Steven R. Simms
University of Utah Press, 2023
Great Salt Lake is a celebrated, world-recognized natural landmark. It, and the broader region bound to it, is also a thoroughly cultural landscape; generations of peoples made their lives there. In an eminently readable narrative, Steven Simms, one of the foremost archaeologists of the region, traces the scope of human history dating from the Pleistocene, when First Peoples interacted with the lapping waters of Lake Bonneville, to nearly the present day. Through vivid descriptions of how people lived, migrated, and mingled, with persistence and resilience, Simms honors the long human presence on the landscape.
First Peoples of Great Salt Lake takes a different approach to understanding the ancients than is typical of archaeology. De-emphasizing categories and labels, it traces changing environments, climates, and peoples through the notion of place. It challenges the "Pristine Myth," the cultural bias that Indigenous peoples were timeless, changeless, primitive, and the landscapes they lived in sparsely populated and perpetually pristine. First Peoples and their descendants modified the forests and understory vegetation, shaped wildlife populations, and adapted to long-term climate change. Native Americans of Great Salt Lake were very much part of their world, and the story here is one of long continuity through dramatic cultural change.
Michael J. Chiarappa
Michigan State University Press, 2003
The contentious claims of groups seeking to use Lake Michigan’s fisheries resources were at the center of modern America’s emerging environmental politics in the middle of the twentieth century. Inheriting the environmental abuse, political oversights, and cultural inclinations of an earlier era, Lake Michigan’s later twentieth century fisheries stakeholders found themselves relentlessly divided by a series of disputes arising from the promotion of sport fishing over commercial fishing, policy-making positions of state government, the ecological changes wrought by nonindigenous species, and the reclamation of treaty-rights fishing by Native Americans.
Going beyond the chronicling of past events, Fish for All contextualizes the shared experiences that shape each group’s collective memory and presents their historical narratives as discourse that legitimizes their current claims to the resource. Fish for All highlights the historically charged consciousness of fishing communities and points to the evolving communication that will take place between them, fisheries historians, fisheries anthropologists, scientists, and policymakers.
Francis M. Veraldi, Stephen M. Pescitelli, and Philip W. Willink
University of Chicago Press, 2025
“A must-have field guide for fans of Second City area fish.”—Robert Ito, The New York Times Book Review • “A treasure of hardcore fish intelligence and delightful tidbits of fish history.”—Dale Bowman, Chicago Sun-Times
Fish don’t heed state boundaries, and neither does this comprehensive, photo-filled guide to the diverse species of Chicago and beyond.
Encompassing southern Lake Michigan, northeastern Illinois, and adjacent areas of Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the Chicago Region is home to rare habitats supporting diverse fish populations. From small creeks to large rivers and from small ponds to one of the world’s largest freshwater ecosystems, Lake Michigan, these systems are home to some 164 fish species representing 31 families. In this essential field guide, the most complete and up-to-date reference for fishes in the Chicago Region, we meet them all—lampreys, sturgeon, paddlefish, gars, drum, darters, perches, sticklebacks, sculpins, and more. Written by leading local ecologists and featuring a pictorial family key, color photographs, detailed species distribution maps, and natural history observations unique to the region, this go-to guide belongs on the shelf—and in the boat—of every angler, naturalist, fisheries manager, and biologist.
Rob Buffler
University of Minnesota Press, 2009
The definitive guide to the eccentric and surprisingly popular sport of rough fishing
Is a carpsucker a carp or a sucker? Where can you find the largest eelpout in the United States? Can you catch creek chubs and fry them for supper?
These questions and more are answered within the pages of Fishing for Buffalo. Rob Buffler and Tom Dickson dispel myths and rumors about rough fish with credible biological information while also demonstrating the joy of angling for nontraditional fish. Its wealth of information qualifies this book as a fishing bible for the growing number of rough fishing enthusiasts in the United States and makes it easy to identify the rough fish you may catch. It even includes a sampling of Dickson and Buffler’s favorite recipes, such as Burbot Boulangère and Deviled Grilled Cisco.Rough fish may be a lot of things—ugly, unruly, or elusive—but they are definitely not boring.Karni R. Perez
University of Alabama Press, 2006
A captivating story of the industry's rise in Alabama.
With a wonderful ear for dialogue and in flowing narrative style, Karni Perez weaves together oral histories collected from early hatchery owners, catfish farmers, processors, and researchers to recount the important contributions made by Alabamians to the channel catfish industry. Perez describes the struggles and glories of fish culture from its early days as an experimental venture to the thriving present-day commercial enterprise that supplies warmwater fish for the American food industry.
