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Nachituti's Gift
Economy, Society, and Environment in Central Africa
David M. Gordon
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

Nachituti’s Gift challenges conventional theories of economic development with a compelling comparative case study of inland fisheries in Zambia and Congo from pre- to postcolonial times. Neoclassical development models conjure a simple, abstract progression from wealth held in people to money or commodities; instead, Gordon argues, primary social networks and oral charters like “Nachituti’s Gift” remained decisive long after the rise of intensive trade and market activities. Interweaving oral traditions, songs, and interviews as well as extensive archival research, Gordon’s lively tale is at once a subtle analysis of economic and social transformations, an insightful exercise in environmental history, and a revealing study of comparative politics.
 

Honorable Mention, Melville J. Herskovits Award, African Studies Association
 

“A powerful portrayal of the complexity, fluidity, and subtlety of Lake Mweru fishers’ production strategies . . . . Natchituti’s Gift adds nuance and evidence to some of the most important and sophisticated conversations going on in African studies today.”—Kirk Arden Hoppe, International Journal of African Historical Studies

“A lively and intelligent book, which offers a solid contribution to ongoing debates about the interplay of the politics of environment, history and economy.”—Joost Fontein, Africa

“Well researched and referenced . . . . [Natchituti’s Gift] will be of interest to those in a wide variety of disciplines including anthropology, African Studies, history, geography, and environmental studies.”—Heidi G. Frontani, H-SAfrica
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The Names of the Python
Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930
David L. Schoenbrun
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
Systems of belonging, including ethnicity, are not static, automatic, or free of contest. Historical contexts shape the ways which we are included in or excluded from specific classifications. Building on an amazing array of sources, David L. Schoenbrun examines groupwork—the imaginative labor that people do to constitute themselves as communities—in an iconic and influential region in East Africa. His study traces the roots of nationhood in the Ganda state over the course of a millennia, demonstrating that the earliest clans were based not on political identity or language but on shared investments, knowledges, and practices.
 
Grounded in Schoenbrun’s skillful mastery of historical linguistics and vernacular texts, The Names of the Python supplements and redirects current debates about ethnicity in ex-colonial Africa and beyond. This timely volume carefully distinguishes past from present and shows the many possibilities that still exist for the creative cultural imagination.
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Naming Colonialism
History and Collective Memory in the Congo, 1870–1960
Osumaka Likaka
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
What’s in a name? As Osumaka Likaka argues in this illuminating study, the names that Congolese villagers gave to European colonizers reveal much about how Africans experienced and reacted to colonialism. The arrival of explorers, missionaries, administrators, and company agents allowed Africans to observe Westerners’ physical appearances, behavior, and cultural practices at close range—often resulting in subtle yet trenchant critiques. By naming Europeans, Africans turned a universal practice into a local mnemonic system, recording and preserving the village’s understanding of colonialism in the form of pithy verbal expressions that were easy to remember and transmit across localities, regions, and generations.
    Methodologically innovative, Naming Colonialism advances a new approach that shows how a cultural process—the naming of Europeans—can provide a point of entry into economic and social histories. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews, Likaka encounters and analyzes a welter of coded fragments. The vivid epithets Congolese gave to rubber company agents—“the home burner,” “Leopard,” “Beat, beat,” “The hippopotamus-hide whip”—clearly conveyed the violence that underpinned colonial extractive economies. Other names were subtler, hinting at derogatory meaning by way of riddles, metaphors, or symbols to which the Europeans were oblivious. Africans thus emerge from this study as autonomous actors whose capacity to observe, categorize, and evaluate reverses our usual optic, providing a critical window on Central African colonialism in its local and regional dimensions.
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Nancy Drew and Company
Culture, Gender, and Girls’ Series
Edited by Sherrie A. Inness
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
This intriguing anthology brings together a broad range of critical essays on girls’ series fiction from established scholars such as Chamberlain, Johnson, and Romalov, along with emerging scholars Katrine Poe, Maureen Reed, and Deborah Siegel. Topics include: Anne of Green Gables, the Isabel Carleton series, early twentieth-century girls’ automobile series, girls’ scouting novels, 1910–1935, Cherry Ames in World War II, Nancy Drew, and Judy Bolton.
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Narration in the Fiction Film
David Bordwell
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985

Most films tell tales, but what does that involve? How do motion pictures tease us into building what we all agree to call stories? In this study, David Bordwell offers the first comprehensive account of how movies use fundamental principles of narrative representation, unique features of the film medium, and diverse story-telling patterns to construct their fictional narratives. The result is a pioneering, far-reaching work which will change the way we perceive narrative film—and which every serious film scholar, student or fan will welcome.

