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  Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition

  Eric Burin

  During the latter half of 2024, with the United States amid unchartered waters, the Revised and Expanded Edition of Picking the President was assembled (like the first edition had been in 2017) to promote understanding of the Electoral College. To this end, Part I (“The First Edition of Picking the President”) consists of the first edition’s Preface, Introduction, and fourteen essays. Part II (“New Perspectives on the Electoral College”) unveils a new Prelude, a new Introduction, and fifteen new essays. Part III (“Resources”) features fifty items, including the complete debate on the subject at the Constitutional Convention, which illuminate the creation, ratification, and early evolution of the United States’ presidential election system. In providing an expansive view of the Electoral College, the Revised and Expanded Edition of Picking the President aims to promote understanding of this system as the United States heads still further into the unknown.

  With new contributions by Robert M. Alexander, Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon, Gary Bugh, Eric Burin, Jane E. Calvert, Wilfred U. Codrington III, Heather Cox Richardson, George C. Edwards III, Mark Stephen Jendrysik, John P. Kaminski, Randall M. Miller, Jack N. Rakove, Michael T. Rogers, Paul Schumaker, Michael H. Taylor, and Rosemarie Zagarri.

  Eric Burin is Professor of History at the University of North Dakota, author of Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society, and editor of the open-access anthology, Protesting on Bended Knee: Race, Dissent, and Patriotism in 21st Century America (2018).

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  An Archaeology of the Red River of the North

  Michael G. Michlovic

  An Archaeology of the Red River of the North offers an expansive survey of the indigenous cultures and peoples in the region of the Red River from the recession of Lake Agassiz around 9000 years ago to the intrusion of the Europeans. Beginning with an overview of the practice of regional archaeology and a justification for its pursuit, Michael Michlovic uses a traditional culture-historical sequence as a framework to incorporate archaeological studies from the late nineteenth century to the present time. Relevant research in fields such as ethnohistory, ethnography, radiometric dating, paleoecology, and geomorphology are used throughout the presentation. Dozens of individual sites and survey projects are summarized and take their place in an overview of the characteristic features of past times, from the earliest hunting and gathering cultures to later farming societies.

  Michael Michlovic is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he taught from 1975 to 2015. His field studies focused on the Red and Sheyenne River Valleys of northwestern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota. He served previously as president of the Council for Minnesota Archaeology, and as a member of the Minnesota state review board for the National Register of Historic Places. He is a past editor of The Minnesota Archaeologist, and currently is on the board of the Minnesota Archaeological Society. He is co-author with G.R. Holley of the The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota volume, Archaeological Cultures of the Sheyenne Bend.

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  Grand Forks at 150: The First Fifty

  Nikki Berg Burin

  2024 marks the 150th anniversary of white settlers platting the city of Grand Forks, North Dakota which in 1874 opened the townsite of Grand Forks to legal settlement. While the city of Grand Forks wasn’t officially incorporated until 7 years later, 2024 nevertheless begins a period of reflection on the history, the present, and the future of the city.
  
  As part of this effort to think about the legacy of the founding of Grand Forks, the University of North Dakota Department of History and American Indian Studies collaborated with the Grand Forks Historic Preservation Commission to produce a series of short essays on the history of the city. Each essay is, appropriately, 150 words and we present here the first group of 50 essays written by UND students, faculty, and community members. Over the next few years, we plan to continue release 100 more of these short essays for a total of 150!

  
  The goal of this project is to represent a plurality of voices and perspectives on the history of Grand Forks. In the fifty essays presented here, authors reflect on events as recent as mid-century school buildings and the Valley School referendum and as distant as the founders of the city, the first women jurors, and roads built over in the 1920s leaving behind only phantom sidewalks.

  Right now, we are offering only a small sample to kick off this project, to whet your appetite for more, and hopefully to encourage as many different voices to contribute essays to this collection as it grows. We are certain that the final product will be a landmark that reflects on Grand Forks’ past, captures the perspectives of the present, and offers a foundation for new futures.

