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10 books match the query 'Lore'
Faces along the Bar
Lore and Order in the Workingman's Saloon, 1870-1920Madelon Powers
University of Chicago Press, 1998
"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
Iowa's Minerals
Their Occurance, Origins, Industries and LorePaul Garvin
University of Iowa Press, 1998
Legends and Lore of Southern Illinois
John W. Allen
Southern Illinois University Press, 1963
In the 1950s and ‘60s, John W. Allen told the people of southern Illinois about themselves—about their region, its history, and its folkways—in his series of newspaper articles, “It Happened in Southern Illinois.” Each installment of the series depicted a single item of interest—a town, a building, an enterprise, a person, an event, a custom. Originally published in 1963, Legends & Lore of Southern Illinois brings together a selection of these articles preserving a valuable body of significant local history and cultural lore.
During territorial times and early statehood, southern Illinois was the most populous and most influential part of the state. But the advent of the steamboat and the building of the National Road made the lands to the west and north more easily accessible, and the later settlers struck out for the more expansive and fertile prairies. The effect of this movement was to isolate that section of the state known as Egypt and halt its development, creating what Allen termed “an historical eddy.” Bypassed as it was by the main current of westward expansion and economic growth, its culture changed very slowly. Methods, practices, and the tools of the pioneer continued in use for a long time. The improved highways and better means of communication of the twentieth century brought a marked change upon the region, and daily life no longer differed materially from that of other areas.
Against such a cultural and historical backdrop, Mr. Allen wrote these sketches of the people of southern Illinois—of their folkways and beliefs, their endeavors, successes, failures, and tragedies, and of the land to which they came. There are stories here of slaves and their masters, criminals, wandering peddlers, politicians, law courts and vigilantes, and of boat races on the rivers. Allen also looks at the region’s earlier history, describing American Indian ruins, monuments, and artifacts as well as the native population’s encounters with European settlers.
Many of the vestiges of the region’s past culture have all but disappeared, surviving only in museums and in the written record. This new paperback edition of Legends & Lore of Southern Illinois brings that past culture to life again in Allen’s descriptive, engaging style.
Lore of the Lumber Camps
Earl Clifton Beck
University of Michigan Press, 1948
The text discusses the cultural life of the lumberjacks, who, despite their rugged lifestyle, adhered to a chivalrous code of conduct. Beck details their traditions, storytelling, music, and dance, emphasizing the rich folklore that emerged from the camps. The book promises further exploration of the log-marking system, notable lumber figures, and the impact of deforestation on Michigan’s landscape.
Michigan Legends
Folktales and Lore from the Great Lakes StateSheryl James
University of Michigan Press, 2013
Over the course of its history, the state of Michigan has produced its share of folktales and lore. Many are familiar with the Ojibwa legend of Sleeping Bear Dunes, and most have heard a yarn or two told of Michigan’s herculean lumberjack, Paul Bunyan.
But what about Detroit’s Nain Rouge, the red-eyed imp they say bedeviled the city’s earliest residents? Or Le Griffon, the Great Lakes’ original ghost ship that some believe haunts the waters to this day? Or the Bloodstoppers, Upper Peninsula folk who’ve been known to halt a wound’s bleeding with a simple touch thanks to their magic healing powers?
In Michigan Legends, Sheryl James collects these and more stories of the legendary people, events, and places from Michigan’s real and imaginary past. Set in a range of historical time periods and locales as well as featuring a collage of ethnic traditions—including Native American, French, English, African American, and Finnish—these tales are a vivid sample of the state’s rich cultural heritage. This book will appeal to all Michiganders and anyone else interested in good folktales, myths, legends, or lore.
Rooted in the North
The Lives and Lore of Twenty Minnesota Nature WritersMark Neuzil
University of Minnesota Press, 2026
Discover unforgettable writers who taught Minnesota how to see its wild heart
In this engaging collection, environmental journalist Mark Neuzil revives the voices that showed generations how to appreciate Minnesota’s wild places. Comprising twenty vivid biographical essays, Rooted in the North traces the lives and lore of writers who shaped our understanding of this great state, from Minnesota’s northwoods to its tallgrass prairies to the storied landscape of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
Readers will encounter towering figures of conservation such as Sigurd F. Olson, whose spiritual vision of wilderness helped define the modern environmental movement, alongside beloved chroniclers like Florence Page Jaques and Helen Hoover, whose intimate portraits of wildlife still resonate decades later. Neuzil also highlights writers Charles Eastman and Maude Kegg, who share insights into their Indigenous childhoods, and once-popular authors like Charles Hallock and George Leonard Herter, restoring them to their rightful place in the state’s literary heritage. Rooted in the North broadens our definition of “nature writer” to include novelists whose fiction grew from close observation of the land. Writers such as Martha Ostenso, Frederick Manfred, and Gary Paulsen appear here not just as storytellers but as keen interpreters of Minnesota’s natural world.
In what began as a popular series for the Minnesota Star Tribune, these essays explore the philosophy, science, adventure, faith, and everyday oddities that enlivened their subjects. The result is the only book of its kind—an illuminating portrait of the voices that helped us define and fall in love with Minnesota’s natural landscapes.
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Skookum
An Oregon Pioneer Family’s History and LoreShannon Applegate
Oregon State University Press, 1988
The Cockroach Papers
A Compendium of History and LoreRichard Schweid
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Traveling from New York City to Louisiana, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Morocco, Schweid blends stories of his own squirm-inducing roach encounters with meticulous research to spin a tale both humorous and harrowing. As he investigates roaches’ more nefarious interactions with our species—particularly with those of us living at the margins of society—Schweid also explores their astonishing diversity, how they mate, what they’ll eat, and what we’ve written about them (from Kafka and Nelson Algren to archy and mehitabel). Knowledge soon turns into respect, and Schweid looks beyond his own fears to arrive at an uncomfortable truth: We humans are no more peaceful, tidy, or responsible about taking care of the Earth or each other than these tiny creatures that swarm in the dark corners of our minds, homes, and cereal boxes.
This Storied River
Legend & Lore of the Upper MississippiDennis McCann
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017
lore
Davis McCombs
University of Utah Press, 2016
Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize
Drawn from the rich folk traditions of his native Mammoth Cave region in Kentucky as well as the folklore of his adopted Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the poems in Davis McCombs’s third collection exist along the fraught lines where nature and agriculture collide or in those charged moments where modernity intrudes on an archaic world. These poems celebrate out-of-the-way places, the lore of plants, wild animals and their unknowable lives, and nearly forgotten ways of being and talking and doing. Rendered in a language of great lexical juxtapositions, here are days of soil and labor, nights lit only by firelight, and the beings, possibly not of this world, lured like moths to its flames. McCombs, always a poet of place and of rootedness, writes poems teetering between two locales, one familiar but achingly distant, one bewildering but alluringly present.