Western Historical Quarterly

Western Historical Quarterly
Mission Statement
The Western Historical Quarterly strives to be a congenial home for the study and teaching of all aspects of North American Wests, frontiers, homelands, and borderlands. Our mission is to cultivate the broadest appreciation of this diverse history.
Western History Association
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Book Reviewer Information

Utah State University 
0740 Old Main Hill
Logan, Utah 84322-0740
phone 435.797.1301
fax 435.797.3899
whq@usu.edu

Volume XLIV - Number 3
Autumn 2013

Articles:


Victoria Grieve
"Celebrating 'Progress'?: Art, Ambivalence, and Vanessa Helder's Grand Coulee Suite"

Abstract: This article explores Washington artist Vanessa Helder’s Grand Coulee Suite, twenty-two watercolors created during the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam. Helder’s Precisionist style challenged landscape painting traditions that depicted the American West as a pristine or sublime wilderness, untouched by civilization. The uneasy silence and precise details in her work force viewers to grapple with the effects of technology on the land and the relationship between people and the environment. Now housed at Spokane’s Northwest Museum of Art & Culture, Helder’s Grand Coulee Suite suggests an ambivalent view surrounding western development, hydropower, and technology in New Deal America.

Rosina A. Lozano
"Managing the 'Priceless Gift': Debating Spanish Language Instruction in New Mexico and Puerto Rico, 1930–1950"

Abstract: While Spanish persisted as a foreign language in the United States, its long presence in New Mexico and Puerto Rico provided the opportunity for native Spanish speakers to bolster their regional identity. New Mexico’s identity was as a leader valuable to hemispheric goodwill while Puerto Rico solidified a separate national identity.

Shelley Brooks
"Inhabiting the Wild: Land Management and Environmental Politics in Big Sur"

Abstract: Recent scholarship has explored the construction of legal wildernesses out of landscapes that were once inhabited and productive. In contrast, residents and authorities of Big Sur, California, created a hybrid space: an area renowned for its natural beauty and lack of development in which residents preserved not only the landscape but their own right to live in it.

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Book Reviews:

  • West, The Essential West, Richard W. Etulain
  • Adams and DeLuzio, ed., On the Borders of Love and Power, Mary Melcher
  • Melcher, Pregnancy, Motherhood, and Choice in 20th Century Arizona, Jennifer Holland
  • Beaton, Colorado Women, Fawn-Amber Montoya
  • Chávez-García, States of Delinquency, Ruth M. Alexander
  • Fox, Three Worlds of Relief, David G. Gutiérrez
  • Rawitsch, The House on Lemon Street, Meredith Oda
  • Tamura, Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence, Joel Miyasaki
  • Arnold, Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead, Sam Herley
  • Hamill, Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau, Erik D. Gooding
  • Haskins, Matrons and Maids, Päivi Hoikkala
  • Lindsay, Murder State, Brenden Rensink
  • Beatty-Medina and Rinehart, ed., Contested Territories, Brad Jarvis
  • Karamanski, Blackbird’s Song, Theresa Schenck
  • Heffernan, Where the Salmon Run, Gray H. Whaley
  • Salmón, Eating the Landscape, Joe Lamb
  • Cook-Lynn, A Separate Country, Jeffrey P. Shepherd
  • Liebmann, Revolt, Shawn Wiemann
  • Swagerty, The Indianization of Lewis and Clark, vol. 1;
    Swagerty, The Indianization of Lewis and Clark, vol. 2, William Foley
  • Garry, Weapons of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Robert J. Moore
  • Stevenson, Deliverance from the Little Big Horn, Robert Wooster
  • Abrams, Sioux War Dispatches, Tom Buecker
  • Lahti, Cultural Constructions of Empire, Timothy Braatz
  • Fallaw and Rugeley, ed., Forced Marches, Aaron Mahr Yáñez
  • Boessenecker, When Law was in the Holster, Robert J. Chandler
  • Smokov, He Rode with Butch and Sundance, Joyce Buckland
  • Johnson, The McLaurys in Tombstone Arizona, Frederick Nolan
  • McCannon, A History of the Arctic, Adrian Howkins
  • Otter, Civilizing the Wilderness, Frieda Knobloch
  • Boyer, A Land Between Waters, Casey Walsh
  • Hirt, The Wired Northwest, Leah Glaser
  • Sellers, Crabgrass Crucible, Ted Steinberg
  • Heefner, The Missile Next Door, Karen Merrill
  • Stoddart, Making Meaning out of Mountains, William S. Swearingen
  • Harwood and Fogel, Quest for Flight, Janet R. Bednarek
  • Berman, Politics, Labor, and the War on Big Business, Greg Hall
  • Driscoll, Gilchrist, Oregon, Linda Carlson

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Coming Soon:

Articles:

Silvana R. Siddali, "Regulating the Jackals of the Monetary World: Banking and Constitutional Reform in the Antebellum Northwest"

Abstract: This article describes the fights over banks and paper money in state constitutional conventions in the antebellum Northwest. These debates played a central role in the development of popular self-government and democracy in the region. Citizens demanded fundamental constitutional reforms that would circumvent irresponsible legislatures and thwart undemocratic financial institutions.

James David Nichols
, "The Line of Liberty: Runaway Slaves and Fugitive Peons in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands"

Abstract: In the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, runaway slaves from Texas and debt peons from Northern Mexico put the new borderline to an unexpected use. Aware that it separated two very different countries, each sought refuge on the other side. Thus, a line intended to seal off one side from the other and keep laborers bounded in their place served a contrary function. The flood of refugees across the border produced a guerra sorda—cold war—between Mexico and the United States over their differing ideas of labor and race. On the ground, this war of words constantly threatened to degenerate into a hot shooting war. And when runaway slaves and Mexican peons became unexpected allies, the situation only deteriorated further. Ultimately, neither Mexican nor U.S. officials could disabuse their servile laborers of the notion that the new border represented a line of liberty and that greater opportunity lay in greater mobility..

Felipe Hinojosa
, "¡Medicina Sí Muerte No!: Race, Public Health, and the “Long War on Poverty” in Mathis, Texas, 1948–1971"

Abstract: This essay examines the evolution and politics of the Chicano movement in South Texas. Framed around the mysterious death of Dr. Fred E. Logan Jr., the author argues that concerns around public health were at the heart of a long struggle to end poverty and overturn years of Anglo political rule in the small town of Mathis..

 

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