Since the early 1800s, people have made a living fishing and harvesting mussels in the lower Ohio Valley. These river folk are conscious of an occupational and social identity separate from those who earn their living from the land. Sustained by a shared love of the river, deriving joy from the beauty of their chosen environment, and feeling great pride in their ability to subsist on its wild resources and to master the skills required to make a living from it, many still identify with the nomadic houseboat-dwelling subculture that flourished on the river from the early nineteenth century to the 1950s. Today's community of fisherfolk is small and economically marginal, but their activities sustain a complex set of traditional skills and a body of verbal folklore associated with river life. In Flatheads and Spoonies, Jens Lund describes the activities, boats, gear, verbal lore, and sense of identity of the fisher folk of the lower Ohio River Valley and provides historical and ethnobiological background for their way of life. Lund connects the importance of river fish in the diet of inhabitants of the valley to local fishing activities and explores the relationship between river people and those whose culture is primarily land-based, painting a colorful portrait of river fishing and river life. This book offers a look—historical and ethnographic—at a little-known aspect of traditional life in the American Midwest, still surviving today despite immense changes in environment, resources, and economic base.

Aboriginal approaches to the naming of places across Australia differ radically from the official introduced Anglo-Australian system. However, many of these earlier names have been incorporated into contemporary nomenclature, with considerable reinterpretations of their function and form. Recently, state jurisdictions have encouraged the adoption of a greater number of Indigenous names, sometimes alongside the accepted Anglo-Australian terms, around Sydney Harbour, for example. In some cases, the use of an introduced name, such as Gove, has been contested by local Indigenous people. The 19 studies brought together in this book present an overview of current issues involving Indigenous placenames across the whole of Australia, drawing on the disciplines of geography, linguistics, history, and anthropology. They include meticulous studies of historical records, and perspectives stemming from contemporary Indigenous communities. The book includes a wealth of documentary information on some 400 specific placenames, including those of Sydney Harbour, the Blue Mountains, Canberra, western Victoria, the Lake Eyre district, the Victoria River District, and southwestern Cape York Peninsula.

This volume will look at the history of trepanation, the identification of skulls, the tools used to make the cranial openings, and theories as to why trepanation might have been performed many thousands of years ago.

A compilation of 108 spiritual destinations around North America-- medicine wheels, rock art, modern pilgrimage routes, prehistoric earthen pyramids, ancient stone structures, monasteries, shrines, temples, and more.

Irving Wallace herein presents the stories of “some Americans who dared to be different”— crackpots, perhaps, all of them, but also exceedingly diverting people to meet, know, and watch as they pursue their peculiar activities. This picturesque and wacky crew is brilliantly dealt with in these nine chapters: In Defense of the Square Peg Wherein we meet Wilbur Glenn Voliva, who believed the Earth was flat, and wherein we learn the need for encouraging individualism and nonconformity. The King of Thirty-Sixth Street Wherein we meet Baron James A. Harden-Hickey, American ruler of Trinidad, who became an authority on the art of suicide. The Man Who Was Phileas Fogg Wherein we meet George Francis Train, millionaire member of the Commune, who was the first man to travel around the world in eighty days. The Free Lover Who Ran for President Wherein we meet Victoria Woodhull, stockbroker, spiritualist, and prostitute, who competed with Ulysses S. Grant for tenancy of the White House. The Forty-Niner Who Abolished Congress Wherein we meet Joshua Norton, self-appointed Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, who issued orders to Abraham Lincoln. The Lady Who Moved Shakespeare’s Bones Wherein we meet Delia Bacon, schoolteacher frustrated in love, who became the implacable enemy of the Bard of Avon. The Explorer of the Hollow Earth Wherein we meet John Cleves Symmes, hero of the War of 1812, who planned an expedition into the interior world through holes in the North and South poles. The Editor Who Was a Common Scold Wherein we meet Anne Royall, widow and author, who interviewed a Chief Executive while he was in the nude. The First in the East Wherein we meet Timothy Dexter, merchant prince and foe of grammar, who sent coals to Newcastle and published a book without punctuation.