Author Archives: uwpress

University of Wisconsin Press Welcomes Scandinavian Studies to Catalog

The University of Wisconsin Press is delighted to announce the addition of the prestigious academic journal Scandinavian Studies to its catalog. This exciting collaboration underscores the University of Wisconsin Press’s commitment to supporting scholarly research and fostering intellectual discourse across various disciplines.

Scandinavian Studies, a leading interdisciplinary journal in the study of the Nordic region, has been at the forefront of academic research and publication for over a century. First published in 1911, it serves as a vital platform for scholars and researchers to explore and showcase scholarship in the fields of Nordic history, literature, linguistics, art, folklore, and culture.

The inclusion of Scandinavian Studies in the University of Wisconsin Press catalog further enhances the esteemed lineup of scholarly journals offered by the press. By expanding its academic offerings, the Press continues to establish itself as a hub for exceptional research and scholarly discourse.

“We are very excited to welcome Scandinavian Studies to our journals publishing program. In addition to the prestige it brings to our program, it will also increase the synergy with our books publishing program, which has a well-established Scandinavian studies list, and a Nordic World series co-published with Aarhus University Press.” – Toni Gunnison, the University of Wisconsin Press Journals manager

Under the editorship of Dean Krouk, professor at the University of Wisconsin’s Scandinavian Studies program, as well as an international editorial board comprised of scholars in the field, Scandinavian Studies consistently publishes groundbreaking research, thought-provoking articles, and critical reviews that contribute to the collective understanding of Scandinavian culture, history, and society. By joining forces with the University of Wisconsin Press, the journal is set to expand its reach, connect with a broader academic audience, and engage in dynamic scholarly conversations.

“I am truly excited about partnering with the University of Wisconsin Press, which will allow Scandinavian Studies to reach a wider audience and further enrich the international academic discourse in our field. The journal will continue to publish original scholarship and research that explores and analyzes Nordic cultures, literature, histories, and societies.” – Dean Krouk

The University of Wisconsin Press is eager to embark on this exciting collaboration and looks forward to contributing to the growth and distribution of knowledge through the publication of Scandinavian Studies.

More information about the journal, as well as current and previous issues can be found on https://sca.uwpress.org/

Remembering Dr. Don E. Dumond, upon his passing

Dr. Don E. Dumond of Eugene, Oregon, passed away June 8, 2023, at the age of 94. Born in 1929 in Childress, Texas, Dr. Dumond (or Dr. D, as he was known to friends, students, and colleagues) was a leading figure of American archaeology, working in Alaska and Latin America after retiring from the Air Force as a captain. He was an anthropology professor at the University of Oregon from 1962-1994 and the director of the Museum of Natural History (now the Museum of Natural and Cultural History) from 1982-1996.

Dumond’s lifelong pursuit of knowledge led to a career as a leading American archaeologist. His work in Alaska began in 1960, while earning his Ph.D. Cressman offered Dumond a project determining the size of salmon runs on the Alaska Peninsula prior to 1880, for which there was no written record. He went on to receive a National Science Foundation grant between 1963-65 for the work, after which he became a professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon while also teaching in the Honors College. Among other accolades, Dumond was an elected Fellow of the Arctic Institute of North America, an elected member and chair of the nominations committee for the American Anthropological Association, an appointed delegate to the Permanent Council of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, an appointed member of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of Archaeologists within the American Anthropological Association, and an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1998, the Alaska Anthropological Association presented Dumond with a Career Achievement Award, and in 2008, they again honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. After retirement, Dumond received the highest honors possible from both museums on his campus: the Director’s Lifetime Achievement Award from MNCH and the Gertrude Bass Warner Award from the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

Dr. Dumond met his beloved wife Carol while both were visiting Mexico in 1950. They were married for 65 years until her death in 2015. His work lives on in the museum he built, the work he accomplished, and the lives he touched.

Dr. Dumond’s extensive bibliography and a dialogue can be found in a special edition of Arctic Anthropology honoring his work in the field: https://aa.uwpress.org/content/47/2

Ecological Restoration editor Steven Handel awarded LaGasse Medal

Steven Handel, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolution, and editor of Ecological Restoration was recently awarded the LaGasse medal by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). This award “Recognizes notable contributions by individuals to the management and conservancy of natural resources and/or public landscapes.”

