University of Nebraska Press

Through the winter of 1862 and spring of 1863, the U.S. Army and Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia clashed along the Rappahannock River in two major battles. Both demonstrated the height of power for the Confederacy in the eastern theater. The Battle of Fredericksburg was a tactically defensive triumph for Lee over the Army of the Potomac. The Battle of Chancellorsville, often described as Lee's masterpiece, was a surprisingly aggressive response to Joseph Hooker's operational flanking maneuver, as Lee sent Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson on a flanking maneuver of his own, dividing an army that already was substantially smaller than its Union counterpart to deliver a crushing blow at a decisive spot. It was in the latter stages of that blow that Jackson was mortally wounded by his own men. The battles, failed campaigns with high casualty rates for the Union, were a lead-up to the armies' meeting at Gettysburg in July 1863. Civil War historian Brian K. Burton provides a clear, concise narrative of the battles and offers a stop-by-stop guide through Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. Illustrated with numerous maps and filled with stories of the people and tactics of both battles, this indispensable guidebook will direct battlefield visitors and armchair historians through the events of these pivotal campaigns.

When Bob Feller hit the Major League Baseball scene, he instantly became one of the most famous athletes in the country. Everything Feller did made headlines, primarily because anything he did had never been done before, especially by someone his age. To this day, Feller is the only pitcher to have signed his first professional contract and played in the Major League while still in high school. By the age of seventeen he had set an American League record for most strikeouts in a game, and by nineteen, he had broken his own Major League strikeout record. So Young, So Great covers the first six years of Feller's career, from 1936 to 1941, from his discovery in the small town of Van Meter, Iowa, as a high school junior, to his immediate entry into the Major Leagues with no minor league detours, the extensive media coverage of his every move and his box office appeal to fans, and his record-breaking feats up to his enlistment into World War II at age twenty-two. Before signing a contract with the Cleveland Indians, Feller was a prospect of such magnitude that Major League scouts were fighting in hotel lobbies to get to Feller, still a minor, to sign a Major League contract. His high school graduation was broadcast nationally on radio. And when he had to have his wisdom teeth removed, a photographer and reporter were in the room to document it. By focusing on the first six years of Feller's career, So Young, So Great captures in revelatory detail Feller's unprecedented arrival, as a high school teenager, on the Big League stage, and his rapid ascension into one of the game's all-time greats.

Tilton and Grace Entokah: An Osage Story offers an episodic history of the Osage Nation of Oklahoma as told through the life narratives of Anthony Lookout's great-grandparents Tilton and Grace Entokah. Anthony Lookout grew up hearing the stories of his relatives, including those of his great-grandfather Fred Lookout, who served as the principal chief of the Osage Nation in the early twentieth century. Anthony Lookout's father, Morris Lookout, methodically recorded the oral traditions and tribal stories of Osage elders and relatives on reel-to-reel tapes from 1965 to 1971. The recordings preserved generations of Osage history, religious practices, and cultural traditions reaching back to the mid-nineteenth century. To write this story of his family and Osage history, Anthony Lookout did additional research in archival collections, newspapers, and magazines and interviewed elders. From the perspective of a participant rather than an observer, Lookout tells the tribal history of the Osage Nation's removal from their Kansas homelands in 1865 and relocation to Oklahoma's Indian Territory from 1872 to the early 1940s. The heart of the story revolves around Lookout's great-grandmother Grace Entokah, who grew up as a traditional Osage woman, and adapted through traumatic and uncertain times, staying true to her Osage culture. She went from riding horses to riding in automobiles, eventually meeting the president of the United States. Lookout covers the family history of the Entokahs, the Allotment Act of 1906, Oklahoma statehood, the depredations of mining and oil companies on Osage lands, the establishment of tribal government and courts, Principal Chief Fred Lookout's journeys to Washington, DC, to meet top government leaders, as well as tribal stories of the infamous 1920s Osage murders and other key episodes in Osage history. Tilton and Grace Entokah is not only the story of the Entokahs but also an Osage history written from the collective memory of those on the Osage reservation.

