Indiana Books

Published in 1976, it's dated, but still a practical guide. Others have said it best: "If you don't know outdoor life, stash this guide in your pack and you'll take along about as knowledgeable a friend as you can find."--William R. New

Jon Marshall, Indiana Division of Fish and Wildlife, once wrote of author, Bill Scifres: "Bill is truly a naturalist. His knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of the outdoors extends far beyond hunting and fishing. His enthusiasm is invigorating. He speaks to the outdoors literally and it seems to speak back to him. . ."

When I found out about this book, I could not wait to buy it! I have always loved railroads, from good ol' Thomas the Tank Engine as a child to model railroading as I grew older. Living here in central Indiana, I became familiar with the Indiana Rail Road Company when their Santa Train would venture near my grandparents home on Lake Lemon. Here in Indianapolis, I used to pester my mom to drive by the Senate Ave Terminal just so I could see the engines. To have an entire volume on the history of my favorite railroad is terrific. It's great to see how one company can make such a difference in our state's (and neighboring states) economy. I had read some basics about Mr. Tom Hoback from the web page and old newsletters, but this book gave me new insight into this very inspiring role model. Obviously, this book is a great item for a "trainhead", but would be very beneficial for one studying Indiana history or economics in general. Go ahead, buy yourself a copy!

As a joke, the founders of the Indiana State Constitution allowed any person of "good morals" be allowed to practice law in the state. Further, the amendment process is a long and troubled one, so it took the lawyers over 20 years to put standards of competency to practice law. William McLauchlan, a great professor who I studied under, provides an interesting insight to the Indiana State Constitution and recommend this book to anyone interested in law in Indiana.

I grew up in the wonderful Hoosier state, moved to Nebraska, and now Colorado. There are many interesting trivia questions which one would not necessarily even associate with Indiana. If you're a true Hoosier, it's worth the reading.

In the early 1960's, Marvin Herzog was the chief interviewer for the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ). The leader of this project was Uriel Weinreich who was also the author's thesis advisor at Columbia University. As the data poured in on the patterns of linguistic and cultural variation between the Jewish communities of pre-Holocaust eastern Europe, the necessity of a method for analyzing this vast quantity of data became obvious. Herzog developed such a method and it became the basis of the doctoral dissertation which constitutes this book.
Herzog, who later became my mentor at Columbia, had the idea that it was possible to isolate a part of the territory covered which was both small enough to be tractable and yet could be regarded as a miniature scale model of the entire territory, capable of exhibiting the dynamics of dialect formation that shaped all of Yiddish-speaking Europe which is an area about as extensive as the northeastern US.
The way he did this was suggested to him by the over all shape of the dialect regions that was emerging as data from the whole area surveyed came in. The bulk of Yiddish-speaking Europe, the part where East Yiddish was spoken, turned out bo be divided into three regions: one in the southwest, one in the northeast and one in the middle. The area in the middle was shaped like an inverted 'V' tilted toward the northwest. The point of the 'V' was in a part of northern Poland with Warsaw in the southwest, Lomza in the northeast and Brest-Litovsk in the middle.
Since the area around the point of 'V' is a miniature version of the whole 'V', Herzog realized that this small area in northern Poland could be regarded as a scale model of the whole East Yiddish territory even though this small area made up less than a tenth of the whole territory surveyed. He made an intensive study of linguistic and cultural variation attested in interviews with people from 34 communities.
The author, a modest person who was perhaps constrained by the conventions of writing a dissertation in a rather conservative field, does not say so explicitly, but the idea of studying dialect interactions in an auspiciously chosen small part of the territory of a language in order to shed light on the dynamics of dialect formation within the language as a whole was a singularly happy one. The principle that regular relationships that hold sway over a small area can hold sway over a much larger one has proven fruitful in my own research.
If this book has a defect it comes from overgeneralizing this principle of the equivalence of different scales. While it is true that accounts of small scale dialect processes can often be scaled up to give a true picture of large scale processes, the reverse is not necessarily the case. That is
large scale structures are not always mirrored in the small scale. I think that Herzog assumed large scale structures generally carry over to smaller scales and this accounts for a dubious choice that he made in presenting his data in map form. A geographical distribution can be presented by showing each location with an iconic symbol to indicate the variant form found there or by drawing lines across the map dividing it into regions in which particular forms predominate. Historically, people working on LCAAJ data have preferred showing the individual locations. Drawing lines adds nothing to the clarity of presentation and requires that the designer make arbitrary decisions as to the exact course of the lines. At its worst, (not in this book but in the first volume of LCAAJ) the line method can suppress detail about individual locations. Herzog favors the line method. I suspect that this is because it works well with maps of the whole Yiddish territory where lines give a fair representation of the gross patterns of variation and he believed, wrongly, that it should work equally well in small scale maps. It does not because there is more irregularity on the smallest scales and the lines tend to gloss this over. But this is a relatively minor objection that detracts very little from a brilliant book.
The data presented in this book can throw new light on the general history of Jews in Eastern Europe. Two examples illustrate this: In the common historical narrative, Hasidism spread from the southwest to the northeast of the territory studied here and was partly beaten back by the opposition of the Lithuanian rabbis. Herzog shows that the present distribution of Hasidism coincides with that of techniques for preparing Sabbath fish and farfl (a kind of pasta). Since rabbis could not have influenced these domestic routines, Herzog suggests that well-entrenched differences in folk culture, including differences in worldview were the ultimate determinates of where Hasidism gained a permanent foothold. Another pattern offers a window into the deeper past of the Jewish settlements. The linguistic features of West Slavic languages (represented here by Polish) differ from those of Eastern Slavic ones (represented here by Belarusian and Ukrainian). Yiddish dialects have both West Slavic and East Slavic borrowings and, as would be expected, Yiddish loans from West Slavic are found to the west of Yiddish loans from East Slavic. However, a comparison of the boundary between West Slavic and East Slavic loans in Yiddish and the boundary between West Slavic and East Slavic languages themselves, reveals an interesting result. The boundary within Yiddish is to the west of the boundary within the Slavic languages, indicating that East Slavicisms have penetrated further west in Yiddish then they have in the Slavic languages themselves. This surprising result contradicts the common assumption of historians that the Jewish settlement in this area went from west to east. If that were true, the Jewish settlers would be expected to have carried West Slavicism with them into East Slavic territory. Instead they appear to have carried East Slavicisms into West Slavic territory. Thus it appears that the course of settlement included migration from east to west.

