Iowa Research Online

O\u27Neil, Brandon James

Volume 37 
Number 3 ( 2020) Special Double Issue: 
Whitman's Fiction 
pps. 272-273 
A Note from the Managing Editor 
Brandon O'Neil 
brandon-oneil@uiowa.edu 
ISSN 0737-0679 (Print) 
ISSN 2153-3695 (Online) 
Recommended Citation 
O'Neil, Brandon. "A Note from the Managing Editor." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 37 (2020), 
272-273. https://doi.org/10.13008/0737-0679.2381 
This Announcement is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for 
inclusion in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more 
information, please contact lib-ir@uiowa.edu. 
A Note from the Managing Editor
Long I was hugg’d close—long and long.
Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me.
—“Song of Myself,” section 44
The story of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review is, as I see it, one of immense 
preparations, impossible to relate without mentioning the “faithful and friend-
ly” support it has received throughout its twenty-seven-year history. When 
the late Gay Wilson Allen founded the Walt Whitman Newsletter at New York 
University in 1955—a four-page centennial celebration of Leaves of Grass—he 
had not intended the work to continue beyond that centennial year; by the time 
of his death in 1995, he had lived to see the Newsletter pass through two more 
incarnations and two more institutions, as the Walt Whitman Review, edited 
by William White at Wayne State University, and finally as the current Walt 
Whitman Quarterly Review, initially co-edited by White and Ed Folsom at the 
University of Iowa. Our journal still stands as a loving tribute to Allen’s devotion 
to Whitman studies, but he is not alone, as evidenced by the continual presence 
of our current and Founding Editorial Board Members listed in every issue’s 
masthead. To this amazing band of Whitman scholars is added the editorial 
insight of Ed Folsom and Stephanie M. Blalock, who guided WWQR’s transition 
in 2015 from a print to an online, open access journal, and oversaw the publica-
tion of the major discoveries and critical contributions in Whitman scholarship 
that mark the past five years. 
These “faithful and friendly . . . arms that have help’d” have seen the 
Quarterly evolve with one goal in mind: to make available to you, “listener up 
there” (as Whitman would have it), the latest Whitman scholarship, criticism, 
and announcements in a convenient and (dare we say it?) pleasurable format. 
To this end, faithful readers of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review might be 
surprised to see some formatting changes in this issue when downloading their 
PDFs. For the current issue, WWQR’s working template has been revamped! 
You will find a more readable text, wider margins, and—most significantly of 
all—a larger page size that conforms to the 8.5” x 11” standard printer sized 
paper. Our rationale for these changes is to prioritize the reader, not only in their 
accessing and reading the published product, but by streamlining the editing 
and publishing process for a more efficient turn-out. I am grateful for the work of 
Stefan Schöberlein, WWQR’s previous Managing Editor, for his thorough guid-
ance when I transitioned into this role. I also cannot too often sing the praises 
WWQR Vol. 37 Nos. 3/4 (Winter/Spring 2020)
272
of Alyssa Varner, graphic designer at the University of Iowa Libraries Digital 
Scholarship and Publishing Studio, for her talented structuring of WWQR’s 
new design template. The hours spent with this template are just another part 
of the “immense preparation,” from concept to published product, that brings 
this issue to you.
For this litany of those who “hugg’d [us] close” and for the readers who 
reach out and do the same, these formatting improvements are tenderly dedi-
cated.
Brandon James O’Neil, Managing Editor 
WWQR Vol. 37 Nos. 3/4 (Winter/Spring 2020)
273


