A collection of essays about Armenian identity and belonging in the diaspora.

In the century since the Armenian Genocide, Armenian survivors and their descendants have written of a vast range of experiences using storytelling and activism, two important aspects of Armenian culture. Wrestling with questions of home and self, diasporan Armenian writers bear the burden of repeatedly telling their history, as it remains widely erased and obfuscated. Telling this history requires a tangled balance of contextualizing the past and reporting on the present, of respecting a culture even while feeling lost within it.

We Are All Armenian brings together established and emerging Armenian authors to reflect on the complications of Armenian ethnic identity today. These personal essays elevate diasporic voices that have been historically silenced inside and outside of their communities, including queer, multiracial, and multiethnic writers. The eighteen contributors to this contemporary anthology explore issues of displacement, assimilation, inheritance, and broader definitions of home. Through engaging creative nonfiction, many of them question what it is to be Armenian enough inside an often unacknowledged community.

Second place, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas, 2003

Perhaps no one has ever been such a survivor as álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Member of a 600-man expedition sent out from Spain to colonize "La Florida" in 1527, he survived a failed exploration of the west coast of Florida, an open-boat crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, shipwreck on the Texas coast, six years of captivity among native peoples, and an arduous, overland journey in which he and the three other remaining survivors of the original expedition walked some 1,500 miles from the central Texas coast to the Gulf of California, then another 1,300 miles to Mexico City.

The story of Cabeza de Vaca has been told many times, beginning with his own account, Relación de los naufragios, which was included and amplified in Gonzalo Fernando de Oviedo y Váldez's Historia general de las Indias. Yet the route taken by Cabeza de Vaca and his companions remains the subject of enduring controversy. In this book, Alex D. Krieger correlates the accounts in these two primary sources with his own extensive knowledge of the geography, archaeology, and anthropology of southern Texas and northern Mexico to plot out stage by stage the most probable route of the 2,800-mile journey of Cabeza de Vaca.

This book consists of several parts, foremost of which is the original English version of Alex Krieger's dissertation (edited by Margery Krieger), in which he traces the route of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions from the coast of Texas to Spanish settlements in western Mexico. This document is rich in information about the native groups, vegetation, geography, and material culture that the companions encountered. Thomas R. Hester's foreword and afterword set the 1955 dissertation in the context of more recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries, some of which have supported Krieger's plot of the journey. Margery Krieger's preface explains how she prepared her late husband's work for publication. Alex Krieger's original translations of the Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo accounts round out the volume.

The Story of the Many Ill-Fated Attempts by Europeans to Create Permanent Settlements in the New World 
The nations of the modern Americas began as successful colonies, but not all colonies succeeded, and the margin between colonies that survived and those that failed was small. Both contribute to our understanding of the ordeals of the Europeans who first settled in the New World and of the Native Americans who had to interact with them, but with the exception of the famous lost Roanoke colony, the failed colonies of North America remain largely unknown except to specialists in colonial history. The Spanish and French repeatedly attempted to colonize parts of Georgia, Florida, and Virginia, while the Dutch, French, and English sought to establish permanent settlements along the northern waterways of the New World. The greatest problem faced by every colony was the specter of starvation. Native Americans gave food to newly arrived colonists, but such generosity could not endure. Indigenous people soon realized that colonists of every nationality were prepared to make war against Native peoples, conquer, subjugate, and even massacre whole communities unless they were cooperative and offered no resistance to the intrusion into their territory. In response, Native Americans withheld aid or resorted to retaliatory violence, dooming many European settlements. 
    In We Could Perceive No Sign of Them: Failed Colonies in North America, 1526–1689, historians David MacDonald and Raine Waters tell the fascinating stories of the many attempts to establish a European foothold in the New World, from the first Spanish colony in 1526 on the coast of Georgia to the final disastrous French endeavors near the arctic. Using primary source texts, the authors synthesize the shared experiences of Europeans to better understand the very fine line between success and failure and the varieties of Native American responses. 

Because autism is an increasingly common diagnosis, North Americans are familiar with its symptoms and treatments. But what we know and think about autism is shaped by our social relationship to health, disease, and the medical system. In The Western Disease Claire Laurier Decoteau explores the ways that recent immigrants from Somalia to Canada and the US make sense of their children’s diagnosis of autism. Having never heard of autism before migrating to North America, they often determine that it must be a Western disease. Given its apparent absence in Somalia, they view it as Western in nature, caused by environmental and health conditions unique to life in North America. 

Following Somali parents as they struggle to make sense of their children's illness and advocate for alternative care, Decoteau unfolds how complex interacting factors of immigration, race, and class affect Somalis’ relationship to the disease. Somalis’ engagement with autism challenges the prevailing presumption among Western doctors that their approach to healing is universal.   Decoteau argues that centering an analysis on autism within the Somali diaspora exposes how autism has been defined and institutionalized as a white, middle-class disorder, leading to health disparities based on race, class, age, and ability. The Western Disease asks us to consider the social causes of disease and the role environmental changes and structural inequalities play in health vulnerability.

“From the ring of the ax in the woods, to the scream of the saw blade in the mill, to the founding of many of Wisconsin’s communities, Jerry Apps does an outstanding job bringing Wisconsin’s logging and lumbering heritage to life.”—Kerry P. Bloedorn, director, Rhinelander Pioneer Park Historical Complex

For more than half a century, logging, lumber production, and affiliated enterprises in Wisconsin’s Northwoods provided jobs for tens of thousands of Wisconsinites and wealth for many individuals. The industry cut through the lives of nearly every Wisconsin citizen, from an immigrant lumberjack or camp cook in the Chippewa Valley to a Suamico sawmill operator, an Oshkosh factory worker to a Milwaukee banker.
     When the White Pine Was King tells the stories of the heyday of logging: of lumberjacks and camp cooks, of river drives and deadly log jams, of sawmills and lumber towns and the echo of the ax ringing through the Northwoods as yet another white pine crashed to the ground. He explores the aftermath of the logging era, including efforts to farm the cutover (most of them doomed to fail), successful reforestation work, and the legacy of the lumber and wood products industries, which continue to fuel the state’s economy. 
     Enhanced with dozens of historic photos, When the White Pine Was King transports readers to the lumber boom era and reveals how the lessons learned in the vast northern forestlands continue to shape the region today.
 

A century ago, many people had given up on the wood duck, dooming it to extinction along with the passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet. Today, it’s one of the most familiar and most harvested ducks in the eastern half of the country, and one of America’s great conservation success stories.

In With Wings Extended, Minnesota conservationist Greg Hoch introduces readers to a duck they probably recognize but may not know well. This book shows how almost anyone can get involved in conservation and do something for wildlife beyond writing checks to conservation organizations. Hoch illustrates the complexities of wildlife and habitat management that landowners as well as state and federal wildlife agencies deal with on a daily basis, and takes readers through the life stages of what is largely considered the most beautiful duck in the world. In this fascinating and practical read, Hoch blends the historical literature about the species with modern science, and also shows how our views of conservation have changed over the last century.