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  The Muslims of Darürrahat

  Ismail Gaspirali

  In Ismail Gaspirali’s 1890s story The Muslims of Darürrahat, (the Peaceful Country) the not entirely intrepid narrator Mullah Abbas Efendi arrives in the imaginary land of Darürrahat. He has been led there by mysteriously appearing guides, who take him from Alhambra palace in Andalusia through an underground tunnel, where he emerges in Darürrahat to find a Muslim utopian country filled with progressive people and dotted with beautiful Islamic architecture and technologically advanced cities. As in most works of utopian imagination which are also aimed squarely at social critique of the author’s present day, there is nothing simple about this world or this literary work.

  The Muslims of Darürrahat first appeared in serialized form in the widely circulated Central Asian newspaper Tercüman, which was edited and largely written by Crimean Tatar educator, journalist and Muslim reformer Ismail Gaspirali. This is the full story’s first appearance in English, translated by Çiğdem Pala Mull and the centerpiece of a book edited by Sharon Carson to include introductory materials, a contextual timeline, and three interpretive essays exploring the story as a work of nineteenth century utopian imagination which has some compelling resonance in our time.

  Çiğdem Pala Mull is Professor of English and the Chair of the Western Languages and Literatures Department at Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University, Turkey. She is also the translator of Harold Bloom’s Western Canon.

  Sharon Carson, is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Dakota, where she teaches American literature, transnational studies, and comparative religions and literature.

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  Corinthian Countrysides: Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey

  David K. Pettegrew

  Corinthian Countrysides presents the datasets, analysis, and results of a large-scale intensive survey in the eastern territory of Corinth between 1997 and 2003. Carried out under a permit of the Greek Ministry of Culture granted through the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey investigated the Isthmus west of the Corinth Canal, a highly-connected transport corridor and densely settled area from prehistory to the present day, and sampled parts of the mountainous and coastal districts of the southeast Corinthia. Researchers recorded a rich body of evidence for habitation and land use covering all periods of human history and documented a materially abundant and varied landscape with few parallels in Greece or the Aegean basin.

  In Corinthian Countrysides, David K. Pettegrew offers the first comprehensive introduction to the project’s history, methods, analyses, and results in connection with primary online datasets published at Open Context. He provides a critical overview of the project’s major discoveries about the history of the Corinthian countryside and a case study of the new kind of data-centered distributional survey that has proliferated in the eastern Mediterranean in recent decades. Pettegrew shows how artifact-level survey and data-centered analyses open up new ways of rethinking Greek landscapes in terms of their most basic fundamental elements—the atomic traces of objects and features in distribution. In his outline of methods, categories, datasets, and source criticism, Pettegrew prepares readers to experiment, tinker, and play with open data as a process of making meaning about the Greek countryside.

  Corinthian Countrysides comprises an important critical edition of a new archaeological resource for understanding the history of Corinth’s territory.

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  Big Pandemic on the Prairie: Spanish Flu in North Dakota

  Christopher Neal Price

  Big Pandemic on the Prairie: The Spanish Flu in North Dakota is the first book-length account of North Dakota’s experience with one of the deadliest pandemics in history. Set against the backdrop of the waning days of World War I, Big Pandemic on the Prairie tells the story of another conflagration that began along the front lines before spreading to the farthest reaches of the globe. By late September 1918, the Spanish flu began afflicting North Dakotans. Authorities in the state instituted restrictions that affected the daily lives of citizens, including limits on public gatherings and the closing of schools and churches, interventions that resemble those enforced during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. These attempts at mitigating the spread of the flu hit just as politicians began campaigning in a pivotal election that gave full control of the state government to the upstart Nonpartisan League. North Dakota’s major newspapers provided a day-to-day accounting of the flu’s spread through the state. North Dakotans experienced the Spanish flu in varied ways.

  Native Americans experienced strict quarantines. Nurses provided medicine and sustenance for those afflicted in both urban and rural areas, and purveyors of patent medicines attempted to profit. Big Pandemic on the Prairie traces the history of the disease as it coursed through North Dakota and shaped the history of the state and its communities.