Stephen Biddulph
University of Utah Press, 2013
Jerry Thornton
University Press of New England, 2018
James F. Muench
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Jim Nowlan and J. Thomas Johnson
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Pointed, honest, and pragmatic, Fixing Illinois is a plan for effective and honest government that seeks an even nobler end: restoring our faith in Illinois's institutions and reviving a sense of citizenship and state pride.
By Monte Akers
University of Texas Press, 2011
What happened in Kirven, Texas, in May 1922, has been forgotten by the outside world. It was a coworker's whispered words, "Kirven is where they burned the [Negroes]," that set Monte Akers to work at discovering the true story behind a young white woman's brutal murder and the burning alive of three black men who were almost certainly innocent of it. This was followed by a month-long reign of terror as white men killed blacks while local authorities concealed the real identity of the white probable murderers and allowed them to go free.
Writing nonfiction with the skill of a novelist, Akers paints a vivid portrait of a community desolated by race hatred and its own refusal to face hard truths. He sets this tragedy within the story of a region prospering from an oil boom but plagued by lawlessness, and traces the lynching's repercussions down the decades to the present day. In the new epilogue, Akers adds details that have come to light as a result of the book's publication, including an eyewitness account of the burnings from an elderly man who claimed to have castrated two of the men before they were lynched.
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.
Edited by Richebourg McWilliams
University of Alabama Press, 1988
Andre Penicaut, a carpenter, sailed with Iberville to the French province of Louisiana in 1699 and did not return to France until 1721. The book he began in the province and finished upon his return to France is an eyewitness account of the first years of the French colony, which stretched along the Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas and in the Mississippi Valley from the Balize to the Illinois country. As a ship carpenter, Penicaut was chosen as a member of several important expeditions: he accompanied Le Sueur up the Mississippi River in 1700 to present-day Minnesota, and he went with Juchereau de St. Denis on the first journey from Mobile to the Red River and overland to the Rio Grande, to open trade with the Spaniards in Mexico. Penicaut helped to build the first post in Louisiana, at Old Biloxi, and the second post on the Mobile River.
Penicaut was at his best when describing the lives and social customs of the Indians of the region. He saw them in realistic terms, showing no prejudice toward their native habits. Neither were his French colleagues cast in heroic or villainous molds—though their accomplishments must strike modern readers as truly epic.
When first published, Fleur de Lys and Calumet was a major stimulus to scholarship in the field. This new edition will be welcomed by a new generation of scholars and readers interested in the colonial history of the Deep South and the Mississippi Valley.
John R. Nelson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
Joel Stone
University of Michigan Press, 2015
William A. Read
University of Alabama Press, 2003
A compendium of Indian-derived names from the three languages of the Muskhogean family—Seminole, Hitchiti, and Choctaw.
The first Native peoples of what is now the United States who met and interacted with Europeans were the people of the lower Southeast. They were individuals of the larger Maskókî linguistic family who inhabited much of present-day Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and eastern portions of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Louisiana. Today, sixteen federally recognized tribes trace their heritage from these early Maskókî peoples, and many of them in both Florida and Oklahoma still speak and understand this root language.
The continuing vitality of this core language, and of Seminole culture and influence, makes this linguistic examination by William Read ever more valuable. A companion to his study of Indian Place Names in Alabama, this long out-of-print guide offers a new introduction from Patricia Wickman in which she provides current understandings of Seminole language and derivations and a brief analysis of Read's contribution to the preservation of the Native linguistic record.
Beth Kephart
Temple University Press, 2014
Harriette Simpson Arnow
Michigan State University Press, 2013
Lynn Willoughby
University of Alabama Press, 1998
K. Maria D. Lane
University of Chicago Press, 2024
May Joseph
Duke University Press, 2013
Joseph considers New York's relation to the water that surrounds and defines it. Her reflections reach back to the city's heyday as a world-class port—a past embodied in a Dutch East India Company cannon recently unearthed from the rubble at the World Trade Center site—and they encompass the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. They suggest that New York's future lies in the reclamation of its great water resources—for artistic creativity, civic engagement, and ecological sustainability.
Herbert K. Russell
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
Cecil A. Reed
University of Iowa Press, 1993
Michelle Burnham
Dartmouth College Press, 2014
PATRICK W. GAINER
West Virginia University Press, 2017
James P. Leary
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
Robert J. Pond
Ohio University Press, 2003
Unique among hiking trails is the one that forms a complete loop around the state of Ohio. That 1,200-mile trail is called the Buckeye Trail. Showing the way on tree trunks, rocks, and other natural signposts are the blue painted markings called “the blue blazes.” In Follow the Blue Blazes, the reader embarks on a journey to discover a part of Ohio largely unseen except along this great path.
