University of Nebraska Press

This Week in History: July 28 - August 1

This Week in History: July 28-August 1, 2008

This week we say farewell to the month of July.  How does time go by so fast?  Before you know it we will be rushing around trying to get ready for Christmas again!  Well, the good news is that football season is only a month away and we still have some time to enjoy the extreme heat before the extreme cold sets in. But, before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s look back at what was happening this week in history.

July 28, 1994: Baseball pitcher Kenny Rogers of the Texas Rangers throws a perfect game.
As all baseball fans know, throwing a perfect game is no small feat, especially at the professional level. Maybe a few of you out there were lucky enough to watch as Rogers in his moment of glory. That’s why television is so great; it allows us to witness great moments such as Rogers.   Where would baseball be without television?  If you’ve ever pondered this question yourself, you should check out Center Field Shot by James R. Walker and Robert V. Bellamy Jr. which explores television’s impact on the game.

July 29 1958: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs into law the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which creates the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Space travel is an extraordinary subject and for those of you interested in learning more about outer space and humanity’s struggle to get there, should check out Chris Gainor’s To a Distant Day or David Hitt, Owen Garriott, and Joe Kerwin’s Homesteading Space.  Explore what it really took for us to reach the final frontier.

July 30, 1930: In Montevideo, Uruguay wins the first World Cup.
Although soccer isn’t huge in the United States, the sports impact around the world can’t be denied.  To help you better understand the way soccer has influenced the world, be on the lookout for The Global Game (which will be coming soon).  This fantastic book is a collection of numerous works written by authors from around the world about this popular sport.  The Global Game editors are John Turnbull, Thom Satterlee, and Alon Raab.

July 31, 1498: On his third voyage to the Western Hemisphere, Christopher Columbus becomes the first European to discover the island of Trinidad.
Exploration has long been a fascination of human beings because we are always trying to discover the unknown. Unfortunately, for most of us living today, exploration into the unknown is limited to the deep sea and space.  However, even if you can’t be a deep sea diver or an astronaut, you can still explore, and a place that might be of interest to you is Nebraska’s Cowboy Trail which is an old railroad turned tourist destination.  Luckily, if you ever want to venture on this trail Keith Terry has written a user’s guide appropriately titled Nebraska’s Cowboy Trail. 

August 1, 1936: Olympic Games: Summer Olympic Games - The Games of the XI Olympiad open in Berlin.
With the Olympics just around the corner, this seemed like a good event to include in this week’s history.  I don’t know about any of you, but one of my favorite events in the summer Olympics is field and track even though I myself am not an avid runner.  If any of you want to learn more about runners and their passion, be on the look out for Personal Record by Rachel Toor, where Toor gives us a inside look into the world of running.   

Neil De Mause on Democracy Now

Field of Schemes: Congress Probes How New Sports Stadiums Turn Public Money into Private Profit


Yesterday author Neil DeMause was a guest, along with Representative Dennis Kucinich and Bettina Damiani (Project Director of Good Jobs New York), on Democracy Now!


The transcript of the show and links to the audio are at:
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/30/field_of_schemes_congress_probes_how

Fact Versus Fiction Battle

"MazdaSpeed Motorsports billed our duel as Fact vs. Fiction, and now we see why fact wins. You made being a racer up. I am a racer."

Sam Moses, author of Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots raced against author Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain) in the Mazda Grand Prix of Portland and WON the "Fact verses Fiction" battle.

Here are the pictures:

Linking in Lincoln: July 30, 2008

New this month from the University of Nebraska Press is, Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting time and space in narrative fiction by Hilary P. Dannenberg. This groundbreaking analysis of plot answers the pivotal question of how do we tell good stories?  By charting the development of fiction over history, from the renaissance to today, Dannenberg explores how the novel has changed over time and authors develop complex strategies for piercing the cognitive stricture of the reader with real life experiences. This week Linking in Lincoln will take a look at both coincidence and counterfactuality (as in defining it) and see what these mysterious subjects have in common both in and out of the novel!

What is plot? Well I’m sure we could all give the fifth grade version (which you could check out here) but what doe the experts have to say? For answers to all your questions on plot, and more, please take a look at Sff plot here.

Interested in Narrative? Well then check out Narrative Magazine: The Future of Reading at Narrativemagazine.com

What is counterfactuality? As always dictionary.com has all the answers.

Plot, narrative, coincidence  these are all the makings of a great work of fiction.  To find out what the other parts are check out wikihow for How to write a short story.

