884 books match the query 'Historical' and 26 start with d

cover of DANCE UNTO THE LORD

DANCE UNTO THE LORD

GEORGE DELL

The Ohio State University Press, 2001

George Dell’s Dance unto the Lord is a compelling fusion of history and fiction. Set in 1848 to 1852, when Ohio was considered to be the West, Dance unto the Lord transports the readers to Union Village, a Shaker community in southwestern Ohio. The novel traces the coming of age of Richard and Ruth, young people who wish to marry but are forbidden to do so by Richard’s parents. In desperation, Richard runs away to Cincinnati. Ruth, too, leaves her family. She settles in Union Village and eventually becomes a teacher at the Shaker school. Torn between her desire for freedom and the security of life with the Shakers, Ruth becomes increasingly more immersed in the Shaker society while dreaming of Richard and a life outside the community. Meanwhile, through his experiences with an ill-fated blacksmith’s shop and its owners, Richard learns that life in the city can be complicated and painful.

As he traces Richard’s and Ruth’s experiences, Dell vividly re-creates the texture of rural and city life in mid-nineteenth-century Ohio, providing a fascinating, well-researched account of a long-gone era. Dance unto the Lord provides wonderfully detailed descriptions of a Shaker community and life style. This book will be compelling reading for anyone interested in the time period, the Shakers, or simply a good story.

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cover of Dale L. Morgan: Mormon and Western Histories in Transition

Dale L. Morgan

Mormon and Western Histories in Transition

Richard L. Saunders

University of Utah Press, 2023

This is the first biography of Dale L. Morgan, preeminent Western historian of the fur trade, historic trails, and the Latter Day Saint movement. The book explores how, despite personal struggles, Morgan committed his life to tracking down sources and interpreting the past on the strength of documentary evidence. Connecting Morgan’s life with some of the broad cultural changes that shaped his experiences, this book engages with methodological shifts in the historical profession, the mid-twentieth-century collision of interpretations within Latter Day Saint history, and the development of a descriptive, scholarly approach to that history.
 
Morgan’s body of work and commitment to serious scholarship signaled the start of new ways of understanding, studying, and retelling history, and he motivated a generation of historians from the 1930s to the 1970s to transform their historical approaches. Sounding board, mentor, and close friend to Nels Anderson, Fawn Brodie, Juanita Brooks, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and Leonard Arrington, Dale Morgan is the common factor linking this influential generation of mid-twentieth-century historians of western America.

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cover of Daleká cesta / Distant Journey

Daleká cesta / Distant Journey

By Jirí Anger

Lever Press, 2026

This volume in the film|minutes series focuses on Alfréd Radok’s Daleká cesta (Distant Journey, 1948), a pioneering Czechoslovak film admired by figures such as André Bazin and Alain Resnais. Renowned for its bold experiments in cinematic montage, the film combines fictional scenes with newsreel footage, Nazi propaganda, and images of liberated concentration camps. Produced shortly after the war, Daleká cesta remains one of the earliest and most formally daring cinematic attempts to grapple with the Holocaust. Drawing on the creators’ ideas of editing as a means of rescuing victims of atrocity—at least momentarily—from historical determinism, the book explores how a montage-like experiment in film analysis can challenge not only deterministic narratives of history, but also the conventions of established theoretical frameworks and academic writing.

Volumes in the film|minutes series cut up films into segments of exactly one minute and transform each minute into an innovative tool for thinking with the film. Each volume works rigorously with the concept of “the minute” as a non-cinematic scale/quantity, a means to zoom in on (dis)orderly fragments that do not necessarily respect the confinements of cinematic form or meaning. As a critical practice, the focus on minutes causes disruptions and displacement that create novel connections and perspectives, and uncovers hidden traces, making it possible to watch each film anew.

