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 July and August, 2026:

Becoming Utopia: History, Heritage, and Sustainability in the American Midwest, by Margaret E. Farrar and Adam Kaul. Series: Anthropology of Contemporary North American.

Becoming Utopia centers on the tiny community of Bishop Hill, Illinois, whose marketing materials call it “Utopia on the Prairie,” home to a radical communal religious sect that emigrated from Sweden in the 1840s. Through rich textual and ethnographic analyses, Margaret E. Farrar and Adam Kaul tell the story of what happens when a small, historically significant Midwestern community negotiates the contradictory impulses of twenty-first-century place-making. At first glance, Bishop Hill is simply a small heritage tourism destination in Midwestern flyover country, but further inspection reveals it to be a complex place that mixes a deep nostalgia for the past undercut by complex origin stories of displacement and colonialism, an active historic preservation movement amid futuristic green energy technologies built by multinational corporations, and a commitment to localism in the context of omnipresent globalization.

Based on fifteen years of fieldwork, Becoming Utopia is an interdisciplinary contribution to conversations about the importance and meaning of place-making, heritage-making, and sustainability (social, economic, and environmental) in the twenty-first century.

Every Sky at Home: Essays on Landscape and Family, by Joe Wilkins. Imprint: Bison Books.

Joe Wilkins was born and raised on the Big Dry of eastern Montana, and make no mistake—those sagebrush-studded prairies and hard badlands raised him just as much as did his mother, as his elderly grandfather, as the memory of his father, who died young, leaving his family mired in poverty. Older now than his own father ever was, Wilkins reckons with this inheritance of landscape and loss and catalogs his travels across the country. From Iowa to Mississippi to the North Country of New York, Wilkins is a perceptive, fierce observer of rural life, and once he and his wife settle in western Oregon to raise their son and daughter, he turns his attention toward the wild places they find themselves drawn to. In this literary reckoning, each essay endeavors to more intimately understand the loves and landscapes that have made, and are making, Wilkins and his family.

Fascist Legacies: Far-Right Ideologies Then and Now, edited by Ari Kohen and Gerald J. Steinacher. Series: Contemporary Holocaust Studies.

The world has changed since the 1930s, but human nature has not. What can we learn when comparing far-right populism in the United States to far-right populism elsewhere? How can we better understand the underlying ideas and ideologies that seem to transcend time and place? How can we best address them? How can we communicate what we have learned about these issues to those outside of academia? These are the central questions in the three-part conversation of Fascist Legacies.

The first part of the book examines the rise of authoritarianism in Europe, the United States, and Latin America; the second part analyzes aspects of the far right and discusses the best strategies for teaching about fascism; and the third part focuses on the relationship between white nationalism, individual Christian churches in the United States, and antisemitism in the past and present. By discussing different aspects of the current global rise of right-wing populism, Fascist Legacies helps readers better understand what is happening in our societies.

Forward to Richmond: the Virginia Campaign of 1862, by Brian K. Burton. Series: Great Campaigns of the Civil War.

In the early eastern theater of the American Civil War, the Northern and Southern armies saw little of combat and little of each other, with most of their military intelligence more akin to propaganda than objective fact. However, by 1862 both sides knew through bloody experience how the other could fight, though gaps in knowledge of the other’s tactics and political strategies remained. Perhaps most important, Northern soldiers had by then spent significant time in the South, and as they witnessed firsthand the effects of slavery, their attitudes hardened toward the South.

Covering all aspects of the war in Virginia in the first six months of 1862, Forward to Richmond treats the military actions in the Shenandoah Valley, the Piedmont, and the Peninsula as part of a theatre-wide campaign. Brian K. Burton goes beyond military events to also examine the political, social, and diplomatic interactions with military events, including the meetings of Union soldiers with Southern civilians and African Americans, ultimately leading to a turn away from conciliation and a beginning of a move toward support of emancipation.

The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 3: Paper Bridges Between Franz Boas and Russian Anthropology, edited by Dmitry V. Arzyutov, Sergei A. Kan, Laura Siragusa and Alexander Pershai. Series: Franz Boas Papers Documentary Edition.

Anthropology is inseparable from writing, whether in field diaries, letters, articles, or books. Among these writings, letters form paper bridges—holding a special place as material artifacts uniquely capable of building scholarly communities and sustaining relationships with field collaborators long after the fieldwork is completed.

The story of Franz Boas, one of the founders of American anthropology, can be imagined as a res publica literaria, a network that, like its Renaissance prototype, shaped the contours of transnational anthropology. This two-part volume chronicles more than forty years of Boas’s collaborations and friendships with Russian and Soviet anthropologists, following a small group of anthropologists as they built the house of Arctic and Siberian anthropology. Through these letters, readers are introduced to a lesser-known aspect of Boas’s political life and his ambition to redefine anthropology as a transnational discipline, one that transcended national borders and political obstacles. Through meticulously gathered correspondence from more than thirty archives in the United States, Russia, France, and Norway, The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 3 reveals an untold chapter in the history of anthropology.

The Missouri, American’s Longest River: a Cultural and Environmental History, edited by Jon K. Lauck and Harry F. Thompson. Series: The Center for Western Studies

Following the success of the Center for Western Studies’ first foray into river histories, Heartland River: A Cultural and Environmental History of the Big Sioux River (second printing, 2025), the CWS is publishing The Missouri, America’s Longest River in 2026 as part of its commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary. The book features chapters by thirty-five historians, scientists, and writers exploring the natural and human history of the waterway that defines the region that is the focus of the Center for Western Studies—South Dakota and the six surrounding states.

