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From Gods To God, Avigdor Shinan, Yair Zakovitch Jan 2012

From Gods To God, Avigdor Shinan, Yair Zakovitch

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

The ancient Israelites believed things that the writers of the Bible wanted them to forget: myths and legends from a pre-biblical world that the new monotheist order needed to bury, hide, or reinterpret. Ancient Israel was rich in such literary traditions before the Bible reached the final form that we have today. These traditions were not lost but continued, passed down through the ages. Many managed to reach us in post-biblical sources: rabbinic literature, Jewish Hellenistic writings, the writings of the Dead Sea sect, the Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and other ancient translations of the Bible, and even outside the ancient …


The Ojibwe Journals Of Edmund F. Ely, 1833-1849, Edmund F. Ely Jan 2012

The Ojibwe Journals Of Edmund F. Ely, 1833-1849, Edmund F. Ely

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Twenty-four-year-old Edmund F. Ely, a divinity student from Albany, New York, gave up his preparation for the ministry in 1833 to become a missionary and teacher among the Ojibwe of Lake Superior. During the next sixteen years, Ely lived, taught, and preached among the Ojibwe, keeping a journal of his day-to-day experiences as well as recording ethnographic information about the Ojibwe. From recording his frustrations over the Ojibwe's rejection of Christianity to describing hunting and fishing techniques he learned from his Ojibwe neighbors, Ely’s unique and rich record provides unprecedented insight into early nineteenth-century Ojibwe life and Ojibwe-missionary relations. Theresa …


Colorado Politics And Policy, Thomas E. Cronin, Robert D. Loevy Jan 2012

Colorado Politics And Policy, Thomas E. Cronin, Robert D. Loevy

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Survey after survey reveals that many Coloradans believe that the U.S. government is too big, too wasteful, and too intrusive. Yet Colorado is arguably one of the most federally subsidized states in the union, with forests, national parks, military bases, and research laboratories benefiting from the federal government’s largesse. A concise history of Colorado’s constitution and central political institutions, Colorado Politics and Policy offers a probing analysis of the state’s political cultures. It shows how the state, in many ways a template of the deeply contrary politics of the nation, puts political power into the hands of an ever-more-polarized electorate …


The French Colonial Mind, Volume 2, Martin Thomas Oct 2011

The French Colonial Mind, Volume 2, Martin Thomas

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

olence was prominent in France’s conquest of a colonial empire, and the use of force was integral to its control and regulation of colonial territories. What, if anything, made such violence distinctly colonial? And how did its practitioners justify or explain it? These are issues at the heart of The French Colonial Mind: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism. The second of two linked volumes, this book brings together prominent scholars of French colonial history to explore the many ways in which brutality and killing became central to the French experience and management of empire. Sometimes concealed or denied, at …


Maryland Politics And Government, Herbert C. Smith, John T. Willis Oct 2011

Maryland Politics And Government, Herbert C. Smith, John T. Willis

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Tucked between the larger commonwealths of Pennsylvania and Virginia and overshadowed by the political maneuverings of its neighbor, Washington, D.C., Maryland has often been overlooked and neglected in studies of state governmental systems. With the publication of Maryland Politics and Government, the challenging demographic diversity, geographic variety, and dynamic Democratic pragmatism of Maryland finally get their due. Two longtime political analysts, Herbert C. Smith and John T. Willis, conduct a sustained inquiry into topics including the Maryland identity, political history, and interest groups; the three branches of state government; and policy areas such as taxation, spending, transportation, and the …


Defying Maliseet Language Death, Bernard C. Perley Oct 2011

Defying Maliseet Language Death, Bernard C. Perley

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Today, indigenous communities throughout North America are grappling with the dual issues of language loss and revitalization. While many communities are making efforts to bring their traditional languages back through educational programs, for some communities these efforts are not enough or have come too late to stem the tide of language death, which occurs when there are no remaining fluent speakers and the language is no longer used in regular communication. The Maliseet language, as spoken in the Tobique First Nation of …


