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Faces along the Bar
Lore and Order in the Workingman's Saloon, 1870-1920
Madelon Powers
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In this lively and engaging history, Madelon Powers recreates the daily life of the barroom, exploring what it was like to be a "regular" in the old-time saloon of pre-prohibition industrial America. Through an examination of saloongoers across America, her investigation offers a fascinating look at rich lore of the barroom—its many games, stories, songs, free lunch customs, and especially its elaborate system of drinking rituals that have been passed on for decades.

"A free-pouring blend of astonishing facts, folklore and firsthand period observations. . . . It's the rich details that'll inspire the casual reader to drink deep from this tap of knowledge."—Don Waller, USA Today recommended reading

"A surprise on every page."—Publishers Weekly

"Here we get social history that appreciates the bar talk even while dissecting its marvelous rituals."—Library Journal, starred review

"Careful scholarship with an anecdotal flair to please even the most sober of readers."—Nina C. Ayoub, Chronicle of Higher Education

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Facing the Monarch
Modes of Advice in the Early Chinese Court
Garret P. S. Olberding
Harvard University Press, 2013
In the popular consciousness, manipulative speech pervades politicized discourse, and the eloquence of politicians is seen as invariably rooted in cunning and prevarication. Rhetorical flourishes are thus judged corruptive of the substance of political discourse because they lead to distortion and confusion. Yet the papers in Facing the Monarch suggest that separating style from content is practically impossible. Focused on the era between the Spring and Autumn period and the later Han dynasty, this volume examines the dynamic between early Chinese ministers and monarchs at a time when ministers employed manifold innovative rhetorical tactics. The contributors analyze discrete excerpts from classical Chinese works and explore topics of censorship, irony, and dissidence highly relevant for a climate in which ruse and misinformation were the norm. What emerges are original and illuminating perspectives on how the early Chinese political circumstance shaped and phrased—and prohibited—modes of expression.
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Facts as I Remember Them
The Autobiography of Rufe LeFors
Edited by John Allen Peterson
University of Texas Press, 1986

The rivers of the Texas Panhandle, the Canadian, and the forks of the Red break through the Cap Rock at the eastern edge of the Staked Plains. It’s rough, bleak country, with few trees and a great expanse of sky. Storms that form on the Great Plains and in the Rocky Mountains sweep through with nothing much to slow them down. And the small dusty towns that serve this vast ranchland cling to the waterways as they have for over a hundred years, since their early settlement. Their names aren’t well known now, but they were once focal points in a rugged country where buffalo hunters, trail drivers, outlaws, and ordinary folks alike passed through.

Rufe LeFors was one such "ordinary" man. With his father and older brothers, he was among the first to settle this country, drawn to West Texas by tales of open land and good grass. His life story, set down near the end of his long and adventurous life, is the best sort of insider's history, the chronicle of a life lived fully amid the exciting events and rough landscape of the frontier's final years.

Rufe LeFors recorded his story over the course of a decade, finishing up in 1941 in his eighty-first year. His memoirs span the period from the War between the States to the early twentieth century, when the Panhandle was still scarcely settled, a true frontier. In his time LeFors was trail driver, pony express rider, and rancher. He traveled for a year with Arrington's Texas Rangers, and he wore the badge of deputy sheriff in the wild west town of Old Mobeetie. He rode a fast horse after claims in the Cherokee Strip, spent time as a horse trader, and finally settled in Lawton, Oklahoma, where, after some twenty years as a deputy, he was elected to the office of sheriff.

LeFors knew how to tell a story. Whether it is an account of an outlaw's capture or the rescue of a white girl from prairie fire by a Comanche brave, he weaves into his narrative all the color, drama, and character of the event. His version of the death of Billy the Kid adds another perspective to that much celebrated episode in western history. His encounters with Temple Houston, the governor's flamboyant son, rancher Charles Goodnight, and Ranger Captain Arrington add to our fund of knowledge about those legendary frontier figures. LeFors wanted to get the facts—as he remembered them—straight. With his sharp eye for texture and detail and keen ear for language and timing, he created a narrative that wonderfully captures the flavor of his life and exciting times.

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Fada
Boredom and Belonging in Niger
Adeline Masquelier
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Niger most often comes into the public eye as an example of deprivation and insecurity. Urban centers have become concentrated areas of unemployment filled with young men trying, against all odds, to find jobs and fill their time with meaningful occupations. At the heart of Adeline Masquelier’s groundbreaking book is the fada—a space where men gather to escape boredom by talking, playing cards, listening to music, and drinking tea. As a place in which new forms of sociability and belonging are forged outside the unattainable arena of work, the fada has become an integral part of Niger’s urban landscape. By considering the fada as a site of experimentation, Masquelier offers a nuanced depiction of how young men in urban Niger engage in the quest for recognition and reinvent their own masculinity in the absence of conventional avenues to self-realization. In an era when fledgling and advanced economies alike are struggling to support meaningful forms of employment, this book offers a timely glimpse into how to create spaces of stability, respect, and creativity in the face of diminished opportunities and precarity.
 
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Family Bible
Melissa J. Delbridge
University of Iowa Press, 2008

"Swimming and sex seemed a lot alike to me when I was growing up. You took off most of your clothes to do them and you only did them with people who were the same color as you. As your daddy got richer, you got to do them in fancier places." Starting with her father, who never met a whitetail buck he couldn't shoot, a whiskey bottle he couldn't empty, or a woman he couldn't charm, and her mother, who "invented road rage before 1960," Melissa Delbridge introduces us to the people in her own family bible. Readers will find elements of Southern Gothic and familiar vernacular characters, but Delbridge endows each with her startling and original interpretation. In this disarmingly unguarded and unapologetic memoir, she shows us what really happened in the "stew of religion and sex" that was 1960s Tuscaloosa.

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Family Ties
By Clarice Lispector
University of Texas Press, 1972

The silent rage that seizes a matriarch whose family is feting her eighty-ninth year.The tangle of emotions felt by a sophisticated young woman toward her elderly mother. An adolescent girl's obsessive fear of being looked at. The "giddying sense of compassion" that a blind man introduces into a young housewife's settled existence. Of such is made the world of Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer whose finest work is acknowledged to be her exquisitely crafted short stories. Here, in these thirteen of Lispector's most brilliantly conceived stories, mysterious and unexpected moments of crisis propel characters to self-discovery or keenly felt intuitions about the human condition. Her characters mirror states of mind. Alienated by their unsettling sense of life's absurdity, they seem at times absorbed in their interior lives and in the passions that dominate and usually defeat them.

Giovanni Pontiero's translation has been lauded by Gregory Rabassa as "magnificent."

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Fangs Of Malice
Hypocrisy Sincerity And Acting
Matthew H Wikander
University of Iowa Press, 2002

The idea that actors are hypocrites and fakes and therefore dangerous to society was widespread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Fangs of Malice examines the equation between the vice of hypocrisy and the craft of acting as it appears in antitheatrical tracts, in popular and high culture, and especially in plays of the period. Rousseau and others argue that actors, expert at seeming other than they are, pose a threat to society; yet dissembling seems also to be an inevitable consequence of human social intercourse. The “antitheatrical prejudice” offers a unique perspective on the high value that modern western culture places on sincerity, on being true to one's own self.

Taking a cue from the antitheatrical critics themselves, Matthew Wikander structures his book in acts and scenes, each based on a particular slander against actors. A prologue introduces his main issues. Act One deals with the proposition “They Dress Up”: foppish slavery to fashion, cross-dressing, and dressing as clergy. Act Two treats the proposition “They Lie” by focusing on social dissembling and the phenomenon of the self-deceiving hypocrite and the public, princely hypocrite. Act Three, “They Drink,” examines a wide range of antisocial behavior ascribed to actors, such as drinking, gambling, and whoring. An epilogue ties the ancient ideas of possession and the panic that actors inspire to contemporary anxieties about representation not only in theatre but also in the visual and literary arts.

Fangs of Malice will be of great interest to scholars and students of drama as well as to theatre professionals and buffs.

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Fanti Kinship and the Analysis of Kinship Terminologies
David B. Kronenfeld
University of Illinois Press, 2008

This book examines Fanti kinship terminology from a variety of analytic and formal perspectives. Based on work with a broad number of informants, David B. Kronenfeld details and analyzes internal variation in usage within the Fanti community, shows the relationship between terminology and social groups and communicative usage, and relates these findings to major theoretical work on kinship and on the intersections of language, thought, and culture.

The terminological analysis in this study employs a great variety of formal approaches, assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and covers a wide range of types of usage. This work also performs a systematic, formal analysis of behavior patterns among kin, joining this approach with the analysis of a kinship terminological system. Rather than treating kinship terminology as a special, isolated piece of culture, this study also ties its analysis to more general semantic and cultural theoretical issues. Including computational and comparative studies of kinship terminologies, this volume represents the fullest analysis of any kinship terminological system in the ethnographic record.

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Far from Home in Early Modern France
Three Women’s Stories
Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation, Anne-Marie Fiquet du Boccage, and Henriette-Lucie Dillon de la Tour du Pin
Iter Press, 2022
An engaging account of women’s travels in the early modern period. 

This book showcases three Frenchwomen who ventured far from home at a time when such traveling was rare. In 1639, Marie de l’Incarnation embarked for New France where she founded the first Ursuline monastery in present-day Canada. In 1750, Madame du Boccage set out at the age of forty on her first “grand tour.” She visited England, the Netherlands, and Italy where she experienced firsthand the intellectual liberty offered there to educated women. As the Reign of Terror gripped France, the Marquise de la Tour du Pin fled to America with her husband and their two young children, where they ran a farm from 1794 to 1796. The writings these women left behind detailing their respective journeys abroad represent significant contributions to early modern travel literature. This book makes available to anglophone readers three texts that are rich in both historical and literary terms.  
 
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The Farm at Holstein Dip
An Iowa Boyhood
Carroll Engelhardt
University of Iowa Press, 2012
Carroll Engelhardt’s parents grew up in homes without electricity on farms without tractors and began farming in the same way. As a farm boy in northeastern Iowa, he thought that history happened only to important people in earlier times and more exotic places. After decades of teaching, he at last perceived that history happens to us all, and he began writing this book. Set within the thoughtfully presented contexts of the technological revolution in American agriculture, the Second World War, the Cold War, and the emerging culture of affluence, The Farm at Holstein Dip is both a loving coming-of-age memoir and an educational glimpse into rural and small-town life of the 1940s and 1950s.
 
Engelhardt writes about growing up in a spacious farmhouse where life was centered in the kitchen and frugality dictated that every purchase be weighed carefully. His chores grew up with him: he fed chickens and gathered eggs at age six, rode a horse on the hayfork at nine or ten, milked cows by hand at eleven, and hired out to other farmers to load bales in the field and work in the haymow at fifteen. The simple pleasures and predictable routines of a Saturday night at the movies in nearby Elkader, Pioneer Days on the 4th of July, Confirmation Sunday, class picnics, and baseball and basketball games play out against a background of rural decline, alternating economic uncertainty and prosperity, and Cold War anxiety—next to polio, he most feared Communist subversion and atomic blasts. The values and contradictions imparted by this evolving mix of international, national, and local cultures shaped his coming of age.
 

Engelhardt brings us into the world of his fourth-generation farm family, who lived by the family- and faith-based work ethic and concern for respectability they had inherited from their German and Norwegian ancestors. His writing has a particularly Iowa flavor, a style that needs no definition to those who live in the state. Readers will discover the appeal of his wry, humorous, and kind observations and appreciate his well-informed perspective on these transformative American decades. 

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The Farm on Badger Creek
Memories of a Midwest Girlhood
Peggy Prilaman Marxen
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2021
Peggy Prilaman Marxen grew up near the town of Meteor in northwestern Wisconsin’s Sawyer County, isolated by geography yet surrounded by close-knit extended family. Multiple generations of her family witnessed changes to rural Wisconsin that altered the fabric of their lives and the lives of all in their community, including the introduction of new farming techniques, school consolidation, and revolutions in transportation and technology. They supplemented their subsistence herd of dairy cows by hunting, fishing, and selling timber and maple syrup. For many years, her home, like those of her neighbors, lacked indoor plumbing, electricity, and a telephone. As a young child, Peggy attended a one-room schoolhouse and walked, biked, or sledded the three miles to school and back, no matter the weather. 
 
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Fear and Conventionality
Elsie Clews Parsons
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Widely admired by the cultural critics and the avant garde in the 1910s, Fear and Conventionality broke new ground for American anthropology. Elsie Clews Parsons—an anthropologist, cultural critic, feminist, and author—turns a cool and ironic eye on the mores and customs of her own upper-class New York society. Influenced by Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas, William James and Havelock Ellis, Parsons's work is informed by a modernist and feminist approach to cultural anthropology and social psychology. Parsons draws on a wide range of cultural texts as well as her own experiences of daily life to argue that the fear of change prompted many social conventions, such as gift-giving, hospitality, and sexual taboos, and to make predictions about American society today, such as the plight to end intolerance.

A modern mind at the turn of the century, Parsons challenged social conventions at a time when it was less than popular to do so. Witty, graceful, and impassioned, this book will be of interest to social and cultural historians and anyone interested in early twentieth-century America.

