Linda Schelbitzki Pickle, a professor of German and Foreign Languages, uses her linguistic dexterity to unveil a rich cache of German-language diaries, letters, and memoirs, delivering it to North American readers in finely-crafted English narrative. The work is also remarkably sensitive to German immigrant diversity; although the immigrant groups hail from five Midwest states-Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska-they represent both Dreisziger Germans and "Germans from Russia," religious and …

Review Of Goff On Goff: Conversations And Lectures Edited By Phillip B. Welch, Carl Matthews

Great Plains Quarterly

Bruce Goff's career as an architect and educator spanned almost seven decades with some five hundred buildings designed and 147 built. In 1916, at the age of twelve, he was apprenticed to the architectural firm of Rush, Endacott & Rush in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was promoted to partner at age twenty-five. After serving in the military in the 1940s and a brief practice in Berkeley, California, Goff accepted a teaching position at the University of Oklahoma, recognized for one of the most creative programs in the country during this period, and quickly assumed the role of Department Chair. He resumed …

Review Of Kit Carson: Indian Fighter Or Indian Killer? Edited By R. C. Gordon-Mccutchan, Robert S. Mcpherson

Great Plains Quarterly

The five essays in this slim volume set out to answer the question asked in the title what was Kit Carson's attitude toward the Navajos he helped defeat during the 1860s. All five authors agree that Carson has been badly abused by other historians writing-often poorly-in the spirit of their own times without sympathetically understanding those of their topic. There is no hung jury on this verdict-Carson deserved better.

The defense's strategy is as follows. Darlis A. Miller lays the foundation by examining the role of dime store novels in creating a thrilling but fabricated reputation for a man who …

Review Of The Frontiers Of Women's Writing: Women's Narratives And The Rhetoric Of Westward Expansion By Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, Karen M. Morin

Great Plains Quarterly

Georgi-Findlay takes on the seemingly impossible task of synthesizing one hundred years of women's writing about American westward expansion. While focusing each chapter on just a few key texts, she draws widely on the works of Anglo-American novelists, journalists, settlers, travelers, tourists, army officers' wives, missionaries, and teachers, writing about a geographical area extending from Mackinaw Island to Puget Sound to Santa Fe. The author constructs a female counterpoint to male renditions of frontier adventure and conquest, but at the same time explores how white women's cultural practices existed in complicity with American territorial acquisition.

The book's three parts are …

Review Of Out Our Way: Gay And Lesbian Life In The Country By Michael Riordon, Ian C. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly

Michael Riordon, radio playwright and author of The First Stone: Homosexuality and the United Church (1990), is obviously a master interviewer. From meetings with some three hundred gay men and lesbians in rural Canada, he distills the personal narratives of subjects from the pseudonymous tightly closeted to local semi-acknowledged "characters" and internationally known figures such as writer Jane Rule or Jim Egan, recent challenger to the Canadian Charter of Rights. Quotable nuggets of wisdom and sharp human observation come from all, often marked by fear, loneliness, and bigotry. Overwhelmingly, story after story echoes the phrase, "I always knew I was …

Review Of Shingwauk's Vision: A History Of Native Residential Schools By J. R. Miller, Jennifer Pettit

Great Plains Quarterly

Historian J. R. Miller takes us on a long awaited journey in Shingwauk's Vision. The study, based on over a decade of research, is the first scholarly comprehensive history of residential schools in Canada from their beginnings to their demise in the 1960s. Miller deserves praise for examining the motivations and experiences of all three of the parties involved-the federal government, the various churches, and the students themselves. Using both government and missionary archives and extensive interviews with former students, Miller reveals not only the policies that shaped the schools, but the internal workings of the institutions as well. …

Review Of A Cowboy Writer In New Mexico: The Memoirs Of John L. Sinclair By John Sinclair, Ben E. Pingenot

Great Plains Quarterly

John Sinclair was the author of four unique grassroots novels: In Time of Harvest; Death in the Claimshack; Cousin Drewey and the Holy Twister; and The Night the Bear Came off the Mountain. In addition he published numerous articles and short stories in the New Mexico Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and other journals. Throughout all his writings runs the thread of his love of the land and the simple, earthy people native to it.

