A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY32 start with O start with O
Taking inspiration from César Chávez, as a young man Salas and others led a historic march from Wautoma to Madison to demand that lawmakers address rampant violations of Wisconsin’s minimum wage laws and housing codes. These young labor leaders founded Obreros Unidos—Workers United—to continue the fight for fairness and respect, as well as to provide much-needed services to migrant families. This memoir of a movement details how their work went beyond the fields to have lasting impacts on representation in community organizations and access to education, empowering later generations to demand better.
Anne Wetzell Armstrong adored her adopted hometown. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she moved with her family to the “West End” (Fort Sanders) area of Knoxville, Tennessee, in the 1880s, a pivotal decade for a city just getting past the trauma of the Civil War and becoming an economically diverse and culturally cosmopolitan center. Author of The Seas of God (1915), set in a thinly disguised Knoxville (called “Kingsville”), Armstrong was privileged, unconventional, and modern. She was divorced (she later married an Armstrong of Knoxville’s Bleak House), a single mother, and worked—not only as a teacher at Knoxville Girls High School but also in personnel with National City Company of New York and in industrial relations at Eastman Kodak. Her second novel, This Day and Time (1930), is regarded as the first fictional work to treat Appalachia realistically.
Journalist John Gunther’s 1946 description of Knoxville as the “ugliest city I ever saw in America” served as the impetus for Armstrong to pen a memoir of a city she remembered quite differently. Sophisticated and witty, Of Time and Knoxville provides lively, sometimes scandalous sketches of such well-known Knoxville figures as Lizzie Crozier French, Armstrong’s mentor and a leader in the woman’s suffrage movement; Perez Dickinson, businessman and owner of the socially popular Island Home farm (and cousin of Emily Dickinson); and Mary Boyce Temple, clubwoman, philanthropist, and socialite, whose home is preserved as the last extant single-family residence in downtown Knoxville. Complemented by Linda Behrend’s excellent introduction and meticulous annotations, this distinctive memoir also delivers an unusual picture of Knoxville’s beloved Market Square and vividly depicts fin de siècle Knoxville, with its great food at hotel restaurants and lively events at dance halls. Armstrong also details the tragic Flat Creek train wreck of 1889, which seriously injured her own father and led to his death five years later. Of Time and Knoxville is a must-read for lovers of Knoxville, Victorian America, women’s history, and memoir.
Uncomplicated when compared with the task of managing today's highly mechanized agricultural complexes, life on the early twentieth-century small farm entailed hard work and afforded simple pleasures that brought satisfaction and enjoyment to the farm and family. Farming on that scale and in the same manner has now become almost completely infeasible, yet in those times a good farmer could prosper and become independent. Wheeler McMillen’s father, Lewis, did both.
Relying frequently on his father’s account books and concise diaries, for this is primarily his father’s story, McMillen recounts the immense labor that farming demanded before the advent of the tractor and the combine harvester. He evokes the special excitements of having company for Sunday dinner, attending the annual oyster supper at the Grange Hall, and gathering on the Fourth of July with the interminable wait for darkness to fall. McMillen also portrays the quiet peace and ineffable joy of private moments, such as resting the horses during spring plowing to watch bronzed grackles search for food in the freshly turned furrows.
Wheeler McMillen’s slice of history will speak to those interested in what rural life was once like in the Midwest and to Ohioans who would like to learn more about their state’s recent past.
When his captain was killed during the Battle of Perryville, John Calvin Hartzell was made commander of Company H, 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He led his men during the Battle of Chickamauga, the siege of Chattanooga, and the Battle of Missionary Ridge. Edited and introduced by Charles Switzer, Ohio Volunteer: The Childhood and Civil War Memoirs of Captain John Calvin Hartzell, OVI documents military strategy, the life of the common soldier, the intense excitement and terror of battle, and the wretchedness of the wounded.
Hartzell’s family implored him to set down his life story, including his experiences in the Civil War from 1862 to 1866. Hartzell did so diligently, taking more than two years to complete his manuscript. The memoir reveals a remarkable memory for vivid details, the ability to see larger and more philosophical perspectives, and a humorous outlook that helped him bear the unbearable.
He also depicted the changing rural economy, the assimilation of the Pennsylvania Dutch, and the transformations wrought by coal mining and the iron industry. Hartzell felt individualism was threatened by the Industrial Revolution and the cruelties of the war. He found his faith in humanity affirmed—and the dramatic tension in his memoir resolved—when 136,000 Union soldiers reenlisted and assured victory for the North. The common soldier, he wrote, was “loyal to the core.”
