Search results for ""University of Nebraska Press""
University of Nebraska Press Restoring Nature: The Evolution of Channel Islands National Park
Off the coast of California, running from Santa Barbara to La Jolla, lies an archipelago of eight islands known as the California Channel Islands. The northern five were designated as Channel Islands National Park in 1980 to protect and restore the rich habitat of the islands and surrounding waters. In the years since, that mission intensified as scientists discovered the extent of damage to the delicate habitats of these small fragments of land and to the surprisingly threatened sea around them. In Restoring Nature Lary M. Dilsaver and Timothy J. Babalis examine how the National Park Service has attempted to reestablish native wildlife and vegetation to the five islands through restorative ecology and public land management. The Channel Islands staff were innovators of the inventory and monitoring program whereby the resource problems were exposed. This program became a blueprint for management throughout the U.S. park system. Dilsaver and Babalis present an innovative regional and environmental history of a little-known corner of the Pacific West, as well as a larger national narrative about how the Park Service developed its approach to restoration ecology, which became a template for broader Park Service policies that shaped the next generation of environmental conservation.
£72.49
University of Nebraska Press Women's American Football: Breaking Barriers On and Off the Gridiron
Tackle football has been primarily viewed as a male sport, but at a time when men’s participation rates are decreasing, an increasing number of women are entering the gridiron—and they have a long history of doing so. Women’s American Football is a narrative history of girls and women participating in American football in the United States since the 1920s, when a women’s team played at halftime during an early NFL game. The women’s game became more organized in 1974, when the National Women’s Football League was established, with notable teams such as the Dallas Bluebonnets, Toledo Troopers, Oklahoma City Dolls, and Detroit Demons. Today there are two main professional leagues in the United States: the Women’s Football Alliance, with nearly seventy teams, and the Women’s National Football Conference, with eighteen, in addition to a number of smaller leagues. The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and the NFL have recently begun sponsoring flag football teams at the college level, and the game is growing for high school girls as well. In 2021 more than two thousand girls played on mostly boys’ teams, and there are currently four all-girls leagues in the United States and Canada, in Manitoba, Utah, Indiana, and New Brunswick. In addition to the rapid growth of women playing football, there have been advancements in other areas of the game. Beginning with Jennifer Welter in 2015, several women have earned positions coaching the professional game. In 2020 ESPN aired Born to Play, a documentary on the Boston Renegades, the 2019 champion of the Women’s Football Alliance. Based on extensive interviews with women players and focusing closely on leagues, teams, and athletes since the passage of Title IX in 1972, Russ Crawford illuminates the rich history of the women who have played football, breaking barriers on and off the field.
£27.90
University of Nebraska Press Disintegrating Empire
Disintegrating Empire examines the entangled histories of three threads of decolonization: the French welfare state, family migration from Algeria, and the French social workers who mediated between the state and their Algerian clients. After World War II, social work teams, midlevel bureaucrats, and government ministries stitched specialized social services for Algerians into the structure of the midcentury welfare state. Once the Algerian Revolution began in 1954, many successive administrations and eventually two independent states—France and Algeria—continuously tailored welfare to support social aid services for Algerian families migrating across the Mediterranean.Disintegrating Empire reveals the belated collapse of specialized services more than a decade after Algerian independence. The welfare state’s story, Elise Franklin argues, was not one merely of rise and fall but of winnowing services to “deserving” clients. Defundi
£72.49
University of Nebraska Press The Rebounders: A Division I Basketball Journey
Unlike the stories of most visible Division I college athletes, Amanda Ottaway’s story has more in common with those of the 80 percent of college athletes who are never seen on TV. The Rebounders follows the college career of an average NCAA Division I women’s basketball player in the twenty-first century, beginning with the recruiting process, when Ottaway is an eager, naive teenager, and ending when she’s a more contemplative twentysomething alumna. Ottaway’s story, along with the journeys of her dynamic Wildcat teammates at Davidson College in North Carolina, covers in engaging detail the life of a mid-major athlete: recruitment, the preseason, body image and eating disorders, schoolwork, family relationships, practice, love life, team travel, game day, injuries, drug and alcohol use, coaching changes, and what comes after the very last game. In addition to the everyday issues of being a student athlete, The Rebounders also covers the objectification of women athletes, race, sexuality, and self-expression. Most college athletes, famous or not, play hard, get hurt, fail, and triumph together in a profound love of their sport and one another, and then their careers end and they figure out how to move on. From concussions and minor injuries to classrooms, parties, and relationships, Ottaway understands the experience of a Division I women’s basketball player firsthand. The Rebounders is, at its core, a feminist coming-of-age story, an exploration of what it means to be a young woman who loves a sport and discovers herself through it.
£17.38
University of Nebraska Press Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry
Breaking the Silence is the first comprehensive collection of literature from Liberia since before the nation’s independence. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley has gathered work from the 1800s to the present, including poets and emerging young writers exploring contemporary literary traditions with African and African diaspora poetry that transcends borders. In this collection, Liberia’s founding settlers wrestle with their identity as African free slaves in the homeland from which their ancestors were captured, and writers of the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries find themselves navigating a landscape at odds with itself. From poets of Liberia’s past to young writers of the present, the contributors to this volume celebrate the beauty of their nation while mourning the devastation of a long, bloody civil war.
£17.38
University of Nebraska Press Sitting Bull and the Paradox of Lakota Nationhood
In this newly revised biography, Sitting Bull and the Paradox of Lakota Nationhood, Gary C. Anderson offers a new interpretation of Sitting Bull’s conflict with General George Custer at Little Big Horn and its aftermath, and details the events and life experiences that ultimately led Sitting Bull into battle. Incorporating the latest scholarship, Anderson profiles this military and spiritual leader of the Lakota people, a man who remained a staunch defender of his nation and way of life until his untimely death.Sitting Bull and the Paradox of Lakota Nationhood explores the complexities and evolution of Lakota society and political culture within Sitting Bull’s lifetime as the Lakotas endured wave after wave of massive military and civilian intrusion into their lands. For a people not accustomed to living under a centralized authority, the Lakotas found themselves needing one to galvanize resistance against a relentless and rapidly expanding nation. Despite tactical success on a number of battlefields, Sitting Bull and the Lakotas lacked the military and political might to form an unyielding consensus on how to deal with the United States’ aggressive land seizures and military attacks. Ultimately, on the blood-soaked ground at Wounded Knee, amid the slaughter of noncombatants and aging warriors, the Lakotas would see their independence broken and Sitting Bull’s vision of a Lakota nation free of U.S. influence lost. This edition features a new afterword.
