front cover of The University and the People
The University and the People
Envisioning American Higher Education in an Era of Populist Protest
Scott M. Gelber
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

The University and the People chronicles the influence of Populism—a powerful agrarian movement—on public higher education in the late nineteenth century. Revisiting this pivotal era in the history of the American state university, Scott Gelber demonstrates that Populists expressed a surprising degree of enthusiasm for institutions of higher learning. More fundamentally, he argues that the mission of the state university, as we understand it today, evolved from a fractious but productive relationship between public demands and academic authority.
    Populists attacked a variety of elites—professionals, executives, scholars—and seemed to confirm academia’s fear of anti-intellectual public oversight. The movement’s vision of the state university highlighted deep tensions in American attitudes toward meritocracy and expertise. Yet Populists also promoted state-supported higher education, with the aims of educating the sons (and sometimes daughters) of ordinary citizens, blurring status distinctions, and promoting civic engagement. Accessibility, utilitarianism, and public service were the bywords of Populist journalists, legislators, trustees, and sympathetic professors. These “academic populists” encouraged state universities to reckon with egalitarian perspectives on admissions, financial aid, curricula, and research. And despite their critiques of college “ivory towers,” Populists supported the humanities and social sciences, tolerated a degree of ideological dissent, and lobbied for record-breaking appropriations for state institutions.

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front cover of Up on the River
Up on the River
People and Wildlife of the Upper Mississippi
Madson, John
University of Iowa Press, 1985
Up on the River is John Madson’s loving and often hilarious tribute to the people, animal life, and places of the Upper Mississippi. Madson’s Upper Mississippi is the part “between the saints,” from St. Louis to St. Paul, and where for thirty years he explored the bright waters of the upper reaches of the mighty river itself as well as the tangled multitude of sloughs, cuts, and side channels that wander through its wooded islands and floodplain forests.
 “Some of my best time on the River has been in the company of game wardens, biologists, commercial fishermen, clammers, trappers, hunters, and a smelly, mud-smeared coterie of river rats in general, and my views of the River are far more likely to reflect theirs than those of the transportation industry,” Madson writes of his thirty-year acquaintance with the Mississippi. Traveling mainly by canoe and johnboat, he tells of encounters between archetypal commercial fishermen and archetypal game wardens over hot fish chowder, fishing for crappies in the tops of submerged trees and for walleyes amid gale force winds, nesting and migrating herons and ducks and eagles, the histories of river logging and pearling and button making, and towboats and barges and the lives of the “ramstugenous” people who move freight on the river.
 
Learning about the Upper Mississippi via the wry tutelage of John Madson, who discovered that “whenever I am out on a river some of its freeness rubs off on me,” readers of this classic book will also come under the spell of this freeness.
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front cover of Uplifting the People
Uplifting the People
Three Centuries of Black Baptists in Alabama
Wilson Fallin Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Uplifting the People is a history of the Alabama Missionary Baptist State Convention—its origins, churches, associations, conventions, and leaders. Fallin demonstrates that a distinctive Afro-Baptist faith emerged as slaves in Alabama combined the African religious emphasis on spirit possession, soul-travel, and rebirth with the evangelical faith of Baptists. The denomination emphasizes a conversion experience that brings salvation, spiritual freedom, love, joy, and patience, and also stresses liberation from slavery and oppression and highlights the exodus experience. In examining the social and theological development of the Afro-Baptist faith over the course of three centuries, Uplifting the People demonstrates how black Baptists in Alabama used faith to cope with hostility and repression.
 
Fallin reveals that black Baptist churches were far more than places of worship. They functioned as self-help institutions within black communities and served as gathering places for social clubs, benevolent organizations, and political meetings. Church leaders did more than conduct services; they protested segregation and disfranchisement, founded and operated schools, and provided community leaders for the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.
 
Through black churches, members built banking systems, insurance companies, and welfare structures. Since the gains of the civil rights era, black Baptists have worked to maintain the accomplishments of that struggle, church leaders continue to speak for social justice and the rights of the poor, and churches now house day care and Head Start programs. Uplifting the People also explores the role of women, the relations between black and white Baptists, and class formation within the black church.
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front cover of The Upper Tanana Dene
The Upper Tanana Dene
People of This Land
by William E. Simeone
University of Alaska Press, 2022
The Upper Tanana Dene conveys the history and knowledge of Dene elders to current and future generations. Oral accounts reveal a unique and compelling perspective on a traditional way of life and offer fascinating commentary on a holistic way of life that is as relevant today as it was generations ago. These narratives, along with photographs and illustrations, show the history of the region alongside a detailed portrait of the people themselves.
 
As young Dene migrate to towns and cities far from their homeland on the upper Tanana River of east central Alaska, they may never learn what it was like living from the land. In these interviews elders express concern that young Dene are becoming ignorant of the traditions that made their ancestors disciplined and strong enough to withstand the rigors of life on the land. The old life was taxing and made demands on the body and soul, and the struggle to achieve security placed a premium on knowledge, endurance, and constant effort. Modern conveniences have made life easier, but elders believe their knowledge is still vital to the survival of future generations. 
 
With text in both Dene and English, The Upper Tanana Dene is a link to Dene experiences, lives, and understanding of the world and is meant for those interested in Dene heritage, as well as students and scholars of cultural and ethnic studies and history.

 
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