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Johnny and Sarah Frank’s lives were steeped in the old ways of survival in the upland boreal forest of northeastern Alaska. Constantly on the move in search of game and other wild resources, sharing the harvest with others around them, and passing on their skills and cultural values through a rich tradition of oral literature, the Franks are vivid examples of how the Gwich’in people survived as a nation. Neerihiinjìk: We Traveled From Place To Place is a narrative of Johnny and Sarah’s life together. Both lived well into their nineties, and, through their abundant social warmth and manifest intelligence, they had an extraordinary influence on the lives of people around them. 

The stories told by Johnny and Sarah in their native language are presented here with English translations on facing pages. The finished texts were transcribed from more than thirty-five hours of tape recordings. Johnny’s tales are focused on the days of long ago, the adventures of Indian warriors, and the feats and songs of powerful medicine men. Sarah, on the other hand, shapes her stories around her own daily life and her useful knowledge of the environment and its resources. Together, they present a balanced view of the Gwich’in world – the masculine and the feminine, the spiritual as well as the practical. 

Neerihiinjìk adds greatly to the Franks’ reputation as rugged individuals who were versed in the ways of their ancestors and who figured prominently in the history of twentieth century Northern Dene.

A new edition of a classic work of American history that eloquently examines the rise of antimodernism at the turn of the twentieth century.
 
First published in 1981, T. J. Jackson Lears’s No Place of Grace is a landmark book in American studies and American history, acclaimed for both its rigorous research and the deft fluidity of its prose. A study of responses to the emergent culture of corporate capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century, No Place of Grace charts the development of contemporary consumer society through the embrace of antimodernism—the effort among middle- and upper-class Americans to recapture feelings of authentic experience. Rather than offer true resistance to the increasingly corporatized bureaucracy of the time, however, antimodernism helped accommodate Americans to the new order—it was therapeutic rather than oppositional, a striking forerunner to today’s self-help culture. And yet antimodernism contributed a new dynamic as well, “an eloquent edge of protest,” as Lears puts it, which is evident even today in anticonsumerism, sustainable living, and other practices. This new edition, with a lively and discerning foreword by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, celebrates the fortieth anniversary of this singular work of history.

Latinas/os and Asians are rewriting the meaning and history of race in the American South by complicating the black/white binary that has frequently defined the region since before the Civil War. Arriving in southern communities as migrants or refugees, Latinas/os and Asians have experienced both begrudging acceptance and prejudice as their presence confronts and troubles local understandings of race and difference—understandings that have deep roots in each community’s particular racial history, as well as in national fears and anxieties about race.

Nuevo South offers the first comparative study showing how Latinas/os and Asians are transforming race and place in the contemporary South. Integrating political, economic, and social analysis, Perla M. Guerrero examines the reception of Vietnamese, Cubans, and Mexicans in northwestern Arkansas communities that were almost completely white until the mid-1970s. She shows how reactions to these refugees and immigrants ranged from reluctant acceptance of Vietnamese as former US allies to rejection of Cubans as communists, criminals, and homosexuals and Mexicans as “illegal aliens” who were perceived as invaders when they began to establish roots and became more visible in public spaces. Guerrero’s research clarifies how social relations are constituted in the labor sphere, particularly the poultry industry, and reveals the legacies of regional history, especially anti-Black violence and racial cleansing. Nuevo South thus helps us to better understand what constitutes the so-called Nuevo South and how historical legacies shape the reception of new people in the region.