“This book is of crucial importance to film specialists. I cannot think that any film teacher/scholar would miss reading this work.”—Don Fredricksen, Cornell University

“David Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film is a major contribution to film studies and to narrative theory. The work, I predict, will be widely read, praised, debated, and damned. Brodwell’s originality lies not so much in demonstrating the deficiencies of other theories, which he does very convincingly, but in the scope and design of his project, against which there is no competition of comparable intellectual weight.”—Jerry Carlson, DePaul University

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A Nation of Politicians
Gender, Patriotism, and Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland
Padhraig Higgins
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
Between the years 1778 and 1784, groups that had previously been excluded from the Irish political sphere—women, Catholics, lower-class Protestants, farmers, shopkeepers, and other members of the laboring and agrarian classes—began to imagine themselves as civil subjects with a stake in matters of the state. This politicization of non-elites was largely driven by the Volunteers, a local militia force that emerged in Ireland as British troops were called away to the American War of Independence. With remarkable speed, the Volunteers challenged central features of British imperial rule over Ireland and helped citizens express a new Irish national identity.
    In A Nation of Politicians, Padhraig Higgins argues that the development of Volunteer-initiated activities—associating, petitioning, subscribing, shopping, and attending celebrations—expanded the scope of political participation. Using a wide range of literary, archival, and visual sources, Higgins examines how ubiquitous forms of communication—sermons, songs and ballads, handbills, toasts, graffiti, theater, rumors, and gossip—encouraged ordinary Irish citizens to engage in the politics of a more inclusive society and consider the broader questions of civil liberties and the British Empire. A Nation of Politicians presents a fascinating tale of the beginnings of Ireland’s richly vocal political tradition at this important intersection of cultural, intellectual, social, and public history.
 
 
Winner of the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book, American Conference for Irish Studies
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Nationalism and Sexuality
Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe
George L. Mosse, With a critical introduction by Mary Louise Roberts
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
This landmark work by George L. Mosse, first published in 1985, examines the history of sexuality through the lens of bourgeois respectability and nationalism. Using a daring breadth of German and English sources, Nationalism and Sexuality pioneered the use of gender stereotypes as a methodology for studying the history of sexuality in mainstream European history. Mosse’s innovative inquiries on gender remain central to discussions about modern constructions of national belonging and the workings of the state. This edition of Mosse’s classic volume includes a new critical introduction by Mary Louise Roberts, whose books include What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France.
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Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec
Richard Handler
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988
Richard Handler’s pathbreaking study of nationalistic politics in Quebec is a striking and successful example of the new experimental type of ethnography, interdisciplinary in nature and intensively concerned with rhetoric and not only of anthropologists but also of scholars in a wide range of fields, and it is likely to stir sharp controversy.
    Bringing together methodologies of history, sociology, political science, and philosophy, as well as anthropology, Handler centers on the period 1976–1984, during which the independantiste Parti Québéois was in control of the provincial government and nationalistic sentiment was especially strong. Handler draws on historical and archival research, and on interviews with Quebec and Canadian government officials, as he addresses the central question: Given the similarities between the epistemologies of both anthropology and nationalist ideology, how can one write an ethnography of nationalism that does not simply reproduce—and thereby endorse—nationalistic beliefs? Handler analyzes various responses to the nationalist vision of a threatened existence. He examines cultural tourism, ideology of the Quebec government, legislations concerning historical preservation, language legislation and policies towards immigrants and “cultural minorities.” He concludes with a thoughtful meditation on the futility of nationalisms.
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The Nationalization of the Masses
Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich
George L. Mosse
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
First published in 1975, The Nationalization of the Masses is George L. Mosse’s major statement about political symbols and the means of their diffusion. Focusing on Germany and, to a lesser degree, France and Italy, Mosse analyzes the role of symbols in fueling mass politics, mass movements, and nationalism in a way that is broadly applicable and as relevant today as it was almost fifty years ago. In this analysis Mosse introduces terms like “secular religion,” “political liturgy,” “national mystique,” “the new politics,” and “the aesthetics of politics” that are now standard in studies of nationalism and fascism, demonstrating the importance of his cultural, anthropologically informed lens to contemporary discourse. This new edition contains a critical introduction by Victoria de Grazia, Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University, contextualizing Mosse’s research and exploring its powerful influence on subsequent generations of historians.
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Native American Autobiography
An Anthology
Arnold Krupat
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994

Native American Autobiography is the first collection to bring together the major autobiographical narratives by Native American people from the earliest documents that exist to the present.  The thirty narratives included here cover a range of tribes and cultural areas, over a span of more than 200 years.
    From the earliest known written memoir—a 1768 narrative by the Reverend Samson Occom, a Mohegan, reproduced as a chapter here—to recent reminiscences by such prominent writers as N. Scott Momaday and Gerald Vizenor, the book covers a broad range of Native American experience.  The sections include “Traditional Lives;” “The Christian Indians, from the Eighteenth Century to Indian Removal, 1830;” “The Resisting Indians, from Indian Removal to Wounded Knee, 1830-90;” “The Closed Frontier, 1890-;” “The Anthropologists' Indians, 1900-;” “‘Native American Renaissance,’ 1968-;” and “Traditional Lives Today.”  Editor Arnold Krupat provides a general introduction, a historical introduction to each of the seven sections, extensive headnotes for each selection, and suggestions for further reading, making this an ideal resource for courses in American literature, history, anthropology, and Native American studies.  General readers, too, will find a wealth of fascinating material in the life stories of these Native American men and women.

