In May 1995, with nothing but a backpack and a vague sense of disquiet, Patrick Dobson left his home and a steady if deadening job in Kansas City, Missouri. Over the next two and a half months he made his way to Helena, Montana, letting chance encounters guide him to a deeper sense of who he was and where he was going. His chronicle of this journey charts his experiences with the seldom-seen people of the small towns, the far-flung outposts, and the Great Plains that make up “our America.”

Ambassadors from Earth relates the story of the first unmanned space probes and planetary explorers—from the Sputnik and Explorer satellites launched in the late 1950s to the thrilling interstellar Voyager missions of the '70s—that yielded some of the most celebrated successes and spectacular failures of the space age.

Football. Far more than a game, America’s favorite spectator sport is an intrinsic part of the nation’s popular culture—a proving ground for high school athletes, a springboard for stars, a multimillion-dollar business, and a vast entertainment enterprise. Football: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture provides a detailed look at America’s pastime through the lens of pop culture, a fascinating A-to-Z inventory of how certain aspects of the game affect and reflect broader society.

Heaven Is a Playground was the first book on the uniquely American phenomenon of urban basketball. Rick Telander, a young photojournalist and former high school basketball player, spent part of the summer of 1973 and all of the summer of 1974 in Brooklyn living the playground life with his subjects at Foster Park in Flatbush. In this third edition, thirty-five years after Telander discovered New York’s kings of basketball, the author provides a retrospective of the game and times.

Tomorrow! is a story of average, nice Americans living in the neighboring cities of Green Prairie and River City in Middle America. It is—until the sudden blitz—the story of the girl next door and her boyfriend; of the accountant who saw what was coming, and the rich old lady who didn’t; of engaging young kids, babies, “hoods,” a bank official who “borrowed” from a customer’s account.

First published in 1934, this collection of tales was recorded and edited by Thelma Adamson (1901–83), a student of Franz Boas and one of the first women to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in the Pacific Northwest. A major contribution to our knowledge of western Washington Salish oral traditions, Folk-Tales of the Coast Salish contains 190 texts from nineteen consultants—most collected in English or in English translation.

Drawing on seventeen years of research into the politics of independent Mexico, Will Fowler provides a revised picture of Santa Anna’s life, with new insights into his activities in his bailiwick of Veracruz and in his numerous military engagements. The Santa Anna who emerges from this book is an intelligent, dynamic, yet reluctant leader, ingeniously deceptive at times, courageous and patriotic at others.

Though George Norris was born and grew up in Ohio, he headed west after earning his law degree and set up practice in Nebraska, eventually settling in McCook. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1902 and the Senate in 1912, Norris was a Republican for most of his life but headed a wing called the Progressives, who believed the government should be more responsive to the needs of ordinary citizens. Fighting Liberal is Norris’s account of his amazing and admirable life from the early impoverished years that informed his populist philosophy to his career in government, where he made great contributions to the nation.

On September 1, 1814, under the command of Lt. Gen. Sir George Prevost, nearly 15,000 veteran British troops, fresh from victory over Napoleon, crossed the Canadian-American border—the largest foreign army ever to invade the United States. Despite the odds, the Americans managed to thwart the world’s strongest naval power in one of the most decisive battles in American history.

Electrifying the Rural American West provides a social and cultural history of rural electrification in the West. Using three case studies in Arizona, Leah S. Glaser details how, when examined from the local level, the process of electrification illustrates the impact of technology on places, economies, and lifestyles in the diverse communities and landscapes of the American West.

During the two centuries following European contact, the world of late prehistoric Mississippian chiefdoms collapsed and Native communities there fragmented, migrated, coalesced, and reorganized into new and often quite different societies. The editors of this volume, Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, argue that such a period and region of instability and regrouping constituted a “shatter zone.”

In 1855 the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw tribes of Oregon signed the Empire Treaty with the United States, which would have provided them rights as federally acknowledged tribes with formal relationships with the U.S. government. The treaty, however, was never ratified by Congress; in fact, the federal government lost the document. In 1956 the U.S. government officially terminated their tribal status as part of a national effort to eliminate the government’s relationship with Indian tribes. In Seeking Recognition, David R. M. Beck examines the termination and eventual restoration of the Confederated Tribes at Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw some thirty years later, in 1984.

Vizenor reveals in Native Liberty the political, poetic, visionary, and ironic insights of personal identity and narratives of cultural sovereignty. He examines singular acts of resistance, natural reason, literary practices, and other strategies of survivance that evade and subvert the terminal notions of tragedy and victimry.

A Native rereading of both British Romanticism and mainstream Euro-American ecocriticism, this cross-cultural transatlantic study of literary imaginings about birds sets the agenda for a more sophisticated and nuanced ecocriticism. Lakota critic Thomas C. Gannon explores how poets and nature writers in Britain and Native America have incorporated birds into their writings.

The Bearer of This Letter illuminates the enduring effects of colonialism by examining the decades-long tension between written words and spoken words in a reservation community. Drawing on archival sources and her own extensive work in the community, Mindy J. Morgan investigates how historical understandings of literacy practices challenge current Indigenous language revitalization efforts on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana.

George Blue Spruce Jr. is recognized as the first American Indian dentist in the United States. His life story reaches back to the ancient Pueblo culture cherished by his grandparents and parents and extends to state-of-the-art dentistry and the current needs of the American Indian people.