Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Title And Contents- Spring 1985

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

SPRING 1985 VOL. 5 NO.2

CONTENTS

WOMEN ON THE PLAINS: AN INTRODUCTION Frances W. Kaye

WOMEN ON THE GREAT PLAINS: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN RESEARCH Glenda Riley

WESTERN WOMEN AND TRUE WOMANHOOD: CULTURE AND SYMBOL IN HISTORY AND LITERATURE June O. Underwood

HAVING A PURPOSE IN LIFE: WESTERN WOMEN TEACHERS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Courtney Ann Vaughn-Roberson

A WIDENING HORIZON: CATHOLIC SISTERHOODS ON THE NORTHERN PLAINS, 1874-1910 Susan C. Peterson

BOOK REVIEWS

Historians and the American West

A Borderlands Town in Transition: Laredo, 1755-1870

Prairie Wildflowers: An illustrated manual of species suitable for cultivation and grassland restoration

The …

Review Of The Explorers: Nineteenth Century Expeditions In Africa And The American West By Richard A. Van Orman, William H. Goetzmann

Great Plains Quarterly

Recently the history of exploration and discovery has become fashionable-possibly as a relief from the dreary "body count" social histories that have been inflicted upon us for the past decade. The Explorers by Richard A. VanOrman is an attempt to capitalize on the new fashion for exploration history. In this work the author attempts to analyze and compare, as his subtitle indicates, "Nineteenth Century Expeditions in Africa and the American West."

This is an artificial topic since there is no overarching logical reason for comparing the two enterprises-at least none that the author addresses. Moreover, the author's approach to the …

Notes And News- Spring 1985

Great Plains Quarterly

NOTES & NEWS

UPCOMING SYMPOSIA

PUBLISHING OPPORTUNITIES

NEBRASKA NOTES

Review Of Prairie Wildflowers: An Illustrated Manual Of Species Suitable For Cultivation And Grassland Restoration By R. Currah, A. Smreciu, And M. Van Dyk, Paul Barnes

Great Plains Quarterly

In recent years, perhaps because of the dwindling virgin prairie in North America, there has been increased public interest in prairie restoration and the cultivation of native species. However, readily accessible information concerning the germination and propagation requirements of many prairie plants, especially the nongrass species or the so-called "wildflowers," has been limited. Prairie Wildflowers is a synthesis of three years of study on the horticultural suitability of more than 140 species of native forbs and shrubs by the University of Alberta Devonian Botanic Garden.

For each species examined, information is given on botanical characteristics (growth habit; flower, fruit, and …

Review Of The Archaeology Of Colorado By E. Steve Cassells, Warren C. Caldwell

Great Plains Quarterly

I suspect that academe, at least that portion called anthropology, will not approve of this book. I t lacks the paraphernalia of scholarshipthere are no citations in the text-at least I saw none, nor are there learned footnotes or BOOK REVIEWS 135 graphic displays of statistical data. There is, however, a remarkably inclusive text and an extensive bibliography that can lead the truly interested reader to a treasure-trove of information. Supplementary chapters include lists of relevant radiocarbon dates, a status report on current archeology, a "scrapbook" of archeologists active in Colorado, and perhaps most useful to the uninitiated, a discussion …

Review Of Historians And The American West Edited By Michael P. Malone, Dick Harrison

Great Plains Quarterly

The seventeen essays in this volume are intended, as Michael Malone says, "to describe what has been done, how well it has been done, and what needs to be done" in western American history. Historians will no doubt approach them as a comprehensive assessment of western historiography, but many Great Plains Quarterly readers will come to them as I have, in search of a research tool for the nonspecialist with a limited range of questions to which the historians may have answers.

Together the essays provide an invaluable guide for the nonspecialist, but some offer clearer guidance than others. While …

Women On The Plains An Introduction, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly

The four essays brought together here are a testimony to the surge of interest in women’s history in general and in the lives of women on the Great plains in particular that has welled up in the last decade. Unlike previous special issues of the Quarterly, which were the results of symposia planned around specific topics, this issue was generated by the articles themselves, which arrived independently on the editor’s desk within a relatively short period of time. Two are Overviews and two are case studies of particular groups of women. Together, the four articles suggest the richness of …

A Widening Horizon Catholic Sisterhoods On The Northern Plains, 1874-1910, Susan C. Peterson

Great Plains Quarterly

Catholic sisterhoods have been part of American life since the colonial period, first as operators of charitable institutions to aid the needy and then, in the nineteenth century, as teachers of both immigrant children in the East and Indian children at mission schools on reservations in the West. Conventional historical studies have either slighted or ignored their contributions to the settlement of the northern plains, and recent articles on Catholic missions in history journals do little better. In both secular and church histories, Catholic sisters are traditionally pictured as silent representatives of female purity or as extensions of the church …

