Tag Archives: Book Covers

The Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse receives documents every month from all Nebraska state agencies, including the University of Nebraska Press (UNP).  UNP books, as well as all Nebraska state documents, are available for checkout by libraries and librarians for their patrons.

Here are the UNP books the Clearinghouse received in January and February, 2025:

The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1888-1891, Volume 1, by Henry James, edited by Michael Anesko, et al. Series: The Complete Letters of Henry James

This first volume in The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1888–1891 contains 171 letters, of which 119 are published for the first time, written from late November 1888 to April 20, 1890. These letters continue to mark Henry James’s ongoing efforts to care for his sister, develop his work, strengthen his professional status, build friendships, engage with timely political and economic issues, and maximize his income, which included hiring an agent. James details his work on The Tragic Muse, “Mrs. Temperly,” “An Animated Conversation,” “The Solution,” and other fiction. This volume opens with James in France and concludes with James on the Continent. Dee MacCormack introduces the volume, paying close attention to James’s increasing interest in the theater.

Men of God : Medicant Orders in Colonial Mexico, by Asunción Lavrin. Series: Confluencias

A broadly researched cultural history, Men of God offers a path to understanding the concept of religious masculinity through an intimate approach to the study of friars and lay brothers in colonial Mexico. Though other scholars have focused on the missionary work of the Augustinian, Franciscan, and Dominican friars, few have addressed their everyday lives and how the internal discipline of their orders shaped them. In Men of God Asunción Lavrin offers a sweeping yet intimate history of the mendicant friars in New Spain from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.

Focusing on these individuals’ lives from childhood through death, Lavrin explores contemporaneous ideas, from how to raise a boy to the friars’ training as novices, and the similarities and differences in the life experiences of lay brothers and ordained members. She discusses their sexuality to reveal the challenges and failures of religious manhood, as well as the drive behind their missionary duties, especially in the late seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries. Men of God also explores the concepts and realities of martyrdom and death, significant elements in the spirituality of the mendicant friars of colonial Mexico.

Of Corn and Catholicism : a History of Religion and Power in Pueblo Indian Patron Saint Feast Days

In Of Corn and Catholicism Andrea Maria McComb Sanchez examines the development of the patron saint feast days among Eastern Pueblo Indians of New Mexico from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the ways Pueblo religion intertwined with Spanish Catholicism, McComb Sanchez explores feast days as sites of religious resistance, accommodation, and appropriation. McComb Sanchez introduces the term “bounded incorporation” to conceptualize how Eastern Pueblo people kept boundaries flexible: as they incorporated aspects of Catholicism, they changed Catholicism as well, making it part of their traditional religious lifeway.

McComb Sanchez uses archival and published primary sources, anthropological records, and her qualitative fieldwork to discuss how Pueblo religion was kept secret and safe during the violence of seventeenth-century Spanish colonialism in New Mexico; how Eastern Pueblos developed strategies of resistance and accommodation, in addition to secrecy, to deal with missionaries and Catholicism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; how patron saint feast days emerged as a way of incorporating a foreign religion on the Pueblos’ own terms; and how, by the later nineteenth century, these feast days played a significant role in both Pueblo and Hispano communities through the Pueblos’ own initiative.

Unsettling Cather, by Marilee Lindemann and Ann Romines. Series: Cather Studies, Volume 14

American author Willa Cather was born and spent her first nine years in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here, as an observant daughter of a privileged white family, Cather first encountered differences and dislocations that remained lively, productive, and sometimes deeply troubling sites of tension and energy throughout her writing life.

The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 14 seek to unsettle prevailing assumptions about Cather’s work as she moved from Virginia to Nebraska to Pittsburgh to New York City to New Mexico and farther west, and to Grand Manan Island. The essays range from examinations of how race shapes and misshapes Cather’s final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, to challenges to criticisms of her 1935 novel, Lucy Gayheart. Contributors also frame fresh discussions of Cather’s literary influences and cultural engagements in the first decade of her career as a novelist through the lens of sex and gender and examine Cather’s engagements with region as a geopolitical, sociolinguistic, and literary site. Together, the essays offer compelling ways of seeing and situating Cather’s texts—both unsettling and advancing Cather scholarship.