The Least Cricket Of Evening, Robert Vivian Oct 2011

The Least Cricket Of Evening, Robert Vivian

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

In the tradition of the meditative essay, the writing of Robert Vivian begins with a mundane moment and, through the delicate workings of curiosity, contemplation, and inspiration, reveals unsuspected meaning. In his second collection of essays Vivian finds his occasions in midwestern towns and European cities. He looks for—and sometimes stumbles upon—the spiritual significance of circumstances and places and those who inhabit them, from the Jewish dead in a long-neglected cemetery in Poland to a dog slaughtered on a highway fronting the Black Sea to gunshots ringing out in rural Michigan. Again and again Vivian probes what such phenomena suggest …


The French Colonial Mind, Volume 1, Martin Thomas Oct 2011

The French Colonial Mind, Volume 1, Martin Thomas

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

What made France into an imperialist nation, ruler of a global empire with millions of dependent subjects overseas? Historians have sought answers to this question in the nation’s political situation at home and abroad, its socioeconomic circumstances, and its international ambitions. But all these motivating factors depended on other, less tangible forces, namely, the prevailing attitudes of the day and their influence among those charged with acquiring or administering a colonial empire. The French Colonial Mind explores these mindsets to illuminate the nature of French imperialism. The first of two linked volumes, Mental Maps of Empire and Colonial Encounters brings …


North American Wildland Plants, Second Edition, James Stubbendieck, Stephan L. Hatch, Neal M. Bryan Apr 2011

North American Wildland Plants, Second Edition, James Stubbendieck, Stephan L. Hatch, Neal M. Bryan

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

North American Wildland Plants contains descriptions of the salient characteristics of the most important wildland plants of North America. This comprehensive reference assists individuals with limited botanical knowledge as well as natural resource professionals in identifying wildland plants. The two hundred species of wildland plants in this book were selected because of their abundance, desirability, or poisonous properties. Each illustration has been enhanced to maximize use of the book as a field guide. Each plant description includes identifying characteristics, an illustration of the plant with enlarged parts, and a general distribution map for North America. Each species description includes nomenclature; …


Virginia City, Ronald M. James Apr 2011

Virginia City, Ronald M. James

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Spent cartridges. The pieces of an original Tabasco Pepper Sauce bottle. Shards of a ceramic pot, stained red. For archaeologists each of the thousands of artifacts uncovered at a site tells a story. For noted Comstock authority Ronald M. James, it is a story resulting from decades of research and excavation at one of the largest National Historic Landmarks in America, the Nevada town that, with the discovery of the Comstock Lode, became a boomtown microcosm of the American West. Drawing on the work of hundreds of volunteers, students, and professional archaeologists, Virginia City: Secrets of a Western Past shows …


Game Faces, Thomas H. Pauly Apr 2011

Game Faces, Thomas H. Pauly

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

This compelling blend of biography and cultural history depicts five important yet nearly forgotten athletes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had a transformative effect on their sports and on the evolution of sports in general. Tom Stevens was the first man to ride a bicycle, “a high wheeler,” around the world (1884-87). Fanny Bullock Workman completed seven expeditions into the Himalayas between 1898 and 1912. Bill Reid, a Harvard football coach and one of the game’s first professionals, played a key role in saving the sport from a national movement to abolish it in 1905. May …


Deterrence Through Strength, Rebecca Berens Matzke Jan 2011

Deterrence Through Strength, Rebecca Berens Matzke

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

The notion of a Pax Britannica—a concept implying that Britain’s overwhelming strength enforced global peace in the era that began with Napoleon’s defeat in 1815—largely ended with the British Empire itself. Although most historians still view this period as a departure from the eighteenth century, when lengthy coalition wars were commonplace, critics argue that Britain had only limited means of exercising power in the nineteenth century and that British military or naval strength played an insignificant role in preserving peace. In Deterrence through Strength, Rebecca Berens Matzke reveals how Britain’s diplomatic and naval authority in the early Victorian period …