£16.56
University of Nebraska Press Nez Perce Summer, 1877: The U.S. Army and the Nee-Me-Poo Crisis
Nez Perce Summer, 1877 tells the story of a people’s epic struggle to survive spiritually, culturally, and physically in the face of unrelenting military force. Written by one of the foremost experts in frontier military history, Jerome A. Greene, and reviewed by members of the Nez Perce tribe, this definitive treatment of the Nez Perce War is the first to incorporate research from all known accounts of Nez Perce and U.S. military participants. Enhanced by sixteen detailed maps and forty-nine historic photographs, Greene’s gripping narrative takes readers on a three-and-one-half month 1,700-mile journey across the wilds of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana territories. All of the skirmishes and battles of the war receive detailed treatment, which benefits from Greene’s astute analysis of the strategies and decision making on both sides. Between 100 and 150 of the more than 800 Nez Perce men, women, and children who began the trek were killed during the war. Almost as many died in the months following the surrender, after they were exiled to malaria-ridden northeastern Oklahoma. Army deaths numbered 113. The casualties on both sides were an extraordinary price for a war that nobody wanted but whose history has since fascinated generations of Americans.
£23.85
University of Nebraska Press Mummy Eaters
2023 American Book Award 2022 Longlist for the National Book Awards Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Sherry Shenoda’s collection Mummy Eaters follows in the footsteps of an imagined ancestor, one of the daughters of the house of Akhenaten in the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt. Shenoda forges an imagined path through her ancestor’s mummification and journey to the afterlife. Parallel to this exploration run the implications of colonialism on her passage. The mythology of the ancient Egyptians was oriented toward resurrection through the preservation of the human body in mummification. Shenoda juxtaposes this reverence for the human body as sacred matter and a pathway to eternal life with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European fascination with ingesting Egyptian human remains as medicine and using exhumed Egyptian mummies as paper, paint, and fertilizer. Today Egyptian human remains are displayed in museums. Much of Mummy Eaters is written as a call and response, in the Coptic tradition, between the imagined ancestor and the author as descendant.
£14.94
University of Nebraska Press Living Room
2023 Virginia Literary Awards Finalist Eric Hoffer Book Award Category Finalist Deeply phenomenological and ecological, Laura Bylenok’s poems in Living Room imagine the lived reality of other organisms and kinds of life, including animals, plants, bacteria, buildings, and rocks. They explore the permeability of human and nonhuman experience, intelligence, language, and subjectivity. In particular, the poems consider so-called model organisms—nonhuman species studied to understand specific and often human biological processes, diseases, and phenomena—as well as an experience of self and world that cannot be objectively quantified. The impulse of these poems is to slow down, to see and feel, and to listen closely. Language becomes solid, palpable as fruit. Long lines propel breath and push past the lung’s capacity. Life at a cellular level, synthesis and symbiosis, is revealed through forests, fairy tales, and vines that grow over abandoned houses and hospital rooms. A living room is considered as a room that is lived in and also a room that is alive. Cells are living rooms. A self is a room that shares walls with others. Interconnection and interplay are thematic, and the network of poems becomes a linguistic rendering of a heterogeneous and nonhierarchical ecosystem, using the language of biology, genetics, and neurochemistry alongside fairy tale and dream to explore the interior spaces of grief, motherhood, mortality, and self.
£14.94
University of Nebraska Press Henry James Framed: Material Representations of the Master
Henry James Framed is a cultural history of Henry James as a work of art. Throughout his life, James demonstrated an abiding interest in—some would say an obsession with—the visual arts. In his most influential testaments about the art of fiction, James frequently invoked a deeply felt analogy between imaginative writing and painting. At a time when having a photographic carte de visite was an expected social commonplace, James detested the necessity of replenishing his supply or of distributing his autographed image to well-wishing friends and imploring readers. Yet for a man who set the highest premium on personal privacy, James seems to have had few reservations about serving as a model for artists in other media and sat for his portrait a remarkable number of twenty-four times. Surprisingly few James scholars have brought into primary focus those occasions when the author was not writing about art but instead became art himself, through the creative expression of another’s talent. To better understand the twenty-four occasions he sat for others to represent him, Michael Anesko reconstructs the specific contexts for these works’ coming into being, assesses James’s relationships with his artists and patrons, documents his judgments concerning the objects produced, and, insofar as possible, traces the later provenance of each of them. James’s long-established intimacy with the studio world deepened his understanding of the complex relationship between the artist and his sitter. James insisted above all that a portrait was a revelation of two realities: the man whom it was the artist’s conscious effort to reveal and the artist, or interpreter, expressed in the very quality and temper of that effort. The product offered a double vision—the strongest dose of life that art could give, and the strongest dose of art that life could give.
£45.75
University of Nebraska Press When Women Ruled the Pacific: Power and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Tahiti and Hawai‘i
Throughout the nineteenth century British and American imperialists advanced into the Pacific, with catastrophic effects for Polynesian peoples and cultures. In both Tahiti and Hawai‘i, women rulers attempted to mitigate the effects of these encounters, utilizing their power amid the destabilizing influence of the English and Americans. However, as the century progressed, foreign diseases devastated the Tahitian and Hawaiian populations, and powerful European militaries jockeyed for more formal imperial control over Polynesian waystations, causing Tahiti to cede rule to France in 1847 and Hawai‘i to relinquish power to the United States in 1893. In When Women Ruled the Pacific Joy Schulz highlights four Polynesian women rulers who held enormous domestic and foreign power and expertly governed their people amid shifting loyalties, outright betrayals, and the ascendancy of imperial racism. Like their European counterparts, these Polynesian rulers fought arguments of lineage, as well as battles for territorial control, yet the freedom of Polynesian women in general and women rulers in particular was unlike anything Europeans and Americans had ever seen. Consequently, white chroniclers of contact had difficulty explaining their encounters, initially praising yet ultimately condemning Polynesian gender systems, resulting in the loss of women’s autonomy. The queens’ successes have been lost in the archives as imperial histories and missionary accounts chose to tell different stories. In this first book to consider queenship and women’s political sovereignty in the Pacific, Schulz recenters the lives of the women rulers in the history of nineteenth-century international relations.
