エピソード

  • Peter Sarandinaki, "In Search of the Romanovs: A Family's Quest to Solve One of History's Most Brutal Crimes" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
    2024/10/26
    In Search of the Romanovs: A Family's Quest to Solve One of History's Most Brutal Crimes (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) is a thrilling, true-life detective story about the search for the missing members of the Romanov royal family, murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918, and one family's involvement in the hundred-year-old forensic investigation into their deaths, clandestine burials, and the recovery and authentication of the remains. Peter Sarandinaki is a retired sea captain now living in Toms River, New Jersey, with his wife. He is the great-grandson of Lieutenant General Sergei Nikolaevich Rozanov, the White Army commander in the eastern Amur region of Russia who was among the first men to enter the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, where the Romanovs were murdered. Sarandinaki has worked on the Romanov case for more than thirty years. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.
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    43 分
  • Benjamin Bergholtz, "Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
    2024/10/21
    Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel (U Nebraska Press, 2024) offers a new theorization of the maximalist novel. Though it’s typically cast as a (white, male) genre of U.S. fiction, maximalism, Benjamin Bergholtz argues, is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right. Bergholtz considers a selection of massive and meandering novels that crisscross from London and Lusaka to Kingston, Kabul, and Kashmir and that represent, formally reproduce, and ultimately invite reflection on the effects of globalization. Each chapter takes up a maximalist novel that simultaneously maps and formally mimics a cornerstone of globalization, such as the postcolonial culture industry (Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children), the rebirth of fundamentalism (Zadie Smith’s White Teeth), the transnational commodification of violence (Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings), the obstruction of knowledge by narrative (Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know), and globalization’s gendered, asymmetrical growth (Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift). By reframing analysis of maximalism around globalization, Swallowing a World not only reimagines one of the most perplexing genres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries but also sheds light on some of the most perplexing political problems of our precarious present. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University.
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    52 分
  • Yolonda Youngs, "Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
    2024/10/09
    Perhaps no American landscape is as iconic as the rainbow rocks of Arizona's Grand Canyon. Yet, as the geographer Yolonda Youngs argues, the Grand Canyon many people think they know is but one sliver of the story of the wider Grand Canyon as a historical and physical place. In Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon (U Nebraska Press, 2024), Youngs, a Cal State - San Bernardino professor, tracks the history of the canyon from the perspective of spatial, physical, and visual culture studies. In doing so, she shows how the ways we think of a place shape how humans use that place. In the case of the Grand Canyon, that means the "classic" perspective that people recognize of the canyon from the south rim, means that changes to the riparian landscape hundreds of feet below often go unnoticed. Wider changes in American visual culture, including the development of postcards, film, and television, also shaped tourist expectations - visitors expecting to see rapids, for instance, rather than the fern groves and waterfalls which also form critical parts of the wider Grand Canyon environment. As the cliche goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and in the example of the Grand Canyon, those same storytelling pictures also shape use in ways that continue up through the present day.
