Book Release: Protesting on Bended Knee: Race, Dissent, and Patriotism in 21st Century America

My friend and colleague Richard Rothaus has this thing called “New Book Day!” I’m stealing it for today to announce the publication of Eric Burin’s Protesting on Bended Knee: Race, Dissent, and Patriotism in 21st Century America.

This book brings together The Digital Press’s commitment to the public humanities, to innovative and responsible digital, open access publishing, and to our collaborative publishing model. The book brings together a wide range of perspectives on history, philosophy, ethics, and practice to bear on protesting, race, and patriotism. Eric Burin’s expansive introduction is cited almost exclusively with over 300 hyperlinks to articles on the media, which have all been made permanent using Perma.cc to prevent link rot. Moreover, the book is available for free and almost all the content is available under an Creative Common CC-By 4.0 license. Finally, this book would not have happened without the time, energy, and encouragement from our contributors and, in particular, Eric Burin, who pushed and, at times, pulled this book into its present form.

Below is the official press release. We hope that you enjoy this book!

~

Press Release

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is excited to announce a timely, relevant, and path-breaking new publication edited by University of North Dakota History professor, Eric Burin.

Protesting on Bended Knee: Race, Dissent, and Patriotism in 21st Century America spotlights the demonstrations associated with Colin Kaepernick, a professional football player who in 2016 began kneeling during the national anthem to draw attention to discrimination and injustice.

The volume opens with an extensive Introduction by Burin that situates the Kaepernick-inspired protests within the context of the distant and recent past, and then carefully analyzes the demonstrations themselves, the causes they symbolized, and the disparate reactions to them.

Bill Caraher, the publisher at The Digital Press, remarks: “Burin offers historical perspectives both on Kaepernick as an activist and on issues of racism, mass incarceration, and criminal justice reform, and this sets the book apart from treatments in the media that tend to focus on the contemporary response to the protests. To my mind, Burin’s Introduction is the definitive work on Kaepernick and the protests at present.”

The volume continues with thirty brief essays penned by a diverse array of authors, including scholars, veterans, sportswriters, coaches, and others. Each describes what he or she sees in the protests. Some view the demonstrations as part of the quest to secure the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Others discuss the legal landscape of dissent, the revival of athlete-activism, the tactics of protesters, or counter-tactics of their opponents. Still others share their perspectives as individuals literally “in the arena.” These observations, together with Burin’s far-ranging Introduction, provide a panoramic and contemporaneous account of the latest chapter in a freedom struggle as old as America itself.

“Protesting on Bended Knee is a first draft of our history,” observed Burin. “It’s history written in real time.”

Burin added that the volume seeks to foster civil dialogue about important issues. “By offering diverse viewpoints and historical perspectives on the protests, the book provides common ground for constructive conversations about race, dissent, and patriotism,” explained Burin. With this goal in mind, the Digital Press at UND has made Protesting on Bended Knee available for free as a download at https://thedigitalpress.org/protesting or as a low-cost paperback from Amazon.com.

Protesting on Bended Knee officially launches on October 16th, the fiftieth anniversary of John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s famed protest at the 1968 Summer Olympics. Burin said the timing was not coincidental. “The book has a bifocal perspective, with one eye on the present and the other on the past. Like the publication date, the section headings, artwork, and even fonts have historical significance,” noted Burin.

In 2017, Burin edited another anthology with contemporary relevance, Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. That volume was also published by the Digital Press at UND, which serves “to publish timely works in the digital humanities, broadly conceived. Whenever possible, [it] produces open access, digital publications, that can attract local and global audiences.”

Eric Burin is available for interviews.

The Joy of Voting

There’s a lot going on over the next month at The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. If you want to be in the loop follow The Digital Press on Twitter. 

