Books published by University of Nebraska Press

Industrial agriculture is generally characterized as either the salvation of a growing, hungry, global population or as socially and environmentally irresponsible. Despite elements of truth in this polarization, it fails to focus on the particular vulnerabilities and potentials of industrial agriculture. Both representations obscure individual farmers, their families, their communities, and the risks they face from unpredictable local, national, and global conditions: fluctuating and often volatile production costs and crop prices; extreme weather exacerbated by climate change; complicated and changing farm policies; new production technologies and practices; water availability; inflation and debt; and rural community decline. Yet the future of industrial agriculture depends fundamentally on farmers’ decisions.In Defense of Farmers illuminates anew the critical role that farmers play in the future of agriculture and examines the social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities of industrial agriculture, as well as its adaptations and evolution. Contextualizing the conversations about agriculture and rural societies within the disciplines of sociology, geography, economics, and anthropology, this volume addresses specific challenges farmers face in four countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. By concentrating on countries with the most sophisticated production technologies capable of producing the largest quantities of grains, soybeans, and animal proteins in the world, this volume focuses attention on the farmers whose labors, decision-making, and risk-taking throw into relief the implications and limitations of our global industrial food system. The case studies here acknowledge the agency of farmers and offer ways forward in the direction of sustainable agriculture.

Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival is the first book to explore the trauma of the boarding school experience at Steward Indian School and the resilience of generations of students who persevered there under the most challenging of circumstances.

The poems in Produce Wagon explore the vast and varied circumstances of the human experience: the poet's love for his wife, his love of nature, his love for the family he grew up in, and his love of stories.

The first detailed account of the history of Fort Phil Kearny, including the dramatic Fetterman Fight of December 21, 1866, in which the U.S. Army suffered its worst defeat on the northern plains until Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn ten years later.

In the face of amnesia, how does one exist? In this poem, Hawad speaks directly to Azawad, a silent figure whose name designates a portion of Tuareg lands divided among five nation-states created in the 1960s.

This a comprehensive collection of the new and collected works of South Africa's second poet laureate, Keorapetse Kgositsile.

Poisoned Eden analyzes the social, political, and cultural effects of three cholera epidemics that shook the northwestern province of Tucuman, Argentina, and the role of public health in building the Argentine state in the late nineteenth century.

Making a Modern U.S. West surveys the history of the U.S. West from 1898 to 1940, centering what is often relegated to the margins in histories of the region-the flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders.

Dirty Knowledge explains how traditional conceptions of academic freedom, still reflective of the capitalist era in which they were conceived, fail to protect unrestricted inquiry in an academy radically altered by neoliberal economics.