book donation

Sumner Matteson,
Donation: $35
“For 40 years Sumner has regularly made time to record the stories of Wisconsin field biologists, ecologists,
conservation biologists, and land stewards. Among them are the well-known and recognized as well as the more obscure and overlooked. All made vital contributions to natural history and conservation in Wisconsin. Some were scientists and teachers. Others were writers and advocates, public servants and citizens. All, in some way, were wisdom-keepers. Their lives span a century and a half, and many never met. Yet they are connected across their diverse places and times and experiences. They shared a passion for what Aldo Leopold called “things natural, wild, and free.” They carried the same conviction that we are bonded to the land and all its inhabitants and to one another upon it. Sumner’s perseverance in gathering their voices has only increased the value of his work. In fact, we need these voices and stories now more than ever. We need them to ground us as we face a future of rapidly changing social, economic, and environmental realities, most especially the uncertain effects of accelerating climate change. We need them, more than anything, to nurture the next generation of citizen-conservationists.” -From Curt Meine’s Foreword to Afield.

Julianne Lutz Warren,
Donation:$54
In 2006, Julianne Lutz Warren (née Newton) asked readers to rediscover one of history’s most renowned
conservationists. Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey was hailed by The New York Times as a “biography of ideas,” making “us feel the loss of what might have followed A Sand County Almanac by showing us in authoritative detail what led up to it.” Warren’s astute narrative quickly became an essential part of the Leopold canon, introducing new readers to the father of wildlife ecology and offering a fresh perspective to even the most seasoned scholars. A decade later, as our very concept of wilderness is changing, Warren frames Leopold’s work in the context of the Anthropocene. With a new preface and foreword by Bill McKibben, the book underscores the evergrowing importance of Leopold’s ideas in an increasingly human-dominated landscape. Drawing on unpublished archives, Warren traces Leopold’s quest to define and preserve land health. Leopold’s journey took him from Iowa to Yale to the Southwest to Wisconsin, with fascinating stops along the way to probe the causes of early land settlement failures, contribute to the emerging science of ecology, and craft a new vision for land use. Leopold’s life was dedicated to one fundamental dilemma: how can people live prosperously on the land and keep it healthy, too? For anyone compelled by this question, the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey offers insight and inspiration.

Frederick Hadleigh West
Donation: $159
During the last Ice Age, a thousand-mile-wide land bridge connected Siberia and Alaska, creating the region known as Beringia. Over twelve thousand years ago, a procession of large mammals and the humans who hunted them crossed this bridge to America. Much of the Russian evidence for this migration has until now remained largely inaccessible to American scholars. American Beginnings brings together for the first time in one volume the most up-to-date archaeological and palaeoecological evidence on Beringia from both Russia and America. “An invaluable resource. . . . It will no doubt remain the key reference book for Beringia for many years to come.”-Steven Mithen, Journal of Human Evolution “Extraordinary. The fifty-six contributors . . . represent the most prominent American and Russian researchers in the region.”-Choice “Publication of this well-illustrated compendium is a great service to early American and especially Siberian Upper Paleolithic archaeology.”-Nicholas Saunders, New Scientist “This is a great book . . . perhaps the greatest contribution to the archaeology of Beringia that has yet been published. . . . This is the kind of book to which archaeology should aspire.” –Herbert D.G. Maschner, Antiquity

Bill McMillon,
Donation: $35
Written expressly for amateur archaeologists and archaeological volunteers to help them discover how they can become part of this increasingly popular field. Covers subjects ranging from excavation techniques, tools, site locations, archaeological methods, archaeology and the law to conducting your own dig. Besides providing extensive data on gaining experience as volunteers of professionally organized digs, it offers an extensive resource section that includes archaeology organizations, field schools and sites, archaeological museums and a bibliography of reading matter which deals with archaeology. A large variety of line-drawings and photographs also assist the would-be archaeologist.

