Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Birger Sandzen: An Illustrated Biography By Emory Lindquist, Ann Davis

Great Plains Quarterly

In Birger Sandzén Lindquist combines biography and art analysis. The first half of the book looks at Sandzen's early years and his decades at Bethany College. After a rich section of forty-nine color plates, the author turns to an examination of the influences on his painting, his methods, the response of art critics, the graphic work, and Sandzen's association with two friends as documented in correspondence. The overall result is a wellrounded picture of a positive adventurer, a regional painter whose work well deserves the recognition afforded it here.

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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 Singing An Indian Song: A Biography Of D' Arcy Mcnickle By Dorothy R. Parker, Robert F. Gish

Great Plains Quarterly

D'Arcy McNickle occupies a position of relatively minor but increasing stature in American Indian history and literature. Dorothy R. Parker's volume is thus a welcome addition to the increasing number of monographs, critical studies, and general commentaries about this ordinary but successful individual.

Modern biography is characterized by a fascination with people who, although notable, are seldom as illustrious and "famous" as the figures who traditionally engaged the attention of earlier, particularly nineteenth-century, biographers. In this sense, McNickle is clearly a modern subject; and reader interest in him, although keen among enthusiasts, will probably be limited.

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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 …

Small Historic Sites In Kansas Merging Artifactual Landscapes And Community Values, Cathy Ambler

Great Plains Quarterly

In Kansas during the past two decades, county historical societies and local community groups have initiated a trend that deserves attention-the establishment and support of small historic sites. Conceived with little aspiration of becoming the next Williamsburg, Plimoth Plantation, or Conner Prairie, they are endeavors by small communities to preserve elements of their traditional built environment and identify themselves with their respective pasts. With the community itself as its essential audience, each site celebrates a historical identity of success, harmony, and stability. Kansas's small historic sites are assembled landscapes that represent local community values, but in which rural and urban …

Some Observations On The Labor Force Of The Canadian Ranching Frontier During Its Golden Age, 1882 .. 1901, Simon M. Evans

Great Plains Quarterly

It is more than a decade since scholars like L. G. Thomas and David H. Breen challenged the assumption that the Canadian ranching frontier was a straightforward case of technological and land-use diffusion from the United States. Breen argued that the Canadian government had played a significant role in bringing the range cattle industry into being within the North West Territories during the 1880s and went on to trace the manner in which the Department of the Interior overtly supported the ranchers for the next twenty years. Under this regulatory umbrella, upheld by the forceful presence of the North West …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

CALLS FOR PAPERS

NORTHERN GREAT PLAINS HISTORY CONFERENCE

GABRIELLE ROY INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM

WESTERN HISTORY ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE

GREAT PLAINS POPULAR CULTURE ASSOCIATION AND AMERICAN CULTURE ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE

CONFERENCE ON REGIONALISM IN CANADIAN AND AMERICAN WRITING

COMPARATIVE FRONTIER STUDIES SYMPOSIUM

The Front .. Gabled Log Cabin And The Role Of The Great Plains In The Formation Of The Mountain West's Built Landscape, Jon T. Kilpinen

Great Plains Quarterly

Students of American material culture have often viewed the arid, largely treeless Great Plains as an innovative source region of various aspects of western culture, especially those that gained expression on the landscape. While barbed wire and sod construction are two familiar examples, another exists in the front-gabled log dwelling, the dominant traditional building form of the Mountain and Inter-mountain Western frontier. Because the front-gabled log dwelling was indeed common on the Plains and reputedly absent in the forested, eastern United States, scholars have identified the Great Plains as the source region of this vernacular floorplan. Recent field and secondary …

Review Of North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, And Differentiation By Terry G. Jordan, Brad A. Bays

Great Plains Quarterly

In this important companion to his earlier book, The American Backwoods Frontier, Terry Jordan has again taken the study of cultural diffusion into a new realm of inquiry and interpretation. Although mainly a synthesis of a vast and interdisciplinary literature, North American Cattle Ranching Frontiers offers a revisionist explanation of the origins, spread, and patterns of cattle ranching in most of North America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. This study will prove to be an even more innovative and controversial work than Backwoods, for the questions asked and the solutions provided are grand ones indeed. A cultural geographer, Jordan tailors …

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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 A Naturalist In Indian Territory: The]Ournals Of S. W. Woodhouse, 1849-50 Eds.John S. Tomer And Michaelj. Brodhead, David J. Harter M.D.

