front cover of The Militarization of Indian Country
The Militarization of Indian Country
Winona LaDuke
Michigan State University Press, 2013

When it became public that Osama bin Laden’s death was announced with the phrase “Geronimo, EKIA!” many Native people, including Geronimo’s descendants, were insulted to discover that the name of a Native patriot was used as a code name for a world-class terrorist. Geronimo descendant Harlyn Geronimo explained, “Obviously to equate Geronimo with Osama bin Laden is an unpardonable slander of Native America and its most famous leader.” The Militarization of Indian Country illuminates the historical context of these negative stereotypes, the long political and economic relationship between the military and Native America, and the environmental and social consequences. This book addresses the impact that the U.S. military has had on Native peoples, lands, and cultures. From the use of Native names to the outright poisoning of Native peoples for testing, the U.S. military’s exploitation of Indian country is unparalleled and ongoing.

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Dragonfly Dance
Denise K. Lajimodiere
Michigan State University Press, 2010

Dragonfly Dance is a collection of poems remarkable for their candor and sense of catharsis. Writing from the vantage point of an American Indian women, Denise Lajimodiere opens a door into the lives of Native girls and women. Her poems often reflect the deep tensions between Native culture and white culture.
     Reflected in Lajimodiere's poems, life is sometimes beautiful but rarely easy. "The Necklace," the narrator details how her mother repaired a favorite beaded necklace, "her arthritic fingers patiently / threading beads / on the long thin needle, weaving / night after night." When the necklace is finally repaired, she wears it to school where

At recess a White boy
ran by, yanked
it off my neck and threw it.
I watched as it ascended
high above the blacktop,
the beads glittered, scattering their light,
a rainbow against gray skies.

     Unadorned, direct, and often raw, these riveting poems sear their way into our imaginations, inviting us into a world we might never have known. We are richer for the knowledge.

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Frederick Douglass
Freedom's Voice, 1818-1845
Gregory P. Lampe
Michigan State University Press, 1998

This work in the MSU Press Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series chronicles Frederick Douglass's preparation for a career in oratory, his emergence as an abolitionist lecturer in 1841, and his development and activities as a public speaker and reformer from 1841 to 1845. Lampe's meticulous scholarship overturns much of the conventional wisdom about this phase of Douglass's life and career uncovering new information about his experiences as a slave and as a fugitive; it provokes a deeper and richer understanding of this renowned orator's emergence as an important voice in the crusade to end slavery. 
     Contrary to conventional wisdom, Douglass was well prepared to become a full-time lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1841. His emergence as an eloquent voice from slavery was not as miraculous as scholars have led us to believe. Lampe begins by tracing Douglass's life as slave in Maryland and as fugitive in New Bedford, showing that experiences gained at this time in his life contributed powerfully to his understanding of rhetoric and to his development as an orator. An examination of his daily oratorical activities from the time of his emergence in Nantucket in 1841 until his departure for England in 1845 dispels many conventional beliefs surrounding this period, especially the belief that Douglass was under the wing of William Lloyd Garrison. Lampe's research shows that Douglass was much more outspoken and independent than previously thought and that at times he was in conflict with white abolitionists. 
     Included in this work is a complete itinerary of Douglass's oratorical activities, correcting errors and omissions in previously published works, as well as two newly discovered complete speech texts, never before published.

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Indian Country
Telling a Story in a Digital Age
Victoria L. LaPoe
Michigan State University Press, 2017
Storytelling has always been an important part of Native culture. Stories play a part in everyday Native life—they are often oral and rich in detail and language and serve as a form of recording history. Digital media now allow for the extension of this storytelling. This necessary text evaluates how digital media are changing the rich cultural act of storytelling within Native communities, with a specific focus on Native newsroom norms and routines. The authors argue that the non-Native press often leave consumers with a stereotypical view of American Indians, and aim to give a more authentic representation to Native journalism. With interviews from more than forty Native journalists around the country, this book is essential to understanding how digital media possibly advances the distribution of storytelling within the American Indian community.
 