Inspired by the dishes made by his mother, Eleanor, and featuring recipes found in her well-worn recipe box, Jerry and his daughter, Susan, take us on a culinary tour of life on the farm during the Depression and World War II. Seasoned with personal stories, menus, and family photos, Old Farm Country Cookbook recalls a time when electricity had not yet found its way to the farm, when making sauerkraut was a family endeavor, and when homemade ice cream tasted better than anything you could buy at the store.
Combining elements of the personal and the universal, these essays chart the passage of time from childhood to adulthood, sickness to health, working life to retirement, parenthood to grandparenthood, and everything in between. These sharply observed vignettes highlight the importance of taking time to appreciate the ordinary occurrences that profoundly shape our lives and the places we call home.
On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War introduces readers to the first regiment from the Pacific Northwest to serve the Union cause. James Robbins Jewell offers a glimpse into the lives of these soldiers, presenting their wartime letters to various northwesterners to share their experiences with loved ones at home.
Complete with a series of reminiscences and excerpts from memoirs by First Oregon Cavalry officers and soldiers, On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War is the first collection of primary source materials from soldiers serving in this Far Western territory. Jewell’s first-rate collection enables readers to step directly into the Pacific Northwest of the early 1860s and experience the Civil War from a different perspective.
Walter Benjamin's posthumously published collection of writings on hashish is a detailed blueprint for a book that was never written--a "truly exceptional book about hashish," as Benjamin describes it in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem. A series of "protocols of drug experiments," written by himself and his co-participants between 1927 and 1934, together with short prose pieces that he published during his lifetime, On Hashish provides a peculiarly intimate portrait of Benjamin, venturesome as ever at the end of the Weimar Republic, and of his unique form of thought.
Consciously placing himself in a tradition of literary drug-connoisseurs from Baudelaire to Hermann Hesse, Benjamin looked to hashish and other drugs for an initiation into what he called "profane illumination." At issue here, as everywhere in Benjamin's work, is a new way of seeing, a new connection to the ordinary world. Under the influence of hashish, as time and space become inseparable, experiences become subtly stratified and resonant: we inhabit more than one plane in time. What Benjamin, in his contemporaneous study of Surrealism, calls "image space" comes vividly to life in this philosophical immersion in the sensuous.
This English-language edition of On Hashish features a section of supplementary materials--drawn from Benjamin's essays, letters, and sketches--relating to hashish use, as well as a reminiscence by his friend Jean Selz, which concerns a night of opium-smoking in Ibiza. A preface by Howard Eiland discusses the leading motifs of Benjamin's reflections on intoxication.
One day, Jesse Donaldson wakes up in Portland, Oregon, and asks his wife to uproot their life together and move to his native Kentucky. As he searches for the reason behind this sudden urge, Donaldson examines both the place where he was born and the life he’s building.
The result is a hybrid—part memoir, part meditation on nostalgia, part catalog of Kentucky history and myth. Organized according to Kentucky geography, with one passage for each of the commonwealth’s 120 counties, On Homesickness examines whether we can ever return to the places we’ve called home.
The reader is given an intimate memoir of Jewish adolescence and life from a young woman’s perspective in an Eastern European shtetl at the end of the nineteenth century. Hinde Bergner, future mother of one of Yiddish literature’s greatest poets and grandmother of one of Israel’s leading painters, recalls the gradual impact of modernization on a traditional world as she finds herself caught between her thirst for a European education and true love, and the expectations of her traditional family. Written during the late 1930s as a series of episodes mailed to her children, and never completed due to Bergner’s murder at the hand of the Nazis, the memoir provides details about her teachers and matchmakers, domestic religion and customs, and the colorful characters that peopled a Jewish world that is no more.
Translated from the Yiddish and with a critical introduction by Justin Cammy, it is a lively addition to the library of Jewish women’s memoir, and should be of interest to students of Eastern European Jewish culture and women’s studies.
Moments of clarity are rare and fleeting; how can we become comfortable outside of them, in the more general condition of uncertainty within which we make our lives? Written by English professor Emily Ogden while her children were small, On Not Knowing forays into this rich, ambivalent space. Each of her sharply observed essays invites the reader to think with her about questions she can’t set aside: not knowing how to give birth, to listen, to hold it together, to love.