The LaGasse Medal is the highest honor the ASLA can award to a non-landscape architect professional. It represents the significant achievements Dr. Handel has made in nearly 40 years working in this field. With this award, Handel joins esteemed recipients including former Secretaries of the Interior Sally Jewell, and Bruce Babbitt. Handel’s medal will be given to him this Fall at the ASLA annual meeting.

The University of Wisconsin Press had the honor of interviewing Dr. Handel about his award. The transcription can be found below:

Congratulations on winning the prestigious LaGasse Medal! Can you tell me how you felt when you first learned about this recognition and what it means to you?

Steven Handel:
Well, I was called by the person who nominated me, and I was surprised, and I was really thrilled. It’s a national honor that only goes to one person in the United States each year, and I was just astonished. I worked very hard for a long time and most of the work of an academic is private. You know, you sit in your office, or in the field working and to realize that a huge professional organization gave me their highest honor for natural resources. I just was like a light went on in a dark room.

It was just wonderful and the people I work with, the landscape architects and so on were also just thrilled for me and said some very nice things. My son asked: “Is this the capstone of your career?” I said, well, I don’t know about that, but it certainly makes me feel that these last 20 years of work and designing public landscapes was appreciated, and I’m grateful for that.

The LaGasse Medal is awarded to individuals who have made significant contributions to the management and conservancy of natural resources and public landscapes. Could you elaborate on the contributions you were recognized for and what impact you believe these projects have had on the field as a whole?

Steven Handel:
That’s right. The nomination said I did 5 things that were worthy of this honor. One is I that I’ve managed the Rutgers Forest, which is an uncut primeval forest, one of the few left in the eastern US, and I helped save that from deer pressure and invasives, so formally helping a national natural landmark.

I’ve done writing, of course, for your journal Ecological Restoration, and also in the scientific literature on restoration, and bringing back natural biodiversity. I’ve done that for many years, many people read that, and I hope, respond to it.

A third, I’ve trained students, both undergraduate and graduate students, over 20 PhD’s and master students, over the years in restoration ecology. I’ve helped train the next generation, and I’ve lectured not only at Rutgers, but also at Harvard University in their Graduate School of Design, which is the biggest landscape architecture program in America. They invited me to give a required course to all their students. I did that for four years about using ecological principles in landscape design, and I hope that’s had an impression.

Finally, was helping to design public parks. I’ve worked with several leading landscape architecture companies to tweak or modify their designs to make them more ecological, more diverse, and more sustainable, and that’s been very interesting for me. Most of my life I worked with scientists, but here I was working with a very different profession of designers and landscape architects, so it’s a transdisciplinary collaboration. It’s so interesting to me that many of these people really listen to what I have to say and make their designs more biodiverse, and I hopefully more sustainable in a changing world.

What motivated you to pursue a career in the restoration of native plant communities and sustainability? Did you always have an interest in restoration work, or did your interest develop over time?

Steven Handel:
There was an actual moment where I decided I’d better look into this. I had spent about 20 years studying plant populations, how they spread, how they reproduce, pollination, seed dispersal and had a fine time.

That was sort of straight scientific population biology work, and one day I took my class out on a field trip and we went to an old landfill in New Jersey. It had been 25 years since they stopped dumping garbage there and at the top of the landfill were just a few weeds. Every textbook in biology says after 25 years of abandonment, you should get ecological succession. It should be perennial wildflowers and shrubs and young trees, and that did not happen on this landfill, and I said, why not? How is it possible to restore these 20 acres into a natural landscape? So I got a grant and we started doing some experiments there to find out why hadn’t it developed into a natural community.

That started this whole part of my career. We learned what some of the problems were and about four years later I got a call from a landscape architecture company. A big one. They said: “We’re doing a project and an old landfill. We heard you study landfills. Can you help us?” I started collaborating with them, and the next thing you know, I won the LaGasse Medal 20 years later.

Could you share some of the challenges or obstacles you encountered along your journey and how you overcame them?

Steven Handel:
Yes, so many people are interested in nature in the city greening American cities. But it’s hard, you know, cities are not Yellowstone National Park. They have many, many stresses and all those stresses have to be addressed using ecological scientific principles. Cities are hot because of traffic and buildings, and cities have fragmented landscapes, so each little bit of green land is surrounded by asphalt, not by other forests. Cities have a lot of invasive species, crummy soil because of past land uses, and each of these constraints has to be overcome to bring back biodiversity and healthy landscapes. Healthy for us, not just for birds and butterflies.