Milton J. Bates
Donation:$24

The Bark River valley in southeastern Wisconsin is a microcosm of the state’s – indeed, of the Great Lakes region’s – natural and human history. “The Bark River Chronicles” reports one couple’s journey by canoe from the river’s headwaters to its confluence with the Rock River and several miles farther downstream to Lake Koshkonong. Along the way, it tells the stories of Ice Age glaciation, the effigy mound builders, the Black Hawk War, early settlement and the development of waterpower sites, and recent efforts to remove old dams and mitigate the damage done by water pollution and invasive species. Along with these big stories, the book recounts dozens of little stories associated with sites along the river. The winter ice harvest, grain milling technology, a key supreme court decision regarding toxic waste disposal, a small-town circus, a scheme to link the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River by canal, the murder of a Chicago mobster, controversies over race and social class in Waukesha County’s lake country, community efforts to clean up the river and restore a marsh, visits to places associated with the work of important Wisconsin writers – these and many other stories belong to the Bark River chronicles. For the two voyageurs who paddle the length of the Bark, it is a journey of rediscovery and exploration. As they glide through marshes, woods, farmland, and cities, they acquire not only historical and environmental knowledge but also a renewed sense of the place in which they live. Maps and historical photographs help the reader share their experience.

Gaylord Nelson, Susan Campbell
Donation: $32

YA/C: Teens will appreciate this to-the-point environmental overview.

After Wisconsinite Nelson began his 18-year stint as a senator in 1963, he was shocked to discover how severe air and water pollution had become. Recognizing that people everywhere shared his concerns (he cites the infamous day in 1969 when the toxic Cuyahoga River burst into towering flames), he thought, ‘Why not organize a huge, grassroots protest about what was happening to our environment?’ Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970, and in its aftermath crucial federal initiatives put a halt to the worst offenses. But three decades later, thanks to a burgeoning human population, myriad sources of toxic waste, corporate greed, and general complacency, Nelson, as avid and well informed as ever, observes that we face renewed and increasingly dire environmental threats. Along with his coauthors, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who provides a rousing foreword, the Earth Day founder presents exceptionally lucid explanations of a host of current ecoissues, and calls for a renewed effort to keep these potentially catastrophic predicaments visible and their possible solutions viable through education and citizen action. – Donna Seaman; 176p

Martha Greene Phillips
Donation: $45
In the summer of 1906, a Milwaukee businessman set out with his young sons and some friends to canoe and camp in the north woods of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Canada. It was the first of several month-long journeys Howard Greene and “The Gang” would make over the years, each detailed in remarkable, handmade journals and documented in hundreds of large-format photographs. Reproduced here with a large selection of photographs and maps, these journals convey readers into a riverine world of outdoor adventure-a northland wilderness and way of life that were, even as Howard Greene charted their genuine charms, already vanishing. Introduced and annotated by Greene’s daughter, these observant narratives run rapids and portage and paddle lakes and rivers, including the Chippewa, Wisconsin, St. Croix, and Presque Isle as well as traveling in areas now in Quetico Provincial Park and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Along the way Greene, a skilled photographer, captures images of logging and mining operations, primitive dams and even more primitive camping, trading posts, and many remote Native American villages. Through it all runs the story of family and friendship forged over campfires in the north woods, reported with dry wit, a keen eye for detail, and an abiding interest in the natural world. Composed decades before Sigurd Olson or Calvin Rutstrum began documenting the wild life of the upper Midwest, Howard Greene’s journals are a window into a world at once familiar and strange, the wilderness caught on the verge of becoming the North Woods we know today.

Laurie Hovell McMillin
Donation: $30
McMillin (rhetoric, composition, & religion, Oberlin Coll.) has crafted a probing and enlightening study that combines local history and family lore with archaeology and sociology. She explores the prehistoric Native American archaeological sites of her hometown of Trempealeau, WI, particularly a group of flat-topped platform mounds that have become a source of local controversy; many of the town’s leaders have opposed archaeological study of the mounds or attempts at preservation by outside groups. While providing excellent archaeological background information on these mounds, McMillin focuses on the attitudes of the townspeople toward the site and toward Native American history in general, delving into town and family histories to understand the origins of their
viewpoint. In so doing, she offers an intimate glimpse into the lives and traditions of one small Wisconsin town. McMillin’s findings concerning non-Native values and attitudes toward Native American history and preservation have broad implications that go far beyond Trempealeau. Interesting photographs enhance this smooth and engaging narrative, and extensive endnotes are included. Recommended for archaeology, sociology, and history collections in academic and larger public libraries, especially those in the Midwest.Elizabeth Salt, Otterbein Coll. Lib., Westerville, OH. 308pg. CAHNERS PUBLISHING, c2006.