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Fourth City
Essays from the Prison in America
Doran Larson
Michigan State University Press, 2014
At 2.26 million, incarcerated Americans not only outnumber the nation’s fourth-largest city, they make up a national constituency bound by a shared condition. Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America presents more than seventy essays from twenty-seven states, written by incarcerated Americans chronicling their experience inside. In essays as moving as they are eloquent, the authors speak out against a national prison complex that fails so badly at the task of rehabilitation that 60% of the 650,000 Americans released each year return to prison. These essays document the authors’ efforts at self-help, the institutional resistance such efforts meet at nearly every turn, and the impact, in money and lives, that this resistance has on the public. Directly confronting the images of prisons and prisoners manufactured by popular media, so-called reality TV, and for-profit local and national news sources, Fourth City recognizes American prisoners as our primary, frontline witnesses to the dysfunction of the largest prison system on earth. Filled with deeply personal stories of coping, survival, resistance, and transformation, Fourth City should be read by every American who believes that law should achieve order in the cause of justice rather than at its cost.
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Spit
Daniel Lassell
Michigan State University Press, 2021
The first-ever poetry book set on a llama farm, Daniel Lassell’s debut collection, Spit, examines the roles we play in the act of belonging. It is a portrait of a boy living on a farm populated with chickens sung to sleep by lullaby,  captive wolves next door that attack a child, and a herd of llamas learning to survive despite coyotes and a chaotic family. The collection in part explores the role of the body in health and illness and one’s treatment of the earth and others. A theme of spirituality also weaves throughout the collection as the speaker treks into adulthood, yearning for peace amid the decline of his parents’ marriage. Driven by a “wish to visit / some landless landscape,” the  speaker eventually leaves his family’s farm, only to find that return is impossible. After losing the farm and the llama herd to his parents’ divorce, the speaker wrestles with the role of presence as it relates to healing, remarking, “I wish enough, / to have only // these memories I have.” Unflinching at every turn, the collection pushes the boundaries of “home” to arrive upon new meaning, definition, and purpose.
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Conrad's Shadow
Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory
Nidesh Lawtoo
Michigan State University Press, 2016
Western thought has often dismissed shadows as fictional, but what if fictions reveal original truths? Drawing on an anti-Platonic tradition in critical theory, Lawtoo adopts ethical, anthropological, and philosophical lenses to offer new readings of Joseph Conrad’s novels and the postcolonial and cinematic works that respond to his oeuvre. He argues that Conrad’s fascination with doubles urges readers to reflect on the two sides of mimesis: one side is dark and pathological, and involves the escalation of violence, contagious epidemics, and catastrophic storms; the other side is luminous and therapeutic, and promotes communal survival, postcolonial reconciliation, and plastic adaptations to changing environments. Once joined, the two sides reveal Conrad as an author whose Janus-faced fictions are powerfully relevant to our contemporary world of global violence and environmental crisis.
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(New) Fascism
Contagion, Community, Myth
Nidesh Lawtoo
Michigan State University Press, 2019
Fascism tends to be relegated to a dark chapter of European history, but what if new forms of fascism are currently returning to the forefront of the political scene? In this book, Nidesh Lawtoo furthers his previous diagnostic of crowd behavior, identification, and mimetic contagion to account for the growing shadow cast by authoritarian leaders who rely on new media to take possession of the digital age. Donald Trump is considered here as a case study to illustrate Nietzsche’s untimely claim that, one day, “ ‘actors,’ all kinds of actors, will be the real masters.” In the process, Lawtoo joins forces with a genealogy of mimetic theorists—from Plato to Girard, through Nietzsche, Tarde, Le Bon, Freud, Bataille, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy, among others—to show that (new) fascism may not be fully “new,” let alone original; yet it effectively reloads the old problematics of mimesis via new media that have the disquieting power to turn politics itself into a fiction.
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The Phantom of the Ego
Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious
Nidesh Lawtoo
Michigan State University Press, 2013

The Phantom of the Ego is the first comparative study that shows how the modernist account of the unconscious anticipates contemporary discoveries about the importance of mimesis in the formation of subjectivity. Rather than beginning with Sigmund Freud as the father of modernism, Nidesh Lawtoo starts with Friedrich Nietzsche’s antimetaphysical diagnostic of the ego, his realization that mimetic reflexes—from sympathy to hypnosis, to contagion, to crowd behavior—move the soul, and his insistence that psychology informs philosophical reflection. Through a transdisciplinary, comparative reading of landmark modernist authors like Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Georges Bataille, Lawtoo shows that, before being a timely empirical discovery, the “mimetic unconscious” emerged from an untimely current in literary and philosophical modernism. This book traces the psychological, ethical, political, and cultural implications of the realization that the modern ego is born out of the spirit of imitation; it is thus, strictly speaking, not an ego, but what Nietzsche calls, “a phantom of the ego.” The Phantom of the Ego opens up a Nietzschean back door to the unconscious that has mimesis rather than dreams as its via regia, and argues that the modernist account of the “mimetic unconscious” makes our understanding of the psyche new.

