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New Special Collections Titles for October-December 2022

by Dylan McDonald on 2023-01-25T16:58:00-07:00 | 0 Comments

Special Collections added the following 11 titles to ASC's holdings during the fourth quarter of 2022. The list is a sample of purchased and donated publications and while not exhaustive, is meant to highlight recent acquisitions. For a full list of Special Collections titles, please search PRIMO, the library’s catalog.

Cover ArtBits and Bridles: An Encyclopedia by Gerhard A. Malm
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating SF309.9 .M35 1996
ISBN: 9780965281809
Publication Date: 1996
This reference book by veterinarian Gerhard A. Malm is intended to familiarize the reader with "bitting," one method of controlling a horse. The beginning reader as well as the professional trainer will find valuable information as to the "why's" and "how's" of various bitting techniques and bits.
Cover ArtDancing on the Stones: Selected Essays by John T. Nichols
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating PS3564.I274 D36 2000
ISBN: 9780826321828
Publication Date: 2000
"Nichols has gathered writing that span more than thirty years and range from idyllic reflections on nature to unmerciful satires on impending Armageddon. We see the author as a young man on the trip to Central America that gave him a social conscience that wouldn't quit; as a hunter, hiker, and naturalist on rivers and in mountains increasingly threatened by development; and as a novelist watching in embarrassed disbelief as his book The Milagro Beanfield War is made into a movie that succeeds in spite of Hollywood's best efforts to garble the outcome."
 
Cover ArtThe Explorers of Mars Hill by William L. Putnam
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating QB82.U62 F537 1994
ISBN: 9780914659693
Publication Date: 1994-03-01
Over 100 years after Percival Lowell founded his observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, it is still remembered by some primarily for the colorful controversy over the canals of Mars. This is undoubtedly unfair, since much more has been accomplished at Lowell Observatory in the intervening century. This volume is meant to be a series of vignettes in the Observatory's history. This volume is well-illustrated with photographs from the Lowell archives.
Cover ArtThe Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950 by Emily Ballew Neff
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating N8214.5.U6 N44 2006
ISBN: 9780300114485
Publication Date: 2006-12-11
A fascinating and novel exploration of the transformative role played by the American West in the development of modernism in the United States Drawing extensively from various disciplines including ethnology, geography, geology, and environmental studies, this groundbreaking book addresses shifting concepts of time, history, and landscape in relation to the work of pioneering American artists during the first half of the 20th century. Paintings, watercolors, and photographs by renowned artists such as Frederic Remington, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, Dorothea Lange, and Jackson Pollock are considered alongside American Indian ledger drawings, tempuras, and Dineh sandpaintings. Taken together, these works document the quest to create a specifically American art in the decades prior to World War II. The Modern West begins with a captivating meditation on the relationship between human culture and the physical landscape by Barry Lopez, who traveled the West in the artists' footsteps. Emily Ballew Neff then describes the evolving importance of the West for American artists working out a radically new aesthetic response to space and place, from artist-explorers on the turn-of-the-century frontier, to visionaries of a Californian arcadia, to desert luminaries who found in its stark topography a natural equivalent to abstraction. Beautifully illustrated and handsomely designed, this book is essential to anyone interested in the West and the history of modernism in American art.     Published in association with The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Exhibition Schedule: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (March 4 - June 3, 2007) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (October 29, 2006 - January 28, 2007)
 
Cover ArtOur Indian Summer in the Far West: An Autumn Tour of Fifteen Thousand Miles in Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and the Indian Territory by Samuel Nugent Townshend; John George Hyde (Photographer); Alex Hunt (Editor); Kristin Loyd (Editor)
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating F594 .T75 2016
ISBN: 9780806187020
Publication Date: 2016-09-12
In 1879 two Englishmen, writer Samuel Nugent Townshend and photographer John George Hyde, set out for a pleasant Indian summer on a tour of the American West. The duo documented their travels by steamship and train, through Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, across the Missouri to the "new state of Kansas" and the beginning of the western lands and business opportunities that were to become the focus of their narrative. Reprinted here with critical notes and introduction, Our Indian Summer in the Far West offers an enlightening--and often entertaining--perspective on an early moment in the growth of capitalism and industry in the American West. Originally published as a photographic travelogue and guide to British investment in the American West, Townshend and Hyde's account is both idiosyncratic and emblematic of its time. Interested in the West's economic and environmental potential, the two men focused on farming in Kansas, railroads and mining in Colorado, a bear hunt in New Mexico, and ranching in Texas. The sojourners' own foibles also enter the narrative: alerted to the difficulty of finding a hotel with a bath, the two Victorians took along a portable bathtub made of India rubber. Their words and pictures speak volumes about contemporary attitudes toward race, empire, and the future of civilization. An introduction by coeditor Alex Hunt provides background on the creators and the travelogue genre. The recovery and republication of this extremely rare volume, an artifact of the Victorian American West, make available an important primary document of a brief but pivotal historical moment connecting the American West and the British Empire.
Cover ArtPostindian Aesthetics: Affirming Indigenous Literary Sovereignty by Debra K. S. Barker (Editor); Connie A. Jacobs (Editor); Robert Warrior (Foreword by)
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating PS153.I52 P67 2022
ISBN: 9780816546268
Publication Date: 2022-05-03
Postindian Aesthetics is a collection of critical, cutting-edge essays on Indigenous writers who are creatively and powerfully contributing to a thriving Indigenous literary aesthetic. This book argues for a literary canon that includes Indigenous literature that resists colonizing stereotypes of what has been and often still is expected in art produced by American Indians. The works featured are inventive and current, and the writers covered are visionaries who are boldly redefining Indigenous literary aesthetics. The artists covered include Orlando White, LeAnne Howe, Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Heid E. Erdrich, Sherwin Bitsui, and many others. Postindian Aesthetics is expansive and comprehensive with essays by many of today's leading Indigenous studies scholars. Organized thematically into four sections, the topics in this book include working-class and labor politics, queer embodiment, national and tribal narratives, and new directions in Indigenous literatures. By urging readers to think beyond the more popularized Indigenous literary canon, the essays in this book open up a new world of possibilities for understanding the contemporary Indigenous experience. The volume showcases thought-provoking scholarship about literature written by important contemporary Indigenous authors who are inspiring critical acclaim and offers new ways to think about the Indigenous literary canon and encourages instructors to broaden the scope of works taught in literature courses more broadly. 
 