Elsie Clews Parsons (1874-1941) is the author of many books, including The Family, The Old-Fashioned Woman, Pueblo Indian Religion, and Mitla. Available from the University of Chicago Press is Elsie Clews Parsons: Constructing Sex and Culture in Modernist America, a biography by Desley Deacon.
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"Fear God and Walk Humbly"
The Agricultural Journal of James Mallory, 1843-1877
James Mallory
University of Alabama Press, 1997
A detailed journal of local, national, and foreign news, agricultural activities, the weather, and family events, from an uncommon Southerner
 
Most inhabitants of the Old South, especially the plain folk, devoted more time to leisurely activities—drinking, gambling, hunting, fishing, and just loafing—than did James Mallory, a workaholic agriculturalist, who experimented with new plants, orchards, and manures, as well as the latest farming equipment and techniques. A Whig and a Unionist, a temperance man and a peace lover, ambitious yet caring, business-minded and progressive, he supported railroad construction as well as formal education, even for girls. His cotton production—four bales per field hand in 1850, nearly twice the average for the best cotton lands in southern Alabama and Georgia--tells more about Mallory's steady work habits than about his class status.
 
But his most obvious eccentricity—what gave him reason to be remembered—was that nearly every day from 1843 until his death in 1877, Mallory kept a detailed journal of local, national, and often foreign news, agricultural activities, the weather, and especially events involving his family, relatives, slaves, and neighbors in Talladega County, Alabama. Mallory's journal spans three major periods of the South's history--the boom years before the Civil War, the rise and collapse of the Confederacy, and the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War. He owned slaves and raised cotton, but Mallory was never more than a hardworking farmer, who described agriculture in poetical language as “the greatest [interest] of all.”
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A Feast for the Eyes
Art, Performance, and the Late Medieval Banquet
Christina Normore
University of Chicago Press, 2015
To read accounts of late medieval banquets is to enter a fantastical world where live lions guard nude statues, gilded stags burst into song, and musicians play from within pies. We can almost hear the clock sound from within a glass castle, taste the fire-breathing roast boar, and smell the rose water cascading in a miniature fountain. Such vivid works of art and performance required collaboration among artists in many fields, as well as the participation of the audience.

A Feast for the Eyes is the first book-length study of the court banquets of northwestern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Christina Normore draws on an array of artworks, archival documents, chroniclers’ accounts, and cookbooks to re-create these events and reassess the late medieval visual culture in which banquets were staged. Feast participants, she shows, developed sophisticated ways of appreciating artistic skill and attending to their own processes of perception, thereby forging a court culture that delighted in the exercise of fine aesthetic judgment.

Challenging modern assumptions about the nature of artistic production and reception, A Feast for the Eyes yields fresh insight into the long history of multimedia work and the complex relationships between spectacle and spectators.
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The Feast of the Sorcerer
Practices of Consciousness and Power
Bruce Kapferer
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Sorcery has long been associated with the "dark side" of human development. Along with magic and witchcraft, it is assumed to be irrational and antithetical to modern thought. But in The Feast of the Sorcerer, Bruce Kapferer argues that sorcery practices reveal critical insights into how consciousness is formed and how human beings constitute their social and political realities.

Kapferer focuses on sorcery among Sinhalese Buddhists in Sri Lanka to explore how the art of sorcery is in fact deeply connected to social practices and lived experiences such as birth, death, sickness, and war. He describes in great detail the central ritual of exorcism, a study which opens up new avenues of thought that challenge anthropological approaches to such topics as the psychological forces of emotion and the dynamics of power. Overcoming both "orientalist" bias and postmodern permissiveness, Kapferer compellingly reframes sorcery as a pragmatic, conscious practice which, through its dynamic of destruction and creation, makes it possible for humans to reconstruct repeatedly their relation to the world.
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Feast or Famine
Food and Drink in American Westward Expansion
Reginald Horsman
University of Missouri Press, 2008

Feast or Famine is the first comprehensive account of food and drink in the winning of the West, describing the sustenance of successive generations of western pioneers. Drawing on journals of settlers and travelers—as well as a lifetime of research on the American West—Reginald Horsman examines more than one hundred years of history, from the first advance of explorers into the Mississippi valley to the movement of ranchers and farmers onto the Great Plains, recording not only the components of their diets but food preparation techniques as well.

Most settlers were able to obtain food beyond the dreams of ordinary Europeans, for whom meat was a luxury. Not only were buffalo, deer, and wild turkey there for the taking, pioneers also gathered greens such as purslane, dandelion, and pigweed—as well as wild fruits, berries, and nuts. They replaced sugar with wild honey or maple syrup, and when they had no tea, they made drinks out of sage, sassafras, and mint. Horsman also reveals the willingness of Indians to convey their knowledge of food to newcomers, sharing salmon in the Pacific Northwest, agricultural crops in the arid Southwest.

Horsman tells how agricultural expansion and transportation opened a veritable cornucopia and how the development of canning soon made it possible for meals to transcend simple frontier foods, with canned oysters and crystallized eggs in airtight cans on merchants’ shelves. He covers food on different regional frontiers, as well as the cuisines of particular groups such as fur traders, soldiers, miners, and Mormons. He also discusses food shortages that resulted from poor preparation, temporary scarcity of game, marginal soil, or simply bad luck. At times, as with the ill-fated Donner Party, pioneers starved.

Engagingly written and meticulously researched, Feast or Famine is a one-of-a-kind look at a subject too long ignored in histories of the West. By revealing the spectrum of frontier fare across years and regions, it shows us that the land of opportunity was often a land of plenty.

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Feeding the Ancestors
Tlingit Carved Horn Spoons
Anne-Marie Victor-Howe
Harvard University Press, 2007

Feeding the Ancestors presents an exquisite group of carved spoons from the Pacific Northwest that resides in the collections of Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Carved from the horns of mountain goats and Dall sheep, and incorporating elements of abalone shell and metal, most of the spoons were collected in Alaska in the late nineteenth century and were made and used by members of the Tlingit tribe. Hillel Burger's beautiful color photographs reveal every nuance of the carvers' extraordinary artistry.

Anne-Marie Victor-Howe introduces the collectors and describes the means by which these and other ethnographic objects were acquired. In the process, she paints a vivid picture of the "Last Frontier" just before and shortly after the United States purchased Alaska. A specialist in the ethnography of the Native peoples of the Northwest Coast, Victor-Howe provides a fascinating glimpse into these aboriginal subsistence cultures as she explains the manufacture and function of traditional spoons. Her accounts of the clan stories associated with specific carvings and of the traditional shamanic uses of spoons are the result of extensive consultation with Tlingit elders, scholars, and carvers.

Feeding the Ancestors is the first scholarly study of traditional feast spoons and a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Pacific Northwest Coast peoples and their art.

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Festivals and the French Revolution
Mona Ozouf
Harvard University Press, 1988

Festivals and the French Revolution—the subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious cult of the Supreme Being. Every history of the period includes some mention of festivals, although most historians have been content either to ridicule them as ineffectual or to bemoan them as repugnant examples of a sterile, official culture. Mona Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process. Festivals offer critical insights into the meaning of the French Revolution; they show a society in the process of creating itself anew.

Historians have recognized the importance of the revolutionary festival as a symbol of the Revolution. But they have differed widely in their interpretations of what that symbol meant and have considered the festivals as diverse as the rival political groups that conceived and organized them. Against this older vision, Ozouf argues for the fundamental coherence and profound unity of the festival as both event and register of reference and attitude. By comparing the most ideologically opposed festivals (those of Reason and the Supreme Being, for instance), she shows that they clearly share a common aim, which finds expression in a mutual ceremonial and symbolic vocabulary. Through a brilliant discussion of the construction, ordering, and conduct of the festival Ozouf demonstrates how the continuity of the images, allegories, ceremonials, and explicit functions can be seen as the Revolution’s own commentary on itself.

A second and important aim of this book is to show that this system of festivals, often seen as destructive, was an immensely creative force. The festival was the mirror in which the Revolution chose to see itself and the pedagogical tool by which it hoped to educate future generations, Far from being a failure, it embodied, socialized, and made sacred a new set of values based on the family, the nation, and mankind—the values of a modern, secular, liberal world.

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Festive Ukrainian Cooking
Marta Pisetska Farley
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
Ukrainian cooking embodies national and ethnic tastes and reflects the spiritual and social awareness of Ukrainians. More than just a cookbook, Festive Ukrainian Cooking is a definitive account of traditional Ukrainian culture as perpetuated in family rituals and celebrated with elegantly prepared food and drink. Working from original sources in Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish, and drawing on experience as an accomplished cook, Marta Pisetska Farley arranges these recipes as they were enjoyed throughout the year, beginning with kolach, a glazed braided bread sprinkled with poppy seeds, for Christmas Eve, and ending with succulent dishes made with wild mushrooms harvested in the fall. Chapter introductions describe the folkways associated with major holidays and family events and the symbolic and celebratory role of food appropriate to each. Festive Ukrainian Cooking, originally published in 1990 and now newly repackaged in paperback, records these traditions and adapts old-style recipes for the modern kitchen.
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Field Observations
Stories
Stories by Rob Davidson
University of Missouri Press, 2001

Field Observations, the debut fiction collection from Rob Davidson, contains stories about people who find themselves at difficult turning points in their lives—times when they are faced with hard choices, broken promises, and the fear of self-destruction. Davidson's characters are diverse: a retired math teacher, an auto repair worker, a technical writer, a nurse living overseas. What connects them is the way Davidson renders each character with essential human dignity, regardless of his or her flaws. This collection addresses such contemporary concerns as love relationships, cultural interaction, divorce, aging, and alcoholism in a lively, sometimes offbeat way.

In "Inventory"—winner of a 1997 AWP Intro Journals Award—the young narrator, fresh out of the army, struggles to take stock of his civilian life and assume responsibility for himself. An estranged wife, in "You Have to Say Something," competes for attention with her husband's manic approach to work, finding both solace and frustration in a new friend, a compulsive gift-giver. "A Private Life" renders a young Peace Corps volunteer grappling with her loneliness in a foreign country, with a sense of exposure and violation. In "What We Leave Behind," a college dropout and onetime golf prodigy finds himself dissatisfied with his current career as a vacuum cleaner salesman; after a quirky encounter with a client, he finds hope for a new beginning.

A recurrent motif in the stories is the presentation of characters who either tend to observe, even spy on, others, or who have the sense that they themselves are being watched. The notion of a passive observer extends to several characters who seem to treat their own lives as subject for observation rather than action, frequently persisting in patterns of behavior that are clearly destructive.

Rendered in clean, smooth prose with sharply observed details and driven by Davidson's fine ear for dialogue, these stories poignantly capture the difficult in-between states that trouble people every day. Fully defined and evocatively written, this collection addresses important real-life issues and concerns.

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Fierce and Indomitable
The Protohistoric Non-Pueblo World in the American Southwest
Edited by Deni J. Seymour
University of Utah Press, 2016

Trending upward as an archaeological field of study, protohistoric mobile groups provide fascinating new directions for cutting-edge research in the American Southwest and beyond. These mobile residents represent the ancient and ancestral roots of many modern indigenous peoples, including the Apaches, Jumano, Yavapai, and Ute. These important protohistoric and historic mobile people have tended to be ignored because their archaeological sites were deemed too difficult to identify, too scant to be worthy of study, and too different to incorporate. This book brings together information from a diverse collection of authors working throughout the American Southwest and its fringes to make the bold statement that these groups can be identified in the archaeological record and their sites have much to contribute to the study of cultural process, method and theory, and past lifeways. Mobile groups are integral for assessing the grand reorganizational events of the Late Prehistoric period and are key to understanding colonial contact and transformations. Now, the only analyses, overviews, and class lectures that will be considered comprehensive will be those that address the presence of these many widespread mobile peoples. 

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The Fighting Horse of the Stanislaus
Stories and Essays by Dan De Quille
LAWRENCE I. BERKOVE
University of Iowa Press, 1990
Tongue-Oil Timothy, as unflappable as he is unconscionable, swindles Wasatch Sam in a villainous poker game. Amazed prospectors discover a full-grown silver man deep in a mountain tunnel. Old Pizen, a horse so mean that he was almost poison to himself, is wagered by his own owner in the fight of his life. The travelling stones of Pahranagat, when scattered about the ground, immediately huddle together like eggs in a nest. Highly eccentric but shrewd, itinerant preacher Lorenzo Dow raises the devil. A cheery voiced goblin frog points the way toward the great Comstack silver lode. These tongue-in-cheek creations join Bendix Biargo, the Seven Nimrods of the Sierras, a Female World-Ranger, and Dan De Quille's other unforgettable characters to make the pioneers and Comstockers come alive once more.
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Filth
Dirt, Digust, and Modern Life
William A. Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2004
From floating barges of urban refuse to dung-encrusted works of art, from toxic landfills to dirty movies, filth has become a major presence and a point of volatile contention in modern life. This book explores the question of what filth has to do with culture: what critical role the lost, the rejected, the abject, and the dirty play in social management and identity formation. It suggests the ongoing power of culturally mandated categories of exclusion and repression.Focusing on filth in literary and cultural materials from London, Paris, and their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary phobias, fictional representations of laboring women and foreigners as polluting, and relations among disease, disorder, and sexual-racial disharmony. Filth provides the first sustained consideration, both theoretical and historical, of a subject whose power to horrify, fascinate, and repel is as old as civilization itself.Contributors: David S. Barnes, U of Pennsylvania; Neil Blackadder, Knox College; Joseph Bristow, U of California, Los Angeles; Joseph W. Childers, U of California, Riverside; Eileen Cleere, Southwestern U; Natalka Freeland, U of California, Irvine; Pamela K. Gilbert, U of Florida; Christopher Hamlin, U of Notre Dame; William Kupinse, U of Puget Sound; Benjamin Lazier, U of Chicago; David L. Pike, American U; David Trotter, U of Cambridge.William A. Cohen is associate professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author of Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction.Ryan Johnson is completing his Ph.D. in the Department of English at Stanford University, where he has served as general editor of the Stanford Humanities Review.
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Finding Mars
Ned Rozell
University of Alaska Press, 2011
Finding Mars is an interwoven tale of science, travel, and adventure, as science writer Ned Rozell accompanies permafrost researcher—and inveterate wanderer—Kenji Yoshikawa on a 750-mile trek by snowmobile through the Alaska wilderness.  Along the way, Rozell learns about Yoshikawa’s fascinating life, from his boyhood in Tokyo to the youthful wanderlust that led him to push a wheeled cart across the Sahara, ski to the South Pole, and take a sailboat into the frozen reaches of the Arctic Ocean, spending a winter frozen in the ice near Barrow. It’s an always on-the-move account of a man driven not just by the desire to fill in the blank spots on a map, but also to learn everything he can about them—and a ringing testament to the power of science, enthusiasm, and individual inspiration.
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Finding Solace in the Soil
An Archaeology of Gardens and Gardeners at Amache
Bonnie J. Clark
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Finding Solace in the Soil tells the largely unknown story of the gardens of Amache, the War Relocation Authority incarceration camp in Colorado. Combining physical evidence with oral histories and archival data and enriched by the personal photographs and memories of former Amache incarcerees, the book describes how gardeners cultivated community in confinement.
Before incarceration, many at Amache had been farmers, gardeners, or nursery workers. Between 1942 and 1945, they applied their horticultural expertise to the difficult high plains landscape of southeastern Colorado. At Amache they worked to form microclimates, reduce blowing sand, grow better food, and achieve stability and preserve community at a time of dehumanizing dispossession. In this book archaeologist Bonnie J. Clark examines botanical data like seeds, garden-related artifacts, and other material evidence found at Amache, as well as oral histories from survivors and archival data including personal letters and government records, to recount how the prisoners of Amache transformed the harsh military setting of the camp into something resembling a town. She discusses the varieties of gardens found at the site, their place within Japanese and Japanese American horticultural traditions, and innovations brought about by the creative use of limited camp resources.
 