Maybe it’s just me, but I always want to know the plot of a movie before I see it. If you find that you’re the same way then the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb, is the best place to go. 

Coincidences happen all the time, truly amazing ones are pretty rare though. For the top 20 most amazing coincidences (and rest assured they are amazing) please go to Oddee.com.

Well bloggers, hope you enjoyed our links!!

Tuesday Trivia Answers

1.True
2.80%
3.26
4.Want to be rid of their partners.
5. True, 35% more ill in fact.
6.True
7. 2 weeks
8. True
9.85%
10. Ages 8 and 9, and lived in China around 1910

Tusday Trivia: July 29, 2008

    Well bloggers, it’s very hot outside (and a little humid), it’s the middle of the summer, and there are no romantic holidays in sight. Now I don’t know if you lament the fact that only one day a year is targeted towards celebrating love, or if you think that’s really one day too many. If you’re the former than to remedy this I present to you a timeless romantic tradition encapsulated into book form for all the world to enjoy, albeit a little off season. If you’re the latter, then may I propose that you keep reading, as you may find some statistics to at least make you laugh.  From the University of Nebraska Press is,  Valentines, by Ted Kooser is a compilation of all the valentine poems he once sent to women all across the United States, upwards to 2500 at times, these lines (and the sentiment behind them) are sure to melt even the coldest heart. To celebrate this little notion we call Love Tuesday Trivia is going to quiz you on just how it’s practiced, by all mammals….

1.True or False: 73% of Russian women believe they are in love whereas only 61% of Russian men do.
2. What percent of married or divorced Americans believe marriage is for life.
3.How many calories can you burn by kissing for a full minute?
4. 8% of Americans what to be rid of what?
5.True or False: You are how much more likely to be ill if you are in an unhappy marriage?
6. True or False: In Hong Kong, if a woman’s husband cheats on her she is allowed to kill him as long as she uses her bare hands?
7. On average a person spends how much of their life kissing.
8.  True or False: Male bats have the highest homosexuality rates among mammals.
9. What percent of men who die of heart failure during intercourse are cheating on their wives when it happens?
10. The youngest parents (ever) were what ages and lived in China during what year?

Join us for the answers tomorrow!

The Path Home, or Rediscovering Paradise in Authentic Place

When I left Omaha for Philadelphia in June to present a paper on place at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment symposium "Keyboard in the Garden," I couldn't have selected a better, more appropriate book to take with me. Paradise is place, the environmental historian John Opie suggests in Virtual America: Sleepwalking through Paradise (UNP, June 2008), but Americans by and large have lost their sense of place--of rootedness--and belonging to and in place. This pervasive feeling of placelessness, as Opie terms it, isn't new in American history, however. Questions about place have puzzled American artists and scholars for decades, centuries even, if a person considers Henry David Thoreau and his contemporaries. Similar anxieties motivate contemporary writers and thinkers such as me (the paper I presented was, ironically, titled "The Puzzle of Place") and result in all manner of artistic production: visual, textual, and virtual. Interestingly, Opie argues that it is this artistic production in America that contributed to, if not caused, Americans' sense of placelessness, of sleepwalking through Paradise, by portraying place as something other than what it was and contributing to the manufacture of a built environment that altered the land to correspond with people's conceptions of nature and place. The emergence of a virtual reality afforded by computers, the World Wide Web, and the Internet, Opie contends, has exacerbated Americans' disconnection from place by further interfering with their ability to discern what actually is there, in a particular place, wherever in America there is; at the same time, paradoxically, Opie believes virtual reality offers opportunities for (re)discovering authentic individual and national identity by aiding in the recovery of the particularities of place.

Unlike many environmental writers, Opie does not condemn technology as the sole or primary cause for the disconnection between people and nature or place. Convincingly, Opie argues that Americans (and others) constructed virtual realities using art, science, and technology from the time their ancestors first encountered the American landscape. Opie's most revealing examples include the many World's Fairs and the future realities they showcased in their many exhibits. None of these "facts" are likely to be new to many people, however, least of all environmental historians, geographers, or ecocritics. Indeed, Virtual America echoes what other and younger environmental historians such as Dan Flores (in Horizontal Yellow) have suggested--namely, as Opie writes, "The heart of an authentic America is less in the big picture or larger philosophies than in the specific sites of vivid human experience" (149)--and thus the book does not contribute new "factual" knowledge to the ongoing conversations about the significance of place and nature in American society, culture, and history. To expect that, however, would be to miss Opie's objective--and the value of Virtual America. Opie, now in his 70s, admits the book is not a traditional history. It is, instead, a collection of connected reflective (and at times personal) essays in which he draws on his lifetime's work and experience to synthesize and consider his understanding of place, his understanding of Americans' sense of placelessness, and his ideas for how individuals (and, by implication, American society) can capitalize on the affordances of technology to recover and discover anew a sense of home--that is, of authentic place and of the authentic individual and national identities grounded in place.

