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NEW PUBLICATIONS

C&RL NEWS, July/August 2005
Vol. 66, No. 7

by George Eberhart

Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (5 vols., March 2005), updates, corrects, and massively expands the first, single-volume edition of 1999 with new biographies, many topical essays, and an expanded scope that encompasses more of the African diaspora in the Americas. This set must come close to the vision that historian and activist W. E. B. Du Bois had in 1909 of an Encyclopedia Britannica for people of African descent. Africana contains entries for most countries of the world, with a detailed history, description, and achievements of their black populations, often accompanied by maps showing political subdivisions. The editors include a much-needed index in the fifth volume and have scattered major essays (called “interpretations”) throughout the text on such topics as Islam, race, blacks in Latin America, AIDS, and African religions. There are many entries for music genres (from ragtime and blues to bebop and rap) and even descriptions of significant African animals from aardvarks to zebras. An excellent resource for all academic libraries. $525.00. Oxford University. ISBN 0-19-517055-5.

The Atlas of the Civil War, by Steven E. Woodworth and Kenneth J. Winkle (400 pages, March 2005), offers a nice cartographic overview of campaigns and battles, enhanced with concise text descriptions and well-chosen illustrations. The maps are excellent and easily interpretable by anyone without a military background. An oversize format, 10 by 13.75 inches. $85.00. Oxford University. ISBN 0-19-522131-1.

Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, by David Block (340 pages, January 2005), thoroughly examines the confusing protohistory of baseball and its bat-and-ball predecessors. Not content with merely demolishing the credibility of Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown once again, Block discerns baseball’s true origins in a British children’s game of the early 18th century. Masterfully researched and extraordinarily well-documented, this book includes an invaluable 60-page, chronological bibliography of baseball mentions from 1450 to 1861. Other extras include a list of constitutions and bylaws of pre-Civil War baseball clubs and nine surviving descriptions of baseball-like games written and published before 1845. $29.95. University of Nebraska. ISBN 0-8032-1339-5.

A British Eyewitness at the Battle of New Orleans, edited by Gene A. Smith (150 pages, December 2004), contains the annotated memoirs of Royal Navy Admiral Robert Aitchison from 1808 to 1827. Although the title makes it sound like this is a thorough account, Aitchison actually missed much of the 1814 battle because he was only serving as a valet. However, his manuscript is a centerpiece of the Historic New Orleans Collection and offers rare insights into the Napoleonic era as well as the flora and fauna of Louisiana, New England, Canada, Cuba, and Bermuda, where he went on his travels. Accompanied by numerous engravings, maps, and color plates. $15.95. Historic New Orleans Collection. ISBN 0-917860-50-X.

Degunking Your PC, by Joli Ballew and Jeff Duntemann (370 pages, March 2005), offers practical advice on getting rid of computer-related clutter. Common signs of “gunk” in an academic setting include too many peripherals, out-of-control cabling, outdated hardware, dust and dirt, disorganized backups, and slow performance. This guide shows how to configure your work area, degunk your components and peripherals, untangle USB and FireWire connections, create both wired and wireless networks, launch an efficient backup strategy, and enhance PC and media performance. Running on a different platform? Paraglyph Press also has Degunking Linux (June 2005), Degunking Your Mac (June 2004), and Degunking Your Mac, Tiger Edition (June 2005) in the same series. $24.99. Paraglyph. ISBN 1-933097-03-5.

Encyclopedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, edited by Rodney P. Carlisle (776 pages, 2 vols., January 2005), takes a geographically inclusive approach to espionage, with articles on spying in most modern nations by 72 contributors. Former CIA Director Robert M. Gates and former KGB Officer Oleg D. Kalugin wrote two different forewords. Entries include individuals (Anthony Blunt, George Tenet), operations (Cointelpro, Operation Ivy Bells), wars (Elizabethan era, Iraq War 2003), organizations (Secret Service, Homeland Security), and methods (cryptography, signals intelligence, spy planes). $199.00. M. E. Sharpe. ISBN 0-7656-8068-8.

The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, edited by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams (342 pages, April 2005), encompasses the life, influences, and writings of this controversial American modernist poet who flirted with fascism in the 1930s but pioneered the use of free verse in extended compositions and was a major influence on Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Moore, Frost, and other poets. This volume provides 265 entries written by more than 100 contributors and an extensive bibliography. $125.00. Greenwood. ISBN 0-313-30448-3.

