Summer Great Plains Quarterly available

            Lincoln, Neb., July 24, 2013 -- The summer issue of Great Plains Quarterly features a Native American family's role in a 1939 farm-development project on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, a newspaper editor who used the publication to boost his town's growth and a Syrian-Lebanese family's entrepreneurial tradition in Kansas.

            Great Plains Quarterly is an academic journal published by the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

            In "Ethnography of One Family on a 1939 Blackfeet Indian Reservation Farm Project in Montana," Donald D. Pepion investigates water resource and land management in 1939 as a farm project developed on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana. "It was also a socioeconomic development effort to ameliorate the desperate living conditions the Blackfeet had suffered with the loss of the their traditional buffalo economy," wrote Pepion, an associate professor of Native American studies at New Mexico State University.

            Michael S. Huefner and Shauna Anderson Young write about Joseph Ellis Johnson, editor of the Council Bluffs (Iowa) Bugle in 1853 in "Joseph E. Johnson: Author of Frontier News, Promotion and Progress." Instead of focusing solely on promoting a political agenda, Johnson used the paper as a platform to promote business and population growth in Council Bluffs. "Johnson made it one of his primary goals to capitalize on the national frontier movement and attract westward travelers, calling them to make their home in Council Bluffs." Huefner is a history and English student at Brigham Young University. Young is a professor and assistant dean of life sciences student services at BYU.

            In "Family, Ethnic Entrepreneurship and the Lebanese of Kansas," by Jay M. Price and Sue Abdinnour, the authors write about one of several Syrian-Lebanese families who established themselves in Kansas. "Starting as peddlers and proprietors of small stores, they went on to establish a tradition of entrepreneurship that continues to the present," they wrote. Price is head of the public history program and Abdinnour is a business professor, both at Wichita State University.

            The issue also includes book reviews of 15 titles on a variety of topics, including the Rocky Mountain Rangers, gender presentation in the frontier West and the impact of folklore on education.

            The journal may be purchased online at http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu. For more information, visit the website of the Center for Great Plains Studies, http://www.unl.edu/plains.

Writer: Katie Nieland