Through a detailed analysis of their unique occupational culture, Making the Voyageur World reexamines the French Canadian workers who dominated the fur trade industry and became iconic images of North American lore.

Nute's best-selling book portrays the indefatigable French-Canadian canoemen, whose labors were vital to the fur trade and whose influence reaches us through the colorful songs, place names, customs, and legends they left behind.

As important cultural icons of the early nineteenth-century United States, adventurers energized the mythologies of the West and contributed to the justifications of territorial conquest. They told stories of exhilarating perils, boundless landscapes, and erotic encounters that elevated their chauvinism, avarice, and violence into forms of nobility. As self-proclaimed avatars of American exceptionalism, Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. suggests in The American Elsewhere, adventurers transformed westward expansion into a project of romantic nationalism. A study of US expansionism from 1815–1848, The American Elsewhere delves into the “adventurelogues” of the era to reveal the emotional world of men who sought escape from the anonymity of the urban East and pressures of the Market Revolution. As volunteers, trappers, traders, or curiosity seekers, they stepped into “elsewheres,” distant and dangerous. With their words and art, they entered these unfamiliar realms that had fostered caution and apprehension, and they reimagined them as regions that awakened romantic and reckless optimism. In doing so, Bryan shows, adventurers created the figure of the remarkable American male that generated a wide appeal and encouraged a personal investment in nationhood among their audiences. Bryan provides a thorough reading of a wide variety of sources—including correspondence, travel accounts, fiction, poetry, artwork, and material culture—and finds that adventurers told stories and shaped images that beguiled a generation of Americans into believing in their own exceptionality and in their destiny to conquer the continent.

For more than a century the history of the American Frontier, particularly the West, has been the speciality of the Arthur H. Clark Company. We publish new books, both interpretive and documentary, in small, high-quality editions for the collector, researcher, and library.

Find a diverse array of valuable ideas for managing the challenges of new technology and the rapidly changing information environment. A Kaleidoscope of Choices helps librarians develop skills and strategies to cope effectively with the myriad changes affecting their profession due to the rapid evolution of technology. In this book, informative chapters address the impact of technology on libraries, scholarly communication, vendors, and the publishing industry. Knowledgeable authors reveal their practical experience with organizing to manage change, managing the virtual library, roles of vendors and publishers in providing access to electronic information, and innovations for the bibliographic control of electronic publications. Chapters examine many topics on the technical environment, including: the Internet and client-server computing World Wide Web and the Mosaic Interface a beginner's guide to Listserv and ListProcs technology's influence on information management steps toward becoming a virtual library reshaping the serials vendor industry new roles for librarians expert systems and cataloging Serials specialists and other librarians who desire to make the most of the new technologies will find A Kaleidoscope of Choices a helpful and informative guide for their daily contact with technology.

VOYAGEUR SKIES chronicles spring, summer, fall, and winter in Voyageurs National Park through Don Breneman's stunning photographs, while University of Minnesota meteorologist/climatologist Dr. Mark Seeley explains the effects of weather and climate on the shaping of the park's pristine landscape. How has the climate in Voyageurs National Park changed in recent years and what does this mean going forward? Climate change is already impacting Minnesota's water resources. While celebrating the speactacular beauty to be found in Minnesota's only national park, VOYAGEUR SKIES facilitates wider discussion and understanding of implications for the future if the quality of the state's water resources is to be preserved. Written for general readers and also for classroom use, this book will be the centerpiece for educational programs to be offered jointly by the University of Minnesota Water Rescources Center and Extension.

This original contribution to hemispheric American literary studies comprises readings of three important novels from Mexico, Canada, and the United States: Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Quebecois writer Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues, and Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. The encyclopedic novel has particular generic characteristics that serve these writers as a vehicle for the reincorporation of hemispheric histories. Starting with an examination of Moby-Dick as precursor, Barrenechea shows how this narrative genre allows Fuentes, Poulin, and Silko to reflect the interconnected world of today, as well as to dramatize indigenous and colonial values in their narratives. His close attention to written documents, visual representations, and oral traditions in these encyclopedic novels sheds light on their comparative cultural relations and the New World from pole to pole. This study amplifies the scope of “America” across cultures and languages, time and tradition.