English

A Note from the Managing Editor

Morand-Metivier, Charles-Louis

210mff
http://ir.uiowa.edu/mff/vol55/iss2/
Imagined Communities. Constructing Collective Identities in Medieval 
Europe, edited by Andrzej Pleszczynski, Joanna Aleksandra Sobiesiak, 
Michał Tomaszek, and Przemysław Tyszka. Explorations in Medieval 
Culture 8. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. x + 395. 3 c. ill., 1 b/w map. 
isbn 978-90-04-36379-3.
The editors of this book explain that their work was motivated by the necessity 
to produce studies analyzing how “the existence of selected communities was 
ideologically justified, and how the members of these groups distinguished 
themselves from others” (1-2). This book relies, then, heavily on two famous cul-
tural theories: that of imagined communities, developed by Benedict Anderson, 
and of emotional communities, coined by Barbara Rosenwein. However crucial 
these notions are, they are only mentioned in the introduction of the book and 
do not seem to be a cornerstone of the volume. The editors have compiled an 
impressive, generous, and wide-ranging collection of essays on the subject, 
which they have divided into five parts: “Dynasty and Power”; “Spirituality”; 
“Social Condition and Gender”; “Region”; and “We and the Other.” 
In part 1, Daniel Bagi focuses on genealogical fictions in eleventh- and 
thirteenth-century hagiographies in Central Europe. He argues that these 
works were crucial to imposing successful narratives on a ruler and his successors 
in a manner that made them stick for a long time. Zbigniew Dalewski’s paper 
examines how dynastic identities were built in Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia. 
Rulers in these kingdoms tried to change the traditional rules of succession to 
create the ruler as a God-anointed entity, thus eliminating those who would not 
fit this mold. Georg Jostkleigrewe focuses his paper on a new interpretation of 
the Rex imperator in regno in France. He argues that this treaty of exemption 
from imperial rule evolved into, and that it should be seen as, a tool used to 
reinforce the power of the French kings as it was not known or observed outside 
of specialist fields such as the judiciary. 
The first essay of part 2, Tomasz Tarczynski’s study, lies at the intersection of 
royal power, national identity, and spirituality in England, and examines how the 
use of religion in the definition of royal power was a tool not only to shape and 
justify royalty but also to create England as a saintly adorned kingdom. Michal 
Tomaszek, in the best essay of this collection, examines the emotional relation 
between monks as subjects and the objects in their environment, and how these 
objects are as important as people in the creation of monastic communities. In 
part 3, Bartosz Klusek focuses on medieval social identity and the role of law 
in community-building. Through the analysis of chronicles of England and 
Scotland, he explains how law became one of the most important facets of the 
211mff
http://ir.uiowa.edu/mff/vol55/iss2/
process of building well-organized groups. The family of the count of Anjou 
is at the center of Karol Szejgiec’s paper, notably their organization through a 
dynastic legend. He explains that the authors of chronicles had to not only keep 
in mind the interest of the readers, but also the demands of the royals in their 
writing. Wojciech Michalski studies how epic poems from Scotland might have 
been used to build and reinforce the identity of noble families through a study 
of the heroics depicted in them. Tatiana Vilkul examines the use of social terms 
and tries to explain how they operate semantically in old Russian chronicles. She 
uses her finding to explain how the very writing of these texts was as important 
as their content. Andrej Pleszczynski’s paper addresses the identity of guilds and 
communes in the Middle Ages. He focuses on their representation in official 
papers and how their identity as communities influenced or was influenced by 
their identity as self-governed groups. Przemislaw Tyszka focuses on the defini-
tion of masculinity and femininity in books of penance from the early Middle 
Ages and how sexual practices are of prime importance in this task.
Part 4 starts with a paper by Euryn Rhys Roberts who analyzes Welsh identity 
through regional Welsh and British paradigms and explains how these differ-
ent notions are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary. Przemyslaw 
Wiszeswki’s paper examines how, in Moravia and Poland, regionalism appears 
as a social construct, principally how the notion of regional consciousness 
was present and employed. Stanislaw Rosik’s paper focusing on the issue of 
regional identity in eleventh- and twelfth-century Pomerania concludes part 
4. Finally, part 5 begins with a paper by Mariusz Bartnicki in which he analyzes 
the distinction between Ruthenians and non-Ruthenians in the twelfth and 
thirteenth centuries. Joanna Sobiesak focuses on the German-Czech relation-
ship as described in Czech chronicles from the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. 
She particularly explains how Germans are often ill-portrayed in these, even 
though the Czech relationship with the German aristocracy was generally 
courteous otherwise. Martin Nodl examines the issues of corporative interests 
and nationalism at Prague University in the sixteenth century. Finally, Pawel 
Kras examines the creation of the image of heretics as an imagined community. 
This volume presents a wide range of different subjects, and they are well 
combined as a collection. The various subjects treated are, however, extremely 
specific, and a non-specialist may have problems perfectly understanding the 
specifics of each article. In spite of this, this volume is very well assembled and 
presents fascinating subjects.
Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier
University of Vermont


Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities in Medieval Europe

 
Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 
________________________________ 
Volume 20, Issue 1 2020 Article No. 9 
 
SPEAKING OF VIOLENCE 
________________________________ 
 
Contributor Bios, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Volume 1, 
Issue 20, Spring 2020 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Copyright © 2020 by the authors. ​Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies ​is produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press 
(bepress). https://ir.uiowa.edu/ijcs 
 
 
IJCS ​93 
Contributor Bios 
 
 
 
 
Maria Capecchi​ is an English PhD candidate at the University of Iowa. She holds an M.A. in 
English, a M.A. in Teaching, and a B.A. in English and Theater. She is working toward a PhD 
Certificate in Book Studies at the University of Iowa Center for the Book and takes theater 
courses through the University of Iowa theater department. Maria’s current research interests are 
early modern poetry and drama, lyric theory, performance studies, and post-colonial theory. She 
is currently engaged in work on Philip Sidney’s ​Astrophel and Stella ​and Edmund Spenser’s ​The 
Faerie Queen​. Maria received the MMLA Graduate Student Paper Prize in 2019, and at the 
University of Iowa, Maria has received the English Department’s W.R. Irwin Teaching Award, 
the University of Iowa Council on Teaching’s Outstanding Teaching Award, and first place in 
the 21st Annual Jakobsen Memorial Conference Prize in the Humanities. 
 