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cover of Darktown Strutters: A Novel

Darktown Strutters

A Novel

Wesley Brown

University of Massachusetts Press, 2000

Darktown Strutters is the story of Jim Crow, a remarkable dancer, born in slavery, who performs in minstrel shows, South and North, during the furious times of pre- and post- Civil War America. Touching, harrowing, and inspiring, Darktown Strutters is a unique novel of courage and pride from the author of Tragic Magic.
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cover of Day of Days

Day of Days

John Smolens

Michigan State University Press, 2020

In the spring of 1927, Andrew Kehoe, the treasurer for the school board in Bath, Michigan, spent weeks surreptitiously wiring the public school, as well as his farm, with hundreds of pounds of dynamite. The explosions on May 18, the day before graduation, killed and maimed dozens of children, as well as teachers, administrators, and village residents, including Kehoe’s wife, Nellie. A respected member of the community, Kehoe himself died when he ignited his truck, which he had loaded with crates of explosives and scrap metal. Decades later, one survivor, Beatrice Marie Turcott, recalls the spring of 1927 and how this haunting experience leads her to the conviction that one does not survive the present without reconciling hard truths about the past. In its portrayal of several Bath school children, Day of Days examines how such traumatic events scar one’s life long after the dead are laid to rest and physical wounds heal, and how an anguished but resilient American village copes with the bombing, which at the time seemed incomprehensible, and yet now may be considered a harbinger of the future.
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cover of Days and Memory

Days and Memory

Charlotte Delbo

Northwestern University Press, 2001

In Auschwitz, memory meant life: remembering the humanity extinguished by the death camps and hoping to survive to tell what had been endured. Charlotte Delbo, a non-Jew sent to Auschwitz for being a member of the French resistance movement, recalls the poems, vignettes, and meditations that fed her companions' spirits, interweaving her experiences with the sufferings of others and depicting dignity and decency in the face of inhumanity.

This definitive translation is by Delbo's close friend, the author and theater critic Rosette Lamont, an expert on the works of Ionesco and Beckett. Lamont wrote that Delbo was, like Beckett, "a minimalist of infinite pain, a voice of conscience."
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cover of Dead Man's Rapids

Dead Man's Rapids

William Durbin

University of Minnesota Press, 2018

When 13-year-old Ben Ward left school to work with his Pa in a logging camp, a winter of peeling potatoes and setting tables wasn’t the adventure he had in mind. Still, come spring, he signs up for the log drive with his friend Nevers, wishing the head cook on the wanigan (the floating cook shack) could be someone other than his crabby Pa. Fate, with a wink, complies, and Pa quits—only to be replaced by someone far worse: Pete Sardman, aka Old Sard, a cantankerous character complete with a greasy apron, an eye patch, one deaf ear, and plenty to say.

Luckily, there’s also the rest of the crew—a colorful, sometimes outrageous company of men. Together Ben and Nevers endure freezing weather, dangerous rapids, logjams, storms and floods, and a number of gripping tall tales, along the way learning about logging on the river and a whole lot more about life.

Taking up where Blackwater Ben left off, Dead Man’s Rapids returns to the north woods of Minnesota in the late nineteenth century, and with warmth, humor, and attention to historical detail engages readers both young and old.

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cover of Death Before Compline: Short Stories by Sharan Newman

Death Before Compline

Short Stories by Sharan Newman

Sharan Newman

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012

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cover of Death of a Confederate Colonel: Civil War Stories and a Novella

Death of a Confederate Colonel

Civil War Stories and a Novella

Pat Carr

University of Arkansas Press, 2007

Dramatically compelling and historically informed, The Death of a Confederate Colonel takes us into the lives of those left behind during the Civil War. These stories, all with Arkansas settings, are filled with the trauma of the time. They tell of a Confederate woman’s care of and growing affection for a wounded Union soldier, a plantation mistress’s singular love for a sick slave child, and an eight-year-old girl’s fight for survival against frigid cold, injury, starvation, heartbreak, and lawlessness. Here are women holding down the home front with heroism and loyalty, or, sometimes, with weakness and duplicity. Will a young belle remain loyal to her wounded fiance? How long can a caring nurse hold her finger on a severed artery? And how does anyone comprehend the legacy of slavery and the brutality of war? The Death of a Confederate Colonel triumphs in its portrayal of desperate circumstances coated in the patina of the Civil War era, the complexity of ordinary people confronting situations that change them forever.
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cover of Derzhavin: A Biography

