Nicole Tonkovich is the author of newly released, The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance. Tonkovich recently began a blog where she will transcribe field diaries kept by Alice Fletcher during
her allotment work. Click here for the first entry. Below she discusses how she discovered her book's topic. 

I became aware of E. Jane Gay and Alice C. Fletcher while
watching Ken Burns’s PBS series The West.
I was immediately intrigued–both by the clarity and beauty of Gay’s
photographs and by the fact that these two women were well into their middle
age when they went West, where Fletcher supervised the allotment of lands to
the Nez Perce Indians from 1889 to 1892.

As I delved into the story I was initially attracted to Gay’s
work. In addition to her photographs, she documented the pair’s adventures in a
series of witty and sometimes-acerbic columns published in reform periodicals
of the era. What she was telling the readers of these newspapers differed in
detail and in intent from the reports her friend Fletcher was sending to the
Indian Bureau. Somewhat reluctantly, I began to read Fletcher’s records, as
well. She was in many ways Gay’s opposite: where Gay was acerbic and witty,
Fletcher was earnest and hectoring. Gay had a lively sense of irony; Fletcher
lacked that sense entirely. Yet together they were part of the conception and
administration of a major federal program that impacted not only the Nez Perces
but nearly every Indian tribe in the nation, decimating their lands and
endeavoring to erase tribal identities altogether.

Continue reading “From the desk of Nicole Tonkovich”

Jason C. Anthony is the author of Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine, which is now available.

Writing
Hoosh, my first book, was a new way
to articulate my affection for Antarctica, an otherworldly place I called home
for several years. Like so many travelers to the polar regions, I found that the
experience of that strange, vast icescape, under an often ethereal light and marked
by traces of an astonishing history, changed me forever. Between 1994 and 2004,
I returned and returned to Antarctica to enjoy the hell out of a job that took
me by plane to the South Pole, across McMurdo Sound in an icebreaker, or into
small tent camps at –35°F in the middle of the polar ice cap. I’ve written
about Antarctica for years, publishing nearly two dozen essays and articles
about the place (many available to read at Albedo Images). 

Writing
Hoosh has been a real joy because it
allowed me to step away from my usual descriptions of landscape and experience
and instead focus on the history of Antarctic exploration and settlement. More
specifically, it allowed me to have some fun exploring the idea of food as a
window onto Antarctic history and culture. Writing about Antarctic cuisine is an
ideal way to measure the tenous relationship Antarcticans have had with their
lifeless home over the last century. It provided great opportunities to sketch many
of the great characters in Antarctic history – the well-known expedition
leaders, their little-known cooks, and other expedition members – and to
highlight the various writers – known and unknown, historical and contemporary
– who have told such great stories about dining at the bottom of the Earth.

Continue reading “From the desk of Jason C. Anthony”

Below is a guest blog from Katya Cengel, author of Bluegrass Baseball. She writes about one of her "many" hometowns and what it did for its little league team that made it to the World Series.

One of the good
things about having moved around a lot in my formative years is that I can
claim many places as my “hometown”. 
Petaluma, California is one of them. My first newspaper internship was
in Petaluma and this summer around the same time my first book was released the
city sent their first little league team to the World Series.

The timing
couldn’t have been better.

Continue reading “Hometown: Petaluma, CA”

Kayta Cengel is the author of Bluegrass
Baseball, which describes a year in the life
of four minor league baseball teams in Kentucky that tell a larger story about
the culture atmosphere of today's minor leagues. Below
she describes meeting her youngest fan.

Although Bluegrass Baseball is an
adult book, it is about baseball, so I figured I would have some young baseball
playing fans. But I wasn’t quite prepared for the ones I came across while on
tour in Kentucky. Most of them were middle school age boys who hoped one day to
be playing in the minor leagues, like the subjects of Bluegrass Baseball. In
Louisville a ten-year-old with a shy smile thanked me personally for signing
the book his father had bought him. Then he bashfully asked if he could take a
picture with me. A few minutes later he returned with a baseball he wanted me
to sign. Watching him inspect his ball as he walked away is a memory I will not
soon forget. But it was another young Kentucky fan that stole my heart.

Continue reading “From the desk of Katya Cengel”

Below is a guest blog from Nancy Plain. Her new book, Light on the Prairie, is the biography and photographic works of Solomon D. Butcher. Here, we get an inside peek as to why she chose Solomon as her newest book subject.  

I can’t remember when I first saw a photograph by Solomon Butcher.  But around the time I was searching for a new book project, I found myself scrolling through his remarkable photos on the “Prairie Settlement” website of the Library of Congress.  I was hooked.  They look straight at the camera, Solomon’s pioneers, and they stand up straight amidst their families and possessions, against a background of infinite prairie.  If you peer really closely, you can find little secrets in the pictures—a shy child peeking out from a window, a dog half hidden in a shadowed doorway.  During the course of my research, I learned about individual sodbusters.  One of my favorite photographs is that of the four beautiful Chrisman sisters, known by their nicknames—Hattie, Lizzie, Lutie, and Babe.  Babe didn’t like how she looked in the photo, though.  She thought it made her look like a “horse thief!”

Continue reading “From the desk of Nancy Plain”

Kate Buford is the author of Native American Son. In light of the Olympics beginning tomorrow, she writes of an Olympic past legend, Jim Thorpe, and today's Olympic excitement.

As the world gears up for Opening Day of the XXX Olympiad, media outlets are pumping out new alarming stories of security snafus in London along with the usual poignant tales of athletes’ life obstacles overcome.

The hype and frenzy are taken for granted now, but when did they begin? When did the world first realize the potential thrill the Games dangle in front of us every four years? That an athlete will come out of nowhere and astonish us with feats of bodily skill we have never seen before.

Though the first Games of the modern Olympic movement were held in 1896 in Athens, it wasn’t until the Fifth Olympiad in Stockholm in 1912 that one athlete – Jim Thorpe – created the model of the Olympic super-star. First he won the classic five-event track and field pentathlon by a huge margin – and then he did the same thing in the new ten-event decathlon.

Continue reading “From the desk of Kate Buford”