Lydia Craig​ is a PhD candidate in the Nineteenth Century Studies program at Loyola University 
Chicago, focusing on nineteenth century issues of class, gender, and race. She holds a BA in 
English and History from the University of Georgia and an MA in English from Loyola 
University Chicago. Besides writing a dissertation on the fraught literary depiction of Victorian 
upstarts, Lydia is conducting a research project on the racial inspiration for Heathcliff in 
Wuthering Heights and another on the life of nineteenth century African American novelist 
Sarah E. Farro. To learn more about her work and activities, visit www.lydiacraig.com. 
 
Maddison McGann​ is an English PhD candidate at the University of Iowa studying Victorian 
fiction and periodicals. Her literary interests include Victorian reading, reviewing, and print 
culture, and her current research focuses on the co-constitutive relationship between 
nineteenth-century print culture and the novel. In particular, Maddison is interested in exploring 
how the genre of the periodical review– with all of its cultural, economic, aesthetic, and 
ideological underpinnings– was both shaping and shaped by the Victorian novel. Before coming 
to the University of Iowa, Maddison earned her B.A. in English from the University of South 
Florida and her M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. 
 
Thi Nhu Trang Nguyen​ (PhD, Vietnam National University-Hanoi, 2012) is a lecturer in 
Western Literature in the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National 
University, Hanoi. Her research and teaching focus on modern Russian literature. She is recently 
also interested in cultural and translation studies, and she has written about the writings and films 
of Vietnamese immigrants in Europe. She has published extensively in both Vietnamese and 
94 
English; her latest writing is a contribution to ​Ecologies in Southeast Asian Literatures​ edited by 
Chi Pham, et al. (Vernon Press, 2019). 
 
Sabreena Niles ​is a lecturer (probationary) at the Department of English of the University of 
Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. Her teaching and research interests include an intersection of theater and 
performance studies, queer studies, women’s studies, spatial politics, and diasporic and 
transnational literature. Her current research foregrounds and examines the centrality of the 
spatial in the literary sphere and lived spaces of post-war Sri Lanka. 
 
Harry J. Olafsen​ recently graduated from Bowling Green State University with an M.A. in 
English Literature. He is interested in cultural representations of women in country music, and 
how their image, sound, and musical content have evolved over time. He is also more broadly 
interested in American culture studies. He plans on pursuing a Ph.D. in the near future. 
 
Swatie​ is a recent PhD graduate from the University of Delhi. She is interested in aspects of 
sexual violence and cultural memory in India. She currently teaches at Lady Shri Ram College 
for Women, University of Delhi.  
 
 
 


Contributor Bios, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Issue 20, Spring 2020

Floyd, Kathryn M.

