Southwestern Historical Quarterly
monly held generalizations about the South's uniqueness. But Mowry limits
his comparative look to the first four decades of the twentieth-century. The
South's experience with slavery, military defeat, and reconstruction, and the
genesis of segregation is thus outside his purview. Yet is it this distinctive
heritage, unknown to the western Middle West, that has prolonged the
South's "sense of difference" into the second half of this century.
Mowry's analysis of the political devices wielded so brilliantly by southern
congressmen is sound but largely retraces ground already covered by V. O.
Key, Jr., Arthur Link, George Tindall, and David Potter, among others.
His conclusion that southern conservatives took a holiday from reform on
racial and labor legislation will come as no surprise to scholars.
University of Texas, Austin NORMAN D. BROWN
The Western American Indian: Case Studies in Tribal History. Edited by
Richard N. Ellis. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. Pp.
xxi+ 203. $2.95.)
The Western American Indian is an anthology designed to impart "in-
depth treatment" of the impact of white settlement, government policies,
and government actions upon western tribes in the United States since I85o.
It is comprised of chapters on treaty-making, war, reservation life, land
allotment, the New Deal, Indian tribal claims against the United States,
and termination. Interspersed within this material are explanatory, transi-
tional narratives written by its editor. The chapters which pertain to treaties,
wars, and the concentration of tribes on reservations in the latter part of
the nineteenth century contain both its bulk and its major strength. Those
which deal with changes in Indian affairs in the twentieth century are
brief, and somewhat less rewarding.
Ellis has provided us with a good anthology, when judged according to
traditional guidelines. All of its chapters are extracted from reliable works;
every excerpt stimulates interest in some important phase of Indian history;
its chapters are linked together so skillfully by transitional paragraphs that
the whole narrative has coherence comparable to that of a book written by
a single author.
The one major fault, which prospective readers should keep in mind, is
made explicit by the editor himself: "Indian views are lacking." This would
be a much better book had the editor conformed to the "new focus" pre-
scribed recently by Robert Berkhofer, in an article in the Pacific Historical
Review: "American Indian history must move from being primarily a record
of white-Indian relations to become the story of Indians," by "putting more
Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 77, July 1973 - April, 1974. Austin, Texas. The Portal to Texas History. http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117148/. Accessed December 25, 2014.