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Image one: E-book titled Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture - synopsis: In this classic book on the meaning of multiculturalism in larger American society, Gary Okihiro explores the significance of Asian American experiences from the perspectives of historical consciousness, race, gender, class, and culture. While exploring anew the meanings of Asian American social history, Okihiro argues that the core values and ideals of the nation emanate today not from the so-called mainstream but from the margins, from among Asian and African Americans, Latinos and American Indians, women, and the gay and lesbian community.
Image two: American Jewish History: A Primary Source Reader - synopsis: Presenting the American Jewish historical experience from its communal beginnings to the present through documents, photographs, and other illustrations, many of which have never before been published, this entirely new collection of source materials complements existing textbooks on American Jewish history with an organization and pedagogy that reflect the latest historiographical trends and the most creative teaching approaches. Ten chapters, organized chronologically, include source materials that highlight the major thematic questions of each era and tell many stories about what it was like to immigrate and acculturate to American life, practice different forms of Judaism, engage with the larger political, economic, and social cultures that surrounded American Jews, and offer assistance to Jews in need around the world.
Image one: E-book titled Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials - synopsis: With Digging Up the Dead, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen reveals a treasure trove of fascinating, surprising, and occasionally gruesome stories of exhumation and reburial throughout American history. Taking us to the contested grave sites of such figures as Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, and even Abraham Lincoln, Kammen explores how complicated interactions of regional pride, shifting reputations, and evolving burial practices led to public and often emotional battles over the final resting places of famous figures. Grave-robbing, cases of mistaken identity, and the financial lures of cemetery tourism all come into play as Kammen delves deeply into this little-known, yet surprisingly persistent, aspect of American history.
Image two: E-book titled Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America - synopsis: Americans' long and restless search for identity through family trees illuminates the story of America itself, according to Francois Weil, as preoccupation with social standing, racial purity, and national belonging gave way to an embrace of diversity in one's forebears, pursued through Ancestry.com and advances in DNA testing. While seeking out one’s ancestors was a genteel pursuit in the colonial era, when an aristocratic pedigree secured a place in the British Atlantic empire, genealogy later developed into a middle-class diversion in the young republic. Over the next century, knowledge of one’s family background came to represent a quasi-scientific defense of elite “Anglo-Saxons” in a nation transformed by immigration and the emancipation of slaves. By the mid-twentieth century, when a new enthusiasm for cultural diversity took hold, the practice of tracing one’s family tree had become thoroughly democratized and commercialized.
Image one: E-book titled The Shaman's Mirror: Visionary Art of the Huichol (2012) - synopsis: Huichol Indian yarn paintings are one of the world’s great indigenous arts, sold around the world and advertised as authentic records of dreams and visions of the shamans. Using glowing colored yarns, the Huichol Indians of Mexico paint the mystical symbols of their culture—the hallucinogenic peyote cactus, the blue deer-spirit who appears to the shamans as they croon their songs around the fire in all-night ceremonies deep in the Sierra Madre mountains, and the pilgrimages to sacred sites, high in the central Mexican desert of Wirikuta. Hope MacLean provides the first comprehensive study of Huichol yarn paintings, from their origins as sacred offerings to their transformation into commercial art. Drawing on twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork, she interviews Huichol artists who have innovated important themes and styles.
Image two: Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (2015) - synopsis: In 1916, as World War I raged around them, a group of bohemians gathered at a small nightclub in Zurich, Switzerland for a series of bizarre performances. Three readers simultaneously recited a poem in three languages; a monocle-wearing teenager performed a spell from New Zealand; another young man flung bits of papier-mâché into the air and glued them into place where they landed. One of these artists called the sessions “both buffoonery and a requiem mass.” Soon they would be known by a more evocative name: Dada. In Destruction Was My Beatrice, modernist scholar Jed Rasula presents the first narrative history of the emergence, decline, and legacy of Dada, showing how this strange artistic phenomenon spread across Europe and then the world in the wake of the Great War, fundamentally reshaping modern culture in ways we’re still struggling to understand today.
Image one: E-book titled Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian (2013) - synopsis: First published in 1942, Sun Chief is the autobiography of Hopi Chief Don C. Talayesva and offers a unique insider view on Hopi society. In a new Foreword, Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert situates the book within contemporary Hopi studies, exploring how scholars have used the book since its publication more than seventy years ago.
Image two: E-book titled Tales of the Earth: Native American Creation Mythology (2021) - synopsis: A revealing analysis of key themes in Native American origin myths—and their stark contrast with the exceptionalist values of the United States. Tales of the Earth is a comprehensive yet concise overview of Native American mythologies. After outlining theories of the origins of Native North Americans, David Leeming considers the creation myths of many different tribes along with commonly occurring figures within their mythologies.
Image one: E-book titled Stone Artifacts of Texas Indians (2011) - synopsis: Useful for academic and recreational archaeologists alike, this book identifies and describes over 200 projectile points and stone tools used by prehistoric Native American Indians in Texas. This third edition boasts twice as many illustrations—all drawn from actual specimens—and still includes charts, geographic distribution maps and reliable age-dating information. The authors also demonstrate how factors such as environment, locale and type of artifact combine to produce a portrait of theses ancient cultures.
Image two: E-book titled Ancestral Mounds: Vitality and Volatility of Native America (2015) - synopsis: Ancestral Mounds deconstructs earthen mounds and myths in examining their importance in contemporary Native communities. Drawing on ethnographic and archaeological studies, Jay Miller explores the wide-ranging themes and variations of mounds, from those built thousands of years ago to contemporary mounds, focusing on Native southeastern and Oklahoma towns.
Image one: E-book titled Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (2018) - synopsis: Most Indigenous activism remains unseen in the mainstream—and so, of course, does its significance. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui set out to change that with her radio program Indigenous Politics. Issue by issue, she interviewed people who talked candidly and in an engaging way about how settler colonialism depends on erasing Native peoples and about how Native peoples can and do resist. Collected here, these conversations speak with clear and compelling voices about a range of Indigenous politics that shape everyday life. Land desecration, treaty rights, political status, cultural revitalization: these are among the themes taken up by a broad cross-section of interviewees from across the United States and from Canada, Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Australia, and New Zealand.