Dada Unshelved: Dada Publications from Library to Museum, 1936-1978

Judovitz, Dalia

Duchamp’s Temporal Machinations and Postmodern Returns

Volume 38 Number 1 ( 2020) 
Back Matter 
ISSN 0737-0679 (Print) 
ISSN 2153-3695 (Online) 
Recommended Citation 
"Back Matter." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 38 (2020). https://doi.org/10.13008/
0737-0679.2389 
This Back Matter and Back Cover is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been 
accepted for inclusion in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. 
For more information, please contact lib-ir@uiowa.edu. 
EPF The Early Poems and Fiction, edited by Thomas L. Brasher (1963)
PW Prose Works 1892, edited by Floyd Stovall. Vol. 1: Specimen Days (1963);
Vol. 2: Collect and Other Prose (1964).
with a Composite Index (1977); Vol. 7, edited by Ted Genoways (2004).
DBN Daybooks and Notebooks, edited by William White. 3 vols. (1978). 
GUIDELINES FOR CONTRIBUTORS
GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS OF STYLE
Essays: Place the author’s name two inches below the title and the institutional 
affiliation at the end of the essay. (Note: this information will be excised for peer 
review by the editor.)
Notes, Book Reviews, Bibliographies: These are configured like essays, except the 
author’s name follows the work.
References: Follow The MLA Style Sheet, Second Edition. Mark references in the text 
with raised footnote numbers, not author-year citations in parentheses. Double-
spaced endnotes should follow the essay on a new page headed “Notes.” Do not use 
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or titles. Make references complete so that a bibliography is unnecessary. When 
citing journal articles, give the volume number of the journal followed by the issue 
date in parentheses, followed by a comma, followed by the page number(s)—e.g., 
Joann P. Krieg, “Whitman and Modern Dance,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 
24 (Spring 2007), 208-209.
QUOTING AND CITING WALT WHITMAN’S WORK
When quoting from individual editions of Leaves of Grass (the 1855, 1856, 1860, 
1867, 1870-1871, 1881, 1891), please use the facsimiles available online on the 
Walt Whitman Archive, and cite the edition, date, and page numbers, followed by 
“Available on the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org).” Do not list 
the URL of individual page images or the date accessed. After the initial citation, 
contributors should abbreviate as “LG” followed by the year of the edition and the 
page number (e.g., LG1855 15).
The standard edition of Whitman’s work is the Walt Whitman Archive (www. 
whitmanarchive.org) in addition to The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, twen-
ty-two volumes published by the New York University Press under the general 
editorship of Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley, and supplemented with 
volumes published by the University of Iowa Press and Peter Lang. Citations 
and quotations from Whitman’s writings not yet available on the Walt Whitman 
Archive should be keyed to the specific volumes in this edition. 
After the initial citation, contributors should abbreviate the titles of the Collected 
Writings in the endnotes as follows:
WWQR Vol. 38 No. 1 (Summer 2020)
NUPM    Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, edited by Edward F.
Grier. 6 vols. (1984).
Journ The Journalism, edited by Herbert Bergmann, Douglas A. Noverr,
and Edward J. Recchia. Vol. 1: 1834-1846 (1998); Vol. 2: 1846-1848   
(2003).
Corr The Correspondence, edited by Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 1: 1842-1867 
(1961); Vol. 2: 1868-1875 (1961); Vol. 3: 1876-1885 (1964); Vol. 4:   
1886-1889 (1969); Vol. 5: 1890-1892 (1969); Vol. 6: A Supplement;   
Vol. 7: edited by Ted Genoways (2004). 
For Whitman’s correspondence, letters available on the Walt Whitman Archive 
take precedence over the The Correspondence edited by Edwin Haviland Mill-
er. These should be cited in this format: Sender to recipient, month, day, year, 
followed by “Available on the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org, 
ID: xxx.00000)”—e.g., Herbert Gilchrist to Walt Whitman, August 20, 1882. 
Available on the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org, ID: loc.02192).
Horace Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden (9 Vols) is available on the Walt 
Whitman Archive. After an intial citation followed by “Available on the Walt Whitman 
Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org),” it should be abbreviated WWWC, followed 
by its volume and page number (e.g. WWWC 3:45).
PROCEDURES FOR SUBMITTING WORK
To submit original work, please visit the WWQR website at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/wwqr.
Address all correspondence to Editor, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, The University 
of Iowa, 308 English Philosophy Bldg., Iowa City, IA, 52242-1492. 
Our email address is wwqr@uiowa.edu. 
ORDERING BACK ISSUES
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Make checks payable to Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and mail your order to: 
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WWQR Vol. 38 No. 1 (Summer 2020)
Jesse Talbot, The Last Gaze, 1860, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in. Private collection. Photo © 
Christie's Images/Bridgeman Images. For more information, see pages 1-40. 


Back Matter

Review of:Visions of the Tallgrass: Prairie Photographs by Harvey Payne, photographs by Harvey Payne, essays by James P. Ronda

Conard, Rebecca

The Annals of Iowa 
Volume 79 Number 1 (Winter 2020) pps. 113-114 
Visions of the Tallgrass: Prairie Photographs by Harvey Payne 
Rebecca Conard 
Middle Tennessee State University 
ISSN 0003-4827 
Copyright © 2020 State Historical Society of Iowa. This article is posted here for personal use, 
not for redistribution. 
Recommended Citation 
Conard, Rebecca. "Visions of the Tallgrass: Prairie Photographs by Harvey Payne." The 
Annals of Iowa 79 (2020), 113-114. 
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.12657 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online 
Book Reviews and Notices      113 
as director that alumni begin to see “a sea change in the gender and 
ethnic politics of the program” (343). 
 Along the way, Dowling discusses a roughly equal number of poets 
and fiction writers—summarizing some well-known anecdotes from 
Workshop lore (such as the 1954 fistfight between future Pulitzer Prize–
winning poets Philip Levine and John Berryman), providing thorough 
research on some lesser-known alumni (including poet Robert Shelley 
and novelist Marguerite Young), and giving a disturbing yet nuanced 
account of the misogyny, sexual predation, and hyper-masculinity that 
permeated Workshop culture for generations. The central chapters on 
the 1970s experiences of Cisneros, Joy Harjo, and Rita Dove are among 
the most compelling in the book. 
 Not all the anecdotes shared in A Delicate Aggression illustrate 
Dowling’s main thesis, and reviewers have been critical of when the 
book’s large-scale focus narrows to the minutiae of individual episodes. 
But Dowling demonstrates how the contradictions raised by Engle’s 
creative and market-driven visions remain as applicable for the Work-
shop in the twenty-first century as they were when Engle inter-
rupted class to proudly announce that he had secured funding for an 
“Iowa Natural Gas Fellowship in Creative Writing” (63). 
 
