https://www.amazon.com/Out-Montana-Memoir-Gordon-Noel/dp/0999216929/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1550859911&sr=8-4&keywords=noel%2C+gordon At the end of 2018, UM Press published Gordon Noel's "Out of Montana," which we will be featuring in subsequent blog posts in the coming months. But yesterday USA Today published a piece on driving in the West in the era before speed limits, and they quoted Gordon. Check out the article here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/02/22/no-speed-limits-nevada-montana-last-states-full-freedom/2947782002/…
GradCon 2018: UM’s Graduate Students Share Their Best Work
When I was asked if I would conduct interviews at GradCon, the annual conference of graduate student research, I agreed and was even enthusiastic about it. The goal was to do spontaneous interviews of presenters and record them so later the recordings could be turned into a podcast focusing on graduate student work at the…
Telling Stories of Montana: The Last Best Stories Podcast
Produced, written, and recorded mostly by students or former students of the University of Montana Journalism program, “Last Best Stories Podcast” is Jule Banville’s attempt to bring stories from what’s “officially unofficially the Last Best Place” to listeners. The podcast covers a variety of subjects, but they all have one thing in common; they are…
The Dying Athabaskan, by Brady Harrison
This January UM Professor of English Literature Brady Harrison’s novella The Dying Athabaskan won the inaugural Publisher’s Long Story Prize. The prize, awarded by Twelve Winters Press, aims to promote and fill the space of publishable stories that fall between the length of a traditional short story and novel. At eighty-one pages, The Dying Athabaskan…
Thinking “Big” with Biology
In 2017, Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) delivered a fairly typical rant against what he deemed pointless scientific research. He cherry-picked a seemingly absurd study of monkey drool. As Montanans who enjoy our Moose Drool (shout out to Big Sky Brewery!), we know how important drool is (and I owned a hound-dog for many years, so…
What is a fit medium for thinking in the 21st century?
The precipitous descent of books from their pedestal as a prestigious cultural institution is one of the hallmarks of late capitalist society, and cultural historians in 200 years will have, no doubt, much to say about it. Reading has been closely associated, if not virtually synonymous, with the act of thinking for the last 2,000…
Black Professionals and the Expansion of Freedom
In 1897, Alexander Crummell delivered his inaugural address to the American Negro Academy, which he founded. In the talk, titled The Attitude of the American Mind Toward the Negro Intellect, Crummell underlines the importance to an audience of rising black intellectuals of “the difficult task of stimulating and fostering the genius of their race as…
An Interview With Ken Egan Jr., Author of Montana 1889
We are delighted to feature this week an online interview with Ken Egan, Director of Humanities Montana, and author of a number of books on Montana history, most recently, Montana, 1889, (Riverbend Publishing, 2017). Montana, 1889 would make a great Christmas gift, so look for it in your local independent bookstore, or check it…
H. Rafael Chacón’s Montanans Over There and at Home.
Two summers ago, sitting behind the desk at the Mansfield Library, a patron returned a slim, rectangular book. As I picked it up to put on the sorting cart to be reshelved, my eye was caught by the title: The Original Man: The Life and Work of Montana Architect A.J. Gibson. Continuing to scan the…
Seeking Balance in the Poems of Eduardo Chirinos, Equilibrist
El equilibrista de Bayard Street / The Bayard Street Tightrope Walker: http://www.umt.edu/umpress/umpress-books/chirinos.php We at the University of Montana Press are delighted to publish this year a 20th Anniversary edition of Eduardo Chirinos’ El equilibrista de Bayard Street, masterfully translated by G.J. Racz, a long-time admirer of Chirinos’ poetry, and now a professor at Long Island…
The University of Montana Press 