Mark Allan Lindquist
Donation:$25
This anthology highlights central values and traditions in Native American societies, exploring the ongoing struggles and survival power of Native American people today. The essays and stories by well-known writers provide an excellent introduction for general readers as well as high school and college students. The stories and historical events are drawn especially from the tribes of the Great Lakes region, such as the Ojibwa (Chippewa) of Wisconsin, and are part of a continuing, sustaining storytelling tradition. Starting with the opening selection, “The Circle of Stories,” which reaffirms the relationship of humans to all living things, the anthology emphasizes themes of connectedness and survival in essays on the environment, identity, community allegiance and treaty rights, marginalization and assimilation in American society, and conflict within the educational system. Several selections about Trickster tales introduce traditions of humor, irony, and imagination that have come to embody native survival, liberation, and continuance. The authors included in Buried Roots and Indestructible Seeds are Kim Blaeser, Joseph Bruchac, George Cornell, Fred Hoxie, James Oberly, Denise Sweet, Tom Vennum, and Gerald Vizenor.

Price: $38
Paleoethnobotany offers powerful tools for reconstructing past cultures by examining the interaction of human populations with the plant world. Plant remains from archaeological sites can provide information for a number of disciplines: archaeologists may use such remains to examine how plants were used, how agriculture changed over time, or how plant offerings in burials signaled social status; ecologists and botanists may use them to study morphological changes in plants due to domestication. Combining case studies and theoretical discussions, Current Paleoethnobotany presents the first full discussion of the major stages and problems of paleoethnobotanical research, from designing and testing equipment, such as flotation machines, to quantification and interpretation. The volume explores a wide range of issues concerning collection techniques, analytical procedures, and interpretive models that will provide accurate information about past human societies from plant remains. The contributors offer data on specific regions as well as more general background information on the basic techniques of paleoethnobotany for the nonspecialist. Throughout, they explicitly examine the assumptions underlying paleoethnobotanical methods and the ways in which those assumptions affect anthropological and ecological research questions. Based on a symposium presented at the 1985 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Current Paleoethnobotany moves beyond a technique-oriented view of paleoethnobotany to successfully integrate current thinking about both procedures and research goals. The contributors demonstrate the potential value of the field of paleoethnobotany and open the way for further discussion and improvement.

Price: $40

Mary Elise Antoine & Lucy Edersveld Murphy
Price: $32
Albert Coryer, the grandson of a fur trade voyageur-turned-farmer, had a gift for storytelling. Born in 1877, he grew up in Prairie du Chien hearing tales of days gone by from his parents, grandparents, and neighbors who lived in the Frenchtown area. Throughout his life, Albert soaked up the local oral traditions, including narratives about early residents, local landmarks, interesting and funny events, ethnic customs, myths, and folklore. Late in life, this lively man who had worked as a farm laborer and janitor drew a detailed illustrated map of the Prairie du Chien area and began to write his stories out longhand, in addition to sharing them in an interview with a local historian and folklore scholar. The map, stories, and interview transcript provide a colorful account of Prairie du Chien in the late nineteenth century, when it was undergoing significant demographic, social, and economic change. With sharp historical context provided by editors Lucy Eldersveld Murphy and Mary Elise Antoine, Coryer’s tales offer an unparalleled window into the ethnic community comprised of the old fur trade families, Native Americans, French Canadian farmers, and their descendants.

Contrib: Murphy, Lucy
Donation: $41

A case study of one of America’s many multi-ethnic border communities, Great Lakes Creoles builds upon recent research on gender, race, ethnicity, and politics as it examines the ways that the old fur trade families experienced and responded to the colonialism of United States expansion. Lucy Murphy examines Indian history with attention to the pluralistic nature of American communities and the ways that power, gender, race, and ethnicity were contested and negotiated in them. She explores the role of women as mediators shaping key social, economic, and political systems, as well as the creation of civil political institutions and the ways that men of many backgrounds participated in and influenced them. Ultimately, The Great Lakes Creoles takes a careful look at Native people and their complex families as active members of an American community in the Great Lakes region.