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  Israel, Palestine, and the Trolley Problem: On the Futility of the Search for the Moral High Ground

  Jack Russell Weinstein

  Arguments about Israel and Palestine are almost always accusatory and polemical. Rather than learning from one another, opponents jockey for the moral high ground trying to find that one attack they believe proves their side to be completely on the right, without compromise. This means Israel’s advocates dismiss Palestinian land claims without due consideration and Pro-Palestinian voices falsely accuse Israel of the most heinous modern crimes: colonialism, genocide, and apartheid. None of this is productive or healthy.

  In Israel, Palestine, and the Trolley Problem: On the Futility of the Search for the Moral High Ground, philosopher Jack Russell Weinstein interweaves philosophy, history, politics, and personal experience to expose the argumentative mistakes we all make too often. Mapping out moral psychology—how we actually make moral decisions—and using the famous Trolley Problem as a metaphor, Weinstein paves the way for a new, more empathetic exchange of ideas about today’s most puzzling moral dilemma: how to find peace in the Middle East.

  Jack Russell Weinstein is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Philosophy in Public Life at the University of North Dakota.

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  Archaeologies of Roads

  Tuna Kalaycı

  What happens if we think of roads not only as a static archaeological object but as a dynamic and complex phenomenon?

  Inspired by this question, “Archaeologies of Roads” brings together various studies spanning diverse landscapes and epochs. The central premise of the book is to reveal the complexity of the road, be it a modern or an ancient one. The starting point is that the road is not only a container for action but also the action itself; roads are perpetual works in progress, continually shaping and being shaped by the world around them.

  Authors contribute with road studies from different contexts, ranging from Bronze Age Pontic–Caspian steppes to Roman Iberia and from Ottoman Anatolia to modern-day China. The book has three sections: routes, methods, and metaphors and constructing histories, reflecting the diversity in and of road studies. As the chapters interweave, they collectively challenge approaches to understanding roads and hopefully inspire readers to transcend conventional boundaries of identification, mapping, and dating of roads. Reflecting the inherent diversity of studying of roads —as a phenomenon, the title of the book calls for many ways of doing road archaeology.

  Tuna Kalaycı is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He specializes in remote sensing and GIS applications in archaeology. He received his PhD in 2013 from the University of Arkansas, US. Previously he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the Consiglio delle Ricerche Nazionale (CNR, IBAM), Italy, and Durham University, UK. He also worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas (IMSFORTH), Greece.

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  A Physician’s Journey

  Robert A. Kyle

  Regrettably, I did not know three of my four grandparents.

  So begins A Physician’s Journey, a quintessential modern memoir. Beginning in the tradition of the prairie reverie with snow-filled winters and single room school houses and ending with a litany of late-life accolades, Dr. Robert Kyle details his life from the farm, to smoke jumper school, to the University of North Dakota, to Northwestern Medical School, the US Air Force and eventually a career at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic.

  At the Mayo Clinic he met his wife, Charlene, pioneered new treatments for cancer, and started his family. The story as Dr. Kyle tells is unique, but somehow still familiar and endearing. By drawing us into his life and accomplishments, we encounter a narrative suffused with the memories of an American experience that through his work, interests, and travels had a global reach.

  “This is the compelling story of a passionate observer — whether of medical minutia or of the wider outside world. Fortunately, Dr Kyle has remarkable powers of recall and there is nothing vague or tentative about the vivid memories that are presented. They constitute a hugely entertaining read. Yet throughout the work an endearing modesty, coupled with a prevailing decency, shines through.”

  Michael York

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  Campus Building

  Shilo Virginia Previti, Grant McMillan, and Samuel Amendolar

  This book celebrates Merrifield Hall on the campus of the University of North Dakota. This century-old building is now enduring a radical renovation designed to keep it relevant for the next generation of students on the UND campus.

  The editors’ goal with this book was both to respect Merrifield Hall’s past and look forward to its now in-process future. It is our hope that this book will offer a space of thoughts, memories, fragments, criticisms, and jokes for all those who have walked the halls of this building and for all those who may one day dance—intellectually and materially—its halls, in whatever future form(s) those halls take.

  Interviews, historical essays, archival illustrations, poetry, creative essays, and photographs from students, faculty, and other denizens of Merrifield Hall enliven this intellectually and visually stunning celebration of one of the great buildings on the University of North Dakota campus. Campus Building stands somewhere between a raucous tribute concert and a love letter to the role that buildings play in our experience of a place, an institution, and a campus.