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    1 時間 6 分
  • Waitman Wade Beorn, "Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
    2024/09/27
    Waitman Wade Beorn's book Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) tells for the first time the history of the Janowska camp in Lviv, Ukraine. Located in a city with the third-largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe, Janowska remains one of the least-known sites of the Holocaust, despite being one of the deadliest. Simultaneously a prison, a slave labor camp, a transit camp to the gas chambers, and an extermination site, this hybrid camp played a complex role in the Holocaust. Based on extensive archival research, Between the Wires explores the evolution and the connection to Lviv of this rare urban camp. Waitman Wade Beorn reveals the exceptional brutality of the SS staff alongside an almost unimaginable will to survive among prisoners facing horrendous suffering, whose resistance included an armed uprising. This integrated chronicle of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders follows the history of the camp into the postwar era, including attempts to bring its criminals to justice
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    1 時間 29 分
  • David Kroening Seitz, "A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
    2024/09/20
    A different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still reeling from a genocidal occupation. The crew was led by a reluctant Black American commander and an extraterrestrial first officer who had until recently been an anticolonial revolutionary. DS9 extended Star Trek’s tradition of critical social commentary but did so by transgressing many of Star Trek’s previous taboos, including religion, money, eugenics, and interpersonal conflict. DS9 imagined a twenty-fourth century that was less a glitzy utopia than a critical mirror of contemporary U.S. racism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy. Thirty years after its premiere, DS9 is beloved by critics and fans but remains marginalised in scholarly studies of science fiction. Drawing on cultural geography, Black studies, and feminist and queer studies, A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) by Dr. David Seitz is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to a critical interpretation of DS9’s allegorical world-building. If DS9 has been vindicated aesthetically, this book argues that its prophetic, place-based critiques of 1990s U.S. politics, which deepened the foundations of many of our current crises, have been vindicated politically, to a degree most scholars and even many fans have yet to fully appreciate. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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    59 分
  • Derek Taira, "Forward without Fear: Native Hawaiians and American Education in Territorial Hawai'i, 1900-1941" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
    2024/07/27
    During Hawai‘i’s territorial period (1900–1959), Native Hawaiians resisted assimilation by refusing to replace Native culture, identity, and history with those of the United States. By actively participating in U.S. public schools, Hawaiians resisted the suppression of their language and culture, subjection to a foreign curriculum, and denial of their cultural heritage and history, which was critical for Hawai‘i’s political evolution within the manifest destiny of the United States. In Forward without Fear: Native Hawaiians and American Education in Territorial Hawai'i, 1900-1941 (U Nebraska Press, 2024), Derek Taira reveals that many Native Hawaiians in the first forty years of the territorial period neither subscribed nor succumbed to public schools’ aggressive efforts to assimilate and Americanize them but instead engaged with American education to envision and support an alternate future, one in which they could exclude themselves from settler society to maintain their cultural distinctiveness and protect their Indigenous identity. Taira thus places great emphasis on how they would have understood their actions—as flexible and productive steps for securing their cultural sovereignty and safeguarding their future as Native Hawaiians—and reshapes historical understanding of this era as one solely focused on settler colonial domination, oppression, and elimination to a more balanced and optimistic narrative that identifies and highlights Indigenous endurance, resistance, and hopefulness.
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    52 分
  • James Mallery, "City of Vice: Transience and San Francisco's Urban History, 1848-1917" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
    2024/07/16
    San Francisco began its American life as a city largely made up of transient men, arriving from afar to participate in the gold rush and various attendant enterprises. This large population of men on the move made the new and booming city a hub of what "respectable" easterners considered vice: drinking, gambling, and sex work, among other activities. In City of Vice: Transience and San Francisco's Urban History, 1848-1917 (U Nebraska Press, 2024), historical architect James Mallery describes how and why San Francisco became the titular "city of vice" by tracking the people and activities that local elites would rather have stayed hidden. In doing so, he paints a remarkable picture of a city undertaking remarkable growth and the limits of elite power to control the habits of a large, mobile, urban population. Through famous San Francisco neighborhoods like Chinatown and the Tenderloin, out to the city's "Outside Lands" outskirts, Mallery shows how neighborhoods are defined by more than just the sum of activities outsiders might see as immoral - they're complex places made up of of complex people, and that even the most run down neighborhood has a brilliant history worth telling.
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    1 時間 5 分
  • David H. Wilson, "Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
    2024/06/29
    Between the mid-19th century and the start of the twentieth century, the Northern Paiute people of the Great Basin went from a self-sufficient tribe well-adapted to living on the harsh desert homelands, to a people singled out by the Native activist Henry Roe Cloud for their dire social and economic position. The story of how this happened is told in Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country (Bison Books, 2022) by David H. Wilson, Jr. By focusing on the human stories that make up the arc of nineteenth century Paiute history, Wilson argues that many historians have gotten the Paiute story wrong, and that greater attention needs to be paid to Native sources, rather than taking the words of American generals at face value. Through characters like O.O. Howard, Sarah Winnemucca, and James Wilbur, Wilson tells the epic story of adaptability and change, even in the face of great tragedy, that sets the Paiute's apart as a singular part of American Western history.
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    1 時間 2 分