Originally posted on historyplaces:
copyright Michael Lowery On September 13 and 14 Americans will commemorate the bicentennial of the Battle of Baltimore, a mostly forgotten battle in U.S. history… except that it gave the United States its national anthem. The song is… Continue reading O, say can you see? Stories of a national anthem
Originally posted on Gregg's Baseball Bookcase:
I often wonder like any other fan, what some umpires are thinking. It seems that they almost want to show up the players at times by making themselves not only part of the… Continue reading Called Out But Safe – A Baseball Umpire’s Journey
Michael E. Harkin is a professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming. He served as associate editor of Ethnohistory for ten years under Neil Whitehead and then as coeditor with Matthew Restall for six years. He is currently editor of Reviews in Anthropology. Neil Lancelot Whitehead (1956–2012) was an important anthropologist and ethnohistorian of lowland South America whose academic interests stretched well beyond this base to include explorations into music, sexuality, and the “post-human.” Neil was born in the London suburbs and was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in philosophy and psychology, he went … Continue reading Neil L. Whitehead: An Appreciation
Margaret D. Jacobs, Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, is the author of the Bancroft Prize–winning White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, … Continue reading From the desk of Margaret D. Jacobs
This past weekend, I was enjoying my Sunday routine of relaxation and watching the latest television series from FX, The Strain. While I do thoroughly enjoy the vampire/zombie/apocalyptic mashup, some of the characters’ backgrounds feel a little forced. For example, Kevin Durand’s character, Vasiliy Fet, is a second generation Russian living in Brooklyn, NY. His occupation: exterminator for the NYC Bureau of Pest Control. Of course, like any good Russian rat-killer, viewers of the show find out that he has a difficult past with his father, a scholar of architecture. For you see, Fet had a scholarship to get his … Continue reading The Marketeers Club: Watching FX No Strain on University Presses
Rob Buchanan is the sales coordinator in the marketing department.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to J. R. R. Tolkien. The first adult books I ever read were The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I know The Hobbit is technically a children’s book, but since it led me to The Lord of the Rings books, and goes well with them, I am including it here. These are the books that began a lifelong love of fantasy books. After reading those books I spent countless hours at the local library, hunting for new books to read. I can’t remember a lot of the books I read at that time, since it has been twenty-five to thirty years since I read them, but some left a lasting impression.
Our library had a number of metal spinning racks and I distinctly remember finding almost all of the Horseclans books by Robert Adams in them. These aren’t traditional fantasy books because they are set in a world many years after an apocalypse. I don’t recall there being any magic, but there was an occasional bit of high technology thrown in. I can’t remember which of the eighteen volumes the library didn’t have, but I still remember the frustration I felt at not being able to read the entire series. I recall the books taking place over a long period of time, following a group of immortals and the people they were guiding. This allowed the author to have a large cast of characters, since of course the immortals outlived everyone as the years passed. Every once in a while I think about going back and getting the series so I can read them again and see if they are as good as I remember. They are old enough that they aren’t in the library any longer, but a quick search of Amazon shows that they are all available, in one form or another.
Continue reading “People Make Publishing: Thanks to J. R. R. Tolkien”
Ryan H. Edgington is a visiting assistant professor of history at Macalester College. His book, Range Wars: The Environmental Contest for White Sands Missile Range is now available in hardcover and paperback.
A couple months ago, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel offered a compromise on the SunZia transmission project that in part traversed the northern call-up area of White Sands Missile Range located in south-central New Mexico. A Department of Defense site about the size of Connecticut, the missile range is the largest overland military site in the Western Hemisphere and the second largest in the Western world (Woomera Test Range in southern Australia is the largest). The project is a 500-kilovolt “clean energy” transmission line that crosses private, state, and federal lands across central New Mexico and Arizona. The project is named for SunZia Transmission, which leads the project accompanied by sponsors including Salt River Project, Shell Wind Energy, Southwestern Power Group II, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, and Tucson Electric Power. The Bureau of Land Management is the lead federal agency on the project. According to the Environmental Impact Statement for the project “the BLM’s purpose and need for the proposed Project is established by regulatory obligations and directives, and current energy development trends.” Those playing a role in the EIS include the missile range, Fort Bliss to its south, Holloman Air Force Base on its eastern border, and the National Park Service (which manages the White Sands National Monument), among others.