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  Sun Ra Sundays

  Rodger Coleman

  In his time on planet Earth, the iconoclastic musician, visionary, big band leader, and composer Sun Ra left behind a treasure trove of music—studio recordings, live performances, rehearsals—many of them appearing on his homegrown label Saturn. In Sun Ra Sundays, Rodger Coleman examines over 130 of these recordings, both released and unreleased, placing them in histor- ical and biographical context and giving detailed critical analyses of the music. Originally appearing on Coleman’s blog NuVoid, all of the essays have been updated, corrected, and arranged in discographical order. Sun Ra Sundays is a major work of criticism, a goldmine of information for both the novice and the experienced Ra fanatic (and everyone in between).

  ~

  Some of the best research and historical commentary are done by scholars without funding—they do it as a labor love. They are driven by curiosity, passion, and a high regard for the subject matter. That’s how Rodger Coleman’s Sun Ra Sundays evolved. The opinions herein are exhaustive, authoritative, and worth reading. They are a valuable addition to Sun Ra scholarship … Thank you Mr. Coleman for your monumental journalistic commitment. I learned a lot from these posts.

  Irwin Chusid, Administrator for the Sun Ra Estate

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  Archaeological Cultures of the Sheyenne Bend

  Michael G. Michlovic and George R. Holley

  This volume presents the results of several decades of archaeological research in the Sheyenne Bend region of southeastern North Dakota. Piecing together evidence from disparate field projects, along with the work done by previous researchers, Archaeological Cultures of the Sheyenne Bend offers a status report on the pre-European era cultures of southeastern North Dakota. Presented in ordinary language, this book constitutes the essential details to make sense of the regional archaeological record.

  Michael Michlovic is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Minne- sota State University Moorhead. He is a former editor of the Minne- sota Archaeologist and past president of the Council of Minnesota Archaeology.

  George R. Holley is currently Emeritus Professor, Minnesota State University Moorhead. He is presently working on a Handbook for Minnesota Precontact Ceramics.

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  The Library of Chester Fritz

  Brian Urlacher

  Time is short!

  Fate has entangled a library, a businessman, and the future of humanity. A trail of documents left behind by an eccentric businessman, traveler, and philanthropist Chester Fritz is the only way to understand the urgent danger. This book brings together Chester Fritz’s journals and follows his travels through war torn China and his ascent to the heights of global capitalism.

  As World War II plunges the world into chaos, Fritz and his traveling companions wrestle with what to do and what forces are too dangerous or too dark for humanity to wield. But something must be done, and the decision will fall to Chester Fritz.

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  Backstories: The Kitchen Table Talk Cookbook

  Cynthia Prescott and Maureen Sherrard Thompson

  Sharing recipes is a form of intimate conversation that nourishes body and soul, family and community. Backstories: The Kitchen Table Talk Cookbook integrates formal scholarship with informal reflections, analyses of recipe books with heirloom recipes, and text with images to emphasize the ways that economics, politics, and personal meaning come together to shape our changing relationships with food. By embracing elements of history, rural studies, and women’s studies, this volume offers a unique perspective by relating food history with social dynamics. It is sure to inspire eclectic dining and conversations.

  Cynthia C. Prescott is Professor of History at the University of North Dakota and an occasional baker. Her research focuses on portrayals of rural women in cultural memory.

  Maureen Sherrard Thompson is a Ph.D. candidate at Florida International University. Her dissertation focuses on business, environmental, and gender perspectives associated with the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century seed industry.

  With contributions by: Linda Ambrose, Samantha K. Ammons, Jenny Barker Devine, Nikki Berg Burin, Lynne Byall Benson, Eli Bosler, Carla Burgos, Joseph Cates, Diana Chen, Myrtle Dougall, Egge, Margaret Thomas Evans, Dee Garceau, Tracey Hanshew, Kathryn Harvey, Mazie Hough, Sarah Kesterson, Marie Kenny, Hannah Peters Jarvis, Katherine Jellison, M. Jensen, Cherisse Jones-Branch, Katie Mayer, Amy L. McKinney, Diane McKenzie, Krista Lynn Minnotte, Elizabeth H. Morris, Sara E. Morris, Mary Murphy, Stephanie Noell, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Virginia Scharff, Rebecca Sharpless, Rachel Snell, Joan Speyer, Pamela Snow Sweetser, Rebecca Shimoni Stoil, Erna van Duren, Audrey Williams, Catharine Anne Wilson, Jean Wilson.

