Bøger udgivet af University of Arkansas Press

Men of No Reputation is the first account to explore the life of Robert Boatright, one of Middle America's most gifted, but forgotten, confidence men. Boatright's story provides a rare window into the secret world of Missouri's criminal past, which influenced the methods of confidence men across the country. Boatright took the preexisting big-store confidence scheme and perfected it. With the assistance of a talented coterie of confederates known as the Buckfoot Gang, this "dean of modern confidence men" fleeced the gentry of the Midwest on fixed athletic contests in the turn-of-the-century Ozarks. Working in concert with a local bank and an influential Democratic boss, Boatright seemed untouchable. A series of missteps, however, led to a string of court cases across the country that brought his criminal enterprise to an end. And yet, the con continued. Boatright's successor, John C. Mabray, and his cronies, many of whom had been in the Buckfoot Gang, preyed upon victims across North America in one of the largest Midwestern criminal syndicates in history before they were brought to heel. Like the works of Sinclair Lewis, Boatright's story exposes a rift in the wholesome Midwestern stereotype and furthers our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American society.

This collection of letters bears witness to the Civil War of the common soldiers and junior officers of the Army of Tennessee. Brothers Alex and Tom Spence described to their family in detail not only the many battles in which they served, but the hardship of campaigning (they marched literally thousands of miles), the pride of serving in battle-proven units, and the pain of losing comrades to bullets and disease. The Spences were a wealthy family who owned land, slaves, and the main hotel in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. With their successful careers and extensive property, they were among Clark County's most prominent families when the shadow of secession fell across Arkansas. Four years later, Arkansas would be ravaged by war, and Tom and Alex Spence would lie in soldiers' graves, far from home. Mark Christ has assembled their powerful letters from a collection in the Old State House Museum, weaving in other letters from their extended family and friends, brief but thorough introductions to each chapter, and evocative photographs. The story moves chronologically from the outset of war to the final letter from Alex's grieving fiancée.

"Pedaling Resistance examines the relationship between veganism and cycling through a blend of memoir-style recollections and critical engagements with works of cultural and social analysis. Focusing on the intersections among cycling, veganism, animal suffering, environmentalism, class, race, and gender, this essay collection sheds light on themes of everyday resistance and boundary crossing to uncover some of the larger social and political issues at stake in these activities"--

"Wager, Adele Elise Williams's raucous debut, celebrates the fearlessness and determination that can be wrested from strife. Early on, Williams confronts multiple challenges, both personal and communal, including persistent childhood anxieties and stunning neighborhood tragedies ("Ray down the street hung / himself like just-bought bananas needing time"). In the working-class communities she moves among, the poet tangles with her perceived failures as a wayward daughter, recovering addict, and skeptical scholar as she buries friends and lovers along the way"--

"Self-Mythology explores multiraciality and the legacy of exile alongside the poet's uniquely American origin as the only child of political refugees from China and Iran. Keramati navigates her ancestral past while asking what language and poetry can offer to those who exist on the margins of contemporary society"--

"When he died, my brother became the architect of the rest of my life," writes Alison Thumel in Architect, which interweaves poems, lyric essays, and visual art to great emotional effect. In this debut collection, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright become a blueprint for elegy, as Thumel overlays the language of architecture with the language of grief to raze and reconstruct memories, metaphors, and myths. With obsessive and exacting focus, the poet leads us through room after room in a search to answer whether it is possible to rebuild in the wake of loss. Meanwhile, the midwestern landscape beyond these rooms--the same landscape that infuses the low, horizontal forms of Wright's Prairie Style buildings--shapes the figures in Architect as well as their fates: "For years after my brother's death, I collected news articles on people who died young and tragically in landlocked states. Prairie Style deaths--boys sucked down into grain silos or swept up by tornadoes or fallen through a frozen pond. The boys I didn't know, but the landscape I did. The dread of it. How many miles you can look ahead. For how long you see what is coming."