This week, the Digital Press kicked off a collaborative project with Dr. Eric Burin in the Department of History at the University of North Dakota and Citizens University, a non profit leader in civic engagement. The project is called The Joy of Voting and it looks to “reinvigorate a culture of voting” or at least remind the public that voting can be a joyous experience. Grand Forks, North Dakota is one of four cities in the U.S. with a Joy of Voting program along with Akron, Charlotte, and West Palm Beach

The Digital Press is working on only one little aspect of the Joy of Voting project in Grand Forks, which focuses on soliciting and publishing online memories of how voting was a joyful experience. Check it out here:

The Joy of Voting website and Facebook page will be updated daily with a new memory of voting as a joyful experience. Depending on the response to the page, we might put together a little digital book celebrating voting in Grand Forks.     

Three Things Thursday

It’s Thursday and the week is racing toward its inevitable conclusion. I have three quick things on my mind as I struggle to get focused enough to push through teaching and a writing day tomorrow before a weekend full of layout for The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. 

There’s a lot going on in the world, and most of it seems bad (or frankly terrifying). From the Kavanaugh hearings to Presidential alert buzzing my phone yesterday, it feel like all I can do is bury myself in either esoteric nonsense or projects that I feel like I can control. These introduce enough clutter to my brain to keep me from becoming too preoccupied, demoralized, or panicked. Maybe this kind of escapism, when recognized at scale, is part of the problem with society; maybe, for some of us, it’s the only way to stay sane. I worry that my own inability to deal effectively with what’s going on in society today is symptomatic of the problem.   

That being said, I will keep doing even if it looks more and more like I’m fiddling while Rome burns…

1. NDQ Volume 85. I am excited that the first volume of North Dakota Quarterly under my term as “Editor-in-Chief” has gone off to the copy editor. This will be a interstitial volume between NDQ publishing as an independent publisher and as an independent “little magazine” published by the University of Nebraska Press (UNP) (this is an open secret still and there hasn’t been an official announcement yet). In other words, NDQ is out of the publishing business, but still in the content producing business. This is good for us financially and in terms of workload. University of Nebraska Press has production capacity and economies of scale in terms of printing and distribution. It means that I can focus my attention on working with our genre editors on content and with Nebraska to expand our readership, contributors, and subscribers. 

The publication date for this, if we can get it into UNP’s hands by November 1, will be early 2019, which isn’t too far from the 2018 date for the volume.  

2. Digital Ephemera and the Archive. One of the interesting things that has come out of the conversation with University of Nebraska Press is the digital future for NDQ. As a public humanities and literary journal (as if these two things were really different), I always have felt that it was more than ephemera. As such, I pushed for the digital archive of NDQ to be made available via the HathiTrust and had always seen both paper and digital distribution and archiving to be part of the journal’s future. In fact, I had imagined that digital subscriptions, particularly for our institutional subscribers, might be more appealing and easier to manage. In effect, I had imagined that the digital form of NDQ would be the archival format and the paper format would be more ephemeral.

This, of course, represents a pretty significant inversion of how I’ve seen publishing. It used to be that paper versions of books and journals were for the archive because the material nature of paper made it relatively easy to preserve when compared to the changing nature of bits and bytes. Today, however, paper appears more and more as a novelty or for the sake of nostalgia or for reasons completely separate from its traditional place as an archival medium. People discuss the feeling of a book, its scent, and even the way in which paper helps us engage the text in a less distracted way.

The digital form is the archive, which I suppose makes some sense, as most of our publications today are born digital.  

3. Bakken and The Digital Press. One of the little things that have vexed me about Amazon.com (among the many, but this was a little one), is that it never connected my two books on the Bakken through it’s “Frequently bought together” feature. 

It was pleasant surprise this week, then, when I noticed that The Bakken and The Bakken Goes Boom were finally connected. It is now possible to buy both The Bakken: An Archaeology of an Industrial Landscape (2017) and The Bakken Goes Boom (2016) together for less then $30. That’s less than ONE DOLLAR a day or less than your favorite coffee at Starbucks.

I was sort of bummed to hear that The Bakken wasn’t selling very well (or it was selling well, but in very low numbers). I think of it as a kind of accessible experiment in understanding complex, industrial landscapes. Even if you aren’t super interested in the Bakken, maybe you’ll be interested in my approach:

 

 

The Digital Press: New Books, Social Media, and Downloads

This fall looks to be an exciting one for The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota.

