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 January and February, 2026:

Nine Persimmons, by Kerry James Evans. Series: The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention.

In Nine Persimmons Kerry James Evans traces a geography both intimate and far-flung—Tuscaloosa and Biloxi, Charleston and New Orleans, the Cloisters above Washington Heights, a banana orchard in the Azores, a journey to Rome. The poems move with the gravity of pilgrimage, their compass set between wandering and witness, as they cross from ballfields and shipyards into the charged realms of myth and ritual. Evans’s gift lies in how the ordinary gathers its own divinity: persimmon seeds split to forecast winter, a grandmother’s weed-eater gospel, Camaro burnouts paired with tarot, psalms rising as pelicans wheel into sudden sky. In this light Nine Persimmons reveals how the most unassuming corners of existence sometimes hold the deepest truths.

A Question of Justice: Criminal Trials, Notorious Homicides, and Public Opinion in Twentieth-Century Mexico, by Elisa Speckman Guerra. Series: Confluencias.

Mexico is a country beset by violence and insecurity, with 98 percent of violent crimes unsolved and 94 percent of crimes unpunished. These staggering statistics illustrate the critical need to understand the history of Mexico’s penal law and justice system, from its evolution and development to its public image and effects on Mexican society.

In A Question of Justice Elisa Speckman Guerra elucidates Mexico’s penal law and justice system in the twentieth century from the disciplinary perspectives of both history and law. Looking at the critical period from 1929 to 1971, Speckman Guerra investigates the democratic rule of law and to what extent it was followed within the justice system, as well as judicial proceedings considering the role of gender, class, and race. For that reason, Speckman Guerra also delves into homicides involving very well-known victims, like the famous singer Guty Cárdenas, and notorious murderers, such as the Olympic medalist Humberto Mariles; the public image of police, judges, defendants, lawyers, and other actors involved in penal processes; and the representations of crime and justice in print and on film. This extensively researched study illuminates the evolution of Mexico’s penal laws, institutions of justice, and sensationalist media and violence, thereby addressing issues that are critically relevant today.

The Raymond D. Fogelson Papers: Essays on Ethnohistory, Ethnology, and Native American Studies, edited by Sergei A. Kan and Michael E. Harkin. Series: Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology.

Raymond D. Fogelson was a luminary theoretician in the interdisciplinary field of ethnohistory who advocated for Indigenous-centered theory and ethnographic writing in the field of Cherokee studies and ethnohistory. Fogelson’s unique methodology was to look for institutions that Cherokees and Native peoples themselves considered traditional and to carefully study them.

Fogelson taught in the anthropology department at the University of Chicago and trained leading ethnohistorians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Dedicated to his graduate students, the corpus of his influential scholarship resides in journal articles, academic presentations, and public lectures. In this essential collection, Sergei Kan and Michael E. Harkin have assembled Fogelson’s pioneering articles as a resource for ethnohistorians in the twenty-first century.

They Are Dead and Yet They Live: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America, edited by John M. Kinder and Jennifer M. Murray. Series: Studies in War, Society, and the Military.

The death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in 2020 reignited a passionate nationwide debate over Confederate memorials and flags as symbols of white supremacy in our public landscape. Controversies about Confederate monuments, however, have overshadowed more consequential battles over Civil War memory taking place in American politics, popular culture, and civil society today.

Integrating the voices of Civil War historians, public historians, and scholars of contemporary America, They Are Dead and Yet They Live explores the use (and abuse) of Civil War memory in the modern era, from the Civil War Centennial and the civil rights era through the political turmoil of the present day. Moving the conversation of Civil War memory beyond Confederate monuments to crucial debates about the Civil War’s usefulness as a frame for understanding America’s recent struggles, these essays show how Civil War memory is as politically urgent and socially relevant today as it was a half century ago.

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