By Dawn Durante, Acquisitions Editor It is that time of year again! The NWSA/UIP First book prize submission deadline is June 1. This prize seeks the best dissertation or first […]
Release Party: Game Faces
Sports figures have a public profile once reserved for the likes of reigning monarchs and movie stars. In the new UIP book Game Faces, Sarah K. Fields looks at six people faced […]
Release Party: Cold War Games
Olympic advertising is in full swing. It is a good time to recall that, not long ago, an Olympic year meant far more than corporate tie-ins and moody video of winsome young […]
200 Years of Illinois: The Great Depression Is our dinner
May 20, 1935 proved that budget impasses have played a part in Illinois history for a long time. That day, the papers printed warnings that over a million state residents […]
Q&A with Sex Testing author Lindsay Parks Pieper
Lindsay Parks Pieper is an assistant professor of sport management at Lynchburg College. She answered some questions about her book Sex Testing: Gender Policing in Women’s Sports. Q: Given the colorful […]
An often overlooked observance
In 2015, the State of Illinois designated May 19 as Malcolm X Day. It doesn’t always show up on the list of official state holidays, interestingly enough, perhaps due to […]
Release Party: Taste of the Nation
During the Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) dispatched scribes to sample the fare at group eating events like church dinners, political barbecues, and clambakes. Its America Eats project sought […]
200 Years of Illinois: Near and Deere
Fleeing debt, John Deere made his way from Vermont to Illinois with a dream: to earn big money making tools. The blacksmith settled in the charmingly-named Grand Detour, Illinois, and […]
RIP Michael S. Harper
Michael S. Harper had a claim on the title of poet-historian, for he drew on the vast histories of African Americans as well as the United States to create works […]
Q&A with Taste of the Nation author Camille Bégin
Camille Bégin is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. She answered some questions about her book Taste of […]
Pump it up with Walt Whitman
The well-read are abuzz over Walt Whitman’s recently discovered journalistic work Manly Health and Training. Published in an obscure newspaper in 1858, Whitman’s dive into the medical science and ubiquitous quackery of […]
Throwbacklist Thursday: The Stories We Tell
Humanity has undoubtedly told stories since forever. Possibly our ancestors acted or danced them before speech found its way into our brains. Writing brought religious texts and Gilgamesh but even […]