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First published in 1939, Nebraska: A Guide to the Cornhusker State was collaboratively written by the Federal Writers? Project (FWP). As part of the Works Project Administration, the FWP gathered together some of the best writers of the era. Collectively, they undertook a nationwide initiative to record information about America and create comprehensive guides to their respective states. The wonderful results were a well-written blend of travel guide, ethnography, local history, and cultural document. This guide to the Cornhusker State brought together Nebraska writers such as Weldon Kees, Mari Sandoz, and Loren Eiseley. These respected authors created a remarkable compendium that includes chapters on the state?s history, environment, peoples, flora and fauna, government, agriculture and industry, folklore, architecture, art, and literature. Rewarding reading for the armchair traveler and a companion for the tourist, Nebraska captures an era and makes accessible to readers information that is not readily available outside archives.

A wide-ranging compilation on the materia medica of the ordinary people of Britain and North America, comparing practices in both places. Informative and engaging, yet authoritative and well researched, Encyclopedia of Folk Medicine reveals previously unexamined connections between folk medicine practices on either side of the Atlantic, as well as within different cultures (Celtic, Native American, etc.) in the United Kingdom and America. For students, school and public libraries, folklorists, anthropologists, or anyone interested in the history of medicine, it offers a unique way to explore the fascinating crossroads where social history, folk culture, and medical science meet. From the 17th century to the present, the encyclopedia covers remedies from animal, vegetable, and mineral sources, as well as practices combining natural materia medica with rituals. Its over 200 alphabetically organized, fully cross-referenced entries allow readers to look up information both by ailment and by healing agent. Entries present both British and North American traditions side by side for easy comparison and identify the surprising number of overlaps between folk and scientific medicine.

Helen Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne, with Memoirs of Charlotte de Cordet was published anonymously at the Minerva Press in 1800, the third of five novels that Craik wrote between 1796 and 1805. Deeply rooted in the contemporary historical milieu of her time, Craik’s novel features the sanguinary events of post-revolutionary France, including the war in the Vendée as well as “The Terror”. Described by critics as a “unique hybrid of historical Gothic,” the novel is indeed permeated by Gothic elements that draw their material directly from the more celebrated novels by Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole. Borrowing from customary and well-oiled Gothic visual elements, from the landscapes surrounding the castle and the rock of Narbonne, to old monasteries and half-ruined edifices, Craik builds the fascinating story of the Countess Adelaide de Narbonne, whose character partly represents the author’s own rebellion against parental authority and despotism. Fashioning Adelaide de Narbonne as the traditional Gothic heroine characterized by refined sensibility and virtue in distress, who staunchly rejects the oppression of male authorities, Craik connects the story of the Countess with that of Charlotte de Cordet (Charlotte Corday), Jean-Paul Marat’s murderer, undoubtedly more than a mere “appendix” to Adelaide’s story, as the title of the novel suggests. Here reprinted and annotated for the first time, Helen Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne, with Memoirs of Charlotte de Cordet joins the voices of numerous late eighteenth-century British women writers who openly defied the patriarchal system of values of the time, symbolically represented in the characters of Marat, Robespierre, and the whole system of the Terror in post-revolutionary France, to promote a challenge and a subversion of the traditional stereotypes of the delicate, passive woman of the age of sensibility.

These stories of vampire legends and gruesome nineteenth-century practices is “a major contribution to the study of New England folk beliefs” (The Boston Globe). For nineteenth-century New Englanders, “vampires” lurked behind tuberculosis. To try to rid their houses and communities from the scourge of the wasting disease, families sometimes relied on folk practices, including exhuming and consuming the bodies of the deceased. Folklorist Michael E. Bell spent twenty years pursuing stories of the vampire in New England. While writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Henry David Thoreau, and Amy Lowell drew on portions of these stories in their writings, Bell brings the actual practices to light for the first time. He shows that the belief in vampires was widespread, and, for some families, lasted well into the twentieth century. With humor, insight, and sympathy, he uncovers story upon story of dying men, women, and children who believed they were food for the dead. “A marvelous book.” —Providence Journal Includes an updated preface covering newly discovered cases.