Behind the Book

By: New Books Network
  • Summary

  • Interviews with University of Nebraska Press authors.
    New Books Network
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Episodes
  • Yolonda Youngs, "Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
    Oct 9 2024
    Perhaps no American landscape is as iconic as the rainbow rocks of Arizona's Grand Canyon. Yet, as the geographer Yolonda Youngs argues, the Grand Canyon many people think they know is but one sliver of the story of the wider Grand Canyon as a historical and physical place. In Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon (U Nebraska Press, 2024), Youngs, a Cal State - San Bernardino professor, tracks the history of the canyon from the perspective of spatial, physical, and visual culture studies. In doing so, she shows how the ways we think of a place shape how humans use that place. In the case of the Grand Canyon, that means the "classic" perspective that people recognize of the canyon from the south rim, means that changes to the riparian landscape hundreds of feet below often go unnoticed. Wider changes in American visual culture, including the development of postcards, film, and television, also shaped tourist expectations - visitors expecting to see rapids, for instance, rather than the fern groves and waterfalls which also form critical parts of the wider Grand Canyon environment. As the cliche goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and in the example of the Grand Canyon, those same storytelling pictures also shape use in ways that continue up through the present day.
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Waitman Wade Beorn, "Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
    Sep 27 2024
    Waitman Wade Beorn's book Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) tells for the first time the history of the Janowska camp in Lviv, Ukraine. Located in a city with the third-largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe, Janowska remains one of the least-known sites of the Holocaust, despite being one of the deadliest. Simultaneously a prison, a slave labor camp, a transit camp to the gas chambers, and an extermination site, this hybrid camp played a complex role in the Holocaust. Based on extensive archival research, Between the Wires explores the evolution and the connection to Lviv of this rare urban camp. Waitman Wade Beorn reveals the exceptional brutality of the SS staff alongside an almost unimaginable will to survive among prisoners facing horrendous suffering, whose resistance included an armed uprising. This integrated chronicle of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders follows the history of the camp into the postwar era, including attempts to bring its criminals to justice
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    1 hr and 29 mins
  • David Kroening Seitz, "A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
    Sep 20 2024
    A different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still reeling from a genocidal occupation. The crew was led by a reluctant Black American commander and an extraterrestrial first officer who had until recently been an anticolonial revolutionary. DS9 extended Star Trek’s tradition of critical social commentary but did so by transgressing many of Star Trek’s previous taboos, including religion, money, eugenics, and interpersonal conflict. DS9 imagined a twenty-fourth century that was less a glitzy utopia than a critical mirror of contemporary U.S. racism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy. Thirty years after its premiere, DS9 is beloved by critics and fans but remains marginalised in scholarly studies of science fiction. Drawing on cultural geography, Black studies, and feminist and queer studies, A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) by Dr. David Seitz is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to a critical interpretation of DS9’s allegorical world-building. If DS9 has been vindicated aesthetically, this book argues that its prophetic, place-based critiques of 1990s U.S. politics, which deepened the foundations of many of our current crises, have been vindicated politically, to a degree most scholars and even many fans have yet to fully appreciate. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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    59 mins

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