"This is the first comprehensive anthology of American Indian autobiography ever published.  It will be of interest to virtually anyone teaching or studying the literatures of the native peoples of North America, as well as to a general audience, because of the informative, literate introductions and the absorbing narratives themselves."—William L. Andrews, series editor

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Native American Communities in Wisconsin, 1600–1960
A Study of Tradition and Change
Robert E. Bieder
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

The first comprehensive history of Native American tribes in Wisconsin, this thorough and thoroughly readable account follows Wisconsin’s Indian communities—Ojibwa, Potawatomie, Menominee, Winnebago, Oneida, Stockbridge-Munsee, and Ottawa—from the 1600s through 1960.  Written for students and general readers, it covers in detail the ways that native communities have striven to shape and maintain their traditions in the face of enormous external pressures.
    The author, Robert E. Bieder, begins by describing the Wisconsin region in the 1600s—both the natural environment, with its profound significance for Native American peoples, and the territories of the many tribal cultures throughout the region—and then surveys experiences with French, British, and, finally, American contact. Using native legends and historical and ethnological sources, Bieder describes how the Wisconsin communities adapted first to the influx of Indian groups fleeing the expanding Iroquois Confederacy in eastern America and then to the arrival of fur traders, lumber men, and farmers. Economic shifts and general social forces, he shows, brought about massive adjustments in diet, settlement patterns, politics, and religion, leading to a redefinition of native tradition.
    Historical photographs and maps illustrate the text, and an extensive bibliography has many suggestions for further reading.

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The Native Population of the Americas in 1492
Edited by William M. Denevan
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992

William M. Denevan writes that, "The discovery of America was followed by possibly the greatest demographic disaster in the history of the world." Research by some scholars provides population estimates of the pre-contact Americas to be as high as 112 million in 1492, while others estimate the population to have been as low as eight million. In any case, the native population declined to less than six million by 1650.
    In this collection of essays, historians, anthropologists, and geographers discuss the discrepancies in the population estimates and the evidence for the post-European decline. Woodrow Borah, Angel Rosenblat, William T. Sanders, and others touch on such topics as the Indian slave trade, diseases, military action, and the disruption of the social systems of the native peoples. Offering varying points of view, the contributors critically analyze major hemispheric and regional data and estimates for pre- and post-European contact.
    This revised edition features a new introduction by Denevan reviewing recent literature and providing a new hemispheric estimate of 54 million, a foreword by W. George Lovell of Queen's University, and a comprehensive updating of the already extensive bibliography. Research in this subject is accelerating, with contributions from many disciplines. The discussions and essays presented here can serve both as an overview of past estimates, conflicts, and methods and as indicators of new approaches and perspectives to this timely subject.

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Nature's Kindred Spirits
Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder
James I. McClintock
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994

In Nature's Kindred Spirits James McClintock shows how their mystical experiences with the wild led to dramatic conversions in their thinking and behavior.  By embracing the ecstasy of nature, they reject modern alienation and spiritual confusion.
    From Aldo Leopold, America’s most important conservationist and author of the classic A Sand County Almanac, to Pulitzer Prize winners Annie Dillard and Gary Snyder and defenders of the desert Joseph Wood Krutch and Edward Abbey, these writers share a common vision that harkens back to Henry David Thoreau and John Muir.  To nineteenth-century Romantic ideals, they add the authority of modern ecological science.  Collectively they have elevated nature’s importance in American culture, shaping the growth of the environmental movement and influencing American environmental policies.
    Widely admired among educated readers but relatively neglected by the literary establishment, these writers unite the experiential with the metaphysical, the ordinary with the sacred, the personal with the public, and the natural with the social.  Using ecology as a touchstone, McClintock further draws connections among science, politics, religion, and philosophy to create an enlightening overview of the work of these “kindred spirits.”