£38.45
University of Nebraska Press Lessons from Fort Apache: Beyond Language Endangerment and Maintenance
Lessons from Fort Apache is an ethnography of Indigenous language dynamics on the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona with North American and global implications concerning language endangerment. Moving beyond a narrow focus on linguistic documentation, M. Eleanor Nevins examines how the linguistics and cultural identities of Indigenous populations are attributed with meaning against other sociocultural concerns and interests. While affirming the value of language documentation and maintenance, Nevins also provides a much-needed appraisal of the potential conflicts in authority claims and language practices between community members and the educators and scholars who research their linguistic heritage. Nevins argues that the debates surrounding the revitalization of Indigenous languages need broadening to include larger questions of social mediation, shifting cultural identities, and the politics intrinsic to the relationship between Indigenous community members and university-accredited experts such as language researchers and educators. This engaging ethnography examines these questions and investigates the language dynamics of the Fort Apache Reservation, including the unintended challenges that standardized textual models sometimes pose to local interests. Nevins reveals the community’s historical and contemporary concerns for language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization.Lessons from Fort Apache demonstrates the need for language maintenance programs and for flexibility in finding politically sustainable forms of collaboration and exchange between researchers, teachers, and those community members who base their claims to an Indigenous language in alternate terms.
£26.29
University of Nebraska Press The Shinnery: A Novel
Reading the West Longlist for Debut Fiction Seventeen-year-old Jessa Campbell thrives on the Shinnery, her family’s homestead in 1890s Texas, bordered by acres of shin oaks on the rolling plains. Without explanation her father sends her away to settle a family debt. A better judge of cattle than of men, Jessa becomes entangled with a bad one. Everything unravels after she puts her trust in Will Keyes. When Jessa returns home to the Shinnery, pregnant and alone, her father goes on a mission of frontier justice, with devastating consequences. In the aftermath Jessa fights for her claim to the family farm and for a life of independence for herself and her sisters. A story of coming-of-age, betrayal, and revenge, The Shinnery is inspired by the author’s family history and a trial that shook the region.
£17.38
University of Nebraska Press Back from the Collapse: American Prairie and the Restoration of Great Plains Wildlife
Back from the Collapse is a clarion call for restoring one of North America’s most underappreciated and overlooked ecosystems: the grasslands of the Great Plains. This region has been called America’s Serengeti in recognition of its historically extraordinary abundance of wildlife. Since Euro-American colonization, however, populations of at least twenty-four species of Great Plains wildlife have collapsed—from pallid sturgeon and burrowing owls to all major mammals, including bison and grizzly bears. In response to this incalculable loss, Curtis H. Freese and other conservationists founded American Prairie, a nonprofit organization with the mission of supporting the region’s native wildlife by establishing a 3.2-million-acre reserve on the plains of eastern Montana, one of the most intact and highest-priority areas for biodiversity conservation in the Great Plains. In Back from the Collapse Freese explores the evolutionary history of the region’s ecosystem over millions of years, as it transitioned from subtropical forests to the edge of an ice sheet to today’s prairies. He details the eventual species collapse and American Prairie’s work to restore the habitat and wildlife, efforts described by National Geographic as “one of the most ambitious conservation projects in American history.”
£20.61
University of Nebraska Press Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties
Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner in Essays How do we reckon with our losses? In Animal Bodies Suzanne Roberts explores the link between death and desire and what it means to accept our own animal natures, the parts we most often hide, deny, or consider only with shame—our taboo desires and our grief. In landscapes as diverse as Salamanca’s cobbled streets, the Mekong River’s floating markets, Fire Island’s windswept beaches, Nashville’s honky-tonks, and the Sierra Nevada’s snowy slopes, Roberts interrogates her memory and tries to make sense of her own private losses (deaths of people and relationships), as well as more public losses, including a mass shooting in her hometown and environmental devastation in the Amazon rainforest. With lyricism, insight, honesty, and dark humor, these essays illuminate the sometimes terrible beauty of what it means to be human, deepening the conversation on death and grief, sexuality, and the shame that comes from surviving the world in a female body with all of its complexities.
£16.56
University of Nebraska Press Daybreak at Chavez Ravine: Fernandomania and the Remaking of the Los Angeles Dodgers
Finalist for the 2023 CASEY Award Fernando Valenzuela was only twenty years old when Tom Lasorda chose him as the Dodgers’ opening-day starting pitcher in 1981. Born in the remote Mexican town of Etchohuaquila, the left-hander had moved to the United States less than two years before. He became an instant icon, and his superlative rookie season produced Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards—and a World Series victory over the Yankees. Forty years later, there hasn’t been a player since who created as many Dodgers fans. After the Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles from Brooklyn in the late 1950s, relations were badly strained between the organization and the Latin world. Mexican Americans had been evicted from their homes in Chavez Ravine, Los Angeles—some forcibly—for well below market value so the city could sell the land to team owner Walter O’Malley for a new stadium. For a generation of working-class Mexican Americans, the Dodgers became a source of great anguish over the next two decades. However, that bitterness toward the Dodgers vanished during the 1981 season when Valenzuela attracted the fan base the Dodgers had tried in vain to reach for years. El Toro, as he was called, captured the imagination of the baseball world. A hero in Mexico, a legend in Los Angeles, and a phenomenon throughout the United States, Valenzuela did more to change that tense political environment than anyone in the history of baseball. A new fan base flooded Dodger Stadium and ballparks around the United States whenever Valenzuela pitched in a phenomenon that quickly became known as Fernandomania, which continued throughout a Dodger career that included six straight All-Star game appearances.Daybreak at Chavez Ravine retells Valenzuela’s arrival and permanent influence on Dodgers history while bringing redemption to the organization’s controversial beginnings in LA. Through new interviews with players, coaches, broadcasters, and media, Erik Sherman reveals a new side of this intensely private man and brings fresh insight to the ways he transformed the Dodgers and started a phenomenon that radically altered the country’s cultural and sporting landscape.
£26.29
University of Nebraska Press Washington State Politics and Government
In the twenty-first century, as many candidates actively campaign against the very government they seek to serve in, and as many people appear to believe their government irreparably broken, T. M. Sell argues that in Washington State, the system works better than most realize. In Washington State Politics and Government Sell explains how the many parts of government function and introduces readers to a diverse array of individuals who work in government, including how they got there and what it is they’re trying to do. Sell covers the three branches of state government, plus county, city, special purpose district, and tribal governments. He explains the state budgets and taxes; the functions of major and better-known state agencies; how policy is made; the political landscape of Washington; and parties, voting, and elections. Sell discusses economic development, including the importance of high-tech industry, aviation, Amazon.com, and more traditional parts of the state economy, such as timber and agriculture. He also provides a contemporary look at Washington’s elected officials, constitution, judiciary, media, demographics, and political culture and landscape. With this volume, any Washington citizen, student of politics, or specialist in government can gain insight into the state’s current political system.
