This edition of This Day in History comes to you courtesy of NPR, which this morning noted that today is the 70th anniversary of the first televised baseball game. The Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers played in this historic game, and about 3,000 viewers are estimated to have watched on  W2XBS (now WNBC-TV). Many more spectators watched from the stands. The significance of this broadcast is outlined in Centerfield Shot: A History of Baseball on Television by James R. Walker and Robert V. Bellamy Jr. In this book the authors explain why the game’s arrival on the small screen … Continue reading This Day in History

For a few weeks now, I’ve been meaning to write about Gabrielle Burton and something she and her family did that I think is pretty cool. First, some background: Gabrielle is the author of Searching for Tamsen Donner, which the University of Nebraska Press published earlier this year, and which I’ve written about before. For Gabrielle, writing a book about the wife of the leader of the ill-fated and famous Donner Party was as much a labor of love as it was a labor of scholarship. Gabrielle became obsessed with Tamsen Donner more than 30 years ago, when she was … Continue reading Two seven-mile treks, 150 years apart

Last week, I started reading Peggy Shumaker’s memoir, Just Breathe Normally. This is a book the University of Nebraska Press published as a hardcover a few years back, before I had begun working here. This fall, the press is releasing it as a paperback. Drawn by its beautiful cover (a swimmer gliding through cool blue-green water), I picked it up as soon as it came arrived in stock. I’m glad I did.  Just Breath Normally jumps back and forth between two difficult times in Shumaker’s life: her childhood, in which she was the oldest of four children of poor, alcoholic, unpredictable … Continue reading This just in: Just Breathe Normally by Peggy Shumaker

Yesterday’s New York Times featured this article, which explains that recent changes in the genre of chick lit mirror recent changes in the U.S. economy. No longer are heroines hunting for rich men whilst climbing their own corporate ladders in lovely, designer shoes. No, they’re doing more practical things, like clipping coupons after their white-collar-criminal husbands go to jail. Or getting divorced. Or generally living simple lives fraught with everyday problems, the kind to which readers can relate. The journeys these women face, the NYT article continues, are emotional journeys, rather than economical ones in which readers see the ambitious … Continue reading An alternative to chick lit

On this day in history, Cecil B. DeMille was born in Ashfield, Mass., in 1881. DeMille produced and directed 70 films, and is perhaps best-known for his over-the-top productions of Cleopatra, The Crusades, and The Ten Commandments (which was a remake of a silent version of the film he produced and directed in the 1920s). Pulp writer Harold Lamb was a technical adviser to DeMille, and the University of Nebraska Press has published several collections of Lamb’s short stories, including Swords from the Desert and Swords from the West, which are new this fall. Many of Lamb’s stories, like many … Continue reading This Day In History