The story of westering Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been told most notably through photographs of American Indians. Unlike this vast archive, produced primarily by male photographers, which depicted American Indians as either vanishing or domesticated, the lesser-known images by the women featured in Trading Gazes provide new ways of seeing the intersecting histories of colonial expansion and indigenous resistance. Four unconventional women-Jane Gay, who documented land allotment to the Nez Perces; Kate Cory, an artist who lived for years in a Hopi community; Grace Nicholson, who purchased cultural items from the Karuk and other northern California tribes; and Mary Schaffer, who traveled among the Stoney and Métis of Alberta, Canada-used cameras to document their cross-cultural encounters. Trading Gazes reconstructs the rich biographical and historical contexts explaining these women's presence in different Native communities of the North American West. Their photographs not only record the unprecedented opportunities available for Euro-American women eager to shed gender restrictions, but also reveal how women's newfound mobility depended on the increasing restrictions placed on Native Americans in this era. By tracing the complex, often unexpected relationships forged between these women, their cameras, and the Native subjects of their photographs, Trading Gazes offers a new focus for recovering women's histories in the West while bringing attention to the complicated legacies of these images for Native and non-Native viewers.

In 1912, Mary Vaux, a botanist, glaciologist, painter, and photographer, wrote about her mountain adventures: "A day on the trail, or a scramble over the glacier, or even with a quiet day in camp to get things in order for the morrow's conquests? Some how when once this wild spirit enters the blood...I can hardly wait to be off again." Vaux's compulsion was shared by many women whose intellects, imaginations, and spirits rose to the challenge of the mountains between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. This Wild Spirit explores a sampling of women's creative responses--in fiction and travel writing, photographs and paintings, embroidery and beadwork, letters and diaries, poetry and posters--to their experiences in the Rocky Mountains of Canada.

Mary Schäffer was a photographer, writer, botanical painter, and mapmaker from Philadelphia, well known for her travels in the Canadian Rockies and Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. In Searching for Mary Schäffer, Colleen Skidmore takes up Schäffer’s own resonant themes—women and wilderness, travel and science—to ask new questions, tell new stories, and reassess the persona of Mary Schäffer imagined in more recent times. Public and private archival collections in the United States and Canada set the stage for this engrossing exploration of Schäffer’s creative, collaborative, and competitive enterprise amid the cultural complexities of Philadelphia’s science and photography communities, and the scientific, tourist, and Indigenous societies of the Rocky Mountains of Canada. “In this impressive book, Colleen Skidmore uses her considerable skills as a social historian of photography to shed new light on the remarkable life of Mary Schäffer. She knows the stories, the characters, and presents a social history that is fresh and convincing. Skidmore’s conclusion is brilliant and will certainly serve as a catalyst for further research and study of Mary Schäffer.” Donna Livingstone, President and CEO, Glenbow Museum

“All predestined affinities are merely debts to be repaid.” In his mortal life, Song Yao ate an elixir pill that dropped from the heavens by accident, and thus began his life as an immortal. After millennia of living in idleness, the Jade Emperor orders Song Yao back to the mortal plane. His task is seemingly simple: to oversee the love trial between two immortal lords. Only when he bids his old friend Hengwen Qingjun farewell at the heavenly gates is he told of his true role on the mortal plane: to steal away the heart of one of the lords, Tianshu Xingjun. Falling from the skies with no way back, Song Yao can only wonder, who’s really being put on trial here?

Stop the presses! These ten intrepid newsmen and women will stop at nothing when it comes to getting the story, even if it means losing their hearts along the way. No Secrets in Spandex: Allegations of drug use surround bike racer Jacob Hunter, and reporter Ariel Hays is ready to do anything to get that story--except reveal her own secrets. Special Angel: A diva with no record of her past, classical singer Angelique must search the globe to find her true identity, with sexy investigative reporter Brian Andrews hot on her heels. Falling Again: When Fiona McCarthy's investigative news piece and Nick St. Claire's photography assignment intersect, can their feelings for each other survive her need to get the story and his to frame the perfect shot? Love's Justice: Profiler Sarah Johnson is not ready for the deceit and corruption investigative reporter Justin Breslow discovers surrounding her mother's death, nor the danger he brings to her life and her heart. Thunder in the Night: Investigative journalist Allison Belsar is insulted when she's assigned a routine travel story, until it becomes anything but ordinary--or safe. Can she trust the gorgeous tour guide who may be her savior, or could he be the man who wants her dead? Creatures of the Moon: After being attacked in the wild, Lydia Davis starts to change in a way that only journalist Ryan Williams can understand. But how can he help her without revealing his own shapeshifting secret? Best Laid Plans: Anchorwoman Violet Gallagher and hotshot photojournalist Jake Macintyre are on very different career paths. Is one enchanted evening worth a lifetime of dreams? A Man for All Seasons: On a whim, journalist Janey Turner agrees to spend Thanksgiving with Joe Argenti, the editor she's never met in person before. When breaking news interrupts their suddenly romantic dinner, will her professional dreams cost her a merry Christmas? High Octane: Unleashed: TV journalist Vivienne McCloud's first big assignment is to draw out F1 driver Adam Fontaine's secrets. While getting to know the stoic speedster she finds far more than she bargained for--including some serious sparks and a story that will threaten both of their careers. Hot Off the Press: After Leigh Cameron's father dies, the seasoned journalist thinks returning to her sleepy hometown to run the family's newspaper will be easy as pie. But her father's right-hand man, David Stone, is an arrogant tyrant, the paper's in serious financial trouble, and the town is harboring some ugly secrets. Leigh must work closely with David to get to the bottom of things, but is it too close for comfort? Sensuality Level: Sensual