Cover ArtThe Rough and Ready Songster: Embellished with Twenty-Five Splendid Engravings, Illustrative of the American Vctories in Mexico
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating M1628.A45 R68 1848
Publication Date: 1848?
A volume of songs produced to celebrate American victories in the Mexican-American War, and to bolster Gen. Zachary Taylor's (ultimately successful) bid for the Presidency in 1848. Included are the lyrics, without music, to scores of songs, including celebrations of American victories at Veracruz, Monterey, Puebla, Buena Vista, and the capture of Mexico City. The engravings show several of these crucial battles, and the frontispiece is a portrait of Taylor himself. There are songs in memory of other famous American military heroes, such as Washington, Jackson, and John Paul Jones, as well as lyrics celebrating ordinary soldiers from Ohio, Connecticut, Kentucky, and elsewhere. Other songs commemorate victories during the Revolution and the War of 1812, and several songs laud Texas, including the Battle of the Alamo, the death of Crockett, "song of the Texian Ranger," "Texas War Cry," and more.
 
Cover ArtScats and Tracks of the Desert Southwest: A Field Guide to the Signs of 70 Wildlife Species by James Halfpenny
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating QL768 .H354 2015
ISBN: 9781493009930
Publication Date: 2015-09-15
Whether you're on the lookout for a kit fox, or trying to steer clear of a bear, Scats and Tracks of the Desert Southwest, by nationally reknown tracker and author Dr. James Halfpenny, helps you recognize what critters went before you and is a primer for reading the stories written in the sand. Easy-to-use and accurate scat and track measurements on each page make this book particularly field friendly and the key to starting off your outing on the right foot
 
Cover ArtU.S. Army Training Center, Fort Bliss, Texas: Antiaircraft Artillery
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating U294.5.B54 U923 1956
Publication Date: 1956
A 1956 yearbook of the enlisted men in the 10th Battalion Antiaircraft Artillery basic training at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas.
 
Cover Art"We'll All Wear Silk Hats": The Erie and Chiricahua Cattle Companies and the Rise of Corporate Ranching in the Sulphur Spring Valley of Arizona, 1883-1909 by Lynn R. Bailey
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating F817.C5 B35 1994
Publication Date: 1994
Tells the story of two Cochise County, Arizona, ranches: the Erie Cattle Company and the Chiricahua Cattle Company, describing how their Pennsylvania-born owners established ranching in southeastern Arizona, and fought cattle rustling and exorbitant railroad costs, while the businesses expanded, only to decline in later years because of overgrazing and other poor range management practices.
 
 
Cover ArtThe Wild Girl: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932: A Novel by Jim Fergus
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating PS3556.E66 W55 2005
ISBN: 9781401300545
Publication Date: 2005-05-04
From the award-winning author of One Thousand White Women, a novel in the tradition of Little Big Man, tracing one man's search for adventure and the wild Apache girl who invites him into her world When Ned Giles is orphaned as a teenager, he heads West, hoping to leave his troubles behind. He joins the 1932 Great Apache Expedition on their search for a young boy, the son of a wealthy Mexican landowner, who was kidnapped by wild Apaches. But the expedition's goal is complicated when they encounter a wild Apache girl in a Mexican jail cell, victim of a Mexican massacre of her tribe that has left her orphaned and unwilling to eat or speak. As he and the expedition make their way through the rugged Sierra Madre mountains, Ned's growing feelings for the troubled girl soon force him to choose allegiances and make a decision that will haunt him forever.

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