"In 'The Trouble with Light,' Jeremy Michael Clark reflects on the legacy of familial trauma as he delves into questions about belonging, survival, knowledge, and self-discovery in unflinching lyrical poems. Largely set in the poet's hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, Clark's portraits of interiority gracefully juxtapose the sorrows of alienation and self-neglect with the restorative power of human connection"

"Once one of the most Democratic states, Arkansas became ardently Republican in just a few years. While the dramatic shift in the partisan makeup of Arkansas officeholders may appear to have happened almost overnight, the rise of the Republican Party in Arkansas was actually years, if not decades, in the making. From changes in voter preference at the top of the ticket in the 1960s, to generational replacement in Arkansas's political power structure in the 1990s, to a more nationalized and polarized electorate--the ascent of the Republican Party in Arkansas serves as a model for explaining partisan change throughout the country"--

Not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor that drew the United States into World War II, the federal government rounded up more than a hundred thousand people of Japanese descent-both immigrants and native-born citizens-and began one of the most horrific mass-incarceration events in US history. The program tore apart Asian American communities, extracted families from their homes, and destroyed livelihoods as it forced Japanese Americans to various "relocation centers" around the country. Two of these concentration camps-the Jerome and Rohwer War Relocation Centers-operated in Arkansas.This book is a collection of brief memoirs written by former internees of Jerome and Rohwer and their close family members. Here dozens of individuals, almost all of whom are now in their eighties or nineties, share their personal accounts as well as photographs and other illustrations related to their life-changing experiences. The collection, likely to be one of the last of its kind, is the only work composed solely of autobiographical remembrances of life in Jerome and Rohwer, and one of the very few that gathers in a single volume the experiences of internees in their own words.What emerges is a vivid portrait of lives lived behind barbed wire, where inalienable rights were flouted and American values suspended to bring a misguided sense of security to a race-obsessed nation at war. However, in the barracks and the fields, the mess halls and the makeshift gathering places, values of perseverance, tolerance, and dignity-the gaman the internees shared-gave significance to a transformative experience that changed forever what it means to call oneself an American.

Readers, writers, and critics alike look forward to each new collection of Thomas Hauser's articles about today's boxing scene. Reviewing these books, Booklist has proclaimed, "Many journalists have written fine boxing pieces, but none has written as extensively or as memorably as Thomas Hauser. . . . Hauser remains the current champion of boxing. . . . He is a treasure." Hauser's newest collection meets this high standard. The Universal Sport features Hauser's coverage of 2021 and 2022 in boxing. As always, Hauser chronicles the big fights and gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at boxing's biggest stars. He offers a cogent look the rise of women's boxing and shines a penetrating light on the murky world of illegal performance enhancing drugs and financial corruption at the sport's highest levels. He explores how boxing has become a tool in the high-stakes world of "sportswashing" by Saudi Arabia and a flash point for discussions about Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine. The book culminates in a memorable four-part essay on the craft of writing coupled with reflections on Hauser's own induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

They went to Cairo, leaving behind the adobe houses built along the edge of the Nile and the villagers who all knew each other and who had lived on this land for more centuries than their names could count. Behind them, they left the imprint of their footsteps for others who might follow. This family saga begins when Salim, the eldest of three brothers, moves to Cairo at the start of the twentieth century with dreams of opening his own bakery. His decision to leave his ancestral village of Kom Ombo despite his parents' objections reverberates across generations, kicking off a series of migrations that shape the lives of his family and their descendants throughout the decades that follow. These migrations only intensify after the revolution of 1952-with Misha, Salim's eldest grandchild, being the first to flee to "Amreeka," his annual phone calls home becoming briefer and briefer with each passing year. Culminating with the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square, Pauline Kaldas's The Measure of Distance is a detailed portrait of immigration against the backdrop of an Egypt in constant flux and an America that is always falling short of the fantasy. Alternating between tales of those who migrate and those who stay, this expansive novel follows its characters as they determine the course of their lives, often choosing one uncertainty over another as they migrate to new lands or plant their roots more firmly in their homeland.