Derzhavin

A Biography

Vladislav Khodasevich, Translated and with an introduction by Angela Brintlinger

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

Russian poet, soldier, and statesman Gavriil Derzhavin (1743–1816) lived during an epoch of momentous change in Russia—imperial expansion, peasant revolts, war with Turkey, and struggle with Napoleon—and he served three tsars, including Catherine the Great. Here in its first English translation is the masterful biography of Derzhavin by another acclaimed Russian man of letters, Vladislav Khodasevich.
            Derzhavin occupied a position at the center of Russian life, uniting civic service with poetic inspiration and creating an oeuvre that at its essence celebrated the triumphs of Russia and its rulers, particularly Catherine the Great. His biographer Khodasevich, by contrast, left Russia in 1922, unable to abide the increasingly repressive regime of the Soviets. For Khodasevich, whose lyric poems were as commonplace in their focus as Derzhavin’s odes were grand, this biography was in a sense a rediscovery of a lost and idyllic era, a period when it was possible to aspire to the pinnacles of artistic achievement while still occupying a central role in Russian society.
Khodasevich writes with humor, intelligence, and understanding, and his work stands as a monument to the last three centuries of Russian history, lending keen insight into Russia’s past as well as its present and future.


“Khodasevich’s light narrative touch (as translated by Brintlinger) lends a novelistic quality to the biography, making it a genuine tour de force. All students and scholars – of history, literature, poetry, biography – will find something of interest here.”—Choice
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cover of Deserters: A Novel

Deserters

A Novel

Jerry Gabriel

Acre Books, 2026

An immersive adventure story set during the American Civil War follows four travelers as they escape toward the Western territories.

It is fall 1864, and Robert Riley has deserted his Army of the Potomac unit outside Petersburg, Virginia. Exhausted from years of war and worried about his motherless sons in Ohio, he returns to collect thirteen-year-old Michael and Sean, three years older, and flees to the Western territories. Along the way, he encounters Janey, an orphan at sixteen, who is also eager to go West. When Riley sees in her a quickness of mind, a brand of cunning that mirrors his own, he is persuaded to take her along.

Crossing the lower Midwest on horseback with little money and few possessions, the four are pursued by a wily private detective after the reward for turning in Riley. He manages to thwart the ragtag group, who abandon their plan of crossing the plains. They slip away by train to Chicago, and there, in that cold, stinking, dangerous metropolis, just before the 1864 election, they meet with problems beyond Riley’s ability to resolve. All four find themselves alone, at the mercy of fortune . . . and the fortune hunter, who finally gets the chance to face down his nemesis.

Deserters alternates between the perspectives of the four major characters as their relationships grow and shift, and as each of them strives to forge their way forward in the late war’s murky upheaval. A book whose antecedents include Charles Portis’s True Grit and Paulette Jiles’s News of the World, Gabriel’s immersive novel is an adventure story with psychological intricacy, emotional intensity, and historical heft.
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cover of Destructive Sublime: World War II in American Film and Media

Destructive Sublime

World War II in American Film and Media

Allison, Tanine

Rutgers University Press, 2018

The American popular imagination has long portrayed World War II as the “good war,” fought by the “greatest generation” for the sake of freedom and democracy. Yet, combat films and other war media complicate this conventional view by indulging in explosive displays of spectacular violence. Combat sequences, Tanine Allison argues, construct a counter-narrative of World War II by reminding viewers of the war’s harsh brutality.

Destructive Sublime traces a new aesthetic history of the World War II combat genre by looking back at it through the lens of contemporary video games like Call of Duty. Allison locates some of video games’ glorification of violence, disruptive audiovisual style, and bodily sensation in even the most canonical and seemingly conservative films of the genre. In a series of case studies spanning more than seventy years—from wartime documentaries like The Battle of San Pietro to fictional reenactments like The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan to combat video games like Medal of Honor—this book reveals how the genre’s aesthetic forms reflect (and influence) how American culture conceives of war, nation, and representation itself.  
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cover of Dickey Chapelle Under Fire: Photographs by the First American Female War Correspondent Killed in Action

Dickey Chapelle Under Fire

Photographs by the First American Female War Correspondent Killed in Action

John Garofolo

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2026

Striking photographs and stories from more than two decades on the frontlines by a groundbreaking photojournalist—and the first female American war correspondent to be killed in action.

In 1941, twenty-two-year-old Georgette "Dickey" Chapelle sold her first photo essay to Look magazine. A year later, with World War II underway, she was photographing American soldiers in combat training in Panama. By the end of the war, she had captured the devastation at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and in the ensuing decades, Dickey and her camera were on the scene at many of the world’s hotspots—from Cuba and the Dominican Republic to Algeria and Lebanon to Vietnam and Laos. Dickey Chapelle Under Fire exposes her remarkable story and shares over 150 stunning images from her extraordinary career as a photojournalist.