Beginning with the startling rock formations and graceful waterfalls of Old Man’s Cave in southern Ohio, and leading clockwise around the state to visit expansive forests, lovely parks, ancient mounds, historic canals and battlefields, and scenic river trails, experienced trailsman Robert J. Pond provides a captivating look at each section of the trail.
Each chapter features an overview of a 100-mile section of the trail and three self-guided featured hikes. The overviews, with accompanying maps, may be read consecutively to acquaint the reader with the entire course of the blue blazes. But most readers will best enjoy the Buckeye Trail by taking the guide along on featured hikes. Each hike is supported by a detailed but easy-to-follow map and includes explicit directions to trailheads and approximate hiking times.
In addition to many outlying areas, the extensive Buckeye Trail is accessible in or near Cincinnati, Dayton, Toledo, Cleveland, and Akron. Robert Pond has supplemented each description with interesting details about the geology and the diverse habitats of flora and fauna. Readers, too, can enjoy the beauty and wonders of Ohio if they Follow the Blue Blazes.
Caroline B. Brettell
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015
Winner, ISHS Certificate of Excellence, 2016
In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the attention of the Catholic and Protestant religious communities around the world focused on a few small settlements of French Canadian immigrants in northeastern Illinois. Soon after arriving in their new home, a large number of these immigrants, led by Father Charles Chiniquy, the charismatic Catholic priest who had brought them there, converted to Protestantism. In this anthropological history, Caroline B. Brettell explores how Father Chiniquy took on both the sacred and the secular authority of the Catholic Church to engineer the religious schism and how the legacy of this rift affected the lives of the immigrants and their descendants for generations. This intriguing study of a nineteenth-century migration of French Canadians to the American Midwest offers an innovative perspective on the immigrant experience in America.
Brettell chronicles how Chiniquy came to lead approximately one thousand French Canadian families to St. Anne, Illinois, in the early 1850s and how his conflict with the Catholic hierarchy over the ownership and administration of church property, delivery of the mass in French instead of Latin, and access to the Bible by laymen led to his excommunication. Drawing on the concept of social drama—a situation of intensely lived conflict that emerges within social groups—Brettell explains the religious schism in terms of larger ethnic and religious disagreements that were happening elsewhere in the United States and in Canada. Brettell also explores legal disputes, analyzes the reemergence of Catholicism in St. Anne in the first decade of the twentieth century, addresses the legacy of Chiniquy in both the United States and Quebec, and closely examines the French Canadian immigrant communities, focusing on the differences between the people who converted to Protestantism and those who remained Catholic.
Occurring when nativism was pervasive and the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party was at its height, Chiniquy’s religious schism offers an opportunity to examine a range of important historical and anthropological issues, including immigration, ethnicity, and religion; changes in household and family structure; the ways social identities are constructed and reconstructed through time; and the significance of charismatic leadership in processes of social and religious change. Through its multidisciplinary approach, Brettell’s enlightening study provides a pioneering assessment of larger national tensions and social processes, some of which are still evident in modern immigration to the United States.
Kathryn M. Frederick
University of Alabama Press, 2026
Incorporates experimental archaeology to understand the food-caching strategies led by Indigenous women in Late Woodland Michigan.
This experimental archaeology book centers on the decision of Indigenous women in Michigan’s Late Woodland to store food in cache pits for later use, to ensure a stable food supply. These food storage techniques were efforts to increase communal chances of survival in direct responses to sociopolitical changes. Kathryn M. Frederick highlights the importance of food storage in these communities and the decision-making and behaviors behind it.
To discover why food storage became a popular practice at that period, Frederick considered the efficacy of subterranean food storage and constructed experiments to understand the timing and use of cache pits and to test their reliability and efficiency. She also compiled ethnographic data on location, environmental conditions, movement strategies, and types of foodstuffs stored for dozens of hunter-gatherer groups. Two distinct patterns of food storage emerged: “reliant” and “redundant.” Frederick argues that the Indigenous women utilized a system of reliant storage during times of abundance but could switch to a redundant system as the socioeconomic climate shifted. This book will interest a wide swath of archaeologists and others interested in Indigenous foodways and women’s key roles.
