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 XLIII - Number 1
Spring 2012

Articles:

Quintard Taylor
"Facing the Urban Frontier: African History in the Reshaping of the Twentieth-Century American West"

Abstract: The arrival of tens of thousands of African American migrants during and after World War II dramatically transformed the Northern California cities of Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond and reshaped the politics of California. This article explores their impact on the political economy of these cities and suggests how their experiences presaged the transformation of urban America.

Steven Sabol
"Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization: The 'Touch of Civilisation' on the Sioux and Kazakhs"

Abstract: This article compares American and Russian colonization of continental interiors and the consequences for the indigenous Sioux and Kazakhs, focusing on imperial perceptions, social and economic dislocation, political sovereignty, and sedentarization. It provides a critical, comparative analysis of internal colonization exercised by the United States and Russia.

Todd M. Kerstetter
"Rock Music and the New West, 1980–2010"

Abstract: This article traces the use of western imagery in rock music from 1980 through 2010 and explores the West’s growing role as an influential producer of culture. While musicians continued to rely on iconic figures and mythical imagery, they increasingly depicted the region more realistically.

Blake Bell
FIELD NOTES "Homestead National Monument of America in the 150th Anniversary of the Homestead Act"

Abstract: Homestead National Monument of America is a National Park Service site dedicated to sharing the history of the Homestead Act of 1862. Most visitors to the monument vaguely remember learning that the federal government once gave settlers free land in the West, and they are surprised to learn the importance of this legislation to the history of the United States and its impact on millions of lives. The agricultural revolution that ensued spurred more sophisticated transportation systems, communication networks, and educational opportunities. Although the history can be complicated, often contradicting, and at times frustrating, it is never boring.

Book Reviews:

• Harmon, Rich Indians, by Daniel H. Usner, Jr.
• St. Jean, Remaining Chicksaw in Indian Territory, 1830s–1907, by Andrew Denson
• Santiago, The Jar of Severed Hands, by Paul Conrad
• Benally, ed., Bitter Water, by Robert S. McPherson
• Belanger, ed., First Nations Gaming in Canada, by Jessica R. Cattelino
• Carter and McCormack, eds., Recollecting, by Sheila McManus
• Cherny, Irwin, and Wilson, eds., California Women and Politics, by Julie Cohen
• Bakken, ed., The World of the American West, by Sterling Evans
• Ekberg, A French Aristocrat in the American West, by Jay Gitlin
• Pfeifer, The Roots of Rough Justice, by Brent M. S. Campney
• DeArment, Assault on the Deadwood Stage, by David A. Wolff
• Bigler and Bagley, The Mormon Rebellion, by Jeff Nichols
• Carpio, Indigenous Albuquerque, by Bradley Shreve
• VanderMeer, Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix, 1860–2009, by Michael F. Logan
• Morser, Hinterland Dreams, by James Feldman
• Miller, Populist Cartoons, by Charles Postel
• Aldama, Facio, Maeda, and Rabaka, eds., Enduring Legacies, by Rebecca A. Hunt
• HoSang, Racial Propositions, by David G. Gutiérrez
• García and Castro, Blowout!, by Ronald W. Lopéz II
• Montejano, Quixote's Soldiers, by Raul A. Ramos
• Buenger and De León, eds., Beyond Texas Through Time, by Laura Lyons McLemore
• Ely, Where the West Begins, by Paula Marks
• McDonald, José Antonio Navarro, by Glen Sample Ely
• Hackel, ed., Alta California, by Quincy D. Newell
• Mora, Border Dilemmas, by María E. Montoya
• Cohen, Braceros, by José Guillermo Pastrano
• Lee, Claiming the Oriental Gateway, by Eileen H. Tamura
• Robbins and Barber, Nature's Northwest, by Joseph E. Taylor III
• Garone, The Fall and Rise of the Wetlands of California's Great Central Valley , by Jeffrey K. Stine
• Swanson, The Bitterroot and Mr. Brandborg, by Greg Gordon
  

Coming Soon:

Articles:

John W. Heaton, "Athabascan Village Stores: Subsistence Shopping in Interior Alaska, 1850–1950"

Abstract: This study examines the emergence of Athabascan village stores along the Tanana River in the 1940s as a key component of a 150-years-long process of market integration. Although shopping has not been seen as part of traditional Indian subsistence, Athabascans have purchased an increasing portion of their needs and wants in Alaska for more than a century prior to 1971’s Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). This study asserts that the emergence of village stores drew Indians into a consumer-oriented economy, offered individuals choices, and encouraged greater consumption of staple and luxury commodities. Athabascans thus participated in the rise of an American consumer culture that began during the 1920s. The story of subsistence shopping challenges the bases of Alaska’s subsistence policy and the view that ANCSA and the creation of Native corporations forced hunter-gatherers into the market economy.

Grace Peña Delgado, "Border Control and Sexual Policing: White Slavery and Prostitution along the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1903–1910"

Abstract: This article argues that the convergence of immigration law and morals purity movements, beginning in 1907, constructed the U.S. southern border as a site of gender and sexual exclusions. At the turn of the twentieth century, policing the U.S.-Mexico border was a gendered and sexualized project of the American state that sought to prohibit the admission of “alien” women and girls practicing prostitution and those who procured them. This work joins a growing body of scholarship that places the origins of the U.S. immigration regime and its use of deportation and surveillance strategies before the Immigration Act of 1917.

George Colpitts, "Provisioning the HBC: Market Economies in the British Buffalo Commons in the Early Nineteenth Century"

Abstract: The case of the “Canadian” buffalo, which ranged north of the Missouri River, raises questions about the way a market economy can tragically ruin a common resource. After 1821 the monopolizing Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), based in London, drove down prices offered to Indian provisions hunters in British territory. In these northern areas of the Great Plains, where bison was commonly hunted not for robes and skins but for food to support the British fur trade, the provisions trade became an important factor in the herds’ destruction. By the 1830s, plains pemmican was valued at least four times lower than it had been three decades before. The company concurrently suppressed prices on dried meats and fats. These lowered prices in turn help explain some of the strategies and increased bison slaughter of Indian hunters. Their needs for European goods, especially firearms, generally increased in the nineteenth century, but their abilities to benefit from the market were undermined in monopolized conditions. In effect, the HBC played Indian hunters against each other by purchasing from them selectively and establishing a district quota system. Ultimately, the HBC enjoyed cheap access to plains-trade pemmican that led to progressively purchasing more of it to expand the company’s commercial reach and, in a larger context, amplify colonial expansion itself.

Samual J. Redman, FIELD NOTES. "Finding Rosie: Documenting the World War II Home Front Experience of the American West through Oral History"

Abstract: This article describes an ongoing oral history project with the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) of The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. It explains how the team frames its research, understands the audience for oral histories, details how individuals are selected for interviews, and outlines the project’s various new initiatives.

Comprehensive List of WHQ Articles, 1970 to the present

2010 - present, vols. XLI -

2000 - 2009, vols. XXXI - XL

1990 - 1999, vols. XXI - XXX

1980 - 1989, vols. XI - XX

1970 - 1979, vols. I - X