This book describes and analyzes one of the most improbable stories in American education - how did it come to pass that the preeminent music school in the United States, probably in the world, came to be situated in southern Indiana - Bloomington to be exact, at Indiana University. George M. Logan, Head of the English Department at Queen's University, Canada became intrigued by this question and wrote a brilliant book to answer it. As an American living in Europe I am often surprised that musically aware people here not only have heard of Bloomington and Indiana, but react so favorably to it. Its performing faculty (like Janos Starker or Menahem Pressler, or students from Indiana like Joshua Bell) are well known here and heard in concerts or on the radio. Here is one American success story well and interestingly told. Not only is the cast of musical charaters in this history fascinating, but Logan has weaved into the narrative the issues and analyses that confronted the Indiana administration and faculty and the outcomes of their decisions. This a colorful book describing high culture, but it is also a kind of ongoing management manual on successful cultural organization, although Logan is well balanced, recording not only successes but failures as well. I loved reading this book, learned a great deal about cultural management and just plain management, and warmly recommend it.

This book was written by my Great Uncle, Walter Brookfield Hendrickson. This book completely describes life in Indianapolis,In. and surrounding areas during the years in the title. There are lots of wonderful pictures of my family in here. He and his brother, my grandfather, lost their father early on in life. Walter had to get a job and he will work until he dies in 1984. If you grew up in Indiana this book is perfect for your collection, lots of memories will be brought back to life.

Reid Duffy is great as usual ! Humor and reviews of the best of Indiana resturants. Information you can use, and always respect his opinion to to right on !

More than just about women, it's about Hoosier history, and the kind of good ol' American fortitude that makes our country great. The drive to excel and accomplish is embodied in these women. They illustrate that the pioneer spirit is still part of the Midwest. Their web site has some sample stories too.

This book was written in 1947 when Indiana was a very different place. Yet this book endures as a compelling and sometimes critical look at important people, times, and events in Indiana's history.

Martin tells about Indiana's beginnings: How people came to settle here, what those people were like. He shows how the Civil War played out in Indiana, where every fourth-grade student is now told that "brother fought against brother." He describes the poverty of Indiana farm life and how natural gas made many men wealthy, both in the late 1800s. He tells of the "golden years" in the early 1900s, as cities began to rise. And he explains the troubled years of the 1930s and 1940s, which were fresh in the memories of this book's first audience.

Martin's most compelling writing, however, is reserved for his portraits of colorful Indiana men: Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, infamous Klansman D. C. Stephenson, and others. The story of Debs is the best part of the book. Martin clearly sympathized with Debs, who championed the worker from his Terre Haute home and, later, from the Presidentail campaign trail and, finally, from prison. Debs's story is all the more interesting to me because I lived in Terre Haute for several years in the 1990s. My apartment was a mile or so north of Debs's home on Eighth Street, which still stands as a historical site. I can imagine the physical setting of Debs's Terre Haute activism as Martin relates it. But it is difficult for me to imagine the spirit of the city in those days, if nothing else because the city's current sleepiness stands in such stark contrast.