 
Visions of the Tallgrass: Prairie Photographs by Harvey Payne, photographs 
by Harvey Payne, essays by James P. Ronda. Charles M. Russell Center 
Series on Art and Photography of the American West 33. Norman: Uni-
versity of Oklahoma Press, 2018. xv, 162 pp. Color photographs, map, 
notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer Rebecca Conard is professor of history emeritus at Middle Ten-
nessee State University. She is the author of Places of Quiet Beauty: Parks, 
Preserves, and Environmentalism (1997). 
Visions of the Tallgrass is a paean to the great prairie that once covered 
central North America, more particularly the 45,000 acres protected by 
The Nature Conservancy as the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie 
Preserve near Pawhuska, Oklahoma, formerly the Barnard tract of the 
Chapman-Barnard Ranch established by Texas oilmen James A. Chapman 
and Horace G. Barnard. More than a hundred captivating photographs 
by nature photographer Harvey Payne, a native Oklahoman, are situ-
ated in a set of discursive essays by noted western historian James P. 
Ronda, a self-described “child of the Chicago suburbs” and trans-
planted academic (14). The skillfully interwoven text and images reflect 
an enduring friendship that began in 1990, when Payne was serving as 
the preserve’s first director and Ronda arrived at the University of Tulsa 
as the first holder of the Barnard Chair in Western American History. 
114      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Following an introductory chapter, eight illustrated essays approach 
the tallgrass prairie from different angles of perception: comprehending 
the vast open space that grasslands once covered and the competing 
visions of the Great Plains as garden and wasteland; reading the weather 
through the expansive and ever-changing skyscape; wading into the 
seasons of grass; understanding the role of fire in sustaining prairie en-
vironments; witnessing a bison rut, a magnificent display of regenera-
tion in a species almost extinguished by industrial technology, market 
forces, and demography; scanning the horizon for raptors, prairie 
chickens, wild turkeys, waterfowl, and neotropical migrants; observing 
the “creatures great and small” that are integral to prairie ecology (127); 
and catching “a glimpse of wholeness in nature” as dawn emerges 
(143). Throughout his essays, Ronda pays homage to just about every-
one who has written about the prairie, all of whom are cited in “Sug-
gestions for Further Reading” at the back of the book. Payne’s elegant 
photographs capture the grandeur of prairie landscapes and skyscapes 
as well as the seemingly infinite variety of wildlife. His many photo-
graphs of bison, taken during the brutality of winter as well as the fair-
weather seasons, suggest a special affinity for the burly animal that once 
roamed the entire geographical range of North America’s grasslands.  
 These photographs are also, as Ronda observes, a reminder that 
“large herds of bison roaming over open unfenced country is a feature 
of prairie life that no longer exists. . . . They live in a world defined by 
human beings” (106). Iowa is a case in point. Less than one tenth of one 
percent of Iowa’s native prairie remains out of the nearly 30 million 
acres that once covered the state. The remnants are mostly in protected 
areas, largely set aside in the past half century. Only two of them—the 
5,600-acre Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge and The Nature Con-
servancy’s 6,000-acre Broken Kettle Grasslands—are large enough to 
support bison. Scores of smaller areas are in designated preserves and 
wildlife areas scattered across the state, ranging in size from 3 un-
plowed acres in the historic Butler Center Cemetery to the 790-acre Five 
Ridge Prairie in Plymouth County. Although precious little is left of 
Iowa’s native landscape, most Iowans can now explore a preserved 
prairie remnant without traveling too far from home. 
 Visions of the Tallgrass is an intimate excursion through the tallgrass 
prairie. The ethos that Payne and Ronda share is evident on every page. 
Together, they have created a feast of words and pictures that is to be 
savored and lingered over.  


Visions of the Tallgrass: Prairie Photographs by Harvey Payne

Review of: The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality, by Anna-Lisa Cox

Harbour, Jennifer

The Annals of Iowa 
Volume 79 Number 2 (Spring 2020) pps. 192-194 
The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America's Forgotten Black 
Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality 
Jennifer Harbour 
University of Nebraska Omaha 
ISSN 0003-4827 
Copyright © 2020 State Historical Society of Iowa. This article is posted here for personal use, 
not for redistribution. 
Recommended Citation 
Harbour, Jennifer. "The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America's Forgotten Black Pioneers 
and the Struggle for Equality." The Annals of Iowa 79 (2020), 192-194. 
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.12666 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online 
192      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Through the political, educational, and economic transitions supported 
by Pitchlynn and others, readers gain insight into the work of Choctaw 
elites as they sought to build a new Choctaw Nation west of the Missis-
sippi River. For his final case study Kelderman turns to Ojibwe authors 
and the romanticized image of the Indian headman. Even as American 
officials saw “real political value in representing Ojibwe leaders through 
the trope of the sympathetic Indian chief” (179), Ojibwe writers like 
George Copway sought to promote images of Ojibwe communities and 
politics that could not be so easily distilled. 
 Authorized Agents addresses each of the four cases with the com-
plexity they deserve, and Kelderman never pushes his argument be-
yond what the evidence allows. Although the nature of the project re-
sults in case studies that don’t flow smoothly from one to the next, each 
chapter offers a critical perspective that pushes readers to think differ-
ently about how to understand and work with the writings of Native 
peoples in the nineteenth century.  
 