Great Plains Quarterly

"Weare still very far from being aware of the dimensions and ramifications of our ethnocentric illusions." Although more than forty years have passed since Joseph Epes Brown penned these words in preface to The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux, Americans still struggle to find a national identity that transcends our European heritage and its Judeo-Greco-Roman foundations. If one doubts just how pervasive (and sometimes counterproductive) the Eurocentric illusion could be, a reading of the Woodhouse Journals and a bit of introspection should suffice to convince. Woodhouse wrote a century before Brown. …

Review Of Schoolwomen Of The Prairies And Plains: Personal Narratives From Iowa, Kansas, And Nebraska, 1860-1920 By Mary Hurlbut Cordier, Sylvia Hunt

Great Plains Quarterly

The book is disappointing, however, in at least two respects. Although Cordier asserts that the women in her study both conformed to and challenged expectations of their gender, she fails to provide supporting evidence. The threads of autonomy for women, demands for equality (at the early date of 1860), and activism toward those ends are evidenced by these school women throughout the work, but they are not woven together into a coherent argument. It is difficult, therefore, to assess the contribution women teachers from the heartland might have made to the women's movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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

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 Life At Four Corners: Region, Gender, And Education In A German-Lutheran Community, 1868-1945 By Carol K. Coburn, Lesley Ann Kawaguchi

Great Plains Quarterly

The strength of this work is Coburn's focus on the way in which boys and girls were socialized into the community and on the roles men and women played in sustaining their households, their community, and their ethnoreligious identity and culture. Furthermore, she has highlighted and offered insight into the German-Lutheran family, a neglected element in many German-American studies. The story of Block Corners's residents is particularly engaging when Coburn draws on individuals, recollections, and anecdotes that illustrate her points, such as first-generation midwife Gesche Mahnken Block and her ties to the informal networks established among the women.

Review Of The Persistence Of Ethnicity: Dutch Calvinist Pioneers In Amsterdam, Montana By Rob Kroes, Frederick C. Luebke

Great Plains Quarterly

The Persistence of Ethnicity is not just another digest of desiccated social data but an engaging account, exceptionally well written, that probes the role of religion in the maintenance of ethnicity in the American West. Atypical perhaps in the small size and isolated location of the area of its focus, this case study is all the more valuable because these very characteristics (combined with the availability of excellent sources) allow Kroes to explore and test his ideas with ease.

Review Of Cather, Canon, And The Politics Of Reading By Deborah Carlin, Christopher Nealon

Great Plains Quarterly

There are moments when Carlin simply gives the novels to much credit for the value of their ambivalence, especially when concluding her chapters: on more than one occasion her final claim seems to be that Cather's late work was simply too complex and metafictional for earlier critics. Moreover, her feminism is more nuanced than her deconstructive technique: although extremely attentive to the complicated ways in which white women make use of black women in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, for instance, Carlin valorizes the way characters in Shadows on the Rock tell small stories in the midst of the …

Review Of Homes In The Heartland: Balloon Frame Farmhouses Of The Upper Midwest, 1850-1920 By Fred W. Peterson, Barry Newton

Great Plains Quarterly

The text examines the influence of balloon frame construction as part of the increasing use of industrial methods and transportation on the development of rural life. Peterson shows particular skill in understanding the process of initial settlement and the gradual adaptations and extension to the dwellings that occur as the farm and its family enlarge and become more successful. He explains in detail how the methods of balloon framing assisted these purposes and enabled families to make dwellings that suited their practical needs and moral and aesthetic choices. He also shows how the influence of architects' pattern books and builders' …

Review Of "A Funnie Place, No Fences": Teenagers' Views Of Kansas, 1867-1900 Edited By C. Robert Haywood And Sandra Jarvis, Carol Miles Petersen

Great Plains Quarterly

For some time we have had accounts written by men of the early years in a new state; then women's diaries began to be discovered recording events from a woman's perspective. With this book, we now have a sense of what it was like to be a teenager who had moved from New York or Iowa into a prairie land with little broken ground and "no fences." "A Funnie Place" adds an important dimension to both our historical and sociological understanding of daily life on the Kansas Plains.