New Narratives, Ruth Page, Bronwen Thomas Jan 2011

New Narratives, Ruth Page, Bronwen Thomas

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Just as the explosive growth of digital media has led to ever-expanding narrative possibilities and practices, so these new electronic modes of storytelling have, in their own turn, demanded a rapid and radical rethinking of narrative theory. This timely volume takes up the challenge, deeply and broadly considering the relationship between digital technology and narrative theory in the face of the changing landscape of computer-mediated communication. New Narratives reflects the diversity of its subject by bringing together some of the foremost practitioners and theorists of digital narratives. It extends the range of digital subgenres examined by narrative theorists to include …


Useful Fictions, Michael Austin Oct 2010

Useful Fictions, Michael Austin

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion observed in The White Album. Why is this? Michael Austin asks, in Useful Fictions. Why, in particular, are human beings, whose very survival depends on obtaining true information, so drawn to fictional narratives? After all, virtually every human culture reveres some form of storytelling. Might there be an evolutionary reason behind our species’ need for stories? Drawing on evolutionary biology, anthropology, narrative theory, cognitive psychology, game theory, and evolutionary aesthetics, Austin develops the concept of a “useful fiction,” a simple narrative that serves an adaptive function unrelated to …


Ceiling Of Sticks, Shane Book Oct 2010

Ceiling Of Sticks, Shane Book

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Shane Book’s collection, Ceiling of Sticks, is a powerful and unflinching sort of documentary poetics. It bears elegiac witness to the effects of global politics on individual lives. Book’s poems carry us to Uganda, Ghana, Mali, Trinidad, and Canada’s west coast; from a religious sacrifice in Tarahumara, Mexico, to Book’s ailing grandfather’s bedside. They bring an intimate vision of humanity to scenes of inhuman atrocity and suffering; a moment of clarity and empathy to individuals overwhelmed by war or other man-made catastrophes. The attentiveness of the poems and meditative lyrics …


Christine, Laura Curtis Bullard Oct 2010

Christine, Laura Curtis Bullard

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

When Laura Curtis Bullard wrote the novel Christine in 1856, she created one of antebellum America’s most radical heroines: a woman’s rights leader. Addressing the major social, political, and cultural issues surrounding women from within an unusually overt feminist framework for its time, Christine openly challenges a social and legal system that denies women full and equal rights. Christine defies her family, rejects marriage, and leaves a job as a teacher to embark on her career, rewriting the script for a successful nineteenth-century heroine. Along the way, she recreates domesticity on her own terms, helping other young women gain economic …


Telling Children’S Stories, Mike Cadden Oct 2010

Telling Children’S Stories, Mike Cadden

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

The most accessible approach yet to children’s literature and narrative theory, Telling Children’s Stories is a comprehensive collection of never-before-published essays by an international slate of scholars that offers a broad yet in-depth assessment of narrative strategies unique to children’s literature. The volume is divided into four interrelated sections: “Genre Templates and Transformations,” “Approaches to the Picture Book,” “Narrators and Implied Readers,” and “Narrative Time.” Mike Cadden’s introduction considers the links between the various essays and topics, as well as their connections with such issues as metafiction, narrative ethics, focalization, and plotting. Ranging in focus from picture books to novels …


Scoreboard, Baby, Ken Armstrong, Nick Perry Oct 2010

Scoreboard, Baby, Ken Armstrong, Nick Perry

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

The adjectives associated with the University of Washington’s 2000 football season—mystical, magical, miraculous—changed when Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry’s four-part exposé of the 2000 Huskies hit the newspaper stands: “explosive . . . chilling” (Sports Illustrated), “blistering” (Baltimore Sun), “shocking . . . appalling” (Tacoma News Tribune), “astounding” (ESPN), “jaw-dropping” (Orlando Sentinel). Now, in Scoreboard, Baby, Armstrong and Perry go behind the scenes of the Huskies’ Cinderella story to reveal a timeless morality tale about the price of obsession, the creep of fanaticism, and the ways in which a community can …