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  Mindful Wandering: Nature and Global Travel through the Eyes of a Farmgirl Scientist

  Rebecca J. Romsdahl

  Mindful Wandering is an inspiring blend of memoir, travelogue, and environmental manifesto. As a translational ecologist, Rebecca Romsdahl is trained to ask critical questions about how we can improve our human relationships with the natural world for a sustainable, resilient future. As a farmgirl, she learned how to observe nature and life through the changing seasons. In this collection of essays spanning two decades, Romsdahl weaves these ideas together as she travels our changing world. From a Minnesota farm to the mountains of Peru and the edge of the Sahara Desert, she explores strategies for sustainability and resilience, and advocates that we (especially those of us privileged enough to travel) must expand our mindful considerations to include all the other inhabitants of this beautiful Earth. Romsdahl practices, and preaches, mindful wandering to reduce her impacts on the natural environment, and to encourage us all to be better global citizens. She implores us, through the eyes of a farmgirl scientist, to ask soul-searching questions: How do we reconnect with the local, seasonal rhythms of life, while learning how to care about the whole Earth as our home?

  Rebecca J. Romsdahl, PhD, is a translational ecologist, educator, writer, and professor in the Department of Earth System Science & Policy at the University of North Dakota. Her research and teaching examine links between social, ecological, and policy factors when scientists, stakeholders, and decision makers work together to solve environmental problems.

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  Deserted Villages: Perspectives from the Eastern Mediterranean

  Rebecca M. Seifried and Deborah E. Brown Stewart

  Deserted Villages: Perspectives from the Eastern Mediterranean is a collection of case studies examining the abandonment of rural settlements over the past millennium and a half, focusing on modern-day Greece with contributions from Turkey and the United States. Unlike other parts of the world, where deserted villages have benefited from decades of meticulous archaeological research, in the eastern Mediterranean better-known ancient sites have often overshadowed the nearby remains of more recently abandoned settlements. Yet as the papers in this volume show, the tide is finally turning toward a more engaged, multidisciplinary, and anthropologically informed archaeology of medieval and post-medieval rural landscapes.

  The inspiration for this volume was a two-part colloquium organized for the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in San Francisco. The sessions were sponsored by the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology Interest Group, a rag-tag team of archaeologists who set out in 2005 with the dual goals of promoting the study of later material and cultural heritage and opening publication venues to the fruits of this research. The introduction to the volume reviews the state of the field and contextualizes the archaeological understanding of abandonment and post-abandonment as ongoing processes. The nine, peer reviewed chapters, which have been substantially revised and expanded since the colloquium, offer unparalleled glimpses into how this process has played out in different places. In the first half, the studies focus on long-abandoned sites that have now entered the archaeological record. In the second half, the studies incorporate archival analysis and ethnographic interviews—alongside the archaeologists’ hyper-attention to material culture—to examine the processes of abandonment and post-abandonment in real time.

  Edited by Rebecca M. Seifried and Deborah E. Brown Stewart.

  With contributions from Ioanna Antoniadou, Todd Brenningmeyer, William R. Caraher, Marica Cassis, Timothy E. Gregory, Miltiadis Katsaros, Kostis Kourelis, Anthony Lauricella, Dimitri Nakassis, David K. Pettegrew, Richard Rothaus, Guy D. R. Sanders, Isabel Sanders, Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, Olga Vassi, Bret Weber, and Miyon Yoo.

  Rebecca M. Seifried is the Geospatial Information Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

  Deborah E. Brown Stewart is Head of the Penn Museum Library at the University of Pennsylvania.