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Nazi Culture
Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich
George L. Mosse
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

    What was life like under the Third Reich? What went on between parents and children?  What were the prevailing attitudes about sex, morality, religion? How did workers perceive the effects of the New Order in the workplace? What were the cultural currents—in art, music, science, education, drama, and on the radio?
    Professor Mosse’s extensive analysis of Nazi culture—groundbreaking upon its original publication in 1966—is now offered to readers of a new generation. Selections from newspapers, novellas, plays, and diaries as well as the public pronouncements of Nazi leaders, churchmen, and professors describe National Socialism in practice and explore what it meant for the average German.
    By recapturing the texture of culture and thought under the Third Reich, Mosse’s work still resonates today—as a document of everyday life in one of history’s darkest eras and as a living memory that reminds us never to forget.

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Necessary American Fictions
Popular Literature of the 1950s
William Darby
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987

William Darby gives us a comprehensive and (mostly) sympathetic reading of over fifty novels and a few movies from the 1950s. He examines titles such as Mandingo, The Invisible Man, I the Jury, Catcher in the Rye, Battle Cry, The Caine Mutiny, The Revolt of Mamie Stover, The Manchurian Candidate, Hawaii, The Bramble Bush, Peyton Place, Ten North Frederick, A Stone for Danny Fisher, The Bad Seed, Not as a Stranger, The Blackboard Jungle, From Here to Eternity, and Compulsion.

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Negotiating Empire
The Cultural Politics of Schools in Puerto Rico, 1898–1952
Solsiree del Moral
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
After the United States invaded Puerto Rico in 1898, the new unincorporated territory sought to define its future. Seeking to shape the next generation and generate popular support for colonial rule, U.S. officials looked to education as a key venue for promoting the benefits of Americanization. At the same time, public schools became a site where Puerto Rican teachers, parents, and students could formulate and advance their own projects for building citizenship. In Negotiating Empire, Solsiree del Moral demonstrates how these colonial intermediaries aimed for regeneration and progress through education.
    Rather than seeing U.S. empire in Puerto Rico during this period as a contest between two sharply polarized groups, del Moral views their interaction as a process of negotiation. Although educators and families rejected some tenets of Americanization, such as English-language instruction, they also redefined and appropriated others to their benefit to increase literacy and skills required for better occupations and social mobility. Pushing their citizenship-building vision through the schools, Puerto Ricans negotiated a different school project—one that was reformist yet radical, modern yet traditional, colonial yet nationalist.
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Neither Black Nor White
Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States
Carl Degler
University of Wisconsin Press, 1986

Carl Degler’s 1971 Pulitzer-Prize-winning study of comparative slavery in Brazil and the United States is reissued in the Wisconsin paperback edition, making it accessible for all students of American and Latin American history and sociology.
    Until Degler’s groundbreaking work, scholars were puzzled by the differing courses of slavery and race relations in the two countries. Brazil never developed a system of rigid segregation, such as appeared in the United States, and blacks in Brazil were able to gain economically and retain far more of their African culture. Rejecting the theory of Giberto Freyre and Frank Tannenbaum—that Brazilian slavery was more humane—Degler instead points to a combination of demographic, economic, and cultural factors as the real reason for the differences.
   “In the early 1970s when studies in social history were beginning to blossom on the North American scene, Carl Degler’s prize-winning contribution was a thoughtful provocative essay in comparative history. Its thoughtfulness has not diminished with the years. Indeed, it is as topical today as when it was first published. The Brazilian experience with rapid industrialization and its attempt to restore democratic government indicates that the issues which Degler treated in the early 1970s are more pertinent than ever today.”—Franklin W. Knight, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University.

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Nell's Story
A Woman from Eagle River
Nell Peters, with Robert Peters
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995
With its desperate acts and dire consequences, Nell Peters's tale of a woman's life in northern Wisconsin is a remarkable story, full of the sense and sound and flavor of a time and place rarely visited in books. Nell's tomboy childhood, her businesslike initiation into sex on the eve of her departure for the WACs in 1951, her resulting pregnancy and return home to a life sharply at odds with small-town conventions, her struggle to keep her twin sons, and her disastrous sexual liaisons with men and women alike are recounted in this funny, gritty, and wildly candid book.
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Net Results
Great Fishing Spots in Southern Wisconsin
Bob Riepenhoff
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
Whether you want to hang a trophy bass or musky on your wall, or just want to spend a few quiet hours catching panfish with your kids, this book is the essential guide to fishing in southern Wisconsin. Author Bob Riepenhoff, outdoor editor for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for fourteen years, wrote a column called "Riepenhoff on Local Lakes." This collection of forty-three of those columns covers fifty-four lakes in southern Wisconsin. Riepenhoff describes his fishing experiences and methods and provides information about the fish species in each lake, fish stocking, management, special regulations, and public access. He draws on the expertise of the most skilled anglers in the state who have guided him through his journeys on local lakes. Net Results is intended to help all anglers, from beginners to experts, have more productive and enjoyable fishing experiences.

