When British explorer George Vancouver arrived at the San Francisco presidio in 1792, he described it as resembling a "compound for cattle"-hardly the opulent outpost he had expected of Spanish California. Today San Francisco is a bustling metropolis with picturesque neighborhoods, dramatic engineering feats such as the Golden Gate Bridge, and ......
Japanese Americans and Nevada Through World War II
Like Friends, Like Foes offers a comprehensive analysis of how Nevada residents responded and reacted to the "Japanese Question" during World War II. Both before and during the war, the experience of Japanese American residents of Nevada varied widely. Once the war started, Japanese immigrants experienced an unusual case of mass internment fromthe ......
Few estates born from the discovery of the Comstock Lode still survive. Among the grandest, Bowers Mansion, dates to the height of the Civil War. The property has a tragic history shrouded in legend, laid bare within these pages: from the mansion's construction; to Eilley Bowers's fight to maintain the property after her husband's death, running ......
Tangential Terrains is an ecocritical study of the work of Cormac McCarthy, focusing primarily on his depictions of the desert and inorganic nature in Blood Meridian. Close readings of previously unexamined archival manuscripts and drafts shed new light on McCarthy's compositional processes, revealing how the development of written matter in the ......
In the late 1970s the golden valley between Utah's Wasatch Mountains was home to some of the best dairies in the country. That was also where Linda Rhodes, a newly minted large animal veterinarian, had to prove that a woman could do what the Mormon dairymen were sure was a man's job. She was often scared that they were right. Throughout her ......
A grieving mother ghost-hunts in Virginia City. A college student's field trip to the Moonlite Bunny Ranch brothel spurs a sexual awakening. A boy starts a wildfire on Peavine while trying to impress his crush. A schoolteacher is dismissed, and the aftermath unfolds in a schoolwide email chain. A woman tries on new identities at Burning Man. All ......
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore
On a San Francisco street corner in 1953, aspiring painter and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti shook hands with sociology instructor and magazine editor Peter Martin. Their handshake sealed Ferlinghetti's five-hundred-dollar investment in a small retail space above a North Beach flower shop that would become City Lights Bookstore and Press. Since the ......
The Long Now Conditions Permit confronts the persistent brutalities of our world through poetry that both names and resists the injustices shaping it. From the quiet sorrows of everyday slight to the overwhelming crises of ecological collapse and gendered violence, these poems document what is occurring-the horrendous and the intimate, the ......
In A Grain of Sand in Lambeth, poetry becomes a lens through which to explore the complex, visionary world of William Blake. Drawing on Blake' s own rejection of tradition and his relentless quest to challenge the boundaries of art, Geoffrey Babbitt confronts the tensions between genius and convention, life and death, light and dark. Each poem ......