Tag Archives: Reading

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, 2026:

Emancipation War: the Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment, by Damon Root. Imprint: Potomac Books.

Speaking to a fractured country for the first time as president, Abraham Lincoln endorsed a constitutional amendment designed to permanently safeguard slavery in every state in which the institution already existed. If that proslavery provision had been ratified, it would have become the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Three years later, Lincoln again threw his support behind a constitutional amendment to address slavery: this time to abolish it. Formally ratified in 1865, this is the Thirteenth Amendment we know today.

What happened in those intervening years that led Lincoln to switch from supporting a proslavery amendment to embracing the antislavery provision that ultimately became enshrined in the Constitution? Why did the Thirteenth Amendment of 1864–65 win out over that of 1861? Lincoln himself provided a key to understanding: “I claim not to have controlled events,” he said, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”

In Emancipation War award-winning journalist Damon Root chronicles the great legal, political, and military struggle to amend the U.S. Constitution to outlaw slavery once and for all. It is the story of canny political tacticians and unyielding radicals; of famous orators and unsung pamphleteers; of liberty-minded Union officers and enslaved persons who liberated themselves by following the North Star to freedom, and who then, in some cases, donned uniforms and took up arms against their former enslavers. It was this wide-ranging movement against slavery—operating both inside and outside the halls of government power, fighting both on and off the battlefield—that made an antislavery constitutional amendment possible.

Telling the story from both the top down and the bottom up, Emancipation War provides a gripping and revealing new history of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville : a Battlefield Guide, by Brian K. Burton. Series: This Hallowed Ground: Guides to Civil War Battlefields.

Through the winter of 1862 and spring of 1863, the U.S. Army and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia clashed along the Rappahannock River in two major battles. Both demonstrated the height of power for the Confederacy in the Eastern Theater. The Battle of Fredericksburg was a tactically defensive triumph for Lee over the Army of the Potomac. The Battle of Chancellorsville, often described as Lee’s masterpiece, was a surprisingly aggressive response to Joseph Hooker’s operational flanking maneuver, as Lee sent Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson on a flanking maneuver of his own, dividing an army that already was substantially smaller than its Union counterpart to deliver a crushing blow at a decisive spot. It was in the latter stages of that blow that Jackson was mortally wounded by his own men. The battles, failed campaigns with high casualty rates for the Union, were a lead-up to the armies’ meeting at Gettysburg in July 1863.

Civil War historian Brian K. Burton provides a clear, concise narrative of the battles and offers a stop-by-stop guide through Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. Illustrated with numerous maps and filled with stories of the people and tactics of both battles, this indispensable guidebook will direct battlefield visitors and armchair historians through the events of these pivotal campaigns.

The Pursuit of Family: a History of Dakota and Lakota Family and Kinship on the Standing Rock Reservation, 1794-2022, by Thomas Grillot. Series: Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indians.

In The Pursuit of Family Thomas Grillot examines how Dakota and Lakota people on the Standing Rock Reservation have lived as families since the 1870s in what is now North Dakota and South Dakota. Grillot examines the collective and individual efforts that made survival possible on Standing Rock, one of the most understudied reservations despite being one of the best-known Native locations in the United States—Sitting Bull died there in 1890, and a protest camp organized there against the Dakota Access pipeline made international news in 2016. Yet this is a book not about famous people or events but about ordinary people confronted with a deceptively simple question: How can we be a family on the reservation? Integrating archival material, oral history, and fieldwork, Grillot tells the history of dozens of reservation-based Dakota and Lakota families from the beginning of the reservation era to today.

The Pursuit of Family reveals how the Dakotas and Lakotas, tied by a common language and way of life, developed under the pressures of settler colonialism and shifted formations of kinship across time and space. It is a story of resistance, negotiation, and adaptation.

Red Woman: My Southern Ute Journey from Poverty to Wall Street, by Pearl E. Casias. Series: American Indian Lives.

In this singular memoir, Pearl E. Casias tells the story of her rise from poverty to chair of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe in rural southwest Colorado. Casias grew up in poverty and was raised by alcoholic parents. She endured domestic violence in one of her marriages. Despite those dire periods in her life, she put herself through college and rose to become a Southern Ute tribal judge. She details her experience in the tribal court, whose jurisprudence is guided by Indigenous knowledge and Ute-centered spiritual rehabilitation. Casias then spent time on the Southern Ute Indian Tribal Council, running the tribe’s political and economic affairs, particularly the development of considerable mineral resources on tribal lands. During her tenure, the Southern Utes attracted a significant investment from Wall Street as the tribe became a leading producer of natural gas. Casias’s eventual election as chair of the Southern Utes, the pinnacle of her accomplishments, made her the tribe’s first woman chair.

