front cover of Uncovering Nevada's Past
Uncovering Nevada's Past
A Primary Source History of the Silver State
John B. Reid
University of Nevada Press, 2004
Nevada’s relatively brief history has been nonetheless remarkably eventful. From the activities of the first Euro-American explorers to the booms and busts of the mining industry, from the struggles and artistry of the Native Americans to the establishment of liberal divorce laws and such unique industries as legalized gambling and prostitution, from Cold War atomic tests to the civil rights movement, from the arrival of a diverse and rapidly growing urban population to the Sagebrush Rebellion, Nevada has played a part in the nation’s development while following its own ruggedly independent path. In Uncovering Nevada’s Past, historians John B. Reid and Ronald M. James have collected more than fifty major documents and visual images—some never before published—that define Nevada’s colorful and complex development. Here are the words of such literary luminaries as Mark Twain, Sarah Winnemucca, and Arthur Miller; anonymous newspaper articles; public documents including Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of Nevada statehood and the probate records of murdered Virginia City prostitute Julia Bulette; personal letters; political speeches; and personal accounts of, among other subjects, the construction of Hoover Dam, life in a mining boomtown, racial segregation in Las Vegas, political careers, and atomic testing. Images include photographs of significant Nevada architecture, the masterpieces of renowned Paiute basketmaker Dat-so-la-lee, tree carvings by Basque sheepherders, and tourism promotions. The collection ranges from the earliest descriptions of the region to the current debate on Yucca Mountain. The volume editors have provided an introduction and headnotes that set the documents into their historical and social context. Uncovering Nevada’s Past is a vital, enlightening record of Nevada’s history—in the words of the people who lived and made it—that makes for lively and engaging reading.
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Under The Mountain
Molly Flagg Knudtsen
University of Nevada Press, 1982

This collection of vignettes about life in Central Nevada is much more than a historical document. According to author Molly Knudtsen, “These are the stories neighbors and families tell, where fact grows just a little larger than life. This is the stuff of legend.”The book focuses on a time when splendorous houses decorated the windswept valleys of Central Nevada; where fearless, stouthearted men and women braved the elements to survive and seek their fortune; and when people who loved the land clung to it and gave it a character all its own. These tales capture the spirit and folklore of early-day Central Nevada and illustrate the effect on its present-day inhabitants. Molly Knudtsen shares the experience of riding horseback through some of the great archaeological finds of the valley. She divulges the secret of converting flour, yeast, and potato water into a perfect loaf of bread. And through colorful anecdotes, she passes along the legendary accounts of Colonel Dave Buel.

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Under the Western Sky
Essays on the Fiction and Music of Willy Vlautin
Neil Campbell
University of Nevada Press, 2018
This original collection of essays by experts in the field weave together the first comprehensive examination of Nevada-born Willy Vlautin’s novels and songs, as well as featuring 11 works of art that accompany his albums and books.

Brutally honest, raw, gritty, down to earth, compassionate and affecting, Willy Vlautin’s writing evokes a power in not only theme, but in methodology. Vlautin’s novels, The Motel Life, Northline, Lean on Pete and The Free (2006-2014) chart the dispossessed lives of young people struggling to survive in difficult economic times and in regions of the U.S. West and Pacific Northwest traditionally viewed as affluent and abundant. Yet as his work shows, are actually highly stratified and deprived.

Likewise, Vlauntin’s songs, penned as lead singer of the Americana band Richmond Fontaine chart a related territory of blue-collar landscapes of the American West and Northwest with a strong emphasis on narrative and affective soundscapes evocative of the similar worlds defined in his novels.

Featuring an interview with Vlautin himself, this edited collection aims to develop the first serious, critical consideration of the important novels and songs of Willy Vlautin by exploring relations between region, music, and writing through the lens of critical regionality and other interdisciplinary, cultural, and theoretical methodologies. In so doing, it will situate his work within its regional frame of the American New West, and particularly the city of Reno, Nevada and the Pacific Northwest, whilst showing how he addresses wider cultural and global issues such as economic change, immigration shifts, gender inequality, and the loss of traditional mythic identities.