So we started learning what the constraints were, and what kinds of plants and what kind of protocols or processes to use. We had to bring back biodiversity, not what was there 400 years ago. Rather a biodiversity that could survive current stresses, in a climate which is changing rapidly, getting hotter and drier. So, it’s been very interesting as a study of applied ecology.

What are the problems? Well ecological links have to be used to address those problems, and you know, I have to work with landscape architects because they are the only ones with a license to do blueprints. I can’t do a blueprint, and also, they deal with all the other needs of a landscape: where people have to walk, where to put the restrooms, where to put the athletic fields, and I work on the spaces around that.

How can we make maximize ecological health? And my award is for trying to get landscape architects to do that, to add some ecological feature to every project they work on.

As a recipient of the LaGasse Medal, you join an esteemed group of individuals (including a former Secretary of the Interior) who have made significant contributions to the field. How does it feel to be recognized alongside such renowned figures?

Steven Handel:
A few of them even, including Bruce Babbitt, who was Secretary of the Interior for President Clinton. So, it’s amazing to read the list of names. Well, first I’ll say I think it’s an important recognition for my field more so than for me. The idea that ecology can play an important role in landscape design and that restoration ecology can partner with the design field. So, I think it’s a way of getting my field better seen, and I hope it will make more ecologists work with the design professions, architecture, and city planning.

For me personally, it just feels that people have appreciated all this hard work I’ve done. I once told your journal manager, Toni Gunnison, I work 50 to 60 hours a week, and I sometimes wonder if anybody even sees that. And so, I felt that it justified all that hard work after all these years.

The LaGasse Medal is a testament to your dedication and commitment to the restoration field. How do you envision the future of the field, and what are some of the emerging trends or challenges that you believe will shape it?

Steven Handel:
Well, that’s a good question. I think nationally people are finally getting to see the immediate impacts of climate change. I mean this horrible, polluted air that’s come down from the big forest fires in Canada, the rising sea levels at all of our coasts, the increased storms which are also part of climate change. People are desperate for solutions with these public problems. Restoration ecology and adding green solutions to the infrastructure are ways to help, so I’m hoping that people will see that ecological science is part of the solution for a healthier, more economically sustainable future for our country.

I completely agree. And the world?

Steven Handel:
One country at a time, my boy. Well, you know, just last week I got a call from a guy who’s a professor at Stockholm University in Sweden and he asked if I could come to Stockholm in September to help them in in a similar project. So, you know there is one international program that’s starting, and even the United Nations has gotten interested. They’re doing something now. They called this the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and are trying to get other countries to realize adding back green solutions and natural solutions as part of protection. It’s for people, not just for butterflies and birds, and I stress that whenever I talk to a government group. By having healthy, sustainable infrastructure, it makes human health better, less asthma, less mental health stresses, and so on.

Lastly, what advice would you give to aspiring professionals in your field who hope to make similar significant contributions to the field?

Steven Handel:
Oh that’s good. I would say to my ecology colleagues and students: reach out to other disciplines. Science is fascinating, wonderful and makes great advances, but to make a better world, we have to reach out to other professions like landscape architects.

The old days of silos with each of us is in our own professional island, has to end, and the only way we’re really going to succeed to improve our country is for people with science backgrounds to work with public policy and the design communities. And they will welcome you.

One of my jobs at Harvard was to build links between biology and landscape architecture, and I think I succeeded a bit. Those kinds of academic and training links have to occur. I tell my ecology graduate students, get to know people in the design professions because you have so much to offer them.

And I think that is starting now nationally. I hope the LaGasse Medal is a recognition of that, and that we’ll get other landscape architects to think about working more closely with ecologists. There are some 15,000 members of the American Society of Landscape Architects and they all will get the news release about this medal and I hope it will make them think to reach out to a local university or ecology group to have them partner in new landscape designs.

Call for editor-in-chief, Native Plants Journal

Native Plants Journal (NPJ) has recently announced they are accepting applications for a new editor-in-chief. The journal, which was founded in 2000 as a collaborative effort between the USDA Forest Service and the University of Idaho, aims to provide a forum for practical information on planting and growing native North American plants for conservation, restoration, landscaping, and other related purposes.

The new editor-in-chief will have a range of responsibilities, including overseeing the editorial process; managing the peer review process; representing the journal at conferences and events; working with authors, reviewers, associate editors, and the managing editor to ensure timely and high-quality publication of articles; developing and implementing editorial policies; and collaborating with the University of Wisconsin Press to ensure efficient production and distribution of each issue.

