Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Haunting Experiences: Ghosts In Contemporary Folklore, Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, Jeannie B. Thomas

All USU Press Publications

Ghosts and the supernatural appear throughout modern culture, in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts. Popular media's commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from what people believe about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Belief and tradition and the popular or commercial nevertheless continually feed off each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from multiple angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously. They …

Placing The Academy: Essays On Landscape, Work, And Identity, Jennifer Sinor, Rona Kaufman

All USU Press Publications

Twenty-one writers answer the call for literature that addresses who we are by understanding where we are--where, for each of them, being in some way part of academia. In personal essays, they imaginatively delineate and engage the diverse, occasionally unexpected play of place in shaping them, writers and teachers in varied environments, with unique experiences and distinctive world views, and reconfiguring for them conjunctions of identity and setting, here, there, everywhere, and in between.

Before The Manifesto: The Life Writings Of Mary Lois Walker Morris, Melissa Lambert Milewski

All USU Press Publications

Mary Lois Walker Morris was a Mormon woman who challenged both American ideas about marriage and the U.S. legal system. Before the Manifesto provides a glimpse into her world as the polygamous wife of a prominent Salt Lake City businessman, during a time of great transition in Utah. This account of her life as a convert, milliner, active community member, mother, and wife begins in England, where her family joined the Mormon church, details her journey across the plains, and describes life in Utah in the 1880s. Her experiences were unusual as, following her first husband's deathbed request, she married …

Religion, Politics, And Sugar: The Mormon Church, The Federal Government, And The Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907 To 1921, Matthew C. Godfrey

All USU Press Publications

One famous target of Progressive Era attempts to rein in monopolistic big business was the eastern Sugar Trust. Less known is how federal regulators also tried to break monopoly control over beet sugar in the West by going after the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, a business supported and controlled by the Latter-day Saints church and run by Mormon authorities. As sugar beet agriculture boomed, the Mormon church's involvement led directly to monopolistic practices by Utah-Idaho Sugar and to federal investigations. Church leaders encouraged members, a majority population in much of the intermountain West, to patronize the company exclusively, as suppliers and …

The Arc And The Sediment, Christine Allen-Yazzie

All USU Press Publications

Gretta Bitsilly, gin-steeped mother of two and self-proclaimed expert at standing outside the margins of ethnicity and peering in, has been all but eclipsed by the world that eludes her--as a wife, a writer, a skeptic in "the other land of Zion," Utah. Gretta has set off to Fort Defiance, Arizona, where she hopes to convince her Navajo husband, who has escaped not from his family but from alcoholism, to come home.

Over a sputtering two-steps-forward, one-step-back desert journey, Gretta is diverted by chance, seizures, an inconstant memory, and the disjointed character of her irresolute quest.

She is fueled by …

Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film As Vernacular Culture, Sharon R. Sherman, Mikel J. Koven

All USU Press Publications

Interest in the conjunctions of film and folklore is stronger and more diverse than ever. Documentaries on folk life and expression remain a vital genre, but scholars such as Sharon Sherman and Mikel Koven also are exploring how folklore elements appear in, and merge with, popular cinema. They look at how movies, a popular culture medium, can as well be both a medium and type of folklore, playing cultural roles and conveying meanings customarily found in other folkloric forms. They thus use the methodology of folklore studies to analyze films made for commercial distribution. The contributors to this book look …

Shoshonean Peoples And The Overland Trails, Dale L. Morgan

All USU Press Publications

This compilation of Dale Morgan's historical work on Indians in the Intermountain West focuses primarily on the Shoshone who lived near the Oregon and California trails.

Three connected works by Morgan are included: First is his classic article on the history of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs. This is followed by a previously unpublished history of early relations among the Western Shoshoni, emigrants, and the government along the California Trail. The book concludes with an important set of government reports and correspondence from the National Archives concerning the Eastern Shoshone and their leader Washakie. Morgan heavily annotated these for …

The Centaur, May Swenson

All USU Press Publications

First published in 1955, May Swenson's "The Centaur" remains one of her most popular and most anthologized poems. This is its first appearance as a picture book for children.

In images bright and brisk and nearly tangible, the poet re-creates the joy of riding a stick horse through a small-town summer. We find ourselves, with her, straddling "a long limber horse with . . . a few leaves for a tail," and pounding through the lovely dust along the path by the old canal. As her shape shifts from child to horse and back, we know exactly what she feels. …

Neck Of The World, Daniel F. Rzicznek

Swenson Poetry Award Winners

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 11, with foreward by Alice Quinn. Neck of the World is the eleventh volume in the prestigious May Swenson Poetry Award series. In it, Daniel Rzicznek offers poems that, in quick angular language, capture the natural world and at the same time extend it into a surreal vision, sometimes dream-like, sometimes dark. Alice Quinn, judge for the 2007 Swenson Award, says this of Rzicznek's work: "Throughout, the language pulsates, always vigorous, by turns knotty and crystalline. . . . In Neck of the World, we have a poet with a striking new vision--challenging, rewarding, and …

Impersonations: Works By Scott Grieger, Dave Hickey, Scott Grieger

Exhibit Catalogues

With the publication of this book and the exhibition, "Impersonations: Work by Scott Grieger," the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art begins a series of scholarly examinations of a select group of artists whose work is represented in the Museum's important collection of innovative art produced in the western United States, from 1930 to the present. The work of these artists reflects unique contributions to the rich and complex history of American 20th century art. With this exhibition--a follow-up to the "Alternative Realities" of 1999 and the recent "Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle" of 2006, curated by Michael …