Great Plains Quarterly publishes new studies on 19th-century events

The 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha, the 1882 Nebraska woman suffrage campaign and the 1820 Stephen Long Expedition -- highlights of the 19th century -- are featured in the spring issue of Great Plains Quarterly, a publication of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Nebraska's Indian population increased dramatically in the summer of 1898, when more than 500 Indians representing 23 tribes came to Omaha to take part in the U.S. Indian Bureau's exhibit at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition. Josh Clough, a Ph.D. student at the University of Oklahoma, said, "Certainly exhibit organizers had their own colonialist ideas about how native peoples should be portrayed to the American public at Omaha. However, Indians who attended the exposition created their own programs of events that defied the notion that they were either subservient or assimilated."

Carmen Heider wrote about a significant moment in the history of the U.S. women's rights movement, when the American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association held their annual conventions in Omaha in September 1882. Heider, assistant professor of communication and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, said the Nebraska conventions pronounced the importance of state and regional suffrage activism in the national movement.

Kevin Z. Sweeney, professor of history and geography at Wayland Baptist University in Plainview, Texas, said he believes the Stephen Long Expedition of 1820 did more to promote the idea of America's plains as the "Great American Desert" than any other source. Sweeney wrote, "After the accounts and report of the expedition were made public, the number of textbook references to the Plains as a desert jumped dramatically." His research shows the Long expedition had preconceived notions of the geographic character of the Plains, which were confirmed by their travels during one of the climatic drought cycles in the region.

In a review essay on two recently published books about Mount Rushmore, David A. Wolff of Black Hills State University in Spearfish, S.D., said, "Until I read these books by John Taliaferro and Jesse Larner, I never considered exactly why Mount Rushmore moves me or exactly what the monument means, or should mean, to the millions of people who visit it each year."

Great Plains Quarterly is edited by Charles A. Braithwaite. The journal may be purchased at Nebraska Bookstore, in the Great Plains Art Museum gift shop at 1155 Q St., or by calling the center at (402) 472-3082.

CONTACT: Linda Ratcliffe, Publications Specialist, Center for Great Plains Studies, (402) 472-3965