Edward B. Jelks & Juliet C. Jelks
Donation: $88

Invaluable both for reference and collection development (with a 150-page bibliography), this guide to mainly prehistoric sites, cultures, and artifacts in the United States and Canada features some 1800 signed entries by 151 expert contributors that highlight the information upon which present North American prehistory is based. A scholarly achievement. Library Journal This dictionary of more than 1800 entries represents a collaboration of 159 archaeologists, each an authority on a particular region. The result is a source of basic information on the major prehistorical cultures, archaeological sites, and types of artifacts found in North America. The sites were selected from the more than one-half million prehistoric archaeological sites recorded in North America because they are the principal ones upon which the major chronologies, classifications, and interpretations of the continent’s prehistory are based. The reference has entries for most major types of artifacts and details the important cultures, including their phases and subdivisions. At the end of each entry is a list of sources which refers primarily to published works, but which also cites unpublished documents on file at universities, museums, and government agencies when these represent the only available source of information.

Heather Anne Pringle
Donation: $43
Training her journalist’s gaze on North American archaeological sites stretching from the northern Yukon to southern Texas, Pringle spent time with committed archaeologists devoted to unearthing new evidence of ancient cultures. Deserving kudos, Pringle dramatically evokes the passion, dedication, and perseverance of these seemingly inexhaustible scientists. In separate narratives, Pringle reveals how each engages in similar struggles to solve the mysteries of early civilizations amid a gathering of clues. The author’s incisive study of the area’s prehistoric era contributes to a stimulating discourse, revealing exciting discoveries and instances of scientific progress. At times, attempts to rule out erstwhile theories crystallize in the retelling. Bringing together colorful portrayals of researchers and stirring descriptions of intriguing

James Deetz
Donation: $23
A fascinating study of American life and an explanation of how American life is studied through the everyday details of ordinary living, colorfully depicting a world hundreds of years in the past. History is recorded in many ways. According to author James Deetz, the past can be seen most fully by studying the small things so often forgotten. Objects such as doorways, gravestones, musical instruments, and even shards of pottery fill in the cracks between large historical events and depict the intricacies of daily life. In his completely revised and expanded edition of In Small Things Forgotten, Deetz has added new sections that more fully acknowledge the presence of women and African Americans in Colonial America. New interpretations of archaeological finds detail how minorities influenced and were affected by the development of the Anglo-American tradition in the years following the settlers’ arrival in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. Among Deetz’s observations: Subtle changes in building long before the Revolutionary War hinted at the growing independence of the American colonies and their desire to be less like the British. Records of estate auctions show that many households in Colonial America contained only one chair-underscoring the patriarchal nature of the early American family. All other members of the household sat on stools or the floor. The excavation of a tiny community of freed slaves in Massachusetts reveals evidence of the transplantation of African culture to North America.

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Robert A. Birmingham & Amy L. Rosebrough,
Donation: $30
More mounds were built by ancient Native Americans in Wisconsin than in any other region of North America-between 15,000 and 20,000, at least 4,000 of which remain today. Most impressive are the effigy mounds, huge earthworks sculpted in the shapes of thunderbirds, water panthers, and other forms, not found anywhere else in the world in such concentrations. This second edition is updated throughout, incorporating exciting new research and satellite imagery. Written for general readers, it offers a comprehensive overview of these intriguing earthworks. Citing evidence from past excavations, ethnography, the traditions of presentday Native Americans in the Midwest, ground-penetrating radar and LIDAR imaging, and recent findings of other archaeologists, Robert A. Birmingham and Amy L. Rosebrough argue that effigy mound groups are cosmological maps that model belief systems and relations with the spirit world. The authors advocate for their preservation and emphasize that Native peoples consider the mounds sacred places. This edition also includes an expanded list of public parks and preserves where mounds can be respectfully viewed, such as the Kingsley Bend mounds near Wisconsin Dells, an outstanding effigy group maintained by the Ho-Chunk Nation, and the Man Mound Park near Baraboo, the only extant human-shaped effigy mound in the world.

Stephen A. Laubach
Donation: $25
In 1935, in the midst of relentless drought, Aldo Leopold purchased an abandoned farm along the Wisconsin River near Baraboo, Wisconsin. An old chicken coop, later to become famous as the Leopold “Shack,” was the property’s only intact structure. The Leopold family embraced this spent farm as a new kind of laboratory-a place to experiment on restoring health to an ailing piece of land. Here, Leopold found inspiration for writing A Sand County Almanac, his influential book of essays on conservation and ethics. Living a Land Ethic chronicles the formation of the 1,600-acre reserve surrounding the Shack. When the Leopold Memorial Reserve was founded in 1967, five neighboring families signed an innovative agreement to jointly care for their properties in ways that honored Aldo Leopold’s legacy. In the ensuing years, the Reserve’s Coleman and Leopold families formed the Sand County Foundation and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. These organizations have been the primary stewards of the Reserve, carrying on a tradition of ecological restoration and cooperative conservation. Author Stephen A. Laubach draws from the archives of both foundations, including articles of incorporation, correspondence, photos, managers’ notes, and interviews to share with readers the Reserve’s untold history and its important place in the American conservation movement.