Image two: E-book titled Living on Thin Ice: The Gwich'in Natives of Alaska (2016) - synopsis: The Gwich’in Natives of Arctic Village, Alaska, have experienced intense social and economic changes for more than a century. In the late 20th century, new transportation and communication technologies introduced radically new value systems; while some of these changes may be seen as socially beneficial, others suggest a weakening of what was once a strong and vibrant Native community. Using quantitative and qualitative data gathered since the turn of the millennium, this volume offers an interdisciplinary evaluation of the developments that have occurred in the community over the past several decades.
Image one: Native American Heritage Month
Image two: E-book titled Land of the Tejas: Native American Identity and Interaction in Texas, A.D. 1300 to 1700 (2012) - synopsis: Combining archaeological, historical, ethnographic, and environmental data, Land of the Tejas represents a sweeping, interdisciplinary look at Texas during the late prehistoric and early historic periods. Through this revolutionary approach, John Wesley Arnn reconstructs Native identity and social structures among both mobile foragers and sedentary agriculturalists.
Image three: E-book titled Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (2016) - synopsis: Inter/Nationalism seeks to lay conceptual ground between American Indian and Indigenous studies and Palestinian studies through concepts of settler colonialism, indigeneity, and state violence. By establishing Palestine as an indigenous nation under colonial occupation, this book draws crucial connections between the scholarship and activism of Indigenous America and Palestine.
Image one: E-book titled Food across Borders (2017) - synopsis: The act of eating defines and redefines borders. What constitutes "American" in our cuisine has always depended on a liberal crossing of borders, from "the line in the sand" that separates Mexico and the United States, to the grassland boundary with Canada, to the imagined divide in our collective minds between "our" food and "their" food. Immigrant workers have introduced new cuisines and ways of cooking that force the nation to question the boundaries between "us" and "them." The stories told in Food across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging.
Image two: E-book titled La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence (2014) - synopsis: Commemorating Juan Ponce de León's landfall on the Atlantic coast of Florida, this ambitious volume explores five centuries of Hispanic presence in the New World peninsula, reflecting on the breadth and depth of encounters between the different lands and cultures. Melding history, literature, anthropology, music, culture, and sociology, La Florida is a unique presentation of the Hispanic roots that run deep in Florida's past and present and will assuredly shape its future.
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Resources: Streaming Video
Streaming video database 1: Academic Video Online: Comprehensive streaming video database that provides over 68,000 video titles covering subject areas such as anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more.
Streaming video database 2: Kanopy: Stream classic cinema, indie films, and documentaries.
Image one: E-book titled Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawaii (2016) - synopsis: In 1893 a small group of white planters and missionary descendants backed by the United States overthrew the Kingdom of Hawai'i and established a government modeled on the Jim Crow South. In Nation Within Tom Coffman tells the complex history of the unsuccessful efforts of deposed Hawaiian queen Lili'uokalani and her subjects to resist annexation, which eventually came in 1898. Coffman describes native Hawaiian political activism, the queen's visits to Washington, D.C., to lobby for independence, and her imprisonment, along with hundreds of others, after their aborted armed insurrection. Exposing the myths that fueled the narrative that native Hawaiians willingly relinquished their nation, Coffman shows how Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt conspired to extinguish Hawai'i's sovereignty in the service of expanding the United States' growing empire.
Image two: E-book titled The Swordfish Hunters: The History and Ecology of an Ancient American Sea People (2012) - synopsis: Thousands of years ago, Maine’s Red Paint People, so called because of the red ochre in their burial sites, were among the first maritime cultures in the Americas. They could have subsisted on easily caught cod, but they chose to capture dangerous and elusive swordfish. This book explains beautifully the prehistory of these people, the evolution of archaeological thinking about them, and the myriad new scientific threads that shed new light on this old culture.
Image one: E-book titled Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome: Sexuality, Identity, and Community in Early Modern Europe (2016) - synopsis: From the tenor of contemporary discussions, it would be easy to conclude that the idea of marriage between two people of the same sex is a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. Not so, argues Gary Ferguson in Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome. Making use of substantial fragments of trial transcripts, Gary Ferguson brings the story of a same-sex marriage to life in striking detail. He unearths an incredible amount of detail about the men, their sex lives, and how others responded to this information, which allows him to explore attitudes toward marriage, sex, and gender at the time. Emphasizing the instability of marriage in premodern Europe, Ferguson argues that same-sex unions should be considered part of the institution’s complex and contested history.
Image two: E-book titled Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (2014) - synopsis: In April 1895, Oscar Wilde stood in the prisoner’s dock of the Old Bailey, charged with “acts of gross indecency with another male person.” Wilde responded with a speech of legendary eloquence, defending love between men as a love “such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare.” Electrified, the spectators in the courtroom burst into applause. Although Wilde was ultimately imprisoned, the courtroom response to his speech signaled a revolutionary moment-the emergence into the public sphere of a kind of love that had always been proscribed in English culture. In this luminous work of intellectual history, Linda Dowling offers the first detailed account of Oxford Hellenism, the Victorian philosophical and literary movement that made possible Wilde's brief triumph and anticipated the modern possibility of homosexuality as a positive social identity.
Image one: E-book titled Poetry of Psychiatry: Essays on Early Twentieth-Century Russian Symbolist Culture (2014) - synopsis: A century ago the Symbolists in Moscow and St. Petersburg dreamed of a fundamental transformation of life in Russia. From their reading of signs in the heavens, these poets, philosophers, and mystics sensed that tsardom was on the threshold of an apocalyptic upheaval. The eventual collision between these dreams and tsarist reality generated enormous intellectual turbulence and the need for substitutes. Not least psychoanalysis came to the rescue of these stranded dreamers.
Image two: E-book titled American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation (2004) - synopsis: Written as a cultural weapon and a call to arms, Howl touched a raw nerve in Cold War America and has been controversial from the day it was first read aloud nearly fifty years ago. This first full critical and historical study of Howl brilliantly elucidates the nexus of politics and literature in which it was written and gives striking new portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs.
Image one: Women in Mongol Iran: The Khatuns, 1206 to 1335 (2017) - synopsis: Explores the political, economic and religious role of women in the Mongol empire This book shows the development of women’s status in the Mongol Empire from its original homeland in Mongolia up to the end of the Ilkhanate of Iran in 1335. Taking a thematic approach, the chapters show a coherent progression of this development and contextualise the evolution of the role of women in medieval Mongol society.