Sinclair was born in New York City in 1902. His father was the son of a wealthy and aristocratic family in northern Scotland. …

Review Of Portraits Of Community: African American Photography In Texas By Alan Govenar, Melissa Rachleff

Great Plains Quarterly

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries photography grew in popularity and accessibility. Better technology in film and processing, which made the medium more economical and easier for the amateur to execute, proved photography to be both a creative and enterprising activity appealing to an ambitious middle class. African Americans were among those who took up the camera, traversing rural communities in the developing South in search of steady work. The more successful photographers set up studios in towns and cities, basing their practice on portraiture and commemorative photography. Alan Govenar's Portraits of Community: African American Photography in Texas …

Review Of Winter Quarters: The 1846-1848 Life Writings Of Mary Haskin Parker Richards Edited By Maurine Carr Ward, Martha Peterson-Taysom

Great Plains Quarterly

Winter Quarters, the first in the new Life Writings of Frontier Women series edited by Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, is the result of Maurine Carr Ward's excellent editing of the journal of Mary Haskin Parker Richards, who converted to Mormonism in Lancashire, England, in 1838 and joined other church members in Nauvoo, Illinois in 1843. Most of the journal, however, was written between 1846 and 1848, from the time she left Nauvoo until her husband, Samuel Richards, nephew of the better-known Willard Richards, returned from Britain to Winter Quarters.

The journal, in offering its richly detailed daily life of one …

Review Of Plain Pictures: Images Of The American Prairie By Joni L. Kinsey, Joan Carpenter-Troccoli

Great Plains Quarterly

In Plain Pictures, Joni Kinsey argues that the depiction of the Plains and prairies has been a matter of accommodation from the time that Euro-American artists first ventured into the West. The prairie's lack of trees, natural and man-made landmarks, and high places from which to view the landscape made it an almost impossible subject for early nineteenthcentury painters. They introduced compositional elements and stylistic conventions into their prairie pictures to make them conform to generally accepted notions of beauty, even as they struggled to find pictorial forms appropriate to the Plains' undifferentiated spaces and low horizons. This process …

Review Of Desegregating Texas Schools: Eisenhower, Shivers, And The Crisis At Mansfield High By Robyn Duff-Ladino, William H. Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly

The author's thesis is that the school desegregation "crisis at Mansfield marked a significant milestone on the pathway to equality in the United States." She builds her argument through a painstaking reconstruction of the national, state, and local circumstances surrounding the failed attempt to integrate the Mansfield, Texas, high school in August 1956.

Nationally, the Supreme Court had issued its Brown desegregation ruling two years earlier, and President Dwight Eisenhower maintained his moderate attitude toward involving the federal executive in desegregation. In Texas, Governor Allan Shivers was determined to cripple desegregation. Shivers's powerful support of Eisenhower in 1952, which helped …

Women Writing About Farm Women, Becky Faber

Great Plains Quarterly

I spent the first sixteen years of my life on Iowa farms. We lived in rural Adair County, Iowa, in an area that was remote, quietly tucked about halfway between Des Moines and Omaha. All I knew was rural life. My parents were farmers, my grandparents were farmers, and most of my uncles and aunts were farmers. The farm determined many elements of my life. We raised much of our own food, butchered our own beef and pork, raised chickens for eggs and meat, milked cows and sold the cream, wore clothes that defined our tasks such as overalls and …

Literatures Of The Great Plains An Introduction, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly

What really happened? A meaningless question. But one I keep trying to answer, knowing there is no answer.¹

Storytelling, narrative, seems to be hardwired into humans as a way of comprehending emotional truths about ourselves and others, our history and our cultures. Through the stories we tell, over and over, circling through different kinds of truths, we make our approaches to the question of "what really happened," and somehow we find a few answers that suit our private and public nows. The conference on literatures of the Great Plains, presented by the Center for Great Plains Studies in Lincoln, …