To be considered for this role, candidates should have knowledge of the academic peer review process, experience in reviewing papers for academic journals, and hold an academic post in a relevant field such as ecology, botany, horticulture, conservation biology, or other plant-related field. Consideration will be given to those in relevant industries who have published papers and understand the value of sharing and expanding knowledge. Interested candidates must submit a CV that includes previous editorial experience in a relevant field, as well as a cover letter that outlines why they would be a good fit for the role and their vision for the future of the journal.

The deadline for applications is June 30th. More information can be found at https://npj.uwpress.org /call-for-editor

The position of editor-in-chief of NPJ presents a unique opportunity for individuals with relevant experience and a passion for the conservation and restoration of North American native plants. The selected candidate will have the chance to shape the future of the journal and make a significant contribution to the field.

University of Wisconsin Press offers free journal access to select countries through Project MUSE

The University of Wisconsin Press Journals Division has taken a significant step in making academic content more accessible to libraries in economically disadvantaged countries. By offering all content at no charge to select countries, this initiative recognizes the unique needs of these libraries and their users.

This program is offered through Project MUSE, a digital platform that provides access to scholarly books and journals from reputable publishers. MUSE has been actively working to bridge the knowledge gap between economically disadvantaged countries and the rest of the world by implementing initiatives like pricing tiers and partnerships with organizations like the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications.

The country list for this program will be updated each year based on the Wold Bank World Development Indicators. The 2023 list includes:

Burkina Faso
Burundi
Central African Republic
Chad
Congo
The Democratic Republic of Congo
Eritrea
Gambia
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Liberia
Madagascar
Mali
Niger
Somalia
South Sudan
Sudan
Togo
Yemen

These efforts can go a long way in providing individuals in these countries with the tools and information they need to succeed. By making academic content more accessible, we can help bridge the knowledge gap and promote a more equitable world. We hope that other publishers and organizations will follow suit and take similar steps to make their content more widely available to those who need it most.

Call for Proposals

First Annual Luso-Brazilian Review
Emerging Scholars Article Incubator

Application Deadline: April 15, 2023

The Luso-Brazilian Review invites applications for the first annual Emerging Scholars Article Incubator program. In the spirit of the LBR’s founders, who in the first issue promised to “encourage publication by younger [scholars],” the article incubator will provide support each year for one advanced graduate student or recent PhD to develop an article-length essay with the hope of preparing it for publication in the LBR. The selected scholar will hold a workshop at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (this year’s workshop will be held via Zoom) during which they will receive developmental feedback from the journal’s History and Social Science editors as well as other invited campus faculty who specialize in Lusophone and other relevant fields. If the awardee is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, they will receive a $1,000 stipend. After the workshop, the author will be invited to revise the article and submit for publication through the regular peer review process of the LBR. This process does not guarantee publication. Questions may be addressed to Marc Hertzman and Jerry Dávila at the following email: LBRarticleIncubator@gmail.com.

Guidelines and Materials:

Applicant must be a graduate student or have been awarded their Ph.D. no earlier than December 2019;
All application materials and the article manuscript must be submitted in English;
Applicants must submit the following:
- C.V.
- Short writing sample (limit 5,000 words). The sample does not need to be related to the proposed article and should simply illustrate the author’s writing abilities
- 250-word cover page, including
  - A clear description of the article, its primary argument(s), contributions to the literature, and source base.
  - A clear indication of the current state of the article (conceptualized, outlined, fully drafted, etc.) and a timeline for completing a polished draft by August 15, 2023.

Timeline:

Application materials due April 15, 2023 (11:59pm Central Time)
Awardee announced by May 15, 2023
Draft of full, polished article for workshop due August 15, 2023
Workshop: September 2023
Revised article submitted to the LBR by November 30, 2023

Call For Papers Ghana Studies – Special Issue Ghana’s Long 1970s: Reconsidering the Lost Decade (1966–1981)

There has been a surge of scholarly interest in the Ghana of the 1950s and 1960s, under its charismatic independence era leader Kwame Nkrumah. These works tell a new story of that era, focusing on the possibilities of independence by looking anew at Pan-Africanism, socialism, new histories of the Cold War and Black internationalism (Alhman 2017; Getachew 2019; Iandolo 2022; Osei-Opare 2023).