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Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious, Volume 2
The Affective Hypothesis
Nidesh Lawtoo
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Representations of violence have subliminal contagious effects, but what kind of unconscious captures this imperceptible affective dynamic in the digital age? In volume two of a Janus-faced diagnostic of the cathartic and contagious effects of (new) media violence, Nidesh Lawtoo traces a genealogy of a long-neglected, embodied, relational, and highly mimetic unconscious that, well before the discovery of mirror neurons, posited mirroring reactions as a via regia to a phantom ego. Rather than being the product of a solipsistic discovery, the unconscious turns out to have haunted philosophers, psychologists, and artists for a long time. This book proposes a genealogy of untimely philosophical physicians that goes from Plato to Nietzsche, Bernheim to Féré, Freud to Bataille, Arendt to Girard, affect theory to the neurosciences. In their company, Lawtoo promotes the transdisciplinary field of mimetic studies by reevaluating the unconscious actions and reactions of homo mimeticus. As a new theory of mimesis emerges, Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious offers a searching diagnosis as to why the pathos of (new) media violence—from film to video games, police murders to the storming of the U.S Capitol—continues to cast a material shadow on the present and future.  
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Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious
vol. 1, The Catharsis Hypothesis
Nidesh Lawtoo
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Representations of violence are often said to generate cathartic effects, but what does “catharsis” mean? And what theory of the unconscious made this concept so popular that it reaches from classical antiquity to the digital age? In Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious, Nidesh Lawtoo reframes current debates on (new) media violence by tracing the philosophical, aesthetic, and historical vicissitudes of the “catharsis hypothesis” from antiquity to modernity and into the present. Drawing on theorists of mimesis from Aristotle to Nietzsche, Bernays to Breuer, Freud to Girard to Morin, Lawtoo offers a genealogy of the relationship between violence and the unconscious with at least two aims: First, this study gives an account of the birth of the Oedipal unconscious—out of a “cathartic method.” Second, it provides new theoretical foundations to solve a riddle of (new) media violence that may no longer rest on Oedipal solutions. In the process, Lawtoo outlines a new theory of violence, mimesis, and the unconscious that does not have desire as a via regia, but rather, the untimely realization that all affects spread contagiously and thus mimetically.
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Creating Conservatism
Postwar Words that Made an American Movement
Michael J. Lee
Michigan State University Press, 2014
Creating Conservatism charts the vital role of canonical post–World War II (1945–1964) books in generating, guiding, and sustaining conservatism as a political force in the United States. Dedicated conservatives have argued for decades that the conservative movement was a product of print, rather than a march, a protest, or a pivotal moment of persecution. The Road to Serfdom, Ideas Have Consequences, Witness, The Conservative Mind, God and Man at Yale, The Conscience of a Conservative, and other mid-century texts became influential not only among conservative office-holders, office-seekers, and well-heeled donors but also at dinner tables, school board meetings, and neighborhood reading groups. These books are remarkable both because they enumerated conservative political positions and because their memorable language demonstrated how to take those positions—functioning, in essence, as debate handbooks. Taking an expansive approach, the author documents the wide influence of the conservative canon on traditionalist and libertarian conservatives. By exploring the varied uses to which each founding text has been put from the Cold War to the culture wars, Creating Conservatism generates original insights about the struggle over what it means to think and speak conservatively in America.
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Increasing the Odds for High-Performance Teams
Lessons Learned
Arlen Leholm
Michigan State University Press, 2006

Have you ever wondered why some work teams greatly out-perform others within the same organizational settings? Have you questioned whether work teams from very different sectors of the economy and society achieved a high performance level by using similar means? Have you considered what you or others might do to help eams increase their chances of becoming truly high performing? Increasing the Odds for High-Performance Teams is written for the business leader who is inquisitive but busy—who seeks new lessons about high team performance but wants them to be succinct and efficient.
     The book is intended to assist professionals in private, public, and not-for-profit organizations who want to use teams to enhance job performance. Also, it is intended to be helpful to the team members, team leaders, mentors, coaches, and administrators across these sectors who want to diagnose their team and organizational conditions, in order to make improvements.