Includes contour maps of 54 lakes.
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The New Gods
Psyche and Symbol in Popular Art
Harold Schechter
University of Wisconsin Press, 1980

Harold Schechter looks at the impossible tales and images of popular art--the space odysseys and extraterrestrial civilizations, the caped crusaders and men of steel, and monsters from the ocean floor--and finds close connections between religious myth and popular entertainment.

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New Hard-Boiled Writers
1970s–1990s
LeRoy Lad Panek
University of Wisconsin Press, 2000
Beginning in the 1970s, a new generation of writers took over the hard-boiled story (created by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett) and transformed it to fit the realities of their world—a universe infected by violence, greed, racism, sexism, war, and commercialism. Their protagonists, too, are far different from Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.
    The author comments both on the way the hard-boiled story has changed over the past three decades and examines the work of ten significant contemporary hard-boiled writers. Chapters on Robert B. Parker, James Crumley, Loren Estleman, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Carl Hiaasen, Earl Emerson, Robert Crais, James Lee Burke, and Walter Mosley demonstrate how these writers have used the hard-boiled hero to make powerful statements about life in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
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New Jersey
Betsy Andrews
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
Betsy Andrews’s sweeping, energetic, book-length poem pounds the pavement of the New Jersey Turnpike, driving through America—past landfills and wetlands and weapons labs—under the towering shadows of engines, oil, and war. With a disarmingly unique voice that evokes the tradition of Pound and Eliot, Whitman and Williams and Ginsberg, Andrews creates a pastiche of landscape, consciousness, history, and politics in this American age.
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New Perspectives on Etruria and Early Rome
Sinclair Bell
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
This impressive collection brings to light the works of international scholars, some previously unavailable to an English-language audience. With new information and assessments about the art, architecture, and archaeology of one of the most dynamic periods in the history of the ancient world—the transition between pre-Roman and Roman Italy—these scholars focus on ancient Italy and the wider Mediterranean. Shedding new light on the evidence of well-known and recently excavated sites and the objects they have yielded—their iconography, manufacturing techniques, and afterlives—this collection follows the first archaeological traces of the rise of ancient Italy to its rediscovery in the Renaissance and its reinvention in contemporary fiction, offering a vibrant contribution to classical studies.
    Paying tribute to Richard Daniel De Puma, a scholar who has made significant and influential contributions to Etruscan and Roman studies, the contributors to this collection echo the ambition and creativity of his work while offering an up-to-date survey of contemporary Etruscan scholarship. In surveying new developments in both fields, the work collected here represent the diverse, interdisciplinary interests of De Puma as well as areas of recent groundbreaking research.  
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The New Political Sociology of Science
Institutions, Networks, and Power
Edited by Scott Frickel and Kelly Moore
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015
In the twenty-first century, the production and use of scientific knowledge is more regulated, commercialized, and participatory than at any other time. The stakes in understanding those changes are high for scientist and nonscientist alike: they challenge traditional ideas of intellectual work and property and have the potential to remake legal and professional boundaries and transform the practice of research. A critical examination of the structures of power and inequality these changes hinge upon, this book explores the implications for human health, democratic society, and the environment.
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Night Sisters
A Novel
Sara Rath
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
Nell Grendon never thought about communing with the dead when she was growing up in Little Wolf, Wisconsin; she was more concerned with slumber parties, boys, and the Lord’s Prayer Ring she won (dishonestly) in a Methodist Bible Bee. But when a chance visit to the eccentric but charming Wocanaga Spiritualist Camp brings the adult Nell face-to-face with the elderly medium Grace Waverly, she cannot resist the temptation to learn more about spirit mediumship.
            Nell intends to fake her intuitive talents, but soon she spontaneously channels Angella Wing, an actress from the 1920s once known as the “Woman of a Thousand Voices.” Nell attempts to conceal her occult interests from skeptical friends, including George, a handsome jazz musician who rents an apartment in her historic home, and Polly, a childhood friend with buried anguish of her own. But soon Angella’s mischievous presence begins to make Nell’s life more and more difficult, eventually attracting shadows of Nell’s past. As she tries to free herself from Angella’s influence, Nell is forced into an investigation of a mysterious death at the very heart of her childhood—and the revelation of surprisingly dark secrets.
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The Nightmare Considered
Critical Essays on Nuclear War Literature
Nancy Anisfield
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991
These essays assess the nature of nuclear war literature from a variety of perspectives. Scholars, activists, novelists, poets, and teachers challenge nuclear ideologies and traditional readings of apocalyptic texts. Included: Holocaust literature of the 1950s, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, poetry and nuclear war, Riddley Walker, Fiskadoro, haiku and Hiroshima, Kopit’s End of the World, O’Brien’s The Nuclear Age, and Vonnegut’s cataclysmic novels.
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Nightmare's Fairy Tale
A Young Refugee's Home Fronts, 1938–1948
Gerd Korman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

Fleeing the Nazis in the months before World War II, the Korman family scattered from a Polish refugee camp with the hope of reuniting in America. The father sailed to Cuba on the ill-fated St. Louis; the mother left for the United States after sending her two sons on a Kindertransport. One of the sons was Gerd Korman, whose memoir follows his own path—from the family’s deportation from Hamburg, through his time with an Anglican family in rural England, to the family’s reunited life in New York City. His memoir plumbs the depths of twentieth-century history to rescue the remarkable life story of one of its survivors.