Michael P. Cohen
Donation: $30
“A tour de force, a remarkable narrative of spiritual and political development. . . . [Cohen’s] oft unanswered, and unanswerable, questions, his views of Muir’s spiritual, intellectual, and political growth are insightful, challenging, and new. They deserve an audience with scholars and Muir devotees.”-Shirley Sargent, Pacific Historian

In this powerful study, Michael Cohen captures as never before the powerful consciousness, vision, and legacy of the pioneering environmentalist John Muir. Ultimately, Cohen stresses, this ecological consciousness would generate an ecological conscience. It was no longer enough for Muir to individually test and celebrate his enlightenment in the wild. His vision, he now felt, must lead to concrete action, and the result was a protracted campaign that stressed the ecological education of the American public, governmental protection of natural resources, the establishment of the National Parks, and the encouragement of tourism. Anyone interested in environmental studies, in American history and literature, or in the future of our natural heritage will be drawn by the very bracing flavor of his wilderness odyssey, evoked here by one of his own-a twentieth-century mountaineer and literary craftsman.

Thomas R. Huffman,
Donation: $55
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Wisconsin citizens have promoted innovative environmental programs. During the 1960s Wisconsin was again at the forefront of the movement advancing mainstream political environmentalism. Thomas Huffman traces the rise of environmentalism in the Badger State during these key years, when the people of Wisconsin instituted policies in such areas as outdoor recreation and resource planning, water pollution control, the preservation of wild rivers, and centralized environmental management. Huffman focuses especially on the influence of Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat and
founder of Earth Day, and Governor Warren Knowles, a Republican. He shows that their efforts–and the efforts of their followers in citizen groups, the business and university communities, and the state government–clearly indicate that the origins of environmentalism cannot be placed along a left-right political spectrum. Rather, the movement evolved from an interweaving of liberal and conservative ideologies and from important traditions and precedents within the state’s environmental culture. What happened in Wisconsin is particularly significant, Huffman points out, because of the effect of that state’s example on other states and the federal government. Originally published in 1994. A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Jerry Hembd
Donation: $32
Through engaging stories, Renewing the Countryside-Wisconsin explores how the state is leading the nation in sustainably grown food, environmentally responsible businesses, and home-grown, forward-looking answers to today’s rural economy.
Seven chapters cover stories ranging from arts and culture, farming, green business, conservation, tourism, community development, and learning. Learn about how the city of Washburn on Chequamegon Bay has become the country’s first ecomunicipality, how Growing Power is connecting urban Milwaukee kids to fresh food and the countryside, and how innovative farmers and artisan food makers are bringing sustainably and organically grown products to consumers throughout the state. This book will spur imaginations, give hope, and foster dialogue. It is a must-read for all who take pleasure in Wisconsin’s countryside and want to see it sustained for future generations.

Laurie Lawlor
Donation: $25
(Grade 4 Up) A delightful work that reads like a love letter to the Eagle Nature Trail in Wisconsin. Readers learn about the past struggles and former glory of this special field and forest that has a seasonal pond. They are invited to follow along the journey of the small community’s efforts to create a nature trail and restore the surrounding prairie. Detailed descriptions of flora and fauna will excite aspiring biologists. Also included is a complete history of this section of land–how it was abandoned and neglected as a dumping ground–then revived and restored to serve as an incredible living laboratory for students. Various story walk opportunities are possible throughout the year thanks to a vibrant partnership with the local library. Service-learning opportunities abound. Social studies and science teachers will be able to mine this book for a wealth of lessons, rich with photos and charts. Students with an interest in social studies will appreciate the author’s efforts to connect larger events in history with the story of the prairie. The book’s vocabulary can be challenging, but with guidance, or perhaps as a class read-aloud, this story could inspire similar projects at schools across the country.

This thoroughly and painstakingly researched book could serve as a blueprint for others seeking to revitalize similar areas. Highly recommended for school library collections. Darby Wallace. 96p. School Library Journal Web Exclusive Reviews.