First, we have two new titles that should appear in the coming weeks: The extended digital version of Hugh Goldring, Nicole Burton, and Patrick McCurdy’s The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet which was originally published by Ad Astra Comix (and you can buy the print version here). There’s a great interview with the authors and creators of this work in the LA Review of Books. You can find the link on the book’s page at The Digital Press.

We’re also very close to having Eric Burin’s edited, Protesting on Bended Knee: Race, Dissent and Patriotism in 21st Century America. We’ve published some previews to this book already, and there’s a great interview with Eric on the book’s page at The Digital Press.  

What makes these two books even more exciting is that we hope that they’ll push The Digital Press over the 5000 download mark (and this doesn’t count the download that were registered from other platforms like Archive.org or copied and shared by our readers) We hope that the release of The Beast and Protesting on Bended Knee will help us achieve this goal!

Finally, and most importantly, The Digital Press has always used social media to keep our readers updated on our latest releases. We don’t ask for emails or anything like that (although we do have an informal back-channel email update when a new book comes out) and we certainly don’t keep any records of who downloads or buys our books. It would be great if you could follow us on Twitter (@DigitalPressUND) or on Facebook. 

Publishing Hybrids

One of the best parts of book production is that it’s a pretty intensive operation. Once a book going into typesetting, it tends to occupy all of my attention until layout is complete. In my experience, layout does not accommodate multitasking and any interruption (four-legged or otherwise) invariably leads to mistakes, delays, and problems. (And as someone who is not prone to be attentive to details, even the smallest interruption (like searching for a new album or fixing a little problem) can let an error slip into the final text.

In short, the attention required to layout and produce a book is, for me at least, delightfully un-modern, despite the fact that it usually involves sitting in front of a computer rather than setting movable type. This experience got me thinking (once again) about the modern publishing process as a distinctly hybrid process. This hybridity, at least for me, emerges both from my process and from the nature of publishing in a digital world. 

Here are three quick thoughts (before I have to put the final touches on a book!):

1. Publishing as Craft. My colleague down at the NDSU Press takes students in her publishing class to work with a series of letterpresses and movable type presses in Braddock, ND. The point of the trip, from what I gather, is to emphasize the craft aspects of publishing which stem from the deep integration of all aspects of book making from the moment a manuscript comes into our hands as publisher to the moment it leaves as a completed book. Of course, in practice, most publishers outsource various aspects of book making – from copy editing and review to layout and design – but generally this outsourcing happens internally with the publisher maintaining control over the process. 

With the re-emergence in small-scale publishing, like The Digital Press, the publisher – as an individual rather than as a corporate entity – takes on even greater control over the entire production process. Moreover, with digital publishing, even the most frequently outsources function of the publication process – printing – tends to be done in-house. In other words, digital work, despite its tendency to fragment processes into bite (byte!) sized entities also encourages the processes of publishing to be more smoothly integrated with, for example, editing, design, typesetting, and printing all taking place in the same digital environment (and often at the same workstation!). This kind of integration is typical to craft practice and challenges a view (that I myself have spouted) that digital practices tend toward dis-integration and the logic of the assembly line or the supply-chain.

2. Finding Focus. I’ve been playing with various little applications for my phone that encourage me to remain focused. I have a busy fall semester and my attention span, which is fragile in the best of circumstances, is doing me no favors (while I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve checked the football scores, responded to two emails, let the yellow dog in and out twice, had a brief conversation with my wife, and reflected on the absence of interesting “Explorer-type” watches from micro brands). While my writing process, which focuses on sentence level execution, tends to endure my scattered approach to life, integrated workflows like typesetting and layout suffer when I get distracted. (Just forwarded another email to colleague…)

For example, texts have flows. Each section of text has to work with every other section. Chapters start on odd number pages, so each section must have an odd number of pages. The first page of each chapter, should have the same design, which means that the most complicated chapter title and the least complicated chapter title must all work within one’s design parameters. Changing one chapter title, for example, requires that we change ALL the chapter titles. Changing one element of layout must extended to the entire book. A change in one section cascades through the entire production flow. Blank pages must be added or removed to make sure that the spread aligns with the binding (for tightly-perfect bound books, the inner gutters and margins must accommodate the binding) and that chapters begin on odd number pages. 