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The Thirty-Year War
A History of Detroit's Streetcars, 1892–1922
Neil J. Lehto
Michigan State University Press, 2017
Streetcars played an especially important role in society around the turn of the twentieth century in Detroit, in part because of the downtown hub-and-spoke design of its main streets. During this period the streetcar was the main mode of transportation for the average citizen, as horse-drawn carriages and automobiles were not found outside of the upper class. Control over streetcar franchises was highly coveted—this control was simultaneous with having power over how and where people were transported throughout the city, making it an incredible political tool. The Thirty-Year War was a battle waged between 1892 and 1922 by the City of Detroit against the politically powerful and deeply entrenched corporations that owned streetcar franchises for control of the city’s streetway system. This compelling history shows how and why the owners of monopoly franchises of great public utilities such as bridges, street railways, electricity, natural gas, and cable television will protect and defend their privilege against public ownership or control, and is an example of how one city successfully fought back.
 
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The Invasion
Janet Lewis
Michigan State University Press, 2000

The Invasion, a novel originally published in 1932, marked the debut of historical novelist Janet Lewis, who went on to write numerous poems and short stories as well as the novels The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Trial of Soren Quist. Lewis grew up in the Lake country of the Old Northwest and The Invasion is based on family stories she heard as a child.The Invasion displays well-researched historical accuracy, an innate understanding of and feeling for Native American culture enhanced by the author's fluency in the Ojibway language, and an economy of style that is remarkable for a first novel. 
     In 1790, John Johnston, a cultivated young Irishman, came to the far corner of the Northwest Territory to make his fortune intending to spend only a year. Instead he married Ozhah-guscoday- wayquay (The Woman of the Glade), daughter of the Ojibway chief Waub- ojeeg, and settled on the St. Mary's River. Together they founded a family that was loved, respected, and famous throughout the region for honesty, fairness, and hospitality. Their home was the center of culture for the area and for every visiting traveler, Native American or white. The Invasion chronicles a time when one culture violently supplanted another even as it depicts a family that blends two cultures together. 
     Henry Rowe Schoolcraft considered the Johnston family his most valued connection to the Native American population. He eventually married Jane Johnston, daughter of John and The Woman of the Glade, and remain close to her entire family. In his diary, Schoolcraft wrote of the Johnstons, "I have in fact stumbled, as it were, on the only family in Northwest America who could in Indian lore have acted as my guide, philosopher, and friend."

