Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2010
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 30:3 (Spring 2010).
Abstract
While this book contains a good deal of useful information, both its research and approach are flawed. The presentation is often tedious, freighted as it is with undigested detail.
The major question must be why so much detail of the military action of the so-called Lane Brigade (the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Kansas Volunteer Regiments) is significant when the personality and background of Lane himself is mostly left out. Benedict opens with a disclaimer that his book is not a biography of Lane, and includes "only the most cursory background information." The reader is referred for Lane's biography to a piece by Wendell Holmes Stephenson published in 1930. Much strong secondary literature on Lane and his war activities since is entirely missing. There have been two book-length biographies of Lane published recently-Robert Collins's Jim Lane: Scoundrel, Statesman, Kansan (2007) and Ian Spurgeon's Man of Douglas, Man of Lincoln: The Political Odyssey of James Henry Lane (2008}-which are not used. National press coverage of Lane, both before the war and during it, is immense, and largely unavailed of here. To say that Lane personally is not significant is not sufficient to make the approach credible. Without him, there remains only the workaday story of an obscure border unit.
Comments
Copyright © 2010 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.