Notions of identity have long structured women’s art. Dynamics of race, class, and gender have shaped the production of artworks and oriented their subsequent reassessments. Arguably, this is especially true of art by women, and of the socially engaged criticism that addresses it. If identity has been a problem in women’s art, however, is more identity the solution? In this study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art in Canada, Kristina Huneault offers a meditation on the strictures of identity and an exploration of forces that unsettle and realign the self. Looking closely at individual artists and works, Huneault combines formal analysis with archival research and philosophical inquiry, building nuanced readings of objects that range from the canonical to the largely unknown. Whether in miniature portraits or genre paintings, botanical drawings or baskets, women artists reckoned with constraints that limited understandings of themselves and others. They also forged creative alternatives. At times identity features in women’s artistic work as a failed project; at other times it marks a boundary beyond which they were able to expand, explore, and exult. Bringing together settler and indigenous forms of cultural expression and foregrounding the importance of colonialism within the development of art in Canada, I’m Not Myself at All observes and reactivates historical art by women and prompts readers to consider what a less restrictive conceptualization of selfhood might bring to current patterns of cultural analysis.

Alice Cunningham Fletcher was both formidable and remarkable. A pioneering ethnologist who penetrated occupations dominated by men, she was the first woman to hold an endowed chair at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology--during a time the institution did not admit female students. She helped write the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 that reshaped American Indian policy, and became one of the first women to serve as a federal Indian agent, working with the Omahas, the Winnebagos, and finally the Nez Perces. Charged with supervising the daunting task of resurveying, verifying, and assigning nearly 757,000 acres of the Nez Perce Reservation, Fletcher also had to preserve land for transportation routes and restrain white farmers and stockmen who were claiming prime properties. She sought to “give the best lands to the best Indians,” but was challenged by the Idaho terrain, the complex ancestries of the Nez Perces, and her own misperceptions about Native life. A commanding presence, Fletcher worked from a specialized tent that served as home and office, traveling with copies of laws, rolls of maps, and blank plats. She spent four summers on the project, completing close to 2,000 allotments. This book is a collection of letters and diaries Fletcher wrote during this work. Her writing illuminates her relations with the key players in the allotment, as well as her internal conflicts over dividing the reservation. Taken together, these documents offer insight into how federal policy was applied, resisted, and amended in this early application of the Dawes General Allotment Act.

The American military’s public international strategy of Communist containment, systematic weapons build-ups, and military occupations across the globe depended heavily on its internal and often less visible strategy of controlling the lives and intimate relationships of its members. From 1950 to 2000, the military justice system, under the newly instituted Uniform Code of Military Justice, waged a legal assault against all forms of sexual deviance that supposedly threatened the moral fiber of the military community and the nation. Prosecution rates for crimes of sexual deviance more than quintupled in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Drawing on hundreds of court-martial transcripts published by the Judge Advocate General of the Armed Forces, Policing Sex and Marriage in the American Military explores the untold story of how the American military justice system policed the marital and sexual relationships of the service community in an effort to normalize heterosexual, monogamous marriage as the linchpin of the military’s social order. Almost wholly overlooked by military, social, and legal historians, these court transcripts and the stories they tell illustrate how the courts’ construction and criminalization of sexual deviance during the second half of the twentieth century was part of the military’s ongoing articulation of gender ideology. Policing Sex and Marriage in the American Military provides an unparalleled window into the historic criminalization of what were considered sexually deviant and violent acts committed by U.S. military personnel around the world from 1950 to 2000.

Alice C. Fletcher (1838-1923), one of the few women who became anthropologists in the United States during the nineteenth century, was a pioneer in the practice of participant-observation ethnography. She focused her studies over many years among the Native tribes in Nebraska and South Dakota. Life among the Indians, Fletcher's popularized autobiographical memoir written in 1886-87 about her first fieldwork among the Sioux and the Omahas during 1881-82, remained unpublished in Fletcher's archives at the Smithsonian Institution for more than one hundred years. In it Fletcher depicts the humor and hardships of her field experiences as a middle-aged woman undertaking anthropological fieldwork alone, while showing genuine respect and compassion for Native ways and beliefs that was far ahead of her time. What emerges is a complex and fascinating picture of a woman questioning the cultural and gender expectations of nineteenth-century America while insightfully portraying rapidly changing reservation life. Fletcher's account of her early fieldwork is available here for the first time, accompanied by an essay by the editors that sheds light on Fletcher's place in the development of anthropology and the role of women in the discipline.

Horror fiction is an important part of the popular culture in many modern societies. This book compares and contrasts horror narratives from two distinct cultures--American and Japanese--with a focus on the characteristic mechanisms that make them successful, and on their culturally-specific aspects. Including a number of narratives belonging to film, literature, comics and video games, this book provides a comprehensive perspective of the genre. It sheds light on the differences and similarities in the depiction of fear and horror in America and Japan, while emphasizing narrative patterns in the context of their respective cultures.