The essays take different positions in relation to considerations of both novels and music, looking for links and relations across genres, always mindful of their specificity. Under the Western Sky shows how although apparently rooted in place, Vlautin’s work traces diverse lines of contemporary cultural enquiry, engaging in an effective and troubling examination of regional haunting.
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Underground Leviathan
Corporate Sovereignty and Mining in the Americas
Israel G. Solares
University of Nevada Press, 2024
Underground Leviathan explores the emergence, dynamics, and effects of the United States Company, and how its mining operations shaped the business, environmental, political, and scientific landscape of North America in the first half of the twentieth century. It explores how the effort to control the richness from the crust of the Earth allowed the company to exercise the power of a concealed Leviathan.
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Unfit For Marriage
Impotent Spouses On Trial In The Basque Region Of Spain, 1650-1750
Edward J. Behrend-Martinez
University of Nevada Press, 2014
The Catholic Church of early modern Europe intended the sacrament of matrimony to represent a lifelong commitment, and it allowed few grounds for the dissolution of an unhappy marriage. One was nonconsummation owing to the sexual impotency of one of the partners. Even then, an annulment was granted only after a church court had conducted a lengthy investigation of the case, soliciting testimony from numerous witnesses as well as from the aggrieved couple, and had subjected the allegedly impotent spouse (and sometimes both spouses) to an intimate physical examination.

Edward J. Behrend-Martinez has studied the transcripts of eighty-three impotency trials conducted by the ecclesiastical court of Calahorra (La Rioja), a Spanish diocese with urban and rural parishes, both Basque and Castilian. From these records, he draws a detailed, fascinating portrait of private life and public sexuality in early modern Europe. These trials were far more than a salacious inquiry into the intimate details of other people’s lives. The church valued marital sex as a cornerstone of stable society, intended not only for procreation but also for maintaining domestic harmony. Every couple’s sex life, however private in practice or intention, was a matter of public and ecclesiastical concern.

Unfit for Marriage offers vivid accounts of marital sex and the role that property, gender, and personal preference played in marriage in early modern Europe. It is essential reading for anyone interested in social history, sexuality, gender studies, canon law, legal history, and the history of divorce in western Europe.
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The University of Nevada, Reno, 1874-2024
150 Years of Inspiring Excellence
John Trent
University of Nevada Press, 2024
With an uncertain beginning in the sparsely populated remote northern Nevada town of Elko, a preparatory school opened its doors in October 1874 through the Morrill Act that sought to establish land-grant universities across the nation. Seven students began their higher education experience with dreams of a better future, but they probably could not have predicted that their alma mater would one day become the University of Nevada, Reno, a nationally classified Carnegie R1 “Very High Research” institution.

As both the University’s student body and the state’s population grew, the campus was transferred to Reno in 1885-86 as an effort to secure the fledgling institution’s prospects for survival. Many of the initial class of thirty-five students resided in Morrill Hall, the only building on campus, where they also received instruction and ate their meals. As the University enhanced its academic offerings, enrollment grew to more than 1,000 students by the turn of the century. A strong belief that the University must always be changing and evolving to meet the needs of its students and answer the challenges of a particular era became the guiding forces behind the administration’s decision-making. With an increasingly diverse student body and one of the most productive academic faculties in the country, the little school on the hill expanded during its first 100 years to become a leading public university in the western United States.

Today, the University continues to achieve institutional benchmarks, including a record 5,000 graduates during the 2019–20 academic year. It is exactly this kind of student success that has always been at the heart of the Wolf Pack Family’s mission to help students find the path that is right for them, and beckon others to share in their journey.

The 150th anniversary book is published in honor of this milestone and highlights numerous parts of the University’s history, showcasing why the University of Nevada, Reno has truly been a catalyst for success and change throughout the state’s story.
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Unnatural Ecopoetics
Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry
Sarah Nolan
University of Nevada Press, 2017
What constitutes an environment in American literature is an issue that has undergone much debate across environmental humanities in the last decade. In the field, some have argued that environments are markedly natural or wild sites while others contend literary spaces can be both wild and urban, or even cultural. Yet, few of the works produced to date have addressed the pronounced influence the author of a text has on a literary environment. Despite exciting work on materiality and culture in conceptions of environments, critics have not yet fully examined the contributions of poetry’s language, form, and self-awareness in rethinking what constitutes an environment.
 
By approaching environments in a new way, Nolan closes this gap and recognizes how contemporary poets employ self-reflexive commentary and formal experimentation in order to create new natural/cultural environments on the page. She proposes a radical new direction for ecopoetics and deploys it in relation to four major American poets. Working from literal to textual spaces through the contemporary poetry of A.R. Ammons’s Garbage, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Susan Howe’s The Midnight, and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters, the book presents applications of unnatural ecopoetics in poetic environments, ones that do not engage with traditional ideas of nature and would otherwise remain outside the scope of ecocritical and ecopoetic studies.
 
Nolan proposes a new practical approach for reading poetic language. Ecocriticism is a very fluid and evolving discipline, and Nolan’s pioneering new book pushes the boundaries of second-wave ecopoetics—the fundamental issue being what is nature/natural, and how does poetic language, particularly self-conscious contemporary poetic agency, contribute to and complicate that question.   
 
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