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Merle Haggard has enjoyed artistic and professional triumphs few can match. He’s charted more than a hundred country hits, including thirty-eight number ones. He’s released dozens of studio albums and another half dozen or more live ones, performed upwards of ten thousand concerts, been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and seen his songs performed by artists as diverse as Lynryd Skynyrd, Elvis Costello, Tammy Wynette, Willie Nelson, the Grateful Dead, and Bob Dylan. In 2011 he was feted as a Kennedy Center Honoree. But until now, no one has taken an in-depth look at his career and body of work.

In Merle Haggard: The Running Kind, David Cantwell takes us on a revelatory journey through Haggard’s music and the life and times out of which it came. Covering the entire breadth of his career, Cantwell focuses especially on the 1960s and 1970s, when Haggard created some of his best-known and most influential music, which helped invent the America we live in today. Listening closely to a masterpiece-crowded catalogue (including songs such as “Okie from Muskogee,” “Sing Me Back Home,” “Mama Tried,” “Working Man Blues,” “Kern River,” “White Line Fever,” “Today I Started Loving You Again,” and “If We Make It through December,” among many more), Cantwell explores the fascinating contradictions—most of all, the desire for freedom in the face of limits set by the world or self-imposed—that define not only Haggard’s music and public persona but the very heart of American culture.

Here is an authoritative reference work that makes biographies of prominent Mexican national politicians from the period 1884–1934 available in English. Like the author's biographical directory for the years 1935–2009, it draws on many years of research in Mexico and the United States and seeks not only to provide accurate biographical information about each entry but also, where possible and appropriate, to connect these politicians to more recent leadership generations. Thus, Mexican Political Biographies, 1884-1934 not only is a useful historical source but also provides additional information on the family backgrounds of many contemporary figures.

The work includes those figures who have held specific posts at the national level or who have served as state governors. Each biographical entry contains the following information: date of birth, birthplace, education, elective political office, political party positions, appointive governmental posts at all levels, group activities, nongovernmental positions and professions, relatives, mentors and important friends, military experience, unusual career activities, and published biographical sources.

Another unique feature of the directory is appendixes with complete lists of the names and dates of cabinet members, supreme court justices, senators, deputies, selected ambassadors, and party leaders.

This fourth edition of Roderic Camp's highly respected Mexican Political Biographies is an updated comprehensive biographical directory of leading state and national politicians in Mexico, covering the years 1935–2009. The original edition, published in 1976, was the first and only comprehensive biographical work on contemporary political figures in any language and served as the prototype for the Mexican government's brief foray into its own official biographical directory. The Mexican Supreme Court has cited every biography of justices in the third edition as the basis of its biographies in the late 1980s.

With updates of the existing biographies and appendices, plus almost 1,000 additional biographies, this fourth edition now features close to 3,000 entries and serves as a unique resource list of the chronological occupants of all leading national political posts. The need for such information has become even more pronounced since Mexico's political transformation from a semi-authoritarian to a democratic model.

This latest edition allows readers access to information about Mexican politicians into the new century, and like its earlier versions, will be a valuable tool for government officials, journalists, historians, social scientists, the business community, and students.

Finally, it includes a detailed bibliographic essay that identifies and explains the significance of biographical sources and has been enhanced by numerous up-to-date Internet sources. An added convenience is an accompanying CD that allows readers to search the biographies and appendices, enhancing the longevity, usefulness, and uniqueness of this edition.

“Not a mirror but a magnifying glass”—such, in the poet Mayakovsky’s words, was the theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold. The first to insist on the primacy of the director’s role, indeed the first to conceive of it as a role, this passionately dedicated Russian director tore down the fourth wall and forced the actors and audience together into one inescapable community of experience.

Yet Meyerhold recorded few of his theories in writing, and the intensity and brilliance of his work must be recaptured through the actors and artists who helped create the performances. Focusing on Meyerhold’s postrevolutionary career, Paul Schmidt has assembled in this book journals, letters, reminiscences, and, of special interest, actual rehearsal notes that build a fascinating, intimate picture of Meyerhold as a theorist and as a man.

