Review of Seldom Heard: Ranchers, Ranchos and Rumors of the South Texas Brush Country

Nationally recognized jewelry designer, photographer, and Hebbronville native Dian L. Malouf provides a second installment of her ongoing romance with the ranchers of the Texas brush country in Seldom Heard. Reminiscent of her first tome, Cattle Kings of Texas (Beyond Words Publishing, 1991), Seldom Heard is a “coffee table book” that provides what might be called a “romantic eulogy” to the industrious, entrepreneurial, and at times, eccentric behavior of twenty-five ranching families living in the rough mesquite and cactus riddled country south of San Antonio. Malouf views these ranchers in much the same way as late-nineteenth-century photographers perceived Native Americans--as a “vanishing race” whose history and culture needed to be recorded and memorialized so that future generations of Americans will not forget them. In the process of dressing up and posing their subjects, however, some of the well-meaning photographers ended up providing rather stereotypical and inaccurate images that didn’t always square with reality. According to the book’s dust jacket, the author spent fifteen years and traveled more than forty thousand miles conducting the interviews for this project, and she is to be commended for her persistence in corralling the various members of ranching families, many of whom live a rather secluded life in remote areas of the Texas brush country. Lady Bird Johnson, no stranger to ranch life in South Texas, provides a brief preface to the book. Malouf adds two or three black-and-white photographs to each of her short vignettes, usually depicting family members and images of significant and/or unusual ranch structures. Virtually all the ranchers interviewed are fourth- or fifthgeneration Texans, having inherited their properties from a particularly hardworking, enterprising, or lucky ancestor who began accumulating land and cattle during the first half of the nineteenth century. While reading through Malouf’s musings about the noble character attributes of the ranchers, one gets the feeling that it is this founding generation of ranchers that she is really seeking to commemorate

Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800

Review of: "Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800," by Thomas A. Britten

Review of Isabella Greenway, an Enterprising Woman

Kristie Miller’s interesting biography examines the life and legacies of Isabella Greenway, the “first of a number of remarkable women in Arizona politics” (p. xv) and the founder of the acclaimed Arizona Inn. The daughter of rancher Tilden Selmes and Martha (Patty) Flandrau, Isabella was born in the Dakota Badlands in March 1886. The Selmeses befriended a grieving Theodore Roosevelt, who had fled west following the deaths of his mother and wife in 1884. According to Miller, Isabella’s beginnings in the Dakotas and her family’s fortuitous relationship with Roosevelt “determined the course of her life” (p. 3)

In This Together: Secondary Language Arts Teachers’ Responses to Learning Labs

Since the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act was signed into law in 2001, literacy leaders and other school administrators have been challenged to increase student achievement to meet the law’s rigorous student proficiency goals and avoid penalties. To avoid the sanctions associated with not making adequate yearly progress (AYP), school and district leaders have been challenged to provide teachers with professional development that effectively equips teachers with the knowledge to meet the unique needs of each student in their classrooms. Because research has determined that high-quality professional development leads to higherquality teaching, and higher-quality teaching leads to increased student achievement, a better solution for professional development was needed to impact a greater number of teachers and inspire sustained changes in their classroom practice. As a result, research into alternative structures for job-embedded, collaborative professional development, such as classroom learning labs, gained traction. In order to describe the impact cross-district classroom learning labs have on secondary ELA teachers from small public schools, a qualitative study was conducted. Interview data was analyzed following a simplified multi-phase interview analysis process to identify, compare and contrast themes. The researcher found that engaging in the classroom learning lab was an overwhelmingly positive professional development experience that resulted in rich opportunities for peer learning, self-reflective learning, and transformational learning

Review of Comanche Jack Stilwell: Army Scout and Plainsman, by Clint E. Chambers and Paul H. Carlson

The book’s primary aim is to provide a straightforward biography of Jack Stilwell (co-author Clint Chambers’s great-great-uncle) and to place his story within the context of western history during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. “Comanche Jack” left little written evidence behind for historians to peruse, but by diligently combing widely scattered army records, census rolls, court testimonies, and commentaries in newspapers and magazines, the authors succeed in providing both an interesting read and a balanced assessment of this rather remarkable individual

War Party in Blue: Pawnee Scouts in the U. S. Army

Review of: "War Party in Blue: Pawnee Scouts in the U.S. Army," by Mark van de Logt

Little Hawk and the Lone Wolf: A Memoir

Review of: Little Hawk and the Lone Wolf: A Memoir, by Raymond C. Kaquatosh

Review of Wars for Empire: Apaches, the United States, and the Southwest Borderlands, by Janne Lahti

The Apache wars of the mid to late nineteenth century continue to be a popular topic in American history, and authors have churned out a broad body of scholarship predominantly focusing on the roles of specific tribes and bands or biographies of participants. Using violence and military culture as an interpretative framework, Janne Lahti offers a new overview of the U.S.–Apache wars that seeks to connect the conflict to recent revisions in borderlands histories. Lahti argues that war and violence “constitute expressions of culture determined by cultural forms and norms”. Wars for Empire, consequently, pays close attention to the protagonists’ expressions and modes of military ethos, training, leadership, organization, and rhetoric. By understanding how Apache and U.S. military motives, goals, and methods differed and why, one can better understand “how one society was able to break the power of another and occupy its space

No One Ever Asked Me: The World War II Memories of an Omaha Indian Soldier

Review of: "No One Ever Asked Me: The World War II Memoirs of an Omaha Indian Soldier," by Hollis D. Stabler, edited by Victoria Smith

The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier. By Scott Zesch (review)

What started out as a quiet walk through a small rural cemetery for author Scott Zesch turned into a quest to understand a long-forgotten relative. Adolph Korn, the author\u27s great-great uncle, was just ten years old when he was captured by Apaches in 1870. His abductors took him to the Indian Territory, where they sold him to Quahada Comanches, with whom he lived for the next three years. In an effort to better understand the emotional and physical trauma his uncle must have endured, Zesch examines the stories of eight additional children captured by Indians between July 1865 and February 1871, the majority of them (like Adolph Korn) coming from German families only recently moved to the Texas Hill Country. T he result is a wonderful mixture of dramatic eyewitness accounts, appropriate historical context, and balanced analysis-the latter two traits often missing from captivity narratives