On the cover: Four Children in a Louisiana Landscape, or Bélizaire and the Frey Children, 1837. Oil on canvas. Attributed to Jacques Amans, Courtesy of Jeremy K. Simien. Even when African Americans were included in portraits, as in the case with Four Children in a Louisiana Landscape, sometimes they were subsequently removed. This work had been owned and kept in storage by the New Orleans Museum of Art since 1972, but in 2004 it was deemed "not relevant" to their mission and deaccessioned. At that time, the painting pictured only three white children, although a shadow of a fourth figure was visible. Subsequent conservation uncovered the titular fourth child: an African American boy leaning against the tree behind the others. Louisiana collector Jeremy K. Simien acquired the painting in 2021, and author Katy Morlas Shannon identified the boy as a fifteen-year-old enslaved house servant named Bélizaire. Bélizaire was born to an enslaved woman named Sally in New Orleans in 1822. Sally and Bélizaire were sold to Frederick Frey, a German merchant and head of Union Bank in New Orleans, in 1828. The portrait was commissioned by Frey in 1837, likely from Jacques Amans, a French portraitist working in New Orleans. Bélizaire was painted over for unknown reasons at some later point. The subsequent uncovering of the figure as well as Bélizaire's story speaks not only to the concealment of enslavement that long occurred in the South, but also to the possibility and imperative of recovery. The urgency of these ideas is now being recognized by major art museums. The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently acquired the painting, and Bélizaire's likeness and history will be featured before an international audience despite one-time attempts to erase him.

Lucile Morris Upton landed her first newspaper job out West in the early 1920s, then returned home to spend half a century reporting on the Ozarks world she knew best. Having come of age just as women gained the right to vote, she took advantage of opportunities that presented themselves in a changing world. During her years as a journalist, Upton rubbed shoulders with presidents, flew with aviation pioneer Wiley Post, covered the worst single killing of US police officers in the twentieth century, wrote an acclaimed book on the vigilante group known as the Bald Knobbers, charted the growth of tourism in the Ozarks, and spearheaded a movement to preserve iconic sites of regional history. Following retirement from her newspaper job, she put her experience to good use as a member of the Springfield City Council and community activist.Told largely through Upton's own words, this insightful biography captures the excitement of being on the front lines of newsgathering in the days when the whole world depended on newspapers to find out what was happening.

"A practical, highly informative, and sympathetic guide."-The Washington PostMost of us will become a caregiver at some point in our lives. And we will assume this role for the most personal reason imaginable: wanting to help someone we love. But we may not know where to start, and we may be afraid of losing ourselves in this daunting task.Former first lady Rosalynn Carter, a longtime advocate for caregivers and mental health, knows firsthand the challenges of this labor of love. Drawing upon her own experiences and those of hundreds of others whose stories she gathered over many decades, Mrs. Carter offers reassuring, practical advice to any caregiver who has faced stress, anxiety, or loneliness.Helping Yourself Help Others, reissued here with a new foreword, is as relevant as ever. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic inspired national conversations about the vast undervaluing of unpaid caregiving, the dangers of burnout, and the merits of self-care for relief, Rosalynn Carter was shining a light on these matters and everything else that caregivers confront. Filled with empathy, this encouraging guide will help you meet a difficult challenge head-on and find fulfillment and empowerment in your caregiving role.

"This whip-smart collection is a playful celebration of feminine power." --Publisher's Weekly "What a beautiful book." > "With the verve of Alice Fulton and the panache of Gerald Stern, Sysko keens into the canon, a welcome voice. Sing, indeed, heavenly muse." > Finalist for the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Selected by Patricia Smith The Daughter of Man follows its unorthodox heroine as she transforms from maiden to warrior--then to queen, maven, and crone--against the backdrop of suburban America from the 1980s to today. In this bold reframing of the hero's journey, L. J. Sysko serves up biting social commentary and humorous, unsparing self-critique while enlisting an eccentric cast that includes Betsy Ross as sex worker, Dolly Parton as raptor, and a bemused MILF who exchanges glances with a young man at a gas station. Sysko's revisions of René Magritte's modernist icon The Son of Man and the paintings of baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi, whose extraordinary talent was nearly eclipsed after she took her rapist to trial, loom large in this multifaceted portrait of womanhood. With uncommon force, The Daughter of Man confronts misogyny and violence, even as it bursts with nostalgia, lust, and poignant humor.