In the male-dominated world of war journalism, Chapelle fought to be taken seriously. She eventually earned the respect of many of her male colleagues and broke down barriers for future generations of female journalists. She embedded herself with military units on frontlines around the globe, capturing not only the horrors of war but also the camaraderie and everyday routines of service men and women.

Always one to follow the action, Chapelle traveled with Algerian rebels across the North African desert and with Fidel Castro through the jungles of Cuba. She spent two months in a Hungarian prison after being caught smuggling aid to refugees fleeing a Soviet invasion. Beginning in 1961, Chapelle set her lens and viewfinder on Southeast Asia, capturing the growing conflict there, until she was killed while on patrol with marines in Vietnam in April 1965—making her the first female American war correspondent to be killed in action.

For twenty-five years, Chapelle's photographs graced the pages of National Geographic, the National Observer, Life, and other major publications. Despite her tragic end, Chapelle’s tenacity, courage, and compassion shine throughout her work, highlighting the human impact of war while revealing the larger stories beyond the battlefield. Her legacy lives on through this powerful collection. 

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cover of Discourse and Defiance under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940–1945

Discourse and Defiance under Nazi Occupation

Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940–1945

Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp

Michigan State University Press, 2013

Captured by German forces shortly after Dunkirk, and not relinquished until May of 1945, nearly a year after the Normandy invasion, the British Channel Islands (Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, Sark, and Herm) were characterized during their occupation by severe deprivation and powerlessness. The Islanders, with few resources to stage an armed resistance, constructed a rhetorical resistance based upon the manipulation of discourse, construction of new symbols, and defiance of German restrictions on information. Though much of modern history has focused on the possibility that Islanders may have collaborated with the Germans, this eye-opening history turns to secret war diaries kept in Guernsey. A close reading of these private accounts, written at great risk to the diarists, allows those who actually experienced the Occupation to reclaim their voice and reveals new understandings of Island resistance. What emerges is a stirring account of the unquenchable spirit and deft improvisation of otherwise ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Under the most dangerous of conditions, Guernsey civilians used imaginative methods in reacting to their position as a subjugated population, devising a covert resistance of nuance and sustainability. Violence, this book and the people of Guernsey demonstrate, is not at all the only means with which to confront evil.

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cover of Divine Days: A Novel

Divine Days

A Novel

Leon Forrest; Foreword by Kenneth W. Warren, Preface by Zachary Price

Northwestern University Press, 2023

A virtuosic epic applauded by Stanley Crouch as “an adventurous masterwork that provides our literature with a signal moment,” back in print in a definitive new edition

“I have an awful memory for faces, but an excellent one for voices,” muses Joubert Jones, the aspiring playwright at the center of Divine Days. A kaleidoscopic whorl of characters, language, music, and Black experience, this saga follows Jones for one week in 1966 as he pursues the lore and legends of fictional Forest County, a place resembling Chicago’s South Side. Joubert is a veteran, recently returned to the city, who works for his aunt Eloise’s newspaper and pours drinks at her Night Light Lounge. He wants to write a play about Sugar-Groove, a drifter, “eternal wunderkind,” and local folk hero who seems to have passed away. Sugar-Groove’s disappearance recalls the subject of one of Joubert’s earlier writing attempts—W. A. D. Ford, a protean, diabolical preacher who led a religious sect known as “Divine Days.” Joubert takes notes as he learns about both tricksters, trying to understand their significance.

Divine Days introduces readers to a score of indelible characters: Imani, Joubert’s girlfriend, an artist and social worker searching for her lost siblings and struggling to reconcile middle class life with her values and Black identity; Eloise, who raised Joubert and whose influence is at odds with his writerly ambitions; (Oscar) Williemain, a local barber, storyteller, and founder of the Royal Rites and Righteous Ramblings Club; and the Night Light’s many patrons. With a structure inspired by James Joyce and jazz, Leon Forrest folds references to African American literature and cinema, Shakespeare, the Bible, and classical mythology into a heady quest that embraces life in all its tumult and adventure.

