University of Nebraska Press

Tuesday Trivia Answers

1) True
2) Africa, South America, Antarctica
3) 202
4) 4
5) Beijing 2008
6) "Faster, Stronger, Higher"
7)Vancouver, Canada (Winter Olympics)
8) 1912
9) 776 BC
10) "Naked"

Chevato added to the American Indian Lives Series; a dominant theme is 19th- and 20th-century Apache life on the U.S.-Mexico border

If you’re a scholar or devoted reader of Native American or Texas and southwestern U.S. history, you don’t want to forego the chance to read Chevato. And don’t let the subtitle—The Story of the Apache Warrior Who Captured Herman Lehmann—bias your expectations. UNP’s November addition to the American Indian Lives Series combines enthohistory with extensive traditional historical research and narrative to tell not only the story of Chevato’s life but also the much broader and complicated story of Native American resistance and survival in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.

The life of the Apache warrior and shaman Chevato is at the center of the monograph in the form of oral histories told to William Chebahtah, Chevato’s grandson, by Thomas David Chebahtah, Chevato’s son. These oral histories are printed at the beginning of each chapter. Historian Nancy McGown Minor’s historical narrative follows. Based on extensive secondary and archival research, Minor’s narrative provides the detailed historical context needed for readers to fully understand and appreciate the content and veracity of the oral histories recounting Chevato’s life.

Although Chevato’s life is the genesis for Chebahtah and Minor’s historical narrative, his life story is far from the only history these author’s tell. Chevato’s life in fact became the catalyst for telling the story of Native American cultures—particularly, the Lipan and Mescalero Apaches and Comanche—under stress and attack by the forces of Mexican and American expansion into the Southern Plains and Southwest. By drawing on Chebahtah’s oral histories, published ethnohistorical accounts, and other primary and secondary sources, the authors show how the various tribes fought one another, Mexicans, and Texans to ensure their continued survival. Of particular value are the revelations these authors make about Native American practices of capturing and adopting enemies or the children of enemies (such as Herman Lehmann) to replenish tribes’ combat losses. Not all individuals taken captive were adopted, however. Many were killed out of vengeance by the families of warriors killed in combat, while others were captured for the purpose of being traded as soon as possible to other tribes or to people in Mexico.

Chevato also offers scholars and general readers significant insight into importance of community (versus individual) identity among Native American tribes and how those ties borne of communal identity made it possible for individuals and their relatives (as understood and recognized by Native Americans) to move between tribes. This is particularly important in understanding how Chevato, a Lipan Apache, became a recognized and influential member of the Mescalero Apaches in New Mexico and later of the Comanche people in Oklahoma, where through his relationship with Quanah Parker (the powerful Comanche son of another white captive, Cynthia Ann Parker), he introduced the peyote ritual and became a founding member of the Native American Church.

In spite of these strengths, the monograph has its weaknesses as well. The story/stories recounted in the oral histories included at the beginning of each chapter and what’s included in the historical narratives that follow don’t always coincide; perhaps as a result, the chronology of events recounted in the historical narrative is occasionally confusing or unclear (particularly the correlations between events recounted in one chapter and the next). Also, the content of the oral histories at the monograph’s end more often are Chebahtah’s reflections on his memories of Chevato than about Chevato. Most surprisingly, several footnotes were omitted from the text when it was printed.

Readers interested in learning more about Native Americans in Texas and the Southwest in the decades prior to Chevato’s birth in 1852 and how those events helped set the proverbial stage for the events in his life should read F. Todd Smith’s From Dominance to Disappearance: The Indians of Texas and the Near Southwest, 1786-1859 (UNP, 2005). Other scholarly monographs that are likely to be interest include David LaVere’s Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains and Removed Indians in Indian Territory (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000) and The Texas Indians (Texas A&M University Press, 2004).

University of Nebraska Press Holiday Web Sale!

Get Ready to Deck Your Shelves! It's time for the University of Nebraska Press Holiday Web Sale. Shop the sale and save 25% on your University of Nebraska Press book order! Just visit our Web site, place your order, and enter ZHL74 in the discount code field of your shopping cart. This offer is good on all regularly priced books purchased through our Web site.* Discount expires December 21, 2007.
Browse our gift book ideas: http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/pages/giftbooks.aspx Happy Ho-lit-days from the University of Nebraska Press! *excludes books published by the Buros Institute of Mental Measurements

Nebraska to publish Knopp’s newest collection, Interior Places

The spring 2008 forecast for new essays, memoirs and other works of creative nonfiction by Cornhusker State authors looks to be unparalleled, especially for readers with an affinity and a passion for writing about the Midwest as a place and space to be savored and celebrated. Not only does Not Just Any Land (UNP, 2004) author John Price have a new book due out, but so too does Nebraska’s preeminent essayist Lisa Knopp. Her latest collection, Interior Places, will be published in March by the University of Nebraska Press / Bison Books.

