So, just when you thought it safe to go to the bookstore, a crazy little book appears that makes you want to cry, laugh, and eat!

President by Massacre pulls back the curtain of "expansionism," revealing how Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Zachary Taylor massacred Indians to "open" land to slavery and oligarchic fortunes.President by Massacre examines the way in which presidential hopefuls through the first half of the nineteenth century parlayed militarily mounted land grabs into "Indian-hating" political capital to attain the highest office in the United States...

Wielding Words like Weapons is a collection of acclaimed American Indian Movement activist-intellectual Ward Churchill’s essays in indigenism, selected from material written during the decade 1995–2005. It includes a range of formats, from sharply framed book reviews and equally pointed polemics and op-eds to more formal essays designed to reach both scholarly and popular audiences. The selection also represents the broad range of topics addressed in Churchill’s scholarship, inclu...

The astonishing first-person account of Mississippi pioneer woman struggling to survive, protect her family, and make a home in the early American South.Near the end of her life, Mary Mann Hamilton (1866 - c.1936) began recording her experiences in the backwoods of the Mississippi Delta. The result is this astonishing first-person account of a pioneer woman who braved grueling work, profound tragedy, and a pitiless wilderness (she and her family faced floods, torna...

The Summer 2025 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.”The Summer 2025 issue, edited by Victor LaValle, features prose by Helen Phillips, Deesha Philyaw, S.A. Cosby, Joanna Pear...

Stories of the primordial woman who married a bear, appear in matriarchal traditions across the global North from Indigenous North America and Scandinavia to Russia and Korea. In The Woman Who Married the Bear, authors Barbara Alice Mann, a scholar of Indigenous American culture, and Kaarina Kailo, who specializes in the cultures of Northern Europe, join forces to examine these Woman-Bear stories, their common elements, and their meanings in the context of matriarchal culture. The...

Life has thrown some hard balls at Barbara Ker-Mann. At age three, she was smitten with infantile paralysis, causing inflammation of her central nervous system resulting in the lifelong loss of leg function. It was a terrible time in her development to be separated from family and encased in stiff white sheets and robes, no color and no window out into the world. This was just the first in the series of difficulties Barbara has faced throughout her amazing life. But she couldnt be held bac...

Violence was a constant on all colonial frontiers, from the British expansion into the Australian and African continents, to the expansion of the United States and the Napoleonic Empire's many incursions into Europe. Yet how did the forms of violence perpetrated in these four corners of the world compare? Did the oppression and exploitation of colonized peoples constitute a new form of violence? Or was it the same that Europeans had always used against conquered peoples?In this boo...

America’s War for Independence dramatically affected the speed and nature of broader social, cultural, and political changes including those shaping the place and roles of women in society. Women fought the American Revolution in many ways, in a literal no less than a figurative sense. Whether Loyalist or Patriot, Indigenous or immigrant enslaved or slave-owning, going willingly into battle or responding when war came to their doorsteps, women participated in the conflict in complex and va...

Trailblazing women working in digital arts media and education established the Midwest as an international center for the artistic and digital revolution in the 1980s and beyond. Foundational events at the University of Illinois and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago created an authentic, community-driven atmosphere of creative expression, innovation, and interdisciplinary collaboration that crossed gender lines and introduced artistically informed approaches to advanced research. ...

A history of modern Jewish literature that explores our enduring attachment to the book as an objectWith the rise of digital media, the "death of the book” has been widely discussed. But the physical object of the book persists. Here, through the lens of materiality and objects, Barbara E. Mann tells a history of modern Jewish literature, from novels and poetry to graphic novels and artists’ books. Bringing contemporary work on secularism and design in conversation...

For the first time, an accomplished scholar offers a painstakingly researched examination of the United States' involvement in deliberate disease spreading among native peoples in the military conquest of the West.The speculation that the United States did infect Indian populations has long been a source of both outrage and skepticism. Now there is an exhaustively researched exploration of an issue that continues to haunt U.S.-Native American relations.Barb...