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  Sixty Years of Boom and Bust: The Impact of Oil in North Dakota, 1958-2018

  Kyle Conway

  In the 1950s, North Dakota experienced its first oil boom in the Williston Basin, on the western side of the state. The region experienced unprecedented social and economic changes, which were carefully documented in a 1958 report by four researchers at the University of North Dakota. Since then, western North Dakota has undergone two more booms, the most recent from 2008 to 2014. Sixty Years of Boom and Bust republishes the 1958 report and updates its analysis by describing the impact of the latest boom on the region’s physical geography, politics, economics, and social structure.

  Sixty Years of Boom and Bust addresses topics as relevant today as they were in 1958: the natural and built environment, politics and policy, crime, intergroup relations, and access to housing and medical services. In addition to making hard-to-find material readily available, it examines an area shaped by resource booms and busts over the course of six decades. As a result, it provides unprecedented insight into the patterns of develop- ment and the roots of the challenges the region has faced.

  Kyle Conway is an associate professor of communication at the University of Ottawa.

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  Visualizing Votive Practice: Exploring Limestone and Terracotta Sculpture from Athienou-Malloura through 3D Models

  Derek B. Counts, Erin Walcek Averett, Kevin Garstki, and Michael K. Toumazou

  Visualizing Votive Practice is an innovative, open-access, digital monograph that explores the limestone and terracotta sculptures excavated from a rural sanctuary at the site of Athienou-Malloura (Cyprus) by the Athienou Archaeological Project. Chapters on the archaeology of the site, the historiography of Cypriot sculpture, and perspectives on archaeological visualization provide context for the catalogue of 50 representative examples of votive sculpture from the sanctuary. The catalogue not only includes formal and contextual information for each object, but also embeds 3D models directly onto the page. Readers can not only view, but also manipulate, measure, zoom, and rotate each model. Additionally, links at the bottom of each entry unleash high-resolution models with accompanying metadata on the Open Context archaeological data publishing platform and on via the Sketchfab 3D viewing platform as well. This innovative monograph is aimed at a variety of audiences, from Mediterranean archaeologists and students to specialists interested in 3D visualization techniques.

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  DATAM: Digital Approaches to Teaching the Ancient Mediterranean

  Sebastian Heath

  DATAM: Digital Approaches to Teaching the Ancient Mediterranean provides a series of new critical studies that explore digital practices for teaching the Ancient Mediterranean world at a wide range of institutions and levels. These practical examples demonstrate how gaming, coding, immersive video, and 3D imaging can bridge the disciplinary and digital divide between the Ancient world and contemporary technology, information literacy, and student engagement. While the articles focus on Classics, Ancient History, and Mediterranean archaeology, the issues and approaches considered throughout this book are relevant for anyone who thinks critically and practically about the use of digital technology in the college level classroom.

  DATAM features contributions from Sebastian Heath, Lisl Walsh, David Ratzan, Patrick Burns, Sandra Blakely, Eric Poehler, William Caraher, Marie-Claire Beaulieu and Anthony Bucci as well as a critical introduction by Shawn Graham and preface by Society of Classical Studies Executive Director Helen Cullyer.

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  One Hundred Voices: Harrisburg’s Historic African American Community, 1850-1920

  Calobe Jackson Jr., Katie Wingert McArdle, David Pettegrew, and Lenwood Sloan

  In 2020, a coalition of citizens, organizers, legislators, and educators came together to commemorate the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments by establishing a new monument in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This would be a memorial dedicated to the capital city’s significant African American community and its historic struggle for the vote. The Commonwealth Monument, located on the Irvis Equality Circle on the South Lawn of Pennsylvania’s State Capitol Grounds, features a bronze pedestal inscribed with one hundred names of change agents who pursued the power of suffrage and citizenship between 1850 and 1920.

  This book is a companion to this monument and tells the stories of those one hundred freedom seekers, abolitionists, activists, suffragists, moralists, policemen, masons, doctors, lawyers, musicians, poets, publishers, teachers, preachers, housekeepers, janitors, and business leaders, among many others. In their committed advocacy for freedom, equality, and justice, these inspiring men and women made unique and lasting contributions to the standing and life of African Americans—and, indeed, the political power of all Americans—within their local communities and across the country.