Image two: E-book titled Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World's Most Famous Heroine (2014) - synopsis: This close look at Wonder Woman’s history portrays a complicated heroine who is more than just a female Superman with a golden lasso and bullet-deflecting bracelets. The original Wonder Woman was ahead of her time, advocating female superiority and the benefits of matriarchy in the 1940s. At the same time, her creator filled the comics with titillating bondage imagery, and Wonder Woman was tied up as often as she saved the world. In the 1950s, Wonder Woman begrudgingly continued her superheroic mission, wishing she could settle down with her boyfriend instead, all while continually hinting at hidden lesbian leanings. Exploring this lost history adds new dimensions to the world’s most beloved female character, and Wonder Woman Unbound delves into her comic book and its spin-offs as well as the myriad motivations of her creators to showcase the peculiar journey that led to Wonder Woman’s iconic status.
Image one: E-book titled Hair, Headwear, and Orthodox Jewish Women: Kallah's Choice (2014) - synopsis: Hair, Headwear, and Orthodox Jewish Women comments on hair covering based on an ethnographic study of the lives of Orthodox Jewish women in a small non-metropolitan synagogue. It brings the often overlooked stories of these women to the forefront and probes questions as to how their location in a small community affects their behavioral choices, particularly regarding the folk practice of hair covering. A kallah, or bride, makes the decision as to whether or not she will cover her hair after marriage. In doing so, she externally announces her religious affiliation, in particular her commitment to maintaining an Orthodox Jewish home.
Image two: E-book titled Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880 to 1930 (2018) - synopsis: The first study of the role of the newspaperwoman in American literary culture at the turn of the twentieth century, this book recaptures the imaginative exchange between real-life reporters like Nellie Bly and Ida B. Wells and fictional characters like Henrietta Stackpole, the lady-correspondent in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. It chronicles the exploits of a neglected group of American women writers and uncovers an alternative reporter-novelist tradition that runs counter to the more familiar story of gritty realism generated in male-dominated newsrooms.
Image one: E-book titled Caring for Equality: A History of African American Health and Healthcare (2018) - synopsis: In Caring for Equality, David McBride chronicles the struggle by African Americans and their white allies to improve poor black health conditions as well as inadequate medical care. Black American health progress resulted from the steady influence of what David McBride calls the health equality ideal: the principle that health of black Americans could and should be equal to that of whites and other Americans.
Image two: E-book titled Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: "There Is a Mystery..." - synopsis: In Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: “There is a Mystery…,” Stephen C. Finley, Margarita Simon Guillory, and Hugh R. Page, Jr. assemble twenty groundbreaking essays that provide a rationale and parameters for Africana Esoteric Studies (AES): a new trans-disciplinary enterprise focused on the investigation of esoteric lore and practices in Africa and the African Diaspora.
Image one: E-book titled Quakers and Native Americans (2018) - synopsis: Quakers and Native Americans is a collection of essays examining the history of interactions between Quakers and American Indians from the 1650s, emphasizing American Indian influence on Quaker history as well as Quaker influence on U.S. policy toward American Indians.
Image two: E-book titled Before Yellowstone: Native American Archaeology in the National Park (2018) - synopsis: Since 1872, visitors have flocked to Yellowstone National Park to gaze in awe at its dramatic geysers, stunning mountains, and impressive wildlife. Yet more than a century of archaeological research shows that the wild landscape has a long history of human presence. In fact, Native American people have hunted bison and bighorn sheep, fished for cutthroat trout, and gathered bitterroot and camas bulbs here for at least 11,000 years, and twenty-six tribes claim cultural association with Yellowstone today. In Before Yellowstone, Douglas MacDonald tells the story of these early people as revealed by archaeological research into nearly 2,000 sites—many of which he helped survey and excavate.
Image one: E-book titled Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop (2016) - synopsis: Popular music compels, it entertains, and it has the power to attract and move audiences. With that in mind, the editors of Indigenous Pop showcase the contributions of American Indian musicians to popular forms of music, including jazz, blues, country-western, rock and roll, reggae, punk, and hip hop. From Joe Shunatona and the United States Indian Reservation Orchestra to Jim Pepper, from Buffy Saint-Marie to Robbie Robertson, from Joy Harjo to Lila Downs, Indigenous Pop vividly addresses the importance of Native musicians and popular musical genres, establishing their origins and discussing what they represent.
Image two: E-book titled How Mockingbirds Are: O'odham Ritual Orations (2011) - synopsis: The power of mockingbirds and the enduring significance of indigenous ceremonial speeches are deftly revealed in this brilliant analysis of ritual orations created and delivered by the O'odham people (also known as the Pima-Papago) who lived along the Akimel rivers and across the arid expanses and mountains of the desert of southern Arizona and northern Sonora. Drawing upon a rich reservoir of O'odham oral traditions and ceremonial performances, a meticulous deciphering of particular texts, and an insightful assessment of the impact of Christianity upon the O'odham people, Donald Bahr offers a brilliant analysis of why some indigenous stories cease to be relevant and told.
Image one: E-book titled Land of Tejas: Native American Identity and Interaction in Texas, A.D. 1300-1700 (2012) - synopsis: Combining archaeological, historical, ethnographic, and environmental data, Land of the Tejas represents a sweeping, interdisciplinary look at Texas during the late prehistoric and early historic periods. Through this revolutionary approach, John Wesley Arnn reconstructs Native identity and social structures among both mobile foragers and sedentary agriculturalists.
Image two: E-book titled Of Sacred Lands and Strip Malls: The Battle for Puvungna (2016) - synopsis: A twenty-two acre strip of land—known as Puvungna—lies at the edge of California State University’s Long Beach campus. The land, owned by California, is also sacred to several Native American tribes. And these twenty-two acres have been the nexus for an acrimonious and costly conflict over control of the land. Of Sacred Lands and Strip Malls tells the story of Puvungna, from the region’s deep history, through years of struggle between activists and campus administration, and ongoing reverberations from the conflict.
Image two: E-book titled The Woman Who Loved Mankind: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Crow Elder (2012) - synopsis: The oldest living Crow at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Lillian Bullshows Hogan (1905–2003) grew up on the Crow reservation in rural Montana. In The Woman Who Loved Mankind, she enthralls readers with her own long and remarkable life and the stories of her parents, part of the last generation of Crow born to nomadic ways.
Image three: E-book titled The Newspaper Warrior: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins's Campaign for Indian Rights, 1864-1891 (2015) - synopsis: This anthology gathers together Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s literary production for newspapers and magazines from her 1864 performances in San Francisco to her untimely death in 1891, focusing on the years 1879 to 1887, when Winnemucca Hopkins gave hundreds of lectures in the eastern and western United States; published her book, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883); and established a bilingual school for Native American children.