Unapologetically capacious in her range of reference and idiosyncratic in the canon she draws on, Ogden moves nimbly among the registers of experience, from the operation of a breast pump to the art of herding cattle; from one-night stands to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe; from kayaking near a whale to a psychoanalytic meditation on drowning. Committed to the accumulation of knowledge, Ogden nonetheless finds that knowingness for her can be a way of getting stuck, a way of not really living. Rather than the defensiveness of willful ignorance, On Not Knowing celebrates the defenselessness of not knowing yet—possibly of not knowing ever. Ultimately, this book shows how resisting the temptation of knowingness and embracing the position of not knowing becomes a form of love.
In these linked essays, Bilocerkowycz invites readers to meet a swirling cast of post-Soviet characters, including a Russian intelligence officer who finds Osama bin Laden a few weeks after 9/11; a Ukrainian poet whose nose gets broken by Russian separatists; and a long-lost relative who drives a bus into the heart of Chernobyl. On Our Way Home from the Revolution muddles our easy distinctions between innocence and culpability, agency and fate.
In the 1950s, professional historians claiming to specialize in tropical Africa were no more than a handful. The teaching of world history was confined to high school courses, and even those were focused on European history, with a chapter added to account for the history of East and South Asia. The change over the ensuing decades was revolutionary.
Philip D. Curtin was a leader among a new generation of historians that emerged after the Second World War. Written with characteristic economy and telling detail, On the Fringes of History: A Memoir follows Curtin from his beginnings in central West Virginia in the 1920s, through a distinguished academic career in which Curtin founded African studies at the University of Wisconsin. He began the programs in comparative world history at Wisconsin and Johns Hopkins, producing many of the most influential historians and Africanists from the 1950s to today.
Always an independent thinker and controversial figure, Curtin revived the study of the Atlantic slave trade. His career stands as an example of the kind of dissatisfaction and struggles that brought about a sea change in higher education. On the Fringes of History traces the movement of African history and world history from the fringes of the history profession into the mainstream. This stunningly illustrated memoir illuminates both the career of a leading historian and the history of twentieth-century academia.
Previously available only in an out-of-print Swedish edition published in 1955, Henry Bengston's firsthand account deals with what historian Dag Blanck calls the "other Swedish America."
Swedish immigrants in general were conservative, but Bengston and others—most notably Joe Hill—joined the working-class labor movement on the left, primarily as Debsian socialists, although their ranks included other socialists, communists, and anarchists. Involved in the radical labor movement on many fronts, Bengston was the editor of Svenska Socialisten from 1912 until he dropped out of the Scandinavian Socialist Federation in 1920. Even after 1920, however, his sympathies remained with the movement he had once strongly espoused.
Frank Denius was not yet twenty-one when he fought his way across Europe and was awarded four Silver Stars, a Presidential Unit Citation, and two Purple Hearts. On the Way describes Denius’s formative experiences during World War II in gripping detail and will cause any reader to wonder how he or she might have held up under similar pressure. The powerful opening chapters are followed by a detailed account of Denius’s life and career after the war, assembled into a first-person memoir from conversations between Denius and Thomas Hatfield, and published by the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.
Discharged from the army in October 1945, Denius enrolled at the University of Texas within a week. He is a lifelong supporter of the university: as part of the Texas Exes, as a donor to numerous academic programs, and as a fan of Longhorn football. Former UT football coach Mack Brown liked to say, “Frank has been to more practices than I have.”
Denius graduated from the University of Texas School of Law and joined one of Austin’s leading law firms in the late 1940s. Denius recounts how Texas operated in Lyndon Johnson’s prime, observes power plays in the Texas energy industry, and describes his role in building a regional university into a global leader.
“I never wanted to be a professor,” writes Jerry Apps in the introduction to Once a Professor. Yet a series of unexpected events and unplanned experiences put him on an unlikely path—and led to a thirty-eight-year career at the University of Wisconsin.
In this continuation of the Apps life story begun in his childhood memoir Limping through Life, Wisconsin’s celebrated rural storyteller shares stories from his years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1957 to 1995, when he left the university to lecture and write fulltime. During those years Apps experienced the turmoil of protests and riots at the UW in the 1960s, the struggles of the tenure process and faculty governance, and the ever-present pressure to secure funding for academic research and programs.
Through it all, the award-winning writer honed a personal philosophy of education—one that values critical thinking, nontraditional teaching approaches, and hands-on experiences outside of the classroom. Colorful characters, personal photos, and journal entries from the era enrich this account of an unexpected campus career.
The book is both a personal record and a unique document of our times. With her characteristic precision and transparency, Wolf examines the interplay of the private, subjective, and major contemporary historical events. She writes about Germany after 9/11, about her work on her last great book City of Angels, and also about her exhausting confrontation with old age. One Day a Year is a compelling and personal glimpse into the life of one of the world’s greatest writers.