The gardens were regarded by the incarcerees as a gift to themselves and to each other. And they were also, it turns out, a gift to the future as repositories of generational knowledge where a philosophical stance toward nature was made manifest through innovation and horticultural skill. Framing the gardens and gardeners of Amache within the larger context of the incarceration of Japanese Americans and of recent scholarship on displacement and confinement, Finding Solace in the Soil will be of interest to gardeners, historical archaeologists, landscape archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and scholars of Japanese American history and horticultural history.
 
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Finding the Arctic
History and Culture Along a 2,500-Mile Snowmobile Journey from Alaska to Hudson’s Bay
Matthew Sturm
University of Alaska Press, 2012
The history of the Arctic is rich, filled with fascinating and heroic stories of exploration, multicultural interactions, and humans facing nature at its most extreme. In Finding the Arctic, the accomplished arctic researcher Matthew Sturm collects some of the most memorable and moving of these stories and weaves them around his own story of a 2,500-mile snowmobile expedition across arctic Alaska and Canada.
During that trip, Sturm and six companions followed a circuitous route that brought them to many of the most historic spots in the North. They stood in the footsteps of their predecessors, experienced the landscape and the weather, and gained an intimate perspective on notable historical events, all chronicled here by Sturm. Written with humor and pathos, Finding the Arctic is a classic tale of adventure travel. And throughout the book,Sturm, with his thirty-eight years of experience in the North, emerges as an excellent guide for any who wish to understand the Arctic of today and yesterday.   
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Fire in the Water, Earth in the Air
Legends of West Texas Music
By Christopher J. Oglesby
University of Texas Press, 2006

From Buddy Holly and the Crickets to the Flatlanders, Terry Allen, and Natalie Maines, Lubbock, Texas, has produced songwriters, musicians, and artists as prolifically as cotton, conservatives, and windstorms. While nobody questions where the conservatives come from in a city that a recent nonpartisan study ranked as America's second most conservative, many people wonder why Lubbock is such fertile ground for creative spirits who want to expand the boundaries of thought in music and art. Is it just that "there's nothing else to do," as some have suggested, or is there something in the character of Lubbock that encourages creativity as much as conservatism?

In this book, Christopher Oglesby interviews twenty-five musicians and artists with ties to Lubbock to discover what it is about this community and West Texas in general that feeds the creative spirit. Their answers are revealing. Some speak of the need to rebel against conventional attitudes that threaten to limit their horizons. Others, such as Joe Ely, praise the freedom of mind they find on the wide open plains. "There is this empty desolation that I could fill if I picked up a pen and wrote, or picked up a guitar and played," he says. Still others express skepticism about how much Lubbock as a place contributes to the success of its musicians. Jimmie Dale Gilmore says, "I think there is a large measure of this Lubbock phenomenon that is just luck, and that is the part that you cannot explain."

As a whole, the interviews create a portrait not only of Lubbock's musicians and artists, but also of the musical community that has sustained them, including venues such as the legendary Cotton Club and the original Stubb's Barbecue. This kaleidoscopic portrait of the West Texas music scene gets to the heart of what it takes to create art in an isolated, often inhospitable environment. As Oglesby says, "Necessity is the mother of creation. Lubbock needed beauty, poetry, humor, and it needed to get up and shake its communal ass a bit or go mad from loneliness and boredom; so Lubbock created the amazing likes of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Terry Allen, and Joe Ely."

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Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape
Edited by Thomas R. Vale
Island Press, 2002

For nearly two centuries, the creation myth for the United States imagined European settlers arriving on the shores of a vast, uncharted wilderness. Over the last two decades, however, a contrary vision has emerged, one which sees the country's roots not in a state of "pristine" nature but rather in a "human-modified landscape" over which native peoples exerted vast control.

Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape seeks a middle ground between those conflicting paradigms, offering a critical, research-based assessment of the role of Native Americans in modifying the landscapes of pre-European America. Contributors focus on the western United States and look at the question of fire regimes, the single human impact which could have altered the environment at a broad, landscape scale, and which could have been important in almost any part of the West. Each of the seven chapters is written by a different author about a different subregion of the West, evaluating the question of whether the fire regimes extant at the time of European contact were the product of natural factors or whether ignitions by Native Americans fundamentally changed those regimes.

An introductory essay offers context for the regional chapters, and a concluding section compares results from the various regions and highlights patterns both common to the West as a whole and distinctive for various parts of the western states. The final section also relates the findings to policy questions concerning the management of natural areas, particularly on federal lands, and of the "naturalness" of the pre-European western landscape.


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Fire Road
Donald Anderson
University of Iowa Press, 2001
Stephen Mann-- loyal son, war veteran, divorced father--is the subject of Donald Anderson's contemporary short-story cycle, Fire Road. In this award-winning collection, Mann negotiates life's punches through gain and loss, love and death, and the all too random dangers of being human. Woven between each personal story are poetic vignettes of isolated moments-- the headlines in a morning paper, a political murder--and the century's most violent tragedies--the bombing of Hiroshima, the firestorm at Dresden. Each vingette is a constant, powerful reminder of the human capacity to love and, ultimately, to destroy. A bruising view of one man's tumultuous journey through life, Fire Road explores the small and large crimes we all commit in the name of love and fear, despair and longing.
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The Fires of Vesuvius
Pompeii Lost and Found
Mary Beard
Harvard University Press, 2010

Pompeii is the most famous archaeological site in the world, visited by more than two million people each year. Yet it is also one of the most puzzling, with an intriguing and sometimes violent history, from the sixth century BCE to the present day.

Destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE, the ruins of Pompeii offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman Empire. But the eruptions are only part of the story. In The Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. She explores what kind of town it was—more like Calcutta or the Costa del Sol?—and what it can tell us about “ordinary” life there. From sex to politics, food to religion, slavery to literacy, Beard offers us the big picture even as she takes us close enough to the past to smell the bad breath and see the intestinal tapeworms of the inhabitants of the lost city. She resurrects the Temple of Isis as a testament to ancient multiculturalism. At the Suburban Baths we go from communal bathing to hygiene to erotica.

Recently, Pompeii has been a focus of pleasure and loss: from Pink Floyd’s memorable rock concert to Primo Levi’s elegy on the victims. But Pompeii still does not give up its secrets quite as easily as it may seem. This book shows us how much more and less there is to Pompeii than a city frozen in time as it went about its business on 24 August 79.

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First Find Your Child a Good Mother
The Construction of Self in Two African Communities
Riesman, Paul
Rutgers University Press, 1992

Through a systematic comparison of the life circumstances, child-rearing practices, and personalities of the FulBe and their former slaves, the RiimaayBe, this book develops an alternative theory of the way personality is formed in the Fulani society of West Africa. Riesman discusses the different characters, economies, and life plans of adult men and women of both groups, focusing on their ideas about the value of relatives. He further presents detailed observations of child-rearing practices, and concludes that the FulBe and RiimaayBe do not differ in these practices. Contrasting Fulani and Western notions of parenting, he suggests that child-rearing practices are themselves irrelevant to the formation of adult personality, but that a people's ideas about the meaning of life, social relations, and the development of character are very important. Finally, Riesman outlines a sociocultural theory of personality and its formation, and uses this theory to make sense of the differences between FulBe and RiimaayBe.

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The First New Chronicle and Good Government
On the History of the World and the Incas up to 1615
By Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala
University of Texas Press, 2009

One of the most fascinating books on pre-Columbian and early colonial Peru was written by a Peruvian Indian named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. This book, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, covers pre-Inca times, various aspects of Inca culture, the Spanish conquest, and colonial times up to around 1615 when the manuscript was finished. Now housed in the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark, and viewable online at www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/en/frontpage.htm, the original manuscript has 1,189 pages accompanied by 398 full-page drawings that constitute the most accurate graphic depiction of Inca and colonial Peruvian material culture ever done.

Working from the original manuscript and consulting with fellow Quechua- and Spanish-language experts, Roland Hamilton here provides the most complete and authoritative English translation of approximately the first third of The First New Chronicle and Good Government. The sections included in this volume (pages 1–369 of the manuscript) cover the history of Peru from the earliest times and the lives of each of the Inca rulers and their wives, as well as a wealth of information about ordinances, age grades, the calendar, idols, sorcerers, burials, punishments, jails, songs, palaces, roads, storage houses, and government officials. One hundred forty-six of Guaman Poma's detailed illustrations amplify the text.

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First Timers and Old Timers
Kenneth L. Untiedt
University of North Texas Press, 2012

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Fishcamp
Life On An Alaskan Shore
Nancy Lord
Island Press, 1997

"Summers, I live at fishcamp. June through August, Mondays and Fridays, my partner and I catch and sell salmon that pass our beach on their way to spawning streams. The rest of the week, and parts of May and September, Ken and I mend nets, comb the rocky shoreline for useful poles and cottonwood bark, do a thousand camp chores and projects. We live quite happily in a tiny cabin at the top of the beach." --from Fishcamp

For the past eighteen summers, Nancy Lord and her partner Ken have made a living, and made a life, fishing for salmon off the west side of Cook Inlet on the southern coast of Alaska. In Fishcamp, Lord provides a nuanced and engrossing portrait of their days and months in camp at the inlet.

Beginning with their arrival by plane on a freshly thawed lake, she describes their joys and tribulations as spring gives way to summer and the long months of summer unfold. With poetic cadence and magical tone, Lord draws the reader into life at camp, sharing experiences that range from the mundane to the sublime: the mending of nets; the muscle-wrenching labor of the catch; the exquisite pleasure of an improvised hot-tub; the often unnoticed bounty of the inlet's flora and fauna. Interwoven throughout the descriptions of quotidian adventure are threads of the deeper history of the region -- stories and legends of the native Dena'ina; anecdotes about past and current inlet residents; discussions of the lives of their neighbors, both human and animal, who, like them, live with fish.

Fishcamp is Nancy Lord's eloquent paean to the place she calls home. In clear and richly textured prose, she captures the simple beauty of a life lived with nature, "a part" rather than "apart." As Lord explains, she shows us in Fishcamp "something about what even one place and its infinitely varied life contributes to the connections among us all and to the wholes we call 'world' and 'culture.'...Wherever our places are and whatever we do in them, perhaps we might all begin to pay more attention to the little and big things that do indeed connect in profound ways to all the rest, miles and eons and cultures apart."

Fishcamp is a remarkable combination of personal, cultural, and natural history from what will surely be recognized as one of the most talented new voices of our time.

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Flatlanders and Ridgerunners
Folktales from the Mountains of Northern Pennsylvania
James York Glimm
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983

Excerpt from Flatlanders and Ridgerunners:

Out-Riddling the Judge

Back in Prohibition my uncle made moonshine. His name was Moses Kenny and his whiskey--they called it “White Mule” was the best in the county. Well, the feds got after him and finally they  arrested him. Took him to a federal judge down in Philadelphia.

Now, the judge liked a good time and thought he’d have a little fun with this hick from the mountains. When Uncle came into court, he said, “are you the Moses who can make the sun dark?”

Moses looked at him and said slowly, “Nope, your honor. But I am the Moses who can make the moon shine.”

The judge let him go.

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Flavor and Soul
Italian America at Its African American Edge
John Gennari
University of Chicago Press, 2017
In the United States, African American and Italian cultures have been intertwined for more than a hundred years. From as early as nineteenth-century African American opera star Thomas Bowers—“The Colored Mario”—all the way to hip-hop entrepreneur Puff Daddy dubbing himself “the Black Sinatra,” the affinity between black and Italian cultures runs deep and wide. Once you start looking, you’ll find these connections everywhere. Sinatra croons bel canto over the limousine swing of the Count Basie band. Snoop Dogg deftly tosses off the line “I’m Lucky Luciano ’bout to sing soprano.” Like the Brooklyn pizzeria and candy store in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever, or the basketball sidelines where Italian American coaches Rick Pitino and John Calipari mix it up with their African American players, black/Italian connections are a thing to behold—and to investigate.

