The MSU Authors Collection is an important part of the University Archives' holdings because the works in this collection document the intellectual heritage of the university and the contributions of MSU faculty, staff, students, and alumni to contemporary scholarship.
Beginning in 2008, the University Archives has hosted a biennial reception honoring MSU faculty, staff and emeriti faculty authors who had written and/or edited books. At this event, a bibliography is created to showcase the books of the previous two years.
This collection in Cornerstone takes those bibliographies and combines them with other lists to provide a comprehensive list of citations for MSU Authors' books. Where appropriate and where copyright allows, full-text versions are made available of certain MSU Authors' books.
For more information about the MSU Authors Collection, visit https://library.mnsu.edu/archives/collections/university-archives/msu-authors/ .
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Enlightenment and History: Theory and Praxis in Contemporary Buddhism
Hyun-Eung, Chang-Seong Hong, and Sun Kyeong Yu
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Beyond Grit: Ten Powerful Practices to Gain the High-Performance Edge
Cindra Kamphoff
In Beyond Grit, Cindra Kamphoff reveals the ten practices that the world's best use to gain the high performance edge. Kamphoff shares the tools and strategies she's taught executives, entrepreneurs, NFL ProBowl athletes, Olympians, college athletes, and championship teams. Based on almost twenty years of research and consulting with the world's best, she provides a practical, inspiring, and easy-to-use guide to radically accelerating your performance and improving your happiness. You'll also discover 52 life-altering strategies that you can put in your High Performance Toolbox to develop these practices and change your daily life. Each chapter describes one strategy and ends with a powerful affirmation to help you develop the High Performance Mindset. Inspiring and practical, Kamphoff will show you how to 'own your why,' develop your grit, take control of your future, discover your purpose, thrive under pressure, and be your best more often.
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Out of Chaos: Reflections of a University President and his Contemporaries on Vietnam-era Unrest in Mankato and its Relevance Today
James F. Nickerson
Out of Chaos: Reflections of a University President and his Contemporaries on Vietnam-era Unrest in Mankato and its Relevance Today is a collection of personal reminiscences that provide a glimpse into what Mankato was like during the 1960s and 1970s. The book was created by Dr. James F. Nickerson, former Mankato State College president, with input from a variety of graduates, faculty, administrators and citizens who were witnesses to these local events. It is by piecing these stories together that the reader gets an understanding of this dynamic time period and how one person can make a difference in the outcome of events.
Minnesota State University, Mankato will observe its 150th anniversary as an institution of higher learning in 2018. Out of Chaos, represents a significant time in University’s past, and so to coincide with other Sesquicentennial undertakings, it is being reprinted as a Sesquicentennial Edition. Out of Chaos has also been selected as the 2017 Common Read book. As Minnesota State Mankato’s Common Read book for 2017, Out of Chaos will support the commemoration of the Sesquicentennial by allowing campus and community readers to explore the University’s remarkable history through book discussions, thought-provoking programming and other associated educational experiences.
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Norwegian American Women: Migration, Communities, and Identities
Betty A. Bergland and LoriAnn Lahlum
The history of Norwegian settlement in the United States has often been told through the eyes of prominent men, while the women are imagined in the form of O. E. Rølvaag’s fictionalized heroine Beret Holm, who made the best of life on the frontier but whose gaze seemed ever fixed on her long-lost home. The true picture is more complex. In an area spanning the Midwest and rural West and urban areas such as Seattle, Chicago, and Brooklyn, Norwegian American women found themselves in varied circumstances, ranging from factory worker to domestic, impoverished to leisured. Offering a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach, Norwegian American Women: Migration, Communities, and Identities considers the stories of this immigrant group through a gendered lens.
Nine noted scholars situate these women in the history, literature, politics, and culture of both their ancestral home and the new land, interpreting their multifarious lives and the communities they helped build. pieces on wide-ranging topics by Betty A. Bergland, Laurann Gilbertson, Karen v. Hansen, Lori Ann Lahlum, Ann M. Legreid, Odd S. Lovoll, Elisabeth Lønnå, David C. Mauk, and Ingrid K. Urberg are bookended by Elizabeth Jameson’s lively foreword and Dina Tolfsby’s detailed bibliography, comprising a collection that enlightens at the same time that it inspires further investigations into the lives of women in Norwegian America.