This process requires sustained attention because any change must be reproduced the same way throughout the book. Modern layout and production software does help streamline this process of course, but since every manuscript, section, and text will be slightly different, there is inevitably small adjustments that must be made by hand. For example, a text block might be extended a few millimeters to prevent an orphan line or a hyphenated word eliminated if it causes confusion or a strange rhythm in the text body.

All this requires focus because each change ripples through the entire manuscript. It is a distinctly un-modern kind of focus that reminds me a bit of archaeological work at the end of a field season when things must be done in a particular order to a particular deadline. Even the most efficient project likely finds that certain tasks must fall to the project directors who are responsible for the field season and its results. 

3. Digital and Print. The main project that I am working on right now is Eric Burin’s Protesting on Bended Knee: Race, Dissent and Patriotism in 21st Century America.  This is, on the one hand, an edited volume with over 20 individual contributions. On the other hand, Dr. Burin’s introduction runs to over 80 pages in the book and close to 20,000 words (without citations). This is a mini-monograph. 

Dr. Burin’s introduction also includes over 350 hyperlinks that stand in for footnotes or other citation systems. This is appropriate for the topic, Colin Kaepernick’s protests during NFL games and the subsequent events, that is being reported in the online, mass media and is still pretty lightly covered in traditional printed academic sources.  

Unfortunately, as I have discussed elsewhere, hyperlinks are a less than ideal mode of citation for academic work. First, they only work in online, digital contexts where the reader can click on the link and go to a resource. Second, they tend to be fragile even in a digital context and break down as media-makers disappear or social media accounts are deleted. Third, if the account is deleted or the webpage removed from the live internet, it becomes difficult to identify the author, context, or even topic of the reference from the hyperlink alone. Unlike a traditional citation that is both humanly and machine readable (ideally), hyperlinks send readers to a web address and may or may not offer much information on the nature of the destination. In this context, then, the publisher (and the author) becomes responsible for preserving both the link and the destination as much as is practical. 

For Dr. Burin’s book, we used Harvard’s perma.cc to archive the online sources that he referenced in his article, and converted the 350+ hyperlinks to rather tidy perma.cc links. To make these links available to reader both online and offline we added endnotes throughout his chapter and these endnotes included both the original hyperlink and the perma.cc link (unless we felt pretty good about the nature of the original hyperlink (e.g. wikipedia pages or very well established publishers whose sites tend to be resistant to this kind of archiving (like the failing New York Times)). For the casual reader, the mass of endnotes at the end of the chapter are a dense and probably incomprehensible block of web addresses.

But for anyone looking to dig deeper into Dr. Burin’s arguments or who finds a dead hyperlink in his text, this material is vital to keeping the academic infrastructure of the work alive.

The use of hyperlinks to web resources embraces the dynamism of the ephemeral web and allowed Dr. Burin to build an argument from sources that appear and change as quickly as the situation. The use of endnotes and perma.cc allowed us to create the kind of stability that would give such a 21st-century work persistent value as an interpretation of a situation as it unfolded. 

Publishing as a kind of hybrid process involves a tremendous amount of stress and work over rather short periods of time and echoes the kind of ebb-and-flow of the premodern work week documented by E.P. Thompson in his famous “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (Past and Present 38 (1967)). Dr. Burin and I are already discussing a celebration (complete with craft beer, of course) at the conclusion of this hybrid project which will offer just the catharsis necessary for The Digital Press to gear up for the next book on the docket.  

Now, I have to get back to work!

 

Workflows, Hybrids, and Design at The Digital Press

This weekend was largely turned over to work on two upcoming projects from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. When I first started the press, I swore that I keep things small, avoid having two projects in production at the same time, and build slowly. 