Rains have flooded parts of New Mexico this summer. But considering long-term climate change and substantial drought conditions over the past few years, such a project might seem not only reasonable, but also urgent. Yet conflict over the project arose as soon as it got off the ground. White Sands Missile Range came out against the plan. Last September, Range Commander Brigadier General Gwen Bingham said, “I’m not going to sit here and tell you that allowing the line will mean the end of White Sands Missile Range…But it will mean the end of some of the programs.” The SunZia project is not the first time the missile range has wrestled with conflicts to its primary mission. Established in the summer of 1945 as White Sands Proving Ground, the missile range has long had to face both local and extra-local challenges to its existence. During World War II regional ranchers raised questions about the value of growing militarization to the regional economy. They suggested that the area was best left to producing beef for the war effort. In the thirty years after the war, local tourist boosters sought to make the Trinity Site (where the first nuclear weapon was detonated) a public monument. The missile range consumed the site as it grew after World War II. The Atomic Energy Commission and the DOD successfully fought to limit public access to the site.
Ranchers, who had used the land prior to World War II to make a living, were tied in to twenty-year grazing permit suspension and property lease agreements after World War II. Upset by what they saw as a reduction of value on their ranchlands when condemnation hearings commenced in the 1970s, the ranchers challenged the missile range’s authority in to the 1990s by bringing lawsuit after lawsuit against the government. In 1982 rancher Dave McDonald and his niece Mary crept into White Sands and occupied the family’s former homestead. Armed with guns, they posted signs to the army (which managed White Sands) to keep out. Members of New Mexico’s congressional cadre eventually escorted them off the range. Yet, not unlike Cliven Bundy’s recent protests against the BLM in Nevada, their protest reflected the discontent with federal land management among rural western producers that has emerged since the Sagebrush Rebellion of the late 1970s. Militarization added a wrinkle to rural discontent across the West.
“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” ―John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars
I work in book publishing and I love to read books. This should come as no surprise. Most people who know this about me probably think that I’ve been a book worm my whole life; why else would I seek a position in the book publishing world? That, however, couldn’t be further from the truth.
When I was younger I hated reading. You couldn’t pay me enough money to sit down with a book and read just for fun. I would only read if I had to for school. I was much too busy watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Rugrats, Boy Meets World and all the other great shows of the 1990s. Who had time for reading?
Then, in September 1998 something miraculous happened. J.K. Rowling wrote the story of a young boy named Harry Potter. All of a sudden reading had a whole new meaning. It didn’t have to be work; I could read for fun! The Harry Potter series transported me into an imaginary world. In this world, I learned to love and care about the characters. I read these stories and instantly wanted to know more. I locked myself in my room for hours just reading away, exploring the grounds at Hogwarts, and I wasn’t alone. The Harry Potter series is one of the best-selling series in history, with more than 450 million copies sold.
Continue reading “The Marketeers Club: The Zeal of Reading a YA Book”
University presses are silos joined in many ways by bridges of varying strength. We’re connected through what we do, who we publish, the genres in which we publish, our missions, and our sense of the importance of scholarly publishing. But we’re also disparate, competing, in a sense, against each other, hoping to sell our books to the same people that are interested in another university press’ titles. We market to the same groups, often using similar techniques. This competition forces us into a silo whereby we have to withhold information or data because there is a belief that we will lose our edge if we share such commodities. But what if university presses took a different approach?
What if, instead of keeping marketing information and data separate we actually opened our silo doors and let those crucial marketing leads and contacts leak out? Maybe we could use these leads and contacts, send them outside of the silo to see what they might find and return to us; a set of marketing carrier pigeons, if you will. Can we, in essence, market multiple university presses at once through a combined system of shared marketing efforts? The simple answer is yes. There are few reasons that cannot be skewered with logic and reason and considered argument. The simple reality is that there seems little inclination at this point to do so.
At the recent AAUP meeting in New Orleans collaboration ran the show. It was all everyone talked about. But as a few panelists noted there is little actual, real collaboration. Danny Bellet, publicity manager at Penn State University Press (PSUP), pointed to efforts they have undertaken on their own to use books from other university presses as their “also of interest” titles. PSUP believes it makes sense to highlight these competing titles because of the power of cross pollination but also because if a customer does like one of those books from the other press there is a better chance they’ll like the one from Penn State as well. Simple. And yet this is a relatively isolated incidence. MIT, Nebraska, Florida, and Purdue came together recently to create the “Up In Space” campaign and this has demonstrated some value but it is static and so rather limited in what it can do.
Continue reading “Doc Martyn’s Soul: The “What If?” of Marketing Multiple University Presses”
Eric Brach is a lecturer in English at California Lutheran University and worked with Billy McGill on his book, Billy “the Hill” and the Jump Hook: The Autobiography of a Forgotten Basketball Legend (November 2013). Billy “the Hill” McGill passed away on … Continue reading From the desk of Eric Brach: Remembering Billy McGill