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Image two: E-book titled Horror in the Heartland: Strange and Gothic Tales from the Midwest (2017) - synopsis: In Horror in the Heartland, historian Keven McQueen offers a guided tour of terrible crimes and eccentric characters; haunted houses and murder-suicides; mad doctors, body snatchers, and pranks gone comically--and tragically--wrong. From tales of the booming grave-robbing industry of late 19th-century Indiana to the story of a Michigan physician who left his estate to his pet monkeys, McQueen investigates a spooky and twisted side of Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Exploring burial customs, unexplained deaths, ghost stories, premature burials, bizarre murders, peculiar wills and much more, this creepy collection reveals the region's untold stories and offers intriguing, if sometimes macabre, insights into human nature.
Image three: E-book titled Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost (2016) - synopsis: Satoko Shimazaki revisits three centuries of kabuki theater, reframing it as a key player in the formation of an early modern urban identity in Edo Japan. Shimazaki argues that kabuki instilled a sense of shared history in the inhabitants of Edo (present-day Tokyo) by invoking “worlds,” or sekai, derived from earlier military tales, and overlaying them onto the present. She then analyzes the profound changes that took place in Edo kabuki toward the end of the early modern period, which witnessed the rise of a new type of character: the vengeful female ghost. Shimazaki’s bold reinterpretation of the history of kabuki centers on the popular ghost play Tōkaidō Yotsiya Kaidan (Ghost Story of Yotsuya in Takaido) by Tsuruya Nanboku IV. Drawing not only on kabuki scripts but also on a wide range of other sources, from theatrical ephemera and popular fiction to medical and religious texts, she sheds light on the development of the ubiquitous trope of the vengeful female ghost and its illumination of new themes at a time when the samurai world was losing its relevance.
Image one: E-book titled Of Corpse: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture (2003) - synopsis: Laughter, contemporary theory suggests, is often aggressive in some manner and may be prompted by a sudden perception of incongruity combined with memories of past emotional experience. Given this importance of the past to our recognition of the comic, it follows that some “traditions” dispose us to ludic responses. The studies in Of Corpse: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture examine specific interactions of text (jokes, poetry, epitaphs, iconography, film drama) and social context (wakes, festivals, disasters) that shape and generate laughter.
Image two: E-book titled The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design (2015) - synopsis: In The Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan argues that the monster is a key figure in Renaissance culture. Drawing on sixteenth-century medical, legal, and scientific texts, as well as recent scholarship on monstrosity, abnormality, and difference in early modern Europe, he considers the garden within a broader framework of inquiry. Developing a new conceptual model of Renaissance landscape design, Morgan argues that the presence of monsters was not incidental but an essential feature of the experience of gardens.
Image one: E-book titled Abominable Science!: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids (2013) - synopsis: Throughout our history, humans have been captivated by mythic beasts and legendary creatures. Tales of Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the Loch Ness monster are part of our collective experience. Now comes a book from two dedicated investigators that explores and elucidates the fascinating world of cryptozoology. Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero have written an entertaining, educational, and definitive text on cryptids, presenting the arguments both for and against their existence and systematically challenging the pseudoscience that perpetuates their myths.
Image two: E-book titled Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade (2014) - synopsis: This collection revises, reframes, and deconstructs persistent critical binaries that have labelled 1940s horror as somehow inferior to a “classical” period or “canonical” mode of horror in the 1930s, especially as represented by the monster films of Universal Studios. The book’s four sections re-evaluate the historical, political, economic, and cultural factors informing 1940s horror cinema. Chapters focus on Gothic and Grand Guignol traditions operating in forties horror cinema; 1940s proto-slasher films; the independent horrors of the Poverty Row studios; and critical reevaluations of neglected hybrid films such as The Vampire’s Ghost (1945) and “slippery” auteurs such as Robert Siodmak and Sam Neufield.
Image one: E-book titled Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials (2010) - synopsis: With Digging Up the Dead, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen reveals a treasure trove of fascinating, surprising, and occasionally gruesome stories of exhumation and reburial throughout American history. Taking us to the contested grave sites of such figures as Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, and even Abraham Lincoln, Kammen explores how complicated interactions of regional pride, shifting reputations, and evolving burial practices led to public and often emotional battles over the final resting places of famous figures. Grave-robbing, skull-fondling, cases of mistaken identity, and the financial lures of cemetery tourism all come into play as Kammen delves deeply into this little-known, yet surprisingly persistent, aspect of American history.
Image two: E-book titled The Vampire: A New History (2018) - synopsis: The vampire first came to public prominence in the early eighteenth century, when Enlightenment science collided with Eastern European folklore and apparently verified outbreaks of vampirism, capturing the attention of medical researchers, political commentators, social theorists, theologians, and philosophers. Nick Groom accordingly traces the vampire from its role as a monster embodying humankind's fears, to that of an unlikely hero for the marginalized and excluded in the twenty-first century.
Image one - E-book titled Weird American Music: Case Studies of Underground Resistance, BarlowGirl, Jackalope, Charles Ives, and Waffle House Music (2018) - synopsis: Examines a tension in certain expressions of American music and music communities since the 1980s between the artists’ striving for authenticity in the values they want to communicate on the one hand, and the demands of the marketplace on the other. The results are “weird” in both the economic and artistic sense.
Image two - E-book titled The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 (2013) - synopsis: A complete history of how the telegraph revolutionized technological practice and life in America. Telegraphy in the nineteenth century approximated the internet in our own day. Historian and electrical engineer David Hochfelder offers readers a comprehensive history of this groundbreaking technology, which employs breaks in an electrical current to send code along miles of wire. The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 examines the correlation between technological innovation and social change and shows how this transformative relationship helps us to understand and perhaps define modernity.
Image three - E-book titled The CIA in Ecuador (2021) - synopsis: Draws on recently released US government surveillance documents on the Ecuadorian left to chart social movement organizing efforts during the 1950s. Emphasizing the competing roles of the domestic ruling class and grassroots social movements, this book details the struggles and difficulties that activists, organizers, and political parties confronted.