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Nineteenth-Century Women at the Movies
Adapting Classic Women's Fiction to Film
Barbara Tepa Lupack
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999
Even in Hollywood’s world of blockbusters and special effects, there continues to be interest in “quieter” adaptations based on the works of writers of other eras, especially the classic novels of nineteenth-century women. Those novels emphasize strong female protagonists, fine language, and sensitivity to social nuances.
    This volume’s twelve essays offer critical insights not only into the visions of the novelist and the filmmaker but also into contemporary cultural concerns. The adaptations of novels by eight popular writers are analyzied: Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Ouida, and George Eliot.
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No Condition Is Permanent
The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa
Sara S. Berry
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

“No condition is permanent,” a popular West African slogan, expresses Sara S. Berry’s theme: the obstacles to African agrarian development never stay the same.  Her book explores the complex way African economy and society are tied to issues of land and labor, offering a comparative study of agrarian change in four rural economies in sub-Saharan Africa, including two that experienced long periods of expanding peasant production for export (southern Ghana and southwestern Nigeria), a settler economy (central Kenya), and a rural labor reserve (northeastern Zambia). 
    The resources available to African farmers have changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century.  Berry asserts that the ways resources are acquired and used are shaped not only by  the incorporation of a rural area into colonial (later national) and global political economies, but also by conflicts over culture, power, and property within and beyond rural communities.  By tracing the various debates over rights to resources and their effects on agricultural production and farmers’ uses of income, Berry presents agrarian change as a series of on-going processes rather than a set of discrete “successes” and “failures.” 
    No Condition Is Permanent enriches the discussion of agrarian development by showing how  multidisciplinary studies of local agrarian history can constructively contribute to development policy.  The book is a contribution both to African agrarian history and to debates over the role of agriculture in Africa’s recent economic crises.

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No Day at the Beach
John Brehm
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
With his trademark self-deprecating wit, unflinching honesty, and sparkling language, John Brehm’s latest collection invites readers along on his spiritual journey. No Day at the Beach traces a progression from loneliness and the magnetic pull of the past to the grace that is found through immersion in the present and the melancholy beauty of impermanence. Informed by Brehm’s Buddhist practice and enlivened by his comic insights, these poems take on a universal dimension, allowing the reader to both luxuriate in the moment and reflect on each poem’s spiritual depth.

By turns playfully philosophical and bracingly open hearted, Brehm’s engagement with the specters of memory, pride, yearning, gain, and loss illuminate the human condition with humor and empathy.
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No Less a Man
Masculist Art in a Feminist Age
Doug Robinson
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994
Robert B. Parker's detective Spenser. John Rambo, created by David Morrell and played on the silver screen by Sylvester Stallone. Bruce Springsteen. All three, Douglas Robinson claims, are central figures in a new form of popular men’s art: art that explores what it means to be a man in a feminist age. Robinson develops a three-stage transformation myth out of Joseph Campbell’s studies of hero mythology: the road of trials, on which repressive “normality” is tested and found lacking (Spenser); a symbolic death in which defensive rational ego-structures are surrendered (the Rambo of First Blood); and regeneration and return, the gradual rebirth of masculinity in a redemptive transformation (Springsteen).
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No One Knows Their Names
Screenwriters in Hollywood
Jorja Prover
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994
This is the first study of Hollywood by an anthropologist. Jorja Prover examines how different groups of individuals, separated from one another superficially by ethnicity, race, and sex, function as writers in Hollywood. She describes the white “majority” Hollywood writers and explores their concerns and creative processes, and then discusses other writers who, until recently, have been virtually invisible in the entertainment industry—women, the physically challenged, gays, African Americans, Latinos, and Asians. In detailing their efforts at gaining professional acceptance, these writers introduce new, previously unmentioned issues involving access, advancement, talent, sexual harassment, and discrimination.
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The Noble Savage in the New World Garden
Notes toward a Syntactics of Place
Gaile McGregor
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988
This book is a literary history of the Noble Savage and a comprehensive metamorphology of the American mind. Wide-ranging and deep-diving, this book suggests many reevaluations of American heroes and attitudes.
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Nomads and the Outside World
Anatoly M. Khazanov; Translated by Julia Crookenden
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994

Hailed by reviewers as “majestic and magisterial,” Nomads and the Outside World was first published in English in 1984.  With the author's new introduction and an updated bibliography, this classic is now available in an edition accessible to students.