"A memoir infused with both empathy and inquiry."-Wendy J. Fox, Electric LiteratureSarah Neidhardt grew up in the woods. When she was an infant, her parents left behind comfortable, urbane lives to take part in the back-to-the-land movement. They moved their young family to an isolated piece of land deep in the Arkansas Ozarks where they built a cabin, grew crops, and strove for eight years to live self-sufficiently. In this vivid memoir Neidhardt explores her childhood in wider familial and social contexts. Drawing upon a trove of family letters and other archival material, she follows her parents' journey from privilege to food stamps-from their formative youths, to their embrace of pioneer homemaking and rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society-and explores the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s as it was, and as she lived it. A story of strangers in a strange land, of class, marriage, and family in a changing world, Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods is part childhood idyll, part cautionary tale. Sarah Neidhardt reveals the treasures and tolls of unconventional, pastoral lives, and her insightful reflections offer a fresh perspective on what it means to aspire to pre-industrial lifestyles in a modern world.

Why did Winthrop Rockefeller, scion of one of the most powerful families in American history, leave New York for an Arkansas mountaintop in the 1950s? In this richly detailed biography of the former Arkansas governor, John Kirk delves into the historical record to fully unravel that mystery for the first time.

"Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins is a collection of essays from Brooks Blevins that explore southern history and culture using [the] author's native Ozarks region as a focus. From migrant cotton pickers and fireworks peddlers to country store proprietors and shape-note gospel singers, Blevins leaves few stones unturned in his insightful journeys through a landscape 'wedged betwixt and between the South and the Midwest - and grasping for the West to boot"--

Beer Places is, most essentially, a road map for craft beer, taking readers to various locales to discover the beverage's deep connections to place. At another level, Beer Places is an academic analysis of these geographical ties. Collected into sections that address authenticity and revitalization, politics and economics, and collectivity and collaboration, this book blends new research with a series of "postcards": informal conversations and first-person dispatches from the field that transport readers to the spots where pints are shared, networks forged, and spaces defined.With insight from social scientists, beer bloggers, travel writers, and food entrepreneurs who recount their experiences of taprooms, breweries, and bottle shops from North Carolina to Zimbabwe, Beer Places reveals differences in the craft beer scene across multiple geographies. Situating craft beer as an emerging and important component of food studies, the essays in this volume attest to the singular power of craft beer to connect people and places.

"Race and Repast: Foodscapes in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature examines how race relations are expressed through struggles over the meaning of food and access to food in Southern literature. This innovative investigation offers new perspectives on the history of racial conflict in the South while illuminating how the very act of eating together allowed Southerners to cross race and class lines at a time of great strife"--

"Although more than one hundred novels set in the Ozarks were published before it, Thames Ross Williamson's 1933 novel The Woods Colt was the first to achieve notable success both popularly and critically. Written entirely in regional dialect, The Woods Colt is the story of the violent and reckless Clint Morgan, whose attempts to secure love and freedom force him down a path of self-destruction. With an introduction and explanatory notes from Phillip Douglas Howerton, this new edition makes the seminal novel available once more to scholars, regional enthusiasts, and anyone looking for a tale of the Ozark hills"--

This new guidebook includes some of Missouri's most outstanding natural features. Written and photographed by Don Kurz, who reviewed over 1,600 public lands and selected 100 special areas that bring out the very best of Missouri's natural world. In it you will find directions (including GPS coordinates), maps, descriptions, and 118 brilliant color photos to special places that you will want to visit again and again. Prairies, waterfalls, shut-ins, caves, wildlife areas, geologic features, springs, trails, swamps, nature centers, and more are featured! This handy guidebook is perfect for nature lovers, photographers, or anyone wanting to visit the Show-Me state's best scenic attractions.