£26.29
University of Nebraska Press One Season in Rocket City: How the 1985 Huntsville Stars Brought Minor League Baseball Fever to Alabama
It’s 1984. Minor League Baseball mogul Larry Schmittou needs a new home for his Southern League Nashville Sounds franchise. Walt Jocketty, an Oakland A’s executive, searches for a new town for his Double-A club. Fate brings them together in Huntsville, Alabama, a city in need of an outlet to unite its residents. Thus the Huntsville Stars are born. One Season in Rocket City brings to life the baseball renaissance that shook up Huntsville, a city many doubted would support professional baseball. Named after Huntsville’s celebrated space industry, the Stars electrified the town with baseball fever to become one of the biggest attractions in Minor League Baseball that first season. Composed of Oakland’s top prospects, who later fueled the A’s championship run in the late 1980s, the Stars were the hottest ticket in town. Visiting teams called Huntsville the “Minor League show,” and the Stars were the toast of the Southern League. Wearing patriotic red, white, and blue team colors, the team won the Southern League championship in their first year, led by future Major Leaguers Darrel Akerfelds, Tim Belcher, Greg Cadaret, José Canseco, Brian Dorsett, Stan Javier, Eric Plunk, Luis Polonia, and Terry Steinbach. But besides the lineup of touted prospects on the club, it was the gutsy role players who never reached the Major Leagues that willed them to a championship. Through interviews with former players, managers, executives, coaches, and beat writers who witnessed the Stars take the Southern League by storm, Dale Tafoya depicts the city’s romance with the club, success on the field, and push for a championship. Beginning with a glimpse into Huntsville’s rich history, One Season in Rocket City takes readers on a journey through the team’s dramatic founding, Huntsville politics, tape-measure home runs, and the club’s resilience to win the championship despite losing top players to promotions in midseason. The Stars were just what Huntsville needed.
£24.66
University of Nebraska Press Under My Bed and Other Essays
Jody Keisner was raised in rural Nebraska towns by a volatile father and kind but passive mother. As a young adult living alone for the first time, she began a nighttime ritual of checking under her bed each night, not sure who she was afraid of finding. An intruder? A monster? Her father? Keisner’s fears mature as she becomes a wife and mother, and the boogeyman under the bed shape-shifts, though its shapes are no less frightening—a young aunt’s drowning, the “chest chomp” in the classic horror movie The Thing, a diagnosis of a chronic autoimmune disease, the murder of a young college student, an eccentric grandmother’s belief in reincarnation and her dying advice: “Don’t be afraid.” In Under My Bed and Other Essays, Jody Keisner searches for the roots of the violence and fear that afflict women, starting with the working-class midwestern family she was adopted into and ending with her own experience of mothering daughters. In essays both literary and experimental, Keisner illustrates the tension between the illusion of safety, our desire for control, and our struggle to keep the things we fear from reaching out and pulling us under.
£17.38
University of Nebraska Press The Umpire Is Out: Calling the Game and Living My True Self
Dale Scott’s career as a professional baseball umpire spanned nearly forty years, including thirty-three in the Major Leagues, from 1985 to 2017. He worked exactly a thousand games behind the plate, calling balls and strikes at the pinnacle of his profession, working in every Major League Baseball stadium, and interacting with dozens of other top-flight umpires, colorful managers, and hundreds of players, from future Hall of Famers to one-game wonders. Scott has enough stories about his career on the field to fill a dozen books, and there are plenty of those stories here. He’s not interested in settling scores, but throughout the book he’s honest about managers and players, some of whom weren’t always perfect gentlemen. But what makes Scott’s book truly different is his unique perspective as the only umpire in the history of professional baseball to come out as gay during his career. Granted, that was after decades of remaining in the closet, and Scott writes vividly and movingly about having to “play the game”: maintaining a facade of straightness while privately becoming his true self and building a lasting relationship with his future husband. He navigated this obstacle course at a time when his MLB career was just taking off—and when North America was consumed by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Scott’s story isn’t only about his leading a sort of double life, then opening himself up to the world and discovering a new generosity of spirit. It’s also a baseball story, filled with insights and memorable anecdotes that come so naturally from someone who spent decades among the world’s greatest baseball players, managers, and games. Scott’s story is fascinating both for his umpiring career and for his being a pioneer for LGBTQ people within baseball and across sports.
£27.90
University of Nebraska Press The Yamasee Indians: From Florida to South Carolina
2019 William L. Proctor Award from the Historic St. Augustine Research Institute The Yamasee Indians are best known for their involvement in the Indian slave trade and the eighteenth-century war (1715–54) that took their name. Yet their significance in colonial history is far larger than that. Denise I. Bossy brings together archaeologists of South Carolina and Florida with historians of the Native South, Spanish Florida, and British Carolina for the first time to answer elusive questions about the Yamasees’ identity, history, and fate. Until now scholarly works have rarely focused on the Yamasees themselves. In southern history, the Yamasees appear only sporadically outside of slave raiding or the Yamasee War. Their culture and political structures, the complexities of their many migrations, their kinship networks, and their survival remain largely uninvestigated. The Yamasees’ relative obscurity in scholarship is partly a result of their geographic mobility. Reconstructing their past has posed a real challenge in light of their many, often overlapping migrations. In addition, the campaigns waged by the British (and the Americans after them) to erase the Yamasees from the South forced Yamasee survivors to camouflage their identities bit by bit.The Yamasee Indians recovers the complex history of these peoples. In this critically important new volume, historians and archaeologists weave together the fractured narratives of the Yamasees through probing questions about their mobility, identity, and networks.
£26.29
University of Nebraska Press Rhymes with Fighter: Clayton Yeutter, American Statesman
From a hardscrabble childhood in the Great Depression on the dusty plains of rural Nebraska, Clayton Yeutter (1930–2017) rose to work for four U.S. presidents, serving in the cabinets of two of them. His challenge, posed by one of President Ronald Reagan’s aides, was this: go and change the world. As U.S. trade representative he did just that, opening the global trading arena with bold efforts that led to NAFTA, the creation of the World Trade Organization, and extraordinary growth in cross-border business. Today’s global trading regime began with Yeutter. A distinguished lawyer with a doctorate in economics, Yeutter also had deep business experience leading the giant futures trading organization the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, now called the CME Group. But he never forgot his family’s farm roots, and those roots led him to another top job as President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of agriculture. Yeutter’s intellectual firepower, paired with an engaging personality and a midwesterner’s beaming smile, made friends and found common ground with leaders and trade officials worldwide. Although a loyal GOP leader who served as counselor to a president and head of the Republican National Committee, Yeutter was a moderate who had admirers on both sides of the aisle. This is his life story.