Aldo Leopold
Donation: $35
His name is inextricably linked with a single work, A Sand County Almanac, a classic of natural history literature and the conservationist’s bible. This book brings together the best of Leopold’s essays.

Patty Loew
Donation: $28
Wisconsin’s rich tradition of sustainability rightfully includes its First Americans, who along with Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Gaylord Nelson shaped its landscape and informed its “earth ethics.” This collection of Native biographies, one from each of the twelve Indian nations of Wisconsin, introduces the reader to some of the most important figures in Native sustainability: from antimining activists like Walt Bresette (Red Cliff Ojibwe) and Hillary Waukau (Menominee) to treaty rights advocates like James Schlender (Lac Courte Oreille Ojibwe), artists like Truman Lowe (Ho-Chunk), and educators like Dorothy “Dot” Davids (Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians), along with tribal geneologists, land stewards, and preservers of language and culture. Each of the biographies speaks to traditional ecological values and cultural sensibilities, highlighting men and women who helped to sustain and nurture their nations in the past and present. The Native people whose lives are depicted in Seventh Generation Earth Ethics understood the cultural gravity that kept their people rooted to their ancestral lands and acted in ways that ensured the growth and success of future generations. In this way they honor the Ojibwe Seventh Generation philosophy, which cautions decision makers to consider how their actions will affect seven generations in the future-some 240 years.

Allen M. Young
Donation: $30
YA/L: For the teen who traps and studies insects without hurting them. Young tells stories of his own scientifically-minded and insect-obsessed youth.

Curator Young invites the reader to walk beside him as he delineates the complicated life cycles of some of the Midwest’s smallest and most ecologically sensitive creatures. Focusing on insects and their immediate predators, he uses fascinating stories to illuminate the biological essence of the four seasons, for example, the cocooning of a Cecropia moth is an expression of the paradox of winter. Young has moments of wit and revelation, including his explanation of how one organism is ‘recycled’ in the tissues of whichever organism is next up on the food chain. For the most part, however, his tone is lyrical; and the steadiness of tone makes the collection best read interspersed with investigative walks through fields and woodlands. Each of his lovely essays reaches the same
conclusion, that small life-forms have a large ecological impact. Aided by the detailed illustrations of Judith Huf, indispensable when trying to imagine the complicated mating behavior of dragonflies, Young makes the case that more loving attention to these intricate systems can only bring about a greater harmony between ourselves and our environment. –Sharon Greene

David S. Brose
Donation: $40
Combines recent research with insights from anthropology, historiography, and oral tradition to examine the cultural landscape preceding and immediately following the arrival of Europeans After establishing the distribution of prehistoric and historic populations from the northeastern Appalachian forests to the southern trans-Mississippian prairies, the contributors consider the archaeological and cultural record of several specific groups, including Mohawk and Onondaga, Monacan, Coosa, and Calusa. For each, they present new evidence of cultural changes prior to European contact, including populations movements triggered by the Little Ice Age (AD 1550-1770), shifting exchange and warfare networks, geological restriction of effective maize subsistence, and use of empty hunting territories as buffers between politically unstable neighbors. The contributors also trace European influences, including the devastation caused by European-introduced epidemics and the paths of European trade goods that transformed existing Native American-exchange networks. While the profound effects of European explorers, missionaries, and traders on Eastern Woodlands tribes cannot be denied, the archaeological evidence suggests that several indigenous societies were already in the process of redefinition prior to European contact. The essays gathered here show that, whether formed in response to natural or human forces, cultural change may be traced through archaeological artifacts, which play a critical role in answering current questions regarding cultural persistence.

Robert A. Birmingham
Donation: $30
Between A.D. 700 and 1100 Native Americans built more effigy mounds in Wisconsin than anywhere else in North America, with an estimated 1,300 mounds-including the world’s largest known bird effigy-at the center of effigy-building culture in and around Madison, Wisconsin. These huge earthworks, sculpted in the shape of birds, mammals, and other figures, have aroused curiosity for generations and together comprise a vast effigy mound ceremonial landscape. Farming and industrialization destroyed most of these mounds, leaving the mysteries of who built them and why they were made. The remaining mounds are protected today and many can be visited. explores the cultural, historical, and ceremonial meanings of the mounds in an informative, abundantly illustrated book and guide.

