A new edition of the classic compilation of Nebraska lore and legend, first published in 1959, includes a selection of weather lore, superstitions, cave legends, superheroes, folk customs, hoaxes, a study of the use of dialect in folklore, and a critical analysis of the origins of American cowboy and folk songs. Reprint.

On the night of November 17, 2018, Danielle Leukam went to bed as a newly single mother and nurse from Minnesota. On the morning of November 18, 2018, she awoke to a sinister world that would never be the same for her again. A home invasion gone awry, Danielle was held at gunpoint and raped repeatedly for five hours while her three-year-old son slept in the next room. Mentally tortured and traumatized, Danielle recounts the events of the attack with raw transparency as the agonizing truth of her experiences unfold. But she is a survivor. Now, Danielle is armed with the weapon of her voice as she turns tragedy to triumph by seeking to break the silence for victims of rape and sexual assault.

Time Magazine's 10 Top Nonfiction Books of the Year • Willa Cather’s letters—withheld from publication for more than six decades—are finally available to the public in this fascinating selection. The hundreds collected here range from witty reports of life as a teenager in Red Cloud in the 1880s through her college years at the University of Nebraska, her time as a journalist in Pittsburgh and New York, and her growing eminence as a novelist. They describe her many travels and record her last years, when the loss of loved ones and the disasters of World War II brought her near to despair. Above all, they reveal her passionate interest in people, literature, and the arts. The voice is one we recognize from her fiction: confident, elegant, detailed, openhearted, concerned with profound ideas, but also at times sentimental, sarcastic, and funny. A deep pleasure to read, this volume reveals the intimate joys and sorrows of one of America’s most admired writers.

Eager to challenge social norms during the Victorian age, Louise Pound was an iconoclast responsible for challenging America¿s views on women, academics, and sports. Discarding the traditional corset to accommodate her sports activities, her athletic prowess resulted in her being a world-class athlete in both tennis and golf. She became a local legend after winning several matches against her male contemporaries. She is now recognized for having layed the social groundwork for female athletes like ¿Babe¿ Didrikson Zaharias. Unable to get accepted into an American post-graduate program, she battled institutional sexism and obtained her Ph.D. in Germany in less than a year. She soon became a world-renowned philologist, American folklorist and educator, and she was the first academician to advocate the recognition of American English as a distinct language from that spoken in Great Britain. Although she is often known for little more than being the love interest of lesbian author Willa Cather, the author debunks such claims, giving sound evidence that the attraction was not reciprocated.

Founded in 1869, the University of Nebraska was given the awesome responsibility of educating a new state barely connected by roads and rail lines. Established as a comprehensive university, uniting the arts and sciences, commerce and agriculture, and open to all regardless of "age, sex, color, or nationality," it has as its motto Literis dedicata et omnibus artibus--dedicated to letters and all the arts. The University at first was confined to four city blocks and didn't have a building until 1871. Cows grazed the campus. But soon the high aspirations of the state began to be realized. Nebraska boasted the first department of psychology west of the Mississippi River, and its faculty included national prominent scholars like botanist Charles Bessey and linguist A. H. Edgren (later a member of the Nobel Commission). Willa Cather, Roscoe Pound, Mari Sandoz, and Louise Pound ranked among its early graduates. And it developed a reputation for excellence in collegiate athletics. Written by a beloved member of the faculty, this history shows both why Robert E. Knoll is so devoted to the University as well as the tests such devotion must endure. Its history is hardly one of placid growth and unimpeded progress. Its regents, administration, faculty, and students have periodically fought one another: sometimes over matters as crucial as the University's purpose, shape, and destination. More often, battles waged over personalities. It is to these personalities that Knoll directs most of his attention. The author focuses on the men and women who made a difference, for good or ill. He locates the University's place in the changing intellectual and academic context of the United States and charts its passage through hard times and prosperity. He notes the contributions of the University to Nebraska, from the early experiments in sugar beet cultivation to the national fame of its football team. Most important, its education of generations of Nebraskans has lifted state goals and achievement, and its outreach has made the University an international community.

“A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.”–New York Times Book Review "Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring ." –O, the Oprah Magazine Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience—from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows—rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments—the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narrator’s persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known. Shimmering and unusual, Pond demands to be devoured in a single sitting that will linger long after the last page.

Today we are urged from all sides to slim down and shape up, to shed a few pounds or lose life-threatening stones. The media's relentless obsession with size may be perceived as a twenty-first-century phenomenon, but as award-winning historian Louise Foxcroft shows, we have been struggling with what to eat, when and how much, ever since the Greeks and the Romans first pinched an inch. Meticulously researched, surprising and sometimes shocking, Calories and Corsets tells the epic story of our complicated relationship with food, the fashions and fads of body shape, and how cultural beliefs and social norms have changed over time. Combining research from medical journals, letters, articles and the dieting bestsellers we continue to devour (including one by an octogenarian Italian in the sixteenth century), Foxcroft reveals the extreme and often absurd lengths people will go to in order to achieve the perfect body, from eating carbolic soap to chewing every morsel hundreds of times to a tasteless pulp. This unique and witty history exposes the myths and anxieties that drive today's multi-billion pound dieting industry - and offers a welcome perspective on how we can be healthy and happy in our bodies.

"Who were 'the folk'? This question has haunted generations of radicals and reactionaries alike. The Folk traces the musical culture of these elusive figures in Britain and the US during a crucial period from 1870 to 1930, and beyond to the contemporary alt-right. It follows an insistent set of disputes surrounding the practice of collecting, ideas of racial belonging, the poetics of nostalgia, and the pre-history of European fascism. It is the biography of a people who exist only as a symptom of the modern imagination and the archaeology of a landscape directing the flow of global politics today"--

"Paul Bunyan yarns have generally been conceded first place among the lies of all time, but here is Febold Feboldson, a Swede who has pushed his way out front and deserves recognition as the most accomplished, the most unqualified, the least repetitious, and--for a change--the most laughable legendary figure to steal the spotlight."--Buffalo, N.Y., Evening News. "Gorgeous reading for all who love genuine Americana."--The American Mercury. "Let us give Febold his full due as a purely regional phenomenon. As such--as an expression of the never-ending fight of Nebraskans against drought, flood, blistering heat, paralyzing cold, choking dust, and bottomless mud--he is very nearly perfect. . . . Paul Beath has done regional literature a service by collecting these richly imaginative tales."--Victor P. Hass, Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books. "Everyone who loves American folklore will welcome this book. . . . The book contains no less than fourteen tales or groups of anecdotes, all of them cheerful, sly, or hilarious."--Stanley Vestal, The Daily Oklahoman. "Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, John Henry, and others of heroic mold may move over and listen a while. . . . Febold, the big Swede who homesteaded down on the Dismal River, his only neighbors the Dirtyleg tribe of Indians, is a folk character made almost before our eyes."--Kansas City Star.