£27.90
University of Nebraska Press Liverpool to Great Salt Lake: The 1851 Journal of Missionary George D. Watt
George Darling Watt was the first convert of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints baptized in the British Isles. He emigrated to Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1842. He returned to the British Isles in 1846 as a missionary, accompanied by his wife and young son. He remained there until 1851, when he led a group of emigrant converts to Salt Lake City, Utah. Watt recorded his journey from Liverpool to Chimney Rock in Pitman shorthand. Remarkably, his journal wasn’t discovered until 2001—and is transcribed and appearing for the first time in this book. Watt’s journal provides an important glimpse into the transatlantic nature of Latter-day Saint migration to Salt Lake City. In 1850 there were more Latter-day Saints in England than in the United States, but by 1890 more than eighty-five thousand converts had crossed the Atlantic and made their way to Salt Lake City. Watt’s 1851 journal opens a window into those overseas, riverine, and overland journeys. His spirited accounts provide wide-ranging details about the births, marriages, deaths, Sunday sermons, interpersonal relations, weather, and food and water shortages of the journey, as well as the many logistical complexities.
£35.21
University of Nebraska Press Knocked Down: A High-Risk Memoir
A laugh-out-loud memoir about a free-spirited, commitment-phobic Brooklyn girl who, after a whirlwind romance, finds herself living in a rickety farmhouse, pregnant, and faced with five months of doctor-prescribed bed rest because of unusually large fibroids. Aileen Weintraub has been running away from commitment her entire life, hopping from one job and one relationship to the next. When her father suddenly dies, she flees her Jewish Brooklyn community for the wilds of the country, where she unexpectedly falls in love with a man who knows a lot about produce, tractors, and how to take a person down in one jiu-jitsu move. Within months of saying “I do” she’s pregnant, life is on track, and then wham! Her doctor slaps a high-risk label on her uterus and sends her to bed for five months. As her husband’s bucolic (and possibly haunted) farmhouse begins to collapse and her marriage starts to do the same, Weintraub finally confronts her grief for her father while fighting for the survival of her unborn baby. In her precarious situation, will she stay or will she once again run away from it all? Knocked Down is an emotionally charged, laugh-out-loud roller-coaster ride of survival and growth. It is a story about marriage, motherhood, and the risks we take.
£18.18
University of Nebraska Press Bandits and Liberals, Rebels and Saints: Latin America since Independence
In Bandits and Liberals, Rebels and Saints Alan Knight offers a distinct perspective on several overarching themes in Latin American history, spanning approximately two centuries, from 1800 to 2000. Knight’s approach is ambitious and comparative—sometimes ranging beyond Latin America and combining relevant social theory with robust empirical detail. He tries to offer answers to big questions while challenging alternative answers and approaches, including several recently fashionable ones. While the individual essays and the book as a whole are roughly chronological, the approach is essentially thematic, with chapters devoted to major contentious themes in Latin American history across two centuries: the sociopolitical roots and impact of banditry; the character and evolution of liberalism; religious conflict; the divergent historical trajectories of Peru and Mexico; the nature of informal empire and internal colonialism; and the region’s revolutionary history—viewed through the twin prisms of British perceptions and comparative global history.
£26.29
University of Nebraska Press 148 Charles Street: A Novel
Tracy Daugherty’s historical novel 148 Charles Street explores the fascinating story of Willa Cather’s friendship with Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. The women shared a passion for writing, for New York, and for the desert Southwest, but their sensibilities could not have been more different: Cather, the novelist of lyrical landscapes and aesthetic refinement, and Sergeant, the muckraking journalist and literary activist. Their friendship is sorely tested when Cather fictionalizes a war that Sergeant covered as a reporter, calling into question, for both women, the uses of art and journalism, the power of imagination and witness. 148 Charles Street is a testament to the bonds that endure despite disagreements and misunderstandings, and in the relentlessness of a vanishing past.148 Charles Street explores, as only fiction can, the two writers’ interior lives, and contrasts Sergeant’s literary activism with Cather’s more purely aesthetic approach to writing.
£16.56
University of Nebraska Press New Kids in the World Cup: The Totally Late '80s and Early '90s Tale of the Team That Changed American Soccer Forever
In 1990, though no one knew it then, a fearless group of players changed the sport of soccer in the United States forever. Young, bronzed, and mulleted, they were America’s finest athletes in a sport that America loved to hate. Even sportswriters rooted against them. Yet this team defied massive odds and qualified for the World Cup, making possible America’s current obsession with the world’s most popular game. In this era, a U.S. Soccer Federation head coach had a better-paying day job as a black-tie restaurant waiter. Players earned $20 a day. The crowd at home games cheered for their opponent, and the fields were even mismarked. In Latin America the U.S. team bus had a machine gun turret mounted on the back, locals would sabotage their hotel, and in the stadiums spectators would rain coins, batteries, and plastic bags of urine down on the American players. The world considered the U.S. team to be total imposters—the Milli Vanilli of soccer. Yet on the biggest stage of all, in the 1990 World Cup, this undaunted American squad and their wise coach earned the adoration of Italy’s star players and their fans in a gladiator-like match in Rome’s deafening Stadio Olimpico. From windswept soccer fields in the U.S. heartland to the CIA-infested cauldron of Central America and the Caribbean, behind the recently toppled Iron Curtain and into the great European soccer cathedrals, New Kids in the World Cup is the origin story of modern American soccer in a time when power ballads were inescapable and mainstream America was discovering hip-hop. It’s the true adventure of America’s most important soccer team, which made possible everything that’s come since—including America finally falling in love with soccer. For more information about the book visit newkidsintheworldcup.com
£27.90
University of Nebraska Press Bring In the Right-Hander!: My Twenty-Two Years in the Major Leagues
One of only twenty-nine Major Leaguers to play in four different decades, Jerry Reuss pitched for eight teams, including the Pittsburgh Pirates twice. So when Reuss tells his story, he covers about as much of baseball life as any player can.Bring In the Right-Hander! puts us on the mound for the winning pitch in game 5 of the 1981 World Series, then takes us back to the schoolyards and ball fields of Overland, Missouri, where Reuss first dreamed of that scene. His baseball odyssey, dedicated to the mantra “work hard and play harder,” began in 1969 with his hometown team, the Saint Louis Cardinals (who traded him three years later for mustache-related reasons). Reuss carries us through his winning seasons with the Dodgers, taking in a no-hitter and that World Series triumph, and introducing us to some of baseball’s most colorful characters. Along the way, as the grizzled veteran faces injuries, releases, and trips to the Minors, then battling his way back into the Majors to finish his career with the Pirates, we get a glimpse of the real grit behind big-league life, on and off the field.