Having A Purpose In Life Western Women Teachers In The Twentieth Century, Courtney Ann Vaughn-Roberson

Great Plains Quarterly

Beginning late in the eighteenth century, social theorists developed an ideology of domesticity, maintaining that women's proper role lay in the care of children, the nurture of the husband, the physical maintenance of the domicile, and the guardianship of both home and social morality.¹ Although this ideology helped to propel females into teaching, historians have not agreed on the impact of domestic ideology on women teachers and on the education profession itself. Some scholars conclude that women's easy access to teaching posts turned the classroom into a workshop for motherhood for the average female, perpetuating anti-intellectualism in education to …

Review Of A Borderlands Town In Transition: Laredo, 1755-1870 By Gilberto Miguel Hinojosa, Ralph H. Vigil

Great Plains Quarterly

This study of Laredo shows how larger events such as Indian raids, war, occupation, and changes of sovereignty affected population growth, decline, and change from the founding of this border town to the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Utilizing primary and secondary sources for his demographic findings, Hinojosa's story of a border community tells us a good deal about average annual rates of population change, family and class structure, ethnicity, age composition, literacy, property ownership, occupations, intermarriage, race relations, and other subjects. Moreover, his comparison with other borderlands communities in this period gives the study perspective. The author …

Western Women And True Womanhood Culture And Symbol In History And Literature, June O. Underwood

Great Plains Quarterly

History cannot happen," says Henry Nash Smith, "that is, men cannot engage in purposive group behavior without images which simultaneously express collective desires and impose coherence." Although Smith does not mention it, women too engaged in purposive group behavior. They too had images that organized their experiences and gave impetus to action. And since women were part of the great western migration, the images that made sense to them and engaged them in action within the westering experience were formative in their history.¹

This article will look at nineteenth-century western women and the symbols that formed their particular history …

Women On The Great Plains Recent Developments Research, Glenda Riley

Great Plains Quarterly

During the past dozen years or so, scholars have become increasingly involved in researching the lives and experiences of women on the Great Plains. At the same time, interest in learning more about the lives of all types of western, frontier, farm, and rural women has burgeoned. As a result, researchers now devote their careers to these topics, national conferences convene to disseminate and refine this increasing scholarship, and journals commit theme issues to presenting research results.

This essay is a survey of research developments concerning plainswomen between the early 1970s and the present day. The purpose of such an …

Review Of The Rocky Mountains: A Vision For Artists In The Nineteenth Century By Patricia Trenton And Peter H. Hassrick & Karl Bodmer's America Introduction By William H. Goetzmann, Richard W. Etulain

Great Plains Quarterly

Historians have generally paid less attention to western art than to other facets of western American cultural history such as literature, religion, and education. Perhaps this lacuna results from historians' lack of knowledge about art history or from their reluctance to venture into the tangled thickets of art criticism. At any rate, except for the useful book length studies of John C. Ewers and Robert Taft (both non-historians) and the less extensive but probing commentaries of William Goetzmann and two of his students, Brian Dippie and Joseph C. Porter, historians only occasionally discuss artistic treatments of the American West.^{1 …}

Title And Contents- Winter 1985

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly

Winter 1985 Volume 5 Number 1

CONTENTS

EUROPEAN INFLUENCE ON THE VISUAL ARTS OF THE GREAT PLAINS: AN INTRODUCTION Jon Nelson

PACKAGING THE GREAT PLAINS: THE ROLE OF THE VISUAL ARTS Roger B. Stein

ORIGINALITY AND INFLUENCE IN GEORGE CALEB BINGHAM'S ART Stephen C. Behrendt

COWBOY KNIGHTS AND PRAIRIE MADONNAS: AMERICAN ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE PLAINS AND PRE-RAPHAELITE ART Kirsten H. Powell

BIRGER SANDZEN: A PAINTER AND HIS TWO WORLDS Emory Lindquist

BOOK REVIEWS

REVIEW ESSAY: RECENT INTERPRETATIONS OF WESTERN AMERICAN ART

The Rocky Mountains: A Vision for Artists in the Nineteenth Century and Karl Bodmer's America Richard …

Review Of The Indian Arts And Crafts Board: An Aspect Of New Deal Indian Policy By Robert Fay Schrader, C. Adrian Heidenreich

Great Plains Quarterly

In fourteen chapters and thirty-nine pages of notes Schrader chronicles the Indian Arts and Crafts Board during its development from the late 1920s to the passage of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board Act in 1935 and its work until 1945. Placing it within the general sociopolitical context of New Deal policies, including those of the Indian office, he provides a careful, detailed, chronological account of the background, activities, accomplishments, and, above all, the struggles of the board.