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West to Far Michigan
Settling the Lower Peninsula, 1815-1860
Kenneth E. Lewis
Michigan State University Press, 2001
West to Far Michigan is a study of the lower peninsula's occupation by agriculturalists, whose presence forever transformed the land and helped to create the modern state of Michigan. This is not simply a history of Michigan, but rather a work that focuses on why the state developed as it did. Although Michigan is seen today as an industrial state whose history is couched in terms of the fur trade and the international rivalry for the Great Lakes, agricultural settlement shaped its expansion. Using a model of agricultural colonization derived from comparative studies, Lewis examines the settlement process in Michigan between 1815 and 1860. This period marked the opening of Michigan to immigrants, saw the rise of commercial agriculture, and witnessed Michigan's integration into the larger national economy.
     Employing numerous primary sources, West to Far Michigan traces changes and patterns of settlement crucial to documenting the large-scale development of southern Michigan as a region. Diaries, letters, memoirs, gazetteers, and legal documents serve to transform the more abstract elements of economic and social change into more human terms. Through the experiences of the early Agriculturists process, we can gain insight into how their triumphs played out in communities within the region to produce small-scale elements that comprise the fabric of the larger cultural landscape.
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The Western Journals of Nehemiah and Henry Sanford, 1839–1846
Kenneth E. Lewis
Michigan State University Press, 2019
The late antebellum period saw the dramatic growth of the United States as Euro-American settlement began to move into new territories west of the Mississippi River. The journals and letters of businessmen Nehemiah and Henry Sanford, written between 1839 and 1846, provide a unique perspective into a time of dramatic expansion in the Great Lakes and beyond. These accounts describe the daily experiences of Nehemiah and his wife Nancy Shelton Sanford as they traveled west from their Connecticut home to examine lands for speculation in regions undergoing colonization, as well as the experiences of their son Henry who later came out to the family’s western property. Beyond an interest in business, the Sanfords’ journals provide a detailed picture of the people they encountered and the settlements and country through which they passed and include descriptions of events, activities, methods of travel and travel accommodations, as well as mining in the upper Mississippi Valley and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and a buffalo hunt on the Great Plains. Through their travels the Sanfords give us an intimate glimpse of the immigrants, settlers, Native Americans, missionaries, traders, mariners, and soldiers they encountered, and their accounts illuminate the lives and activities of the newcomers and native people who inhabited this fascinating region during a time of dramatic transition.
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Uprising
How Women Used the US West to Win the Right to Vote
Tiffany Lewis
Michigan State University Press, 2021
Decades before white women won the right to vote throughout the United States, they first secured that right in its Western region—beginning in Wyoming in 1869. Many scholars have studied why and how the Western states enfranchised women before the Eastern ones; this book instead examines the influence of the West on the national US suffrage movement. As the campaign for woman suffrage intensified, US suffragists often invoked the West in their verbal, visual, and embodied advocacy. In deploying this region as a persuasive resource, they challenged the traditional meanings of the West and East, thus gaining additional persuasive strategies. Tiffany Lewis’s analysis of the public discourse, images, and performances of suffragists and their opponents shows that the West played a pivotal role in the successful campaign for white women’s enfranchisement that culminated in 1920. In addition to offering a history of this political movement’s rhetorical strategy, Lewis illustrates the usefulness of region in protest—the way social movements can tactically employ region to motivate social change.
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Taking African Cartoons Seriously
Politics, Satire, and Culture
Peter Limb
Michigan State University Press, 2018
Cartoonists make us laugh—and think—by caricaturing daily events and politics. The essays, interviews, and cartoons presented in this innovative book vividly demonstrate the rich diversity of cartooning across Africa and highlight issues facing its cartoonists today, such as sociopolitical trends, censorship, and use of new technologies. Celebrated African cartoonists including Zapiro of South Africa, Gado of Kenya, and Asukwo of Nigeria join top scholars and a new generation of scholar-cartoonists from the fields of literature, comic studies and fine arts, animation studies, social sciences, and history to take the analysis of African cartooning forward. Taking African Cartoons Seriously presents critical thematic studies to chart new approaches to how African cartoonists trade in fun, irony, and satire. The book brings together the traditional press editorial cartoon with rapidly diverging subgenres of the art in the graphic novel and animation, and applications on social media. Interviews with bold and successful cartoonists provide insights into their work, their humor, and the dilemmas they face. This book will delight and inform readers from all backgrounds, providing a highly readable and visual introduction to key cartoonists and styles, as well as critical engagement with current themes to show where African political cartooning is going and why.
 
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Green Communication and China
On Crisis, Care, and Global Futures
Jingfang Liu
Michigan State University Press, 2020
How does China speak for nature? How are the pollution and climate change crises being addressed? What are the possibilities and limitations of mobilizing publics to care about the environment through new media, tourism, and government policy? Green Communication and China is the first volume to identify the importance of studying environmental communication in, about, and with China, a rising global environmental leader whose ecological and political controversies often make international headlines. Organized into three sections on communicating crisis, communicating care, and environmental futurity, these essays span multimodal communication practices and methods in green public culture and address topics ranging from The North Face advertisements to NGO advocacy to global governmental policy. The volume showcases the work of leading scholars, all of them deeply intimate with China, in disciplines ranging from cultural studies and rhetoric to public opinion polling, discourse analysis, ethnic studies, and sociology. These complex projects engage transnational and national politics, ecological and economic challenges, media saturation, and government control. Holding these tensions together without glossing over differences, Green Communication and China will inform new agendas for environmental communication in China, the United States, and beyond.
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front cover of Civic Empowerment in an Age of Corporate Greed
Civic Empowerment in an Age of Corporate Greed
Edward C. Lorenz
Michigan State University Press, 2012

A thought-provoking investigation of an urgent issue facing American communities today, Edward C. Lorenz’s book examines the intersection of corporate irresponsibility and civic engagement. At the heart of this case study is a group of firms responsible for seven of the most contaminated Superfund sites in the United States, the largest food contamination accident in U.S. history, stunning stock and financial manipulations, and a massive shift of jobs off shore. In the face of these egregious environmental, employee, and investor abuses, several communities impacted by these firms organized to confront and combat failures in corporate and bureaucratic leadership, winning notable victories over major financiers, lobbyists, and indifferent or ineffective government agencies. A critical analysis of public and private leadership, business and economic ethics, and civic life, this book concludes with a stirring blueprint for other communities facing similarly overwhelming opposition.

