University of Michigan Press Blog

WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH ACKNOWLEDGMENT by Karen Chilton

"Any woman who has a great deal to offer the world is in trouble. And if she's a Black woman, she's in deep trouble." –Hazel Scott

Over that grand expanse of time during February and March when Black Americans are honored and American women are acknowledged for their great works, I am often struck by what is missing, or better, who is missing out on the mass praise and adulation.

Watch the launching event for The US Army Stability Operations Field Manual

Watch the video of the Brookings launch of the new book The US Army Stability Operations Field Manual (FM 3-07) from C-SPAN2 at: http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info&products_id=284924-1

Also read an article, or watch the press conference, from the BBC discussing President Obama's new strategy for Afghanistan here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7966982.stm

Continue the discussion by leaving a comment.

New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History

Bruce Boyd Raeburn, author of New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History looks forward to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival

Spring is here in the Crescent City and that means that the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is about a month away. This year I’ll be interviewing drummer Johnny Vidacovich at the Music Heritage Stage on the first Friday, and I’m looking forward to it because we have been friends for thirty-five years and he also happens to be one of the best drummers in New Orleans.

U-M redefining scholarly publications in the digital age

U-M Press refocuses on disseminating ideas, adding authors, printing on demand

Ann Arbor, Mich -- The scholarly monograph isn't going anywhere. But exactly where and how scholarly works appear is undergoing nothing less than a revolution comparable, some say, to the invention of the printing press nearly six centuries ago.

The Accidental Teacher is a "Book of the Year" Finalist!

The University of Michigan Press would like to congratulate Annie Lubliner Lehmann on her book, The Accidental Teacher, for being selected as a "Book of the Year" Finalist in the Family & Relationships category by ForeWord Magazine.  A heart-felt memoir about the life lessons Lehmann has learned from her autistic son, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. More information can be found about the book here.

We also would like to applaud Annie Lubliner Lehmann for being a named 2009 Silver Recipient in Special & Exceptional Needs by Mom's Choice Awards.

GOLD: Author Ray La Raja Goes After "D.C. Leprechauns"

from Ray La Raja, author of Small Change

"The economic downturn will not deter powerful interest groups from contributing big money to those good ole’ D.C…let’s call them “leprechauns.” D.C. leprechauns.  

GOOD DRINK: Author Steve Z hangs out in the Guinness Archives

A St. Patrick's Day "non-endorsement," story, and random fact from PROF STEVE ZILIAK, co-author of THE CULT OF STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives

"William Sealy Gosset, an amiable, rucksack-wearing chemist who – beginning in 1899 – worked all his adult life for Guinness and eventually rose to the rank of head brewer, is the hero of The Cult. So a couple months ago I was in the reading room of the Guinness Archives, Dublin, when a couple guys entered the room...

Q&A with Betty Jean Lifton, author of Lost & Found

The first edition of Betty Jean Lifton’s Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience advanced the adoption rights movement in the United States in 1979, challenging many states’ policies of maintaining closed birth records. For nearly three decades the book has topped recommended reading lists for those who seek to understand the effects of adoption---including adoptees, adoptive parents, birth parents, and their friends and families.

Now in its third edition, author Betty Jean Lifton talks with us about her book. Dr. Lifton is an adoption counselor and adopted person. She has a practice in Cambridge Massachusetts as well as New York City and does telephone counseling across the country. Visit her website at: www.bjlifton.com.

You can also listen to this interview on our University of Michigan Press Author Podcast page at: www.press.umich.edu/podcasts/index.jsp.

The University of Michigan Press: What makes this book still relevant today? Why a third edition?

Betty Jean Lifton: The book is relevant because the psychological issues that adoptees faced in the past are still with them today. Whether they grew up in the closed adoption system or the semi-open system we have now, adoptees still feel like second class citizens because adoption records are sealed in all but eight states. As long as records are sealed, there is a stigma to being adopted, of being illegitimate, of being a bastard. Of being, as I say, invisible, because no one can see what it feels like to have been abandoned by one set of parents, even if one was chosen by another set of loving ones.

Still, despite the psychological feelings remaining the same, there have been many changes in adoption practice. And this third edition covers them.

UMP: What are some of these changes?

BJL: One of the most important ones is that there is a shortage of adoptable babies in this country, unlike years ago.

UMP: Why is that?

BJL: Many reasons. For one, the 1960’s saw the beginning of many societal changes. There was no longer the same discrimination about an unwed mother keeping her baby. And many did. Then, too, abortion was legalized in 1974, and women had a choice about having their baby or not.

Incidentally, the shortage of babies changed the way society treated birth mothers. Before they were told to disappear after they gave up their babies. Today we see birth mothers in the position of choosing who will parent their child. Birth mothers are much in demand, like the goose who laid the golden egg. Prospective parents are in the uncomfortable position of competing for the few available babies by making up brochures in which they have to sell themselves. Also it is important to point out that these women giving up their babies are for the most part not young hapless teenagers, but married women who already have a few children and cannot afford to raise another one.

Gearing up for Spring in Michigan with Jim DuFresne

In 1986, I enrolled in a one-day fly fishing clinic staged by the Mershon Chapter of Trout Unlimited in Saginaw and fell in love with casting a fly. There was something about dropping a dry fly onto a moving river that intrigued me, something I never experienced while chucking a lure or a worm on a hook. I quickly purchased my first fly rod--a Fenwick five-weight--and when I was confident enough that not every one of my back casts would result in my fly dangling just out of reach in a tree, I purchased a copy of  Gerth Hendrickson's Twelve Classic Trout Streams in Michigan and headed up north to explore them.

Twenty years later University of Michigan Press asked if I would be interested in updating the classic fishing guide. Gerth had died years earlier and now I was being handed his book, 300 pages of personal observations about coldwater streams, the festy nature of a wild brookies and the joys of watching a trout rise to take a well placed fly.

I never met Gerth but through his words, analyzing them one by one, I know him well. He was an avid fly angler but also a hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey who surveyed many of the great trout streams in the Lower Peninsula. Gerth was a researcher, a man of science, so he could never say the stream is two to three feet deep but always had to add a "usually" or "generally" or "most of the time" in front of such a statement. He loved wild trout, was suspicious of salmon that were introduced in the Great Lakes, and while he himself had long ago given up bait and spinners,  choosing to fish only with flies, he never looked down on anybody who tossed a worm into a stream in search of a brookie.

I would explore an access site, the same one that Gerth had explored almost 30 years earlier, and marvel at the fact that so little had changed. The gravel bottom that Gerth so carefully surveyed was still there so were the muddy banks that he described in his text or the brushy alder that he warned would snag wayward flies. Most of all, the trout were still there, rising to the same afternoon hatches that Gerth experienced. There is something reassuring about that, knowing that long after I have hung up my waders for the last time others can follow and find these streams exactly as Gerth and I did. In the end I discovered it wasn't the fish that makes a trout stream a classic but being able to transcend generations.

Jim DuFresne is author of the forthcoming fully revised edition of Twelve Classic Trout Streams in Michigan: A Handbook for Fly Anglers.

Read a review from the Detroit Free Press