£17.38
University of Nebraska Press Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France
Winner of the 2020 Catholic Press Association Book Award in HistoryApostles of Empire is a revisionist history of the French Jesuit mission to Indigenous North Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offering a comprehensive view of a transatlantic enterprise with integral secular concerns. Between 1611 and 1764, 320 Jesuits were sent from France to North America to serve as missionaries. Most labored in colonial New France, a vast territory comprising eastern Canada and the Great Lakes region, inhabited by diverse Native American populations. Although committed to spreading Catholic doctrines and rituals and adapting them to diverse Indigenous cultures, these missionaries also devoted significant energy to more worldly concerns, particularly the transatlantic expansion of the absolutist-era Bourbon state and the importation of the culture of elite, urban French society. In Apostles of Empire Bronwen McShea accounts for these secular dimensions of the mission’s history through candid portraits of Jesuits engaged in a range of activities. We see them not only preaching and catechizing in terms borrowed from Indigenous idioms but also cultivating trade and military partnerships between the French and various Indian tribes. McShea shows how the Jesuits’ robust conceptions of secular spheres of Christian action informed their efforts from both sides of the Atlantic to build up a French and Catholic empire in North America through Indigenous cooperation.
£23.04
University of Nebraska Press Death at the Edges of Empire: Fallen Soldiers, Cultural Memory, and the Making of an American Nation, 1863–1921
Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the U.S. Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead. In Death at the Edges of Empire Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memories of war expressed through American cultural traditions that emerged within broader transatlantic and transpacific networks. Examining the pragmatic collaborations between middle-class Americans and government officials to negotiate the contradictory terrain of empire and nation, Death at the Edges of Empire shows how Americans imposed modern order on the inevitability of death and used the war dead to reimagine political identities and opportunities into imperial ambitions.
£26.29
University of Nebraska Press Chasing the Ghost Bear: On the Trail of America’s Lost Super Beast
Winner of the 2023 New Mexico-Arizona Book AwardReading the West Longlist for Nonfiction No animal shakes the human consciousness quite like a bear, and few compare to the giant short-faced bears that stalked North America during the Pleistocene. Even among the mammoths and saber-toothed cats, they were a staggering sight: on all fours, the biggest would stare a six-foot person in the face and weigh close to a ton. On hind legs they towered more than ten feet, with jaws powerful enough to crush skulls and snap bones like twigs. The bears weren’t invincible, however. Despite their size, they were swept off the planet in a mysterious wave of Ice Age extinctions more than ten thousand years ago, then mostly forgotten. Chasing the Ghost Bear is Mike Stark’s journey into the bear’s enigmatic story—its life, disappearance, and rediscovery—and those trying to piece it together today. An engaging guide through his intrepid search, Stark’s story leads us from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles to a cornfield in Indiana, the far ends of the Arctic, the plains of Texas, and the swamps of Florida. Part natural history, part travelogue, and part meditation on extinction and loss, Chasing the Ghost Bear returns these magnificent beasts to their rightful place in our understanding of the world just an epoch past.
£19.80
University of Nebraska Press The Sisterhood: The 99ers and the Rise of U.S. Women's Soccer
For legions of soccer fans, the players on the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team are the game’s standard-bearers. Together their accomplishments include four World Cup titles and four Olympic gold medals. Within five years of their inaugural match in 1985, the team was the best women’s soccer team on the planet. But its rise was neither easy nor harmonious. The national team came onto the scene when team sports for women were in their infancy. The players were paid little and played to sparse crowds on marginal pitches and carried their own equipment and luggage. They faced discrimination and unequal treatment, most notably from their governing bodies, FIFA and U.S. Soccer.The Sisterhood is the story of the first and second generations of national team players, known as the 99ers, who were the driving force behind the rise of U.S. women’s soccer and who built the foundation for the team’s enduring success. Rob Goldman takes the reader onto the pitch and into the minds of the players and coaches for the team’s greatest victories and most heartbreaking defeats. Among those featured are players Michelle Akers, Julie Foudy, Mia Hamm, and Brandi Chastain, as well as coaches Anson Dorrance and Tony DiCicco. When the team won the ’99 World Cup in front of more than ninety thousand fans at the Rose Bowl, it was the largest crowd to ever attend a women’s sporting event. After Brandi Chastain’s winning penalty kick beat China, everything changed. These women’s soccer players were no longer outcasts; they were hard-nosed players and leaders who not only transformed women’s sports but led a cultural revolution. They were trailblazers, role models, and selfless best friends. Their story, told here largely in the voices of the players and coaches who were there, is epic and inspiring.
£26.29
University of Nebraska Press Amazonian Kichwa of the Curaray River: Kinship and History in the Western Amazon
Amazonian Kichwa of the Curaray River is an exploration of the dynamics of regional societies and the ways in which kinship relationships define the scale of these societies. It details social relations across Kichwa-speaking indigenous communities and among neighboring members of other ethnolinguistic groups to explore the multiple ways in which the regional society is conceptualized among Amazonian Kichwa. Drawing on recent studies in kinship, landscape from an indigenous perspective, and social scaling, Mary-Elizabeth Reeve presents a view of Amazonian Kichwa as embedded in a multiethnic regional society of great historic depth. This book is a fine-grained ethnography of the Kichwa of the Curaray River region (Curaray Runa) in which Reeve focuses on ideas of social landscape, as well as residence, extended kin groups, historical memory, and collective ritual celebration, to show the many ways in which Curaray Runa express their placement within a regional society. The final chapter examines social scaling as it is currently unfolding in indigenous societies in Amazonian Ecuador through increasing multisited residence and political mobilization. Based on intensive fieldwork, Amazonian Kichwa of the Curaray River breaks new ground in Amazonian studies by focusing on extended kinship networks at a larger scale and by utilizing both ethnographic and archival research of Amazonian regional systems.
£45.75
University of Nebraska Press The Light of Earth: Reflections on a Life in Space
Apollo 15 command module pilot Al Worden was one of the highest-profile personalities among the Apollo astronauts, renowned for his outspokenness and potent views but also recognized as a warm and well-liked person who devoted much of his life after retiring from NASA to sharing his spaceflight experiences. Worden had nearly finished writing this book before his passing in 2020 at the age of eighty-eight. Coauthored with spaceflight historian Francis French, The Light of Earth is Worden’s wide-ranging look at the greatest-ever scientific undertaking, in which he was privileged to be a leading participant. Here Worden gives readers his refreshingly candid opinions on the space program, flying to the moon, and the people involved in the Apollo and later shuttle programs, as well as sharing hard-hitting reflections on the space shuttle program, the agonies and extraordinary sights and delights of being a NASA Apollo astronaut, and the space program’s triumphs and failures. Worden delves into areas of personal grief that reveal the noble and truly human side of the space program’s earliest years. He does not hold back when discussing the shocking deaths of his fellow astronauts in the three major tragedies that struck the space agency, nor does he shy away from sharing his personal feelings about fellow Apollo astronauts including Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Worden was known as a charismatic speaker and one of the most thoughtful Apollo astronauts. His candid, entertaining, and unique perspective in The Light of Earth will captivate and surprise.
