I used to have another blog called Immortal Palms, where I posted pop culture reviews and blurbs and stuff. Immortal Palms will stay where it is, but I’d like to start posting that kind of stuff here.
So here’s an awesome new video from Prawn. If you like no-bullshit, OG-style emo, you probably already know about Prawn. If you don’t, you should definitely check them out anyway.
I want to reblog Lisa Hoover’s wonderful post from the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Blog without too much ado. Hoover’s post, “Librarians as Cultural Warriors & Protectors,” delves into Rebecca Knuth’s recent book Libricide to discuss the ways that librarians, archivists, curators, and other information professionals have both resisted and supported censorship. Knuth argues that “libricide” is part of a calculated effort by extremists to destroy a peoples’ culture by undermining its written heritage.
One quick rumination: I was thinking about Pierre Bourdieu while reading the post and it made me agree even more wholeheartedly as I read. In Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu argued that culture is best understood as habitus: the set of strategies, or the “rulebook,” by which people live. If x occurs, our habitus instructs us, do y. For its participants, the habitus is true. This is what troubles so many people about postmodernism. It acknowledges that what is true within one habitus is not true within another. Librarians may or may not choose to worry about truth, but a culture’s texts, in whatever form they take, are critical building blocks of habitus; and, for the culture within which they are embedded, libraries are regarded as repositories of truth. Extremism seeks to undermine truth by attacking existing authorities as well as free thought. If truth and culture are intertwined at the library—and if you’re the kind of person inclined to read the ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Blog, I’m willing to bet you agree that they are—it is no wonder that libraries are often the first target of extremists. Information professionals occupy the vanguard of the fight against extremism.
Here’s a link to the post, once again.
March 2018
Bockstoce, John R. White Fox and Icy Seas in the Western Arctic: The Fur Trade, Transportation, and Change in the Early Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Link
Calloway, Colin. The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Link
Graber, Jennifer. The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Link
Little, Ann. The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Link
Monaco, C.S. The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Link
April 2018
Kracht, Benjmain R. Religious Revitalization among the Kiowas: The Ghost Dance, Peyote, and Christianity. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Link
Nohelani Teves, Stephanie. Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Link (Image)
Schulze, Jeffrey M. Are We Not Foreigners Here?: Indigenous Nationalism in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Link
Sharfstein, Daniel J. Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War. New York: W.W. Norton, 2018. Link
May 2018
Biolsi, Thomas. Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Link
Haynes, Joshua. Patrolling the Border: Theft and Violence on the Creek-Georgia Frontier, 1770-1796. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. Link
June 2018
Archer, Seth. Sharks Upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778–1855. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Link
Sleeper-Smith, Susan. Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Link
Short clip from a ten minute snow flurry this morning in Tallahassee, Florida.
C.B. Crenshaw 