Upcoming Book Signing for Captive Arizona, 1851-1900 on 4/28 #LNK

UNL Professor Victoria Smith to read and sign copies of her newest book Captive Arizona, 1851-1900 at the University Bookstore on April 28th, 2010. Smith’s presentation on Captive Arizona, 1851-1900 will begin at 7:00pm Wednesday April 28th with a book signing to follow.

Captivity was endemic in Arizona from the end of the Mexican-American War through its statehood in 1912. The practice crossed cultures: Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Mexicans, and whites kidnapped and held one another captive. Victoria Smith's narrative history of the practice of taking captives in early Arizona shows how this phenomenon held Arizonans of all races in uneasy bondage that chafed social relations during the era. It also maps the social complex that accompanied captivity, a complex that included orphans, childlessness, acculturation, racial constructions, redemption, reintegration, intermarriage, and issues of heredity and environment.

This in-depth work offers an absorbing account of decades of seizure and kidnapping and of the different “captivity systems” operating within Arizona. By focusing on the stories of those taken captive—young women, children, the elderly, and the disabled, all of whom are often missing from southwestern history—Captive Arizona, 1851–1900 complicates and enriches the early social history of Arizona and of the American West.

Update: David Sedaris Book Signing

I stopped by the University Bookstore the other day to pick up the new Laura Lippman (success!), The Cloud Atlas (still on order; showed up the next day—of course), and the Dooce book (on order). While there, I cornered Steph and made her tell me more about the June 20th David Sedaris event:

• First, I made her look me in the eye and swear she was telling the truth. I now believe her.
• She said that she scored this event partially because of a previous, very successful Harry Potter event.
• No photos will be allowed.
• Sedaris often likes to spend a couple of hours at the store before the event, so get there early!
• So far, I can't get her to promise a front-row seat for me. Come on, Steph—don't make me beg. But! Maybe I can hand books to him while he's signing (I've already started practicing).
  

The Willa Cather Archive

The Willa Cather Archive is another Nebraska Press/UNL Libraries collaboration (in partnership with the Cather Project). My favorite parts of this site are Cather's journalism and the image gallery.

The project originated in 1997, and over the years has digitized and published hundreds of thousands of words of Cather-authored texts and Cather scholarship. It now includes, in a fully-searchable format, digital transcriptions of eight Cather books (copyright law forbids digitally republishing her post-1922 works); all of her short fiction pre-1912, many of which are presented in their original periodical publications; her interviews, speeches, and public letters; her uncollected periodical nonfiction from the 1910s; the first five volumes of Cather Studies; the back issues of Teaching Cather; a large, searchable gallery of photographs; multiple biographies; announcements and news from the Cather scholarly community, virtual tours of Cather-related locales, and much more. Recent additions include A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather: An Expanded, Digital Edition; text analysis of Cather's complete fiction, powered by TokenX; and "Mapping a Writer's World: A Geographic Chronology of the Life of Willa Cather."

David Sedaris is coming!

A little bird has told me that David Sedaris will be appearing at the University Bookstore on June 20th. For free! Holy cow!

I hope to be helping out at the event (please please please, Steph!), but you can be sure I'll be there regardless.

I'll post more details as they become available. Until then, you can prepare by reading some of his recommended books.

Nebraska U: A Collaborative History

This is another cool electronic project from UNL Libraries:

From the Archives of the UNL Libraries, Nebraska U is a collaborative effort to explore, through student research projects and multimedia, the history of Nebraska's most important University.

It includes An Architectural Tour of Historic UNL, a project from architecture librarian Kay Logan-Peters.

This website illustrates with text and images the dramatic physical development of Nebraska's largest academic institution, the University of Nebraska, and the people who committed their lives to it. This website is devoted in particular to the growth of the Lincoln campuses, now known as City and East.

Much of the information contained in this site is available elsewhere, but it requires a determined researcher to track down the parts that make up the whole. Architectural records are contained at the University's Facilities Management department, other records are held within various files in the University Archives, embedded within the Board of Regents minutes, and scattered throughout various publications touching on the history of Lincoln and the University. Nearly all of this data is in print, that is, on paper. The intention of this work is to bring this vast amount of information together into an electronic publication, interpret and present it in a way that makes it meaningful, and deliver it to the researcher or casual reader in an easily accessible form. The remarkable history of the University of Nebraska deserves nothing less.

The Journals of Lewis & Clark Online

I was fortunate enough to have been part of the project team that created The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition online. On this site you can browse the full text of the Nebraska edition of Lewis and Clark's journals.

Also included are a gallery of images, important supplemental texts, and audio files of selected passages plus Native American perspectives. With a focus on full-text searchability and ease of navigation, the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online is intended to be both a useful tool for scholars and an engaging website for the general public.

Over the course of the implementation phase we uploaded about 200 pages a month. In a nutshell, this was our workflow:

• obtain electronic file for the current volume (either from UNP's archive, from one of our vendors' archives, or by having it rekeyed)
• send file to UNL Libraries Electronic Text Center for XML coding
• a printout of the XML file with stylesheet applied comes back to UNP where it is proofread side-by-side with the print edition—not an easy task considering all of the journalists' creative spelling was retained
• the marked-up hard copy goes back to E-Text where changes are incorporated into the XML file and any other necessary changes are made by UNP to the live site: menu revised, links added, etc.
  
• the new pages go live