The Freedom of the Streets, by Sharon E. Wood (321 pages, April 2005), investigates the problems of working women—both prostitutes as well as those more respectably employed—in Davenport, Iowa, during the Gilded Age. Post-Civil War industrialization allowed women to take up paid employment as a path to political and social independence. Wood chose Davenport as typical of many American cities of similar size where women’s reform attempts were thwarted at the local level by men with differing views of sexuality and political power. Middle-class women who entered the work force faced the prevailing conviction that employment disrupted domestic stasis and that wage-earners were little better than the prostitutes who often worked a block or two away from respectable businesses. Wood also takes a close look at the Lend a Hand Club that working women joined, the reasons why local women turned to prostitution, civic efforts to regulate the brothels, and the reformatories that attempted to civilize wayward girls. $59.95. University of North Carolina. ISBN 0-8078-2939-0.

A Guide to Slavic Collections in the United States and Canada, edited by Allan Urbanic and Beth Feinberg (198 pages, January 2005), describes 85 libraries in North America that own significant Slavic and East European research materials. Contact information for each is provided, along with online catalog Web sites and access policies. Published simultaneously as Volume 5, Number 3–4, of Haworth’s Slavic and East European Information Resources. $19.95. Haworth. ISBN 0-7890-2250-8.

For Africanists, Haworth’s Research, Reference Service, and Resources for the Study of Africa, edited by Deborah M. LaFond and Gretchen Walsh (299 pages, January 2005), offers eight essays on African studies in the United States and library collaboration and innovation in Africana collection development and information resources. Also published as Numbers 87–88 of The Reference Librarian. $39.95. ISBN 0-7890-2509-4.

Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations of the World Dictionary, edited by Helene Henderson (906 pages, 3rd ed., March 2005), is a major reworking of the 1997 edition with 75 additional pages, more than 400 new entries, an expanded section on calendar systems, a perpetual calendar for 1583–2080, and e-mail addresses and Web sites for many events. There is a surfeit of fetes here for everyone to celebrate, including the Reindeer Driving Competition in Finland, the Red Waistcoat Festival in Portugal, Gambia Independence Day, the Black Cowboys Parade in Oakland, the Song of Hiawatha Pageant in Minnesota, and the National Hollerin’ Contest in North Carolina. With many appendices, notably legal holidays by state and country, chronological indexes of fixed and movable holidays, and special subject indexes. $110.00. Omnigraphics. ISBN 0-7808-0422-8.

Military Tribunals and Presidential Power: American Revolution to the War on Terrorism, by Louis Fisher (279 pages, February 2005), takes a comprehensive legal look at the military tribunals created by the United States that operated either in this country or abroad, with a particular emphasis on the breadth of presidential powers during wartime. Fisher starts with the Articles of War enacted by the Continental Congress in 1775 and winds up with the Bush administration’s actions against al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists and its designation of certain U.S. citizens (Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla) as “enemy combatants.” The author argues that, as judicial proceedings created and administered by the executive branch, tribunals represent an aberration of the constitutional balance of powers. $35.00. University Press of Kansas. ISBN 0-7006-1375-7.

The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac, by Josephine F. Pacheco (307 pages, February 2005), describes the nature of slavery in the District of Columbia, where the slave trade was not prohibited until 1850 and the institution not abolished until 1862, only nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation. Slave labor helped build the U.S. Capitol, the White House, and the Treasury building, and slaves were often rented out for work in the Washington Navy Yard. Pacheco takes as a focal point the Pearl incident of 1848, in which two white watermen hid 76 fugitive slaves on a schooner they had leased and tried to take them up the Chesapeake Bay to freedom. However, they were apprehended by a posse of slaveowners as they lay anchored at the mouth of the Potomac waiting for favorable winds. Most of the runaways were given to slave dealers who sold them to buyers in the Deep South. The incident inspired the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher to take up the antislavery cause. $29.95. University of North Carolina. ISBN 0-8078-2918-8.

West Virginia Tough Boys, by F. Keith Davis (254 pages, November 2003), recounts the little-known story of the rough-and-tumble, old-style, back-room electioneering that resulted in John F. Kennedy winning the West Virginia primary in 1960. As much an examination of life in Appalachia in the mid-20th century as a political memoir, Davis’s interviews and conversations with the former old-boy Democratic bosses in Logan County—who engaged in some questionable methods for getting out the vote—are a rich mine of local color and country culture. $29.95. Woodland Press. ISBN 0-9724867-2-0.

Another Woodland Press title is The Tale of the Devil: The Biography of Devil Anse Hatfield, by Coleman C. Hatfield and Robert Y. Spence (320 pages, August 2003), which centers on the Hatfield-McCoy feud of 1882–1890 and the leader of one faction, William Anderson Hatfield, the coauthor’s great-grandfather. $29.95. ISBN 0-9724867-1-2. 

George M. Eberhart is senior editor of American Libraries, e-mail: geberhart@ala.org