In 1990 a fearless group of players changed the sport of soccer in the United States forever. Young, bronzed, and mulleted, they were America's finest athletes in a sport their country loved to hate. Even sportswriters rooted against them. Yet this team defied massive odds and qualified for the World Cup, making possible America's current obsession with the world's most popular game. Back then players earned twenty dollars a day, the crowds at home games cheered for their opponents, and the fields were often mismarked. In Latin America the U.S. team bus had a machine gun turret mounted on the back, locals sabotaged their hotels, and in the stadiums spectators rained coins, batteries, and plastic bags of urine down on the U.S. players. The world considered the U.S. team impostors. Yet on the biggest stage of all, in the 1990 World Cup, this undaunted American squad and their wise coach earned the adoration of Italy's star players and their fans in a gladiator-like match in Rome's deafening Stadio Olimpico. From windswept soccer fields in the U.S. heartland to the CIA-infested cauldron of Central America and the Caribbean, behind the recently toppled Iron Curtain and into the great European soccer cathedrals, New Kids in the World Cup is the origin story of modern American men's soccer. It's the true adventure of America's most important soccer team—and the one that made America finally fall in love with soccer.

Charles W. A. Prior offers a new account of the sovereign claims of Native Americans, the Crown, and colonies in early America, arguing that Native American diplomacy shaped how sovereignty was negotiated and contested among all three, from Virginia's founding to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Previous scholars have focused on the contested relationship between the British imperial state and the colonies it established along the Atlantic Coast without addressing how sovereign Native nations shaped the colonial process through warfare, diplomacy, trade, peace-making, and treaty-making. Prior adopts a new interpretive framework for examining sovereignty in early America, arguing that the Native and colonial spaces of the Northeast were a treaty ground thickly layered with agreements and negotiated rules of interaction. Drawing on an extensive range of treaty records, writings on colonial and imperial affairs, letters, and official documents, Treaty Ground argues that sovereignty was negotiated within diplomacy and shaped the norms of war, the terms of peace and alliances, the rightful ownership of territory, and appropriate responses to treaty violations. This process in turn structured relations between the Crown and colonies and framed initial positions on how the power of congress related to that of the states. Treaty Ground offers historical depth to our understanding of how Native nations articulated Indigenous power within colonialism, cuts settler colonialism down to size, and expands contemporary understandings of the sovereign relationships between Native nations in the United States and Canada.

Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland offers an intimate social history of Jewish childhood during and after the Holocaust. Centered on children from German-occupied Poland but informed by experiences across Nazi-occupied Europe, the book highlights the child's own perspective to illuminate rescue, survival, and relationships with adults under the Nazi occupation. In the first part, Joanna Beata Michlic examines children's wartime experiences, showing how agency, gender, class, and religious or social background shaped their chances of survival. The second part traces the complex efforts of these young survivors to reclaim both childhood and Jewish identity, revealing the gap between their hopes and the actual opportunities of the immediate postwar period. Drawing on children's diaries, letters, testimonies, and memoirs, Michlic illuminates how children experienced and remembered trauma: the destruction of their families, the loss of their prewar worlds, and the struggle to adapt to a new reality, challenging myths that sentimentalize the children's endurance and portray the Holocaust as neatly concluded. This powerful study shows why the history of Holocaust child survivors remains a vital resource for understanding vulnerability, agency, and the enduring impact of war and genocide.

Diane J. Purvis's memoir offers a unique view from the Los Angeles County suburbs as she was coming of age during the era of civil rights activism, the women's movement, and Vietnam anti-war movement. More than Flower Power recalls the youthful energy that surged in the 1960s as political and cultural tensions rose to the surface. Her parents, Midwest transplants to California, sought the postwar American dream and went from pinching pennies to living in upper middle-class suburbs, which were imbued with rigid social and political codes. Purvis rejected this conservative bias while attending racially integrated schools and witnessing the dichotomy between suburban and inner-city students, motivating her to embrace social justice. Purvis and her peers were influenced by images of the Vietnam War and political protests they saw on television and the music they heard on their transistor radios, two emerging technologies that shaped popular perceptions during this tumultuous decade. Purvis was possessed by the desire to make a difference even though inroads to social and political equality looked impossible in the face of America's cultural consensus and conformism of the era. Through the lens of one person's experience, More than Flower Power offers an intimate portrait of a West Coast generation's optimism, idealism, and transformative influence on American culture and society.