Mark Pierce
University of Missouri Press, 2027
For 49 years St. Louis was home to two NFL football franchises comprising many colorful and even great players, but ever since the Rams moved back to Los Angeles in 2016, the Gateway City has secured a solid reputation as an NFL ghost town. In Football Town:The Rough and Tumble Gridiron History of St. Louis, the first scholarly treatment of the history of all professional football in St. Louis, Mark Pierce challenges the standard narrative, chronicling the city’s rich yet largely forgotten history of pro football, celebrating its more successful moments on the gridiron, and proving that St. Louis has long been and still is far more than a “Baseball Town.”
Pierce begins with St. Louis’s efforts to compete in the burgeoning NFL in 1923 and 1934-1936, yet the city’s pro football history begins in earnest with the arrival of the Cardinals from Chicago in 1960. The author chronicles the team’s entire 28-season stay in St. Louis, including its most successful period under head coach Don Coryell, from 1973 to 1977, and the inconsistency that prevailed after his tenure. Eventually, revenue concerns, failed stadium negotiations, and other issues culminated in the owner of the franchise’s decision to move the team to Phoenix after the 1987 season, despite offers of better terms at Busch Stadium and the promise of the construction of a new downtown stadium by city and state government leaders.
Even after the loss of the Cardinals, a craving for pro football persisted in St. Louis, and the search for a new team commenced almost immediately thereafter. Pierce documents the tumultuous process of securing the Rams’ 1995 move from their native Los Angeles to St. Louis, a deal concluded through high-stakes negotiations despite efforts by NFL insiders to prevent the move entirely. Nevertheless, by April that year, St. Louis fans could once again emotionally invest in the NFL—and they did so in earnest. In addition to detailing the ups and downs of the Ram’s subsequent twenty years in the city, Pierce closely examines the “poison pill” made in its original lease agreement with the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission, which would ultimately lead to disaster.
Football Town is built on a foundation of 25 interviews the author personally conducted with former players, coaches, and broadcasters, including Pro Football Hall of Famers Dick Vermeil and Jackie Smith; Baseball Hall of Fame broadcaster Joe Buck; Cardinals greats Jim Hart, Mel Gray, O.J. Anderson, and Roy Green; and Rams’ Super Bowl champions Mike Martz, Trent Green, Adam Timmerman, Keith Lyle, and Adam Timmerman.
Accompanied by dozens of photos not seen in decades, Football Town allows those who played the game in St. Louis to tell their stories and share their thoughts on the city’s rich and colorful football history.
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.
Lloyd A. Hunter
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2011

JoEllen McNergney Vinyard
University of Illinois Press, 1998
Carl Corey
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2014
John Balzarini and Melody L. Boyd
Temple University Press, 2027
Landlords are often painted as “rich, indifferent, and miserly.” For Rent humanizes small-scale landlords who are highly involved in their property management and tenant interaction. John Balzarini and Melanie Boyd interview small-scale landlords in Philadelphia to understand how they think, why they invest in rental housing, and how their experiences as housing providers shape both their supportive and detrimental behaviors toward renters. They reveal an earnest desire to provide decent rental housing and resolve rent issues through communication, flexibility, and compromise rather than eviction.
For Rent describes these landlords’ challenges, from social problems connected to high poverty rates, to the increasing consolidation of rental housing by large-scale corporate landlords, which can push small-scale landlords out of the rental housing market. The authors argue that the decline of small-scale landlords could reduce housing affordability and increase evictions. Instead, collectively valuing rental housing and implementing policies that support small-scale landlords can strengthen housing stability and improve outcomes for renters.
Providing a regional focus that is indicative of national trends, For Rent shows the many advantages small-scale landlords have over their corporate competitors, while also critically analyzing the broader housing system that places them on the front lines of managing market contradictions.
Mike Royko
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Judy Y. Kawamoto
University Press of Colorado, 2020
Forced Out: A Nikkei Woman’s Search for a Home in America offers insight into “voluntary evacuation,” a little-known Japanese American experience during World War II, and the lasting effects of cultural trauma. Of the roughly 120,000 people forced from their homes by Executive Order 9066, around 5,000 were able to escape incarceration beforehand by fleeing inland. In a series of beautifully written essays, Judy Kawamoto recounts her family’s flight from their home in Washington to Wyoming, their later moves to Montana and Colorado, and the influence of those experiences on the rest of her life. Hers is a story shared by the many families who lost everything and had to start over in often suspicious and hostile environments.
Kawamoto vividly illustrates the details of her family’s daily life, the discrimination and financial hardship they experienced, and the isolation that came from experiencing the horrors of the 1940s very differently than many other Japanese Americans. Chapters address her personal and often unconscious reactions to her parents’ trauma, as well as her own subsequent travels around much of the world, exploring, learning, enjoying, but also unconsciously acting out a continual search for a home.