Image one - E-book titled Harnessed to the Pole: Sledge Dogs in Service to American Explorers of the Arctic, 1853-1909 (2014) - synopsis: Harnessed to the Pole follows the adventures of eight American explorers and their dog teams, starting with Elisha Kent Kane and ending with Robert Peary, controversial claimant of the title of first to reach the North Pole. While history has long forgotten these “little camels of the north,” Sheila Nickerson reveals how critical dogs were to the Arctic conquest. Besides providing transportation in extreme conditions, sledge dogs protected against wolves and polar bears, helped in hunting, found their way through storms, and provided warmth in extreme cold. They also faced rough handling, starvation, and the possibility of being left behind as expeditions plunged ahead. Harnessed to the Pole is an extraordinary—and unflinching—look at the dogs that raced to the top of the world.
Image two - E-book titled We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (2015) - synopsis: In We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner place popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. They explore how and why U.S. troops turned to music as a way of connecting to each other and the World back home and of coping with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. They also demonstrate that music was important for every group of Vietnam veterans—black and white, Latino and Native American, men and women, officers and 'grunts'—whose personal reflections drive the book's narrative.
Image three - E-book titled Born To Be Wild: The Rise of the American Motorcyclist (2015) - synopsis: In 1947, 4,000 motorcycle hobbyists converged on Hollister, California. As images of dissolute bikers graced the pages of newspapers and magazines, the three-day gathering sparked the growth of a new subculture while also touching off national alarm. Author Randy D. McBee narrates the evolution of motorcycle culture since World War II, examining the rebelliousness of early riders of the 1940s and 1950s, riders‘ increasing connection to violence and the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, the rich urban bikers of the 1990s and 2000s, and the factors that gave rise to a motorcycle rights movement.
Image one - E-book titled Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (2013) - synopsis: In Entertaining Elephants Susan Nance examines elephant behavior—drawing on the scientific literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications—to offer a study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus entertainment between 1800 and 1940. Entertaining Elephants is the first account that uses research on animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical record, examining how both circus people and elephants struggled behind the scenes to meet the profit necessities of the entertainment business. The book does not claim that elephants understood, endorsed, or resisted the world of show business as a human cultural or business practice, but it does speak of elephants rejecting the conditions of their experience. They lived in a kind of parallel reality in the circus, one that was defined by their interactions with people, other elephants, horses, bull hooks, hay, and the weather.
Image two - E-book titled Winnebago Nation: The Peculiar Place of the RV in American Culture (2014) - synopsis: In Winnebago Nation, popular critic James B. Twitchell takes a light-hearted look at the culture and industry behind the yearning to spend the night in one's car. For the young, the road trip is a coming-of-age ceremony; for those later in life, it is the realization of a lifelong desire to be spontaneous, nomadic, and free. Informed by his own experiences on the road, Twitchell recounts the RV's origins and evolution over the twentieth century; its rise, fall, and rebirth as a cultural icon; its growing mechanical complexity as it evolved from an estate wagon to a converted bus to a mobile home; and its role in bolstering and challenging conceptions of American identity.
Image three - E-book titled The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America (2019) - synopsis: In the post–World War I American climate of isolationism, nativism, democratic expansion of civic rights, and consumerism, Italian-born star Rodolfo Valentino and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini became surprising paragons of authoritarian male power and mass appeal. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States and Italy, Giorgio Bertellini’s work shows how their popularity, both political and erotic, largely depended on the efforts of public opinion managers, including publicists, journalists, and even ambassadors. Beyond the democratic celebrations of the Jazz Age, the promotion of their charismatic masculinity through spectacle and press coverage inaugurated the now-familiar convergence of popular celebrity and political authority.
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Image one: E-book titled Odd Couples: A History of Gay Marriage in Scandinavia (2011) - synopsis: Odd Couples is the first comprehensive history of registered partnership and gay marriage in Scandinavia. It traces the origins of laws which initially were extremely controversial-inside and outside the gay community-but have now gained broad popular and political support, as well as the positive effects and risks involved in state recognition of lesbian and gay couples. Through a comparison of how these laws have been received and practiced in all of the Scandinavian countries, including Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the author presents a nuanced study of a fascinating political process that began in the 1960s and continues to change the way we understand family, sexuality, and nation.
Image two: E-book titled Queer Festivals: Challenging Collective Identities in a Transnational Europe (2018) - synopsis: Through the study of festivals in Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Copenhagen, and Oslo, Queer Festivals: Challenging Collective Identities in a Transnational Europe thoughtfully analyses the role of activist practices in the building of collective identities for social movement studies as well as the role of festivals as significant repertoires of collective action and sites of identitarian explorations in contemporary Europe.
Image one: E-book titled Queer Ancient Ways: A Decolonial Exploration (2018) - synopsis: In this radically unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves. An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, Xiang’s work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that has been all-but-lost to modern thought, in the process critically revealing the operations of modern/colonial systems of gender/sexuality and knowledge-formation that have functioned, from the Conquista de America in the sixteenth century to the present, to keep these systems in obscurity.
Image two: E-book titled Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth: Gender, Shamanism, and the Third Sex (2018) - synopsis: Ujarak, Iqallijuq, and Kupaaq were elders from the Inuit community on Igloolik Island in Nunavut. The three elders, among others, shared with Bernard Saladin d'Anglure the narratives which make up the heart of Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth. Through their words, and historical sources recorded by Franz Boas and Knud Rasmussen, Saladin d'Anglure examines the Inuit notion of personhood and its relationship to cosmology and mythology. Central to these stories are womb memories, narratives of birth and reincarnation, and the concept of the third sex—an intermediate identity between male and female. As explained through first-person accounts and traditional legends, myths, and folk tales, the presence of transgender individuals informs Inuit relationships to one another and to the world at large, transcending the dualities of male and female, human and animal, human and spirit.
Image one: E-book titled Stone by Stone: Exploring Ancient Sites on the Canadian Plains (2015) - synopsis: In this revised and updated edition of her one-of-a-kind guidebook, author Liz Bryan explores archaeological sites that are accessible to today's inquisitive travelers and provides enough detailed information, striking photographs, maps, and illustrations to satisfy any armchair archaeologist. With riveting insight and clarity, Bryan presents the stone effigies, cairns, medicine wheels, buffalo jumps, rock art, and remains of settlements scattered across this vast prairie, creating an invaluable resource for anyone who wishes to navigate these ancient sites and understand their significance.