This edition brings Forrest’s masterpiece back into print, incorporating hundreds of editorial changes that the author had requested from W. W. Norton, but were not made for their editions in 1993 and 1994. Much of the inventory from the original printing of the book by Another Chicago Press in 1992 had been destroyed in a disastrous warehouse fire.
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cover of Dongola: A Novel of Nubia

Dongola

A Novel of Nubia

Idris Ali

University of Arkansas Press, 1998

The University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation, 1997

In this, the first Nubian novel ever translated, Awad Shalali, a Nubian worker in modern Egypt, dreams of Dongola—the capital of medieval Nubia, now lost to the flood waters of the Aswan High Dam. In Dongola, the Nubians reached their zenith. They defeated and dominated Upper Egypt, and their archers, deadly accurate in battle, were renowned as “the bowman of the glance.

Helima, Awad’s wife, must deal with the reality of today’s Nubia, a poverty-stricken bottomland. Men like Awad now work in Cairo for good wages while the women remain at home in squalor, dominated by the Islam of their conquerors and ignorant of the glory now covered by the Nile’s water. Left to tend Awad’s sick mother and his dying country, Halima grows despondent and learns the truths behind the Upper Egyptian lyric: “Time, you are a traitor—what have you done with my love?

Through his characters’ pain and suffering, Idris Ali paints in vibrant detail, with wit and a keen sense of history’s absurdities, the story of cultures and hearts divided, of lost lands, impossible dreams, and abandoned lives.

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cover of Douglas Home

Douglas Home

David Dutton

Haus Publishing, 2006

Alec Douglas-Home was an aristocrat who disclaimed his peerage to become Prime Minister in 1963.
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cover of Douglass in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Douglass in His Own Time

A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

John Ernest

University of Iowa Press, 2014

One of the most incredible stories in American history is that of Frederick Douglass, the man who escaped from slavery and rose to become one of the most celebrated and eloquent orators, writers, and public figures in the world. He first committed his story to writing in his 1845 autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Over the course of his life, he would expand on his story considerably, writing two other autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, as well as innumerable newspaper articles and editorials and orations.

As valuable as these writings are in illuminating the man, the story Douglass told in 1845 has become rather too easy to tell, obscuring as much as it reveals. Less a living presence than an inspiring tale, Frederick Douglass remains relatively unknown even to many of those who celebrate his achievements. Douglass in His Own Time offers an introduction to Douglass the man by those who knew him. The book includes a broad range of writings, some intended for public viewing and some private correspondence, all of which contend with the force of Douglass’s tremendous power over the written and spoken word, his amazing presence before crowds, his ability to improvise, to entertain, to instruct, to inspire—indeed, to change lives through his eloquent appeals to righteous self-awareness and social justice. In approaching Douglass through the biographical sketches, memoirs, letters, editorials, and other articles about him, readers will encounter the complexity of a life lived on a very public stage, the story of an extraordinary black man in an insistently white world.
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cover of Dr. Kate’s Courageous Calling

Dr. Kate’s Courageous Calling

Rebecca Hogue Wojahn

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2027

Meet the trailblazing doctor whose determination, compassion, and vision helped to save lives and inspired a generation to make history.
As a child in the late 1800s, young Kate Pelham knew she wanted to have a career when she grew up, even though that wasn’t expected of women at the time. After losing her mother and then her fiancée at a young age, she decided to dedicate her life to becoming a doctor—a career path then largely closed to women. But Kate would not be deterred, and before long she was known throughout the Wisconsin Northwoods as, simply, Dr. Kate.
Written for ages 8–11, Dr. Kate’s Courageous Calling shares the remarkable story of a woman who challenged expectations, transformed her community, and inspired thousands through a lifetime of service. Readers will journey alongside Kate Pelham-Newcomb as she traverses snowy back roads—sometimes on snowshoes—to care for patients. They will discover how, as the local health officer, she established community health standards and helped improve water and milk sanitation throughout the Northwoods region.
The story reaches an unforgettable climax with the extraordinary Million Penny Campaign, led by local high school students—many of whom Dr. Kate had delivered as babies—to raise money for a desperately needed hospital. Their efforts attracted contributions from tens of thousands of people around the world, bringing in more than enough to build the Lakeland Memorial Hospital in Woodruff, Wisconsin.
Dr. Kate’s Courageous Calling is a story of perseverance, leadership, sacrifice, and a community that joined together to make a difference. Combining women’s history, local history, and a remarkable true story of civic engagement, this book celebrates a pioneering physician who healed her neighbors and inspired the world.

