Illinois Press Book Blog

The November 5, 2009, edition of Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac will feature Maura Stanton’s poem “Psalm for a Lost Summer” from her recent book Immortal Sofa.

Make your own academic sentence. Look what I came up with in just a few clicks:

The reification of post-capitalist hegemony may be parsed as the historicization of the gendered body.

Inside Higher Ed reports today that Utah State University Press will pursue a new publishing model:

This week comes news that the press will survive — in part by embracing a new model of organization (becoming part of the university library) and a new business model (embracing open access, in which most publications would be available online and free). While both of those changes are significant, key aspects of the press’s identity and mission will not change. It will continue to be a peer-reviewed scholarly publisher, and plans to continue its highly regarded work in fields such as composition studies, folklore, poetry, environmental studies, and the history and culture of the West.

Searching for illustrations for my book, Breadwinners, recapped the challenges—and rewards—of writing about working women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Documentation of women who worked as servants, seamstresses, saleswomen, and factory hands has always been thin. The popular press tended to depict working women as unruly servants or downtrodden seamstresses.

My book contests these stereotypes by telling the stories of women who used their wage work to articulate a new sense of independence and to claim full rights of citizenship. After weeks of archival research, I was thrilled when I found images that captured the spirit of the women I knew so well from their diaries, letters, speeches, and investigations. My favorite discovery now graces the cover of the book: Maggie Hinchey, an Irish American laundry worker leading a parade of working women dressed in white to signal their support for suffrage.

In 1913 and 1914, Hinchey, an organizer for the Women’s Trade Union League, stormed the states of New York and New Jersey to explain working women’s need for the ballot. Her powerful appeal earned her an invitation to spread her message west, to union men in Montana and Nevada. This picture of Maggie Hinchey captures working women’s determination to be recognized as breadwinners and shows how they organized to achieve their goals.

*****

Lara Vapnek, assistant professor of history at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, is author of the new book Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920.

Joe McFarland, co-author of Edible Wild Mushrooms of Illinois and Surrounding States, shot Chef Lasse Sorensen in the kitchen of Tom’s Place in DeSoto, Illinois, during the recent mushroom dinner, holding the Oyster Mushrooms with roasted oysters.

Here’s the recipe for Hedgehog Mushroom Salad (courtesy of Chef Mark Fontana, Bogey’s at Stone Creek, Makanda, Illinois) that was also served that evening.

Last Thursday, Kathleen Kornell (UIP copyright czar) and I attended a copyright primer given by Columbia University’s Kenneth Crews and hosted by the University of Illinois Graduate College and University Library. Crews, who is currently the Director of the Copyright Office at Columbia, was on a mission to help faculty and students better understand copyright and manage the rights to their own scholarship. “Who Owns Your Scholarship: Copyright, Publication Agreements, and Good Practice” was part of the CAS/MillerComm Lecture Series, and will be archived here.

Billie Jean Isbell’s book, Finding Cholita, will receive the honorable mention award for this year’s Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. The committee was very impressed by the melding of genres and portrayal of long-term psychological reality of chronic violence.

Isbell has been invited to read from her work during the SHA session at the annual AAA meeting on Friday, December 4th.

black cat bone
I believe my good gal have found my black cat bone
I can leave Sunday mornin’ Monday mornin’ I’m tippin’ ’round home.
—Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Broke And Hungry,” 1926

A hoodoo charm held to confer magical powers upon its possessor, including invisibility and the ability to triumph over sexual rivals. In the above song, the performer is suggesting that his girlfriend has been able to prevent abandonment by virtue of using his own black cat bone. As dispensed by some conjurers, the charm was represented as a bone boiled from a live black cat that made no reflection in a mirror (Puckett, 1925). An ex-slave noted: “First, the cat is killed and boiled, after which the meat is scraped from the bones. The bones are then taken to the creek and thrown in. The bone that goes up stream is the lucky one and should be kept” (Minnie R. Ross, as quoted in Born in Slavery). At the same time, the phrase was loosely applied to mean “just a bone they put in that hoodoo bag . . . [with] a piece of lodestone, some kind of red cloth; they got it mixed up together” (Willie Moore).

From Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary by Stephen Calt.

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Update 10/29/09: snooker

October 27, 2009 – Champaign, IL and New York, NY –The University of Illinois Press, the not-for-profit publishing division of the University of Illinois, and JSTOR, the preservation archive and research platform that is part of the not-for-profit ITHAKA, announced an agreement today to make leading journals from the Press available worldwide as part of the Current Scholarship Program. 

The Current Scholarship Program is a new collaboration initiated by University of California Press and JSTOR and first announced on August 13, 2009.  Together, participants in this Program aim to create an improved online work environment for faculty and students by bringing complete journal runs from multiple publishers together in one place, to ease the burden on librarians of negotiating separate license agreements with a multitude of publishers and independent titles, and to promote a more cost-effective publishing environment for the scholarly community.

“For the last several years the University of Illinois Press and JSTOR have worked together through the History Cooperative, building strong ties of respect and trust,” said Willis G. Regier, Director of the University of Illinois Press.  “We take this step with the blessings of our colleagues in the University of Illinois Library and with high anticipation for our journals.”

Current and historical content from at least ten University of Illinois Press-published journals will be available on a re-designed JSTOR in 2011.  This will offer faculty and students around the world access to current issues alongside back issues and a growing set of primary source materials from libraries easily and seamlessly. JSTOR’s nearly 6,000 library participants worldwide will be able to license the Press’s current journals, either individually or as part of current issue collections, together with JSTOR back issue collections in a single transaction. University of Illinois Press-published journals available as part of the Program will include American Journal of Psychology, American Music, Journal of Aesthetic Education, and Journal of American Ethnic History among others. The journals will also be preserved in Portico, the digital preservation service that is also part of ITHAKA.

“The University of Illinois Press has been a leader in promoting digital scholarship, innovation, and new publishing collaborations in the humanities,” said Michael Spinella, JSTOR Managing Director. “The Press not only shares our aim to deliver excellent scholarship at good value to libraries, faculty, and students, but brings a spirit of cooperation and a strong desire to support new forms of scholarship using digital technology.  We are thrilled to be working with them to advance scholarship through the Program.”

With the addition of the University of Illinois Press, the current issues of at least forty journals will be available from JSTOR for the 2011 subscription year. Other organizations are being encouraged to join the Program.

Rebecca Simon, Associate Director of University of California Press and Director of Journals + Digital Publishing added, “It is terrific that the University of Illinois Press is joining this effort and bringing their fine portfolio of titles to the Program.  The more like-minded participants we have, the greater the benefits we are able to deliver to libraries and to users.”

For more information, see: http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/programs/currentScholarship.jsp