Image two: E-book titled Prose: Literary Terms and Concepts (2012) - synopsis: Narratives come in many forms, fall into many genres, and tell the stories of an endless assortment of characters. Despite recurring themes and conceits in works from around the world, each story—from biography to science fiction—is singular and designed to elicit a distinct emotional response from its readers. The rhetorical tools and literary styles that have helped reinvent the art and study of storytelling over time are surveyed in this captivating volume.
Image one: E-book titled Leaves of Grass (1855) - synopsis: This collection of loosely connected poems represents the celebration of Walt Whitman’s philosophy of life and humanity and praises nature and the individual human’s role in it. Rather than focusing on religious or spiritual matters, Leaves of Grass focuses primarily on the body and the material world. With one exception, its poems do not rhyme or follow standard rules for meter and line length. Leaves of Grass is also notable for its discussion of delight in sensual pleasures during a time when such candid displays were considered immoral.
Image two: E-book titled Dreamtime Superhighway: Sydney Basin Rock Art and Prehistoric Information Exchange (2008) - synopsis: Dreamtime Superhighway presents a thorough and original contextualization of the rock art and archaeology of the Sydney Basin in Australia. By combining excavation results with rock art analysis it demonstrates that a true archaeology of rock art can provide insights into rock art image-making in people’s social and cultural lives.
Image one: E-book titled Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (2019) - synopsis: This path-breaking book documents the transformation of reproductive practices and politics on Native American reservations from the late nineteenth century to the present, integrating a localized history of childbearing, motherhood, and activism on the Crow Reservation in Montana with an analysis of trends affecting Indigenous women more broadly. Blending local and intimate family histories with the histories of broader movements such as WARN (Women of All Red Nations), Theobald links the federal government's intrusion into Indigenous women's reproductive and familial decisions to the wider history of eugenics and the reproductive rights movement. She argues convincingly that colonial politics have always been--and remain--reproductive politics.
Image two: E-book titled Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (2017) - synopsis: It is no secret that 19th century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as "medical superbodies" highly suited for medical experimentation. In this book, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities.
Image one: E-book titled Black Women in Politics: Demanding Citizenship, Challenging Power, and Seeking Justice (2018) - synopsis: This book explores how Diasporic Black women engage in politics, highlighting three dimensions—citizenship, power, and justice—that are foundational to intersectionality theory and politics as developed by Black women and other women of color. By extending beyond particular time periods, locations, and singular definitions of politics, Black Women in Politics sets itself apart in the field of women’s and gender studies in three ways: by focusing on contemporary Black politics not only in the United States, but also the African Diaspora; by showcasing politics along a broad trajectory, including social movements, formal politics, public policy, media studies, and epistemology; and by including a multidisciplinary range of scholars, with a strong concentration of work by political scientists, a group whose work is often excluded or limited in edited collections.
Image two: E-book titled Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues (2020) - synopsis: This book argues that women served as leaders in a number of synagogues during the Roman and Byzantine periods. The evidence for this consists of nineteen Greek and Latin inscriptions in which women bear the titles “head of the synagogue,” “leader,” “elder,” “mother of the synagogue,” and “priestess.” These inscriptions range in date from 27 B.C.E. to perhaps the sixth century C.E. and in provenance from Italy to Asia Minor, Egypt, and Palestine. While new discoveries make this a growing corpus of material, a number of the inscriptions have been known to scholars for some time. The book contains a new preface by the author.
Image one: E-book titled Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History (2018) - synopsis: Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the region's thriving black lesbian communities.
Image two: E-book titled Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (2016) - synopsis: Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn all made lasting impressions with the cinematic cross-dressing they performed onscreen. What few modern viewers realize, however, is that these seemingly daring performances of the 1930s actually came at the tail end of a long wave of gender-bending films that included more than 400 movies featuring women dressed as men. Laura Horak spent a decade looking at American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early 20th century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity. Girls Will Be Boys excavates a rich history of gender-bending film roles, enabling readers to appreciate the wide array of masculinities that these actresses performed—from sentimental boyhood to rugged virility to gentlemanly refinement.
Image one: E-book titled Wives and Wanderers in a New Guinea Highlands Society: Women's Lives in the Wahgi Valley (2022) - synopsis: Brings to the reader anthropologist Marie Reay’s field research from the 1950s and 1960s on women’s lives in the Wahgi Valley, Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Dramatically written, each chapter adds to the main story that Reay wanted to tell, contrasting young girls’ freedom to court and choose partners, with the constraints (and violence) they were to experience as married women. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of gender relations, anthropology and feminism, Melanesia and the Pacific. The material in this book, which Reay had written by 1965 but never published, remains startlingly contemporary and relevant.
Image two: E-book titled Women, Disability, and Culture (2020) - synopsis: Women and girls with disabilities find themselves constantly having to deal with multiple, intersectional discrimination due to both their gender and their disability, as well as social conditioning. Indeed, the intersection made up of factors such as race, ethnic origin, social background, cultural substrate, age, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, gender, disability, status as refugee or migrant and others besides, has a multiplying effect that increases discrimination yet further. This book seeks to focus attention on the condition of women with disabilities, offering points for reflection on the different, often invisible, cultural and social undertones that continue to feed into prejudicial stereotypes.
Image one: E-Book titled Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (2019) - synopsis: In the 1960s and 70s, the two most important black nationalist organizations, the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party, gave voice and agency to the most economically and politically isolated members of black communities outside the South. Though vilified as fringe and extremist, these movements proved to be formidable agents of influence during the civil rights era, ultimately giving birth to the Black Power movement. Drawing on deep archival research and interviews with key participants, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar reconsiders the commingled stories of—and popular reactions to—the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, and mainstream civil rights leaders.
Image two: E-Book titled Liberia, South Carolina: An African American Appalachian Community (2018) - synopsis: In 2007, while researching mountain culture in upstate South Carolina, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall stumbled upon the small community of Liberia in the Blue Ridge foothills. There he met Mable Owens Clarke and her family, the remaining members of a small African American community still living on land obtained immediately after the Civil War. This intimate history tells the story of five generations of the Owens family and their friends and neighbors, chronicling their struggles through slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the desegregation of the state. This story sheds new light on the African American experience in Appalachia, and in it Coggeshall documents the community’s 150-year history of resistance to white oppression, while offering a new way to understand the symbolic relationship between residents and the land they occupy, tying together family, memory, and narratives to explain this connection.