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cover of Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon: Suffragist, Senator, Plural Wife

Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon

Suffragist, Senator, Plural Wife

Constance L. Lieber

Signature Books, 2022

Martha Hughes Cannon (1857–1932) may best be known as the first female state senator in the United States, elected in Utah in 1896, nearly a quarter century before most women in the country could vote. She was also a suffragist, physician, gifted speaker, plural wife, faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and mother of three. This short biography examines what drove Cannon to accomplish so much. Following two periods of self-imposed exile to avoid prosecution for polygamy, and a subsequent career in partisan politics, she died in California, surrounded by her children and grandchildren but virtually forgotten by the larger world. She had much to say during her lifetime and has much to say to us today about persevering in spite of adversity. Constance Lieber chronicles the important story of one of the American West’s and Mormonism’s most intriguing characters.
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cover of Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent

Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent

Beth Kephart

Temple University Press, 2013

Flavored by the oddities of historic personalities and facts, Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent is set in Bush Hill, Philadelphia, 1871—home to the Baldwin Locomotive Works and a massive, gothic prison. Acclaimed writer Beth Kephart captures the rhythms and smells of an extraordinary era as William Quinn and his Ma, Essie, grapple with life among terrible accidents, miraculous escapes, and shams masquerading as truth. 

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cover of Dream City: A Novel

Dream City

A Novel

Douglas Unger

University of Nevada Press, 2024

In this unconventional tale of Las Vegas during the two delirious boom decades before the bust of the Great Recession, failed actor “C. D.” Reinhart, who has launched a new career in hotel marketing, is gradually losing his moral and existential compass. Working on The Strip during an era when Sin City’s population growth was outpacing any other place in America, C. D. climbs the industry ladder while modeling himself after a Pyramid Resorts top executive, Lance Sheperd. C. D.’s professional choices lead him down a tumultuous road, as Sheperd, a complex and, at times, visionary figure, pilots his ventures through the tangled wheeling and dealing of finance and corporate politics straight into catastrophe.

As the story progresses, C. D. comes to understand how his personal losses and the losses of his cohort of hard driving executives on the make—especially the tragic life of his work partner, Greta Olsson, the only woman to break through into their male dominated world—are a result of the make-believe environment he has helped to create, a world where representation replaces reality. Hoping to piece together his faltering marriage and family relationships, C. D. must find a new path as he struggles to hold onto his dreams.

In this fictionalized version of the city of glittering lights, author Douglas Unger pits the ideologies of marketing and consumerism in the casino economy of America against the erosion of individual and humane values that success in that world demands. Unger reveals the hard truth that Las Vegas, a blue-collar town considered by many to be “the most honest city,” can be a temple for self-deceptions, emblematic of a service economy that knows the price of everything and too often the value of little else. Dream City becomes both a love song and an elegy for Las Vegas that sets it apart from any other literary novel previously written about this global entertainment attraction that in so many ways represents postmodern America. Sooner or later, the challenge that faces everyone is to discover what matters most, and to learn how to bet on the better angels of our natures.  
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cover of Dreaming the Mississippi

Dreaming the Mississippi

Katherine Fischer

University of Missouri Press, 2006

Offering a fresh perspective on the river’s environment, industry, and recreation, Dreaming the Mississippi challenges old stereotypes through the experiences of modern Americans who work the barges, rope-swing into muddy bottoms, struggle against hurricane floodwaters, and otherwise find new meaning on this great watery corridor. In an engaging voice, earnest and energetic, Katherine Fischer describes how the river’s natural and human histories overlap and interweave as she tells of her own gradual immersion in its life—which led her to buy a house so close to its banks that each spring she must open her basement doors to accept its inevitable floods.
            Fischer blends stories of people living along the river with accounts of national and global consequence. She weaves humorous accounts of river rats and towboat pilots with stories of sandbagging against a flood tide that refuses to be contained. She tells of river hangouts—“joints” that literally join segments of humanity along the river—as she revels in the colorful clientele of her favorite waterfront taverns. Some chapters connect the wildness of this mythical river to outside regions such as the Great Salt Lake and Florida, taking the lure of the mighty Mississippi as far as Japan. Another chapter, about the river’s mouth, “Gulf,” considers the gulf between engineers and naturalists—and between America’s haves and have-nots—as it offers heartfelt reflections on Katrina’s wrath.
            Through compelling words and photographs, Dreaming the Mississippi invites readers to taste life on today’s Mississippi, as sweet, tangy, and wildly cantankerous as it gets. In conveying her understanding of contemporary life along the river’s length, Katherine Fischer has much to teach us not only about reverence for this glorious American waterway but also about our eternal connections to the natural world.
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cover of Duels

