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Jean Sue Johnson Libkind. Photo by Robert Libkind.

In Memoriam, Jean Sue Johnson Libkind, former marketing manager of the University of Wisconsin Press

JEAN SUE JOHNSON LIBKIND, retired publishing executive and literary agent, died Oct. 17, 2015 at Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse, Philadelphia. Mrs. Libkind, 71, had resided in Philadelphia since 1984.

Mrs. Libkind, born in Racine, Wisconsin, operated a literary agency in Philadelphia, the Bookschlepper, representing university and academic publishers in the management of subsidiary rights. After graduation from Park High School in Racine, she earned a bachelor of arts degree in journalism in 1966 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She attended the university on a scholarship from Western Printing of Racine, the publishers of Golden Books, where her father was a staff artist. She also attended summer school at the University of Oslo, Norway. While at the University of Wisconsin, she was managing editor of the student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal. She also served as a board member of the Daily Cardinal Alumni Association.

Before starting her own agency, she was director of publishing operations for the Jewish Publication Society in Philadelphia, and before that worked as a marketing manager for the University of Pennsylvania Press, the University of Georgia Press, and the University of Wisconsin Press. She had also served as managing director of Worldwide Books in Ithaca, New York. Her professional affiliations included Women in Scholarly Publishing, of which she was a founding member, the Philadelphia Publishers Group, Women in Communications, and the Madison Press Club.

She was among the founders and later president of Friends of Eastern State Penitentiary Park, which improved the neglected property outside the walls of the historic prison in Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood. While a resident of Madison, Wisconsin, she was president of seven after school day care centers. She was a member of the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship of Athens, Georgia, and was until her recent illness active with the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, including its women’s book club.

She was preceded in death by her son, Eric David Spradling; her father, John B. Johnson; her mother, Jean Barr Johnson; and step-mother, Loretta Richards Johnson. She is survived by her husband, Robert L. Libkind, as well as aunts and cousins in Wisconsin, Alaska and Norway.

In lieu of flowers donations may be made to the American Heart Association.

Jean Sue has asked that the following be sent to all her friends in the event of her death:

My apologia,

Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free. 

If I, if I’ve been unkind, I hope that you will just let it go by, and if I, if I have been untrue, I hope you know that it was not to you. 

I saw a man, a beggar leaning on his crutch. He said to me, “Why do you ask for so much?” There was a woman, a woman leaning in a door, She said “Why not, why not, why not ask for more?’

Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.

— Leonard Cohen.

Here are some things you’ve heard me say; I call them “GienTsu-isms”—

• It is not enough to survive. One must do it with a sense of style, a sense of grace and a sense of humor.
• The mark of a civilization is how it treats its old, its young and its ill. We are barbarians.
• “If you give a child a love of reading and teach him to read with ease, the child can learn anything.”
• Romance doesn’t end in a marriage; the love evolves into something far deeper than mere romance with a bit of whimsy emerging every once in a while, just for fun.
• It is not enough to practice what you preach; you must have the courage to preach what you practice.
• It’s that damn “Y” chromosome: the leg of the Y gets caught in a man’s ear and he can’t hear what you’re saying.
• There are twenty people in the world and everything else is done with smoke and mirrors.
• The good news about the human race is that 99.9% of the people are doing the best they can; the bad news is that 99.9% of the people are doing the best they can.
• A bird in the hand leaves a messy palm.
• I earned every one of these wrinkles and gray white hairs.
• I’m an old woman and I can do what I want.
• The opinions of those who wish you well matter; the others can go to hell.
• It is easier to ask for forgiveness than beg for permission.
• Every time I see the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s some damn gnome with a lantern.
• She’s got Bette Davis eyes; I’ve got Madelyn Albright’s hair.
• Most policies are like fire hydrants. Everybody wants to leave his/her mark.
• Subset: There is always a Chihuahua who thinks he is a Great Dane..
• In case of an emergency, call an ambulance.
• When the organic material impacts with the ventilating device, have a beer and remember the good times.

With love and affection—Jean Sue

• Remember: No place is safe: Mrs. Elizabeth Anne Hewelett Hodges, 32, was asleep on the living room couch when a nine-pound meteor came through the roof of her Sulacauga, Alabama house, bounced off the radio and struck her hip (November 30, 1954). She was bruised; the radio did not survive.

Reposted from the blog MoralesWrites by Jennifer Morales

Jennifer Morales

Jennifer Morales is on a national book tour for her fiction collection, Meet Me Halfway: Milwaukee Stories (UW Press), and having conversations about race in America

Read more of Jennifer Morales’s blogs from her tour, talking about race in America at MoralesWrites.com.

The Midwestern History Association this week announced the winner of its first annual Frederick Jackson Turner Award, bestowed on an individual for lifetime service to Midwestern history. The honor is conferred upon Margaret Beattie Bogue, professor emerita of history and liberal studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Margaret Beattie Bogue

Bogue joined the University of Wisconsin Extension program in 1966 and later the Department of History at UW–Madison. Her research interests have included the fisheries and wetlands of the Great Lakes region as well as Midwestern agricultural and environmental history.

The Midwestern History Association was formed in 2014 to advocate and support greater attention to Midwestern history among professional historians. Bogue is the first recipient of this new award, which will be presented April 17^th at the annual meeting of the Midwestern History Association in St. Louis, in conjunction with the Organization of American Historians conference.