If you’ve read any of Knopp’s previous books—The Nature of Home (UNP, 2002), Flight of Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape (University of Iowa Press, 1998), and Field of Vision (University of Iowa Press, 1996)—you know how intelligent, intense, and incisive her literary gaze is; how passionate her prose; and how inspiring her love for and attention to the Iowa and Nebraska of her childhood and later adult life. Interior Places returns to and expands on the themes that have informed her already deep and impassioned discovery and recovery of life on the Great Plains—what it means, for example, to live in the interior of the country, the heartland, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and also what it means to be middle aged, both daughter and parent, and still discovering a deeper appreciation for what’s here now.

If you’ve never read any of Knopp’s wide-ranging essays, including memoir and nature and travel writing, you don’t want to miss this opportunity. You’ll never forgive yourself. The journey you’ll experience in reading Interior Places will be as much a journey of physical and historical discovery—a discovery of the heartland that is and why—as it will be a discovery of Knopp’s (and our, her readers’) previously unknown personal connections to the people, places and events that are and give meaning to the Midwest.

Essays in Interior Places also carry on Knopp’s much respected reflections on the resilience of nature and how land and history have unpredictably combined in wondrous ways to create the place she so fervently and eloquently called home in her previous collection, The Nature of Home. The environmental historian William Cronon once wrote that “The romantic legacy [of wilderness] means that wilderness is more a state of mind than a fact of nature, and the state of mind that today most defines wilderness is wonder.” Knopp might not be writing about wilderness per se—one essay in Interior Places, for example, explores the origin, history and impact of corn on the land—but her essays nonetheless reveal her heartfelt wonder at the richness of nature and the depth of life in America’s interior places and show us—her lucky readers—what it means to be from here, the heartland. I can’t wait to return to the journey.

Rural Marketing

by Mary Ridder

Comparing business activity in the heart of Manhattan, New York, to the Sandhills, Nebraska was fascinating last week. As I walked down 5th Avenue I couldn’t help but see why rural communities and businesses have such unique challenges. While every business must address marketing, the ultimate concern, not all have to   face it where sheer numbers are challenging.

I met a manager of a gallery on 7th Avenue and W. 55th Street. The monthly rent is $20,000. And in the first 7 to 8 days of each month, the rent bill is paid.

The businesses in Roots of Change don’t have access to such a volume of potential customers, so nowhere must you be more creative in your business plan, particularly your marketing plan, than in a remote rural area.
_______________________________________________________________________

Mary Ridder is the author of Roots of Change, now available from the University of Nebraska Press.

Live in Omaha: Kooser to speak about Nebraska wonders

Nebraska poet and two-time U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser will speak next Sunday, Oct. 14, at 1:00 p.m. at Sokol South Omaha (21st and U Streets). Kooser won’t be reading poetry, though. He’ll be reading from and discussing his memoir Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (UNP, 2002).

According to Newsday writer Dan Cryer, Local Wonders includes “eloquent meditations on country pleasures, the rhythms of the seasons and the lingering presence of Czech folk culture in rural Nebraska." In the book, Kooser’s first collection of prose, he describes with exquisite detail and humor the rolling hills of southeastern Nebraska—an area also known as the Bohemian Alps—that he calls home.

The event is sponsored by and benefits the Omaha Czech Cultural Club. Admission is $4 for adults and free for children 12 and younger.

Local Wonders won the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003 and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection in 2002. The book also won the Gold Award for Autobiography in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards.

If you want to learn more about Kooser or would like to read a sampling of his poetry, check out his website www.tedkooser.com/. Other books of his published by UNP include The Poetry Home Repair Manual, The Blizzard Voices, and Writing Brave and Free.

