Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2003
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 1, Winter 2003, pp. 55.
Abstract
This well-written, well-illustrated anthology will gladden the hearts of students of the American West, not least because nine of the eleven authors are young-doctoral candidates or assistant professors. There is hope for Western studies. Five are historians, six trained in and teach literature, but most cross disciplinary boundaries quite easily. The geographical scope of the essays stretches well beyond the Great Plains, but the reader will land squarely between the Missouri and Montana in much of the volume.
Theresa Strouth Gaul introduces the writings of three Pennsylvania sisters named Stewart who crossed the Overland Trail to Oregon in 1853 and their struggle (not always successful) to transcend the guidebook genre in describing their own migrant experiences. Linda Schelbitzki Pickle explains how gender shaped the recollections of Germans who journeyed to Iowa and Kansas between 1852 and 1905, particularly what male and female memoirists thought important to record and what not to. Gioia Woods discusses the life and writings of Sarah Winnemucca and how she worked to explain her Paiute world to a white audience.
Matthew Evertson, focusing on Stephen Crane's stories set in Nebraska and Mexico, shows how Crane devised a literary-realist vision of the West different from Theodore Roosevelt's or Owen Wister's. Douglas M. Edward provides a strongly documented description of boom-and-bust homesteading in Montana from 1908 to the early 1920s, revealing how "both state-builders and homesteaders ... were motivated and ultimately betrayed by ideologies, ... the natural environment and global economic systems."
Comments
Copyright 2003 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln