NCompass Blog

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 May and June, 2025:

At the Corner of Past and Future: a Collection of Life Stories, by Pamela Carter Joern.

With keen observation and deep reflection, Pamela Carter Joern probes her life. No topic is too small or too sacred, from gutting chickens to Gaudí’s cathedral. Through a range of experiences—growing up in rural Nebraska, raising children, surviving cancer, becoming a writer—she explores the tenuous link between memory and truth. Joern displays a gift for mining wisdom through surprising connections, juxtaposing her father’s life to the discoveries of Isaac Newton or the writer’s task to the ancient art of alchemy. She weds philosophical insight and spiritual imagination and laces this amalgam with candor and wit, resulting in a work that is engaging, intimate, and illuminating.

Into the Void: Adventures of the Spacewalkers, by John Youskauskas and Melvin Croft. Series: Outward Odyssey: A People’s History of Spaceflight.

The world had been fascinated with astronauts and spaceflight since well before the first crewed launches in 1961, when Yuri Gagarin, Alan Shepard, and John Glenn became household names. But when Alexei Leonov of the Soviet Union exited his spacecraft in March of 1965, a new era in spaceflight began. And when Ed White, clad in his gleaming space suit with a large American flag on his left shoulder, eased himself outside his Gemini spacecraft later that year, Americans too had a new space hero. They also learned a new acronym: EVA, short for extravehicular activity, more commonly known as “spacewalking.”

Though few understood the tremendous risks White was taking in his twenty-two-minute space walk, Americans watched with immense pride and patriotism as White, tethered to Gemini 4, propelled himself around the spacecraft with a pressurized oxygen-fueled zip gun. But White’s struggle to fit his space-suited body back inside the claustrophobic Gemini spacecraft and close the hatch confirmed what NASA should have known: spacewalking wasn’t easy.

More than fifty years and hundreds of space walks later, the art of EVA has evolved. The first space walks, preparation for walking on the moon, intended to prove that humans could function in raw space inside their own miniature spacecraft—a space suit. After the end of the lunar program, both the Americans and Soviets turned their focus to long-duration flights on space stations in low Earth orbit, and space walks were crucial to the success of these missions. The construction of the International Space Station—the most sophisticated spacecraft to date—required hundreds of hours of work by spacewalkers from many countries.

In Into the Void John Youskauskas and Melvin Croft tell the unique story of those who have ventured outside the spacecraft into the unforgiving vacuum of space as we set our sights on the moon, Mars, and beyond.

Invisible Contrarian: Essays in Honor of Stephen O. Murray, edited by Regna Darnell and Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz. Series: Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology

In Invisible Contrarian Regna Darnell and Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz have assembled scholars to memorialize and celebrate the prescient vision and interdisciplinary contributions of the late Stephen O. Murray (1950–2019), who did pioneering research in ethnolinguistics and anthropology of gender and homosexuality. His socially relevant work continues to provide a cogent example of an emergent, forward-looking anthropology for the twenty-first century.

Murray’s wide-ranging work included linguistics, regional ethnography in Latin America and Asia, activism, history of anthropology in relation to social sciences, and migration studies.

Along with a complete list of his publications, Invisible Contrarian highlights Murray’s methodological innovations and includes key writings that remain little known, since he never pursued a tenured research position.  Murray’s significant, prolific contributions deserve not only to be reexamined but to be shared with contemporary and future audiences. Ideal both as a primer for those who have not yet read Murray’s work and as an in-depth resource for those already familiar with him, this volume demonstrates the wide-ranging accomplishments of a man who modeled how to be an independent scholar outside an academic position.

James Cowles Prichard of the Red Lodge: a Life of Science During the Age of Improvement, by Margaret M. Crump. Series: Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology

EIn James Cowles Prichard of the Red Lodge Margaret M. Crump offers the first in-depth biography of the early Victorian British scientist James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848). An intellectual giant in the developing human sciences, he was a pioneering psychiatric theorist in the formative years of the discipline and one of Europe’s leading anthropologists. With evocative detail, Crump draws readers into the social and cultural milieu of early nineteenth-century Bristol, a world of pre-scientific medicine and the emerging fields of anthropology and psychiatry.

As the century’s premier theorist of the common origin of all humanity, known as monogenism, Prichard asserted the affinity and equal capacity of all humans. Even though he was politically and socially conservative, Prichard worked behind the scenes to support abolitionism, and he advocated for the humane treatment of colonial British subjects. He challenged the rising tide of scientific racism starting to fester in the academic halls of Europe and the United States. He is also considered one of the pioneers of Celtic linguistics. His influential publications on neurological and psychological conditions called for the humane care and treatment of the mentally ill and mentally disabled and protection of their civil liberties. Born into changing, challenging times, during a revolution in British culture and at the threshold of modern science, Prichard fully embodied the Age of Improvement.

Prison Town: Making the Carceral State in Elmira, New York, by Andrea R. Morrell. Series: Anthropology of Contemporary North America

Elmira, a town of about twenty-six thousand people in central New York, is in some ways a typical town—with quiet, tree-lined residential streets, an art museum, local coffee shops, and a small college. The city, however, is best known as home to Elmira Correctional Facility and, until its closure in March 2022, the Southport Correctional Facility. Hundreds of locals have worked at the prisons, the town plays host to visitors of the incarcerated, and local medical institutions provide treatment to prisoners. The prisons and Elmira are inseparable.