Not Just Any Price: Now in paperback—Price's Not Just Any Land

Essayist John Price’s eagerly read literary memoir and study of Midwestern nature writers the likes of William Least Heat-Moon and Mary Swander has finally hit bookshelves in paperback. The essence of Not Just Any Land is John’s rediscovery of his Midwestern roots and affinity for the American grasslands where he had grown up but had longed to escape from. Fortunately, Fate intervened. His love of literature—he studied literature and creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa—introduced him to regional writers who, like John, struggled with their own identities as Midwesterners and yet chose to write about, rather than abandon, a place disparaged by people as varied as nineteenth-century immigrants and twentieth-century coastal urbanites who had neither knowledge of nor interest in experiencing and intimately knowing a place popular culture condemned as a wasteland—dare I say it, the Great American Desert! The authors Price read, met, interviewed and then wrote about confronted and overcame this and other persistent and ill-founded myths and arrived at their own conclusions and sense of commitment to place. Through them and his own explorations of the grasslands, Price discovered his own intellectual roadmap to home. Now that Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands (UNP, 2004) is in paperback, hopefully it will reach the larger audience Price’s story rightly deserves and in the process help others also find their ways home.

If you’ve never read anything by Price before, check out Orion magazine, where he often publishes creative nonfiction essays, or read his essay “Nuts” in The Big Empty, a compilation of writing by and about Nebraskans and Nebraska. The book, edited by Ladette Randolph and Nina Shevchuk-Murray, was published by UNP in May 2007. Also be on the lookout early next year for John’s latest book, a memoir that includes previously published humorous selections from Orion and elsewhere, as well as new selections, in which he continues to explore the unexpected and enriching intersections between nature and personal life. The book, tentatively titled Man Killed by Pheasants (and Other Kinships), is expected to be published in April 2008 by Da Capo, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

On a final note, any readers interested in America’s grasslands, most specifically the national reserves (akin to national forests) that preserve and also are called grasslands, you might want to check out Francis Moul’s and Georg Joutras’s The National Grasslands: A Guide to America's Undiscovered Treasure. The book was published by UNP in October 2006.

Briefly noted

I haven't much time today, what with the IMPENDING CHANGES taking place here on the blog (can hardly wait), but two quick items of note for our faithful readers and soon-to-be faithful readers:

Have a MySpace page?  Yeah, me neither.  Well, I have one pending, but haven't really gotten around to developing it yet.  And, I do not have a Facebook account.  What? you may ask.  Aren't you the blog coordinator for UNP?  And I'll answer, yes.  I am.  I am also part of that 'tween generation (no, not between teenage and kid!) that knows more about the Internet and all of its wows than those that come before me (like Baby Boomers, for instance), but I admit (quietly) I know considerably less than those that are younger than me.  Those that come after the Gen X-ers, for example (Gen Y, I think).  But for us book lover readers and book lovers writer, there is a fun article regarding MySpace by Pagan Kennedy in the NYT.

Secondly, for you book lovers, want to share what you're reading with those you love (or like deeply) in one quick shot?  Then check out Goodreads.

Have a good rest of a short, abbreviated week!

A Decade of Links and Opinions

According to Saturday's The Wall Street Journal, it's the tenth anniversary of the web log, or the blog.  On December 23, 1997, Mr. Barger began "logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis," according to the Journal and according to Mr. Barger's website, which has a whole lotta links!  Included in the article are some famous folks' favorite blog sites, such as actress Mia Farrow's (BoingBoing.net and GPSMagazine.com), CEO of Craigslist Jim Buckmaster (Slashdot.org, Metafilter.com, Valleywag.com, and TechDirt.org), and founding editor of Gawker Elizabeth Spiers (Reason.com/blog, MaudNewton.com, and DesignObserver.com).

Technically, it's not the 23rd of December yet, but I think we can celebrate bloggin' in style on that date. 

-DeEee

Summer Travel

As the long days of summer wear on, you may be getting a little wanderlust.  On the sidebar of this blog, you'll find a new link (just added yesterday) to Backroads Nebraska, a touring company that specializes in trips off the beaten path.

Besides Nebraska and its back roads, you may want to check out these blogs and do a little desktop traveling:

Travel Blog is a collection of travel journals, photos, and posts from around the world.  There is also a forum, world facts, guides, wallpaper, and a lot more.

My Travel Backpack is a fun, communal site where bloggers submit posts on travel and their backpacks.  Each blogger gives a description of their trip, a picture, and answer these four questions:

*Backpack brand
*Backpack model and capacity
*The location where you took the picture
*Trip Length

Travel Rants is just what it sounds like--boiling posts on all things travel.  Well-maintained and very informative.

Vagabondish "follows the story of Mike, a lifelong travel addict, on a long-term journey ’round the world."  To find out who this Mike is, if he's a millionaire, and if a guy who travels around the world can maintain a steady relationship, check out his ABOUT page.

Have a good Friday, a great weekend, and happy trails,

DeEee.