THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS CELEBRATES 90 YEARS OF PUBLISHING EXCELLENCE
The University of Illinois Press reaches a new milestone in 2008, marking ninety years of supporting the mission of the University through the worldwide dissemination of significant scholarship. Started in 1918, this founding member of the Association of American University Presses has grown from a fledgling operation—publishing a history of the University of Illinois, a book on Abraham Lincoln, and a few journals—into a publisher of international renown. The Press currently publishes more than 100 books and 30 scholarly journals each year in an array of subjects including American history, labor history, sports history, folklore, food, film, American music, American religion, African American studies, women’s studies, and, of course, Abraham Lincoln.
“We take Illinois into the living rooms, classrooms, and libraries of the world,” says Willis G. Regier, Director of the Press. “As we celebrate ninety years of continuous publication, we look forward to our centenary with ambitious plans for becoming an even better publisher.”
In addition to issuing venerable publications such as the American Journal of Psychology, founded in 1887 by the noted psychologist G. Stanley Hall, and the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, established in 1906, the Press is a leader in electronic publishing. In 2000 it partnered with the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Academies Press to form the online History Cooperative, and in 2001 it initiated the online publication of the multivolume Booker T. Washington Papers.
In its nine decades the Press has had five directors: Harrison E. Cunningham, Wilbur Schramm, Miodrag Muntyan, Richard Wentworth, and current director Regier, who had earlier directed the university presses at the University of Nebraska and the Johns Hopkins University. Under Regier’s direction, beginning in 1998, the University of Illinois Press greatly broadened the scope of its list to include multicultural and international topics.
Highlights from the first 90 years abound:
– In 1955 Donald Jackson edited Black Hawk: An Autobiography, which has been reprinted many times and is still selling 1,500 copies a year fifty years later.
– Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (1982), edited by John Hope Franklin and August Meier, sold almost 60,000 copies in cloth and paperback.
– In 1978 the press acquired the paperback rights to Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and in the next ten years 356,000 copies were sold, more than 75,000 in the last year before a commercial publisher reclaimed the rights.
– Prairiescapes (1987), a collection of photographs by Larry Kanfer of Champaign, has become a perennial best seller.
– Science in the British Colonies of America (1970), by University of Illinois historian Raymond Phineas Steams, won the National Book Award.
– The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60, by John D. Unruh Jr., (1979) won seven awards, including the major awards of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
– Three Illinois books have received the Bancroft Award from Columbia University, considered by many to be the most prestigious award for a book in American history. These are Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (1982), by Nick Salvatore; Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (1989), by Neil R. McMillen; and Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994), by John Dittmer.
– Celebrating Illinois’s progressive history, the Press has published one volume of the Jane Addams papers and has reprinted eight definitive, handy paperback editions of Jane Addams’s major works.
In September 2008 the University of Illinois Press is planning to commemorate its history with a reception in each of the University’s three locations; Chicago, Springfield, and Urbana-Champaign.
Director Regier concludes, “Year after year, through thick and thin, the University of Illinois has given its Press support, encouragement, and pathbreaking scholarship. We thank the authors, series editors, librarians, and readers who have made this celebration and these ambitions possible.”
TESTIMONIALS
“The University of Illinois Press has made a major contribution to African American letters. They have sought out new work, published long-forgotten texts, and brought thousands of new readers to new work.”
–Robert E. Hemenway, Chancellor, University of Kansas
“The University of Illinois Press has furthered the study of world musics and of the anthropology of music through the production of landmark books significant for the discipline as a whole and for the understanding of American culture, becoming one of the two leading publishers of scholarly work in ethnomusicology.”
–Bruno Nettl, professor emeritus of music and anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“More than any other academic press, the University of Illinois Press has given readers the American people–African Americans, women, immigrants, musicians, singers, and athletes–the people who once stood outside the house of history with their faces pressed against the windows looking in.”
–Randy W. Roberts, Distinguished Professor of History, Purdue University
“The University of Illinois Press has established itself as a leader in the field of U.S. women’s history. Its publications have greatly enriched the field and helped to transform the writing of American history at large. The Press deserves a hearty round of congratulations for its magnificent work.”
–Mari Jo Buhle, William R. Kenan Jr. University Professor and professor of American Civilization and History, Brown University.
“The University of Illinois Press outstrips all publishing venues in the United States in its production of dazzling scholarly books about labor, the left, and African American history and culture. Its perseverance in reissuing so many vital works of fiction and poetry that also speak to these themes has likewise provided an inimitable contribution to which all students of twentieth-century U.S. cultural studies are in debt.”
–Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor, English Literature and American Culture, University of Michigan
“The University of Illinois Press’s consistent support for labor history has been enormously important in expanding the field. It has not only enabled creative young scholars to get their books out but has shaped the horizons of scholarship on the working class.”
–Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of History, Columbia University
“It is indeed a pleasure to congratulate and thank the University of Illinois Press on this important occasion. At a moment when the history of the poor, the working class, and a variety of racial, ethnic, and nationality groups existed in the shadows of academic scholarship, it was the University of Illinois Press that brought these subjects into the mainstream and helped to transform the craft of history, making it a broader and more inclusive enterprise.”
–Joe W. Trotter, Mellon Professor and chair, department of history, Carnegie Mellon University