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Religious Misperceptions: The Case of Musims and Christians in France
Stephen Michael Croucher
In the wake of numerous historical and current geopolitical, social and economic events/tragedies, misunderstandings have emerged and proliferated about Islam and Christianity. Inadequate media coverage, lack of interpersonal understanding/knowledge, and deep-seeded prejudices have led to the communication of various misconceptions. These misconceptions have ranged from how Islam and Christianity began, to confusion over how and even if governments and society should protect the rights of religious groups.
This book provides a glimpse into how misperceptions between Muslims and Christians in France and Britain perpetuate interpersonal and societal conflicts. Through the use of in-depth interviews and statistical analysis, Muslims and Christians express their experiences. Christians explain how they perceive Islam changing the very nature of Europe. Furthermore, Christians assert this change is something Christian Europe should resist. Muslims, on the other hand, see Europe as an unwelcoming home that expects them to change and become Europeans but does not understand their faith or heritage. Readers will find vivid descriptions from respondents of their experiences from living as a Muslim or a Christian in a Europe going through what many consider an identity shift. -
Brazilian Immigration and the Quest for Identity
Catarina Fritz
This book is a detailed study of the lives of a group of young Brazilians living in the greater Boston area, the majority of whom entered the country illegally. It explores the extent to which their origins in a more racially fluid environment affects their adaptation to a society with a much more rigid form of racial categorization. In what ways does their adaptation to the racial hierarchy influence their lives in the United States and how their varying ancestry and legal status impact this process? The book provides further insight into the debate about "post-racialism" and the changing dynamics of race relations in contemporary American society.
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Believe Again: A Journey Back to Faith
Andrew Johnson
This book was written for those who have left their Christian faith or who have become what Bishop John Shelby Spong calls, “believers in exile.” It also speaks to those who are questioning their current Christian faith. It describes a mystical view of Christianity that incorporates Gnosticism, quantum physics, shamanism, cognitive psychology, Jungian psychology, and biblical scholarship. At the end of each chapter are prompts, questions, and activities that invite readers to make personal connections with the ideas presented. These are designed to be recorded in a journal. This book can be used with a book club, a study group, or individually. It will be a tool for your spiritual growth and renewal.
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A Mirthful Spirit: Embracing Laughter for Wellness
Mary Huntley and Edna Thayer
A self-help resource for people in their journey through life using a balance of thought-provoking quotes, anecdotes and acronyms, research and practical tips to underline the link between laughter and wellness in life and work.
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Boy Soldier of the Confederacy: The Memoir of Johnnie Wickersham
Kathleen Gorman
Johnnie Wickersham was fourteen when he ran away from his Missouri home to fight for the Confederacy. Fifty years after the war, he wrote his memoir at the request of family and friends and distributed it privately in 1915. Boy Soldier of the Confederacy: The Memoir of Johnnie Wickersham offers not only a rare look into the Civil War through the eyes of a child but also a coming-of-age story.Edited by Kathleen Gorman, the volume presents a new introduction and annotations that explain how the war was glorified over time, the harsh realities suppressed in the nation's.
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Dearest Folks: Sister Leatherneck's Letter Excerpts and WWII Experiences
Berneice Ann Herron
Dearest Folks tells about two sisters, rural school teachers, from southwestern Minnesota, and how, in l943, they answered their "Uncle Sam's" call by driving their l938 Chevrolet, without air conditioning, or radio, to Long Beach, California, to work in Defense.
They accepted positions in the California Shipbuilding Corporation, where the much needed, famous "Liberty" ships were built. Eleanor returned to Minnesota that August to teach, but Berneice explored the Branches of Service. They then both decided to join the Women's Marine Corps and were members for 2 years 8 ½ months.
They went to Boot Camp at Camp Lejeune, New River, North Carolina and then to Specialist School at Cherry Point, N.C. From there they were transferred to El Toro Marine Air Base, at Santa Ana, California, where they taught Aircraft and Ship Recognition to Marine Fighter Pilots; after VJ Day the became Rehabilitation Interviewers, and helped discharge other Marines.
They wrote home almost daily and still have those letters. Excerpts from many of these most interesting, original letters are contained in the book as well as many pictures, mementos, and other illustrations.
You will find humor, history, adventure, love and excitement in reading Dearest Folks.