Image one: E-book titled Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 (2018) - synopsis: Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest recovers the agrarian village world Indian women created in the lush lands of the Ohio Valley. Algonquian-speaking Indians living in a crescent of towns along the Wabash tributary of the Ohio were able to evade and survive the Iroquois onslaught of the seventeenth century, to absorb French traders and Indigenous refugees, to export peltry, and to harvest riparian, wetland, and terrestrial resources of every description and breathtaking richness. These prosperous Native communities frustrated French and British imperial designs, controlled the Ohio Valley, and confederated when faced with the challenge of American invasion.
Image two: E-book titled These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598-1912 (2019) - synopsis: Spanning three hundred years and the colonial regimes of Spain, Mexico, and the United States, Maurice S. Crandall's sweeping history of Native American political rights in what is now New Mexico, Arizona, and Sonora demonstrates how Indigenous communities implemented, subverted, rejected, and indigenized colonial ideologies of democracy, both to accommodate and to oppose colonial power.
Image one: E-book titled Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (2019) - synopsis: This pathbreaking book documents the transformation of reproductive practices and politics on Indian reservations from the late nineteenth century to the present, integrating a localized history of childbearing, motherhood, and activism on the Crow Reservation in Montana with an analysis of trends affecting Indigenous women more broadly.
Image two: E-book titled Horse Nations: The Worldwide Impact of the Horse on Indigenous Societies Post-1492 (2015) - synopsis: Provides the first wide-ranging and up-to-date synthesis of the impact of the horse on the Indigenous societies of North and South America, southern Africa, and Australasia following its introduction as a result of European contact post-1492. Drawing on sources in a variety of languages and on the evidence of archaeology, anthropology, and history, the volume outlines the transformations that the acquisition of the horse wrought on a diverse range of groups within these four continents.
Image one: E-book titled Shifting Grounds: Landscape in Contemporary Native American Art (2019) - synopsis: In Shifting Grounds, art historian Kate Morris argues that Indigenous artists are expanding, reconceptualizing, and remaking the forms of landscape painting still further, expressing Indigenous attitudes toward land and belonging even as they draw upon mainstream art practices. The resulting works are rarely if ever primarily visual representations, but instead evoke all five senses: from the overt sensuality of Kay WalkingStick's tactile paintings to the eerie soundscapes of Alan Michelson's videos and Postcommodity's installations to the immersive environments of Kent Monkman's dioramas, this landscape art resonates with a fully embodied and embedded subjectivity.
Image two: E-book titled Living with Whales: Documents and Oral Histories of Native New England Whaling History (2013) - synopsis: Native Americans along the coasts of southern New England and Long Island have had close ties to whales for thousands of years. They made a living from the sea and saw in the world’s largest beings special power and meaning. After English settlement in the early seventeenth century, the region’s natural bounty of these creatures drew Natives and colonists alike to develop whale hunting on an industrial scale. By the nineteenth century, New England dominated the world in whaling, and Native Americans contributed substantially to whaleship crews. In Living with Whales, Nancy Shoemaker reconstructs the history of Native whaling in New England through a diversity of primary documents: explorers’ descriptions of their “first encounters,” indentures, deeds, merchants’ accounts, Indian overseer reports, crew lists, memoirs, obituaries, and excerpts from journals kept by Native whalemen on their voyages.
Image one: E-book titled Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War (2018) - synopsis: With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the “First Indian War” (later named King Philip’s War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins.
Image two: E-book titled Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty: Navajos, Hozho, and Track Work (2011) - synopsis: For over one hundred years, Navajos have gone to work in significant numbers on Southwestern railroads. As they took on the arduous work of laying and anchoring tracks, they turned to traditional religion to anchor their lives. Jay Youngdahl, an attorney who has represented Navajo workers in claims with their railroad employers since 1992 and who more recently earned a master's in divinity from Harvard, has used oral history and archival research to write a cultural history of Navajos' work on the railroad and the roles their religious traditions play in their lives of hard labor away from home.
Image one: E-book titled Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (2017) - synopsis: This updated edition of Native Seattle brings the indigenous story to the present day and puts the movement of recognizing Seattle’s Native past into a broader context. Native Seattle focuses on the experiences of local indigenous communities on whose land Seattle grew, accounts of Native migrants to the city and the development of a multi-tribal urban community, as well as the role Native Americans have played in the narrative of Seattle.
Image two: E-book titled Chair of Tears (2012) - synopsis: The best stories create traditions, and this novel by celebrated Native American writer Gerald Vizenor is a marvelous conjunction of trickster stories and literary ingenuity. Chair of Tears is funny, fierce, ironic, and deadly serious, a sendup of sacred poses, cultural pretensions, and familiar places from reservations to universities.
Image one: E-book titled American Indians and National Forests (2016) - synopsis: American Indians and National Forests tells the story of how the U.S. Forest Service and tribal nations dealt with sweeping changes in forest use, ownership, and management over the last century and a half. Indians and U.S. foresters came together over a shared conservation ethic on many cooperative endeavors; yet, they often clashed over how the nation’s forests ought to be valued and cared for on matters ranging from huckleberry picking and vision quests to road building and recreation development.
Image two: E-book titled I Am Where I Come From: Native American College Students and Graduates Tell Their Life Stories (2017) - synopsis: Presents the autobiographies of thirteen Native American undergraduates and graduates of Dartmouth College, ten of them current and recent students. The autobiographies contained in I Am Where I Come From explore issues of native identity, adjustment to the college environment, cultural and familial influences, and academic and career aspirations.
Image one: E-book titled Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory (2017) - synopsis: The 1830’s forced removal of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland became the most famous event in the Indian history of the American South, an episode taken to exemplify a broader experience of injustice suffered by Native peoples. In this book, Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal through an examination of memorials, historic sites, and tourist attractions dating from the early twentieth century to the present.
Image two: E-book titled Starring Red Wing!: The Incredible Career of Lilian M. St. Cyr, the First Native American Film Star (2019) - synopsis: Brings the exciting career, dedicated activism, and noteworthy legacy of Ho-Chunk actress Lilian Margaret St. Cyr vividly to life. Known to film audiences as “Princess Red Wing,” St. Cyr emerged as the most popular Native American actress in the pre-Hollywood and early studio-system era in the United States.
Image one: E-book titled Tribal Strengths and Native Education: Voices from the Reservation Classroom (2018) - synopsis: Basing his account on the insights of six veteran American Indian educators who serve in three reservation schools on the Northern Plains, Terry Huffman explores how Native educators perceive pedagogical strengths rooted in their tribal heritage and personal ethnicity. He recounts their views on the issues facing students and shows how tribal identity can be a source of resilience in academic and personal success. Throughout, Huffman and the educators emphasize the importance of anchoring the formal education of Indian children in Native values, worldviews, and tribal strengths.
