Richley Crapo and Bonnie Glass-Coffin
Transcribed from the original Nahuatl manuscript (written circa 1600) and translated into English for the first time, this epic chronicle tells the preconquest history of the Tlaxcalteca, who migrated into central Mexico from the northern frontier of the Toltec empire at its fall. By the time of Cortés's arrival in the sixteenth century, the Tlaxcalteca were the main rivals to the Mexica, or Aztecs, as they are commonly known. One of the few peoples of central Mexico not ruled from the Mexica capital city of Tenochtitlan, the Tlaxcalteca resided in the next valley to the east and became Cortés's powerful allies. They were also speakers of the Nahuatl language who followed a sophisticated agriculturally based urban way of life and documented their history in traditional —painted books —created by specially trained scribes. Thus, their chronicle, Anónimo Mexicano, offers a rare alternative perspective on the history of central Mexico, which has been dominated in the popular imagination by the stories of the Mexica. The original Anónimo Mexicano is housed in the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris. Its first complete publication here includes a full English translation, the original classical Nahuatl, a modern Nahuatl version, and comprehensive annotation. This definitive edition thus will be valuable for linguists, ethnohistorians, folklorists, Mesoamerican scholars, and others. Moreover, anyone interested in the epic origin tales of peoples and nations will find interest in Anónimo Mexicano's grand narrative of dynastic wars, conquests, and migrations, cast in mythological terms.
Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Gantt
The first collection of critical essays on May Swenson and her literary universe, Body My House initiates an academic conversation about an unquestionably major poet of the middle and late twentienth century. Includes many previously unpublished Swenson poems. Essays here address the breadth of Swenson's literary corpus and offer varied scholarly approaches to it. They reference Swenson manuscripts---poems, letters, diaries, and other prose---some of which have not been widely available before. Chapters focus on Swenson's work as a nature writer; the literary and social contexts of her writing; her national and international acclaim; her work as a translator; associations with other poets and writers (Bishop, Moore, and others); her creative process; and her profound explorations of gender and sexuality. The first full volume of scholarship on May Swenson, Body My House suggests an ambitious agenda for further work. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, May Swenson produced eleven volumes of poetry, received many major awards, was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and was acclaimed by writers in virtually every school of American poetry.
Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie B. Thomas
Ghosts and the supernatural appear throughout modern culture, in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts. Popular media's commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from what people believe about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Belief and tradition and the popular or commercial nevertheless continually feed off each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from multiple angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously. They draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes the basis of belief in experience and the usefulness of ghost stories. And they look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. Together, they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.
Alison Comish Thorne
Alison Thorne provides a small-town Utah perspective on the progressive social movements that in the mid to late twentieth century dramatically affected American society. A born activist, Thorne has fought for women's rights, educational reform in public schools and universities, the environment, peace, and the war on poverty. Her efforts have been all the more challenging because of the conservative social and cultural environment in which she has undertaken them. Yet, Thorne, who has deep personal and familial roots in the politically conservative and predominantly Mormon culture of Utah and much of the West, has worked well with people with varied political and social perspectives and agendas. She has been able to establish effective coalitions in contexts that seem inherently hostile. She demonstrated this through her election to the local school board and through her appointment by both Republican and Democratic governors, eventually as chair, to the statewide Governor's Committee on the Status of Women. Alison Thorne's background prepared her to challenge restrictive social contexts, see the broader picture, and encourage progressive change. Educated in the field of consumption economics, which studies those aspects of consumption that operate outside the market system, especially government services and unpaid household production, primarily by women, she received a Ph.D. in economics after graduate study at the University of Chicago and Iowa State, a first for a woman at the latter. Moving with her husband after he was hired at Utah State University, she soon discovered that her education and abilities were undervalued and that tight nepotism rules kept her out of an academic position. She devoted herself to research and writing about alternatives to the narrow definitions of a housewife's role and duties prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s. Both her scholarly work and her personal inclinations prepared her for the emergence of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. Her participation in the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment honed her skills as an activist, which she applied to multiple other causes. But Alison Thorne's style has never been mere protest of injustice; she has always been fully engaged with her communities, directly working for social change and betterment. Rather than be discouraged by initial rejection, she found ways to contribute to education on the USU campus, eventually achieved academic standing, and helped create women's studies programs and a women's center. She met other challenges in her city and state similarly, by taking her gloves off, reaching out to others, building coalitions, and getting to work.