£24.66
University of Nebraska Press Buffalo Soldiers in Alaska: Company L, Twenty-Fourth Infantry
The town of Skagway was born in 1897 after its population quintupled in under a year due to the Klondike gold rush. Balanced on the edge of anarchy, the U.S. Army stationed Company L, a unit of Buffalo Soldiers, there near the end of the gold rush. Buffalo Soldiers in Alaska tells the story of these African American soldiers who kept the peace during a volatile period in America’s resource-rich North. It is a fascinating tale that features white officers and Black soldiers safeguarding U.S. territory, supporting the civil authorities, protecting Native Americans, fighting natural disasters, and serving proudly in America’s last frontier. Despite the discipline and contributions of soldiers who served honorably, Skagway exhibited the era’s persistent racism and maintained a clear color line. However, these Black Regulars carried out their complex and sometimes contradictory mission with a combination of professionalism and restraint that earned the grudging respect of the independently minded citizens of Alaska. The company used the popular sport of baseball to connect with the white citizens of Skagway and in the process gained some measure of acceptance. Though the soldiers left little trace in Skagway, a few remained after their enlistments and achieved success and recognition after settling in other parts of Alaska.
£23.04
University of Nebraska Press The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland
Following the Civil War, large corporations emerged in the United States and became intent on maximizing their power and profits at all costs. Political corruption permeated American society as those corporate entities grew and spread across the country, leaving bribery and exploitation in their wake. This alliance between corporate America and the political class came to a screeching halt during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, when the U.S. workers in the railroad, mining, canal, and manufacturing industries called a general strike against monopoly capitalism and brought the country to an economic standstill. In The St. Louis Commune of 1877 Mark Kruger tells the riveting story of how workers assumed political control in St. Louis, Missouri. Kruger examines the roots of the St. Louis Commune—focusing on the 1848 German revolution, the Paris Commune, and the First International. Not only was 1877 the first instance of a general strike in U.S. history; it was also the first time workers took control of a major American city and the first time a city was ruled by a communist party.
£23.04
University of Nebraska Press Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity
Laura E. Smith unravels the compelling life story of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw (1906–84), one of the first professional Native American photographers. Born on the Kiowa reservation in Anadarko, Oklahoma, Poolaw bought his first camera at the age of fifteen and began taking photos of family, friends, and noted leaders in the Kiowa community, also capturing years of powwows and pageants at fairs, expositions, and other events. Smith examines the cultural and artistic significance of Poolaw’s life in professional photography from 1925 to 1945 in light of European and modernist discourses on photography, portraiture, the function of art, Native American identity, and Native religious and political activism. Rather than through the lens of Native peoples’ inevitable extinction or within a discourse of artistic modernism, Smith evaluates Poolaw’s photography within art history and Native American history, questioning the category of “fine artist” in relation to the creative lives of Native peoples. A tour de force of art and cultural history, Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity illuminates the life of one of Native America’s most gifted, organic artists and documentarians and challenges readers to reevaluate the seamlessness between the creative arts and everyday life through its depiction of one man’s lifelong dedication to art and community.
£23.04
University of Nebraska Press Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian School Students Speak
Boarding School Voices is both an anthology of mostly unpublished writing by former students of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and a study of that writing. The boarding schools’ ethnocidal practices have become a metaphor for the worst evils of colonialism, a specifiable source for the ills that beset Native communities today. But the fuller story is one not only of suffering and pain, loss and abjection, but also of ingenious agency, creative syntheses, and unimagined adaptations. Although tragic for many students, for others the Carlisle experience led to positive outcomes in their lives. Some published short pieces in the Carlisle newspapers and others sent letters and photos to the school over the years. Arnold Krupat transcribes selections from the letters of these former students literally and unedited, emphasizing their evocative language and what they tell of themselves and their home communities, and the perspectives they offer on a wider American world. Their sense of themselves and their worldview provide detailed insights into what was abstractly and vaguely referred to as “the Indian question.” These former students were the oxymoron Carlisle superintendent Richard Henry Pratt could not imagine and never comprehended: they were Carlisle Indians.
£59.53
University of Nebraska Press Reconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism
Regions connect and divide us even as global economies, weather, and germs batter us. Historians, literary scholars, and social scientists use region to ground and challenge ideas about national belonging. In Reconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism Alexander Finkelstein and Anne F. Hyde have assembled leading scholars of regionalism to discuss the relationship of region to nation. The contributors explore how historical forces have changed regional associations and how regional associations have changed culture and history. The themes of culture, space, and institutions organize this volume: contributors historicize how race and racial thinking have evolved as a major force to define region and nation over time; the essays raise questions about the stability and validity of “canonical regions” in U.S. history to find new complexity in how these blocs form and how they understand themselves; and they focus on historicist and conjunctural trends and how institutions and ordinary people shape regional identities through politics and cultural change throughout history. Challenging ideas about both national belonging and local association, the contributors emphasize how regional analysis deepens understanding of migration, race, borders, infrastructure, climate, and Native sovereignty.
£72.49
University of Nebraska Press The History of Anthropology: A Critical Window on the Discipline in North America
In The History of Anthropology Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the Americanist tradition centered around the figure of Franz Boas and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focused on researchers often known as the Boasians, The History of Anthropology reveals the theoretical schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the anthropology and ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell’s fifty-year career entails seminal writings in the history of anthropology’s four fields: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology. Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Edward Sapir, Daniel Brinton, Mary Haas, Franz Boas, Leonard Bloomfield, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Stanley Newman, and A. Irving Hallowell, as well as the professionalization of anthropology, the development of American folklore scholarship, theories of Indigenous languages, Southwest ethnographic research, Indigenous ceremonialism, text traditions, and anthropology’s forays into contemporary public intellectual debates.The History of Anthropology is the essential volume for scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students to enter into the history of the Americanist tradition and its legacies, alternating historicism and presentism to contextualize anthropology’s historical and contemporary relevance and legacies.
£26.29
University of Nebraska Press A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872
Since the early twentieth century, historians have traditionally defined manifest destiny as the belief that the United States was destined to expand from coast to coast. This generation of historians has posed manifest destiny as a unifying ideology of the nineteenth century, one that was popular and pervasive and ultimately fulfilled in the late 1840s when the United States acquired the Pacific Coast. However, the story of manifest destiny was never quite that simple. In A Failed Vision of Empire Daniel J. Burge examines the belief in manifest destiny over the nineteenth century by analyzing contested moments in the continental expansion of the United States, arguing that the ideology was ultimately unsuccessful. By examining speeches, plays, letters, diaries, newspapers, and other sources, Burge reveals how Americans debated the wisdom of expansion, challenged expansionists, and disagreed over what the boundaries of the United States should look like. A Failed Vision of Empire is the first work to capture the messy, complicated, and yet far more compelling story of manifest destiny’s failure, debunking in the process one of the most pervasive myths of modern American history.