Enrique Martínez Celaya: Collected Writings And Interviews, 1990–2010, Enrique Martinez Celaya Oct 2010

Enrique Martínez Celaya: Collected Writings And Interviews, 1990–2010, Enrique Martinez Celaya

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

This collection, spanning two decades of artistic activity, features selections of writings tracing the intellectual influences and development of one of the more formidable and productive minds in the contemporary art world. The writings of Enrique Martínez Celaya comprise public lectures; essays; interviews; correspondence with artists, critics, and scholars; artist statements; blog posts; and journal entries. This selection of writings includes the six public lectures Martínez Celaya delivered during his three-year appointment as the second Visiting Presidential Professor at the University of Nebraska. Marked by an encyclopedic curiosity and considerable knowledge about the world, these lectures explore the nature of …


Palmento, Robert V. Camuto Oct 2010

Palmento, Robert V. Camuto

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Inspired by a deep passion for wine, an Italian heritage, and a desire for a land somewhat wilder than his home in southern France, Robert V. Camuto set out to explore Sicily’s emerging wine scene. What he discovered during more than a year of traveling the region, however, was far more than a fascinating wine frontier. Chronicling his journey through Palermo to Marsala, and across the rugged interior of Sicily to the heights of Mount Etna, Camuto captures the personalities and flavors and the traditions and natural riches that have made Italy’s largest and oldest wine region the world traveler’s …


Beneficial Bombing, Mark Clodfelter Oct 2010

Beneficial Bombing, Mark Clodfelter

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

The Progressive Era, marked by a desire for economic, political, and social reform, ended for most Americans with the ugly reality and devastation of World War I. Yet for Army Air Service officers, the carnage and waste witnessed on the western front only served to spark a new progressive movement—to reform war by relying on destructive technology as the instrument of change. In Beneficial Bombing Mark Clodfelter describes how American airmen, horrified by World War I’s trench warfare, turned to the progressive ideas of efficiency and economy in an effort to reform war itself, with the heavy bomber as their …


Benjamin Franklin And The American Revolution, Jonathan R. Dull Oct 2010

Benjamin Franklin And The American Revolution, Jonathan R. Dull

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

The inventor, the ladies’ man, the affable diplomat, and the purveyor of pithy homespun wisdom: we all know the charming, resourceful Benjamin Franklin. What is less appreciated is the importance of Franklin’s part in the American Revolution: except for Washington he was its most irreplaceable leader. Although aged and in ill health, Franklin served the cause with unsurpassed zeal and dedication. Jonathan R. Dull, whose decades of work on The Papers of Benjamin Franklin have given him rare insight into his subject, explains Franklin’s role in the Revolution, what prepared him for that role, and what motivated him. The Franklin …


The Nebraska Dispatches, Christopher Cartmill Oct 2010

The Nebraska Dispatches, Christopher Cartmill

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Standing Bear, a Ponca Native American chief, is best known for successfully arguing in U.S. District Court in 1879 that Native Americans are “persons within the meaning of the law” who have the right of habeas corpus. When playwright Christopher Cartmill returned to his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, to write a play about Chief Standing Bear, he unknowingly began a complicated adventure. As he followed the story of the Ponca chief who fought so hard to return from a reservation in Oklahoma to his homeland in northern Nebraska, Cartmill stumbled into the politics of identity, contested notions of homeland, and …


Football's Last Iron Men, Norman L. Macht Oct 2010

Football's Last Iron Men, Norman L. Macht

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

In November 1934, the Princeton football team—unbeaten in its last fifteen games—faced the 3–3 Yale Bulldogs, who gave new meaning to the term “underdogs.” As much a thrilling play-by-play account of college football at its finest as it is a fascinating work of sports history, this book chronicles the season that brought Princeton and Yale together in a game like no other since. Football’s Last Iron Men follows the teams from the hiring of future Hall of Fame coaches Fritz Crisler and Greasy Neale through spring practice to their annual clash on November 17. The Yale Elis, it seemed, had …


