*The Newberry Bookshop will be closed Thursday, November 28 through Saturday, November 30 in observance of Thanksgiving. Thusly, BLACK FRIDAY IS ON! Punch in the code Turkey for a 20% discount! Have a lovely holiday and see you next week!*
Originally published in 1893 and 1901, Simon Pokagon's birch bark stories were printed on thinly peeled and elegantly bound birch bark. In this edition, these rare booklets are reprinted with new essays that set the stories in cultural, linguistic, historical, and even geological context. Experts in Native literary traditions, history, Algonquian languages, the Michigan landscape, and materials conservation illuminate the thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge that Pokagon elevated in his stories. This is an essential resource for teachers and scholars of Native literature, Neshnabé pasts and futures, Algonquian linguistics, and book history.
Who has the right to represent Native history? The past several decades have seen a massive shift in debates over who owns and has the right to tell Native American history and stories. For centuries, non-Native actors have collected, stolen, sequestered, and gained value from Native stories and documents, human remains, and sacred objects. However, thanks to the work of Native activists, Native history is now increasingly being repatriated back to the control of tribes and communities. Indigenous Archival Activism takes readers into the heart of these debates by tracing one tribe's fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite their history. Rose Miron tells the story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and their Historical Committee, a group of mostly Mohican women who have been collecting and reorganizing historical materials since 1968. She shows how their work is exemplary of how tribal archives can be used strategically to shift how Native history is accessed, represented, written and, most importantly, controlled. Based on a more than decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, Miron's research and writing is shaped primarily by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations and input from the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee. As a non-Mohican, Miron is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the context of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways.
Jim Terry (Ho-Chunk) is a Chicago comic book artist whose memoir Come Home, Indio was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Jim recently was an artist-in-residence at the Newberry, and his new graphic novel, Paper Cuts, commissioned for Indigenous Chicago, reflects his personal journey through the library’s collections and its vast holdings in American Indian and Indigenous Studies.
After many requests over the years, it’s back! This new edition once again includes a selection of Chicago gang compliment cards but with a handful of swap outs from the original, and is now ordered geographically (more or less) winding from south to north to reflect both the fundamental link of these organizations with physical locations and their interactions with others nearby. The essay has also been updated to reflect new information and perspectives introduced since the last edition was published.Thee Almighty & Insane: Chicago Gang Business Cards from the 1970s & 1980s is an ode to an idiosyncratic print subculture that arose in Chicago just prior to the digital age when street gangs made business cards displaying their symbols, nicknames, territories, and enemies as a means to assert their pride, recruit new members, and serve as general tokens of affiliation. Less intended, but maybe more significant is the role of these cards as historical artifacts—not only documenting the specific histories of these gangs and their members, but also the larger social dynamics of a contentious time period in the city of Chicago. With enlarged reproductions of 70+ cards and an introductory essay by collector Brandon Johnson, this book is an appreciation of Chicago gang “compliment cards”: their hand-drawn graphics, their blackletter typefaces, their outlandish names and clever slogans.Clothbound, 96 pagesFull color
A new account of racial logics in premodern Islamic literature. In Black Knights, Rachel Schine reveals how the Arabic-speaking world developed a different form of racial knowledge than their European neighbors during the Middle Ages. Unlike in European vernaculars, Arabic-language ideas about ethnic difference emerged from conversations extending beyond the Mediterranean, from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. In these discourses, Schine argues, racialized blackness became central to ideas about a global, ethnically inclusive Muslim world. Schine traces the emergence of these new racial logics through popular Islamic epics, drawing on legal, medical, and religious literatures from the period to excavate a diverse and ever-changing conception of blackness and race. The result is a theoretically nuanced case for the existence and malleability of racial logics in premodern Islamic contexts across a variety of social and literary formations.
An engaging look at ocean routes' complicated beginnings and elusive impact. Sara Caputo's Tracks on the Ocean is a sweeping history of how we have understood routes of travel over the ocean and how we came to represent that movement as a cartographical line. Focusing on the representation of sea journeys in the Western world from the early sixteenth century to the present, Caputo deftly argues that the depiction of these lines is inextricable from European imperialism, the rise of modernity, and attempts at mastery over nature. Caputo recounts the history of ocean tracks through an array of lively stories and characters, from the expeditions of Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century to tracks depicted in Moby Dick and popular culture of the nineteenth century to the use of navigational techniques by the British navy. She discusses how tracks evolved from tools of surveying into tools of surveillance and, eventually, into paths of environmental calamity. The impulse to record tracks on the ocean is, Caputo argues, reflective of an ongoing desire for order, schematization, and personal visibility, as well as occupation and permanent ownership--in this case over something that is unoccupiable and impossible to truly possess. Both beautifully written and deeply researched, Tracks on the Ocean shares how the lines drawn on maps tell the audacious and often tragic and violent stories of ocean voyages.