At once deeply intimate and terrifyingly universal, One Hour in Paris weaves together Freedman’s personal experience with the latest philosophical, neuroscientific, and psychological insights on what it means to live in a body that has been traumatized. Using her background as a philosopher, she looks at the history of psychological trauma and draws on recent theories of posttraumatic stress disorder and neuroplasticity to show how recovery from horrific experiences is possible. Through frank discussions of sex and intimacy, she explores the consequences of sexual violence for love and relationships, and she illustrates the steep personal cost of sexual violence and the obstacles faced by individual survivors in its aftermath. Freedman’s book is an urgent call to face this fundamental social problem head-on, arguing that we cannot continue to ignore the fact that sexual violence against women is rooted in gender inequalities that exist worldwide—and must be addressed.
One Hour in Paris is essential reading for survivors of sexual violence as well as an invaluable resource for therapists, mental health professionals, and family members and friends of victims.
In 1991, Mark Osteen and his wife, Leslie, were struggling to understand why their son, Cameron, was so different from other kids. At age one, Cam had little interest in toys and was surprisingly fixated on books. He didn’t make baby sounds; he ignored other children. As he grew older, he failed to grasp language, remaining unresponsive even when his parents called his name. When Cam started having screaming anxiety attacks, Mark and Leslie began to grasp that Cam was developmentally delayed. But when Leslie raised the possibility of an autism diagnosis, Mark balked. Autism is so rare, he thought. Might as well worry about being struck by lightning.
Since that time, awareness of autism has grown monumentally. Autism has received extensive coverage in the news media, and it has become a popular subject for film, television, and literature, but the disorder is frequently portrayed and perceived as a set of eccentricities that can be corrected with proper treatment. In reality, autism permanently wrecks many children’s chances for typical lives. Plenty of recent bestsellers have described the hardships of autism, but those memoirs usually focus on the recovery of people who overcome some or all of the challenges of the disorder. And while that plot is uplifting, it’s rare in real life, as few autistic children fully recover. The territory of severe autism—of the child who is debilitated by the condition, who will never be cured—has been largely neglected. One of Us: A Family’s Life with Autism tells that story.
In this book, Mark Osteen chronicles the experience of raising Cam, whose autism causes him aggression, insomnia, compulsions, and physical sickness. In a powerful, deeply personal narrative, Osteen recounts the struggles he and his wife endured in diagnosing, treating, and understanding Cam’s disability, following the family through the years of medical difficulties and emotional wrangling. One of Us thrusts the reader into the life of a child who exists in his own world and describes the immense hardships faced by those who love and care for him. Leslie and Mark's marriage is sorely tested by their son's condition, and the book follows their progress from denial to acceptance while they fight to save their own relationship.
By embracing the little victories of their life with Cam and by learning to love him as he is, Mark takes the reader down a road just as gratifying, and perhaps more moving, than one to recovery. One of Us is not a book about a child who overcomes autism. Instead, it’s the story of a different but equally rare sort of victory—the triumph of love over tremendous adversity.
Hideko was ten years old when the atomic bomb devastated her home in Hiroshima. In this eloquent and moving narrative, Hideko recalls her life before the bomb, the explosion itself, and the influence of that trauma upon her subsequent life in Japan and the United States. Her years in America have given her unusual insights into the relationship between Japanese and American cultures and the impact of Hiroshima on our lives.
This new edition includes two expanded chapters and revisions throughout. A new epilogue brings the story up to date. This poignant story of courage and resilience remains deeply relevant today, offering a profoundly personal testament against the ongoing threat of nuclear warfare.
Digging into her past, Suzette uncovered a deeply buried truth: she’d been in love with her best friend—a woman—for nearly two decades—and still was. Leaning into these “unspeakable” feelings would put Suzette’s identity, relationships, and life of privilege at risk—but taking this leap might be her only chance to feel fully alive. As Suzette opened herself up to new possibilities, an unexpected visit to a new city helped her discover who she was meant to be.
Introspective, bittersweet, and empowering, The Only Way Through Is Out is both a coming-out and coming-of-age story, as well as a call to action for every human who is longing to live authentically but is afraid of the cost.
Paulus came from a family of Roosevelt Democrats, but when a friend campaigned for a Republican seat in the state legislature, she switched parties. As she put it, “The Republicans were in politics for all the right reasons.” Amid the nationwide political upheavals of the late 1960s, Oregon’s Republicans, led by popular governor Tom McCall, seemed to be her kind of people—principled, pragmatic, and committed to education, the environment, and equality for all citizens under the law.
