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Assassination and Commemoration: JFK, Dallas, and The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

– June 5, 2013Posted in: Author Features, History of the United States, Videos

Author and Associate Curator Stephen Fagin discusses his new book, Assassination and Commemoration: JFK, Dallas, and The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. Published by the University of Oklahoma Press, it highlights the decades-long work that went into the creation of The Sixth Floor Museum. The book places the history and development of the Museum within the context of the social and political history of Dallas in the aftermath of the assassination and acknowledges the effort of a group of individuals who were determined to create a museum that both commemorates a president and recalls the drama and heartbreak of November 22, 1963.

Available in July from OU Press. Read more about the book.

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Book Review: “The Old Man’s Love Story” by Rudolfo Anaya

– May 20, 2013Posted in: Book Reviews, In The News, Literature/Language
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Buy The Book

An old man loses his wife, his lifelong companion, who dies of old age. He struggles to understand the void she leaves in his life. This might be a pedestrian story in the hands of a lesser writer, but in the hands of Rudolfo Anaya, it becomes a journey though the changes age brings at the end of life.

“An anguish deep in his soul sprouted and set loose suffocating tentacles. He had not cried since childhood, but now he cried. The loss he felt wracked his days and nights. He had entered a time of grieving, not knowing if it had an end.”

It is also a time of self-examination and self-evaluation. He is fiercely lonely and considers trying to establish a relationship with another woman, a new romance. But he is old, and he still feels his wife’s presence and speaks to her with his inner voice. He tells her about his loneliness and his doubts about starting a new relationship. “Anyway, he said, who would want to kiss an old man? They think we smell. I shower! I shave! I use deodorant! He paused. My body feels dry and crinkly. I don’t sweat like I used to. I can go days without a bath.”

He tries going to the senior citizen center. He joins a swim class. He feels ill at ease.

“I don’t like it! Some of the men do smell — one even wets his pants. He won’t wear those Depends diapers. The old wags smell — use a lot of cheap prefumes.

“‘We all smell!’ he blurted out. ‘So what!’”

Despite his self-professed malodorousness, the old man can’t forget the pleasure that physical contact with another person brings. “‘A woman’s body to hold — you know?”

Rear more…

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‘Blackfoot Redemption’ wins Great Plains book prize!

– May 13, 2013Posted in: Awards and Honors, In The News
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Buy the book.

“Blackfoot Redemption: A Blood Indian’s Story of Murder, Confinement and Imperfect Justice” by William E. Farr is this year’s winner of the Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize from the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska.

Farr reconstructs the events of a Canadian Blackfoot called Spopee who shot and killed a white man in 1879. Through the narrative, he reveals a larger story about race and prejudice as the transition to reservations began.

Spopee, or Turtle, was captured as a fugitive and narrowly escaped execution. He disappeared inside an insane asylum in Washington, D.C., for more than 30 years until a delegation of American Blackfeet discovered him and gained a pardon from President Woodrow Wilson.

“It is a small story telling a larger one,” Farr said. “For the book is not only about what happened to Spopee, it is also about what happened to the Real People, the Niitsitapi, in this same period as they were confined or imprisoned on their reservation, as they underwent a wrenching transition from freedom to dependence, from communal buffalo hunting to irrigation and reservation allotment. Too often, individual experiences were lost in that transition and are now invisible.”

“(The book) contains a compelling narrative of an individual Native American who was caught up in an alien political/justice system — that of the frontier U.S. — and sets it as part of the larger tribal and settlement histories of the Montana border regions,” said Kari Ronning, one of the book prize judges and editor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition.

Read the complete news release.

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Book Review: “Deliverance From the Little Big Horn: Doctor Henry Porter and Custer’s 7th Cavalry” by Joan Nabseth Stevenson

– April 4, 2013Posted in: Uncategorized
Deliverance

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Not every soldier died at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, of course. The many wounded in Major Marcus Reno’s command received treatment from 28-year-old Henry Porter, the only one of three surgeons to survive the 7th Cavalry’s June 1876 ordeal in Montana Territory. Reno’s disastrous attack in the valley was followed by a marathon fight for survival and then transportation of the wounded to the steamer Far West for the 700-mile journey down the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers to the hospital at Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory.

Author Joan Stevenson examines the battle and aftermath from a medical perspective and shines the spotlight on the unsung Porter, who was an acting assistant surgeon (a civilian surgeon serving the Army under contract). Read more…

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Book Review: “With Golden Visions Bright Before Them: Trails to the Mining West, 1849–1852″ by Will Bagley

– April 4, 2013Posted in: Book Reviews
with golden visions

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So Rugged and Mountainous, Will Bagley’s history of the overland trails from their formation through the 1840s emigrations to Oregon Territory and the Salt Lake Valley, amassed an impressive collection of firsthand accounts, in effect allowing the emigrants to relate their own stories. In his novel approach Bagley culled numerous emigrant accounts of particularly important sites—the start of a cutoff, say, or a particularly difficult mountain passage—and presented them chronologically, thus relating a cohesive account of the march west and its associated hardships. Bagley’s skill at unearthing a variety of firsthand accounts has again born fruit in With Golden Visions Bright Before Them, the second volume in his planned three-part series on the overland trails. With Golden Visions details trail life during the California Gold Rush years 1849–52. The narrative inches along with the Forty-Niners, sharing their views on the passing geography, flora and fauna from the wide-open plains along the North Platte River to the death march of the Forty-Mile Desert and the harsh, forbidding peaks of the High Sierras. Read more…

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