In Flavor and Soul, John Gennari spotlights this affinity, calling it “the edge”—now smooth, sometimes serrated—between Italian American and African American culture. He argues that the edge is a space of mutual emulation and suspicion, a joyous cultural meeting sometimes darkened by violent collision. Through studies of music and sound, film and media, sports and foodways, Gennari shows how an Afro-Italian sensibility has nourished and vitalized American culture writ large, even as Italian Americans and African Americans have fought each other for urban space, recognition of overlapping histories of suffering and exclusion, and political and personal rispetto.

Thus, Flavor and Soul is a cultural contact zone—a piazza where people express deep feelings of joy and pleasure, wariness and distrust, amity and enmity. And it is only at such cultural edges, Gennari argues, that America can come to truly understand its racial and ethnic dynamics.
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The Flavor of Wisconsin
An Informal History of Food and Eating in the Badger State
Harva Hachten
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2023
The Wisconsin Historical Society published Harva Hachten's The Flavor of Wisconsin in 1981. It immediately became an invaluable resource on Wisconsin foods and foodways. This updated and expanded edition explores the multitude of changes in the food culture since the 1980s. It will find new audiences while continuing to delight the book’s many fans. And it will stand as a legacy to author Harva Hachten, who was at work on the revised edition at the time of her death in April 2006.

While in many ways the first edition of The Flavor of Wisconsin has stood the test of time very well, food-related culture and business have changed immensely in the twenty-five years since its publication. Well-known regional food expert and author Terese Allen examines aspects of food, cooking, and eating that have changed or emerged since the first edition, including the explosion of farmers' markets; organic farming and sustainability; the "slow food" movement; artisanal breads, dairy, herb growers, and the like; and how relatively recent immigrants have contributed to Wisconsin's remarkably rich food scene.
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Flavor of Wisconsin for Kids
A Feast of History, with Stories and Recipes Celebrating the Land and People of Our State
Terese Allen
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2012

What are some food favorites in Wisconsin, and why are they special to us? How have our landscape and the people who have inhabited it contributed to our food heritage? This unique blend of history book and cookbook gives kids a real taste for hands-on history by showing them how to create and sample foods that link us to the resources found in our state and the heritage of those who produce them.

Designed for kids and adults to use together, The Flavor of Wisconsin for Kids draws upon the same source material that makes The Flavor of Wisconsin by Harva Hachten and Terese Allen a fascinating and authoritative document of the history and traditions of food in our state, and presents it in a colorful, kid-friendly format that’s both instructional and fun. Mindful of the importance of teaching kids about where the foods they eat come from, each chapter examines a different food source—forests; waters; vegetable, meat, and dairy farms; gardens; and communities. The authors explore our state’s foodways, from their origins to how they have changed over the years, and then offer a selection of related recipes. The recipes are written for modern kitchens but use many traditional ingredients and techniques. Level of difficulty is clearly noted, as well as whether a recipe requires a heat source to prepare.

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The Flow of Life
Essays on Eastern Indonesia
James J. Fox
Harvard University Press, 1980
Indonesia east of Bali is perhaps the least known of all major cultural areas of Southeast Asia. Yet the anthropology of the region has long held a prominent place in the development of structuralist theories of marital exchange and symbolic classification. Falling in a distinguished lineage running from van Wouden to Lévi-Strauss to Rodney Needham, The Flow of Life presents a comprehensive set of essays by a distinguished group of international scholars, which provides both a full picture of this culturally rich area and an important extension of earlier structuralist theory.This volume is bound to become the standard source on the social anthropology of eastern Indonesia. But it is a work of more than regional significance, providing a variety of empirical resources to address the questions which lie at the bottom of much structuralist thought about mind and society: what is the nature of symbolic thought? how does consciousness intertwine with society and ecology? what is the difference between “primitive” and “modern” society?
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Flow
The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River
Beth Kephart
Temple University Press, 2014
The Schuylkill River-the name in Dutch means "hidden creek"-courses many miles, turning through Philadelphia before it yields to the Delaware. "I am this wide. I am this deep. A tad voluptuous, but only in places," writes Beth Kephart, capturing the voice of this natural resource in Flow.
An award-winning author, Kephart's elegant, impressionistic story of the Schuylkill navigates the beating heart of this magnificent water source. Readers are invited to flow through time-from the colonial era and Ben Franklin's death through episodes of Yellow Fever and the Winter of 1872, when the river froze over-to the present day. Readers will feel the silt of the Schuylkill's banks, swim with its perch and catfish, and cruise-or scull-downstream, from Reading to Valley Forge to the Water Works outside center city.
Flow's lush narrative is peppered with lovely, black and white photographs and illustrations depicting the river's history, its people, and its gorgeous vistas. Written with wisdom and with awe for one of the oldest friends of all Philadelphians, Flow is a perfect book for reading while the ice melts, and for slipping in your bag for your own visit to the Schuylkill.
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The Flower and the Scorpion
Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture
Pete Sigal
Duke University Press, 2011
Prior to the Spanish conquest, the Nahua indigenous peoples of central Mexico did not have a notion of “sex” or “sexuality” equivalent to the sexual categories developed by colonial society or those promoted by modern Western peoples. In this innovative ethnohistory, Pete Sigal seeks to shed new light on Nahua concepts of the sexual without relying on the modern Western concept of sexuality. Along with clerical documents and other Spanish sources, he interprets the many texts produced by the Nahua. While colonial clerics worked to impose Catholic beliefs—particularly those equating sexuality and sin—on the indigenous people they encountered, the process of cultural assimilation was slower and less consistent than scholars have assumed. Sigal argues that modern researchers of sexuality have exaggerated the power of the Catholic sacrament of confession to change the ways that individuals understood themselves and their behaviors. At least until the mid-seventeenth century, when increased contact with the Spanish began to significantly change Nahua culture and society, indigenous peoples, particularly commoners, related their sexual lives and imaginations not just to concepts of sin and redemption but also to pleasure, seduction, and rituals of fertility and warfare.
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Flowering of the Cumberland
Harriette Simpson Arnow
Michigan State University Press, 2013
Harriette Arnow’s search for truth as early American settlers knew it began as a child—the old songs, handed-down stories, and proverbs that colored her world compelled her on a journey that informs her depiction of the Cumberland River Valley in Kentucky and Tennessee. Arnow drew from court records, wills, inventories, early newspapers, and unpublished manuscripts to write Seedtime on the Cumberland, which chronicles the movement of settlers away from the coast, as well as their continual refinement of the “art of pioneering.” A companion piece, this evocative history covers the same era, 1780–1803, from the first settlement in what was known as “Middle Tennessee” to the Louisiana Purchase. When Middle Tennessee was the American frontier, the men and women who settled there struggled for survival, land, and human dignity. The society they built in their new home reflected these accomplishments, vulnerabilities, and ambitions, at a time when America was experiencing great political, industrial, and social upheaval.
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Flowers in the Dustbin
Culture, Anarchy, and Postwar England
Neil Nehring
University of Michigan Press, 1993
Flowers in the Dustbin looks at the volatile relations between literature, rock music, and youth subcultures in postwar England. Neil Nehring traces the continuities between the original avant-garde of the twenties and thirties and the postwar youth culture, arguing that anarchism never really disappeared from the world. The author shows that British youth groups like the Mods, the Rockers, Punks, and Teddy Boys and the music that inspired them appear increasingly more acute than their literary counterparts, belying conventional assumptions about the relative powers of "high" and "low" culture. By examining literary texts as part of a larger sampling of cultural forms and their uses in everyday life, Flowers in the Dustbin provides a striking illustration of the significance the field of cultural studies holds for studies in English.
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Folk Groups And Folklore Genres Reader
A Reader
edited by Elliott Oring
Utah State University Press, 1989
Compiled to accompany the best-selling textbook, Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction, the selections in this anthology extend the discussion in diverse directions, alert the reader to new problems, and introduce alternative perspectives. The essays include folklore classics and recent works, and are organized in sections that correspond to the chapter headings in An Introduction.
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Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border
By Américo Paredes
University of Texas Press, 1995

In an illustrious career spanning over forty years, Américo Paredes has often set the standard for scholarship and writing in folklore and Chicano studies. In folklore, he has been in the vanguard of important theoretical and methodological movements. In Chicano studies, he stands as one of the premier exponents.

Paredes's books are widely known and easily available, but his scholarly articles are not so familiar or accessible. To bring them to a wider readership, Richard Bauman has selected eleven essays that eloquently represent the range and excellence of Paredes's work. The hardcover edition of Folklore and Culture was published in 1993. This paperback edition will make the book more accessible to the general public and more practical for classroom use.

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The Folklore and Folklife of New Jersey
Cohen, David Steven
Rutgers University Press, 1983
 An examination of the traditional culture and customs of New Jersey includes discussions of crafts, jokes, names, songs, cooking, legends, and games.
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Folklore by the Fireside
Text and Context of the Tuscan Veglia
By Alessandro Falassi
University of Texas Press, 1980

For centuries, social life in rural Tuscany has centered around the veglia, an evening gathering of family and friends at the hearth. Folklore by the Fireside is a thorough and insightful study of this custom—from the tales, riddles, lullabies, and folk prayers performed as the small children are put to bed to the courtship songs and dances later in the evening to the anti-veglia male gossip, card games, and protest songs originating in the tavern.

Alessandro Falassi skillfully correlates the veglia to the rites of passage and family values of an agrarian society. Although the impact of mass media and other factors has tended to weaken the tradition, even today Tuscan children are taught to behave and adolescents are guided along the conventional path to adulthood, courtship, and marriage through veglia folklore.

This is the first work to deal systematically with Tuscan folklore from a semiotic and structural viewpoint and to examine the veglia as a means of handing down traditional values. It is important not only for its careful, detailed description but also for its rigorous methodology and theoretical richness.

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Folklore
In All of Us, In All We Do
Kenneth L. Untiedt
University of North Texas Press, 2006

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Folklore in Motion
Texas Travel Lore
Kenneth L. Untiedt
University of North Texas Press, 2007

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Folklore in Utah
A History and Guide to Resources
David Stanley
Utah State University Press, 2004

Over thirty scholars examine the development of folklore studies through the lens of over one hundred years of significant activity in a state that has provided grist for the mills of many prominent folklorists. In the past the Folklore Society of Utah has examined the work of such scholars in biographical and other essays published in its newsletters. This book incorporates those essays and goes well beyond them to include many other topices, offering a thorough history of folklore studies and a guide to resources for those pursuing research in Utah now and in the future.

The essays survey the development and contributions of folklore studies in Utah from 1892 to 2004 but also represent developments in both academic and public-sector folklore throughout the United States. Following a thorough historical introduction, part I profiles the first folklorists working in the state, including Hector Lee, Thomas Cheney, Austin and Alta Fife, Wayland Hand, and Lester Hubbard. Part II looks at the careers of prominent Utah folklorists Jan Harold Brunvand, Barre Toelken, and William B. Wilson, as well as the works of the next, current generation of folklorists. Part III covers studies in major folklore genres, with essays on the study of material culture, vernacular architecture, and Mormon, ethnic, Native American, and Latino folklore. Part IV examines public folklore programs including organizations, conferences, and tourism. Back matter describes academic programs at Utah institutions of higher education, summarizes the holdings of the various folklore archives in the state, and provides a complete cross-indexed bibliography of articles, books, and recordings of Utah folklore.

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Folktales from the Helotes Settlement
John Igo
University of North Texas Press, 2014

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Follow the New Way
American Refugee Resettlement Policy and Hmong Religious Change
Melissa May Borja
Harvard University Press, 2023

An incisive look at Hmong religion in the United States, where resettled refugees found creative ways to maintain their traditions, even as Christian organizations deputized by the government were granted an outsized influence on the refugees’ new lives.

Every year, members of the Hmong Christian Church of God in Minneapolis gather for a cherished Thanksgiving celebration. But this Thanksgiving takes place in the spring, in remembrance of the turbulent days in May 1975 when thousands of Laotians were evacuated for resettlement in the United States. For many Hmong, passage to America was also a spiritual crossing. As they found novel approaches to living, they also embraced Christianity—called kev cai tshiab, “the new way”—as a means of navigating their complex spiritual landscapes.

Melissa May Borja explores how this religious change happened and what it has meant for Hmong culture. American resettlement policies unintentionally deprived Hmong of the resources necessary for their time-honored rituals, in part because these practices, blending animism, ancestor worship, and shamanism, challenged many Christian-centric definitions of religion. At the same time, because the government delegated much of the resettlement work to Christian organizations, refugees developed close and dependent relationships with Christian groups. Ultimately the Hmong embraced Christianity on their own terms, adjusting to American spiritual life while finding opportunities to preserve their customs.

Follow the New Way illustrates America’s wavering commitments to pluralism and secularism, offering a much-needed investigation into the public work done by religious institutions with the blessing of the state. But in the creation of a Christian-inflected Hmong American animism we see the resilience of tradition—how it deepens under transformative conditions.

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Following Tradition
Simon J. Bronner
Utah State University Press, 1998

Following Tradition is an expansive examination of the history of tradition—"one of the most common as well as most contested terms in English language usage"—in Americans' thinking and discourse about culture. Tradition in use becomes problematic because of "its multiple meanings and its conceptual softness." As a term and a concept, it has been important in the development of all scholarly fields that study American culture. Folklore, history, American studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and others assign different value and meaning to tradition. It is a frequent point of reference in popular discourse concerning everything from politics to lifestyles to sports and entertainment. Politicians and social advocates appeal to it as prima facie evidence of the worth of their causes. Entertainment and other media mass produce it, or at least a facsimile of it. In a society that frequently seeks to reinvent itself, tradition as a cultural anchor to be reverenced or rejected is an essential, if elusive, concept. Simon Bronner's wide net captures the historical, rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological dimensions of tradition. As he notes, he has written a book "about an American tradition—arguing about it." His elucidation of those arguments makes fascinating and thoughtful reading. An essential text for folklorists, Following Tradition will be a valuable reference as well for historians and anthropologists; students of American studies, popular culture, and cultural studies; and anyone interested in the continuing place of tradition in American culture.