Nourish your body and mind through food with these 60 recipes celebrating Navajo culinary traditions. The Modern Navajo Kitchen takes you on an exhilarating journey for your taste buds. This beautifully photographed cookbook ties together traditional Navajo recipes as well as global recipes with a Navajo spin, creating a truly unique culinary experience! Choose from a plethora of drinks, breads, breakfasts, soups, mains, sides, and desserts--the sky's the limit. Incorporating traditional and modern ingredients, some of the deliciously nourishing and comforting recipes include: Navajo Boba Milk Tea (Abe' Boba Dééhk'azí)Fry Bread (Dah Díníilghaazh)Navajo Burgers (Atsį' Yik'ą́ Náneeskadí Bil Alch'į' Át'éhí)Sumac and Strawberry Greek Yogurt Ice Pops (Chiilchin Yogurt Tiní)and more!This comprehensive cookbook also includes instructions for how to make such things as juniper ash, roasted cornmeal, and roasted chiles that will bring your Navajo cooking skills to the next level. A short history of Navajo culinary traditions is provided to provide cultural context behind your new culinary experiences, and sample meal plans will help you put together the perfect menus for the week ahead or for those special occasions with family and friends. Reconnect to your cultural heritage or treat your palate (or both!) with The Modern Navajo Kitchen.
From the best-selling You're My Little series comes You're My Little Latke! Celebrate Hanukkah with adorable latkes, dreidels, gelt, jelly donuts, and menorahs paired with sweet, rhyming text in this board book with cut-outs and raised elements. National Bestselling Series--More Than 4.1 Million Books Sold! Celebrate Hanukkah with You're My Little Latke, a board book sure to become one of your family's favorite holiday books. This sweet, festive book includes cut-outs and raised elements on every page, featuring everything from yummy latkes to golden gelt to shining menorahs. With chunky pages and tactile elements, children will love the interactive features alongside the story. This special holiday book in the best-selling You're My Little series makes a treasured Hanukkah gift for the little ones in your life. Parents and children alike will be delighted by the text that celebrates the love between parents and children with a holiday twist. Get to know the You're My Little series from Silver Dolphin Books! From Valentine's Day to Christmas Day and every day in between, the bestselling You're My Little series is cute as can be--and fun too! Pages from these delightful books feature adorable illustrations by Natalie Marshall, as well as shaped cut-outs, raised elements, or even stickers. Perfect for cuddling up with your little one, these sweet rhyming stories celebrate a parent's love for their child.
"Not just for fans of punk rock--Punk Planet is a fine source of articles about politics, current events, and do-it-yourself culture." --Utne Reader"All of the interviews are probing and well thought out, the questions going deeper than most magazines would ever dare; and each has a succinct, informative introduction for readers who are unfamiliar with the subject. Required reading for all music fans." --Library Journal The first compilation of the riveting and provocative interviews of Punk Planet magazine, which was founded in 1994 and charged unbowed into the new millennium. Never lapsing into hapless nostalgia, these conversations with figures as diverse as Jello Biafra, Kathleen Hanna, Noam Chomsky, Henry Rollins, Sleater-Kinney, Ian MacKaye, and many more provide a unique perspective into American punk rock and all it has inspired (and confounded). Not limited to conversations with musicians, the book includes vital interviews with political organizers, punk entrepreneurs, designers, filmmakers, writers, illustrators, and artists of many different media.Punk Planet consistently explored the crossover of punk with activism, and reflected the currents of the underground while simultaneously challenging the bleak centerism of popular American culture. The expanded edition of We Owe You Nothing is updated with six more interviews and a new introduction, bringing the definitive book of conversations with the underground's greatest minds up to 2007. New interviews include talks with bands like The Gossip and Maritime, a conversation with punk legend Bob Mould, and more.
A provocative and unique look at how the women Hemingway loved shaped this literary legend Ernest Hemingway's passion was writing, and he was inspired by a lifetime of daring adventures and encouraged by the many women in his life. He nurtured his creativity by purposely seeking dangerous situations to test his own levels of courage and to create literary heroes who displayed grace under pressure. His masculine, adventurous spirit appealed to women of all ages, including four wives and a long list of legendary actresses, and he frequently transformed the women in his life into memorable fictional characters.In 1950, Hemingway told Marlene Dietrich that he truly loved only five women. Who were these women and why did he love them? Some of them may have included his wives--Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh--but there were others too, among them Agnes von Kurowsky. Through quotations from his works and personal letters, as well as more than sixty photographs--many of which have not been previously published--Hemingway scholar Nancy W. Sindelar captures Hemingway's life and romantic adventures, revealing his own feelings about his romantic relationships and the ways his experiences with women appear in his literary works.Much has been written about Hemingway, but to date no book has linked the women he loved to his written work. The stories of Hemingway's romantic relationships reveal not only the influence these women had on his writing but also his personal ambition, heartbreak, and literary triumphs and trials. Sindelar's provocative analyses of Hemingway's literature give fresh insight into the life of a legendary author, outdoorsman, adventurer, and lover.Includes 60 photographs, many never previously published.
Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry--Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut by award-winning author Ananda Lima. "Remarkable and memorable." --OLIVIE BLAKE - "An astounding new voice." --ERIC LaROCCA - "I love it so much." --KELLY LINK - "Trippy, eerie, wry, and always profound." --JOHN KEENE - "Incredible. Truly wondrous." --KEVIN WILSON - "Heart-wrenching and wickedly funny." --GWEN KIRBY - "Propulsive, uncanny, and expertly built." --JULIA FINE At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true. Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they'll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences-of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging--and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home. With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as "singular and wise and fresh" (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil includes: "Rapture," "Ghost Story," "Tropicália," "Antropógaga," "Idle Hands," "Rent," "Porcelain," "Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory," and "Hasselblad." A great next read for fans of Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties and V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. Recommended reading by Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, and more!
*2022 Pattis Award Winner*A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book A Best Book of 2021 by BuzzFeed and Real Simple An "unmissable" (Vogue), "exceptional" (The Washington Post), and "evocative" (Chicago Tribune) memoir about three Black girls from the storied Bronzeville section of Chicago that offers a penetrating exploration of race, opportunity, friendship, sisterhood, and the powerful forces at work that allow some to flourish...and others to falter. They were three Black girls. Dawn, tall and studious; her sister, Kim, younger by three years and headstrong as they come; and her best friend, Debra, already prom-queen pretty by third grade. They bonded--fervently and intensely in that unique way of little girls--as they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Black folks who fled the ravages of the Jim Crow South. These third-generation daughters of the Great Migration come of age in the 1970s, in the warm glow of the recent civil rights movement. It has offered them a promise, albeit nascent and fragile, that they will have more opportunities, rights, and freedoms than any generation of Black Americans in history. Their working-class, striving parents are eager for them to realize this hard-fought potential. But the girls have much more immediate concerns: hiding under the dining room table and eavesdropping on grown folks' business; collecting secret treasures; and daydreaming about their futures--Dawn and Debra, doctors, Kim a teacher. For a brief, wondrous moment the girls are all giggles and dreams and promises of "friends forever." And then fate intervenes, first slowly and then dramatically, sending them careening in wildly different directions. There's heartbreak, loss, displacement, and even murder. Dawn struggles to make sense of the shocking turns that consume her sister and her best friend, all the while asking herself a simple but profound question: Why? In the vein of The Other Wes Moore and The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, Three Girls from Bronzeville is a "deeply personal" (Real Simple) memoir that chronicles Dawn's attempt to find answers. It's at once a celebration of sisterhood and friendship, a testimony to the unique struggles of Black women, and a tour-de-force about the complex interplay of race, class, and opportunity, and how those forces shape our lives and our capacity for resilience and redemption.
*2024 Pattis Award Winner*Winner of The Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award, by The Pattis Family Foundation and the Newberry Library From skyline-defining icons to wonders of the world, the second period of the Chicago skyscraper transformed the way Chicagoans lived and worked. Thomas Leslie's comprehensive look at the modern skyscraper era views the skyscraper idea, and the buildings themselves, within the broad expanse of city history. As construction emerged from the Great Depression, structural, mechanical, and cladding innovations evolved while continuing to influence designs. But the truly radical changes concerned the motivations that drove construction. While profit remained key in the Loop, developers elsewhere in Chicago worked with a Daley political regime that saw tall buildings as tools for a wholesale recasting of the city's appearance, demography, and economy. Focusing on both the wider cityscape and specific buildings, Leslie reveals skyscrapers to be the physical results of negotiations between motivating and mechanical causes. Illustrated with more than 140 photographs, Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 tells the fascinating stories of the people, ideas, negotiations, decision-making, compromises, and strategies that changed the history of architecture and one of its showcase cities.
In early North America, carrying watercraft--usually canoes--and supplies across paths connecting one body of water to another was essential in the establishment of both Indigenous and European mobility in the continent's interior. The Chicago portage, a network of overland canoe routes that connected the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds, grew into a crossroads of interaction as Indigenous and European people vied for its control during early contact and colonization. John William Nelson charts the many peoples that traversed and sought power along Chicago's portage paths from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, including Indigenous Illinois traders, French explorers, Jesuit missionaries, Meskwaki warriors, British officers, Anishinaabe headmen, and American settlers. Nelson compellingly demonstrates that even deep within the interior, power relations fluctuated based on the control of waterways and local environmental knowledge. Pushing beyond political and cultural explanations for Indigenous-European relations in the borderlands of North America, Nelson places environmental and geographic realities at the center of the history of Indigenous Chicago, offering a new explanation for how the United States gained control of the North American interior through a two-pronged subjugation of both the landscapes and peoples of the continent.