 
The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the 
Struggle for Equality, by Anna-Lisa Cox. New York: PublicAffairs, 2018. 
xviii, 280 pp. Maps, notes, index. $28.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Jennifer Harbour is associate professor of black studies and wom-
en’s studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. She is the author of Or-
ganizing Freedom: Black Emancipation Activism in the Civil War Midwest (2020). 
Anna-Lisa Cox’s new monograph tells the story of black farming settle-
ments in the antebellum and wartime Old Northwest (what is present-
day Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin). In her introduc-
tion, Cox argues that, while her deliberate use of the words pioneer and 
frontier may seem problematic and redolent of indigenous genocide, she 
aims to engage the historiography by framing the lost history of “The 
First Great Migration” as agricultural, ambitious, and decidedly African 
American. The growing communities that resulted from that migration, 
she posits, spread across five states with free people who envisioned 
themselves as farmers with citizenship rights. How on earth, Cox won-
ders, did historians overlook where and how black men and women 
became pioneers on the land carved out by the Northwest Territory in 
1787? This space was to date the largest piece of American land to be 
free from slavery—at least in theory. The territory also offered equal 
voting rights to property-owning men, thus making it a safe haven for 
hundreds of black people who had the money and means to migrate 
and settle.  
Book Reviews and Notices      193 
 Cox’s discovery and analysis of more than 300 African American 
communities shows what historians have only just begun to under-
stand: black people deliberately settled this land because they sought a 
new space in which to pursue equality. Cox’s research is meticulous, 
and she clearly defines the parameters of her study: she sought only 
people who owned property and who self-identified as farmers. Her 
historical subjects include neither urban dwellers nor rural “entrepre-
neurs” who owed businesses such as mills, general stores, and smith-
eries. Even when she discovered fascinating people who made their liv-
ing as teachers or pastors, she deliberately excluded them. This degree 
of specificity allows Cox to cast her historical subjects as Jeffersonian in 
nature—men and women who employed westward expansion, and its 
language of the ideal democratic agrarian society, to capitalize on the 
opportunity to settle in the new, more equitable America. Of course, 
like the already present indigenous populations, African Americans 
quickly discovered that these rural enclaves were heavily populated by 
white racists who had no intention of sharing their spaces.  
 Cox organizes her study into nine chapters, each recounting a nar-
rative oriented to reveal how diverse the midwestern frontier actually 
was, a striking characteristic for historians who once believed that the 
real substantive action in the West only began with Bleeding Kansas. In 
flowing chapters with titles like “Gibson County, Indiana, 1828” (chap. 
3), “Cincinnati, 1841” (chap. 6), and “A History of Repeated Injuries and 
Usurpations” (chap. 9), Cox provides a series of historical vignettes. 
These will undoubtedly whet the appetite for a deeper understanding 
of how tightly knit kinfolk refused to fail in their demanding emotional 
and physical labor. Each of these sections describes seemingly disparate 
situations; African Americans experienced an incalculable range of 
aggressions from the land, the law, and the social landscape. Cox uses 
these scenarios to argue that black pioneers insisted on being an integral 
part of the new and expanding nation. Readers seeking fascinating sto-
ries of this place and period will find stories of marriage and romance, 
crime and punishment, law and retribution. There are fights, fires, friend-
ships, and fierce competition. 
 This work builds on Cox’s first book-length study, A Stronger Kin-
ship: One Town’s Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith (2006), which 
chronicled white and black inhabitants of Covert, Michigan. In that 
town, Cox discovered, black Michiganders built extraordinary postbel-
lum interracial friendships and partnerships with their white counter-
parts. That work was a welcome addition to the oft-ignored field of mid-
western history, in part because of her unrelenting search for evidence. 
Admirably, Cox also visited these communities and interviewed the 
194      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
descendants of the community’s founders. No historian of any margin-
alized group could quibble with such painstaking research, and it is a 
testament to Cox’s commitment to her historical subjects that she tells 
their story in such artistic and heartfelt prose. It is this insistence upon 
portraying the most positive aspects of the lives of these black pioneers, 
however, that occasionally comes across as hyperbolic. For instance, in 
the last few sentences of the book, Cox writes that the black pioneers 
“rose up to trample tyranny and to bring the blessings of liberty and 
equality along the length and breadth of the land” (200). It is likely that 
the black settlers themselves felt this way, especially because records 
such as speeches, diaries, letters, sermons, and especially black political 
convention records use this exalted language. Given the rancor and 
hostility of white racism and white supremacy everywhere in America, 
however, it would seem that black Americans did not actually trample 
tyranny, but instead constantly dreamt of doing so. 
 