In Prison Town Andrea R. Morrell illustrates the converging and shifting fault lines of race and class through a portrait of a prison town undergoing deindustrialization as it chooses the path of prison expansion. In this ethnography, Morrell highlights the contradictions of prison work as work that allows a middle-class salary and lifestyle but trades in other forms of stigma. Guards, prisoners, prisoners’ families, and meager amounts of money and care work travel through spaces of free and unfree via the porous borders between prison and town. As Morrell captures the rapid expansion of the carceral state into upstate New York from the perspective of a small city with two prisons, she demonstrates how the prison system’s racialized, gendered, and classed dispossession has crossed its own porous borders into the city of Elmira.

Rising Above: Language Revitalization in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, by Benjamin E. Frey. Series: Many Wests

Today there are roughly two hundred first-language Cherokee speakers among the seventeen thousand citizens of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina. In 2019 the United Keetoowah Band, the Cherokee Nation, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians declared a state of emergency for the Cherokee language.

In Rising Above Eastern Band Cherokee citizen Benjamin E. Frey chronicles his odyssey of being introduced to the Cherokee language with trepidation as a young adult and his eventual work revitalizing the Cherokee language in a Cherokee way. In the first book to examine the process of language shift and revitalization among this band, Frey explores the institutional, economic, and social factors that drove the language shift from Cherokee to English, interpreted through the lens of a member of the Eastern Band Cherokee community in conversation with other community members. Rising Above navigates Frey’s upbringing, the intricacies of language and relationships, the impact of trauma, and the quest for joy and healing within the community.

In addition to language documentation and preservation, Rising Above explores how to breathe new life into the language and community, using storytelling to discuss the Cherokee language, its grammatical components, and its embedded cultural ideologies alongside its interactions with broader American society.

Sacred Wonderland: The History of Religion in Yellowstone, by Thomas S. Bremer. Series: America’s Public Lands

ince its beginning in 1872, Yellowstone National Park has been an alluring destination with significance beyond its stunning mountain scenery, abundant wildlife, and the world’s largest collection of geysers and hot springs. Once deemed America’s “wonderland,” this national park has long been a repository of meanings for and aspirations of the American people. In Sacred Wonderland Thomas S. Bremer explores the historical role of religion in making Yellowstone National Park an American icon.

The park’s religious history spans nineteenth-century evangelical Christian ideas of Manifest Destiny in addition to religiously informed conservationist movements. Bremer touches on white supremacist interpretations of the park in the early twentieth century and a controversial new religious movement that arrived on the scene in the 1980s. From early assumptions about Native American beliefs to eclectic New Age associations, from early rivalries between nineteenth-century Protestants and Catholics to twentieth-century ecumenical cooperation, religion has been woven into the cultural fabric of Yellowstone. Bremer reveals a range of religious beliefs, practices, and interpretations that have contributed to making the park an appealing tourist destination and a significant icon of the American nation.

Too Good to Be Altogether Lost: Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Books, by Pamela Smith Hill.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the well-known Little House series, wrote stories from her childhood because they were “too good to be altogether lost.” And those stories seemed far from being lost during the remainder of her lifetime and through most of the twentieth century. They were translated into dozens of languages; generations of children read them at school; and dedicated readers made pilgrimages to the settings of the Little House books. With the release of NBC’s Little House on the Prairie series in 1974, Wilder was well on her way to becoming an international literary superstar. Simultaneously, however, the novels themselves began to slip from view, replaced by an onslaught of assumptions and questions about Wilder’s values and politics and even about the books’ authenticity. From the 1980s, a slow but steady critical crescendo began to erode Wilder’s literary reputation.

In Too Good to Be Altogether Lost, Wilder expert Pamela Smith Hill dives back into the Little House books, closely examining Wilder’s text, her characters, and their stories. Hill reveals that these gritty, emotionally complex novels depict a realistic coming of age for a girl in the American West. This realism in Wilder’s novels, once perceived as a fatal flaw, can lead to essential discussions not only about the past but about the present—and the underlying racism young people encounter when reading today. Hill’s fresh approach to Wilder’s books, including surprising revelations about Wilder’s novel The First Four Years, shows how this author forever changed the literary landscape of children’s and young adult literature in ways that remain vital and relevant today.

The Whiz Kids: How the 1950 Phillies Took the Pennant, Lost the World Series, and Changed Philadelphia Baseball Forever, by Dennis Snelling.

Before the 1950 World Series, the Philadelphia Phillies were infamous for a record-breaking lack of achievement that dated from their conception in 1883 through the 1940s. When twenty-eight-year-old Robert Carpenter Jr. took over in 1944, the Phillies had won only a single National League title in more than sixty years. For the next five years, Carpenter and the newly hired general manager, Herb Pennock, would overhaul the team’s operations, building a farm system from scratch and spending a fortune on young talent to build a team that would gain immense popularity and finally bring a National League pennant in 1950.

Nicknamed the “Whiz Kids” because they had so many players under thirty, the team caught lightning in a bottle for one season. Although they lost the World Series to the New York Yankees, the team became legendary in Philadelphia and beyond. The Whiz Kids is about a team that shocked everyone by winning, and then shocked everyone by never winning again. It includes a cast of characters and unusual storylines: a first baseman targeted for murder by a woman he had never met; a young catcher from Nebraska, Richie Ashburn, who became a Hall of Fame center fielder and later voice of the team for nearly three decades; a left fielder who lived and played in the shadow of his legendary father, then inspired Ernest Hemingway with the most legendary swing of a bat in franchise history; and a thirty-three-year-old bespectacled relief pitcher who won the Most Valuable Player Award with an undertaker as his personal pitching coach. The team succeeded under the watchful eye of its young owner, whose father handed him the team, and a college professor manager, only to see it slowly crumble as the slowest in the National League to integrate.

The Whiz Kids recounts the history of a team that, though hand-built to be champions, fell short—yet remains legendary anyway.

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