For more extensive treatment and analysis of the ideas informing Virtual America or about American environmental history, a field Opie helped to establish as founder of the American Society for Environmental History and founding editor of the journal Environmental History, read Opie's earlier books, including Nature's Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (Wadsworth Publishing, 1998), Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land (2nd ed., UNP, 2000), and The Law of the Land: Two Hundred Years of American Farmland Policy (UNP, 1994).

Author in the News

Susan Brownell, author of the University of Nebraska Press title, The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism, was featured this morning on NPR. Listen to the NPR broadcast as she discusses China and their efforts to enthusiastically support their country at this year’s summer Olympics.

Brownell’s title, The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games, is due out this September. 

Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs Discusses Her New Lewis and Clark Book

Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs, author of Why Sacagawea Deserves the Day Off and Other Lessons Learned from the Lewis and Clark Trail, spoke to a crowd of 50 Lewis and Clark enthusiasts at the Great Plains Art Museum last week. Tubbs discussed the extraordinary symbolism that has been attached to Sacagawea's legacy as well as the importance of the Lewis and Clark expedition to capturing and developing the lifelong environmental interest of young readers, answered questions from the audience, and read from the title chapter of Why Sacagawea Deserves the Day Off:

"Again I ask that we reconsider the historical Sacagawea and give her credit for who she was. For example, although in popular culture she is celebrated as a guide, we do not celebrate her greater genius, which would seem to be her memory for landscapes, her ability to translate between highly different languages and worldviews, and her understanding of harvesting foods and moccasin reading. In modern times she might have been an engineer or a crime scene investigator or a foreign correspondent with those skills. In her world landmarks told stories and because of that they stayed fixed in her mind. Think of Beaverhead Rock. She remembered those places because as a young child she would travel there with her people looking for bison and roots. These travels were based on the seasons and the stories associated with the places they went. The landmarks told stories, and Sacagawea must have been a very good listener."

This Week in History: July 21-25, 2008

Well bloggers, it’s been awhile. You try and try, but sometimes life (or in this case summer classes) just gets in the way.  What’s important though, is that we’re together again and that even though we haven’t seen each other, history has prevailed. This week we’ve got everything from Jesse James to Praibha Patil, and a little Italian fascism just for fun.  Ready to pick up where we left off?

July 21, 1873: Jesse James and the James-Younger gang attempted and succeeded in pulling off the first successful train robbery in the American West.

Well I think it’s safe to say that Jesse James was a rebel of sorts (rebel, robber, murderer…you know) but if you’re interested in another kind of “bad boy” then please check out REBEL: The Life and Times of John Singleton Mosby by Kevin H. Siepel, which chronicles the life of this bipartisan Commander.

July 22, 1882: American Painter Edward Hopper was born today.
If you fancy yourself an art connoisseur   then please take a look at Beyond Madness: The Art of Ralph Blakelock by Norman A. Geske.

July 23, 1929: Fascist Italy bans the use of foreign words.
In the wake of a burgeoning bilingual culture, Americans are well versed in the foreign word controversy. If you find that you’re an advocate of words, regardless of their origin, then you may enjoy the book of poetry Modern Archaist by Osip Mandelstam.

July 24, 1783: Simon Bolivar, the South American liberator is born today.
There is so much to South American culture, the politics, literature, food, entertainment and sports. If the latter is what really appeals to you the please take a look at Venezualen Bust Baseball Boom: Andres Reiner scouting on the New Frontier by Milton H. Jamil.

July 25, 2007: Pratihba Patil is sworn in as the first women president in India.
The position of women in politics has risen considerably in the past 50 years. For a look at Lincolns first female mayor please take a look at Mayor Helen Boosalis: My Mother’s Life in Politics by Beth Boosalis Davis.

Ok, bloggers that’s enough history for today check out the UNP website for more titles.  Join us next week for a little Trivia and a few Links!