With unflinching honesty, Casias lays out the problems confronting Southern Ute people, including the harm that centuries of colonialism have wrought on the reservation. Blending her personal story with that of her tribe, Casias describes how, as a tribal leader, she strove to develop positive cultural values within Ute society.

Tilton and Grace Entokah: an Osage Story, by Anthony Lookout. Series: American Indian Lives.

Tilton and Grace Entokah: An Osage Story offers an episodic history of the Osage Nation of Oklahoma as told through the life narratives of Anthony Lookout’s great-grandparents Tilton and Grace Entokah. Anthony Lookout grew up hearing the stories of his relatives, including those of his great-grandfather Fred Lookout, who served as the principal chief of the Osage Nation in the early twentieth century. Anthony Lookout’s father, Morris Lookout, methodically recorded the oral traditions and tribal stories of Osage elders and relatives on reel-to-reel tapes from 1965 to 1971. The recordings preserved generations of Osage history, religious practices, and cultural traditions reaching back to the mid-nineteenth century. To write this story of his family and Osage history, Anthony Lookout did additional research in archival collections, newspapers, and magazines and interviewed elders.

From the perspective of a participant rather than an observer, Lookout tells the tribal history of the Osage Nation’s removal from their Kansas homelands in 1865 and relocation to Oklahoma’s Indian Territory from 1872 to the early 1940s. The heart of the story revolves around Lookout’s great-grandmother Grace Entokah, who grew up as a traditional Osage woman, and adapted through traumatic and uncertain times, staying true to her Osage culture. She went from riding horses to riding in automobiles, eventually meeting the president of the United States.

Lookout covers the family history of the Entokahs, the Allotment Act of 1906, Oklahoma statehood, the depredations of mining and oil companies on Osage lands, the establishment of tribal government and courts, Principal Chief Fred Lookout’s journeys to Washington, DC, to meet top government leaders, as well as tribal stories of the infamous 1920s Osage murders and other key episodes in Osage history. Tilton and Grace Entokah is not only the story of the Entokahs but also an Osage history written from the collective memory of those on the Osage reservation.

Treaty Ground: Diplomacy and the Politics of Sovereignty, from Roanoke to the Republic, by Charles W. A. Prior.

Charles W. A. Prior offers a new account of the sovereign claims of Native Americans, the Crown, and colonies in early America, arguing that Native American diplomacy shaped how sovereignty was negotiated and contested among all three, from Virginia’s founding to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Previous scholars have focused on the contested relationship between the British imperial state and the colonies it established along the Atlantic Coast without addressing how sovereign Native nations shaped the colonial process through warfare, diplomacy, trade, peace-making, and treaty-making.

Prior adopts a new interpretive framework for examining sovereignty in early America, arguing that the Native and colonial spaces of the Northeast were a treaty ground thickly layered with agreements and negotiated rules of interaction. Drawing on an extensive range of treaty records, writings on colonial and imperial affairs, letters, and official documents, Treaty Ground argues that sovereignty was negotiated within diplomacy and shaped the norms of war, the terms of peace and alliances, the rightful ownership of territory, and appropriate responses to treaty violations. This process in turn structured relations between the Crown and colonies and framed initial positions on how the power of congress related to that of the states.

Treaty Ground offers historical depth to our understanding of how Native nations articulated Indigenous power within colonialism, cuts settler colonialism down to size, and expands contemporary understandings of the sovereign relationships between Native nations in the United States and Canada.

The Twenty-Second Mental Measurements Yearbook, edited by Janet F. Carlson, Kurt F. Geisinger, Jessica L. Jonson, and Nancy A. Anderson. Series: Buros Mental Measurement Yearbook

Charles W. A. Prior offers a new account of the sovereign claims of Native Americans, the Crown, and colonies in early America, arguing that Native American diplomacy shaped how sovereignty was negotiated and contested among all three, from Virginia’s founding to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Previous scholars have focused on the contested relationship between the British imperial state and the colonies it established along the Atlantic Coast without addressing how sovereign Native nations shaped the colonial process through warfare, diplomacy, trade, peace-making, and treaty-making.

Prior adopts a new interpretive framework for examining sovereignty in early America, arguing that the Native and colonial spaces of the Northeast were a treaty ground thickly layered with agreements and negotiated rules of interaction. Drawing on an extensive range of treaty records, writings on colonial and imperial affairs, letters, and official documents, Treaty Ground argues that sovereignty was negotiated within diplomacy and shaped the norms of war, the terms of peace and alliances, the rightful ownership of territory, and appropriate responses to treaty violations. This process in turn structured relations between the Crown and colonies and framed initial positions on how the power of congress related to that of the states.

Treaty Ground offers historical depth to our understanding of how Native nations articulated Indigenous power within colonialism, cuts settler colonialism down to size, and expands contemporary understandings of the sovereign relationships between Native nations in the United States and Canada.

**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 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.