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Shedding Skins
Four Sioux Poets
Adrian C. Louis
Michigan State University Press, 2008

Here's the myth: Native Americans are people of great spiritual depth, in touch with the rhythms of the earth, rhythms that they celebrate through drumming and dancing. They love the great outdoors and are completely in tune with the natural world. They can predict the weather by glancing at the sky, or hearing a crow cry, or somehow. Who knows exactly how? The point of the myth is that Indians are, well, special. Different from white people, but in a good way.
     The four young male Native American poets whose work is brought together in this startling collection would probably raise high their middle fingers in salute to this myth. These guys and "guys" they are—don't buy into the myth. Their poems aren't about hunting and fishing or bonding with animal spirits. Their poems are about urban decay and homelessness, about loneliness and despair, about Payday Loans and 40-ounce beers, about getting enough to eat and too much to drink. And there is nothing romantic about their poetry, either. It is written in the vernacular of mean streets: often raw and coarse and vulgar, just like the lives it describes. Sure, they write about life on the reservation. However, for the Indians in their poems, life on the reservation is a lot like life in the city, but without the traffic. These poets are sick to death of the myth. You can feel it in their poems.
     These poets are bound by a common attitude as well as a common heritage. All four—Joel Waters, Steve Pacheco, Luke Warm Water, and Trevino L. Brings Plenty—are Sioux, and all four identify themselves as "Skins" (as in "Redskins"). In their poems, they grapple with their heritage, wrestling with what it means to be a Sioux and a Skin today. It's a fight to the finish.

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Cleveland Architecture 1890–1930
Building the City Beautiful
Jeannine deNobel Love
Michigan State University Press, 2020
This study looks at the architectural transformation of Cleveland during its “golden age”—roughly the period between post–Civil War reconstruction and World War I. By the early twentieth century, Cleveland, which would evolve into the fifth largest city in America, hoped to shed the gritty industrial image of its rapid-growth period and evolve into a city to match the political clout of its statesmen like John Hay and wealth of its business elites such as John D. Rockefeller. Encouraged by the spectacle and public  response to the Beaux-Arts buildings of the Chicago World’s Exposition of 1893, the city embarked upon a grand scheme to construct new governmental and civic structures known as the Cleveland Plan of Grouping Public Buildings, one of the earliest and most complete City Beautiful planning schemes in the country. The success of this plan led to a spillover effect that prompted architects to design all manner of new public buildings with similar Beaux-Arts stylistic characteristics during the next three decades. With the group plan realized, civic leaders— with the goal of expanding the city’s cultural institutions to match the distinction of its civic center—established its counterpart in  University Circle, creating a secondary group plan, the first cultural center in the country.
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The Geoarchaeology of Lake Michigan Coastal Dunes
William A. Lovis
Michigan State University Press, 2012

Complex sets of environmental factors have interacted over the past 5,000 years to affect how changes in climate, temperature, relative precipitation, and the levels of Lake Michigan influence the preservation of archaeological sites in coastal sand dunes along Lake Michigan. As a collaboration between earth scientists, archaeologists, and geoarchaeologists, this study draws on a wealth of research and multidisciplinary insights to explore the conditions necessary to safeguard ancient human settlements in these landscapes. A variety of contemporary and innovative techniques, including numerous dating methods and approaches, were employed to determine when and for how long sand dunes were active and when and for how long archaeological sites were occupied. Knowledge of dune processes and settlement patterns not only affects archaeological interpretations, but it is also consummately important to land planners responsible for managing heritage archaeological sites in the Lake Michigan coastal zone.