Included are Meyerhold’s frantic notes to his teacher, friend, and bête noire Stanislavsky; detailed descriptions of how he trained his actors in “biomechanics”; and memories by such students as Eisenstein and such friends as Pasternak and Ehrenburg. One chapter deals with Meyerhold’s never-realized conception of Boris Godunov, while another describes his direction of Camille, which starred Zinaida Raikh, his wife, and which played its 725th and last performance on the day Stalin’s government liquidated Meyerhold’s theater. Paul Schmidt’s introduction and headnotes enhance our understanding of Meyerhold as a pioneer of modern theater.

    Mice in the Freezer, Owls on the Porch is in many ways a love story—about a quiet scientist and his flamboyant wife, but also about their passions for hunting, for wild lands, and for the grouse and raptor species that they were instrumental in saving from destruction.
    From the papers and letters of Frederick and Frances Hamerstrom, the reminiscences of contemporaries, and her own long friendship with this extraordinary couple who were her neighbors, Helen Corneli draws an intimate picture of Fran and "Hammy" from childhood through the genesis and maturation of a romantic, creative, and scientific relationship. Following the Hamerstroms as they give up a life of sophisticated convention and comfort for the more "civilized" (as Aldo Leopold would have it) pleasures of living and conducting on-the-spot research into diminishing species, Corneli captures the spirit of the Hamerstroms, their profession, and the natural and human environments in which they worked. A nuanced account of the labors, adventures, and achievements that distinguished the Hamerstroms over the years—and that inspired a generation of naturalists—this book also provides a dramatic account of conservation history over the course of the twentieth century, particularly in Wisconsin during the eventful years from the 1920s through the 1970s.

The digital storytelling project Humanizing Deportation invites migrants to present their own stories in the world’s largest and most diverse archive of its kind. Since 2017, more than 300 community storytellers have created their own audiovisual testimonial narratives, sharing their personal experiences of migration and repatriation. With Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge, the project’s coordinator, Robert Irwin, and other team members introduce the project’s innovative participatory methodology, drawing out key issues regarding the human consequences of contemporary migration control regimes, as well as insights from migrants whose world-making endeavors may challenge what we think we know about migration.

In recent decades, migrants in North America have been treated with unprecedented harshness. Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge outlines this recent history, revealing stories both of grave injustice and of seemingly unsurmountable obstacles overcome. As Irwin writes, “The greatest source of expertise on the human consequences of contemporary migration control are the migrants who have experienced them,” and their voices in this searing collection jump off the page and into our hearts and minds.

The life of a crusading federal judge who stood up and fought for “the little guy”

This is the story of Miles Lord (1919–2016), who rose from humble beginnings on Minnesota’s Iron Range to become one of the most colorful and powerful judges in the country, described as “an unabashed Prairie populist” and “a live-wire slayer of corporate behemoths.” He cut a wide swath through history on his path to the bench: coming of age alongside a cadre of young Midwestern social-gospel progressives, including Hubert H. Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, and Walter Mondale, in the days before they reached national fame; teaming with Bobby Kennedy as a hotshot prosecutor in pursuit of Jimmy Hoffa; and serving as the secret envoy between his friends Hubert and Eugene in their battle for the soul of the Democratic party in the historic 1968 presidential campaign. Later, after donning his black robe, he reshaped jurisprudence with precedent-breaking rulings—on issues ranging from women’s rights to consumer protection to education reform—and breaking trail when he ordered the shutdown of the Reserve Mining Company in northern Minnesota, which was spewing its waste into Lake Superior, in the most sensational trial of the early environmental era.