The central argument of this book is that the board, one of the major Roosevelt-Collier "Indian New Deal" programs, was the most …

Originality And Influence In George Caleb Bingham's Art, Stephen C. Behrendt

Great Plains Quarterly

The work of "the Missouri artist," George Caleb Bingham (1811-79), offers us a good opportunity for considering the broad subject of originality and influence in the arts. The combination of originality and convention in paintings such as Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, The Jolly Flatboatmen, and The County Election can tell us much about the dynamics of that branch of American art which sought to reconcile the inherited traditions of formal, academic European art with the often strikingly unconventional reality of a New World.

Often condescendingly labeled "regional" art because of its frequently eclectic emphasis upon the local and the …

Review Of John Steuart Curry And Grant Wood: A Portrait Of Rural America By Joseph S. Czestochowski, Robert Spence

Great Plains Quarterly

This catalogue was assembled to coincide with an exhibition of "the best works" (p. 5) of two of our most famous American scene painters, Grant Wood (1892-1942) of Iowa and John Steuart Curry (1897-1946) of Kansas. The exhibition traveled, fittingly, to museums in Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas, and was very well received.

Make no mistake about it, the Midwestern Regionalists are "in": the bellwether artistsCurry, Wood, and their friend Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri-have been rescued from the obscurity to which they were consigned during the heyday of abstractionism after world War II. Mr. Czestochowski, an established museum professional and …

Birger Sandzén: A Painter And His Two Worlds, Emory Lindquist

Great Plains Quarterly

Birger Sandzén, Swedish-born painter and lithographer, achieved a national reputation during the more than half a century that he was associated with Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas. His place in the mainstream of American landscape painting is readily apparent if one considers the vast number of exhibitions of his paintings, which ranged from hand-carried portfolios in a school or church to one-man shows in major galleries in the United States and Europe.

Although Sandzén's paintings had been exhibited before, his national reputation really began in 1922 with a showing of his work at the Babcock Galleries in New York City. …

Notes And News- Winter 1985

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News

GRANT AWARDED

ART ACQUISITIONS

CENTER FOR GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

CONFERENCES IN RELATED FIELDS

European Influence On The Visual Arts Of The Great Plains An Introduction, Jon Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly

From colonial times, American art has been subject to European stylistic influences, but art historians have not heretofore devoted much attention to the effect of such influences on the visual art of the Great Plains. Thus this topic seemed a fruitful theme for the 1984 annual symposium of the Center for Great Plains Studies, as was proved by the variety of proposals elicited by a call for papers. Many of the submitted papers concerned the various manifestations of Romanticism and its effects on painting in and of the region. Romanticism, an imprecise term, covers a multitude of feelings, philosophies, and …

Cowboy Knights And Prairie Madonnas American Illustrations Of The Plains And Pre-Raphaelite Art, Kirsten H. Powell

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1911, Dorothy Canfield's short story "The Westerner" appeared in Scribner's Magazine.¹ The story describes the chauvinism of Joanna, a young lady from Kansas who, when sent East to attend college, tries to convince her friends that eastern notions of the West are misconceptions. "You think all Western men are long haired cowpunchers!" she cries to her Maineborn roommate. "Let me tell you that they are not, but a great deal better-dressed, and more up-to-date and-and cultivated than these silly Eastern boys!" She takes her crusade to Hillsboro, Vermont, where she informs her elderly cousins that there is no …

Packaging The Great Plains The Role Of The Visual Arts, Roger B. Stein

Great Plains Quarterly

To consider the influence of Europe upon the visual arts of the Great Plains is to engender not only a new body of information but also some complex methodological questions of concern not only to the specialist but to the student of the region more generally. How does a regional perspective focus one's investigation? How does "influence" work within a culture and how, specifically, that of Europe upon American and western culture? Finally, how do the visual arts function to shed light on these broader questions? It is the last of these questions that I will address here, not as …

Review Of Farm Women On The Prairie Frontier: A Sourcebook For Canada And The United States By Carol Fairbanks And Sara Brooks Sundberg, Vernon R. Lindquist

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a book divided-almost against itself. The first half consists of a series of brief essays, the second half a series of annotated bibliographies. The early essays seem caught between a chatty informality and serious scholarship. Added to this apparent indecision about style is a lack of collaboration on focus so that Sundberg's essay, "Early Agricultural Settlement on the Interior Grasslands of North America," seems without significant connection to Fairbanks's essay, "Women and their Visions: Perspectives from Fiction." More importantly, the authors seem confused about the book's purpose. It is called a "sourcebook," which implies a detailed bibliography (which …

Review Of The Troll Garden By Willa Cather, David Stouck

Great Plains Quarterly

In the introduction to this variorum edition of Cather's first collection of stories, James Woodress, distinguished American literature scholar and Cather biographer, points out that Cather regarded her short fiction as her literary apprenticeship and wrote few stories after she began publishing novels. One could also observe that Cather did not develop the genre significantly and accordingly is infrequently anthologized. At the same time, it should be pointed out that her stories are important because they anticipate the novels thematically and, perhaps more importantly, because they provide us with a venue for the development of her craft.