From reviews of the first edition:



“Magisterial.  .  .  .  Combining a phenomenal erudition, a candid judgment, and a subtle sense of irony, Khazanov sets out to challenge the orthodox view of nomadic feudalism and, in the process, has produced the first comparative survey of pastoral societies that can claim to be truly comprehensive, covering their history in Eurasia, the Middle East, and Africa from the origins of pastoralism to the dawn of the modern era.”—Tim Ingold,

Current Anthropology

“This is the best study on pastoral nomadism that the reviewer has ever read.  At last we have a major attempt to present the whole phenomenon in historical, ecological, spatial and structural perspective.  .  .  .  Superb scholarship.  It is the kind of work that can only be produced as a result of years of specific research, much deep thinking  .  .  .  and a determination to reject cant.”—John C. Wilkinson,

Geographical Journal

“Khazanov's book on pastoral nomadism is a heroic endeavor of a kind no one has seriously attempted before.  .  .  .  Particularly valuable to western readers are the materials on the numerous peoples of Central Asia and Siberia  .  .  .  and their integration with analysis of more familiar societies such as those of North and East Africa and the Middle East.  .  .  .  The insights provided by this book are too numerous to list.”—Caroline Humphrey,

Times Literary Supplement
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Noncognitive Skills and Their Development
Special Issue of Journal of Human Resources 43:4 (Fall 2008)
Edited by Thomas J. Kniesner and Bas ter Weel
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010

These articles include recent research on ways to incorporate the noncognitive side of ability in economic theory and to empirically assess and explain its role in labor market and behavioral outcomes. Contributions investigate the extent to which assignment of workers is determined by traditional cognitive variables and by personality traits. Also presented in this collection is research on the role of noncognitive skills in explaining the labor market position of underrepresented groups and research that integrates the economic and psychological theory and evidence on noncognitive skills.

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Norsk, nordmenn og Norge 1
Textbook for Beginning Norwegian
Kathleen Stokker and Odd Haddal
University of Wisconsin Press, 1981

This introduction to Norwegian helps students acquire the basic units of vocabulary and structure and use that knowledge to learn about Norway and Norwegian culture.
    Once students acquire the basic units of vocabulary and structure, they will use their knowledge of the language to learn about Norway. Students will learn about the cities of Oslo and Bergen, how to converse when eating in a Norwegian home or restaurant, and about Norwegian schools. Emphasis is also given to travel and communications, as well as the seasons of the year and Norwegian holidays.
    The present edition of the text features a short grammar summary, a reference for review to assist in drawing together aspects of the grammar that are presented throughout the text. To aid in developing good pronunciation and intonation habits, as well as to internalize certain items of vocabulary and structure, most chapters contain a practice dialogue for students to practice repeatedly while studying the chapter.

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Norsk, nordmenn og Norge 2, Antologi
Textbook for Intermediate Norwegian
Kathleen Stokker
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

This intermediate-level anthology offers a lively collection of writingsfor students learning Norwegian. Introductions to selected Norwegian authors, vocabulary lists, and maps promote discussions of Norwegian history, culture, geography and literature.

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Norsk, nordmenn og Norge
Workbook
Louis E. Janus
University of Wisconsin Press, 1981
The Norsk, nordmenn og Norge series regards communication as the primary goal of language learning. This workbook provides meaningful structural practice in socially relevant and useful ways, combining entertaining activities with more traditional exercises.
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The Norske Nook Book of Pies and Other Recipes
Jerry Bechard and Cindee Borton-Parker
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015
The Norske Nook, founded as a small-town café in 1973, is now a foursome of revered pie shrines in Osseo, Rice Lake, Eau Claire, and Hayward, Wisconsin. The Nook’s international fame grew from a tradition of Midwest home baking, informed by Scandinavian roots and enriched by the luscious ripe fruit and sumptuous sour creams and cream cheeses of America’s dairyland.
            This cookbook features the restaurants’ award-winning baking: Scandinavian specialties, cheesecakes, tortes, cookies, muffins, and more than seventy recipes (and variations) for pie. More than fifty new pie recipes have been created by the Nook bakers since 1990, when Jerry Bechard purchased the Osseo café from founder Helen Myhre. The Norske Nook has won thirty-six blue ribbons at the National Pie Championships in Florida—including three in 2014, for Lemon Cream Cheese, Peaches and Cream, and Jamberry.