Showing how the impacts of traumatic events are collective and generational, Kawamoto draws
interconnections between her family’s displacement and later aspects of her life and juxtaposes the impact of her early experiences and questions of identity, culture, and assimilation. Forced Out will be of great interest to the general reader as well as students and scholars of ethnic studies, Asian American studies, history, education, and mental health.
2022 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, Honor Title, Adult Non-Fiction Literature
2022 Evans Handcart Award Winner
David H. DeJong
University of Utah Press, 2011
During the nineteenth century, upstream diversions from the Gila River decreased the arable land on the Gila River Indian Reservation to only a few thousand acres. As a result the Pima Indians, primarily an agricultural people, fell into poverty. Many Pima farmers and leaders lamented this suffering and in 1914 the United States Indian Irrigation Service assigned a 33-year-old engineer named Clay “Charles” Southworth to oversee the Gila River adjudication. As part of that process, Southworth interviewed 34 Pima elders, thus putting a face on the depth of hardships facing many Indians in the late nineteenth century.
Michael Liu
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
Pero G Dagbovie
Michigan State University Press, 2025
Michael C. Batinski
Southern Illinois University Press, 2022
Anita Huizar-Hernández
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Paul J Draus
Michigan State University Press, 2025
Stephen E. Strom
University of Arizona Press, 2024
James W. Byrkit
University of Arizona Press, 1982
David Bigler
Utah State University Press, 1998
Beck, Henry
Rutgers University Press, 1983
David L. Bigler
Utah State University Press, 2004
In May 1855 twenty-seven men set out from the young Mormon settlements in Utah to establish the northernmost colony of the Kingdom of God, "the Northern Mission to the Remnants of the House of Jacob"-American Indians. More colonists, including families, would join them later. Building a fort in the Limhi Valley, four hundred miles to the north and at the foot of the pass by which Lewis and Clark had crossed the Continental Divide, they began to proselyte among Sacagawea's Shoshone relatives as well as members of the Bannock, Nez Percé, and other tribes. Three years later, some of their expected and actual Indian converts violently drove the colonists out and destroyed Fort Limhi.
In Fort Limhi: The Mormon Adventure in Oregon Territory, 1855-1858, David Bigler shows that the colony, known as the Salmon River Mission, played a pivotal role in the Utah War of 1857-1858 and that the catastrophic end of the mission was critical in keeping that conflict from becoming an all out war between Mormon Utah and the United States. In the process, he uses a multitude of primary sources, many newly uncovered or previously overlooked, to reconstruct a dramatic and compelling story involving stalwart Mormon frontiersmen, Brigham Young, a variety of Native American individuals and groups, the U. S. Army, and "mountaineers," as the surviving fur trade veterans now commonly known as "mountain men" called themselves.
Canter Brown
University of Alabama Press, 1995
The oldest town in interior south Florida, Fort Meade lies about 50 miles east of Tampa and 10 miles south of Polk County's seat of Bartow. In this volume, Polk County native Canter Brown recounts the intriguing story of the founding and evolution of Fort Meade during the last half of the 19th century, when it was first established as a military outpost to separate Seminoles from white pioneer families desirous of cattle-grazing lands. A civilian community coalesced at Fort Meade under the pressures of the Billy Bowlegs War of 1855-58. Quickly the village developed as a cattle-industry center, which was important to the Confederacy until its destruction in 1864 by home-grown Union forces.
In the postwar era the cattle industry revived, and the community prospered. The railroads arrived in the 1880s, bringing new settlers, and the village grew into a town. Opportunities expanded as well with the growth of citrus, phosphate mining, truck farming, and tobacco industries. A boom-and-bust economy alternately bolstered and rocked the town, and the disastrous freezes of 1894Ð95 almost delivered a fatal blow.
Little has been written about town development on the Florida frontier. This book portrays the extremely complicated and often exciting processes and influences at play in interior south Florida, and the very precarious hold that town life possessed on that frontier.Local history the way it should be written. Canter Brown has managed to score several significant accomplishments in Fort Meade, 1849-1900. The book contributes to the growing body of good, solid monographs dealing with Florida state and local history and represents the building blocks necessary for a state and regional synthesis. The cumulative research compiled for this volume is impressive and daunting. Canter Brown proves that good local history requires considerable detective work and far-ranging inquiries.
Stan Hoig
University of Arkansas Press, 2005
Stan Hoig
University of Arkansas Press, 2005