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The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell
Contemporary Appalachian Tables
Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt
Ohio University Press, 2019

Blue Ridge tacos, kimchi with soup beans and cornbread, family stories hiding in cookbook marginalia, African American mountain gardens—this wide-ranging anthology considers all these and more. Diverse contributors show us that contemporary Appalachian tables and the stories they hold offer new ways into understanding past, present, and future American food practices. The poets, scholars, fiction writers, journalists, and food professionals in these pages show us that what we eat gives a beautifully full picture of Appalachia, where it’s been, and where it’s going.

Contributors: Courtney Balestier, Jessie Blackburn, Karida L. Brown, Danille Elise Christensen, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, Michael Croley, Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, Robert Gipe, Suronda Gonzalez, Emily Hilliard, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Abigail Huggins, Erica Abrams Locklear, Ronni Lundy, George Ella Lyon, Jeff Mann, Daniel S. Margolies, William Schumann, Lora E. Smith, Emily Wallace, Crystal Wilkinson

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Foods of Association
Biocultural Perspectives on Foods and Beverages that Mediate Sociability
Nina L. Etkin
University of Arizona Press, 2009
“We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink.”—Epicurus

This fascinating book examines the biology and culture of foods and beverages that are consumed in communal settings, with special attention to their health implications. Nina Etkin covers a wealth of topics, exploring human evolutionary history, the Slow Food movement, ritual and ceremonial foods, caffeinated beverages, spices, the street foods of Hawaii and northern Nigeria, and even bottled water. Her work is framed by a biocultural perspective that considers both the physiological implications of consumption and the cultural construction and circulation of foods. For Etkin, the foods and beverages we consume are simultaneously “biodynamic substances and cultural objects.”

The book begins with a look at the social eating habits of our primate relatives and discusses our evolutionary adaptations. It then offers a history of social foods in the era of European expansion, with a focus on spices and “caffeinated cordials.” (Of course, there were some powerful physiological consequences of eating foods brought home by returning explorers, and those are considered too—along with consequences for native peoples.) From there, the book describes “street food,” which is always served in communal settings. Etkin then scrutinizes ceremonial foods and beverages, and considers their pharmacological effects as well. Her extensive examination concludes by assessing the biological and cultural implications of bottled water.

While intended primarily for scholars, this enticing book serves up a tantalizing smorgasbord of food for thought.
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Foodways in Roman Republican Italy
Laura M. Banducci
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Foodways in Roman Republican Italy explores the production, preparation, and consumption of food and drink in Republican Italy to illuminate the nature of cultural change during this period. Traditionally, studies of the cultural effects of Roman contact and conquest have focused on observing changes in the public realm: that is, changing urban organization and landscape, and monumental construction. Foodways studies reach into the domestic realm: How do the daily behaviors of individuals express their personal identity, and How does this relate to changes and expressions of identity in broader society? Laura M. Banducci tracks through time the foodways of three sites in Etruria from about the third century BCE to the first century CE: Populonia, Musarna, and Cetamura del Chianti. All were established Etruscan sites that came under Roman political control over the course of the third and second centuries BCE. The book examines the morphology and use wear of ceramics used for cooking, preparing, and serving food in order to deduce cooking methods and the types of foods being prepared and consumed. Change in domestic behaviors was gradual and regionally varied, depending on local social and environmental conditions, shaping rather than responding to an explicitly “Roman” presence.

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Football and Colonialism
Body and Popular Culture in Urban Mozambique
Nuno Domingos
Ohio University Press, 2017

In articles for the newspaper O Brado Africano in the mid-1950s, poet and journalist José Craveirinha described the ways in which the Mozambican football players in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) adapted the European sport to their own expressive ends. Through gesture, footwork, and patois, they used what Craveirinha termed “malice”—or cunning—to negotiate their places in the colonial state. “These manifestations demand a vast study,” Craveirinha wrote, “which would lead to a greater knowledge of the black man, of his problems, of his clashes with European civilization, in short, to a thorough treatise of useful and instructive ethnography.”

In Football and Colonialism, Nuno Domingos accomplishes that study. Ambitious and meticulously researched, the work draws upon an array of primary sources, including newspapers, national archives, poetry and songs, and interviews with former footballers. Domingos shows how local performances and popular culture practices became sites of an embodied history of Mozambique. The work will break new ground for scholars of African history and politics, urban studies, popular culture, and gendered forms of domination and resistance.

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Foothold on a Hillside
Memories of a Southern Illinoisan
Charless Caraway. Foreword by Paul Simon
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986

In a style reminiscent of the master storytellers of yore, Charless Caraway recounts the story of his life, as a man and a boy, on small farms in Saline and Jackson counties, particularly around Eldorado, Makanda, and Etherton Switch. He makes no bones about the hardships of those "old days," first helping his father eke out a living from the land, then scrambling for a living as a sharecropper and fruit picker, as he scrimped and saved for the day when he and his young wife, Bessie Mae Rowan Caraway, could buy a piece of land of their own.

The one-room school, the general store, the trips by wagon over roads that choked you in summer and swallowed you in winter, the home that burned: all are described in a matter-of-fact yet moving way. Many of the locations, buildings, and people are represented in equally unromanticized photographs from the family’s collection. Some of the stories and photos recall the common disasters of the frontier: drought, flood, and the tornado of 1925.

It is clear from these stories that each aspect of life exacted a price, but the Caraways paid that price without regret and rallied to go on their way. Charless and his family and friends fill this book with courage, strength, and an unshakable faith in the value of human endeavor.

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For the Love of Mike
More of the Best of Mike Royko
Mike Royko
University of Chicago Press, 2001
In 1999, the University of Chicago Press published a collection of Mike Royko's columns, entitled One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko. The response was immediate and overwhelming—readers almost instantly began asking when the second volume of Royko columns would appear. With more than a hundred vintage Royko columns and a foreword by Roger Ebert, For the Love of Mike was the answer.

Royko, a nationally syndicated Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote for three major Chicago newspapers in the course of his 34 years as a daily columnist. Chosen from more than 7,000 columns, For the Love of Mike brings back more than a hundred vintage Royko pieces-most of which have not appeared since their initial publication-for readers across the country to enjoy. This second collection includes Royko's riffs on the consequences of accepting a White House dinner invitation (not surprisingly, he turned it down); his explanation of the notorious Ex-Cub Factor in World Series play; and his befuddlement at a private screening of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, to which he was invited by his pal Ebert, the screenplay's author. The new collection also illuminates Royko's favorite themes, topics he returned to again and again: his skewering of cultural trends, his love of Chicago, and his rage against injustice. By turns acerbic, hilarious, and deeply moving, Royko remains a writer of wit and passion who represents the best of urban journalism.

"To read these columns again is to have Mike back again, nudging, chuckling, wincing, deflating pomposity, sticking up for the little guy, defending good ideas against small-minded people," writes Roger Ebert in his foreword to the book. For the Love of Mike does indeed bring Mike back again, and until a Chicago newspaper takes up Ebert's suggestion that it begin reprinting each of Royko's columns, one a day, this collection will more than satisfy Royko's loyal readers.
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Forbidden Relatives
THE AMERICAN MYTH OF COUSIN MARRIAGE
Martin Ottenheimer
University of Illinois Press, 1996
Forbidden Relatives challenges the belief--widely held in the United States--that legislation against marriage between first cousins is based on a biological risk to offspring. In fact, its author maintains, the U.S. prohibition against such unions originated largely because of the belief that it would promote more rapid assimilation of immigrants.
A social anthropologist, Martin Ottenheimer questioned U.S. laws against cousin marriage because his international research into marriage patterns showed no European countries prohibit such unions. He examines the historical development of U.S. laws governing marriage, contrasts them with European laws, and analyzes the genetic implications of first cousin marriage. Modern genetic evidence, Ottenheimer says, doesn't support the concept that children of these unions are at any special risk.
Ottenheimer's book, the only volume available that deals with kinship in this way, will challenge readers and give them much to consider and discuss.
 
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The Force of Custom
Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan
Judith Beyer
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
The Force of Custom presents a finely textured ethnographic study that sheds new light on the legal and moral ordering of everyday life in northwestern Kyrgyzstan. Through her extensive fieldwork and firsthand experience, Judith Beyer reveals how Kyrgyz in Talas province negotiate proper behavior and regulate disputes by invoking custom, known to the locals as salt. While salt is presented as age-old tradition, its invocation is shown to be a highly developed and flexible rhetorical strategy that people adapt in order to meet the challenges of contemporary political, legal, economic, and religious environments. Officially, codified state law should take precedence when it comes to dispute resolution, yet the unwritten laws of salt and the increasing importance of Islamic law provide the standards for ordering everyday life. As Beyer further demonstrates, interpretations of both Islamic and state law are also intrinsically linked to salt.
            By interweaving case studies on kinship, legal negotiations, festive events, mourning rituals, and political and business dealings, Beyer shows how salt is the binding element in rural Kyrgyz social life and how it is used to explain and negotiate moral behavior and to postulate communal identity. In this way, salt provides a time-tested, sustainable source of authentication that defies changes in government and the shifting tides of religious movements.
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Foreign Eyes
International Students Reflect on Utrecht
Edited By Emmeline Besamusca
Amsterdam University Press, 2012

Every year hundreds of students from all over the world come to study in Utrecht. On the occasion of the 375th anniversary of the founding of Utrecht University, foreign students and alumni were invited to reflect on Dutch culture as they had experienced it in their university years there. This book collects the best of the essays they wrote; the result is a unique and fascinating contribution to the study of Dutch culture. These essays offer not only an intimate portrait of the students’ experiences, but also a fresh perspective on the remarkable, frustrating, and fascinating features of Dutch culture.

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The Forest of Taboos
Morality, Hunting, and Identity among the Huaulu of the Moluccas
Valerio Valeri
University of Wisconsin Press, 2000

The Forest of Taboos may be considered among the most important books ever written by an anthropologist. Valeri writes superbly, and this book makes a fundamental contribution to one of the most central lines of thought in twentieth-century anthropology. He shows that taboo is finally comprehensible.”—John Stephen Lansing, University of Michigan
 
The Forest of Taboos is no conventional ethnography, more an extended meditative essay on its subject, erudite, rich in ideas and data, wide-ranging in its theoretical inspiration, and self-consciously literary in form. It is a fitting memorial to an author whose life was so tragically cut short.”—Roy Ellen, University of Kent at Canterbury

This eloquent and profound book, completed by Valerio Valeri shortly before his death in 1998, contends that the ambivalence felt by all humans about sex, death, and eating other animals can be explained by a set of coordinated principles that are expressed in taboos. In elegant prose, Valeri evokes the world of the Huaulu, forest hunters of Indonesia. The hidden attractions of the animal world, which invades the human world in perilous ways, he shows, also delineate that which the Huaulu regard as most human about themselves.

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Forever Belle
Sallie Ward of Kentucky
Randolph Paul Runyon
University of Tennessee Press, 2024
Forever Belle is the intriguing story of a nineteenth-century socialite, Sallie Ward Lawrence Hunt Armstrong Downs (1827–1896). Beautiful, charming, and kind—but also reckless and bold—she was born in Scott County, Kentucky, to a family of means beset by tragedy—early deaths, suicides, and even murders. Sallie basked in the national spotlight, appearing in newspapers as far-flung as Milwaukee and Charleston, written up for her exploits, which included such scandalous behavior as smoking cigars, dressing in “Turkish pantalets,” wearing rouge, and getting divorced.

Such a character invites romanticizing, and in this new biography, Randolph Paul Runyon does much to ground Sallie Ward in reality, fact-checking stories such as her infamous horse ride through the Louisville market house and examining his subject in the context of her wealthy family. Runyon carefully details his subject’s life, beginning with her aristocratic origins as the descendant of slaveowners, merchants, and politicians who stole land from Native groups and grew rich off the labor of enslaved people. He accurately covers Sallie’s madcap adventures and charitable actions, faithfully representing her legacy as a Kentuckian, a mother, and a grandmother. Illustrated with images of the family, their property, and their lavish grave markers, this volume provides an entertaining and informative glimpse into the world of antebellum privilege in a border state, as well as an examination of the birth of celebrity for its own sake. Forever Belle, finally, is also the story of an early if conflicted feminist: a woman who believed she should have control over her own appearance, actions, political views, and marital status.
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The Forge and the Funeral
The Smith in Kapsiki/Higi Culture
Walter E. A. van Beek
Michigan State University Press, 2015
Throughout Africa one craft among many stands out: that of the blacksmith. In many African cultures, smiths occupy a significant position, not just as artisans engaging in a difficult craft but also as special people. Often they perform other crafts, as well, and make up a somewhat separate group inside society. The Forge and the Funeral describes the position of the smith in the culture of the Kapsiki/Higi of northern Cameroon and northeastern Nigeria. Situated in the Mandara Mountains and straddling the border of these two countries, Kapsiki culture forms a specific and highly relevant example of the phenomenon of the smith in Africa. As an endogamous group of about 5 percent of the population, Kapsiki smiths perform an impressive array of crafts and specializations, combining magico-religious functions with metalwork, in particular as funeral directors, as well as with music and healing. The Forge and the Funeral gives an intimate description and analysis of this group, based upon the author’s four decades–long involvement with the Kapsiki/Higi. Description and analysis are set within the more general scholarly debates about the dynamics of professional closure—including the notions of caste and guild—and also consider the deep history of iron and brass in Africa.
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Forging Southeastern Identities
Social Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Folklore of the Mississippian to Early Historic South
Gregory A. Waselkov
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Forging Southeastern Identities: Social Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the Mississippian to Early Historic South, a groundbreaking collection of ten essays, covers a broad expanse of time—from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries—and focuses on a common theme of identity. These essays represent the various methods used by esteemed scholars today to study how Native Americans in the distant past created new social identities when old ideas of the self were challenged by changes in circumstance or by historical contingencies.
 