In contrast, Ghana’s 1970s are often reduced to an afterthought. Military coups dominate the narrative. Indeed, the 1970s are a decade characterized by military rule, economic decline, emigration, and hardship (Hutchful 1979; Pellow & Chazan 1986). This hardship is reflected in the relative lack of scholarship on the period. The body of work that does exist tends to reinforce a top-down narrative, with a strong focus on the state. It is only after 1981, when J.J. Rawlings comes to power and stays, that Ghana again attracts significant scholarly interest (Herbst 1993; Nugent 1995; Brydon & Legge 1996).

Forty years on, it is high time to return to the 1970s. Inspired by the interest in the Nkrumah years, and motivated by the availability of new archives in Ghana and elsewhere, we invite historians to reconsider the 1970s with us. Building on recent scholarship that begins to probe the 1970s anew (Hart 2016; Murillo 2017; Wiemers 2021), we seek contributions that engage with the following questions:
● How might our understanding of this decade change if instead of focusing on disjuncture, we looked for continuity?
● How did this period of transition between two defining political regimes (between Nkrumah and Rawlings) shape contemporary Ghana?
● How did ordinary Ghanaians navigate this tumultuous decade? What does a focus on everyday lives, rather than a state-centric approach, reveal about these years?
● What new methods and sources might we turn to, to recover histories of a decade when state institutions supposedly collapsed?
● To what extent can the framing of “Ghana’s long 1970s” (1966–1981) help us reconsider the history of postcolonial Ghana?

We are particularly interested in contributions that de-center political narratives, but are open to a wide array of approaches. We welcome expressions of interest and further conversations regarding potential submissions (write to: claire.nicolas@unil.ch).

Submission Guidelines

Abstracts (200 words) should be submitted to Claire Nicolas (claire.nicolas@unil.ch) and Elisa Prosperetti (elisa.prosperetti@nie.edu.sg) by 1 April 2023.

Contributors will be notified by 15 April 2023.

Full papers (8000 words) are to be received by 15 September 2023.

All articles will undergo peer review. Those accepted for publication will appear in a special issue of Ghana Studies, scheduled for publication in 2024.

About Ghana Studies
Ghana Studies is the peer-reviewed journal of the Ghana Studies Association, an international affiliate of the African Studies Association (U.S). Its current editors are Victoria Ellen Smith (University of Bristol) and Nana Yaw Boampong Sapong (University of Ghana). Since its first issue in 1998, the journal has published significant work by leading scholars based in Ghana, the United States, Canada, and Europe. It is published annually by the University of Wisconsin Press.

About the editors of the special issue
Claire Nicolas is a Research Fellow from the Swiss National Science Foundation, at SOAS (University of London). She specializes in the history of sport, citizenship, and gender.
Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Education at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She specializes in the history of education, development, and nation-building.

Bibliography
J. Alhman, Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017).
L. Brydon and K. Legge, Adjusting Society: The World Bank, the IMF, and Ghana (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1996).
A. Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
J. Hart, “‘NIFA NIFA’: Technopolitics, Mobile Workers, and the Ambivalence of Decline in Acheampong’s Ghana,” African Economic History, 44 (2016): 181–201.
J. Herbst, The Politics of Reform in Ghana, 1982-1991 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
E. Hutchful, “A Tale of Two Regimes: Imperialism, the Military and Class in Ghana,” Review of African Political Economy 14 (1979): 36–55.
A. Iandolo, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022).
B. Murillo, Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017).
P. Nugent, Big Men, Small Boys, and Politics in Ghana: Power, Ideology, and the Burden of History, 1982-1994 (London: Pinter, 1995).
N. Osei-Opare, “Ghana and Nkrumah Revisited: Lenin, State Capitalism, and Black Marxist Orbits,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (2023): 1-23.
D. Pellow and N. Chazan, Ghana: Coping with Uncertainty (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986).
A. Wiemers, Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2021).

CALL FOR PAPERS

The journal Arctic Anthropology, founded in 1962 by Chester S. Chard, announces a call for papers for our upcoming volume 59. We seek papers that report on research pertaining to the peoples and cultures of the arctic, subarctic, and contiguous regions of the world. Papers addressing new directions in interdisciplinary northern research, contemporary issues among northern peoples, collaborative research with northern residents, and northern voices are particularly welcome.

The style guide for the journal is available here. Please send inquiries to Pete Collings, editor of Arctic Anthropology, at pcollings@ufl.edu

Please send manuscripts by February 24

UW Press statement of solidarity

The University of Wisconsin Press unequivocally states that Black Lives Matter. We stand in solidarity with Black, Indigenous, and all people of color, and join our voices in condemning the violent deaths of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony Robinson, and countless others at the hands of the police or vigilantes.

