Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Book Review: Western Traditions: Contemporary Artists Of The American West, Reece Summers

Great Plains Quarterly

American western art is experiencing an astonishing resurgence in quantity and popularity. The Los Angeles Times recently reported that "Americans are buying Western art (pictures and sculptures of cowboys, Indians, ranch animals and the landscapes that sustain them) at a startling rate, paying prices that stretch into six and seven figures." Modern-day critics of traditional western art are not as enthusiastic, pointing to its male-centered tradition celebrating violence and overlooking the devastation of indigenous cultures and the environment caused by European settlement.

Book Review: The Western Pursuit Of The American Dream: Selections From The Collection Of Kenneth W. Rendell, Ron Tyler

Great Plains Quarterly

Like many other lovers of the West, collector and dealer Kenneth Rendell was inspired by his childhood experiences in nature-in his case, his family's annual summer stay at a lakeside cabin sans utilities north of Boston. It was nurtured by his firsthand acquaintance with the original materials of history when he began his dealership in 1959, flourished in his friendship with historian Stephen Ambrose, and reaches its zenith with the stunning collection of materials he shared in a 2004-05 exhibition at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington, MA, and published in this book.

Natural Areas, Regions, And Two Centuries Of Environmental Change On The Great Plains, David J. Wishart

Great Plains Quarterly

A careful reading of recent issues of the Natural Areas Journal, the publication of the Natural Areas Association, will leave you with the conclusion that humans are not a part of natural areas. When humans do appear, it is either as disturbing agents, disrupting the naturalness through, for example, the introduction of exotic plants and animals, or as managers, enhancing the naturalness through, for example, prescribed burning. This is an explicit and purposeful exclusion: "We can probably all agree," wrote the editor of the journal in 2004, "that 'natural' places are areas where human actions have minimally changed the …

Book Review: Locust: The Devastating Rise And Mysterious Disappearance Of The Insect That Shaped The American Frontier, Ken Baake

Great Plains Quarterly

Locust is a hybrid academic study and popular science mystery that tells of the locust plague that swept out of the Rocky Mountains to eviscerate much of the Great Plains' fledgling agriculture in the late nineteenth century.

Book Review: The Captured: A True Story Of Abduction By Indians On The Texas Frontier, Gary L. Ebersole

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a well-researched and well-written study of a handful of Indian captivities on the Texas frontier in the 1870s. Its author was motivated by the desire to know more about the life of Adolph Korn (1859-1895), his distant relative, who was captured at the age of ten by Comanche Indians. The Indian captivity tale has been a staple of the literature of the Americas since the publication of Mary Rowlandson's account from Puritan New England in 1682. Hundreds of accounts - factual, fictional, and fictionalized - have told the tale of the innocent abducted and carried off to the …

Great Plains Quarterly Spring 2006 Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly Spring 2006 Editorial Manner, Table of Contents, and Book Notes.

Review Essay: Encyclopedia Of The Great Plains, William Ferris

Great Plains Quarterly

How proud Ellison would be to see his work and that of so many other distinguished artists, writers, and musicians recognized in the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains. The Great Plains roots of Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Cornel West, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, and Jay McShann make emphatic the region's importance in African American history and culture. Like their counterparts in the American South, these artists migrated to Chicago and New York where they became leaders in the nation's cultural life.

Book Review: Tell Me, Grandmother: Traditions, Stories, And Cultures Of Arapaho People, Loretta Fowler

Great Plains Quarterly

Organized as a series of "imagined conversations" between Virginia Sutter and her great-grandmother Goes In Lodge (1830-76), Tell Me, Grandmother presents in alternating chapters Goes In Lodge's and Sutter's recollections of their life experiences.