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and folklorists working in the Southeast have always recognized the region’s social diversity; indeed, the central purpose of these disciplines is to study peoples overlooked by the mainstream. Yet the ability to define and trace the origins of a collective social identity—the means by which individuals or groups align themselves, always in contrast to others—has proven to be an elusive goal. Here, editors Gregory A. Waselkov and Marvin T. Smith champion the relational identification and categorical identification processes, taken from sociological theory, as effective analytical tools.
 
Taking up the challenge, the contributors have deployed an eclectic range of approaches to establish and inform an overarching theme of identity. Some investigate shell gorgets, textiles, shell trade, infrastructure, specific sites, or plant usage. Others focus on the edges of the Mississippian world or examine colonial encounters between Europeans and native peoples. A final chapter considers the adaptive malleability of historical legend in the telling and hearing of slave narratives.
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Forgotten Bodies
Imperialism, Chuukese Migration, and Stratified Reproduction in Guam
Sarah A. Smith
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Women from Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia, who migrate to Guam, a U.S. territory, suffer disproportionately poor reproductive health outcomes. Though their access to the United States is unusually easy, through a unique migration agreement, it keeps them in a perpetual liminal state as nonimmigrants, who never fully belong as part of the United States Chuukese women move to Guam, sometimes with their families but sometimes alone, in search of a better life: for jobs, for the education system, or to access safe health care. Yet, the imperial system they encounter creates underlying conditions that greatly and disproportionately impact their ability to succeed and thrive, negatively impacting their reproductive health. Through clinical and community ethnography, Sarah A. Smith illuminates the way this system stratifies women’s reproduction at structural, social, and individual levels. Readers can visualize how U.S. imperialist policies of benign neglect control the body politic, change the social body, and render individual bodies vulnerable in the twenty-first century but also how people resist.
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Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey
Beck, Henry
Rutgers University Press, 1983
Composed, for the most part, from sketches that were published in the Courier-Post newspapers of Camden, New Jersey, Beck provides us with a series of stories of towns too tiny or uncertain for today's maps.  Together, these sketches help to create a more complete picture of the history of New Jersey.  A connecting skein of untold or little known wartime history--the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the conflict of North against South--runs through most of the sketches.  Many of the sketches concern the pine towns and their people, "the pineys" who lived in the Jersey pine barrens.
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Four Classic Mormon Village Studies
Howard M. Bahr
University of Utah Press, 2014
Saints Observed: Studies of Mormon Village Life, 1850–2005 serves as a comprehensive introduction to this second volume, which makes available four of the best Mormon village studies, all previously unpublished. These postwar village studies differ substantially from earlier village studies initiated by Nelson’s work and offer in-depth investigations by observers who lived and participated in village life. Together, they capture in rich detail the dayto- day life of mid-century Mormon villagers. Editor Howard Bahr’s afterword highlights changes in the four villages across the past half-century, drawing upon recent site visits, interviews, and texts.

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Four Germanys
A Chronicle of the Schorcht Family
Donald S. Pitkin
Temple University Press, 2016

In this last book by the late Donald Pitkin, author of The House that Giacomo Built, comes a story of the Schorcht family, through whose fortunes and struggles one can see the transformations of Germany through the long twentieth century.

Each chapter of Four Germanys is reflective of generational rather than historical time. In 1922, Edwin Schorcht inherited his family farm, and in Part One, Pitkin traces the derivation of this farmstead.  Part Two focuses on Schorcht’s children who came of age in Hitler’s Germany. Part Three has the Schorchts growing up in the Ulbricht years (1950–73) of the German Democratic Republic. The book concludes with the great-granddaughter, Maria, looking back to the past in relation to the new Germany that history had bequeathed her.

Ultimately, Four Germanys reflects the impact of critical historical events on ordinary East Germans while it also reveals how one particular family managed its own historical adaptation to these events.

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Fragile Lives
Violence, Power, and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris
Arlette Farge
Harvard University Press, 1993

The rich and complex texture of working-class neighborhoods in eighteenth-century Paris comes vibrantly alive in this collage of the experiences of ordinary people—men and women, rich and poor, masters and servants, neighbors and colleagues. Exploring three arenas of conflict and solidarity—the home, the workplace, and the street—Arlette Farge offers the reader an intimate social history, bringing long-dead citizens and vanished social groups back to life with sensitivity and perception.

Fragile Lives reconstructs the rhythms of this population's daily existence, the way they met, formed relationships and broke them off, conducted their affairs in the community, and raised their young. Farge follows them into the factory and describes the ways they organized to improve their working conditions, and how they were controlled by the authorities. She shows how these Parisians behaved in the context of collective events, from festive street spectacles to repressive displays of power by the police. As the author examines interwoven lives as revealed in judicial records, we come to know and understand the criminals and the underworld of the time; the situation of women as lovers, wives, or prostitutes; anxieties about food and drink, and the rules of conduct in a “fragile” society. Elegantly written and skillfully translated, Fragile Lives is a book for the curious general reader and for those interested in social and cultural history.

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Fragments of Culture
The Everyday of Modern Turkey
Kandiyoti, Deniz
Rutgers University Press, 2002
Fragments of Culture explores the evolving modern daily life of Turkey. Through analyses of language, folklore, film, satirical humor, the symbolism of Islamic political mobilization, and the shifting identities of diasporic communities in Turkey and Europe, this book provides a fresh and corrective perspective to the often-skewed perceptions of Turkish culture engendered by conventional western critiques. In this volume, some of the most innovative scholars of post 1980s Turkey address the complex ways that suburbanization and the growth of a globalized middle class have altered gender and class relations, and how Turkish society is being shaped and redefined through consumption. They also explore the increasingly polarized cultural politics between secularists and Islamists, and the ways that previously repressed Islamic elements have reemerged to complicate the idea of an "authentic" Turkish identity. Contributors examine a range of issues from the adjustments to religious identity as the Islamic veil becomes marketed as a fashion item, to the media's increased attention in Turkish transsexual lifestyle, to the role of folk dance as a ritualized part of public life.

Fragments of Culture shows how attention to the minutiae of daily life can successfully unravel the complexities of a shifting society. This book makes a significant contribution to both modern Turkish studies and the scholarship on cross-cultural perspectives in Middle Eastern studies.
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Fragments of Culture
The Everyday of Modern Turkey
Kandiyoti, Deniz
Rutgers University Press, 2002
Fragments of Culture explores the evolving modern daily life of Turkey. Through analyses of language, folklore, film, satirical humor, the symbolism of Islamic political mobilization, and the shifting identities of diasporic communities in Turkey and Europe, this book provides a fresh and corrective perspective to the often-skewed perceptions of Turkish culture engendered by conventional western critiques.

In this volume, some of the most innovative scholars of post 1980s Turkey address the complex ways that suburbanization and the growth of a globalized middle class have altered gender and class relations, and how Turkish society is being shaped and redefined through consumption. They also explore the increasingly polarized cultural politics between secularists and Islamists, and the ways that previously repressed Islamic elements have reemerged to complicate the idea of an "authentic" Turkish identity. Contributors examine a range of issues from the adjustments to religious identity as the Islamic veil becomes marketed as a fashion item, to the media's increased attention in Turkish transsexual lifestyle, to the role of folk dance as a ritualized part of public life. Fragments of Culture shows how attention to the minutiae of daily life can successfully unravel the complexities of a shifting society. This book makes a significant contribution to both modern Turkish studies and the scholarship on cross-cultural perspectives in Middle Eastern studies.
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Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity
An Athenian Anthropography
Eleni Panourgia
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996

The death of her grandfather sets Neni Panourgiá and her readers on a path through the rituals of mourning and memory in modern urban Greece. Blending emotional richness and intellectual rigor, the anthropologist returns home in this exploration of kinship and identity within her own family and native city of Athens. What emerges is not only a new anthropological view of contemporary Greek culture, but also a reflective consideration of the self and subject.
    Following men and women grappling with questions of mortality, Panourgiá moves through the streets and neighborhoods of Athens, seaside resorts and pistachio groves, the corridors and rooms of the Cancer Institute, wakes in apartments and observances in cemeteries. She mingles popular culture, venerable traditions, and contemporary theory as she considers how individuals define their identity as Athenians, as members of a family, as subjects of a polity, in sickness and in health, in death or in mourning. Memory is their guide as it negotiates their relationships with a personal, collective, and cultural past—and the memory of many deaths challenges and reaffirms, deconstructs and reconstructs who they are.
    As intellectually ambitious as it is moving, Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity reconfigures the subject and object of anthropological study and recasts the line where experience ends and analysis begins.
 

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Fragments of the European City
Stephen Barber
Reaktion Books, 1995
This book explores the visual transformation of the contemporary European city, focusing on the most emblematic and visibly wounded of all European cities – Berlin.

Taking as its subject the "intricately assembled, relentlessly disassembling metropolitan screen", it charts the virulent implosions of culture, the distortions and violence that give city-living its fractured and hallucinatory quality.

Provocatively written as a series of inter-locking poetic fragments, the text evokes the formation of metropolitan "identity" as it ricochets between the physical surface of the city and the vulnerable but manipulating consciousness of city dwellers.

Barber has discovered a powerful new vocabulary – a vocabulary charged with the visual and sonic impact of the cinema. Like the city, the text pulsates, creatively chaotic, raw and exhilarating.
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Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court
Music and the Circulation of Power
Suzanne G. Cusick
University of Chicago Press, 2009
A contemporary of Shakespeare and Monteverdi, and a colleague of Galileo and Artemisia Gentileschi at the Medici court, Francesca Caccini was a dominant musical figure there for thirty years. Dazzling listeners with the transformative power of her performances and the sparkling wit of the music she composed for more than a dozen court theatricals, Caccini is best remembered today as the first woman to have composed opera. Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court reveals for the first time how this multitalented composer established a fully professional musical career at a time when virtually no other women were able to achieve comparable success.

Suzanne G. Cusick argues that Caccini’s career depended on the usefulness of her talents to the political agenda of Grand Duchess Christine de Lorraine, Tuscany’s de facto regent from 1606 to 1636. Drawing on Classical and feminist theory, Cusick shows how the music Caccini made for the Medici court sustained the culture that enabled Christine’s power, thereby also supporting the sexual and political aims of its women.

In bringing Caccini’s surprising story so vividly to life, Cusick ultimately illuminates how music making functioned in early modern Italy as a significant medium for the circulation of power.
 

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Francois Vallé and His World
Upper Louisiana before Lewis and Clark
Carl J. Ekberg
University of Missouri Press, 2002

Winner of the Kemper & Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History for excellence in historical scholarship for the year 2002, awarded by The Historic New Orleans Collection, The Louisiana Historical Association.

In François Vallé and His World, Carl Ekberg provides a fascinating biography of François Vallé (1716–1783), placing him within the context of his place and time. Vallé, who was born in Beauport, Canada, immigrated to Upper Louisiana (the Illinois Country) as a penniless common laborer sometime during the early 1740s. Engaged in agriculture, lead mining, and the Indian trade, he ultimately became the wealthiest and most powerful individual in Upper Louisiana, although he never learned to read or write.
 
Ekberg focuses on Upper Louisiana in colonial times, long before Lewis and Clark arrived in the Mississippi River valley and before American sovereignty had reached the eastern bank of the Mississippi. He vividly captures the ambience of life in the eighteenth-century frontier agricultural society that Vallé inhabited, shedding new light on the French and Spanish colonial regimes in Louisiana and on the Mississippi River frontier before the Americans arrived.
 
Based entirely on primary source documents—wills and testaments, parish registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials, and Spanish administrative correspondence—found in archives ranging from St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve to New Orleans and Seville, François Vallé and His World traces not only the life of François Vallé and the lives of his immediate family members, but also the lives of his slaves. In doing so, it provides a portrait of Missouri’s very first black families, something that has never before been attempted. Ekberg also analyzes how the illiterate Vallé became the richest person in all of Upper Louisiana, and how he rose in the sociopolitical hierarchy to become an important servant of the Spanish monarchy.
 
François Vallé and His World provides a useful corrective to the fallacious notion that Missouri’s history began with the arrival of Lewis and Clark at the turn of the nineteenth century. Anyone with an interest in colonial history or the history of the Mississippi River valley will find this book of great value.
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Freedom in Fulani Social Life
An Introspective Ethnography
Paul Riesman
University of Chicago Press, 1977
Paul Riesman's Freedom in Fulani Social Life is based upon his two years of residence among the Jelgobe, a group of semi-nomadic Fulani of the Sahel in Upper Volta, western Africa. Since its original publication, this classic study has profoundly influenced the field of anthropology through its re-examination of the enthnographer's personal input on his research.