Paulus’s appointment by Governor McCall to the Marion-Polk Boundary Commission in 1969, a precursor to Oregon’s urban growth boundaries, helped launched her on a long and distinguished career of public service. She ran successfully for the Oregon House of Representatives in 1970, the first women to do so in the district. After three terms in the House, where she championed environmental causes, women’s rights and government transparency, she was elected Oregon’s Secretary of State in 1976—the first woman to hold that office and be elected to a statewide office in Oregon. She was the Republican candidate for governor in 1986, served a stint on the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, went on to become Oregon’s superintendent of public instruction, and headed the Oregon Historical Society.
During her years of public service, spanning the 1970s through the early 2000s, Norma Paulus occupied a distinctive niche in Oregon’s progressive political ecosystem. Her vivid personality and strong convictions endeared her to a broad swath of citizens. Beautiful and opinionated, charming and forceful, Paulus was widely covered in statewide and national newspapers and television during her eventful, sometimes controversial career. Now, The Only Woman in the Room sums up her life and work in a lively, anecdotal history that will appeal to historians, political scientists, newshounds, and ordinary citizens alike.
In graduating from Gallaudet University, finding a job in Washington, D.C., and starting a family with her college sweetheart, Kitty Fischer tacitly abandoned the Louisiana Cajun culture that had exposed her to little more than prejudice and misery as a child. Upon discovering that she suffered from Usher syndrome (a genetic condition that causes both deafness and blindness), however, Fischer began an unlikely journey toward reclaiming her heritage. She and Cathryn Carroll tell the story of her heroic struggle and cultural odyssey in Orchid of the Bayou: A Deaf Woman Faces Blindness.
“By this time Mama knew I was ‘not right,’” Fischer says of her early childhood. “She knew the real words for ‘not right,’ too, though she never said those words. I was deaf and dumb.” Initially Fischer’s parents turned to folk healers to try and “cure” their daughter’s deafness, but an aunt’s fortunate discovery of the Louisiana School for the Deaf would rescue Fischer from misunderstanding and introduce her to sign language and Deaf culture. She weathered the school’'s experiments with oralism and soon rose to the top of her class, ultimately leaving Louisiana for the academic promise of Gallaudet.
While in college, Fischer met and married her future husband, Lance, a Jewish Deaf man from Brooklyn, New York, and each landed jobs close to their alma mater. After the birth of their first child, however, Fischer could no longer ignore her increasing tunnel vision. Doctors quickly confirmed that Fischer had Usher syndrome.
While Fischer struggled to come to terms with her condition, the high incidence of Usher syndrome among Cajun people led her to re-examine her cultural roots. “Could I still be me, Catherine Hoffpauir Fischer, had I not been born of a mix that codes for Usher syndrome?” she asks. “To some extent, the history of my people explains the constitution of my genes and the way my life has unfolded.” Today Fischer prospers, enjoying her time with family and friends and celebrating the Deaf, Cajun, Blind, and Jewish cultures that populate her life. Her lively story will resonate with anyone who recognizes the arduous journey toward claiming an identity.
“I am a butterfly at half-mast. Muscles coiled like springs. I have not unwound yet,” writes Julie Marie Wade in Otherwise. In this series of intimate, braided essays written throughout her 30s, Wade traces her own unwinding and becoming through probing lyricism. As a daughter, lover, lesbian, and writer, she invites readers on a journey of self-discovery framed by memory, literature, and popular culture. Touching and tender, empathic and insightful, Otherwise revels in its author's self-acceptance at the threshold of mid-life.
While many baby boomers are downsizing to a simpler retirement lifestyle, photographer and writer Judy Blankenship and her husband Michael Jenkins took a more challenging leap in deciding to build a house on the side of a mountain in southern Ecuador. They now live half the year in Cañar, an indigenous community they came to know in the early nineties when Blankenship taught photography there. They are the only extranjeros (outsiders) in this homely, chilly town at 10,100 feet, where every afternoon a spectacular mass of clouds rolls up from the river valley below and envelopes the town.