Review Essay: Encyclopedia Of The Great Plains, Andrew C. Isenberg

Great Plains Quarterly

The latest of the local encyclopedias is the University of Nebraska Press's Encyclopedia of the Great Plains. This work was long in the making: the idea for the encyclopedia emerged out of the University of Nebraska's Center for Great Plains Studies in the late 1980s.
Somewhere along the way, the editors of the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains decided to organize the entries not alphabetically but thematically. This thematic organization has its virtues, especially for readers interested in particular subjects. As editor David Wishart explains, the thematic chapters provide "an interpretive function which is lacking in purely alphabetical works." Yet …

Book Review: Women Of The Northern Plains: Gender And Settlement On The Homestead Frontier, 1870- 1930, Angel Kwolek-Folland

Great Plains Quarterly

Focusing on the history of North Dakota farm women from the years of settlement and community-building to the transition to an industrial, consumer economy, Handy-Marchello argues that North Dakota farm marriages of necessity were economic partnerships throughout this period.

Fields Of Opportunity: Wind Machines Return To The Plains, Jacob Sowers

Great Plains Quarterly

The last two decades have seen a rebirth of wind machines on the rural landscape. In ironic fashion the wind's kinetic energy has grown in significance through its ability to generate commercial amounts of electricity, the commodity that a few generations earlier hastened the demise of the old Great Plains windmill. Yet the reemergence of wind machines on the landscape has been slowed by local opposition. Many places across the country have seen resistance to the construction of vast wind turbine arrays. Although wind energy fulfills both the businessman's requirement for profit and the environmentalist's desire for clean electrical production, …

In The Footsteps Of The Third Spanish Expedition: James Mackay And John T. Evans' Impact On The Lewis And Clark Expedition, Kevin C. Witte

Great Plains Quarterly

The odyssey that was the Lewis and Clark Expedition continues to capture the hearts of those who love tales of adventure and unknown lands. In light of the current bicentennial celebration that began in 2003 and will continue through 2006, the popularity and aggrandizement of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their Corps of Discovery has never been greater. Clearly, none can deny that they were essential to expanding the geographical horizons of a fledgling nation coming to grips with the rich resources that the vast expanse of the Louisiana Territory would offer. However, lost in the glorification of these intrepid …

"These Is My Words" . . . Or Are They?: Constructing Western Women's Lives In Two Contemporary Novels, Jenneifer Dawes Adkison

Great Plains Quarterly

In analyzing Gloss's The Jump-Off Creek, and Turner's These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories, I explore how questions of authenticity can help us to understand and situate these novels as well as how these texts playfully reinvent the "authentic" western.

German Heritage And Culture In Louise Erdrich's The Master Butchers Singing Club, Thomas Austenfeld

Great Plains Quarterly

Reid's discussion of the formal properties of Erdrich's work helps explain the author's popular appeal. Mewing easily between urban and rural settings, between reservation culture and mainstream culture, Erdrich has been evoking the various sets of social and historical circumstances that define the lives of contemporary Native Americans in the Great Plains. In The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003), Erdrich turns her attention explicitly to her own part-German ancestry and fictionalizes it, thereby bringing a n element of both thematic and autobiographical relevance into prominence.

Book Review: Indians In Unexpected Places, William Bauer

Great Plains Quarterly

In his first book, Playing Indian (1998), Philip Deloria examined the ways that non-Indians used American Indian images to create their own identity. In his latest book, Deloria looks at the American Indians who challenged the assumptions that often informed those representations. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, American Indians appeared in places where non-Indians did not expect to find them-on football fields, in beauty parlors, in Cadillacs. As Indians entered these unexpected places, they challenged notions of modernity, tradition, and the conventional role many people had created for them. Ultimately, though, they failed to change America's …

Book Review; The Garden Of Art: Vic Cicansky, Sculptor, Ruth Chambers

Great Plains Quarterly

Don Kerr's The Garden of Art: Vic Cicansky, Sculptor reviews the career and practice of one of Saskatchewan's must important visual artists. Although paperback and inexpensive, the book includes an illustrated text followed by sixty-four pages of full-color photographs that provide a retrospective of Cicansky's work. The author describes Cicansky's sculptures and his working process and records relevant details of his life.