Last year, I broke that rule and this fall, it seems like I’m breaking the rule again. I’m in production with Eric Burin’s Protesting on Bended Knee project and with Patrick McCurdy and Ad Astra Comix on the expanded, digital version of The Beast. Fortunately, the projects are both super cool and they’re challenging me to refine my craft as a publisher, develop new workflows, and think more about the nature of books. 

The first challenge that I faced this weekend was publishing a series of essays on Colin Kaepernick originally written for the web. As a result, they had hyperlinks rather than traditional footnotes or in-text citation. The links were embedded in the text, which I received as a Microsoft Word file from the book’s editor, Eric Burin. Moreover, Burin was working on a massive introductory essay (that may well initiate the field of Kaepnerick Studies) that has over 400 embedded hyperlinks instead of traditional scholarly citation.

I had two concerns with these files. First, I needed to check and, wherever possible, stabilize the links by making them as persistent as is possible for the web. Second, I needed to make these links visible so that when the book appears in paper form someone can follow the citations back to the original source.

Workflows

I devised a simple workflow to extract the URLs from the Word files. First, I converted the .docx format to markdown (.md) using the remarkable and powerful Pandoc. Then I opened the markdown versions of the documents in Word and used a little visual basic that I cribbed from the internet to convert all the URLs to hyperlinks:

Sub ConvertSelectedURLTextsToHyperlink()
  Word.Options.AutoFormatReplaceHyperlinks = True
  Selection.Range.AutoFormat
End Sub

I could then select all the hyperlinks in the document and paste them into Perma.cc, where I have a professional account for The Digital Press. Perma.cc allows me to convert all the various URLs into stable and permanent URLs as a batch which it then outputs as a .csv file. 

Once I’ve dropped the original hyperlinked document into InDesign, I can swap out the original URLs in the document with the new stabilized version. There should be a way to automate this, but I don’t know how to do it. 

More significantly, I decided to insert the permanent URLs as both hyperlinks, for the digital version, and as footnotes for the print version. 

As a little aside, anyone with a serious interest in publishing, learn how to code. I wish I know how to automate parts of this process, but I simply don’t have the coding skillz necessary to do it!

Hybrids

Protesting on Bended Knee is a hybrid project that will appear in both print and digital forms. Things like hyperlinks present both a technical challenge for the paper version of the book, but also presents a challenge for how we engage with a text. Hyperlinks constantly tempt the reader to move beyond the linearity of the text and embrace the dynamism of textual meaning emerging from a series of relationships between words, sentences, and other texts. The book in contrast disciplines the reader to follow an argument, page-by-page, from from start to finish. From a technical standpoint, citations are still allude to the relationship between the text in a print book and other texts and the reader is still free to follow these connections, but the book does little to facilitate or encourage it. Instead, citations stand as a kind of infrastructure supporting the text, but also conveniently set to the margins of our vision. 

My current compromise is to include the perma.cc, persistent links in footnotes, but to eschew formal citation. This isn’t ideal, in that these links lack the legibility and transparency of formal footnotes, but they at least point the reader to places where the text has been linked in a conventional way. I guess this is the think with hybrids. They reflect the instability of their form and refuse to map easily onto their constituent parts.  

In the end, this is what the pages of Burin’s Protesting on Bended Knee look like. 

Design

If you’ve been following my work on Protesting on Bended Knee, you’ll know that I’ve already messed about with designing the book. I got some feedback from Chris Olsen our graphic designer and tried to give the page a bit more of a contemporary look with more white space. I’m not sure that the updated design is a cool as the one that Chris proposed, but maybe it’s getting there? I wanted to retain a certain house style for this book, but not at the expense of making the book look good.

Designing the expanded content for The Beast is a good bit more fun in some ways. First, the book will only be digital. So I felt less pressure to produce a functionally hybrid text. More importantly, though, I can try to play a bit with making sure that the book looks good in digital form. I’ve decided to use a sans serif font that looks good on screen. I also played a bit more with the graphic element of the book because I don’t have to worry about how the headings will look when printed. At the same time, I did maintain the page as the basic unit for engaging the text largely because The Beast itself, the comic, is paginated and it makes sense for the essays to follow this form as well to lend cohesion to the book.