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Where the Clouds Meet the Water
Kimberly E. Contag and James A. Grabowska
Where the Clouds Meet the Water follows the historical journey of the German Ecuadorian widower, Ernst Contag, and his four young children from their home in the South American Andes to Nazi Germany in 1942. Blacklisted as an enemy alien, Ernst Contag and his children are forcibly repatriated to the country of Ernst's grandparents as part of a diplomatic exchange arranged by the United States' State Department and cooperating countries. In Nazi Germany, Ernst and his children must deny their Ecuadorian past and learn to live as Germans. The Contag family strives to keep the ray of hope in their hearts when the Nazi oath of "blood and honor" leads to fear, abandonment, and death. The children and their father navigate an ever-shifting horizon as they face despair and fear in internment and refugee sites, separation, devastation and loss in Germany (1942-45), hunger and hopelessness in post-war France (1945-46), and hostility in their own Andean homeland. Through it all, the strength of family serves as the glue that holds them all together. The story is based on historical research conducted in libraries and archives on three continents, interviews with survivors of the Ecuadorian blacklist, personal records and official documents submitted to the authors by survivors and their families. Where the Clouds Meet the Water will intrigue readers of all ages who are moved by coming-of-age stories, and fascinated by World War II history and survivor stories.
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Gender and the Archaeology of Death
Bettina Arnold and Nancy L. Wicker
Burials are places where archaeologists reasonably expect gendered ideologies and practices to play out in the archaeological record. Yet only modest progress has been made in teasing out gender from these mortuary contexts. In this volume, methods for doing so are presented, cases of successful gender theorizing from mortuary data presented, and comparisons made between European and Americanist traditions in this kind of work. Cases are broad in temporal and geographic scope—from Inuit burials in Alaska and Oneota mortuary rituals to Viking Scandinavia, Neolithic China and Iron Age Britain. Methods for identifying and analyzing gender are suggested for cultures at various levels of social complexity with or without documentary or ethnoarchaeological evidence to assist in the analysis.
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Diaries of Girls and Women a Midwestern American Sampler
Suzanne L. Bunkers
Diaries of Girls and Women captures and preserves the diverse lives of forty-seven girls and women who lived in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin between 1837 and 1999. A compelling work of living history, it brings together both diaries from historical society archives and diaries still in possession of the diarists or their descendants.
Editor Suzanne L. Bunkers has selected these excerpts from more than 450 diaries she examined. Some diaries were kept only briefly, others through an entire lifetime; some diaries are the intensely private record of a life, others tell the story of an entire family and were meant to be saved and appreciated by future generations. By approaching diaries as historical documents, therapeutic tools, and a form of literature, Bunkers offers readers insight into the self-images of girls and women, the dynamics of families and communities, and the kinds of contributions that girls and women have made, past and present.
As a representation of the girls and women of varied historical eras, locales, races, and economic circumstances who settled and populated the Midwest, Diaries of Girls and Women adds texture and pattern to the fabric of American history.
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A Qualitative Analysis of the Jehovah's Witnesses: The Rhetoric, reality, and religion in the Watchtower Society
Daniel Cronn-Mills
Jehovah’s Witnesses are one of the most persecuted religious groups in the world and the most persecuted Christian organization in the 20th century. How the Witnesses shape their response to persecution is invariably associated with the social reality they construct in their rhetorical practices. This is a descriptive analysis and interpretation of the social reality constructed by the discourse of the Jehovah'’ Witnesses, utilizing a qualitative-interpretive approach for exploration into a social reality. The purpose is to determine how the textual and contextual reality of Jehovah’s Witnesses influences their lives and courses of action, how discursive practices are fundamental to their understanding of themselves and others.
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Mankato State University: The Second Century: The First Twenty-Five Years, 1968-1992: An Interpretative Essay
Claire E. Faust
Donald Youel, in Mankato State College - An Interpretative Essay, commented on the development of this institution for its first one hundred years. He did not chronicle each event, but rather provided the reader with an understanding of what happened and what it meant for the College and for society. He organized this essay from different perspectives: "the developing program, the enrollment, students, the state governing board, administration and faculty." He made the point well that "Mankato's story is a representative instance of America's dream that opportunity means, fundamentally, educational opportunity."
Mankato State University, the Second Century - the First Twenty-Five Years, is also an interpretative essay which is written from similar perspectives. The purpose of this essay is to review some of the events that occurred at Mankato State during the first quarter of the second century, and to discuss how this institution has addressed the challenges to higher education in a changing world.