One of Judge Lord’s landmark cases—and interlaced as a centerpiece narrative of this book—involved the Dalkon Shield intrauterine device, which caused horrific infections in thousands of women, resulting in infertility and sometimes death. Author Roberta Walburn served as the judge’s law clerk during that litigation in 1983–84, and she provides a page-turning account (both an insider’s view and an in-depth chronicle) of what was called “one of the most disastrous episodes of American corporate misconduct.” In the end, more than 200,000 women received nearly $3 billion in compensation, and the Fortune 500 defendant was left in ruins. But Judge Lord was hauled up on judicial misconduct charges for his no-holds-barred actions that were certainly provocative but also stand as a timely reminder, even (or especially) today, of the challenges in balancing the scales of justice for a legal system that too often skews to the rich and powerful.

The author deftly weaves the Dalkon Shield drama into the larger story of the life of a one-of-a-kind man, crafting a sweeping and spirited true-life tale with not only her first-hand experiences as the judge’s law clerk but also with unrestricted access to the judge’s personal files. This is a rare and compelling portrait of a remarkable man and his place in both Minnesota and U.S. history.

Winner of the 2021 Minnesota Book Award for Minnesota Nonfiction

The story of the scientist who first mapped Minnesota’s geology, set against the backdrop of early scientific inquiry in the state

At twenty, Newton Horace Winchell declared, “I know nothing about rocks.” At twenty-five, he decided to make them his life’s work. As a young geologist tasked with heading the Minnesota Geological and Natural History Survey, Winchell (1839–1914) charted the prehistory of the region, its era of inland seas, its volcanic activity, and its several ice ages—laying the foundation for the monumental five-volume Geology of Minnesota. Tracing Winchell’s remarkable path from impoverished fifteen-year-old schoolteacher to a leading light of an emerging scientific field, Minnesota’s Geologist also recreates the heady early days of scientific inquiry in Minnesota, a time when one man’s determination and passion for learning could unlock the secrets of the state’s distant past and present landscape.

Traveling by horse and cart, by sailboat and birchbark canoe, Winchell and his group surveyed rock outcrops, river valleys, basalt formations on Lake Superior, and the vast Red River Valley. He studied petrology at the Sorbonne in Paris, bringing cutting-edge knowledge to bear on the volcanic rocks of the Arrowhead region. As a founder of the American Geological Society and founding editor of American Geologist, the first journal for professional geologists, Winchell was the driving force behind scientific endeavor in early state history, serving as mentor to many young scientists and presiding over a household—the Winchell House, located on the University of Minnesota’s present-day mall—that was a nexus of intellectual ferment. His life story, told here for the first time, draws an intimate picture of this influential scientist, set against a backdrop of Minnesota’s geological complexity and splendor.

A collection of narrative essays on femininity, sexuality, community, and belonging

Miss Southeast explores the strange, often contradictory cultural circumstances of being queer and female in the American South and beyond. Born and raised in North Carolina, the youngest in a family of precocious daughters, Rogers spends her teenage years as a half-closeted lesbian desperate to escape the South, convinced the rest of the United States must be “more enlightened than our cow-dotted corner of the county.”

Adulthood takes Rogers to Ohio, New York, Louisiana, Arkansas, Washington, DC, and China, but each essay finds her reckoning with participation in and resistance to rigid cultural institutions—whether a coming-out story set at a high school beauty pageant or a meditation on swimming pools as emblems of racial divides across the South. In lyric prose enlivened by a poet’s sense of musicality, Miss Southeast considers how both place and our layered identities shape our sense of belonging.

The United States Census 2000 presents a twenty-first century America in which mixed-race marriages, cross-race adoption, and multiracial families in general are challenging the ethnic definitions by which the nation has historically categorized its population. Addressing a wide spectrum of questions raised by this rich new cultural landscape, Mixing It Up brings together the observations of ten noted voices who have experienced multiracialism first-hand.

From Naomi Zack's "American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues" to Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger's "Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance," this diverse collection spans the realities of multiculturalism in compelling new analysis. Arguing that society's discomfort with multiracialism has been institutionalized throughout history, whether through the "one drop" rule or media depictions, SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs reflect on the means by which the monoracial lens is slowly being replaced.

Itself a hybrid of memoir, history, and sociological theory, Mixing It Up makes it clear why the identity politics of previous decades have little relevance to the fluid new face of contemporary humanity.