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Imprints
The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago
John N. Low
Michigan State University Press, 2016
The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians has been a part of Chicago since its founding. In very public expressions of indigeneity, they have refused to hide in plain sight or assimilate. Instead, throughout the city’s history, the Pokagon Potawatomi Indians have openly and aggressively expressed their refusal to be marginalized or forgotten—and in doing so, they have contributed to the fabric and history of the city.
Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago examines the ways some Pokagon Potawatomi tribal members have maintained a distinct Native identity, their rejection of assimilation into the mainstream, and their desire for inclusion in the larger contemporary society without forfeiting their “Indianness.” Mindful that contact is never a one-way street, Low also examines the ways in which experiences in Chicago have influenced the Pokagon Potawatomi. Imprints continues the recent scholarship on the urban Indian experience before as well as after World War II.
 
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Maltese in Michigan
Joseph M. Lubig
Michigan State University Press, 2011

Maltese in Michigan is an enlivening volume depicting the struggles and accomplishments of a singular culture, an immigrant narrative at once recognizable and enigmatic. Without realizing it, most Americans are probably familiar with the Maltese people through the cross displayed by firefighters, which bears a strong similarity in design and meaning to the one used by the Knights of Malta. The noble qualities embodied by the Maltese Cross are reflected in the pride and accomplishments of Maltese immigrants in Michigan, a small but vibrant ethnic group. Rooted in the post–World War II experiences of the 20th century, the Maltese established themselves in the city of Detroit, and thrived due to a strong work ethic and Catholic faith, while maintaining a strong central identity. This volume is a tribute to the Maltese of Michigan and all who have begun anew in an unfamiliar land and culture.

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Serbians in Michigan
Paul Lubotina
Michigan State University Press, 2014
Fighting, nationalism, and religion influenced Serbian migration to America in three distinct waves during the twentieth century, first following the Balkan Wars, again after the Second World War, and most recently, following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1980s. Serbians in Michigan examines the lives of Serbian immigrants from lowland areas of the Balkans and the distinct highland culture of Montenegro. The work provides cultural background to Serbian society that serves as a benchmark to compare the changes that occurred among the population after arriving in Michigan. The book also functions as an informational how-to guide for individuals of Serbian descent who are interested in learning more about their ancestors. Lubotina provides key words, phrases, and recipes that allow readers to sample aspects of Serbian culture from the comfort of their homes. Additionally, the book explores the nature of a split between conservative and liberal factions in Serbian-American communities. However, a key theme in the book is how the Serbian Orthodox Church has maintained Serbian heritage and nationalism through several generations in America.
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front cover of Rhetoric, Independence, and Nationhood, 1760–1800, Volume II
Rhetoric, Independence, and Nationhood, 1760–1800, Volume II
Stephen E Lucas
Michigan State University Press, 2022
Few periods of American history have been studied more extensively or debated more intensely than the last four decades of the eighteenth century, during which the thirteen colonies declared their independence from Great Britain, won their independence on the battlefield, created the United States Constitution, and implemented a new national government. Scholars have approached these developments from a variety of perspectives—economic, social, political, religious, legal, and diplomatic, to name a few. This volume adopts a rhetorical perspective, which foregrounds the art of effective expression as a means of influencing political perceptions, values, and behaviors. It presents eleven essays by an interdisciplinary group of scholars who bring to bear a variety of methods, backgrounds, perspectives, and specializations. The essays illuminate key rhetors, works, controversies, and moments that helped shape American discourse and politics during the years 1760–1800.
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The Origins of Bioethics
Remembering When Medicine Went Wrong
John A. Lynch
Michigan State University Press, 2019
The Origins of Bioethics argues that what we remember from the history of medicine and how we remember it are consequential for the identities of doctors, researchers, and patients in the present day. Remembering when medicine went wrong calls people to account for the injustices inflicted on vulnerable communities across the twentieth century in the name of medicine, but the very groups empowered to create memorials to these events often have a vested interest in minimizing their culpability for them. Sometimes these groups bury this past and forget events when medical research harmed those it was supposed to help. The call to bioethical memory then conflicts with a desire for “minimal remembrance” on the part of institutions and governments. The Origins of Bioethics charts this tension between bioethical memory and minimal remembrance across three cases—the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook Hepatitis Study, and the Cincinnati Whole Body Radiation Study—that highlight the shift from robust bioethical memory to minimal remembrance to forgetting.
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