The Follinglo Dog Book

Arriving in Iowa in what was still the age of wooden equipment and animal power, the Tjernagels witnessed each successive revolution on the land. They built homes and barns, cultivated the land, and encountered every manner of natural disaster from prairie fires to blizzards. And, of course, there are the dogs who shepherd, protect, and even baby-sit the residents of Follinglo Farm.

In this lyrical volume Robert R. Archibald explores a growing crisis of modern America: the dissolution of place that leads to a dangerous rupture of community. Community_born historically within the collective space of the town square where citizens come together to share stories and make meaning of their common histories_is dissipating as Americans are increasingly isolated from that shared space and are being submerged into an individualistic consumer monoculture with disregard for the common good. This volume examines how public history museums and historians can help restore community by offering a source of identity for people and their places, becoming a wellspring of community and an incubator of democracy, a consciousness of connection with a responsibility to those in our past and future. The New Town Square offers its readers a space to understand and celebrate the shared space of community, and is a vital resource for public historians and those interested in restoring the meaning of community.

This Vast Book of Nature is a careful, engaging, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the ways in which the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire---and, by implication, other wild places---have been written into being by different visitors, residents, and developers from the post-Revolutionary era to the days of high tourism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawing on tourist brochures, travel accounts, pictorial representations, fiction and poetry, local histories, journals, and newspapers, Pavel Cenkl gauges how Americans have arranged space for political and economic purposes and identified it as having value beyond the economic. Starting with an exploration of Jeremy Belknap’s 1784 expedition to Mount Washington, which Cenkl links to the origins of tourism in the White Mountains, to the transformation of touristic and residential relationships to landscape, This Vast Book of Nature explores the ways competing visions of the landscape have transformed the White Mountains culturally and physically, through settlement, development, and---most recently---preservation, a process that continues today.

It is 1869 and Ole and Helena Branjord are Norwegian immigrants attempting to make a new life on forty acres of central Iowa farmland. Ole is a kind, gentle man who questions his ability to provide for his family. Helena is pining for a real house, but has sadly learned through her past experiences that promises, no matter how sincere, are never certain. But Ole has lofty dreams to prove all the naysayers wrong and double his farmstead. The Branjord children each possess talents and challenges. Eleven-year-old Oline loves music. Martin is intelligent beyond his eight years. Four-year-old Berent wants to wear pants instead of the dresses Norwegian custom dictates he don every day. Populating the Branjords world are other immigrants that include a giant, strong man who can make a violin sing; a Civil War veteran with disfiguring physical scars; and members of the local Lutheran church determined to save their congregation. But among all the good is one enemy from Helenas past who wants nothing more than to destroy the Branjords. Twedts well-researched novel deserves to be awarded a place next to Rolvaag's work on the book shelves of home, public, and college libraries. It is apparent that Twedt has devoted many years to perfecting his craft as a storyteller. Brad Steiger

In the hot summer of 2004, David Leff floated away from the routine of daily life just as Henry David Thoreau and his brother had done in their own small boat in 1839. Fortified with Thoreau’s observations as revealed in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Leff brought his own concept of mindful deep travel to these same New England waterways. His first-person narrative uses his ecological way of looking, of going deep rather than far, to show that our outward journeys are inseparable from our inward ones. How we see depends on where we are in our lives and with whom we travel. Leff chose his companions wisely. In consecutive journeys his neighbor and friend Alan, a veteran city planner; his son Josh, an energetic eleven-year-old; and his sweetheart Pamela, a compassionate professional caregiver, added their perspectives to Leff’s own experiences as a government official in natural resources policy. Not so much sight seeing as sight seeking, together they explored a geography of the imagination as well as the rich natural and human histories of the rivers and their communities. The heightened awareness of deep travel demands that we immerse ourselves fully in places and realize that they exist in time as well as space. Its mindfulness enriches the experience and makes the voyager worthy of the journey. Leff’s intriguing, contemplative deep travel along these historic rivers presents a methodology for exploration that will enrich any trip.

In the continental United States, rivers serve to connect state to state, interior with exterior, the past to the present, but they also divide places and peoples from one another. These connections and divisions have given rise to a diverse body of literature that explores American nature, ranging from travel accounts of seventeenth-century Puritan colonists to magazine articles by twenty-first-century enthusiasts of extreme sports. Using pivotal American writings to determine both what literature can tell us about rivers and, conversely, how rivers help us think about the nature of literature, The Meaning of Rivers introduces readers to the rich world of flowing water and some of the different ways in which American writers have used rivers to understand the world through which these waters flow. Embracing a hybrid, essayistic form—part literary theory, part cultural history, and part fieldwork—The Meaning of Rivers connects the humanities to other disciplines and scholarly work to the land. Whether developing a theory of palindromes or reading works of American literature as varied as Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and James Dickey’s Deliverance, McMillin urges readers toward a transcendental retracing of their own interpretive encounters. The nature of texts and the nature of “nature” require diverse and versatile interpretation; interpretation requires not only depth and concentration but also imaginative thinking, broad-mindedness, and engaged connection-making. By taking us upstream as well as down, McMillin draws attention to the potential of rivers for improving our sense of place and time.

At the core of this nuanced book is the question that ecocritics have been debating for decades: what is the relationship between aesthetics and activism, between art and community? By using a pastoral lens to examine ten fictional narratives that chronicle the dialogue between human culture and nonhuman nature on the Great Plains, Matthew Cella explores literary treatments of a succession of abrupt cultural transitions from the Euroamerican conquest of the “Indian wilderness” in the nineteenth century to the Buffalo Commons phenomenon in the twentieth. By charting the shifting meaning of land use and biocultural change in the region, he posits this bad land—the arid West—as a crucible for the development of the human imagination. Each chapter deals closely with two novels that chronicle the same crisis within the Plains community. Cella highlights, for example, how Willa Cather reconciles her persistent romanticism with a growing disillusionment about the future of rural Nebraska, how Tillie Olsen and Frederick Manfred approach the tragedy of the Dust Bowl with strikingly similar visions, and how Annie Proulx and Thomas King use the return of the buffalo as the centerpiece of a revised mythology of the Plains as a palimpsest defined by layers of change and response. By illuminating these fictional quests for wholeness on the Great Plains, Cella leads us to understand the intricate interdependency of people and the places they inhabit. Cella uses the term “pastoralism” in its broadest sense to mean a mode of thinking that probes the relationship between nature and culture: a discourse concerned with human engagement—material and nonmaterial—with the nonhuman community. In all ten novels discussed in this book, pastoral experience—the encounter with the Beautiful—leads to a renewed understanding of the integral connection between human and nonhuman communities. Propelling this tradition of bad land pastoralism are an underlying faith in the beauty of wholeness that comes from inhabiting a continuously changing biocultural landscape and a recognition of the inevitability of change. The power of story and language to shape the direction of that change gives literary pastoralism the potential to support an alternative series of ideals based not on escape but on stewardship: community, continuity, and commitment.

Signs orient, inform, persuade, and regulate. They help give meaning to our natural and human-built environment, to landscape and place. In Signs in America’s Auto Age, cultural geographer John Jakle and historian Keith Sculle explore the ways in which we take meaning from outdoor signs and assign meaning to our surroundings—the ways we “read” landscape. With an emphasis on how the use of signs changed as the nation’s geography reorganized around the coming of the automobile, Jakle and Sculle consider the vast array of signs that have evolved since the beginning of the twentieth century.