  Calobe Jackson, Jr., is an historian of Harrisburg African American studies, Katie Wingert McArdle is a writer and researcher currently serving as the head swim coach at Dickinson College, and David Pettegrew is a professor of history at Messiah University.

  ~

  This book emerged at the intersection of the Commonwealth Monument Project (for more on that go here) and the Digital Harrisburg project (for more on that go here). This work is continuing. For example, check out the work of the Digital Harrisburg team discussing the region’s difficult history of racial injustice here.

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  Failing Gloriously and Other Essays

  Shawn Graham

  Please, you gotta help me. I’ve nuked the university.

  Failing Gloriously and Other Essays documents Shawn Graham’s odyssey through the digital humanities and digital archaeology against the backdrop of the 21st-century university. At turns hilarious, depressing, and inspiring, Graham’s book presents a contemporary take on the academic memoir, but rather than celebrating the victories, he reflects on the failures and considers their impact on his intellectual and professional development. These aren’t heroic tales of overcoming odds or paeans to failure as evidence for a macho willingness to take risks. They’re honest lessons laced with a genuine humility that encourages us to think about making it safer for ourselves and others to fail.

  A foreword from Eric Kansa and an afterword by Neha Gupta engage the lessons of Failing Gloriously and consider the role of failure in digital archaeology, the humanities, and social sciences.

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  Dakota Datebook: North Dakota Stories from Prairie Public

  David Haeselin

  Prairie Public’s beloved Dakota Datebook radio series is now in book form! The students of the University of North Dakota’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing program combed the archives and selected 365 of their favorites for this endearing, compelling, and humorous collection. North Dakota’s history includes many strange stories of eccentric towns, unforgettable animals, war heroes, crafty criminals, and various colorful characters. Read all about them with this Dakota Datebook.

  Published in collaboration with Prairie Public Broadcasting, Inc.

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  Protesting on Bended Knee: Race, Dissent and Patriotism in 21st Century America

  Eric Burin

  Protesting on Bended Knee eyes the modern crusade for racial equality through the prism of the demonstrations associated with Colin Kaepernick, a professional football player who in 2016 began kneeling during the national anthem to draw attention to discrimination and injustice. A diverse array of thirty-one authors explain in brief essays what they see in the protests; collectively, they describe where the demonstrations fit within Americans’ quest to form “a more perfect union”; the legal landscape of dissent; the revival of athlete-activists; the tactics of protesters and counter-tactics of their opponents; and the perspective of others—reporters, coaches, players, and fans—“in the arena.” Their observations, along with an extensive Introduction by historian Eric Burin, provide a nearly contemporaneous account of the latest chapter in a freedom struggle as old as America itself.

  Eric Burin is Professor of History at the University of North Dakota, and author of Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (2005) and editor of Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College (2016).

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  The Old Church on Walnut Street

  Chris Price

  In the late 1800s, Norwegian immigrants began flooding into the Red River Valley. As they moved into the Grand Forks area, they brought their Old World folkways and religious practices. On the corner of Third and Walnut, Norwegian Lutherans built a small sanctuary to house their services.

  The building mirrored the simple worship of the Hauge Synod, the organization to which this congregation belonged. After merging with two other Norwegian church- es in town, the old Trini Lutheran structure passed into the hands of the Grand Forks Church of God, a congregation that echoed the revival fires of the Second Great Awakening. This is the story of a church building and the two assemblies that utilized it over a 100-year period.

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  Codex

  Micah Bloom

  Micah Bloom’s Codex examines the fate of books in the aftermath of the 2011 Minot flood. It is an ambitious project that flows across a wide range of media (digital text, video, hardcover, and paperback), embraces archaeological sensibilities, and speaks simultaneously to universal and profoundly local experiences.

  This is the digital version of the book released in 2017 by The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota (http://thedigitalpress.org/) as a numbered, large-format, print version combining Micah Bloom’s photography with nine new essays inspired by Codex. This digital text is both a stand alone book and a companion to two versions of a film (40 minutes: https://commons.und.edu/press-media/1 and 20 minutes: https://commons.und.edu/press-media/2) and a trade paperback.