This is my page for The Beast. I quite like it.

 

Sixty Years of Boom and Bust: The Impact of Oil in North Dakota, 1958–2018

Over the last year, I’ve been whispering about this project a bit. Kyle Conway is editing an updated version of The Williston Report: The Impact of Oil on the Williston Area of North Dakota (1958), and The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota will republish both original report and an updated slate of essays. The updated version will be titled Sixty Years of Boom and Bust The Impact of Oil in North Dakota, 1958–2018, and it will become a contributing volume to the Bakken Bookshelf and sit nice alongside The Bakken Goes Boom: Oil and the Changing Geographies of Western North Dakota (2016). 

If you’re interested in the original report, which anyone interested in North Dakota history should read. There’s a digital copy of the book available from The Digital Press’s page on the Internet Archive here (and if you’re interested in a paper copy one is available from Re-Ink Books in Delhi, India). 

Kyle Conway has sent me a little peek at the table of contents for the new version of the book. It looks fantastic:

I. INTRODUCTION

1. Introduction: Sixty Years of Boom and Bust (2018), by Kyle Conway
2. Introduction and Summary (1958), by Bernt L. Wills, Ross B. Talbot, Samuel C. Kelley, Jr., and Robert B. Campbell

II. PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY
3. Physical Attributes of the Area (1958), by Bernt L. Wills
4. The Geographic Setting of the Bakken Oil Shale Play (2018), by Bradley C. Rundquist and Gregory S. Vandeberg 

III. POLITICS
5. Political Impact (1958), by Ross B. Talbot
6. Political Impacts (2018), by Andrea Olive

IV. ECONOMY
7. The Economic Impact of Oil Development (1958), by Samuel C. Kelley, Jr.
8. The Economic Consequences of Oil Development (2018), by David Flynn

V. SOCIAL CHANGE
9. Social Change in the Basin (1958), by Robert B. Campbell
10. Social Impacts of Oil Development (2018), by Rick Ruddell and Heather Ray
11. Making Home in the Bakken Oil Patch (2018), by William Caraher and Bret Weber
12. Drinking, Drugs, and Long Waits: Community Members’ Perceptions of Living in a North Dakotan Boomtown (2018), by Karin L. Becker
13. Boomtown Bias: Reflections on the Past, Present, and Future of North Dakota’s Commercial Sex Laws (2018), by Nikki Berg Burin

VI. APPENDICES
Appendix A: Methodology Note (1958)
Appendix B: Supplementary Tables (1958)

Kyle has also been playing around with the cover and grabbed a great photograph of Williston on his last visit to the area.

Ideally the book will drop toward the end of this year, but we’re probably dealing with the “long 2018” for this volume with an early 2019 publication date, but judging by the table of contents, I’m pretty sure that this book will be worth the wait.

Making the Book: Protesting on Bended Knee

The essays have been copy edited, sent back to their authors, and some have even been returned to the publisher! Eric Burin’s Protesting on Bended Knee: Race, Dissent and Patriotism in 21st Century America, is slipping gently into the production phase at The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota.

Yesterday morning, I started to think about how the book would look. I will keep the book at the 5.5 x 8.5 size to keep some continuity with Eric’s Picking the President from 2017. I’ve made the margins a bit more generous on the inside of the page to give the text block a little more room from the binding. I will keep the formality of the Janson font because it suits the seriousness of the books topic. 

As for the first page of every chapter, Eric suggested that we try to use a font that evokes the Civil Rights era posters from the 1960s. Like everyone, I immediately grabbed an image of the famous I AM A MAN poster.

Of course, it was likely wood type or even hand lettered like many of the posters of that era, so it was a bit of a non starter. I did try a vaguely art deco Rosina, that I used on the cover of Haunted by Waters.