Image two: E-book titled Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth: Gender, Shamanism, and the Third Sex (2018) - synopsis: Ujarak, Iqallijuq, and Kupaaq were elders from the Inuit community on Igloolik Island in Nunavut. The three elders, among others, shared with Bernard Saladin d'Anglure the narratives which make up the heart of Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth. Through their words, and historical sources recorded by Franz Boas and Knud Rasmussen, Saladin d'Anglure examines the Inuit notion of personhood and its relationship to cosmology and mythology. As explained through first-person accounts and traditional legends, myths, and folk tales, the presence of transgender individuals informs Inuit relationships to one another and to the world at large, transcending the dualities of male and female, human and animal, human and spirit.
Image one: E-book titled Histories of Maize: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Prehistory, Linguistics, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize (2006) - synopsis: The multidisciplinary evidence from the social and biological sciences presented in this volume have generated a much more complex picture of the economic, political, and religious significance of maize. The volume also includes ethnographic research on the uses and roles of maize in indigenous cultures and a linguistic section that includes chapters on indigenous folk taxonomies and the role and meaning of maize to the development of civilization.
Image two: E-book titled A Digital Bundle: Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Knowledge Online (2018) - synopsis: An essential contribution to Internet activism and a must read for Indigenous educators, A Digital Bundle frames digital technology as an important tool for self-determination and idea sharing, ultimately contributing to Indigenous resurgence and nation building. By defining Indigenous Knowledge online in terms of “digital bundles,” Jennifer Wemigwans elevates both cultural protocol and cultural responsibilities, grounds online projects within Indigenous philosophical paradigms, and highlights new possibilities for both the Internet and Indigenous communities.
Image two: E-book titled Kayanerenkó:wa - The Great Law of Peace (2018) - synopsis: Several centuries ago, the five nations that would become the Haudenosaunee — Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca — were locked in generations-long cycles of bloodshed. When they established Kayanerenkó:wa, the Great Law of Peace, they not only resolved intractable conflicts, but also shaped a system of law and government that would maintain peace for generations to come. This law remains in place today in Haudenosaunee communities: an Indigenous legal system, distinctive, complex, and principled. It is not only a survivor, but a viable alternative to Euro-American systems of law. With its emphasis on lasting relationships, respect for the natural world, building consensus, and on making and maintaining peace, it stands in contrast to legal systems based on property, resource exploitation, and majority rule.
Image two: E-book titled Cemeteries and Gravemarkers: Voices of American Culture (1989) - synopsis: Cemeteries house the dead, but gravemarkers are fashioned by the living, who record on them not only their pleasures, sorrows, and hopes for an afterlife, but also more than they realize of their history, ethnicity, and culture. Richard Meyer has gathered twelve original essays examining burial grounds through the centuries and across the land to give a broad understanding of the history and cultural values of communities, regions, and American society at large.
Image three: E-book titled The Untold Story of Champ: A Social History of America's Loch Ness Monster (2012) - synopsis: Robert E. Bartholomew embarks on a search for the Champ monster, both of the Lake Champlain firsthand and through period sources and archives, many never before published. Although he finds the trail obscured by sloppy journalism, local leaders motivated by tourism income, and bickering monster hunters, he weighs the evidence to craft a rich, colorful history of Champ. From the nineteenth century, when Champ was a household name, to 1977, when he appeared in Sandra Mansi’s controversial photograph, Bartholomew covers it all. Real or imaginary, Champ and his story will fascinate believers and skeptics alike.
Image one: E-book titled Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore (2007) - synopsis: In Haunting Experiences, Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.
Image two: E-book titled Boo!: Culture, Experience, and the Startle Reflex (1996) - synopsis: The startle reflex provides a revealing model for examining the ways in which evolved neurophysiology shapes personal experience and patterns of recurrent social interaction. In the most diverse cultural contexts, in societies widely separated by time and space, the inescapable physiology of the reflex both shapes the experience of startle and biases the social usages to which the reflex is put. This book describes ways in which the startle reflex is experienced, culturally elaborated, and socially used in a wide variety of times and places. It offers explanations both for the patterned commonalities found across cultural settings and for the differences engendered by diverse social environments.
Image one: E-book titled Witchcraft in Early North America (2010) - synopsis: Witchcraft in Early North America investigates European, African, and Indian witchcraft beliefs and their expression in colonial America. Alison Games’ engaging book takes us beyond the infamous outbreak at Salem, Massachusetts, to look at how witchcraft was a central feature of colonial societies in North America. Her substantial and lively introduction orients readers to the subject and to the rich selection of documents that follows. The documents begin with first encounters between European missionaries and Native Americans in New France and New Mexico, and they conclude with witch hunts among Native Americans in the years of the early American republic.
Image two: E-book titled Frankenstein - synopsis: Victor Frankenstein, a young university student, becomes obsessed with discovering the secret to creating life. Over several months, he builds a creature out of body parts stolen from graves. Yet after he brings his work to life, Victor becomes terrified and, wanting nothing to do with his creation, abandons the “monster.” Rejected by the world because of his appearance, the monster lives in hiding but searches for his creator.
Image one: E-book titled Abominable Science!: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids (2013) - synopsis: Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero have written an entertaining, educational, and definitive text on cryptids, presenting the arguments both for and against their existence and systematically challenging the pseudoscience that perpetuates their myths. After examining the nature of science and pseudoscience and their relation to cryptozoology, Loxton and Prothero take on Bigfoot; the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, and its cross-cultural incarnations; the Loch Ness monster and its highly publicized sightings; the evolution of the Great Sea Serpent; and Mokele Mbembe, or the Congo dinosaur.
Image two: E-book titled Silent Hill: The Terror Engine (2012) - synopsis: Silent Hill: The Terror Engine is both a close analysis of the first three Silent Hill games and a general look at the whole series. Taking a transmedia approach and underlining the designer’s cinematic and literary influences, this book uses the narrative structure; the techniques of imagery, sound, and music employed; the game mechanics; and the fiction, artifact, and gameplay emotions elicited by the games to explore the specific fears survival horror games are designed to provoke and how the experience as a whole has made the Silent Hill series one of the major landmarks of video game history.