"Freedom in Fulani Social Life richly documents how the ethnographer's own personal and cultural background is implicated in the research process. . . . For this reason, [Riesman's] book will be of paramount interest to all ethnographers."—Philip L. Kilbride, Reviews in Anthropology

"A remarkably well-written and insightful account of Fulani life. . . . In addition to using the conventional approaches of participating in and observing the daily activities of the Jelgobe . . . Riesman enriches his account by examining his personal feelings about particular incidents."—Library Journal

"An interesting and provocative study."—Choice

At the time of his death in 1988, Paul Riesman was an anthropologist who taught at Carleton College.
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French in Michigan
Russell M. Magnaghi
Michigan State University Press, 2016
Compared to other nationalities, few French have immigrated to the United States, and the state of Michigan is no exception in that regard. Although the French came in small numbers, those who did settle in or pass through Michigan played important roles as either permanent residents or visitors.
The colonial French served as explorers, soldiers, missionaries, fur traders, and colonists. Later, French priests and nuns were influential in promoting Catholicism in the state and in developing schools and hospitals. Father Gabriel Richard fled the violence of the French Revolution and became a prominent and influential citizen of the state as a U.S. Congressman and one of the founders of the University of Michigan. French observers of Michigan life included Alexis de Tocqueville. French entrepreneurs opened copper mines and a variety of service-oriented businesses. Louis Fasquelle became the first foreign-language instructor at the University of Michigan, and François A. Artault introduced photography to the Upper Peninsula. As pioneers of the early automobile, the French made a major contribution to the language used in auto manufacturing.
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Frenchtown Chronicles of Prairie du Chien
History and Folklore from Wisconsin's Frontier
Mary Elise Antoine
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016

Albert Coryer, the grandson of a fur trade voyageur-turned-farmer, had a gift for storytelling. Born in 1877, he grew up in Prairie du Chien hearing tales of days gone by from his parents, grandparents, and neighbors who lived in the Frenchtown area. Throughout his life, Albert soaked up the local oral traditions, including narratives about early residents, local landmarks, interesting and funny events, ethnic customs, myths, and folklore.

Late in life, this lively man who had worked as a farm laborer and janitor drew a detailed illustrated map of the Prairie du Chien area and began to write his stories out longhand, in addition to sharing them in an interview with a local historian and folklore scholar. The map, stories, and interview transcript provide a colorful account of Prairie du Chien in the late nineteenth century, when it was undergoing significant demographic, social, and economic change. With sharp historical context provided by editors Lucy Eldersveld Murphy and Mary Elise Antoine, Coryer’s tales offer an unparalleled window into the ethnic community comprised of the old fur trade families, Native Americans, French Canadian farmers, and their descendants.

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Friendly Fire
Kathryn Chetkovich
University of Iowa Press, 1998
Winner of the 1998 John Simmons Short Fiction Award "These stories about the common human experiences of romance, friendship, and family are rich with witty, devastating observations. They show us what it means to live where friendly fire is the real hazard. Kathy Chetkovich's touch is deft, affectionate, and very funny."--Nancy Packer, author of Jealous-Hearted Me "I was once lucky enough to publish a story Kathy Chetkovich had worked on for fourteen years, at least that's what she claimed. To me the story felt like a bolt of fire, searing, delicious, made for the moment, all-devouring. She is the kind of crafty writer who makes it seem so easy. I read her the way I eat an apple--grateful something so close to home can be so exquisite."--Howard Junker, editor, ZYZZYVA "This is a book that's genuine fun to read thanks in part to the comic vision that gives these stories a memorable charm. The humor in Friendly Fire springs more from keen observation than situation. It's a complex humor that seems absolutely natural to the predominantly youthful voices of these narrators; yet, beneath the quips, there's a wisdom that prevents the youthfulness from ever seeming callow and a sense of understated sentiment that's all the more affecting for its comic guise."--Stuart Dybek, author of Childhood and Other Neighbors and judge of the 1998 John Simmons Short Fiction Award Friendly Fire describes how we are sometimes brought down by those we love. Kathryn Chetkovich's stories detail the lives of women finding their way in a contemporary world where the traditional maps of love, family, and community are no longer particularly reliable.
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Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence
Dale Kent
Harvard University Press, 2009

The question of whether true friendship could exist in an era of patronage occupied Renaissance Florentines as it had the ancient Greeks and Romans whose culture they admired and emulated. Rather than attempting to measure Renaissance friendship against a universal ideal defined by essentially modern notions of disinterestedness, intimacy, and sincerity, in this book Dale Kent explores the meaning of love and friendship as they were represented in the fifteenth century, particularly the relationship between heavenly and human friendship.

She documents the elements of shared experience in friendships between Florentines of various occupations and ranks, observing how these were shaped and played out in the physical spaces of the city: the streets, street corners, outdoor benches and loggias, family palaces, churches, confraternal meeting places, workshops of artisans and artists, taverns, dinner tables, and the baptismal font.

Finally, Kent examines the betrayal of trust, focusing on friends at moments of crisis or trial in which friendships were tested, and failed or endured. The exile of Cosimo de’ Medici in 1433 and his recall in 1434, the attempt in 1466 of the Medici family’s closest friends to take over their patronage network, and the Pazzi conspiracy to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici in 1478 expose the complexity and ambivalence of Florentine friendship, a combination of patronage with mutual intellectual passion and love—erotic, platonic, and Christian—sublimely expressed in the poetry and art of Michelangelo.

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A Frieze of Girls
Memoirs as Fiction
Allan Seager
University of Michigan Press, 2004

A Frieze of Girls speaks with a fresh voice from an American era long past. This is more than Allan Seager's story of what happened; it is also about how "the feel of truth is very like the feel of fiction, especially when either is at all strange."

Seager gives us his coming-of-age story, from a high-school summer as a sometime cowboy in the Big Horn mountains to a first job at seventeen managing an antiquated factory in Memphis to a hard-drinking scholarship year in Oxford, cut short by tuberculosis. At once funny with an undercurrent of pain, the stories in A Frieze of Girls remind us of the realities we create to face the world and the past, and in turn of the realities of the world we must inevitably also confront. "Time makes fiction out of our memories," writes Seager. "We all have to have a self we can live with and the operation of memory is artistic---selecting, suppressing, bending, touching up, turning our actions inside out so that we can have not necessarily a likable, merely a plausible identity." A Frieze of Girls is Allan Seager at the top of his form, and a reminder that great writing always transcends mere fashion.

Allan Seager was Professor of English at the University of Michigan and author of many highly praised short stories and novels, including Amos Berry. He died in Tecumseh, Michigan, in 1968. Novelist Charles Baxter is the author of Saul and Patsy.

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front cover of From Azaleas to Zydeco
From Azaleas to Zydeco
My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South
Mark W. Nichols
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2013
Inspired by a 1937 map and travelogue of a newspaperman’s tour, author Mark W. Nichols embarked on his own long journey into the unique cities of the South. En route he met beekeepers, cheese makers, crawfish “bawlers,” duck callers, and a licensed alligator hunter, as well as entrepreneurs and governors. His keen observations encompass the southern states from Virginia to Arkansas and points south, and he unpacks the unique qualities of every city he visits. “It’s easy to say that getting to meet so many interesting and wonderful people was the best part of the journey--because it’s true,” Nichols writes. “I know there are friendly people everywhere, but southern friendliness is different.” His story embraces a wealth of southern charm from local characters, folklore, and customs to food, music, and dancing. Besides being just plain fun to read, Nichols’s account of his journey gives readers a true taste of the flavor of the evolving modern South.
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From Beneath the Volcano
The Story of a Salvadoran Campesino and His Family
Michael Gorkin and Marta Evelyn Pineda
University of Arizona Press, 2011
In 1980 El Salvador was plunged into a bloody civil war, and Luis Campos, a peasant farmer, found himself drawn into a deadly political maelstrom of guerrilla fighting for twelve years. In this collection of fascinating and revealing oral histories, Gorkin and Pineda portray the personal and social lives of Luis and his family, who for the past eighteen years have been working to rebuild their lives in their new community beneath the Guazapa volcano.

Luis, his mother, his wife, his in-laws, his children, and some neighbors recall in a simple and often eloquent manner their experiences of everyday life before, during, and after the civil war. Nina Bonafacia, Luis’s mother, tells of the days before the war when two of her daughters were murdered and she fled with her family to a refugee camp. Julia, Luis’s wife, recounts her life as a guerrillera during which, incidentally, she gave birth to the first two of her eight children. Joaquin, a neighbor and comrade-in-arms, discusses how he and others took control of the land of Comunidad Guazapa and began rebuilding in those turbulent days and months right after the war. Margarita and Francisco, the two oldest children, with candor and insight discuss the trajectory of their lives and that of the postwar generation. And at the center of all these stories stands Luis, the guerrillero, farmer, neighbor, husband, father—and raconteur par excellence.

In sum, the multiple voices in From Beneath the Volcano combine to form a rich tapestry displaying a story of war, family, and community and provide a never-before-seen view of both the past and present El Salvador.
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front cover of From Can See to Can’t
From Can See to Can’t
Texas Cotton Farmers on the Southern Prairies
By Thad Sitton and Dan K. Utley
University of Texas Press, 1997

Cotton farming was the only way of life that many Texans knew from the days of Austin's Colony up until World War II. For those who worked the land, it was a dawn-till-dark, "can see to can't," process that required not only a wide range of specialized skills but also a willingness to gamble on forces often beyond a farmer's control—weather, insects, plant diseases, and the cotton market.

This unique book offers an insider's view of Texas cotton farming in the late 1920s. Drawing on the memories of farmers and their descendants, many of whom are quoted here, the authors trace a year in the life of south central Texas cotton farms. From breaking ground to planting, cultivating, and harvesting, they describe the typical tasks of farm families—as well as their houses, food, and clothing; the farm animals they depended on; their communities; and the holidays, activities, and observances that offered the farmers respite from hard work.

Although cotton farming still goes on in Texas, the lifeways described here have nearly vanished as the state has become highly urbanized. Thus, this book preserves a fascinating record of an important part of Texas' rural heritage.

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front cover of From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express
From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express
A History of Chinese Food in the United States
Liu, Haiming
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Received an Honorable Mention for the 2015-2016 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature, Adult Non-Fiction category

Finalist in the Culinary History category of the 2016 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards​


From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express takes readers on a compelling journey from the California Gold Rush to the present, letting readers witness both the profusion of Chinese restaurants across the United States and the evolution of many distinct American-Chinese iconic dishes from chop suey to General Tso’s chicken. Along the way, historian Haiming Liu explains how the immigrants adapted their traditional food to suit local palates, and gives readers a taste of Chinese cuisine embedded in the bittersweet story of Chinese Americans.
 
Treating food as a social history, Liu explores why Chinese food changed and how it has influenced American culinary culture, and how Chinese restaurants have become places where shared ethnic identity is affirmed—not only for Chinese immigrants but also for American Jews. The book also includes a look at national chains like P. F. Chang’s and a consideration of how Chinese food culture continues to spread around the globe. 
 
Drawing from hundreds of historical and contemporary newspaper reports, journal articles, and writings on food in both English and Chinese, From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express represents a groundbreaking piece of scholarly research. It can be enjoyed equally as a fascinating set of stories about Chinese migration, cultural negotiation, race and ethnicity, diverse flavored Chinese cuisine and its share in American food market today.
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From Household to Empire
Society and Economy in Early Colonial New Mexico
Heather B. Trigg
University of Arizona Press, 2005
Published in cooperation with the
William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

Settlers at Santa Fe and outlying homesteads during the seventeenth century established a thriving economy that saw the exchange of commodities produced by indigenous peoples, settlers, and Franciscan friars for goods manufactured as far away as China, France, and Turkey. This early Spanish colonial period in New Mexico provides an opportunity to explore both economic activity within a colony and the relations between colony and homeland. By examining the material remains of this era from 1598 to 1680, Heather Trigg reveals a more complete picture of colonial life. Drawing on both archaeological and historical sources, Trigg analyzes the various levels of economic activity that developed: production of items in colonial households, exchanges between households, and trade between the colony and Mexico. Rather than focusing only on the flow of products and services, she also explores the social mechanisms that likely had a significant impact on the economic life of the colony. Because economic activity was important to so many aspects of daily life, she is able to show how and why colonial society worked the way it did. While focusing on the colonists, she also explores their relations with Pueblo peoples. Through her analysis of these two pools of data, Trigg generates insights not usually gleaned from the limited texts of the period, providing information about average colonists in addition to the governors and clergy usually covered in historical accounts. By using specific examples from historical documents and archaeological materials, she shows that colonists from all levels of society modified both formal and informal rules of economic behavior to better fit the reality of the colonial frontier. With its valuable comparative data on colonization, From Household to Empire provides a novel way of examining colonial economies by focusing on the maintenance and modification of social values. For all readers fascinated by the history of the Southwest, this book provides a fuller picture of life in early New Mexico than has previously been seen.
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From Lapland to Sápmi
Collecting and Returning Sámi Craft and Culture
Barbara Sjoholm
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A cultural history of Sápmi and the Nordic countries as told through objects and artifacts

Material objects—things made, used, and treasured—tell the story of a people and place. So it is for the Indigenous Sámi living in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, whose story unfolds across borders and centuries, in museums and private collections. The objects created by the Sámi for daily and ceremonial use were purchased and taken by Scandinavians and foreign travelers in Lapland from the seventeenth century to the present, and the collections described in From Lapland to Sápmi map a complex history that is gradually shifting to a renaissance of Sámi culture and craft, along with the return of many historical objects to Sápmi, the Sámi homeland.

The Sámi objects first collected in Lapland by non-Indigenous people were drums and other sacred artifacts, but later came to include handmade knives, decorated spoons, clothing, and other domestic items owned by Sámi reindeer herders and fishers, as well as artisanal crafts created for sale. Barbara Sjoholm describes how these objects made their way via clergy, merchants, and early scientists into curiosity cabinets and eventually to museums in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, and abroad. Musicians, writers, and tourists also collected Sámi culture for research and enjoyment. Displays of Sámi material culture in Scandinavia and England, Germany, and other countries in museums, exhibition halls, and even zoos often became part of racist and colonial discourse as examples of primitive culture, and soon figured in the debates of ethnographers and curators over representations of national folk traditions and “exotic” peoples. Sjoholm follows these objects and collections from the Age of Enlightenment through the twentieth century, when artisanship took on new forms in commerce and museology and the Sámi began to organize politically and culturally. Today, several collections of Sámi objects are in the process of repatriation, while a new generation of artists, activists, and artisans finds inspiration in traditional heritage and languages.