In this absorbing memoir, Blankenship tells the interwoven stories of building their house in the clouds and strengthening their ties to the community. Although she and Michael had spent considerable time in Cañar before deciding to move there, they still had much to learn about local customs as they navigated the process of building a house with traditional materials using a local architect and craftspeople. Likewise, fulfilling their obligations as neighbors in a community based on reciprocity presented its own challenges and rewards. Blankenship writes vividly of the rituals of births, baptisms, marriages, festival days, and deaths that counterpoint her and Michael’s solitary pursuits of reading, writing, listening to opera, playing chess, and cooking. Their story will appeal to anyone contemplating a second life, as well as those seeking a deeper understanding of daily life in the developing world.
What makes a pink-haired queer raise his hand to enlist in the military just as the nation is charging into war? In his memoir, Out of Step, Anthony Moll tells the story of a working-class bisexual boy running off to join the army in the midst of two wars and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era. Set against the backdrop of hypermasculinity and sexual secrecy, Moll weaves a queer coming-of-age story.
Out of Step traces Moll’s development through his military service, recounting how the army both breaks and builds relationships, and what it was like to explore his queer identity while also coming to terms with his role in the nation’s ugly foreign policy. From a punk, nerdy, left-leaning, poor boy in Nevada leaving home for the first time to an adult returning to civilian life and forced to address a world more complicated than he was raised to believe, Moll’s journey isn’t a classic flag-waving memoir or war story—it’s a tale of finding one’s identity in the face of war and changing ideals.
Outside Passage is a lyrical and affecting memoir of those years, simultaneously an emotional account of a young girl’s first steps into adulthood and a unique portrait of a vanished frontier life.
Confronting trauma behind the transnational adoption system—now back in print
Many adoptees are required to become people that they were never meant to be. While transracial adoption tends to be considered benevolent, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural, and economic toll on those who directly experience it. Outsiders Within is a landmark publication that carefully explores this most intimate aspect of globalization through essays, fiction, poetry, and art. Moving beyond personal narrative, transracially adopted writers from around the world tackle difficult questions about how to survive the racist and ethnocentric worlds they inhabit, what connects the countries relinquishing their children to the countries importing them, why poor families of color have their children removed rather than supported—about who, ultimately, they are. In their inquiry, the contributors unseat conventional understandings of adoption politics, reframing the controversy as a debate that encompasses human rights, peace, and reproductive justice.
Contributors: Heidi Lynn Adelsman; Ellen M. Barry; Laura Briggs, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Catherine Ceniza Choy, U of California, Berkeley; Gregory Paul Choy, U of California, Berkeley; Rachel Quy Collier; J. A. Dare; Kim Diehl; Kimberly R. Fardy; Laura Gannarelli; Shannon Gibney; Mark Hagland; Perlita Harris; Tobias Hübinette, Stockholm U; Jae Ran Kim; Anh Đào Kolbe; Mihee-Nathalie Lemoine; Beth Kyong Lo; Ron M.; Patrick McDermott, Salem State College, Massachusetts; Tracey Moffatt; Ami Inja Nafzger (aka Jin Inja); Kim Park Nelson; John Raible; Dorothy Roberts, Northwestern U; Raquel Evita Saraswati; Kirsten Hoo-Mi Sloth; Soo Na; Shandra Spears; Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark; Kekek Jason Todd Stark; Sunny Jo; Sandra White Hawk; Indigo Williams Willing; Bryan Thao Worra; Jeni C. Wright.
His road to success was not a smooth one, and Neal tells his unique story with humor, candor, and hard-earned wisdom, explaining his rocky journey from hardscrabble beginnings in rural Lee County to the role of prosecutor to the judicial bench. Along the way, many whites saw him as a threat to the established order and many blacks saw him as a traitor who was prosecuting and sitting in judgment of his own people. But Neal emphasized fairness and equal treatment at every opportunity, saying, “The way I got past all of this was by talking to my people about what I did and why, and by telling them how difficult it was for me. And I think that many folks understood me.” Looking back on these years and the people he met along the way, he offers insights into the traumas of the time and the toll they took on his mental and physical health, as well as the relationships that helped him face these challenges.
Published just days before America’s entry into World War II, Ozark Country is Otto Ernest Rayburn’s love letter to his adopted region. One of several chronicles of the Ozarks that garnered national attention during the Depression and war years, when many Americans craved stories about people and places seemingly untouched by the difficulties of the times, Rayburn’s colorful tour takes readers from the fictional village of Woodville into the backcountry of a region teeming with storytellers, ballad singers, superstitions, and home remedies.
Rayburn’s tales—fantastical, fun, and unapologetically romantic—portray a world that had already nearly disappeared by the time they were written. Yet Rayburn’s depiction of the Ozarks resonates with notions of the region that have persisted in the American consciousness ever since.
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