Swallowing The Soap, William Kloefkorn Oct 2010

Swallowing The Soap, William Kloefkorn

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

This volume, the first to span the forty-year career of Nebraska state poet William Kloefkorn, brings together the best-known and most beloved poems by one of the most important Midwestern poets of the last half century. Collecting work from limited editions and hard-to-find books, along with Kloefkorn’s most anthologized poems, Swallowing the Soap is an indispensable one-volume compendium of the work of a major American poet. “These poems aim for nothing less than the impossible: to understand what it means to be alive and human on this moveable earth,” writes the editor, Ted Genoways. Swallowing the Soap is filled with …


Breaking Into The Backcountry, Steve Edwards Oct 2010

Breaking Into The Backcountry, Steve Edwards

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

In 2001 Steve Edwards won a writing contest. The prize was seven months of “unparalleled solitude” as the caretaker of a ninety-two-acre backcountry homestead along the Rogue National Wild and Scenic River in southwestern Oregon. Young, recently divorced, and humbled by the prospect of so much time alone, he left behind his job as a college English teacher in Indiana and headed west for a remote but comfortable cabin in the rugged Klamath Mountains. Well aware of what could go wrong living two hours from town with no electricity and no neighbors, Edwards was surprised by what could go right. …


The Year 3000, Paolo Mantegazza Oct 2010

The Year 3000, Paolo Mantegazza

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

First published in 1897, The Year 3000 is the most daring and original work of fiction by the prominent Italian anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza. A futuristic utopian novel, the book follows two young lovers who, as they travel from Rome to the capital of the United Planetary States to celebrate their “mating union,” encounter the marvels of cultural and scientific advances along the way. Intriguing in itself, The Year 3000 is also remarkable for both its vision of the future (predicting an astonishing array of phenomena from airplanes, artificial intelligence, CAT scans, and credit cards to controversies surrounding divorce, abortion, and …


The Hard Way Home, Steve Kahn Oct 2010

The Hard Way Home, Steve Kahn

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

A lifelong Alaskan, Steve Kahn moved at the age of nine from the “metropolis” of Anchorage to the foothills of the Chugach Mountains. A childhood of berry picking, fishing, and hunting led to a life as a big-game guide. When he wasn’t guiding in the spring and fall, he worked as a commercial fisherman and earned his pilot’s license, pursuits that took him to the far reaches of the Alaskan wilderness. He lived through some of the most important moments of the state’s history: the 1964 earthquake (the most powerful in U.S. history), the Farewell Burn wildfire, the last king …


Paralyses`, John Culbert Oct 2010

Paralyses`, John Culbert

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Modernity has long been equated with motion, travel, and change, from Marx’s critical diagnoses of economic instability to the Futurists’ glorification of speed. Likewise, metaphors of travel serve widely in discussions of empire, cultural contact, translation, and globalization, from Deleuze’s “nomadology” to James Clifford’s “traveling cultures.” John Culbert, in contrast, argues that the key texts of modernity and postmodernity may be approached through figures and narratives of paralysis: motion is no more defining of modern travel than fixations, resistance, and impasse; concepts and figures of travel, he posits, must be rethought in this more static light. Focusing on the French …


Bliss And Other Short Stories, Ted Gilley Oct 2010

Bliss And Other Short Stories, Ted Gilley

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this daring collection of nine stories introduces readers to an edgy vision and a world in which certainties are tested and found wanting. A Cambodian refugee negotiates the icy waters of American social and sexual life. A young couple seeks “peak experiences” to escape grief, only to discover that they’ve brought it along with them. A teenage girl, unable to face the imminent end of her grandfather’s life, risks her own life in an impulsive act. A man’s fragile hold on reality becomes the key to his finding, albeit through a …