As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.
How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.
Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.
What really happened at “the first Thanksgiving”? In This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (Bloomsbury, 2019), historian David J. Silverman reveals the complex history surrounding the 1621 feast that every November many Americans associate with silver-buckled Pilgrim costumes, Squanto and Massasoit, and miraculous feats of friendship. Silverman bust these myths - and the many others - that skew American interpretations, understandings, and depictions of the Wampanoag peoples’ relationship with Plymouth colonists.
This Land is Their Land painstakingly recounts the events leading up to and resulting from the Wampanoag-English alliance, and how the manipulation of this history continues to impact the present. Upon landing at Plymouth Rock four hundred years ago this November, English Separatists were swept up into the powerful currents of a dynamic indigenous world, populated with diverse peoples with diverse interests. Native figures such as Ousamequin, Tisquantum, Corbitant, Epenow, and others occupy center stage in This Land is Their Land, encouraging readers to forego stereotypical depictions of powerful Englishmen and passive Native peoples for a more truthful rendition of Anglo-Native interactions on and around present-day Cape Cod. Silverman draws on twenty years of research and work alongside Wampanoag linguists, historians, and educators in an effort to construct a more honest history of the now-famous Wampanoag-English encounter. Underlying this history is the present reality of Wampanoag peoples who continue to commemorate the last Thursday in November as their Day of Mourning. Illuminating the damages still wrought by colonization and colonial mythologies, This Land is Their Land will leave many readers with much to chew on at the Thanksgiving table.
Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can follow her on Twitter @labrcq.
Shortly after the first Europeans arrived in seventeenth-century New England, they began to import Africans and capture the area’s indigenous peoples as slaves. By the eve of the American Revolution, enslaved people comprised only about 4 percent of the population, but slavery had become instrumental to the region’s economy and had shaped its cultural traditions. This story of slavery in New England has been little told. In this concise yet comprehensive history, Jared Hardesty, Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University, focuses on the individual stories of enslaved people, bringing their experiences to life. He also explores larger issues such as the importance of slavery to the colonization of the region and to agriculture and industry, New England’s deep connections to Caribbean plantation societies, and the significance of emancipation movements in the era of the American Revolution. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England (Bright Leaf, An Imprint of University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of New England.
Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers(West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all.
Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).
Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith have written an accessible and important book about the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and broader considerations of, essentially, how we got to where we are, in the United States, in regard to race and racism. They also go on to suggest and encourage readers and citizens to move towards a more equal and better future.
Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter (NYU Press, 2019) compiles social science research and data to explain the current situation for white citizens, African-American citizens, Latinx citizens, and citizens of other races in the United States. By laying out, in facts and figures, the very different experiences and daily lives of citizens, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith demonstrate not only the way many individuals live profoundly separate and different lives in the United States, but also to show the many ways in which we, as Americans, speak past each other when we are talking about the fraught issue of race, racism, and racial inequality. Stay Woke provides substantial social science data to buttress the discussion and analysis of race and racism in the United States, and it also has an excellent chapter that provides definitions, context, and understanding of so many of the terms that are used, and often differently conceptualized, by citizens in thinking about race, inequality, and social and political dynamics. The authors also examine the history around structural racism and racial inequality. At the end of each chapter Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith also include other resources that contributed to their research and that extends the substance of each chapter—the resources include podcast, films, documentaries, television shows, websites, books and articles. These resources along with the questions provided for discussion and debate help readers and students think about what they are learning from each section of the book. The final part of the book provides more options for activism while positioning these actions within the American federal system. This book can be used in classes across a variety of disciplines; it is also a text that is accessible and of interest to any citizen who might want to learn more and work towards a better future.
