BiblioVault - Books about Story

Narrating Jane

Telling the Story of an Early African American Mormon Woman

Quincy D. Newell

Utah State University Press, 2016

In volume 21 of the Arrington Lecture Series, Quincy Newell studies the life of Jane Elizabeth Manning James, an African American, born in 1822, who converted to Mormonism in 1843. The narrative of Jane's life has to date been told in versions that favored official LDS positions on race and gender at the time of their telling. Newell's study here brings contemporary historical scholarship and critical distance to bear on the facts and the meanings of Jane M. James's experience.

The Arrington Lecture series, established by one of the twentieth-century West's most distinguished historians, Leonard Arrington, has become a leading forum for prominent historians to address topics related to Mormon history. Utah State University hosts the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series through the Merrill-Cazier Library Special Collections and Archives department.

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Natchiq Grows Up

The Story of an Alaska Ringed Seal Pup and Her Changing Home

Donna D.W. Hauser

University of Alaska Press, 2023

This is the story of Natchiq, the ringed seal pup, growing up in her snow cave on the sea ice in northern Alaska with her mom Siku. Interwoven with Indigenous Knowledge from Qikiktagruk Elders from northwest Alaska, Iñupiaq terms, and scientific findings, readers follow Natchiq’s daring escapes from predators and seal dogs specially trained to help biologists find ringed seals.

Beginning in the 1980s, scientists started traveling to northwest Alaska to research the lives of ringed seals, bringing Labrador retrievers who could sniff out seals and their snow cave homes (called lairs) on the sea ice. Decades later, scientists partnered with the Iñupiaq people of
Qikiktaġruk (Kotzebue) to learn more about ringed seals. They relied on a combination of Indigenous Knowledge and scientific techniques to capture and apply tags to understand the movements and behavior of ringed seals.

But the Arctic homes of ringed seals are changing, and the long history of ringed seal science in the Kotzebue Sound proved to be just the beginning of long and cooperative relationships melding science and Indigenous knowledge. During 2018 and 2019, with unprecedented sea ice conditions, Qikiktagrumiut Elders and scientists returned to the ice to measure changes in the habitat available for ringed seal pups in the region.

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Night Spirits

The Story of the Relocation of the Sayisi Dene

Ila Bussidor

University of Manitoba Press, 1997

For over 1500 years, the Sayisi Dene, 'The Dene from the East', led an independent life, following the caribou herds and having little contact with white society. In 1956, an arbitrary government decision to relocate them catapulted the Sayisi Dene into the 20th century. It replaced their traditional nomadic life of hunting and fishing with a slum settlement on the outskirts of Churchill, Manitoba. Inadequately housed, without jobs, unfamiliar with the language or the culture, their independence and self-determination deteriorated into a tragic cycle of discrimination, poverty, alcoholism and violent death.By the early 1970s, the band realized they had to take their future into their own hands again. After searching for a suitable location, they set up a new community at Tadoule Lake, 250 miles north of Churchill. Today they run their own health, education and community programs. But the scars of the relocation will take years to heal, and Tadoule Lake is grappling with the problems of a people whose ties to the land, and to one another, have been tragically severed.In Night Spirits, the survivors, including those who were children at the time of the move, as well as the few remaining elders, recount their stories. They offer a stark and brutally honest account of the near-destruction of the Sayisi Dene, and their struggle to reclaim their lives. It is a dark story, told in hope.

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Nobody's Boy and His Pals

The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic

Hendrik Hartog

University of Chicago Press, 2024

An engaging account of social reformer Jack Robbins, the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, and their legacy.

In 1914, social reformer Jack Robbins and a group of adolescent boys in Chicago founded the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, an unconventional and unusual institution. During a moral panic about delinquent boys, Robbins did not seek to rehabilitate and/or punish wayward youths. Instead, the boys governed themselves, democratically and with compassion for one another, and lived by their mantra “So long as there are boys in trouble, we too are in trouble.” For nearly thirty years, Robbins was their “supervisor,” and the will he drafted in the late 1950s suggests that he continued to care about forgotten boys, even as the political and legal contexts that shaped children’s lives changed dramatically.

Nobody’s Boy and His Pals is a lively investigation that challenges our ideas about the history of American childhood and the law. Scouring the archives for traces of the elusive Jack Robbins, Hendrik Hartog examines the legal histories of Progressive reform, childhood, criminality, repression, and free speech. The curiosity of Robbins’s story is compounded by the legal challenges to his will, which wound up establishing the extent to which last wishes must conform to dominant social values. Filled with persistent mysteries and surprising connections, Nobody’s Boy and His Pals illuminates themes of childhood and adolescence, race and ethnicity, sexuality, wealth and poverty, and civil liberties, across the American Century.

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Nothing Like Sunshine

A Story in the Aftermath of the MLK Assassination

Ben Kamin

Michigan State University Press, 2010

Rabbi Ben Kamin has written a definitive personal expression about race, coming of age in the 1960s, a forbidden friendship, and his personal love for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This is a story that spans a four-decade search for a lost high school chum, a deep misunderstanding, and a coming to terms with an America painfully evolving from the blood of MLK to the promise of Barack Obama.
The book is a remembrance of Kamin's life at Cincinnati's notorious Woodward High School, a microcosm of the 1960s and of America itself, as well as detailing Kamin's search-for Clifton, for America, for the key to understanding what race relations really are in the United States. Simultaneously, it is the story of the emerging rabbi's search for the legacy of his spiritual mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., taking Kamin from Cincinnati to Cleveland to Memphis to New Orleans and other points, and constantly bringing him home to his friend Clifton and "the heaving hallways" of that high school.

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