Duels

Néhémy Dahomey

Seagull Books, 2025

A gripping tale of education, violence, and hope, in which one man's dream for a better future collides with a community on the edge of transformation.

Set in 1842, this novel foregrounds a Haiti that is grappling with the weight of an onerous debt imposed by France, forcing its citizens to pay reparations to French colonists in exchange for diplomatic recognition of the first Black republic of the Americas. In the town of Boën, a prosperous notary, Ludovic Possible, decides to take a bold step to secure the future of his community. He opens a schoolhouse where local children can learn both artisanal skills and the essential ability to read and write. For Ludovic, education represents the best chance for the people of Boën to rise above their hardships and build a prosperous future—especially for Aïda, a quiet and enigmatic girl whose mother’s marvelous stories captivate him.

The tranquility of Boën is soon shattered, however, by a series of duels that pit families, neighbors, and even animals against each other. As tensions rise, Ludovic’s vision for a better future is threatened by the escalating violence. In Duels, Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey introduces readers to a rich and unforgettable cast of characters—Aïda, Ludovic, Balthazar Possible, Pépé the Tempest, and many others—who find themselves at the crossroads of a nation on the brink of transformative change.
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cover of Duncan Upshaw Fletcher: Dixie’s Reluctant Progressive

Duncan Upshaw Fletcher

Dixie’s Reluctant Progressive

Wayne Flynt

University of Alabama Press, 2026

A Southern senator at the crossroads of change.

Duncan Upshaw Fletcher: Dixie’s Reluctant Progressive is the definitive portrait of one of Florida’s most influential yet overlooked political figures. Serving in the U.S. Senate from 1909 to 1936, Fletcher bridged the gap between Wilsonian progressivism and Roosevelt’s New Deal, shaping landmark legislation such as the Federal Farm Loan Act, the Shipping Act, and major banking reforms. Far from a demagogue, Fletcher was a methodical, pragmatic leader who championed moderation, urban progressivism, and economic development while resisting racial and religious extremism. 

Wayne Flynt’s deeply researched biography illuminates Fletcher’s paradoxical career—a Unitarian in a fundamentalist state, a reformer who later embraced conservatism, and a Southern Democrat who became a loyal New Dealer. Through vivid analysis of Florida’s turbulent political landscape, the book explores themes of coalition-building, economic modernization, and the South’s evolving role in national politics. This work will captivate readers interested in Southern history, political biography, and the roots of modern progressivism. Scholars of the New Deal, reform movements, and Florida history will find it indispensable, while general readers will appreciate its lucid style and insights into a leader whose story resonates with today’s debates over moderation, governance, and social change.

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cover of Dutton's Dirty Diggers: Bertha P. Dutton and the Senior Girl Scout Archaeological Camps in the American Southwest, 1947–1957

Dutton's Dirty Diggers

Bertha P. Dutton and the Senior Girl Scout Archaeological Camps in the American Southwest, 1947–1957

Catherine S. Fowler

University of Utah Press, 2020

Catherine Fowler chronicles a significant yet little-known program for Girl Scouts in post–WWII America. At a time when women were just beginning to enter fields traditionally dominated by men, these two-week camping caravans and archaeological excavations introduced teenage girls not only to the rich cultural and scientific heritage of the American Southwest but to new career possibilities. Dr. Bertha Dutton, curator at the Museum of New Mexico, served as trip leader.

While on the road and in camp, Dutton and other experts in anthropology, archaeology, geology, natural history, and more helped the campers appreciate what they were seeing and learning. This book details the history of the program, sharing trip itineraries and selected memories from the nearly three hundred girls who attended the camps. It also serves as a mini-biography and tribute to Bertha Dutton, who, through her knowledge, teaching, and strong persona, provided a role model for these young women, many of whom later pursued careers in anthropology and related fields.

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