Gold Medal Winner, Cookbook, Foreword Reviews IndieFab Book of the Year Awards 

Runner-up, Cookbooks/Crafts/Hobbies, Midwest Book Awards

“Outstanding” books for public & secondary school libraries from university presses, American Library Association

“Best of the Best” books for public libraries from university presses, American Library Association
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North Woods River
The St. Croix River in Upper Midwest History
Eileen M. McMahon and Theodore J. Karamanski
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
The St. Croix River, the free-flowing boundary between Wisconsin and Minnesota, is a federally protected National Scenic Riverway. The area’s first recorded human inhabitants were the Dakota Indians, whose lands were transformed by fur trade empires and the loggers who called it the “river of pine.” A patchwork of farms, cultivated by immigrants from many countries, followed the cutover forests. Today, the St. Croix River Valley is a tourist haven in the land of sky-blue waters and a peaceful escape for residents of the bustling Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan region.
    North Woods River is a thoughtful biography of the river over the course of more than three hundred years. Eileen McMahon and Theodore Karamanski track the river’s social and environmental transformation as newcomers changed the river basin and, in turn, were changed by it. The history of the St. Croix revealed here offers larger lessons about the future management of beautiful and fragile wild waters.
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Norwegian-English Dictionary
A Pronouncing and Translating Dictionary of Modern Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk) with a Historical and Grammatical Introduction
Editor-in-Chief Einar Haugen
University of Wisconsin Press, 1974

For more than forty years, the Haugen Norwegian–English Dictionary has been regarded as the foremost resource for both learners and professionals using English and Norwegian. With more than 60,000 entries, it is esteemed for its breadth, its copious grammatical detail, and its rich idiomatic examples. In his introduction, Einar Haugen, a revered scholar and teacher of Norwegian to English speakers, provides a concise overview of the history of the language, presents the pronunciation of contemporary Norwegian, and introduces basic grammatical structures, including the inflection of nouns and adjectives and the declension of verbs.

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Note-Taking Made Easy
Judi Kesselman-Turkel and Franklynn Peterson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

Updated and revised edition
    As every student quickly learns, merely sitting through a class and paying attention is usually not sufficient to ensure good grades. The proper taking of good notes is essential. Note-Taking Made Easy tells why the student should take his or her own notes (rather than buying them or taping lectures), and tells exactly how to determine what is worth noting, whether during a lecture, classroom discussion, even from a book or during a meeting.
     The authors describe the two most successful methods of organizing notes—outlining and patterning—and provide shortcuts to really make note-taking easy, from shorthand devices to abbreviations.
     Special sections are devoted to taking notes from texts, fiction as well as nonfiction, and handling charts, graphs, and photos. A final chapter shows how to tie together notes from various sources.

This STUDY SMART reference guide series, designed for students from junior high school through lifelong learning programs, teaches skills for research and note-taking, presents strategies for test-taking and studying, provides exercises to improve spelling, grammar, and vocabulary, and reveals secrets for putting these skills together in great essays.

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Novelist to a Generation
The Life and Thought of Winston Churchill
Smith
University of Wisconsin Press

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Now, Voyager
Edited by Jeanne Thomas Allen; Tino T. Balio, Series Editor
University of Wisconsin Press, 1984

Now Voyager (1942) is appreciated today for a skillfully modulated performance by Bette Davis and a rare theme in American mass culture—the study of a woman's struggle for independence. This book includes the complete screenplay.

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Now We're Getting Somewhere
David Clewell
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994
David Clewell’s graceful, honest lines accumulate and remind us that poems can be as tangible, as substantial, as redemptive as those things the poet will not let go unspoken in the world. His compassionate witness is born out of immersion in doggedly bittersweet particulars: the cockeyed wisdom of 1950s science fiction movies; Do Not Disturb signs; vegetarian physics; the perils of bed-and-breakfast lodging; flying saucer disciples; what to do in case of Rapture; Debbie Fuller, reluctant childhood angel; the theory and practice of Spontaneous Human Combustion. His passionate transformation of that raw data into song—no matter how fragile or raucous—provides irrefutable testimony about the consequences of being nothing less than human, where “every day someone crawls out of his ocean of sleep / and takes those first tottering steps on the planet again, / he’s playing with real fire.” And with Clewell’s insistence on the unlikely grace in that condition, along with the generosity of his unabashed inclusiveness, his poetry is a powerful antidote to the bad medicine we‘re too often asked to swallow.
    This is a book of sustenance, of fresh assurances that come to us—ready or not—out of the blue of this spirited poet’s most engaging work yet.
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The Nuclear Muse
Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs
John Canaday
University of Wisconsin Press, 2000
John Canaday analyzes a variety of texts produced by physicists before, during, and after the Second World War, including Niels Bohr’s "The Quantum Postulate"; the Blegdamsvej Faust, a parody of Goethe’s Faust that cast physicists as its principle characters; The Los Alamos Primer, the technical lectures used for training at Los Alamos; scientists’ descriptions of their work and of the Trinity test; and Leo Szilard’s post-war novella, The Voice of the Dolphins.
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