Book Review: Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story Of George Bent - Caught Between The Worlds Of The Indian And The White Man, Lincoln Faller

Great Plains Quarterly

In the last two decades of his life Bent became a prolific letter-writer as well; more than five hundred of his letters survive in various archives. His chief correspondents were Grinnell, with whom he collaborated in shaping the foundational texts of Cheyenne history and ethnography, and George Hyde, who also worked with Grinnell and supplied him with a great deal of information gleaned from his own far more extensive correspondence with Brent. Bent's letters to Hyde became the basis for Hyde's Life of George Bent: Written from His Letters (essentially completed by 1916, hut not published until 1968), which Halfbreed …

Book Review: Horizons West: Directing The Western From John Ford To Clint Eastwood, Joanna Hearne

Great Plains Quarterly

First published in 1969, Horizons West was one of the early structuralist treatments of a Hollywood genre and a pivotal text in American writing on the Western. Borrowing from anthropological studies of myth, Kitses outlined a series of binary oppositions between the individual and the community, nature and culture, the West and the East, and wedded this thematic outline to a stylistic exploration of three directors: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, and Sam Peckinpah. The book signaled serious academic consideration of Westerns not only as a legitimate art form but also as a complex and meaningful expression of American cultural history. …

Book Review: Charles M. Russell: The Storyteller's Art, Jim Hoy

Great Plains Quarterly

Charles M. Russell: The Storyteller's Art, by shedding light on Russell's ability to create narrative in writing, has the added advantage of contributing critical insight into his painting as well.

Migration Out Of 1930s Rural Eastern Oklahoma: Insights For Climate Change Research, Robert Mcleman

Great Plains Quarterly

I undertook an investigation of how rural populations responded to a period of adverse climatic conditions in rural eastern Oklahoma during the 1930s, with particular interest in those households that adapted by migrating to rural California. This is not the first time that 19305 Oklahoma has been the subject of research into how people and communities adapt to difficult environmental conditions. In the wake of a 1985 conference entitled "Social Adaptation to Semi-Arid Environments" at the Center for Great Plains Studies in Lincoln, Great Plains Quarterly presented a series of papers by well-known scholars exploring human-environment interactions that gave rise …

Book Review: Encyclopedia Of The Lewis And Clark Expeditions, Stephen S. Witte

Great Plains Quarterly

In their preface, the authors hope "that this book will prove a valuable resource to students of the Lewis and Clark Expedition." Regrettably, numerous errors and contradictions drastically reduce its value.

Book Review: Horizons West: Directing The Western From John Ford To Clint Eastwood, Joanna Hearne

Great Plains Quarterly

The new edition is a useful overview of six major directors, a densely descriptive homage to the genre, and a touchstone in the history of film genre criticism. Critics familiar with the 1969 edition will appreciate the way Kitses has updated and elaborated on his initial premises. Readers new to Western genre criticism should see the work as an important strand in a broad range of critical discourses that now includes, among others, studies of gender in Westerns by Lee Clark Mitchell and Jane Tompkins, materialist, industry-based analyses by Peter Stanfield, Peter Lehman's extensive readings and re-readings of John Ford's …

Notes And News- Spring 2005

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News

Frederick C. Luebke Award

Great Plains Symposium 2005

Northern Great Plains History And The Society For Military History 2005 Conference

International Cather Seminar 2005

Call For Papers: Western History Association 2006 Conference

Western History Association 2005 Conference

Review Of Ghost Towns Alive: Trips To New Mexico's Past By Linda G. Harris, David Pike

Great Plains Quarterly

Not even ghost towns are exempt from progress. In New Mexico, some ghost towns are disappearing into the earth or being subsumed by ranches, while others are reincarnating themselves into outright tourist attractions. Accordingly, books about them are morphing from travel guides that tell us what we'll see, to coffee tables that show us what we missed. Ghost Towns Alive by Linda Harris is one of the former, but its artistic photos and clever, sensitive writing nod to the latter.