BIPOC leaders are again shining a bright light on the injustices of our state and our institutions. The violence against and murder of Black people occurs within the context of centuries-long racism, and more recently, amid a pandemic that is killing a disproportionate number of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people.

We recognize that our own history includes many of the racist and white supremacist behaviors we reject. In academic publishing generally, and at UW Press, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) are underrepresented in all areas: leadership, staff, authors, peer reviewers, and editors. As an organization, we acknowledge this and will seek to address it in all our processes and procedures. We are committed to using our platform to engage and amplify more BIPOC voices. True dedication to the Wisconsin Idea means embodying the principle that scholarship produced at the university should be available to and reflect the needs of everyone in the state.

Individually and collectively, we commit to listening and acting. We continue to educate ourselves on the cultural pervasiveness of white supremacy and our own internalized racism. We take responsibility for and are working to dismantle structures of inequality and replace them with sustained systems of support for BIPOC within ourselves, our communities, and our workplace.

To our BIPOC authors, vendors, colleagues, family, and neighbors: We see you and we hear you. We acknowledge your grief and righteous anger.

We can and will do better.

Detritus from The Round Barn

Today’s guest blogger is Jacqueline Dougan Jackson, author of The Round Barn: A Biography of an American Farm, Volume Four.

At 14, I told my grandfather that I was going to write him a book— and call it, “The Round Barn.” Now, at 90, with the book(s!) finished, I’ve been gathering up the materials I’ve collected over the years, and going over them one final time in preparation for archiving them at the University of Wisconsin. Whitewater will expect the letters, ledgers, and photographs from the farm, operating from 1906-1972, documenting its history as an innovative dairy. Not so much (but are accepting nonetheless) such equipment and objects as:

1. Original stanchion, surcingle, and cow cups from the Round Barn. Grampa wrote in a letter, how milk production had increased dramatically after he installed drinking cups in the barn. (Before, they had just the creek in the pasture, and the cow tank in the barnyard.) We kids liked to push down the lips of the cups, shaped for a cow’s nose, when the barn was empty! I saved two of these heavy cups, the pole and all, and sent one to UW. I couldn’t find the stanchion I saved, until my daughter said she’d seen it behind all the coats in the downstairs closet. Sure enough–so that went to the Archives, too.

As to the surcingle– “What’s a surcingle?” I explained:
It’s a harness to hold the milking machine under the cow. Nobody remembered seeing the surcingle. But finally I recalled an upstairs closet where we kept the dress-up clothes, and there it was, on a hook, along with shorter belts and sashes. It never could have been used for a costume, but was a good place for it. So that’s gone off, too, marked “surcingle” though I think the canny, farm-bred archivist will probably recognize it! I also found (with both triumph and dismay) various odds and ends that could have made a story. Too late now! But let me share some here:

My Pet
I have a pet pig. I named him Jacky after myself. He was born an our farm and is quite a big pig now. I’m sad because he soon will be butchered.
My pig was very clever when he was a baby, but now all he does is lie in the mud and eat.
One day I came to the pig pen. Jacky was going with the other pigs to another pen. I picked Jacky up by his tail. You should have heard him squeal!
He is smart too. He found out a way to get the most corn. Jacky is very greedy. He can also run quickly, and can dodge very well. I think my pig is very nice.

(I was a practical farm kid.)

A photo of the unique cream-catcher bottle we used for a few years, before homogenization — provided a procedure for pouring the cream without disturbing the milk. I’ve described the technique in Vol 1, but didn’t have the photo. Here it is, that’s me holding the bottle, with my sister Jo and brother-in-law Karl. Do you like my dress?
A quick conversation recorded shortly after Jo and Karl’s Catholic wedding. Jo, a new convert to Catholicism, and Dad (Ron), a Methodist, were driving along a country road and came across a crow consuming roadkill.
Dad: That must be a Methodist crow.
Jo (indignantly): Why, what do you mean?!
Dad: Well, It’s not Catholic anyway…. it’s Friday!

I think I’m going to find more juicy bits to crow about! _____
More information and stories at http://roundbarnstories.com

Jacqueline Dougan Jackson is the author of fourteen books, including Stories from the Round Barn, More Stories from the Round Barn, and the first three volumes of The Round Barn, A Biography of an American Farm. She is a founding faculty member of Sangamon State University, now the University of Illinois–Springfield, and her books have been featured on Wisconsin Public Radio.