£45.75
University of Nebraska Press Negative Geographies: Exploring the Politics of Limits
Negative Geographies is the first edited collection to chart the political, conceptual, and ethical consequences of how the underexplored problem of the negative might be posed for contemporary cultural geography. Using a variety of case studies and empirical investigations, these chapters consider how the negative, through annihilations, gaps, ruptures, and tears, can work within or against the terms of affirmationism. The collection opens up new avenues through which key problems of cultural geography might be differently posed and points to the ways that it might be possible and desirable to think, theorize, and exemplify negation.
£72.49
University of Nebraska Press The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1884–1886: Volume 2
Recipient of the Approved Edition seal from the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions This second volume of The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1884–1886 contains 156 letters, of which 111 are published for the first time, written from December 24, 1885, to December 31, 1886. These letters mark Henry James’s ongoing efforts to care for his sister, develop his work, strengthen his professional status, build friendships, engage timely political and economic issues, and maximize his income. James details work on his midcareer novel The Princess Casamassima and announces plans for The Tragic Muse. This volume opens with James’s engagement with friends in Britain and France and concludes with his arrival in Italy for a six-month visit.
£66.01
University of Nebraska Press Jump Shooting to a Higher Degree: My Basketball Odyssey
Jump Shooting to a Higher Degree chronicles Sheldon Anderson’s basketball career from grade school in small-town Moorhead, Minnesota, in the 1960s, to inner-city high school and college ball in Minneapolis, to a professional career in West Germany, and finally to communist Poland, where he did PhD research while on a basketball junket behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s. Because he was the only American player in the league at the time, and with help from a Polish scholar, Anderson was one of the first Western scholars to gain access to Communist Party documents. He's also likely the only American scholar to have funded his research by playing semi-pro basketball in a communist country.Jump Shooting to a Higher Degree is much more than a basketball story. Anderson provides insights into the everyday lives of people on either side of the Iron Curtain, such as the English coach he played for in West Germany, an elderly woman he visited many times in East Germany, and a sailmaker’s family he lived with in Warsaw. He reflects on German, Polish, and Cold War history, providing a commentary on the times and the places where he lived and played, and the importance of basketball along the way.
£17.38
University of Nebraska Press Sports and Aging: A Prescription for Longevity
2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title In Sports and Aging a wide-ranging group of physically active people, including many scholar-athletes, fifty years and older, discuss sports in the context of aging and their own athletic experiences. This collection of personal accounts includes a spectrum of contributors across genders, social classes, and racial, ethnic, national, religious, and educational backgrounds to determine whether there are any common characteristics that can promote long, happy, healthy, and meaningful lifespans. In this fresh look at the role of sports in the process of aging, contributors range from a ninety-six-year-old great-grandmother to a former Olympian. Many contributors have used education to better their lot in life or to find solace and meaning in the service of others. For all, sports or physical activity has enhanced their health and temperament and provided a sense of community.
£72.49
University of Nebraska Press The Masters: A Hole-by-Hole History of America's Golf Classic
Revered as the most prestigious tournament in golf, the Masters commands international attention, even among nongolfers. The first and second editions of The Masters: A Hole-by-Hole History of America’s Golf Classic took the unique approach of tackling Augusta National hole by hole. Each hole had its own chapter, with colorful stories on the greatest shots, biggest disasters, and most amazing events that took place on each. David Sowell returns to Augusta with the third edition of The Masters, adding more history and updating each hole with additional stories of greatness and tales of woe for a new generation of golfers led by Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy, and Patrick Reed, as well as from an older guard represented by Bubba Watson, Adam Scott, and Sergio García. The legends of the Masters are in full force in this lively look at America’s golf classic. From Bobby Jones and Gene Sarazen to Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus to Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson to Bubba Watson and Jordan Spieth, all the greatest Masters moments of the greatest—and not so great—golfers are here in one book. This third edition provides a rich historical view of the course where success breeds legends and where failure can haunt even the most brilliant golfer’s career.
£17.38
University of Nebraska Press Go West, Young Man: A Father and Son Rediscover America on the Oregon Trail
2022 Silver Midwest Book Award Winner At the sound of the bell on the last day of kindergarten, B.J. Hollars and his six-year-old son, Henry, hop in the car to strike out on a 2,500-mile road trip retracing the Oregon Trail. Their mission: to rediscover America, and Americans, along the way. Throughout their two-week adventure, they endure the usual setbacks (car trouble, inclement weather, and father-son fatigue), but their most compelling drama involves people, privilege, and their attempt to find common ground in an all-too-fractured country. Writing in the footsteps of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, Hollars picks up the trail with his son more than half a century later. Together they sidle up to a stool at every truck stop, camp by every creek, and roam the West. They encounter not only the beauty and heartbreak of America, but also the beauty and heartbreak of a father and son eager to make the most of their time together. From Chimney Rock to Independence Rock to the rocky coast of Oregon, they learn and relearn the devastating truth of America’s exploitative past, as well as their role within it.Go West, Young Man recounts the author’s effort to teach his son the difficult realities of our nation’s founding while also reaffirming his faith in America today.
£16.56
University of Nebraska Press Imagining Seattle: Social Values in Urban Governance
Imagining Seattle dives into some of the most pressing and compelling aspects of contemporary urban governance in the United States. Serin D. Houston uses a case study of Seattle to shed light on how ideas about environmentalism, privilege, oppression, and economic growth have become entwined in contemporary discourse and practice in American cities. Seattle has, by all accounts, been hugely successful in cultivating amenities that attract a creative class. But policies aimed at burnishing Seattle’s liberal reputation often unfold in ways that further disadvantage communities of color and the poor, complicating the city’s claims to progressive politics. Through ethnographic methods and a geographic perspective, Houston explores a range of recent initiatives in Seattle, including the designation of a new cultural district near downtown, the push to charge for disposable shopping bags, and the advent of training about institutional racism for municipal workers. Looking not just at what these policies say but at how they work in practice, she finds that opportunities for social justice, sustainability, and creativity are all constrained by the prevalence of market-oriented thinking and the classism and racism that seep into the architecture of many programs and policies. Houston urges us to consider how values influence actions within urban governance and emphasizes the necessity of developing effective conditions for sustainability, creativity, and social justice in this era of increasing urbanization.
£23.04