A Comparative Ethnoarchaeology of Gender and Subsistence
Circumpolar Lives and Livelihood is a cross-cultural ethnoarchaeological study of the gendered nature of subsistence in northern hunter-gatherer-fisher societies. Based on field studies of four circumpolar societies, it documents the complexities of women's and men's involvement in food procurement, processing, and storage, and the relationship of ......
A Look Inside Small-College Basketball in West Virginia
For most of the twentieth century, West Virginia was a college basketball hotbed. Its major programs were a success, but perhaps even more successful was the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, composed of fifteen schools that rarely earned headlines but set many records and became an identifiable part of small town culture and a ......
Winner of the 2023 SABR Larry Ritter Book Award Finalist for the 2022 CASEY Award You don't know the history of the Chicago Cubs until you know the story of Charles Webb Murphy, the ebullient and mercurial owner of this historic franchise from 1905 through 1914. Originally a sportswriter in Cincinnati, he joined the New York Giants front office ......
When Jason Brown's mother is arrested for stealing $38,000, he agrees to serve as a character witness for her, hoping to keep her out of prison. Thus begins Character Witness, a memoir, a chronicle of a mother's struggle with mental illness, addiction, and poverty, and an inquiry into whether we can escape the legacy of the past. Brown realizes ......
American author Willa Cather was born and spent her first nine years in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here, as an observant daughter of a privileged white family, Cather first encountered differences and dislocations that remained lively, productive, and sometimes deeply troubling sites of tension and energy throughout her writing life. The ......
Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Butterfly Nebula reaches from the depths of the sea to the edges of space to chart intersections of the physical universe, the divine, the human, and the constantly unfolding experience of being "one thing in the act of becoming another." This collection of poems teems with creatures and cosmic phenomena ......
With radical candor and sardonic wit, Randolph Lewis offers an autopsy of the recent past, looking for glimmers of hope and redemption among the detritus strewn about by neo-Gilded Age billionaires, Big Tech, and political extremes during the first Trump administration and the pandemic era. American life took a weird turn in June 2015, when an ......
How Global Consumer Culture Shapes Our Perceptions of the Ice Continent
Antarctica is, and has always been, very much "for sale." Whales, seals, and ice have all been marketed as valuable commodities, but so have the stories of explorers. The modern media industry developed in parallel with land-based Antarctic exploration, and early expedition leaders needed publicity to generate support for their endeavors. Their ......
He was not much of a player and not much more of a manager, but by the time Branch Rickey (1881-1965) finished with baseball, he had revolutionized the sport-not just once but three times. In this definitive biography of Rickey-the man sportswriters dubbed "The Brain," "The Mahatma," and, on occasion, "El Cheapo"-Lee Lowenfish tells the full and ......