**Pictures and Synopses courtesy of University of Nebraska Press.

The Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse receives documents every month from all Nebraska state agencies, including the University of Nebraska Press (UNP).  UNP books, as well as all Nebraska state documents, are available for checkout by libraries and librarians for their patrons.

Here are the UNP books the Clearinghouse received in November and December, 2024:

Colonialism and Literature : An Affective Narratology, by Patrick Colm Hogan. Series: Frontiers of Narrative

In earlier work Patrick Colm Hogan argued that a few story genres—heroic, romantic, sacrificial, and others—recur prominently across separate literary traditions. These structures recur because they derive from important emotion-motivation systems governing human social interaction, such as group pride and shame.

In Colonialism and Literature Hogan extends this work to argue that these genres play a prominent role in the fashioning of postcolonization literature—literature encompassing both the colonial and postcolonial periods. Crucially, colonizers and colonized people commonly understand and explain their situation in terms of these narrative structures. In other words, the stories we tell to some degree simply reflect the facts. But we also tend to interpret our condition in terms of genre, with the genre guiding us about what to record and how to evaluate it. Hogan explores these consequential processes in theoretical and literary analysis, presenting extended, culturally and historically specified interpretations of works by Pádraic Pearse (Ireland), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Kenya), Yasujiro Ozu (Japan), J. M. Coetzee (South Africa), Margaret Atwood (Canada), Rabindranath Tagore (India), Abderrahmane Sissako (Mali), and Dinabandhu Mitra (India).

Contemporary Humanistic Judaism : Beliefs, Values, Practices, edited by Adam Chalom and Jodi Kornfeld. Series: JPS Anthologies of Jewish Thought

Opening up multidimensional ideas, values, and practices of Humanistic Judaism to Jews of all backgrounds and beliefs, Contemporary Humanistic Judaism collects the movement’s most important texts for the first time and answers the oft-raised question, “How can you be Jewish and celebrate Judaism if you don’t believe in God?” with new vision.

Part 1 (“Beliefs and Ethics”) examines core positive beliefs—in human agency, social progress, ethics without supernatural authority, sources of natural transcendence, and Humanistic Jews’ own authority to remake their traditional Jewish inheritance on their own terms “beyond God.” Part 2 (“Identity”) discusses how Humanistic Judaism empowers individuals to self-define as Jews, respects people’s decisions to marry whom they love, and navigates the Israel-Diaspora relationship. Part 3 (“Culture”) describes how the many worlds of Jewish cultural experience—art, music, food, language, heirlooms—ground Jewishness and enable endless exploration. Part 4 (“Jewish Life”) applies humanist philosophy to lived Jewish experience: reimagined creative education (where students choose passages meaningful to them for their bar, bat, or b mitzvah [gender-neutral] celebrations), liturgy, life cycle, and holiday celebrations (where Hanukkah emphasizes the religious freedom to believe as one chooses).

Jewish seekers, educators, and scholars alike will come to appreciate the unique ideologies and lived expressions of Humanistic Judaism.

Great Plains Ethnohistory : New Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Rani-Henrik Andersson, Thierry Veyrié, and Logan Sutton. Series: Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indians

Great Plains Ethnohistory offers a collection of state-of-the-field work in Great Plains ethnohistory, both contemporary and historical, covering the traditional anthropological subfields of ethnography, cultural history, archaeology, and linguistics. As ethnohistory matured into an interdisciplinary endeavor in the 1950s with the formation of the American Society for Ethnohistory, historians and anthropologists developed scholarly methodology for the study of Native American societies from their own points of view. Within this developing framework, Native cultures of the Great Plains represented a foundational research area.

Great Plains Ethnohistory pays intellectual debts to Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks, whose research from the 1970s onward brought ethnohistorical approaches to the study of Native cultures, histories, and languages into the international community of the humanities and social sciences, sciences, and arts. The work of the scholars assembled in this volume advocates for an ethnohistory that continues to decompartmentalize Indigenous knowledge and scholarly methodologies, including some of the constructs, biases, and prejudices perpetuated within traditional scholarly disciplines.

Including essays by Gilles Havard, Joanna Scherer, Sebastian Braun, Brad KuuNUx TeeRIt Kroupa, and DeMallie and Parks themselves, among others, plus an afterword by Philip J. Deloria, this is an essential contribution to the scholarly field and a volume for undergraduate and graduate students and scholars who study Native American and Indigenous cultures.

