Category Archives: General

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 March and April, 2026:

Agents of Survivance: Indigenous Women Teachers in the Boarding School Era, by Anne Ruggles Gere. Series: Indigenous Education.

In Agents of Survivance Anne Ruggles Gere complicates and enriches established accounts of the Indian boarding school era and what preceded it by looking closely at the largely ignored Indigenous women teachers in these schools. Focusing on Sarah Winnemucca, S. Alice Callahan, Angel DeCora, and Ella Deloria, Gere shows how these and many other Indian women teachers subversively resisted assimilation with tribal presence, relationality, connection to land, rejection of victimhood, and maintenance of cultural traditions, art, and languages. Their vulnerable positions in schools directed by Euro-Americans necessitated that their contributions be subversive, nearly invisible. Despite this, they developed policies and practices that were passed to Indian students who in turn became teachers of the next generation of Indian students, and many of their innovations inform contemporary movements toward sovereignty for Indian education.

The Missouri River is one of the most dangerous rivers in the United States—and one of the most economically important. Even as prolonged drought in the Midwest has imperiled urban drinking water and agricultural water supplies, parched regions in the basin far from the river have proposed piping water from the Missouri to alleviate their own water shortages.

Indispensable for future research, Agents of Survivance includes two appendixes drawn from Bureau of Indian Affairs records documenting dozens of Native women teachers, as well as Native women who worked in boarding schools doing laundry, kitchen work, dormitory cleaning, and sewing.

Around the Bend: Floating Down the Missouri River, by Lisa G. Dill. Series: Bison Books.

In an attempt to better understand the river and its place in the American imagination, Lisa G. Dill set out with four of her mother’s cousins on a forty-year-old pontoon boat on a modern voyage of discovery. The hope was to sail nearly 750 river miles from Sioux City, Iowa, to St. Louis, Missouri, a goal whose success was by no means assured, given the rickety state of the family vessel. From departure—a day late, because the motor wouldn’t start—until she got off the boat, Dill bears witness to the river, its flora and fauna, the efforts to control it, and its history, along with the misadventures of a crew of “relative strangers” and the boat’s tenuous viability on one of the world’s most powerful rivers.

In Around the Bend Dill teases out the cultural and environmental history of the Missouri and urges readers to change the way they think about America’s rivers and the landscapes through which they flow.

Confronting Water Insecurity: Global Institutions and the Transformation of Water Science, Policy, and Practice, by Roberto L. Lenton.

Confronting Water Insecurity provides an account of the role of multilateral cooperation and global institutions in transforming science, policy, and practice for water security from 1945 to 2024, a period characterized by significant disparities in water security between low- and high-income countries, ever-rising water use, and growing concerns about the harms of climate change and other disturbances on the global water cycle.

Roberto L. Lenton tells how the scientific and policy response to these new challenges has become more global and integrated, and describes the role of global institutions in addressing fundamental global water issues with long-term implications for sustainability. Following the quest for water security as it transformed from an issue driven primarily by local or national interests into one of global concern, Lenton offers lessons from the successes and failures from 1945 to 2024 that will help us imagine the new approaches we need to ensure that the world can meet the next generation of water challenges. Beyond the world of water, he provides insights into how we can better address the global challenges that arise from humanity’s complex relationships with the natural world.

Northern Slave, Black Dakota: The Life and Times of Joseph Godfrey, by Walt Bachman. Series: Bison Books.

Born into slavery in free territory, Joseph Godfrey died widely reviled for his controversial role in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. Separated from his mother at age five when his enslaver sold her, Godfrey sought refuge in his teens among the Dakota people he had befriended as a child. Godfrey married a Dakota woman and was living with his family on the Lower Sioux Reservation in 1862, when the U.S.-Dakota War broke out. Pressured to join Dakota warriors in the war’s opening days, when the six-week conflict ended, he became the first of hundreds of men tried by a military court created by Commander Henry Sibley. Sibley, who was one of Godfrey’s former enslavers, approved death sentences for Godfrey and 302 other Dakota soldiers.

In this riveting biography, Walt Bachman untangles the thorny questions that haunt Godfrey’s story: How was he enslaved in a free state? Did he murder the frontier settlers for which the Dakota dubbed him Otakle (“Many Kills”)? Did he turn traitor to save his own life? Did Godfrey’s testimony send thirty-eight Dakota men, including his father-in-law, to the gallows? In this carefully researched book, Bachman argues that the 1862 war trials, which ended with the largest mass execution in U.S. history, were both more just and more unfair than we have ever understood.

Ravelings: Essays on Love, Loss, and Wonder, by Lisa Knopp. Series: American Lives.

In Ravelings, Lisa Knopp takes up an older, opposing meaning of the verb “ravel”—“to entangle”—as she explores the deaths and departures of loved ones and the rituals by which we mourn and honor them, while contemplating her relationships with writing, spirituality, sense of home, aging, desire, and the relationship between body and mind. Entangled in these losses and changes, Knopp experiences wonder, joy, connectivity, and wholeness.

In these nimble and companionable essays, Knopp considers hunger and fullness through ethical, disordered, and mindful eating; awakens to common magic through two chance encounters with a magician; and finds humility and empowerment as an unpartnered sixty-year-old woman in a ballroom dance class filled with young couples. Knopp comprehends her experiences with nuance, revealing time and again that the same ravel of text can encompass the blending in a single moment of the exotic and mundane, of fullness and want, of love and abhorrence, of desire and contentment, of freedom and bondage, of severance and connection, and of the creative act as both an evocation and an imposition.

Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet, by Michael Patrick Cullinane. Imprint: Potomac Books.

In his final days in office in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt invited dozens of friends to the White House for lunch. They had never met as a group, but they had one thing in common: Each played tennis with the president and advised on policy matters. Roosevelt half-joked that the public would never know how much these tennis partners did to make his administration a success. Journalists dismissively called them the “Tennis Cabinet,” making light of their contribution, but Roosevelt knew otherwise.

This inner circle led the administration’s campaigns against corporate greed, investigated public health violations, and formulated consumer protections. They founded environmental conservation policies, prosecuted civil rights violations, and implemented bureaucratic efficiencies that saved the government billions. Roosevelt’s tennis mates shaped the nation’s diplomacy, ending wars and promoting American interests abroad.

Never had a more eclectic group advised a U.S. president. The Tennis Cabinet included legendary frontier lawman Seth Bullock and the starched-shirt corporate lawyer Henry Stimson, who served in five presidential administrations. Texas wolf wrangler Jack Abernathy played with stuffy bureaucrats like Labor Commissioner Charles Patrick Neill and social activist James Bronson Reynolds. The French ambassador Jean Jules Jusserand spun yarns with football hero George Washington Woodruff and Roosevelt’s college friend and banker Robert Bacon. James Garfield, namesake son of a martyred president, sipped mint juleps with Supreme Court Justice William Henry Moody. And J. P. Morgan’s silver-spooned son-in-law Herbert Satterlee kept company with rugged soldier Luther “Yellowstone” Kelly.

For all their differences, these men shared a desire to help the president transform the nation from a parochial nineteenth-century republic into an imperial and industrial global power. They have escaped the attention of reporters and historians only because of Roosevelt’s towering celebrity. Turning away from Roosevelt as the singular force behind his administration, it is possible to see how the contributions of his Tennis Cabinet quietly sowed the seeds of the American Century.

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