“The Midwestern History Association is proud to confer the first Turner Award upon Professor Bogue, who has been a long-time leader in studying the American Midwest, especially its deeply agrarian character and the decisive role of the Great Lakes in the region’s development,” said Jon K. Lauck, president of the association.

Bogue’s definitive history of the decline of the Great Lakes’ fisheries—Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783–1933 was published in 2000 by the University of Wisconsin Press and received national and regional awards, including the Wisconsin Library Association’s Outstanding Achievement book award. She also brought the rich local histories of the Great Lakes region to the general public through two guides to historic sites: Around the Shores of Lake Michigan and Around the Shores of Lake Superior, also both published by UW Press. In her 2007 second edition of the Superior book, she added historical essays on the Ojibwe presence, French exploration, industry on and around the lake, and the impact of this human history on the natural environment, garnering that book several awards, including the Award of Merit for Leadership in History from the American Association for State and Local History. Her first book, in 1959, was Patterns from the Sod: Land Use and Tenure in the Grand Prairie, 1850–1900 (Illinois State Historical Library).

“Margaret Bogue does meticulous research and analysis, but she makes her work accessible to general readers as well as scholars. She’s always been active in bringing history to the citizens of the Midwest and Great Lakes regions,” noted Gwen Walker, editorial director of the University of Wisconsin Press.

The Turner Award is named for the prominent historian Frederick Jackson Turner, whose famous 1890 lecture on the influence of “the frontier” on American identity considerably shaped the historiography of the Midwest and the broader field of U.S. history. Turner was born in Portage, Wisconsin, in 1861 and earned his BA from the University of Wisconsin in 1884. His essays on regionalism and the American Midwest won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1933. As a professor at the University of Wisconsin and later at Harvard, Turner trained many historians and helped shape many fields of historiography. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the discipline of American history was his focus on Midwestern history, an emphasis that was carried on by his many students.

The members of this year’s Frederick Jackson Turner Award committee are Pamela Riney-Kehrberg of Iowa State University, Brian Hosmer of the University of Tulsa, and Jane Pederson of the University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire.

Jason Knirck’s new book challenges the depiction of the 1920s as a period of political inertia in Ireland

Jason Knirck

Reposted from the IRISH TIMES

BY JASON KNIRCK, author of Afterimage of the Revolution: Cumann na nGaedheal and Irish Politics, 1922–1932

In March 1923, Ireland’s Cumann na nGaedheal government was criticised in the Dáil (Irish parliament) for allowing the military to seize cattle found trespassing on a landlord’s estate.  TJ O’Connell of the opposition Labour party claimed it was hypocritical for the government to insist on strict enforcement when Sinn Féin had openly encouraged disrespect for the law during the revolution.

In response, vice-president Kevin O’Higgins denied that his party had preached anarchy and famously said, “we are the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution.”

Kevin O’Higgins

This rather disingenuous statement has come to define Cumann na nGaedheal and the postrevolutionary period in Ireland, as historians often depict the 1920s as an era of stultifying conservatism and inertia. John Regan has even labelled the government counter-revolutionary, with its main goal being the creation of the Irish Party’s imagined Home Rule state.

The common notion is that the promise of the revolution faded in the 1920s as a conservative government replicated the institutions and ethos of its colonial predecessor. While the achievements of the revolution undoubtedly disappointed many, and were largely carried out in an atmosphere of social and cultural conservatism shared by much of the Sinn Féin leadership, recent research has increasingly questioned the depiction of Cumann na nGaedheal as counter-revolutionary or static.

The revolution and its emancipatory rhetoric cast a deep shadow over the following decade, as members of the government and their anti-Treaty opponents generally defended their policies by invoking revolutionary principles. Although most Treatyites understood the importance of the transition from active revolutionaries to government ministers, this shift did not necessitate a wholesale abandonment of revolutionary ideals.

Like any postrevolutionary government, Cumann na nGaedheal emphasised some aspects of the revolution while downplaying others. Notions of self-determination, anti-imperialism, and Irishness inherited from Sinn Féin became the key points around which Cumann na nGaedheal policies pivoted.

Taking a closer look at the Free State’s relationship with the British Empire is crucial in this regard. Despite constant criticism that the government was pro-British or pro-imperial, Cumann na Gaedheal consistently sought to protect and expand the state’s sovereignty against British threats.

The broadest strokes of this policy are well-known, culminating with the 1931 renunciation of the British parliament’s right to legislate for the Dominions, but the government’s support for Irish sovereignty went beyond these major initiatives.

Shortly before his assassination, for example, O’Higgins represented Ireland at a naval disarmament conference in Geneva. Although Ireland had no immediate interest in naval matters, O’Higgins attended in order to prevent Britain signing any agreement on behalf of the “British Empire,” an entity that he claimed had no legal existence.

The Irish government also earlier turned down a British offer to pay the expenses of Irish delegates travelling to London for the 1926 Imperial Conference, seeing this as an infringement on Irish independence. In this case, the desire to protect sovereignty even triumphed over the tightfistedness of the Department of Finance.

The government also invoked the other Dominions in protecting its sovereignty. Treatyites claimed that existing Dominions would be guarantors of Irish freedom, as any British interference with the Free State would implicitly threaten other Commonwealth members as well. This reimagined the British Commonwealth as an anti-imperial empire: a collection of sovereign states united against the metropole.

continue to page 2, on the Irish Times site here