Review Of Preserving The Great Plains And Rocky Mountains By Elaine Freed, Amil Quayle

Great Plains Quarterly

The title is misleading. This is actually a book about preserving human-made structures and prehistory sites and artifacts in the region. There is no strong argument here against stopping the forces that lay waste to the landscape as the European onslaught continues to nullify the symbiotic relationships that Native American peoples practiced with their mother, the Earth, on this continent.

Review Of Flat Water: A History Of Nebraska And Its Water Edited By Robert Kuzelka, Charles Flowerday, Robert Manley, Bradley Rundquist, And Sally Herrin, James E. Sherow

Great Plains Quarterly

Read this volume if you want to know anything, nearly everything, about the history of water development in Nebraska. Robert Manley first began this book as a centennial history of the Nebraska State Irrigation Association, but he persuaded the editors of the need for a more inclusive treatment of Nebraska, which incidentally is an Omaha or Oto word meaning "Broad, Flat Water." Over thirty contributors would write the articles, draw the maps, make the charts, and take the photographs that comprise this hefty undertaking. The production staff should take pride in everyone's efforts.

Review Of Nebraskaland Magazine's The Cellars Of Time: Paleontology And Archaeology In Nebraska Vol. 72 No.1; January/February 1994. Lincoln: Nebraska Game And Parks Commission, Luann Wandsnider

Great Plains Quarterly

Nebraska is blessed with amazing and bountiful, and often unheralded, fossil and artifact resources. No Great Plains library is complete without this volume, which does a wonderful job of proclaiming this rich heritage. For Nebraska archaeology, it represents the only current source that is accessible and engaging. Students of paleontology will be similarly entranced and enlightened. NEBRASKAland and Nebraska History are to be congratulated.

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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 …

Review Of Prairie Populism: The Fate Of Agrarian Radicalism In Kansas, Nebraska, And Iowa, 1880-1892 By Jeffrey Ostler, Christina L. Wolak

Great Plains Quarterly

Ostler's review and interpretation of political events in Iowa is convincing, and the tables he provides clearly show a marked difference in voting patterns on either side of the Nebraska/Kansas and Iowa borders. His treatment of the political situation in Nebraska and Kansas is not as thorough, however, since it focuses mainly on the doings of Alliance members and does not give as detailed attention to the Republican Party. Overall this book is engaging reading and accessible to a wide audience.

"Who's Going To Dance With Somebody Who Calls You A Main Streeter" Communism, Culture, And Community In Sheridan County, Montana, 1918,1934, Gerald Zahavi

Great Plains Quarterly

So began Logan's long career in Sheridan County. The year was 1930, and she had just arrived from North Dakota, a fresh Cum Laude graduate of Jamestown College. The social and cultural walls that divided the community were at once unambiguously defined for her-with a simple list. The good Catholics and Lutherans of Plentywood made sure that the custodians of their children's minds would be well insulated from the riffraff of the town-the liquor distillers, the bootleggers, and, of course, the reds. The social center of the community, the Farmer-Labor Templethe "Red Temple" to local conservatives-was generally off limits …

Notes And News For Vol.14 No.4

Great Plains Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Walking The Sky: Visionary Traditions Of The Great Plains, Lee Irwin

Great Plains Quarterly

The shared worldviews of the indigenous peoples of North America are rooted and linked in a rich pre-Columbian artifactual and oral past that is still highly active today. One perspective into these worlds is obtained by understanding the nature of dreams and visions. In traditional Native American cultures, such a perspective is an essential part of the search for spiritual knowledge where dreams and visions represent contacts with primordial sources of empowerment. To perceive this search for empowerment requires an appreciation of the visionary experience, an experience which has often been denied or marginalized in the dominant cultures.¹

Review Of Pike's Peak Vision: The Broadmoor Art Academy , 1919-1945, Barbara Racker

Great Plains Quarterly

Pike's Peak Vision: The Broadmoor Art Academy, 1919-1945 is a catalog for a 1989/90 exhibition organized by the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Co-curators and authors Stanley L. Cuba and Elizabeth Cunningham state that the exhibition was the first survey of the collections of the Broadmoor Art Academy and its successor, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.