Chapter contributors represent the following institutions: Augustana University, College of New Jersey, Helena College, Loras College, Loyola University, Midland University, Minnesota State University–Mankato, Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, Northern Illinois University, Ohio State University, Oklahoma City University, Providence College, South Dakota School of Mines, South Dakota State Historical Society, South Dakota State University, State Historical Society of North Dakota, University of California–Riverside, University of Colorado–Boulder, University of Kansas, University of Kansas–Monticello, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, University of South Dakota, and the United States Geological Survey.

Oklahoma Reconsidered: a History, by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin.

Oklahoma Reconsidered provides a concise and conversational history of Oklahoma from the 1700s and into the twenty-first century by two historians who show how Oklahoma has been shaped by wars, epidemics, civil rights movements, and unified efforts to heal after devastating terrorist attacks. While other books on Oklahoma history often linger in the nineteenth century, Oklahoma Reconsidered places the central focus on Oklahoma from 1907 to 2025—including the rise in the Latinx population in the state, the success of the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA basketball team as a unifying force in the state, and the significance of the McGirt decision in 2020, which granted tribal jurisdiction over much of eastern Oklahoma as Indian Country, offering a glimpse into the tensions between state and tribal authority

Star Bound: A Beginner’s Guide to the American Space Program, from Goddard’s Rockets to Goldilocks Planets and Everything in Between, by Emily Carney and Bruce McCandless III. Series: Outward Odyssey: A People’s History of Spaceflight

Star Bound is a book for anyone who wants to learn about the American space program but isn’t sure where to start. First and foremost, it’s a history—short, sweet, and straightforward. From rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard’s primitive flight tests in 1926 through the creation of NASA, from our first steps on the moon to construction of the International Space Station and planning a trip to Mars, readers will meet the people and projects that have put the United States at the forefront of space exploration. Along the way, they’ll learn:

• How the United States beat the Soviets to the moon

• Why astronauts float in space (Hint: It’s not for lack of gravity!)

• How fast spacecraft have to go to stay in orbit around Earth

• How we can “look back in time” through a space telescope

Authored by two veteran space writers with unique insights into the topic, Star Bound offers up the story of Americans in space with a focus on the cultural and societal contexts of the country’s most important missions. Vibrant, positive, and humorous, Star Bound is packed with facts, asides, and not-entirely-definitive lists of the greatest space songs, books, movies, and more.

Tied to Their Country: the Farm Crisis, Agrarian Activism, and the Rise of Rural Anti-Federalism, by Rebecca Shimoni Stoil.

Historically, rural spaces in the United States have encompassed a wide array of political cultures and affiliations, but in the late twentieth century, rural America became a breeding ground for anti-government militancy. Disparate groups coalesced around an ideology grounded in virulent rural anti-federalism. Although farmers today are often beneficiaries of federal programs and payments, anti-federal sentiments run rampant across rural America. The reason, Rebecca Shimoni Stoil argues, lies in the collapse of rural society during the Farm Crisis of the 1970s and 1980s.

In Tied to Their Country, Shimoni Stoil examines the immediate and long-term political repercussions of the Farm Crisis. Beginning as an agricultural crisis, it quickly enveloped all of rural America as banks collapsed, Main Street storefronts closed, and small towns became ghost towns. Because the federal government failed to offer farmers viable solutions, previously disparate ideologies converged in this political vacuum to advocate for agrarian America amid growing distrust of federal institutions and intentions. Farmers found their best strategy was appealing to romantic ideas of American traditions, and social conservatives quickly reciprocated, turning farm country into the heartland of social conservatism. The perceived failure of the federal government’s response to the Farm Crisis generated distrust, resentment, and a crisis of faith in government that resonates across rural spaces today.

Vulture Gold: Stories, by Micah Dean Hicks. Series: The Raz/Shumaker Prairire Schooner Book Prize in Fiction.

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction

Welcome to a dark country of sadness and wonder. Where a wedding dress turns a reluctant bride into a flock of birds, and families put on their wolf coats before devouring one another. These growling, prickly-feathered stories blur the lines between human and animal, living and dead. Teenage spirits are condemned to drive around their hometown forever. Five brothers learn that they were once crows. The bank hires a man to go into foreclosed houses and kill their monsters. Two sisters find an oven that can resurrect the dead. Plumbers kidnap mermaids trapped in a city sewer system. A mockingbird sings a woman’s sins. A boy with a single swan’s wing yearns to fly. And watching over all of them is the queen of the dead, who sends her vulture men to scavenge the bones. The characters in these modern fairy tales challenge expectations and norms in a dark and magical shared world.

Willa Cather and Letters, edited by Melissa J. Homestead. Series: Cather Studies.

Although it has long been claimed that Willa Cather destroyed most of her letters in order to protect her privacy, the record now makes clear that this is largely myth: The Complete Letters of Willa Cather digital archive has collected more than three thousand letters, and more are regularly being located. What can we learn about Cather and her fiction from such a wealth of firsthand writings? The essays in Willa Cather and Letters use a variety of approaches to consider both letters authored by Cather and letters written to her, shining new light on Cather’s relationships with her brother Roscoe Cather and her friends playwright and screenwriter Zoë Akins and opera diva Olive Fremstad.

Readers also come to understand Cather’s pleasure in artistic works produced by others, her experience of disability, and her appreciation of the GIs who read her books in Armed Services Editions. Contributors show how digital tools can be used to read across her letters at a larger scale, finding patterns and trends not discernible using conventional methods.

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