I’m not sure that this font really works even if I do love the low strokes on the E (and, on the A which would evoke the low stroke on the “A” in I AM A MAN.)

For all the pages, I’d like to continue my emerging house style of using a small icon next to the title of each contribution. In this case, I’m using the fist from the cover of the book, which I think will be rendered in a bit less of a sketchy style in the final version. It will also evoke the Black Power protests at the 1968 Olympics on October 16th, which will coincide with out release date for the book. 

I think I’ll go with a simpler sans serif font for the chapter titles. I’ve recently been enamored with FF Meta (which would allow for a little unintentional trolling, if you know the recent history of this font’s use).

I also need to breathe some more room into the header of the page. I am trying to get a bit more sensitive in my use of negative space to create both balance on the page and as a form of emphasis without changing font sizes and weights. (I have this idea that for some project in the future using the same fonts and sizes throughout using only all caps and negative space for for emphasis).

The single fine line beneath the title gives it a bit of a 1990s vibe. I might leave it out of the final version, but for nostalgic reasons (I spent most of the 1990s with my head buried in a book!), I’ll leave it in for now.

As always, I post this stuff here because I want feedback (and praise, of course, but also I also enjoy snarky criticism!). 

 

Burin Talks Kaepernick on Jack Russell Weinstein’s Why? Radio Show

If you didn’t catch Eric Burin talking about his new book on Colin Kaepernick on the olde tyme wireless last night, don’t worry! You can hear Eric and Jack Russell Weinstein discuss Eric’s new book project, Protesting on Bended Knee: Race, Dissent, and Patriotism in 21st Century America which pulls together over 30 papers dealing with Colin Kaepernick, protest, and race in America. 

Here’s a link to the podcast version fo the show. (Here’s the version that was broadcast live.)

Here’s a blurb about the radio show from the Why? Radio page:

America is in the midst of a ferocious debate about protests on the football field. Quarterback Colin Kaepernick started kneeling during the national anthem to call attention to police brutality against African Americans, inspiring others to do the same. Some think he is justified, others claim he is just a belligerent employee. On this episode, we look at the philosophical issues behind this debate, and have a discussion that focuses on race, sports, patriotism, the history of the United States, and the nature of democracy itself.

Eric Burin is a Professor History at the University of North Dakota who works on American history, with special attention to slavery and race. He is the author of the book Slavery and the Peculiar Solution and the editor of the free collection Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College which is available to download for free (or purchase in paper!). He is also the editor of an upcoming collection on the football protests, which will also be available for free, here.

And, if you want more about the book project, check out a preview essay, and to download your copy when the book appears, go and drop a bookmark on this link.

Eric Burin on Colin Kaepernick on Why? Radio

I’m pretty excited for the next couple months at The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. We have a few books in the pipeline that will appeal to a wide range of readers.

Next week, Eric Burin will appear on Jack Russell Weinstein’s Why? Radio show that broadcasts on Prairie Public Radio and appears regularly as a podcast. The show will air on July 8 at 5 pm Central. Eric will talk about his next book, Protesting on Bended Knee: Dissent and Patriotism in 21st Century America, which will appear from the Digital Press this fall. You can check out a preview from the book here. 

(Eric will be a repeat offender with the Digital Press this fall. His first book, Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College is kind of a big deal.)

The book (and here I’m quoting from the little blurb): “eyes the modern crusade for racial equality through the prism of the demonstrations associated with Colin Kaepernick, a professional football player who in 2016 began kneeling during the national anthem to draw attention to discrimination and injustice.” It brings together over 30 essays that consider Kaepernick’s protests and the underlying issues from a wide range of perspectives. 

Jack Russell Weinstein, the host of the Why? radio show asks: “The next episode of Why? Radio will ask whether NFL players have a right to kneel during the national anthem. We will discuss the morality of their actions and the political, moral, racial, and economic context that inspires their protests. Send us your questions for our guest Eric Burin, editor of the upcoming book Protesting on Bended Knee.” 
 
You can send your questions by 11 am, July 5 to: askwhy@und.edu