Harris offers her definition of "ghost town" as a place founded for a purpose, later to decline. By adding "accessible …

Book Notes- Spring 2005

Great Plains Quarterly

Book Notes

The True Life Wild West Memoir of a Bush Popping Cow Waddy

Jim Courtright of Fort Worth: His Life and Legend

Native American Literatures: An Introduction

Charles Fritz: An Artist with the Corps of Discovery

Saskatchewan Writers: Lives Past and Present

The Art of American Arms Makers: Marketing Guns, Ammunition and Western Adventure during the Golden Age of Illustration

Nebraska Simply Beautiful

Review Of The Great Sioux Uprising: Rebellion On The Plains, August-September 1862 By Jerry Keenan, Paul N. Beck

Great Plains Quarterly

With only eighty-nine pages of text, Jerry Keenan's The Great Sioux Uprising was not meant to be the definitive work on the Minnesota's Dakota War of 1862, but rather an overview of the conflict for the general public. As such, the book is a worthy effort. Keenan, the author of several volumes dealing with the Indian wars in the West, adequately covers the issues and events of the war.

Keenan, writing in an easy, reader-friendly style, first gives brief biographical sketches of the various individuals involved in the conflict, followed by a good general overview of the various reasons for …

Review Of Wilderness Journey: The Life Of William Clark By William E. Foley & William Clark And The Shaping Of The West By Landon Y. Jones, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly

Following the Lewis and Clark expedition's return in 1806, almost a decade passed before the first official record of their journey was published by Nicholas Biddle and James Allen in 1814. Two hundred years later Gary E. Moulton's definitive thirteen-volume editing of the journals was completed. In the past two centuries dozens of books and thousands of articles have explored various aspects of the Corps of Discovery and its participants. Dozens of biographies have chronicled the lives of Meriwether Lewis, George Drouillard, York, and, especially, Sacagawea. Amazingly, William Clark has received little notice. One important exception was Jerome O. Steffen's …

Review Of How The Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage In The Western United States, 1868-1914 By Rebecca J. Mead, Karen E. Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly

Rebecca Mead has crafted a detailed history of suffrage campaigns in the western states. While her accounts are particularly rich for California, her definition of the West also includes Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. Each chapter of How the Vote Was Won focuses on one or a handful of states, tracing the factors Mead identifies as critical to success (or failure) of campaigns for woman suffrage. More than this, she provides vibrant descriptions of the backgrounds of state suffrage leaders, their relationships with prominent national suffrage activists, the content of state suffragists' …

Review Of High River And The Times: An Alberta Community And Its Weekly Newspaper, 1905-1966 By Paul Voisey, Bert Deyell

Great Plains Quarterly

Paul Voisey investigates the town's storyteller rather than the story of High River. Dismissing postmodernist media theories of communication as too abstract, Voisey opts for informal textual analysis: his personal interpretation. The pages of the High River Times, supplemented with personal papers of the proprietors and archives at the Glenbow Museum, evidence a cycle common to small town prairie history: boosterism, economic hardship, reappraisal, and reactionary rural idealism.

The Times initially declares the potential of High River in term of progress, says Voisey; the local weekly newspaper becomes a publicity agent for speculators, governments, and railways. But economic and …

Review Of Myths America Lives By By Richard T. Hughes, Kris Fresonke

Great Plains Quarterly

Scholars of American culture can resist anything except temptation, and the ultimate temptation is to write a jeremiad. Like New England divines, suckled in a creed outworn, calling for reform from pulpits tenured and unnoticed, the contemporary academic observer of American life, as a matter of professional privilege, redrafts his raw material into a social gospel. Its formal features are fundamentalism and selective evidence. Its mood is unironic. It has one ending: decline and fall.

Richard T. Hughes's Myths America Lives By suggests that the United States has both created and been created by six national, and in some cases …