The Corporate Farming Debate In The Post -World War Ii Midwest, Jon Lauck

Great Plains Quarterly

Ben Hogan balanced a mix of milk cows, corn, soybeans, sheep, and turkeys, avoided borrowing too much, invented his own machinery, and maintained an orderly farm, keeping his fences "horse high, bull strong and hog tight." Above all, he worked hard: "He worked and never slowed. He bulled his way through the house before sunrise each morning, growling to his sons to get out of bed and do the chores." He motivated the sons, who worked as hard as he did, by telling them "You're the laziest damned rednecks I ever laid eyes on. You're the weakest goddamned mollycoddles I …

Notes And News- Spring 1998

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes And News

Images Of The Northern Great Plains

Visiting Scholar Program, University Of Oklahoma

Mid-American Studies

Communities And Traditional Knowledge

Western History Conferences

Gendered Landscapes Synergism Of Place And Person In Canadian Prairie Drama, Anne F. Nothof

Great Plains Quarterly

In an attempt to realize the relationship of character and landscape, recent Canadian Prairie drama has moved beyond the confines of theatrical space through a metaphysical evocation of place and time. The prairies are configured as an imaginative projection of the human psyche, expressed through images that are themselves a reflection of an interaction of human and elemental forces. In the works of three women playwrights in particular Gwen Pharis Ringwood's Mirage, Sharon Pollock's Generations, and Connie Gault's Sky and The Soft Eclipse, character has metonymic resonance: it is contiguous with place and time. The relationship with …

Review Of Better Red: The Writing And Resistance Of Tillie Olsen And Meridel Le Sueur By Constance Coiner & Three Radical Women Writers: Class And Gender In Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, And Josephine Herbst By Nora Ruth Roberts, Linda Ray Pratt

Great Plains Quarterly

HARVEST SONGS AND ELEGIAC NOTES

"Writing about living subjects, especially those with whom one feels political and personal solidarity, is a touchy, even painful business," begins Constance Coiner in the introduction to her book on Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. Contemporary directions in scholarship have recognized that interaction and opened up the personal voice in the scholarly study. Putting aside the dream of disinterestedness, the scholar herself may become part of the subject. The traditions of an objective scholarship are especially hard to fulfill, even to honor, when the research is done in cooperation with a living author who …

Review Of Garth Brooks: The Road Out Of Santa Fe By Matt O'Meilia, Kent Blaser

Great Plains Quarterly

Garth Brooks has been a musical phenomenon. By various counts, admittedly unreliable and difficult to verify, his record sales between 1989 and 1996 topped sixty million, surpassing those of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson and making him the best selling solo musical act ever. Brooks not only dominated the country music genre; he is often credited with being the main force behind the country music revival of the 1990s, even with being a key factor in the overall growth of the popular music industry early in the decade.

Brooks is an important figure for students of the American West and …

Review Of Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner And Other Essays: A Tribal Voice, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is a Dakota who, born and raised to adulthood on the Crow Creek Indian Reservation near Fort Thompson, South Dakota, became a successful academic and a writer. On her departure from Eastern Washington University where she taught for nineteen years, she was described by her colleagues as "one of Indian Studies' secondary founders and also, in many ways, its conscience."

She dedicates her book to "the indigenous writer in the modern world" and declares it to be "designed to raise and discuss issues that are some of the most central and crucial questions in the field of American …

Review Of Till Freedom Cried Out: Memories Of Texas Slave Life Edited By T. Lindsay Baker And Julie P. Baker, Barry A. Crouch

Great Plains Quarterly

As the Civil War's last shot was fired, Texas held one-tenth of the slave population of all the Confederate States: four hundred thousand- an increase of almost a quarter of a million souls from the beginning of hostilities. That this forced migration did not lead to continuous and prolonged upheaval is rather remarkable. Also remarkable is the number of narratives collected from former slaves residing in Texas in the 1930s regardless of where they had been born. These recollections comprise six of the forty-one volumes in the collection of slave narratives edited by George P. Rawick. Now, in a beautiful …

Review Of Charles M. Russell: The Life And Legend Of America's Cowboy Artist By John Taliaferro, Elizabeth Dear

Great Plains Quarterly

For all the books written on Russell, an accurate, up-to-date biography has been lacking. Perhaps a definitive biography can never be fashioned since Russell left so little writing about himself. He and his wife Nancy did, however, leave many clues in letters to friends, in his fascinating tales, and in numerous other documents which, when pieced together, provide a credible portrayal of this complicated individual.

