Behind the Book

In the Nahuatl language, nepantla refers to the ancient Mesoamerican “philosophy that views the world through motion-change,” binding past, present and potential futures together in creative tension (p. xvii). In Nepantla Squared: Transgender Mestiz@ Histories in Times of Global Shift (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), Prof. Linda Heidenreich relies on this concept to reflect expansively about identity, subjectivity, and the research process in this volume, mapping potential connections and useful collusions between Chicanx studies and trans studies. In five deeply researched and resonant chapters, they recover the histories of trans mestiz@s, focusing particularly on the lives of Jack Garland in late nineteenth-century California, and Gwen Amber Rose Araujo in late twentieth-century California. In this conversation, Heidenreich and Prof. Mirelsie Velazquez reflect on how the concept of nepantla invites all historians to consider the self and the now as part of the warp and weave of any inquiry into the past. Join us for an impassioned conversation about weaving together rage and hope to imagine a future of possibilities beyond borders.

Mirelsie Velazquez is an Associate Professor & Rainbolt Family Endowed Presidential Professor, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, University of Oklahoma.

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Today I interview Patrick Madden, an essayist. 

Now, for most of us, an essay—that thing we were assigned to write in high school or maybe that thing we stayed up all night writing in college—doesn't immediately evoke feelings of joy and excitement or associations of pleasure and profundity. 

No, an essay isn't something we usually chose to do. And we can take that view of the essay even further. I'm guessing most of us didn't grow up hoping to be an essayist. In fact, we might be surprised to recall that such an identity actually exists. 

When, after all, is the last time you met an essayist, if you ever have? Well, I'm happy to say that, if you haven't, today is the day, and I couldn't think of a better essayist to dispel any wizened views of the essay that you or I might hold than Madden. 

His new book Disparates: Essays (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) is full of delights and surprises and goofy jokes and riffs on rock lyrics and doodles and, just as often, moving insights on how all of these things are intrinsic to what makes us human. And in the spirit of Madden's essays, this interview also has a surprise guest, one who's intelligence and good humor has made this conversation a high for me in nearly a decade of conversations for the New Books Network.

Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Today I interview Patrick Madden, an essayist. 

Now, for most of us, an essay—that thing we were assigned to write in high school or maybe that thing we stayed up all night writing in college—doesn't immediately evoke feelings of joy and excitement or associations of pleasure and profundity. 

No, an essay isn't something we usually chose to do. And we can take that view of the essay even further. I'm guessing most of us didn't grow up hoping to be an essayist. In fact, we might be surprised to recall that such an identity actually exists. 

When, after all, is the last time you met an essayist, if you ever have? Well, I'm happy to say that, if you haven't, today is the day, and I couldn't think of a better essayist to dispel any wizened views of the essay that you or I might hold than Madden. 

His new book Disparates: Essays (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) is full of delights and surprises and goofy jokes and riffs on rock lyrics and doodles and, just as often, moving insights on how all of these things are intrinsic to what makes us human. And in the spirit of Madden's essays, this interview also has a surprise guest, one who's intelligence and good humor has made this conversation a high for me in nearly a decade of conversations for the New Books Network.

Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Today the salary cap is an NBA institution, something fans take for granted as part of the fabric of the league or an obstacle to their favorite team’s chances to win a championship. In the early 1980s, however, a salary cap was not only novel but nonexistent. The Cap: How Larry Fleisher and David Stern Built the Modern NBA (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) tells the fascinating, behind-the-scenes story of the deal between the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association that created the salary cap in 1983, the first in all of sports, against the backdrop of a looming players’ strike on one side and threatened economic collapse on the other.

Joshua Mendelsohn illustrates how the salary cap was more than just professional basketball’s economic foundation—it was a grand bargain, a compromise meant to end the chaos that had gripped the sport since the early 1960s. The NBA had spent decades in a vulnerable position financially and legally, unique in professional sports. It entered the 1980s badly battered, something no one knew better than a few legendary NBA figures: Larry Fleisher, general counsel and negotiator for the National Basketball Players Association; Larry O’Brien, the commissioner; and David Stern, who led negotiations for the NBA and would be named the commissioner a few months after the salary cap deal was reached.

As a result, in 1983 the NBA and its players made a novel settlement. The players gave up infinite pay increases, but they gained a guaranteed piece of the league’s revenue and free agency to play where they wished—a combination that did not exist before in professional sports but as a result became standard for the NBA, NFL, and NHL as well.

The Cap explores in detail not only the high-stakes negotiations in the early 1980s but all the twists and turns through the decades that led the parties to reach a salary cap compromise. It is a compelling story that involves notable players, colorful owners, visionary league and union officials, and a sport trying to solidify a bright future despite a turbulent past and present. This is a story missing from the landscape of basketball history.

Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in September 2020. You can reach Paul at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Professor Andrew Grant Wood’s new edited volume, The Business of Leisure: Tourism History in Latin America and the Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), explores the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of tourism in the region and its relationship to nationalism, imperialism, development, and many other themes. The volume also provides a new way of understanding the relationship between the United States and Latin America during the twentieth century, showing how Latin American and US elites used tourism to create lucrative business deals, shape domestic and international politics, and bolster exceptionalist national histories. On this episode of the podcast, I talk with Wood about the book, along with Anadelia Romo and Elizabeth Manley, two contributors to the volume.

Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at [email protected] and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.

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The story of Manifest Destiny and the role of expansion in American slavery is dominated by the history of Western migration. In A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), Claire M. Wolnisty shows that the South had a long history of looking not just West, but South to protect the future of a proslavery southern system. In the antebellum era, multiple groups of southerners built connections in Latin America to establish an empire rooted in slavery and promote their vision of southern identity. They positioned slave labor as not just compatible but key to creating a modern society and economy. Dr. Wolnisty, an assistant professor at Austin College, discusses how these ideas played out among three main groups--filibusters, commercial expansionists, and postwar southern emigrants--explaining how their efforts at expansion played important roles in defining Southern identity and the limits of their efforts. This history helps us broaden our understanding of expansion, southern identity, and Manifest Destiny.

Christine Lamberson is a historian. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s.

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There is something quintessentially American about the idea of the west. Though the time of western expansion has long since passed, stories about cowboys on horses and pioneers panning for gold resonate with us to this day, living on in our books, our movies, and our in cultural imaginations. Through these stories, the west has come to represent values like stoicism, self-reliance, and rugged individualism. For many who call it home, the west also represents a heritage, a tradition, and a way of life. But how many of these collective conceptions of the west are actually true?

In her stunning debut essay collection, Anything Will Be Easy After This: A Western Identity Crisis (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), author Bethany Maile reaches into the depths of her childhood on the prairies of Eagle, Idaho to determine where the many myths about the American west begin and end. To help answer these questions, Maile goes on expeditions to an Idaho rodeo pageant, a Lady Antebellum concert, a livestock auction house, a gun range, and more. All the while, Maile attempts to reconcile her western sense of self, with what she knows to be true: that when we tell ourselves the same stories over and over again, without evolution, a piece of them—and of us—begins to die.

Today on New Books in Literature, please join us as we sit down with Bethany Maile to learn more about Anything Will Be Easy After This: A Western Identity Crisis, available now from the University of Nebraska Press (2020).

Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies and teaches creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and the co-editor of its anthology, The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020).

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Behind the braided wigs, buckskins, and excess bronzer that typified the mid-century "filmic Indian" lies a far richer, deeper history of Indigenous labor, survival, and agency. This history takes center stage in historian Liza Black's new book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which looks at Indigenous peoples' experiences in the American film industry that so often relied upon and reproduced racialized stereotypes of "authentic Indians" to produce profit. Black shows how non-Native film producers, in producing monolithic and historically static Native caricatures for profit, reinforced settler colonial narratives on screen while simultaneously denying Indigenous actors, extras, and staff of their modernity.

Thorough in detail and innovative in analysis, Black incorporates film studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and history, shedding new light on the mid-century film industry and Native peoples' roles in it. Black chronicles the contours of American settler colonialism and its cultural and economic manifestations both on- and off-screen, giving the "authentic Indian" so familiar to non-Native audiences a much-needed dose of historical context. The result is an engaging story of Indigenous talent, labor, and livelihood that transcends critical moments in Native and U.S. histories alike.

Listeners can now purchase Picturing Indians using code 6AF20 for a 40% discount on the University of Nebraska Press' site.

Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.

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For many of its participants, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) offered them an opportunity to change their lives, yet few were as transformed as that of Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez. As Kat D. Williams details in Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban-American Baseball Star (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), playing in the league gave her the chance for a new start in a different country. Williams highlights the role Lefty’s mother María played in encouraging her to take up sports as a way of escaping their family’s slide into poverty. Lefty’s involvement with baseball coincided with a unique period of opportunities for women in the sport, one that she embraced first by playing for an all-Cuban team then by signing a contract with the AAGPBL. Though a knee injury and the demise of the AAGPBL ended her professional career, Lefty remained in the United States after its demise, finding employment and becoming an active participant in the AAGPBL reunions that began in the 1980s.

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Before the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana became one of the state’s top private employers—with its vast landholdings and economic enterprises—they lived well below the poverty line and lacked any clear legal status.

After settling in the Bayou Blue in 1884, they forged friendships with their neighbors, sparked local tourism, and struck strategic alliances with civic and business leaders, aid groups, legislators, and other tribes. Coushattas also engaged the public with stories about the tribe’s culture, history, and economic interests that intersected with the larger community, all while battling legal marginalization exacerbated by inconsistent government reports regarding their citizenship, treaty status, and eligibility for federal Indian services.

Well into the twentieth century, the tribe had to overcome several major hurdles, including lobbying the Louisiana legislature to pass the state’s first tribal recognition resolution (1972), convincing the Department of the Interior to formally acknowledge the Coushatta Tribe through administrative channels (1973), and engaging in an effort to acquire land and build infrastructure.

Basket Diplomacy: Leadership, Alliance-Building, and Resilience among the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, 1884-1984 (University of Nebraska Press) demonstrates how the Coushatta community worked together—each generation laying a foundation for the next—and how they leveraged opportunities so that existing and newly acquired knowledge, timing, and skill worked in tandem.

Denise E. Bates is a historian and an assistant professor of leadership and interdisciplinary studies at Arizona State University.

David Dry is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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