No Place to Call Home: The 1807-1857 Life Writings of Caroline Barnes Crosby, Chronicler of Outlying Mormon Communities
Edward Leo Lyman, Susan Ward Payne, and S. George Ellsworth
Caroline Crosby's life took a wandering course between her 1834 marriage to Jonathan Crosby and conversion to the infant Mormon Church and her departure for her final home, Utah, on New Year's Day, 1858. In the intervening years, she lived in many places but never long enough to set firm roots. Her adherence to a frontier religion on the move kept her moving, even after the church began to settle down in Utah. Despite the impermanence of her situation, perhaps even because of it, Caroline Crosby left a remarkably rich record of her life and travels, thereby telling us not only much about herself and her family but also about times and places of which her documentary record provides a virtually unparalleled view. A notable aspect of her memoirs and journals is what they convey of the character of their author, who, despite the many challenges of transience and poverty she faced, appears to have remained curious, dedicated, observant, and cheerful. From Caroline's home in Canada, she and Jonathan Crosby first went to the headquarters of Joseph Smith's new church in Kirtland, Ohio. She recounts, in a memoir, the early struggles of his followers there. As the church moved west, the Crosbys did as well, but as became characteristic, they did not move immediately with the main body to the center of the religion. For awhile they settled in Indiana, finally reaching the new Mormon center of Nauvoo in 1842. Fleeing Nauvoo with the last of the Mormons in 1846, they spent two years in Iowa and set out for Utah in 1848, the account of which journey is the first of Caroline Crosby's vivid trail journals. The Crosbys were able to rest in Salt Lake City for less than two years before Brigham Young sent them on a church mission to the Society and Austral Islands in the South Pacific. She recorded, in detail, their overland travel to San Francisco and then by sea to French Polynesia and their service on the islands. In late 1852 the Crosbys returned to California, beginning what is probably the most historically significant part of her writings, her diaries of life. First, in immediately post Gold Rush San Francisco and, second, in the new Mormon village of San Bernardino in southern California. There is no comparable record by a woman of 1850s life in these growing communities. The Crosbys responded in 1857 to Brigham Young's call for church members to gather in Utah and again abandoned a new home, this the nicest one they had built, one of the finest houses in San Bernardino. Such unquestioning loyalty was a characteristic Caroline and Jonathan displayed again and again.
Jennifer Sinor and Rona Kaufman
Twenty-one writers answer the call for literature that addresses who we are by understanding where we are--where, for each of them, being in some way part of academia. In personal essays, they imaginatively delineate and engage the diverse, occasionally unexpected play of place in shaping them, writers and teachers in varied environments, with unique experiences and distinctive world views, and reconfiguring for them conjunctions of identity and setting, here, there, everywhere, and in between.
After a career of working and living with Native Americans and studying their traditions, Barre Toelken has written this sweeping study of Native American folklore in the West. Within a framework of performance theory, cultural worldview, and collaborative research, he examines Native American visual arts, dance, oral tradition (story and song), humor, and patterns of thinking and discovery to demonstrate what can be gleaned from Indian traditions by Natives and non-Natives alike. In the process he considers popular distortions of Indian beliefs, demystifies many traditions by showing how they can be comprehended within their cultural contexts, considers why some aspects of Native American life are not meant to be understood by or shared with outsiders, and emphasizes how much can be learned through sensitivity to and awareness of cultural values.
Melody Graulich and Paul Crumbley
A stellar group of writers, scientists, and educators illuminate the intersections between environmental science, creative writing, and education, considering ways to strengthen communication between differing fields with common interests.
Kenneth W. Brewer
The solid rightness of image after image in Ken Brewer's poetry was never better than in Why Dogs Stopped Flying. His familiar style is plain-spoken, his humor reliable and self-ironic. Yet, in this collection perhaps more than in his earlier work, the particularity of the poet's insight into the physical world--and the warmth of his affection for it--combine to create an unexpected transcendence. Beasts and bodies are transformed in his lines, and our dim, unremarkable lives on this shadowed earth become somehow more luminous--small suns opening in the dark, small words to the moon.
Polly Stewart, Steve Siporin, C. W. Sullivan III, and Suzi Jones
A diverse group of writers and scholars follow the lead of noted folklorist Barre Toelken and consider, from the inside, the ways in which varied cultures in the American West understand and express their relations to the world around them. As Barre Toelken puts it in The Dynamics of Folklore, "'Worldview' refers to the manner in which a culture sees and expresses its relation to the world around it." In Worldviews and the American West, seventeen notable authors and scholars, employing diverse approaches and styles, apply Toelken's ideas about worldview to the American West. While the contributors represent a range of voices, methods, and visions, they are integrated through their focus on the theme of worldview in one region. Worldviews and the American West includes essays by Margaret K. Brady, Hal Cannon, Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, James S. Griffith, Barry Lopez, Robert McCarl, Elliott Oring, Twilo Scofield, Steve Siporin, Kim Stafford, C. W. Sullivan III, Jeannie B. Thomas, George Venn, George B. Wasson, and William A. Wilson. Each of the authors in this collection attempts to get inside one or more of the worldviews of the many cultures that have come to share and interpret the American West. The result is a lively mix of styles and voices as the authors' own worldviews interact with the multiple perspectives of the diverse peoples (and, in Barry Lopez's "The Language of Animals," other species) of the West. This diversity matches the geography of the region they all call home and gives varied life and meaning to its physical and cultural landscape.