The first biography, published in 1948, twenty-two years after his death and eight after his wife's, was based on a manuscript commissioned by Nancy Russell which she deemed unsuitable for publication. Earlier autobiographies by some …

Review Of Hawk Flies Above: Journey To The Heart Of The Sandhills By Lisa Dale Norton, Brenda Doxtator

Great Plains Quarterly

"I realize that I am being seduced by memories," Lisa Dale Norton informs us, "that the task at hand has slipped behind the mirage of the past .... This place is lined with my stories. It has the power of home, and any tale I can tell is woven with knowledge I carry from a childhood spent exploring sandy prairie."

There are moments of loss in our lives when an unexpected song on the radio replays haunting fragments of our past. There are moments of joy when the scent of melting snow in spring rises like black earth freshly plowed, …

Review Of Uncommon Common Women: Ordinary Lives Of The West By Anne M. Butler And Ona Siporin, Gaynell Gavin

Great Plains Quarterly

Written for a general audience, Uncommon Common Women examines "ordinary" female experience in the American West. Although the women who appear in this book are ordinary in the sense of having gained neither fame nor notoriety, most of them expressed remarkable courage and fortitude in the face of hardship. Uncommon Common Women also emphasizes diversity in western experience.

The authors have used an interesting, but somewhat problematic, blend of history, fiction, and photographs. The photographs, for instance, enhance the text, but lack of captions or numbers makes it arduous for readers to correlate photographs with the numbered photo credits appearing …

Review Of Farm Boys: Lives Of Gay Men From The Rural Midwest Collected And Edited By Will Fellows, John Gilgun

Great Plains Quarterly

Dear Will Fellows:

Thank you for collecting and editing Farm Boys. I have already found a use for it. Today, in one of my classes, a student, Ed Grimes, read a poem he had written. I have asked Ed if I can use some of it here:

Jeremiah, twenty-two years old, great looking, great personality, yet he is so damn alone, trying to bust out of the prison which is his closet of sexuality.

He sees fear, he senses despair, he sees facing family, friends and life of such blackness that he cannot comprehend all of the changes it …

Review Of Mexicans In The Midwest, 1900-1932 By Juan R. Garcia, Ralph Grajeda

Great Plains Quarterly

This is an important book on a significant and neglected topic: the immigration of Mexicans into the Midwest during the early decades of this century.

In contrast to the Southwestern US, the Midwest-with its distinctive Plains landscape and northern weather-would seem inhospitable to a predominantly working-class, Catholic, Spanish-speaking people accustomed to the desert regions and temperate weather of the central valley of Mexico. Mexican immigrants came, though-single men first and families later-"pushed" out from a Mexico in economic or civil strife and "pulled" in by the ready availability of US jobs. Using published materials, government documents, and archival sources, Juan …

Review Of White Man's Wicked Water: The Alcohol Trade And Prohibition In Indian Country, 1802-1892 By William E. Unrau, Maril Hazlett

Great Plains Quarterly

This book examines how the federal government and private capital, through interlocking agendas, used the alcohol trade in nineteenth-century Indian country to achieve the removal and dispossession of Native peoples from their remaining lands. William E. Unrau argues that federal Indian land cession policies influenced the increase in the region's alcohol trade, thereby ensuring the failure of Indian prohibition. His analysis, challenging the racist view that Indians are by nature disposed to alcohol, claims instead that whites in Indian country "set the standard" for Indian drinking.

Unrau proves that poorly drafted prohibition legislation, conflicting court decisions, and non-enforcement of treaty …

Review Of People Of The Great Plains By Peter Miller, Gregory L. Morris

Great Plains Quarterly

In his introduction, Peter Miller declares of the Great Plains: "This is a metaphysical land." By the time both he and his reader, however, make their way through the visual and literary territory covered in this. handsome volume, the Great Plains come to seem far less metaphysical and far more problematical a place. While Miller reinforces some of the traditional mythology of the Plains in his complementary texts and photographs-the elemental and inherent freedom of Plains life, the stubborn resilience of its people, the soul that resides in geography-he also explores the contradictions that have come in time to trouble …