Finalist, Social Science, Midwest Book Awards

Thomas Davis
Donation: $40
Sustaining the Forest, the People, and the Spirit tells the story of the Menominee Indian Tribe and how they have sustained their 230,000 acre forest in ways that have enhanced, rather than degraded, the environment in the face of development pressures. Through a careful look at Menominee history, politics, institutions, economy, culture, spirituality, science, and technology, Thomas Davis provides insight into how this case study of sustainable environmental development can offer a rough road map for other communities to follow.

Lynne Heasley
Donation: $30
A Thousand Pieces of Paradise is an ecological history of property and a cultural history of rural ecosystems set in one of Wisconsin’s most famous regions, the Kickapoo Valley. While examining the national war on soil erosion in the 1930s, a controversial real estate development scheme, Amish land settlement, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dam project, and Native American efforts to assert longstanding land claims, Lynne Heasley traces the historical development of modern American property debates within ever-more diverse rural landscapes and cultures. Heasley argues that the way public discourse has framed environmental debates hides the full shape our system of property has taken in rural communities and landscapes. She shows how democratic and fluid visions of property-based on community relationships-have coexisted alongside individualistic visions of property rights. In this environmental biography of a landscape and its people lie powerful lessons for rural communities seeking to understand and reconcile competing values about land and their place in it.

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Robert Root
Donation: $28
When longtime author Robert Root moves to a small town in southeast Wisconsin, he gets to know his new home by walking the same terrain traveled by three Wisconsin luminaries who were deeply rooted in place-John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and August Derleth. Root walks with Muir at John Muir State Natural Area, with Leopold at the Shack, and with Derleth in Sac Prairie; closer to home, he traverses the Ice Age Trail, often guided by such figures as pioneering scientist Increase Lapham. Along the way, Root investigates the changes to the natural landscape over nearly two centuries, and he chronicles his own transition from someone on unfamiliar terrain to someone secure on his home ground.In prose that is at turns introspective and haunting, Walking Home Ground inspires us to see history’s echo all around us: the parking lot that once was forest; the city that once was glacier. “Perhaps this book is an invitation to walk home ground,” Root tells us. “Perhaps, too, it’s a time capsule, a message in a bottle from someone given to looking over his shoulder even as he tries to examine the ground beneath his feet.”

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Robert C. Ostergren,
Donation: $40
Rolling green hills dotted with Holstein cows, red barns, and blue silos. The Great Lakes ports at Superior, Ashland, and Kenosha. A Polish wedding dance or a German biergarten in Milwaukee. The dappled quiet of the Chequamagon forest. A weatherbeaten but tidy town hall at the intersection of two county trunk highways. Ojibwa families gathering wild rice into canoes. The boat ride through the Dells. The upland ridges of the Driftless Area, falling away into hidden valleys. . . . These are images of Wisconsin’s land and life, images that evoke a strong sense of place. This book, Wisconsin Land and Life, is an exploration of place, a series of original essays by Wisconsin geographers that offers an introduction to the state’s natural environment, the historical processes of its human habitation, and the ways that nature and people interact to create distinct regional landscapes. To read it is to
come away with a sweeping view of Wisconsin’s geography and history: the glaciers that carved lakes and moraines; the soils and climate that fostered the prairies and great northern pine forests; the early Native Americans who began to shape the landscape and who established forest trails and river portages; the successive waves of Europeans who came to trade in furs, mine for lead and iron, cut the white pines, establish farms, work in the lumber and paper mills, and transform spent wheatfields into pasture for dairy cattle. Readers will learn, too, about the platting and naming of Wisconsin’s towns, the establishment of county and township governments, the growth of urban neighborhoods and parishes, the role of rivers, railroads, and religion in shaping the state’s growth, and the controversial reforestation of the cutover lands that eventually transformed hardscrabble farms and swamps into a sportsman’s paradise. Abundantly illustrated with photos and maps, this book will richly reward anyone who wishes to learn more about the land and life of the place we know as Wisconsin.

August Derleth
Donation: $33
A classic account of the Wisconsin River’s early exploration by French traders and Jesuit priests through the 1940s. Mixing folklore and legend, Derleth tells of the Winnebago, Sauk, and Fox peoples; of lumberjacks, farmers, miners, and preachers; of ordinary folks and famous figures such as the Ringling Brothers, Chief Blackhawk, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Zona Gale.

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