In the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs, Anishinaabe leaders granted land to a college where their children could be educated. At the time, the colonial settlement of Anishinaabe homelands hardly extended beyond Detroit in what settlers called the “Michigan Territory.” Four days after the Treaty of Fort Meigs was signed, the First College of Michigania was founded to claim the land that the Anishinaabeg had just granted. Four years later, the newly-chartered University of Michigan would claim this land. By the time that the university’s successor moved to Ann Arbor twenty years later, Anishinaabe people had been forced to cede almost all their land in what had become the state of Michigan, now inhabited by almost 200,000 settlers.

Under the Campus, the Land narrates the University of Michigan’s place in both Anishinaabe and settler history, tracing the university’s participation in the colonization of Anishinaabe homelands, Anishinaabe efforts to claim their right to an education, and the university’s history of disavowing, marginalizing, and minimizing its responsibilities and obligations to Anishinaabe people. Continuing the public conversations of the same name on U-M’s campus in 2023, Under the Campus, the Land provides a new perspective on the relationship between universities and settler colonialism in the US. Members of the U-M community, scholars of Midwest history, and those interested in Indigenous studies will find this book compelling.

The heart of this volume is the verbatim diary of a union soldier stationed in the deep south immediately after the Civil War.

A Union Soldier in the Land of the Vanquished is a vivid and authentic diary that transports readers to the tense and uncertain months following the Civil War. Edited by historian F. N. Boney, this work presents the unvarnished words of Sergeant Mathew Woodruff, a seasoned veteran of the 21st Missouri Infantry. After fighting in the major campaigns of the western theater, Woodruff returned to duty in June 1865 for occupation service along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Alabama—a region still reeling from defeat.

Spanning June through December of 1865, Woodruff’s daily entries capture the raw texture of life as a Union soldier in a conquered land. His observations range from the mundane to the profound: enforcing discipline among restless troops, navigating the challenges of Reconstruction, and finding moments of respite in hunting, fishing, and social gatherings. Through his candid reflections—complete with misspellings and colloquial phrasing—readers gain insight into the frustrations, hopes, and humanity of men tasked with rebuilding a fractured nation.

In the first volume of a series on Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca, Anne V. T. Kirkby investigated the agricultural production in the valley. With land-use data gathered at the time of her study (the 1960s), she created population and distribution models to help archaeologists interpret prehistoric settlement patterns in the region.