Hell-Bent for Leather : Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western, edited by Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush and Sara L. Spurgeon. Series: Postwestern Horizons

Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western builds on the Locus Award finalist Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre. This new collection takes a deep dive into the myriad ways sex and sexuality are imagined in weird western literature, film, television, and video games, paying special attention to portrayals of power and privilege. The contributors explore weird western challenges to assumptions about varied genders and sexualities, drawing our attention to how the western can reinforce existing gender and sexual paradigms or overturn them in delightful, terrifying, or unexpected ways.

Primary texts range from CBS’s campy BDSM-inflected steampunk western The Wild Wild West to the Star Wars franchise’s popular leather-daddy bounty hunter The Mandalorian, from Ishmael Reed’s satirical postmodern western Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down to C Pam Zhang’s acclaimed novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Chapters engage texts from Australia and Great Britain, classic horror like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the popular video games BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us II, and less well-known texts like Laguna Pueblo–Navajo author A. A. Carr’s erotic vampire/monster slayer western Eye Killers.

Public Land and Democracy in America : Understanding Conflict Over Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, by Julie Brugger. Series: Anthropology of Contemporary North America

In recent years the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah has figured prominently in the long and ongoing struggle over the meaning and value of America’s public lands. In 1996 President Bill Clinton used the Antiquities Act to create the monument, with the goal of protecting scientific and historical resources. His action incensed Utah elected officials and local residents who were neither informed nor consulted beforehand, and opposition to the monument has continued to make its day-to-day management problematic. In 2017 President Donald Trump reduced the monument’s size, an action immediately challenged by multiple lawsuits; subsequently, President Joe Biden restored the monument in 2021.

In Public Land and Democracy in America Julie Brugger brings into focus the perspectives of a variety of groups affected by conflict over the monument, including residents of adjacent communities, ranchers, federal land management agency employees, and environmentalists. In the process of following management disputes at the monument over the years, Brugger considers how conceptions of democracy have shaped and been shaped by the regional landscape and by these disputes.

Through this ethnographic evidence, Brugger proposes a concept of democracy that encompasses disparate meanings and experiences, embraces conflict, and suggests a crucial role for public lands in transforming antagonism into agonism.

Taking Charge, Making Change : Native People and the Transition of Education from Stephan Mission to Crow Creek Tribal School, by Robert W. Galler, Jr. Series: Indigenous Education

Taking Charge, Making Change gives voice to generations of Native people—from Crow Creek, Lower Brule, and other reservations in North Dakota and South Dakota—who shaped a school originally designed to foster Catholicism and assimilation. Local initiatives and collaboration transformed the Catholic Stephan Mission boarding school into the Crow Creek Tribal School, which now features both tribal traditions and American educational programs.

Through archival research and interviews with parents, graduates, teachers, and staff at Crow Creek and the surrounding community, Robert W. Galler Jr. places Native students at the heart of the narrative, demonstrating multifaceted family connections at a nineteenth-century, on-reservation religious school that evolved into a tribally run institution in the 1970s. He shows numerous ways that community members worked with Catholic leaders and ultimately transformed their mindsets and educational approaches over nearly a century. While recognizing the many challenges and tragedies that Native students endured, Galler highlights the creativity, collaborations, and contributions of the students and graduates to their communities.

Taking Charge, Making Change shows how individuals and families helped to found the school, maintain enrollment, secure funding, and influence school policies. Its graduates went on to serve with distinction in the U.S. military, earn advanced degrees after college, join and lead tribal councils in North and South Dakota, help their communities push back against federal policies, and continue to run their own education system.

The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry, edited by Ted Kooser.

The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry is an anthology of poems originally selected by Ted Kooser in 1980 and published by his Windflower Press, a small, independent publisher that specialized in poetry from the Great Plains. The collection contains almost two hundred poems from dozens of poets and was designed to resemble a commonplace farmer’s almanac.

The Windflower Press was the sole operation of Kooser, who was later named the first U.S. poet laureate from the Great Plains. His press gained national recognition for highlighting the work of the region’s young poets, and its Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry earned notice from the Library Journal as one of its era’s best small press books.

**Pictures and Synopses courtesy of University of Nebraska Press.