 
In God’s Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during 
the American Civil War, by Benjamin L. Miller. Modern War Studies. 
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. xi, 256 pp. Illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Timothy Wesley is associate professor of history at Austin Peay 
State University. He is the author The Politics of Faith during the Civil War 
(2013). 
Benjamin Miller’s impressive In God’s Presence is first and foremost a 
spatial study of religious life “under the gun.” Evaluating the wartime 
interactions between spiritual captains and the men to whom they min-
istered based largely on the physical settings in which such interactions 
occurred allows Miller to make clear the vitally malleable nature of 
“religious space.” But it is not solely in highlighting the differences be-
tween the understood religious realm, what the author calls the “sacred 
space” of churches and religious ceremonies, and the newly contested 
but still “profane” spaces of the camp, battlefield, and hospital that 
makes Miller’s effort significant. To the contrary, for while the author 
documents in detail the wartime clergy’s efforts to sacralize the numer-
ous environments through which they were compelled to lead their 
beleaguered flock, arguably more memorable in Miller’s offering is 
simply the constancy of the shepherds themselves.  
 Most of the men who served in America’s Civil War armies were 
religious to one extent or another. Their spirituality had been forged in 
an antebellum world of separate public and sacred spheres, the latter’s 
static spaces adding meaning to their faith and providing the context 


The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America\u27s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality

Review of: Equality at the Ballot Box: Votes for Women on the Northern Great Plains, edited by Lori Ann Lahlum and Molly P. Rozum

Stek, Pam

The Annals of Iowa 
Volume 79 Number 2 (Spring 2020) pps. 201-203 
Equality at the Ballot Box: Votes for Women on the Northern Great 
Plains 
Pam Stek 
University of Iowa 
ISSN 0003-4827 
Copyright © 2020 State Historical Society of Iowa. This article is posted here for personal use, 
not for redistribution. 
Recommended Citation 
Stek, Pam. "Equality at the Ballot Box: Votes for Women on the Northern Great Plains." 
The Annals of Iowa 79 (2020), 201-203. 
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.12671 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online 
Book Reviews and Notices      201 
 Beltman’s approach is solidly quantitative, but he carefully incor-
porates individual and family accounts along the way. Further, in part 
two, he focuses on selected individuals and connects their experiences 
to the larger sociohistorical processes he discusses. First, he analyzes 
E. J. G. Bloemendaal (Sioux County, Iowa), then he turns to Ulbe and 
Maaike Eringa (Bon Homme County, South Dakota). 
 Self-publishing brings its own editing challenges. The book cover is 
a pen-and-ink sketch of a farmscape, but, without any title or attribution, 
it seems tenuously tied to the topic. Some of the maps are a bit blurry 
and hard to read, and attributions are scarce. There are no illustrations, 
either of individuals or buildings or towns discussed. Beltman ties his 
material to larger discussions of immigration, migration, ethnicity, and 
region. Nevertheless, his discussions at times can seem perfunctory or 
dated, such as “market and community” and region. Regarding region, 
he is more keyed to connecting his material to the West than to the 
burgeoning discussion of the Midwest. 
 The book’s weaknesses are minor, however. Beltman’s writing is 
clear. His analysis is carefully stated and balanced. He blends quantita-
tive material and personal accounts effectively. He describes in detail 
how and why Dutch American colonies in Iowa and South Dakota 
were made and persist: “Ethnic persistence is strongly linked to ethnic 
territoriality” (342). To the same point, Sioux County colonist E. J. G. 
Bloemendaal was more colorful in his 1911 memoir: “America is a good 
land! . . . [Still,] the more Hollanders come, the better I like it, and the 
better they fare, the more pleased I will be” (288). This is now the best 
book with which to begin to understand the midwestern Dutch experi-
ence west of the Mississippi River. 
 