Despite long odds and low funds, the Czech Republic's national baseball team of amateur players managed to shock the world at the 2023 World Baseball Classic – the sport's World Cup – when they took an upset win against Spain in the WBC qualifiers and then defeated China in the actual tournament, securing their place in the upcoming 2026 tournament. While the rest of the teams in the WBC rely on experienced professionals, and some like Italy and Great Britain bring in American "passport" players, the Czech Republic's roster consists almost entirely of amateur players who were born and have played only within the Central European nation. The team's roster consists of firefighters, teachers, financial auditors, and field caretakers—even the manager is a neurologist!—and yet the team managed to not only compete on the international stage but succeed against global superstars like Shohei Ohtani. In a world where athletes have become multi-million-dollar legends, We Sacrifice Everything to Baseball reveals how teamwork, sacrifice, and self-belief can still make a difference. Michael Clair, who spent time with the Czech team throughout the 2023 World Baseball Classic, has unparalleled insight on the team and their unlikely success. Like the Jamaican bobsled team in Cool Runnings, Leicester City's unexpected Premier League soccer title, and the United States' remarkable victory against Russia in the 1980 Olympics, the Czech Republic baseball team has an underdog story everyone can cheer for. Their story proves it's still possible to build a team from the ground up, with a small player pool, little attention, and a low budget, and compete on the world stage.

Thomas Ward examines Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's seventeenth-century work and how it influenced post-independence Peruvian literature in the nineteenth century. As literati struggled to define their fledgling Peruvian Republic, they found inspiration in the dual-heritage author Garcilaso de la Vega's previously banned work, Royal Commentaries. Ward focuses on four authors who turned back to the colonial-era chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega as they synthesized Inkan tradition into modern national thinking: Juana Manuela Gorriti, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Manuel González Prada, and Ricardo Palma. An element of this cultural dynamic included gender awareness. At the time, women were accepted in the literary establishment much more than they would be in the following century, a fact Ward highlights in this study of the two most famous men authors and the two most famous women authors from this time period. In Inca Garcilaso de la Vega Ward brings gender and ethnic perspectives into a postcolonial discussion of a reality that was striving to establish "Peruvian" as a bona fide proper noun with substantive denotative and connotative meaning.

The Missouri River is one of the most dangerous rivers in the United States—and one of the most economically important. Even as prolonged drought in the Midwest has imperiled urban drinking water and agricultural water supplies, parched regions in the basin far from the river have proposed piping water from the Missouri to alleviate their own water shortages. In an attempt to better understand the river and its place in the American imagination, Lisa G. Dill set out with four of her mother's cousins on a forty-year-old pontoon boat on a modern voyage of discovery. The hope was to sail nearly 750 river miles from Sioux City, Iowa, to St. Louis, Missouri, a goal whose success was by no means assured, given the rickety state of the family vessel. From departure—a day late, because the motor wouldn't start—until she got off the boat, Dill bears witness to the river, its flora and fauna, the efforts to control it, and its history, along with the misadventures of a crew of "relative strangers" and the boat's tenuous viability on one of the world's most powerful rivers. In Around the Bend Dill teases out the cultural and environmental history of the Missouri and urges readers to change the way they think about America's rivers and the landscapes through which they flow.

With radical candor and sardonic wit, Randolph Lewis offers an autopsy of the recent past, looking for glimmers of hope and redemption among the detritus strewn about by neo–Gilded Age billionaires, Big Tech, and political extremes during the first Trump administration and the pandemic era. American life took a weird turn in June 2015, when an aging reality star descended a golden escalator to announce his bid for the White House. From there, Lewis watched from his longtime home in the Lone Star State as the country slipped into an endless fever dream churning with chaos, uncertainty, and fear. Wanting to decipher how things went sideways in such a hurry, Lewis drove all over the Sunbelt and beyond, trying to make sense of what was happening. He sojourns to an apocalyptic slab of the Mojave Desert; the rugged mountains under assault near Colorado Springs; the epic sprawl of Las Vegas, Austin, and Houston; the expat communities of central Mexico; the hotbeds of racism in the Deep South; and the fjords of Norway, from which, surreally, Lewis watched the unfolding news of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and decided to go there. In a register mournful, meditative, and darkly comic, Lewis offers a portrait of modern American life under a system whose democratic norms have been stretched to the limit. Lewis, an American studies professor for three decades, examines the trajectories of cultural burnout that have ushered us into a new Gilded Age of fear, hustle, and hype. In this passionate critique of the anxious new world we inhabit, Lewis offers sketches of where we've ended up, why it feels so wrong, and how we might find our way out of Bummerland.

Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in FictionSlow Guillotine follows three broke weirdos whose collective desire to make and think about art is constantly interrupted by their art-industry-adjacent minimum-wage jobs. Throughout the novel, the three friends' day jobs in a failing independent bookstore, a sterile gallery in downtown Manhattan, and miscellaneous living rooms across the Long Island birthday-party-clown circuit interweave with their attempts to come to terms with their precarity, gender-dysphoric embodiment, and the floating dream of collective liberation. Spanning one year and told through an obsessive first-person present tense, Slow Guillotine brings the bildungsroman structure through the autofictional looking glass, questioning how "coming of age" could be feasible in a society of debtors, wage laborers, and renters.

I Have a Home, There Is a We, whose original Swahili edition was in 2015 the first book of poetry to win the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature, brings the acclaimed verse of prolific Zanzibari poet, journalist, and cultural changemaker Mohammed Khelef Ghassani to English-language readers for the first time. The book explores the poet's life as a migrant in Germany: linguistic and cultural alienation, nostalgia, and longing for his homeland on the island of Pemba. These poems form a catalog of sorrow and love addressed to the family he left behind, to the children whose roots "he tore forcefully from the ground" in hopes of offering them a better life, and above all to the country he calls home, using the deeply resonant Swahili term "kwetu"—our place—named over and over again as Zanzibar. Utilizing the structured verse forms of traditional Swahili prosody, the collection is modern, unique, and innovative, speaking to a global diasporic experience even as it draws deeply on an idiom specific to the poet's tiny island home. A ripple of political defiance suffuses the poems as Ghassani positions himself against layered forms of oppression and marginalization both at home and abroad in this synthesis of love song, lamentation, and freedom declaration.

Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African PoetsAll that Refuses to Die is a poetry collection that interrogates the present conditions of Africans through a historical lens. Michael Imossan moves into historical spaces such as museums and sites of enslavement, touching artifacts that hold meaning, and asking, Where was Africa? Where is Africa now? And what has changed? The Biafran War that claimed three million lives, though declared over, still has its lingering effect on Nigeria and Nigerians. Congo, though free of King Leopold and the exploitation of cotton, is still not free of other kinds of exploitation, nor is Uganda. Though the slave trade has ended, African bodies are still found in the Sahara Desert and in the Atlantic Ocean. All that Refuses to Die is a collection that brims with stories and memories that evoke as well as provoke. As he moves through historical places, the poet compares the past with the present and finds that nothing has really changed.

The second volume in The Complete Letters of Henry James: 1888–1891 contains 131 letters, of which 80 are published for the first time, written from April 23, 1890, to January 3, 1891. These letters continue to mark Henry James’s ongoing efforts to care for his chronically ill sister, develop his work, strengthen his professional status, and build friendships. They also trace James’s efforts to write for the theater up to the afternoon before the first performance of The American.

Baseball is the national pastime of both the United States and Japan, but the two countries approach and play the game differently both on the field and away from it. To shed light on these differences and help fans gain a greater appreciation for Nippon Professional Baseball, Robert K. Fitts turns to the true experts, the people who play, oversee, promote, and watch the game, to find out what makes Japanese baseball special. In the Japanese Ballpark features engaging interviews with twenty-six baseball personalities to provide a behind-the-scenes look at the game. Fitts speaks with participants in the games such as players, managers, and an umpire; support staff including an interpreter, trainer, and data analyst; front office personal such as an owner, general and assistant managers, and marketing directors; ballpark workers including cheerleaders, a mascot, beer vendor, and usher; and professionals who surround the sport, such as baseball writers, a player agent, and a sports card dealer; as well as a league commissioner. Through their personal experiences, these individuals reveal the inner workings of the Japanese game and explain the cultural aspects that make Nippon Professional Baseball different from Major League Baseball. In the Japanese Ballpark features interviews with Bobby Valentine, Trey Hillman, Matt Murton, Robert Whiting, Marty Kuehnert, Tomoko Namba, Ambassador Ryozo Kato, and many others. Their experiences and insights provide inside knowledge to make the fan experience more enjoyable, for both those watching a Japanese game for the first time and well as for seasoned followers.