Books published by University of Nebraska Press

Koasati Dictionary is one of the first modern dictionaries ever published of a language of the Muskogean language family, whose speakers formerly occupied most of the southeastern United States. When first met by Europeans in the sixteenth century, the Koasati people were living in eastern Tennessee. Early in the eighteenth century they moved to southcentral Alabama and eventually migrated to present-day Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma. Today their language survives in southwestern Louisiana, where it is still spoken by the majority of tribal members living there.Published three years after Kimball''s richly detailed Koasati Grammar, this dictionary is the second of three monographs to result from his fifteen-year study of the language. In this work, Kimball provides the user with a substantial introduction outlining Koasati grammar and then organizes dictionary entries into two parts, the first arranged from Koasati to English and the second from English to Koasati. In addition to English translations, entries in the Koasati-English section include sample sentences that illustrate word usage as well as illuminate traditional Koasati culture. Most of these sentences are taken from narrative texts.The dictionary, like Kimball''s grammar of Koasati, is an indispensable reference work for linguists, anthropologists, and historians - indeed, for anyone interested in the native culture history of the southeastern United Stated.Geoffrey D. Kimball is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Tulane University.

Tells the story of Sultana, an Algerian woman doctor who, after years spent living in France, returns to her native village in order to attend the funeral of a former lover. This book explores the clash between her origins and the Westernized life she now leads.

Today the Osage tribe numbers about 18,000, but only two elders still speak the traditional language. Osage Grammar is the first documentation of how the Osage language works, including more than two thousand sentences from Osage speakers, and a detailed description of its phonology, morphology, and syntax.

George Copway rose to prominence in American literary, political, and social circles during the mid-nineteenth century. This work chronicles Copway's cultural journey, portraying the freedom of his early childhood, the dramatic moment of his spiritual awakening to Methodism, and the rewards and frustrations of missionary work.

Presents a survey and analysis of the southeastern Native languages at the close of the twentieth century. The diversity and richness of these surviving linguistic traditions emerge in this volume. It provides an overview and grammatical sketch of a language, basing discussion on a narrative text presented at the beginning of the chapter.

Written twenty years before it was first published in 1972, War Games features both black and charcoal-gray humor, whose characters and events are as unpredictable as they are absorbing--a book, in the author''s words, "where the extremity of the bizarre is seen as the ultimate effort to change oneself, if not the world." At the center of the novel is the developing relationship between the protagonist, a fifty-three-year-old army colonel, and a Viennese immigrant whom he first knows as Mrs. Tabori and whose story he has learned through a dying amputee, Human Kopfman. Themes and characters that first appear in War Games reappear in The Field of Vision and Ceremony in Lone Tree.In the preface to this edition, Wright Morris describes the genesis of the book in 1951 and comments on its connections with his late work: "War Games may well prove to be the seedbed of much more in my fiction than I am aware, since it was the first turning of earth more than twenty years buried. My novels are linked in this manner, but sometimes at odds with the chronology of publication. In the absence of War Games, many clues to the fiction that followed were missing. . . ."[This novel] seems to me darkly somber, a book of interiors, dimly lighted streets, hallways and lobbies, with glimpses of objects and colors that emerge in subdued lighting. I''d like to think that my readers, both new and old, will find the world of the Colonel and Mrs. Tabori relevant to the one in which they are living."One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.