 
Equality at the Ballot Box: Votes for Women on the Northern Great Plains, 
edited by Lori Ann Lahlum and Molly P. Rozum. Pierre: South Dakota 
Historical Society Press, 2019. xii, 410 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, index. 
$34.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Pam Stek earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Iowa. 
Her dissertation was titled “Immigrant Women’s Political Activism in Iowa, 
Minnesota, and Wisconsin, 1880–1920.” 
The essays in Equality at the Ballot Box analyze the politics of woman 
suffrage in the Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming territories and the four 
states admitted from those territories. In the Northern Great Plains, the 
debate over women’s rights intersected with westward expansion, 
settler colonialism, and changing ideas of citizenship and nationhood. 
Strategies employed by suffragists and their opponents reflected and 
202      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
influenced conceptions of European immigrants, American Indians, 
and rural communities. As the authors in this anthology argue, a study 
of the Northern Great Plains suffrage movement sheds light on evolving 
ideas about democracy and national belonging in the late nineteenth 
and early twentieth centuries.  
 The volume contains three thematic sections. The chapters in part 
one provide overviews of the suffrage debates in each of the four states. 
Jennifer Helton argues that the commitment to woman suffrage in Wy-
oming, the first state in the nation to grant women full voting rights, 
must be considered in the context of Reconstruction-Era politics and 
Radical Republicans’ vision for expanding westward the doctrine of 
equality. In contrast, as Barbara Handy-Marchello points out, North 
Dakota Republican Party bosses resisted woman suffrage in order to 
maintain the loyalty of German-Russian voters and to ensure legislative 
support for the powerful railway lobby; that opposition was a key factor 
in North Dakota women’s inability to gain full voting rights until the 
passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Jennifer J. Hill focuses on the 
work of three prominent Montana women whose personal influence 
and years of suffrage activism came to fruition in 1914 when Montana 
enfranchised women. In Paula M. Nelson’s analysis of the many set-
backs endured by South Dakota suffragists, she highlights the influence 
of anti-suffrage organizations whose efforts helped delay the passage 
of woman suffrage in the state until 1918.  
 Part two contains four case studies that help illuminate the regional 
women’s rights movement: the role of South Dakota’s school suffrage 
laws in normalizing women’s political participation; the impact of local 
and national suffragists’ differing views of ethnic minority support for 
women’s rights in South Dakota; the ways South Dakota’s referenda for 
woman suffrage and American Indian voting rights revealed racialized 
and gendered conceptions of citizenship and property; and suffragists’ 
at times frustrating  and unexpectedly drawn-out campaigns to ratify 
the Nineteenth Amendment in the Northern Great Plains states, the site 
of some of the suffrage movement’s earliest and most visible successes.  
 The chapters in part three focus on the lives and contributions of 
prominent suffragists: North Dakotans Cora Smith Eaton and Kate Selby 
Wilder and Blackfeet activists Helen Piotopowaka Clarke and Virginia 
Billedeaux. Smith Eaton and Wilder leveraged their organizational con- 
nections to advance their suffrage activism while Clarke’s and Bille-
deaux’s support for woman suffrage emerged from a broader agenda 
of civil and political rights for American Indians. 
 Interspersed between the three main sections are several short “Suf-
frage Snapshots” that highlight prominent local suffragists and probe 
Book Reviews and Notices      203 
other elements of the regional movement’s development, such as activ-
ists’ use of automobiles in suffrage campaigns, the intertwined support 
for temperance and woman suffrage in Norwegian American commu-
nities, and woman suffrage content in German-language newspapers. 
 Equality at the Ballot Box represents a valuable contribution to 
woman suffrage scholarship. The essays included provide a thorough 
account of suffrage activists’ successes and failures in the region and 
present compelling analyses of the forces that helped or hindered suf-
fragists’ efforts. Especially welcome are chapters that address the per-
spectives of ethnic communities and of American Indian women. How-
ever, as the editors note, additional research on the political activism of 
American Indian women and women of color is needed to provide an 
even more complete picture of women’s concerns and strategies in the 
Northern Great Plains. Also, although the collection includes research on 
European immigrants, the perspective of immigrant women is missing. 
Several of the contributing authors note that many immigrant men op-
posed women’s enfranchisement, but the essays fail to consider how im-
migrant women responded to debates over women’s political equality. 
 This volume also offers important comparisons to the women’s 
rights movement in other parts of the nation. The states of the Northern 
Great Plains shared a number of social and economic characteristics 
with other midwestern states: primarily rural populations, local econo-
mies dependent on agriculture and the connections railroads provided 
to distant urban markets, and relatively large numbers of European im-
migrant settlers. Given these similarities, the essays in this work suggest 
additional areas of research and points of reference that could shed fur-
ther light on the suffrage movement in the Midwest. Equality at the Ballot 
Box provides a compelling history of woman suffrage in the Northern 
Great Plains and enhances our understanding of how the politics of 
woman suffrage influenced regional and national conceptions of de-
mocracy and citizenship.  
 
 
A Life on the Middle West’s Never-Ending Frontier, by Willard L. “Sandy” 
Boyd. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019. xix, 362 pp. Illustra-
tions, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 hardcover.  
Reviewer Michael S. Hevel is associate professor of higher education at the 
University of Arkansas. His research and writing focus on student life at 
colleges and universities, including an article in the Annals of Iowa in 2011 
on the role of literary societies in early Iowa higher education. 
“I was one of the few World War II veterans who experienced the prom-
ised land of California but opted to return to the heartland to live my 


Equality at the Ballot Box: Votes for Women on the Northern Great Plains

Review of: The Federalist Frontier: Settler Politics in the Old Northwest, 1783–1840, by Kristopher Maulden

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