Deftly written and amply illustrated, with contextual notes on language and Nordic history, From Lapland to Sápmi brings to light the history of collecting, displaying, and returning Sámi material culture, as well as the story of Sámi creativity and individual and collective agency.

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From Missouri
An American Farmer Looks Back
Thad Snow, Edited by Bonnie Stepenoff
University of Missouri Press, 2012

After years of subjecting the editors of St. Louis newspapers to eloquent letters on subjects as diverse as floods, tariffs, and mules, Thad Snow published his memoir From Missouri in his mid-seventies in 1954. He was barely retired from farming for more than half a century, mostly in the Missouri Bootheel, or “Swampeast Missouri,” as he called it. Now back in print with a new introduction by historian Bonnie Stepenoff, these sketches of a life, a region, and an era will delight readers new to this distinctive American voice as well as readers already familiar with this masterpiece of the American Midwest.

Snow purchased a thousand acres of southeast Missouri swampland in 1910, cleared it, drained it, and eventually planted it in cotton. Although he employed sharecroppers, he grew to become a bitter critic of the labor system after a massive flood and the Great Depression worsened conditions for these already-burdened workers. Shocking his fellow landowners, Snow invited the Southern Tenant Farmers Union to organize the workers on his land. He was even once accused of fomenting a strike and publicly threatened with horsewhipping.

Snow’s admiration for Owen Whitfield, the African American leader of the Sharecroppers’ Roadside Demonstration, convinced him that nonviolent resistance could defeat injustice. Snow embraced pacifism wholeheartedly and denounced all war as evil even as America mobilized for World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he became involved with creating Missouri’s conservation movement. Near the end of his life, he found a retreat in the Missouri Ozarks, where he wrote this recollection of his life.

This unique and honest series of personal essays expresses the thoughts of a farmer, a hunter, a husband, a father and grandfather, a man with a soft spot for mules and dogs and all kinds of people. Snow’s prose reveals much about a way of life in the region during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the social and political events that affected the entire nation. Whether arguing that a good stock dog should be left alone to do its work, explaining the process of making swampland suitable for agriculture, or putting forth his case for world peace, Snow’s ideas have a special authenticity because they did not come from an ivory tower or a think tank—they came From Missouri.

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From Plantation to Paradise?
Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764–1789
David M. Powers
Michigan State University Press, 2014
In 1764 the first printing press was established in the French Caribbean colonies, launching the official documentation of operas and plays performed there, and marking the inauguration of the first theatre in the colonies. A rigorous study of pre–French Revolution performance practices in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Powers’s book examines the elaborate system of social casting in these colonies; the environments in which nonwhite artists emerged; and both negative and positive contributions of the Catholic Church and the military to operas and concerts produced in the colonies. The author also explores the level of participation of nonwhites in these productions, as well as theatre architecture, décor, repertoire, seating arrangements, and types of audiences. The status of nonwhite artists in colonial society; the range of operas in which they performed; their accomplishments, praise, criticism; and the use of créole texts and white actors/singers à visage noirs (with blackened faces) present a clear picture of French operatic culture in these colonies. Approaching the French Revolution, the study concludes with an examination of the ways in which colonial opera was affected by slave uprisings, the French Revolution, the emergence of “patriotic theatres,” and their role in fostering support for the king, as well as the impact on subsequent operas produced in the colonies and in the United States.
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From Pompeii
The Afterlife of a Roman Town
Ingrid D. Rowland
Harvard University Press, 2014

When Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, the force of the explosion blew the top right off the mountain, burying nearby Pompeii in a shower of volcanic ash. Ironically, the calamity that proved so lethal for Pompeii's inhabitants preserved the city for centuries, leaving behind a snapshot of Roman daily life that has captured the imagination of generations.

The experience of Pompeii always reflects a particular time and sensibility, says Ingrid Rowland. From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town explores the fascinating variety of these different experiences, as described by the artists, writers, actors, and others who have toured the excavated site. The city's houses, temples, gardens--and traces of Vesuvius's human victims--have elicited responses ranging from awe to embarrassment, with shifting cultural tastes playing an important role. The erotic frescoes that appalled eighteenth-century viewers inspired Renoir to change the way he painted. For Freud, visiting Pompeii was as therapeutic as a session of psychoanalysis. Crown Prince Hirohito, arriving in the Bay of Naples by battleship, found Pompeii interesting, but Vesuvius, to his eyes, was just an ugly version of Mount Fuji. Rowland treats readers to the distinctive, often quirky responses of visitors ranging from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain to Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman.

Interwoven throughout a narrative lush with detail and insight is the thread of Rowland's own impressions of Pompeii, where she has returned many times since first visiting in 1962.

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From Princess to Chief
Life with the Waccamaw Siouan Indians of North Carolina
Priscilla Freeman Jacobs
University of Alabama Press, 2013
A collaborative life history of Priscilla Freeman Jacobs, From Princess to Chief tells the story of the first female chief (from 1986 to 2005) of the state-recognized Waccamaw Siouan Indian Tribe of North Carolina. 
 
In From Princess to Chief, Priscilla Freeman Jacobs and Patricia Barker Lerch detail Jacobs’s birth and childhood, coming of age, education, young adulthood, marriage and family, Indian activism, and spiritual life. Jacobs is descended from a family of Indian leaders whose activism dates back to the early twentieth century. Her ancestors pressured the local county and state governments to fund their Indian schools, led the drive for the Waccamaw Sioux to be recognized as Indians in state and federal legislation, and finally succeeded in opening the long-awaited Indian schools in the 1930s. 
 
Jacobs’s lasting legacies to her community include the many initiatives on which she collaborated with her father, Clifton Freeman, including the acquisition of common land for the tribe, initiation of a tribal board of directors, incorporation of a development association, and the establishment of a day care and many other social and educational programs. In the 1970s Jacobs served on the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs and was active in the Coalition of Eastern Native Americans.
 
Introducing the powwow as a way for young people to learn about the traditions of Indian people throughout the state of North Carolina, Jacobs taught many children how to dance and wear Indian regalia with pride and dignity. Throughout her life, Jacobs has worked hard to preserve the traditional customs of her people and to teach others about the folk culture that shaped and molded her as a person.
 
Told from the point of view of an eyewitness to the community’s effort to win federal recognition in 1950 and their lives since, From Princess to Chief helps preserve the story of Jacobs’s Indian community.

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front cover of From Quebradita to Duranguense
From Quebradita to Duranguense
Dance in Mexican American Youth Culture
Sydney Hutchinson
University of Arizona Press, 2007
Salsa and merengue are now so popular that they are household words for Americans of all ethnic backgrounds. Recent media attention is helping other Caribbean music styles like bachata to attain a similar status. Yet popular Mexican American dances remain unknown and invisible to most non-Latinos. Quebradita, meaning “little break,” is a modern Mexican American dance style that became hugely popular in Los Angeles and across the southwestern United States during the early to mid 1990s. Over the decade of its popularity, this dance craze offered insights into the social and cultural experience of Mexican American youth. Accompanied by banda, an energetic brass band music style, quebradita is recognizable by its western clothing, hat tricks, and daring flips. The dance’s combination of Mexican, Anglo, and African American influences represented a new sensibility that appealed to thousands of young people. Hutchinson argues that, though short-lived, the dance filled political and sociocultural functions, emerging as it did in response to the anti-immigrant and English-only legislation that was then being enacted in California. Her fieldwork and interviews yield rich personal testimony as to the inner workings of the quebradita’s aesthetic development and social significance. The emergence of pasito duranguense, a related yet distinct style originating in Chicago, marks the evolution of the Mexican American youth dance scene. Like the quebradita before it, pasito duranguense has picked up the task of demonstrating the relevance of regional Mexican music and dance within the U.S. context.
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front cover of From Scenarios to Networks
From Scenarios to Networks
Performing the Intercultural in Colonial Mexico
Leo Cabranes-Grant
Northwestern University Press, 2016

In this innovative study, Leo Cabranes-Grant analyzes four intercultural events in the Viceroyalty of New Spain that took place between 1566 and 1690. Rather than relying on racial labels to describe alterations of identity, Cabranes-Grant focuses on experimentation, rehearsal, and the interaction between bodies and objects. His analysis shows how scenarios are invested with affective qualities, which in turn enable cultural and semiotic change. Central to his argument is Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, which figures society as a constantly evolving web of relationships among objects, people, and spaces. In examining these scenarios, Cabranes-Grant attempts to discern the reasons why the conditions of an intensified moment within this ceaseless flow take on a particular value and inspire their re-creation. Cabranes-Grant offers a fresh perspective on Latour’s theory and reorients debates concerning history and historiography in the field of performance studies.

 

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front cover of From Slave Cabins to the White House
From Slave Cabins to the White House
Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture
Koritha Mitchell
University of Illinois Press, 2021

Koritha Mitchell analyzes canonical texts by and about African American women to lay bare the hostility these women face as they invest in traditional domesticity. Instead of the respectability and safety granted white homemakers, black women endure pejorative labels, racist governmental policies, attacks on their citizenship, and aggression meant to keep them in "their place."

Tracing how African Americans define and redefine success in a nation determined to deprive them of it, Mitchell plumbs the works of Frances Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, and others. These artists honor black homes from slavery and post-emancipation through the Civil Rights era to "post-racial" America. Mitchell follows black families asserting their citizenship in domestic settings while the larger society and culture marginalize and attack them, not because they are deviants or failures but because they meet American standards.

Powerful and provocative, From Slave Cabins to the White House illuminates the links between African American women's homemaking and citizenship in history and across literature.

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From the Blue Windows
Recollections of Life in Queenstown, Singapore, in the 1960s and 1970s
Tan Kok Yang
National University of Singapore Press, 2013
Imagine a Singapore in which flat rental was S$50 a month, a plate of noodles cost as little as 20 cents, and television broadcasts ended at 10pm every night.
 From the Blue Windows is a collection of Tan Kok Yang's memories of growing up in Queenstown back when the tallest residential building there was fourteen storeys, the Alexandra Canal flooded regularly, and wayang shows were a regular feature on Mei Ling Street. He stayed in Princess Estate, an area that was colloquially known as "the Blue Windows" because of its unique blue glass louvred windows.


With nostalgia and a sense of loss, this memoir is a personal tribute to and celebration of Queenstown and a simple but fulfilling way of life that has all but vanished from modern Singapore.
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From the Jewish Heartland
Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways
Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost
University of Illinois Press, 2013
From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways reveals the distinctive flavor of Jewish foods in the Midwest and tracks regional culinary changes through time. Exploring Jewish culinary innovation in America's heartland from the 1800s to today, Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost examine recipes from numerous midwestern sources, both kosher and nonkosher, including Jewish homemakers' handwritten manuscripts and notebooks, published journals and newspaper columns, and interviews with Jewish cooks, bakers, and delicatessen owners.
 
With the influx of hundreds of thousands of Jews during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came new recipes and foodways that transformed the culture of the region. Settling into the cities, towns, and farm communities of Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota, Jewish immigrants incorporated local fruits, vegetables, and other comestibles into traditional recipes. Such incomparable gustatory delights include Tzizel bagels and rye breads coated in midwestern cornmeal, baklava studded with locally grown cranberries, dark pumpernickel bread sprinkled with almonds and crunchy Iowa sunflower seeds, tangy ketchup concocted from wild sour grapes, Sephardic borekas (turnovers) made with sweet cherries from Michigan, rich Chicago cheesecakes, native huckleberry pie from St. Paul, and savory gefilte fish from Minnesota northern pike.
 
Steinberg and Prost also consider the effect of improved preservation and transportation on rural and urban Jewish foodways, as reported in contemporary newspapers, magazines, and published accounts. They give special attention to the impact on these foodways of large-scale immigration, relocation, and Americanization processes during the nineteenth century and the efforts of social and culinary reformers to modify traditional Jewish food preparation and ingredients.
 
Including dozens of sample recipes, From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways takes readers on a memorable and unique tour of midwestern Jewish cooking and culture.
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front cover of From Uncertain to Blue
From Uncertain to Blue
By Keith Carter
University of Texas Press, 2011

"In the beginning, there was no real plan, just a road trip that became a journey." In the years 1986 and 1987, Keith Carter and his wife, Patricia, visited one hundred small Texas towns with intriguing names like Diddy Waw Diddy, Elysian Fields, and Poetry. He says, "I tried to make my working method simple and practical: one town, one photograph. I would take several rolls of film but select only one image to represent that dot on my now-tattered map. The titles of the photographs are the actual names of the small towns. . . ." Carter created a body of work that evoked the essence of small-town life for many people, including renowned playwright and fellow Texan, Horton Foote. In 1988, Carter published his one town/one picture collection in From Uncertain to Blue, a landmark book that won acclaim both nationally and internationally for the artistry, timelessness, and universal appeal of its images—and established Carter as one of America's most promising fine art photographers.

Now a quarter century after the book's publication, From Uncertain to Blue has been completely re-envisioned and includes a new essay in which Carter describes how the search for photographic subjects in small towns gradually evolved into his first significant work as an artist. He also offers additional insight into his creative process by including some of his original contact sheets. And Patricia Carter gives her own perspective on their journey in her amplified notes about many of the places they visited as they discovered the world of possibilities from Uncertain to Blue.

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Front Yard America
The Evolution and Meanings of a Vernacular Domestic Landscape
Fred E.H. Schroeder
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

Throughout Front Yard America, Schroeder inquires into the functions, values, and meanings that Americans have found in the domestic landscapes of back yards and front yards, walls and fences, porches and patios.

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