Early American colonialism is often distinguished by an urban and rural divide. Urban development was a sign of imperial progress. British writers frequently boasted about the size of early Boston and Philadelphia while mocking the scattered settlements of the French. Colonial founders characterized their social experiment as a ‘City on a Hill’, and texts that promoted colonization listed the size and location of a growing number of principal towns and cities. Outside the confines of cities lay different places: the backcountry of settlement and Indian war; an unmapped landscape of forests and rivers. If the town stood out as a site of ordered settlement, the ‘wilderness’ remained a place of mystery and danger.
Paul Musselwhite is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. In Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake (University of Chicago Press, 2019), he challenges the conventional view of the Chesapeake as a rural society of tobacco and slavery that prevented the development of towns and cities. He argues that contemporaries argued about urban development in ways that intersected with wider discussions of the political and commercial order of the Chesapeake, and its place in theories of commerce and the state in Britain between the early seventeenth century and the American Revolution.
Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster.
When people today visit or imagine Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world, they often perceive a cold, remote, and pristine body of water, relatively untouched by industrialization. Yet, Lake Superior has experienced substantial environmental change—including today’s impressive but incomplete ecological recovery—in its existence, especially over the last 150 years. So argues the renowned environmental historian Nancy Langston in her latest book, Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World (Yale University Press, 2019). An interdisciplinary scholar to her core, Langston ushers her training in science and history to tell a story of industrial development, ecological change, toxic pollution, and environmental injustice—and yet also one of ecological and human resilience. Much like the topic of her study, Langston moves fluidly across various political jurisdictions, from states and provinces, to national governments and international agreements, to First Nations and tribal territories. In so doing, she gives voice to a host of actors, including indigenous peoples (past and present), corporate executives and technicians in the pulp and paper and mining industries, government regulators and engineers, environmentalists, scientists, environmental justice activists, politicians, union workers, and many others. Sustaining Lake Superior illustrates the promises and limitations of ecological and human resilience, the inseparability of the local from the global, and the ongoing relevance of history for responding some of the most urgent challenges of climate change and environmental injustice.
Nancy Langston is Distinguished Professor of Environmental History at Michigan Technological University.
Joshua Nygren is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri. His research focuses on the intertwined histories of conservation, industry, and the state in the twentieth-century United States. You can find him on Twitter @joshua_nygren. Thanks to Justin Dean and UCM’s Digital Media Production program for production assistance.
Jeffrey Ostler’s Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (Yale University Press, 2019) is the first of what will be a two-volume set that comprehensively chronicles the devastating effects of U.S. expansionism on Native Nations. Surviving Genocide covers the eastern United States from the 1750s to the start of the Civil War. In it Ostler makes the compelling argument that American democracy relied on Indian dispossession and what officials claimed to be “just and lawful” wars to remove and kill Indians who resisted. Importantly, Ostler’s book documents the resilience of Native people, showing how they survived genocide in the face of serious and diverse threats to their existence.
Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years.
The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W. W. Norton, 2019) breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans―the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia―before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would the great modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved?
Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, as well as from archival sources, Demuth shows how the social, the political, and the environmental clashed in this liminal space. Through the lens of the natural world, she views human life and economics as fundamentally about cycles of energy, bringing a fresh and visionary spin to the writing of human history.
Bathsheba Demuth is an Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. As an environmental historian, she specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. She has lived in Arctic communities from Eurasia to Canada. Demuth has a B.A. and M.A. from Brown University, and an M.A. and PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley.
Steven Seegel (NBN interviewer) is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado.
Christine M. DeLucia is the author of Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, published by Yale University Press in 2018. Memory Lands provides a much needed new account of King Philip’s War which centers the Natives of the Northeast, instead of the English colonizers. Weaving together the history of King Philip’s War and the history of Northeast Native people to the modern day, DeLucia illustrates the many, complex, ways in which history and historical violence are intimately connected to the present day, and rarely ever just part of the past.
Christine M. DeLucia is an Assistant Professor of History at Williams College. Her areas of research include Early American history, Native American and Indigenous Studies, material culture, cross-cultural communications, and violence.
Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.