That interest is …

Review Of Western American Literary Criticism By Martin Bucco, Helen Winter Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly

Martin Bucco's Western American Literary Criticism is a tight, terse compendium of Western American literature and its criticism from the mid-1700s to the present. Beginning with an examination of the relative worth of the early criticism (and finding much of it "a byproduct of the bar and the pulpit"), he discusses the American preoccupation at various times with Western humor, regionalism, morality, and the effect of Marxist criticism on the literature.

With so much territory to cover in so little space, Bucco cannot present a detailed study of the many individuals important to the field, but he manages adroit brief …

Title & Contents- Fall 1984

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

FALL 1984 VOL. 4 NO.4

CONTENTS

WILLA CATHER TODAY: AN INTRODUCTION Mildred R. Bennett and Susan J. Rosowski

WILLA CATHER AND THE SWEDES Mona Pers

WILLA CATHER'S AMERICAN GOTHIC: SAPPHIRA AND THE SLA VE GIRL Susan J. Rosowski

NEBRASKA NATURALISM IN JAMESIAN FRAMES John J. Murphy

CATHER'S LAST THREE STORIES: A TESTAMENT OF LIFE AND ENDURANCE Marilyn Arnold

LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THE CATHER WORLD: A PERSONAL ESSAY Lucia Woods

WILLA CATHER'S NEBRASKA PRIESTS AND DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP L. Brent Bohlke

WILLA CATHER TODAY James E. Miller, Jr.

BOOK REVIEWS

The Troll Garden

Willa Cather: …

Cather's Last Three Stories A Testament Of Life And Endurance, Marilyn Arnold

Great Plains Quarterly

Near the end of her career-and her life-in the conclusion to the story "Before Breakfast," Willa Cather described the "first amphibious frog-toad" who, when he "found his water-hole dried up behind him," undauntedly "jumped out to hop along till he could find another" and in doing so, "started on a long hop."l At first glance, this little parable might appear to be a misplaced curiosity in a story by a Midwesterner about a frazzled businessman seeking refuge on an island off the North Atlantic sea coast. Closer scrutiny reveals it to be essential to the meaning of the story and …

Willa Cather Today An Introduction, Mildred R. Bennett, Susan J. Rosowski

Great Plains Quarterly

The essays in this volume were originally presented in June 1983 at the second national seminar on Willa Cather, "Willa Cather Today." For nearly a week, 125 people gathered in Hastings and Red Cloud, Nebraska, some coming from nearby homes and some traveling from twenty-eight other states, India, China, and Sweden. In doing so, participants had in substance one of the most basic ideas in Cather's writing, that place and movement are complementary. In coming to Webster County, participants affirmed the importance of not only place in Cather's writing but also the journeys that connect lives. In 1981, the theme …

Willa Cather's Nebraska Priests And Death Comes For The Archbishop, L. Brent Bohlke

Great Plains Quarterly

When Willa Cather returned to the prairies of her childhood as a locale for her fiction in O Pioneers! in 1913, she returned to a number of other things as well. Among these were the religious faith and practice of her old neighbors and the importance of this faith to their lives. Cather's experience of rediscovery, struggle, and assimilation of the Christian faith is reflected throughout her Nebraska books and is particularly evident in Death Comes for the Archbishop, written after she, along with her parents, had been confirmed into the Episcopal Church at Grace Church, Red Cloud. Although …

Review Of Critical Essays On Willa Cather Edited By John J. Murphy, Bruce P. Baker

Great Plains Quarterly

John J. Murphy's volume in G. K. Hall's series Critical Essays on American Literature is a significant contribution to Cather studies. In a substantial introduction, Murphy, who presently contributes the annual bibliographical essay "Fiction: 1900-1930" to American Literary Scholarship, has collaborated with Kevin Synnott in surveying Cather scholarship over the years. Both negative and positive reviews as well as important articles and books are chronologically presented and succinctly characterized. Murphy and Synnott give considerably more attention to the reviews than did Bernice Slote's fine bibliographical contribution to Sixteen Modern American Authors (1973); in so doing, they call attention to …