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The Diary of Caroline Seabury, 1854-1863
Suzanne L. Bunkers
In 1854 Caroline Seabury of Brooklyn, New York, set out for Columbus, Mississippi, to teach French at its Institute for Young Ladies. She lived in Columbus until 1863, through the years of mounting sectional bitterness that preceded the Civil War and through the turmoil and hardships of the war itself. During that time, her most intimate confidant was her diary. Discovered in the archives of the Minnesota State Historical Society, it is published here for the first time.
The diary is an illuminating account of southern plantation society and the “peculiar institution” of slavery on the eve of its destruction. Seabury also records her uneasy attempts to come to terms with her position as an unmarried, white, Northern woman whose job was to educate wealthy, white, Southern girls in a setting seemingly oblivious to the horrors of slavery. The diary is not simply a chronicle of daily happenings; Seabury concentrates on remarkable events and the memorable feelings and ideas they generate, shaping them into entries that reveal her as an accomplished writer. She frames her narrative with her journey south in 1854 and the hazardous and exhausting return north through battle lines in 1863.
Disapproving of slavery, yet deeply attached to friends and her life in Columbus and also painfully conscious of the fragility of her own economic and social position, Seabury condemned privately in her diary the evils that she endured silently in public. There are striking scenes of plantation life that depict the brutalities of slavery and benumbed responses to them. Seabury also successfully captures the mood of Mississippi as it changed from a fire-eating appetite to fight the Yankees to a grim apprehension of inexorable defeat. Most impressive of all is Seabury’s poignantly honest presentation of herself, caught in the middle.
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Those Barracks Babies
Marcia Baer
This is a book about how a group of folks, in a time long ago, living in a small Minnesota college town, celebrated life. It is a story of reflection. Reflection into the past when times and people were - shall we say - different. The people were veterans returning from the war, the time was the middle of the century-1947 through 1964. The place was Mankato State College in Southern Minnesota. This is the story of "The Barracks Babies." After you read these letters, look at the fading photographs, you'll know this is not the '90s. What makes these people different? "Well, for one thing," explained Margaret Philip, Assistant Professor of Psycholgy at MSU, "all of these people seemed to be focused on a goal - dedicated to becoming professionals. Most knew they were going to be teachers from the first day, so they worked hard to get there quickly. Today students don't know what profession they will choose or whether they'll even get a job after college." Yes, it's obvious the Barracks Babies were highly motivated to achieve. After being in the service and surviving the war, they were simply appreciative of being alive. There was a spirit of excitement about their new life -a wife - a family - a home - an education - the prospect of earning a good living in the future. It didn't matter if living conditions weren't the best for a few years - they saw an end to it. After all the rent was cheap! And, they never lost their sense of humor. Most (but not all) of the students were male. Especially in the early days of the Barracks, the wives did not work but stayed home to raise the family and give moral support to their husbands and each other. In fact, they were frequently awarded their Ph.T. (Putting Him Through)! here was quite a bit of "no-cost" socializing - and all were in the same financial boat. No one had to compete or climb the status ladder. "There was definitely a spirit of cooperativeness," said Philip. She also noted they tended to show originality in problem solving behaviors - in other words, learning how to "make-do" with nothing. After reading the stories, Mrs. Philip felt that "the most amazing thing about them is that 40 years later these folks had such clear recollections. I believe that shows they were feeling good about what they were doing and they processed it into long term memory!" Turn now to those days and enjoy some of the most wonderful true-life stories you'll ever read. It's Those Barracks Babies ...
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Publications of Arts & Science Faculty, 1971-1975
Elwood B. Ehrle, Jane F. Earley, and Marion J. Carrison
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Mankato State College: An Interpretative Essay
Donald B. Youel
The account of Mankato State College which follows is not a chronicle of events. It is rather a seeking for understanding of what happened: what led up to, what was part of, what followed, of what this part and that meant - for the College and for society. It is thus an essay. The tactic has been to look at the account from different perspectives: the developing program, the enrollment, students, the state governing board, administration and faculty. Inevitably such a procedure means going over the historic events again. But since there are always many facets to each significant happening this may be an aid to understanding. A theme emerges in these first notes-the dream of opportunity through education - and its variations inform both whole and parts [p. 12].
