Recent ucrlibrary_oabooks items

Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun: An Elegy

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun, Crystal Mun-hye Baik blends different genres, from narrative prose to epistles to ancestral mourning rites, to offer an intimate cultural history of war, illness, and estrangement through the experiential lens of her family.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California Libraries.

Native Women's History in Eastern North America before 1900

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This landmark anthology is an essential guide to the histories of Native women’s lives in earlier centuries. Sixteen classic essays, plus new commentary—many by the original authors, describe a broad range of research methods and sources offering insight into the lives of Native American women. The authors explain the use of letters and diaries, memoirs and autobiographies, newspaper accounts and ethnographies, census data and legal documents. This collection offers guidelines for extracting valuable information from such diverse sources and assessing the significance of a such variables as religious affiliation, changes in women’s power after colonization, connections between economics and gender, and representations of Native women.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California Libraries.

Death Stalks the Yakama: Epidemiological Transitions and Mortality on the Yakama

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Clifford Trafzer's disturbing new work, Death Stalks the Yakama, examines life, death, and the shockingly high mortality rates that have persisted among the fourteen tribes and bands living on the Yakama Reservation in the state of Washington. The work contains a valuable discussion of Indian beliefs about spirits, traditional causes of death, mourning ceremonies, and memorials. More significant, however, is Trafzer's research into heretofore unused parturition and death records from 1888-1964. In these documents, he discovers critical evidence to demonstrate how and why many reservation people died in "epidemics" of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and heart disease. Death Stalks the Yakama, takes into account many variables, including age, gender, listed causes of death, residence, and blood quantum. In addition, analyses of fetal and infant mortality rates as well as crude death rates arising from tuberculosis, pneumonia, heart disease, accidents, and other causes are presented....