Books

Public Domain Day 2026

One of the most exciting days of the year is Public Domain Day! On January 1 each year, works copyrighted 95 years prior enter the public domain. This means that anything published in the US in 1930 is now in the public domain!

Happy New Year!

For North Dakota Quarterly, this means the volume 20 is now available with no restrictions. You can enjoy the esteemed jurist Sveinbjor Johnson’s article on “The University and the State” Or these two poems dedicated to the memory of Carl Ben Eielson.

Mdp.39015075902778 seq_246.

Of course, there are plenty of other things to read from this year. John Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel, the first of his U.S.A. Trilogy, Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies, or for more popular faire Dashiell Hammett’s, The Maltese Falcon or Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison. For those “Hellenically inclined” check out Thornton Wilder’s The Woman of Andros. For those who enjoy the more Gothic side of things, check out Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. 

If you’re into magazines, you probably already know that you can find the entire run of the New Masses (1926–1948) is available online, but now the 1930 volume in the public domain (which features unsurprisingly som John Dos Passos!). Volume 4 of Prairie Schooner from 1930 offers perspectives on a perennial question in Higher Ed, “Should Professors Think?” Or a later issue of The Midland which features these nice winter poems from Frederick ten Hoor in volume 16:

Inu.32000000697351 seq_26.

Boeotia III: Some Unboxing Notes

Over the weekend, I spent about 10 hours with John Bintliff, Emeri Farinetti, and Anthony Snodgrass’s latest publication from their work in Boeotia from 1978-2001: Boeotia Project, Volume III: Hyettos. The Origins, Florescence and Afterlife of a Small Boeotian City (2025). 

It is massive (700+ pages), dense (in two columns!), and it is also open access! In fact, you can download it here. Funny story: I was so excited to get a copy, that when I saw people buzzing about it on social media, I ordered a paper copy before I knew that I could just download it. Do I regret this. No. 

I had the vague idea that I could spend 10 or so hours with this book and that might be enough for a preliminary review. It turns out that I was mistaken. That said, I think that I have enjoyed the volume enough to do the equivalent of an product “unboxing” where I can offer a few preliminary observations.

1. Modify and Adapt. If I were going to write a formal, published review of this book, the first thing I would do is hyperlink the living daylights out of the it. For example, the best description of sites is in “Chapter 4: The analysis of the Hyettos rural landscape (ii): the CN rural sites” where Bintliff and Farinetti describe and interpret each site in some detail. These sites are then discussed throughout the volume in different contexts and by different authors. As the book is downloaded, it is difficult to move between the original description of the site and later analysis. The internal link would solve this beautifully. 

I was tempted (for a moment) to see whether I could easily modify the book to allow a reader to move more easily between sections. Then I noticed that the book was published with a ND license and technically my modifications would violate this license. Of course, I could do it anyway, but I suspect that if the authors publish a book with a restrictive license like this, they are not inclined to entertain modifications.

2. Published Data. As readers of my blog know, I am very interested in how projects publish data. It was exciting to see the Boeotia project published their ceramic data as simple .xlsx downloads here. (They also published their data on architectural fragments here). This data appears to not have any license associated with it which makes it tempting to think of ways to allow the reader to integrate it more tightly with the volume. With the vast number of online data presentation and publication platforms available, it seems pretty easy to create a way to link specifically to particular datasets (say, site data) as well as making the entire dataset available. 

3. Sites. The Boeotia survey pioneered offsite survey not only by collecting data at scale, but offering arguments for why this data matters. Foremost among these arguments it the (in)famous manuring hypothesis which suggests that offsite halos around settlement reflect the scatter of trash associated with the spreading of manure into market gardens around more dense settlements. Alternately, the halo could represent lower density settlement and activity areas surrounding a core settlement. The relatively lower density and shorter term occupation would lead to lower density ceramic scatters that appear archaeologically in very similar ways to manuring especially as they are likely to contain similar assemblages of household ceramics.

The Boeotia project also continued to sample higher density assemblages in the landscape at a higher level. These are areas that exceeded the surrounding density to such an extent that they plausibly represent higher intensity activity areas in the past. By sampling these areas more intensively, the survey teams produced a more robust sample of artifacts and a better relative measure of site densities. This allowed them to discern where densities “fall off” around the borders of the site and return to the level of background scatter and to speak more directly to the function of activities at the site. The functional cohesion of the various period assemblages and the continuity of densities creates a compelling argument for these sites as actually existing as activity areas in the past rather than as the accidental or incidental overlap of lower density scatters. In short, the sites documented by this project are convincing.

4. Early Byzantine Pottery, Assemblages, and Settlement. Finally, I was pretty excited to  read Athanasios K. Vionis, with Chrystalla Loizou’s chapter on “A household archaeology and history of Hyettos and its territory: the Byzantine to Early Modern pottery.” The thing that immediately caught my eye was their discussion of Early Byzantine pottery — particularly handmade and slow-wheel made wares. What’s distinct about their discussion is that they do not simply identify random sherds in offsite scatters, which are a rare, but not unexpected occurrence in areas with long settlement history, but they are able to identify assemblages that include amphora, flat bottomed pitchers (or juglets) and even some burnished brown table wares. While the number of sherds remains small, the diversity in the assemblages is perhaps sufficient to define persistent settlement during these often shadowy centuries.

My interest in this is two fold. First, as readers of this blog know, I’m puttering away on publishing the a more fulsome treatment of the “Slavic” (or better Early Byzantine pottery) from Isthmia and I’ve very recently agreed to write a chapter on the economy of the Early Byzantine countryside (with emphasis, I suspect, on Greece and Cyprus). The traces of evidence for this period are quite scant and the appearance of a cluster of sherds that suggest a domestic assemblage is meaningful indeed.

There is much more to say about this volume and there is a good chance that a longer, more detailed review will appear on this very blog in the near future.

Kim Bowes, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent

I’ve been enjoying Kim Bowes’ latest book, Surviving Rome, and I’ve blogged a bit about it on my Thanksgiving live blog. The book contributed nicely my thinking about my Roman History class in the spring. I’ll likely include it as a highly recommended book for students to review in the class. 

The book examines the economic lives of “the 90%” of the Roman world though archaeology, non-literary texts (especially graffiti, ostraca, and papyrus), numismatics, and human bodies. The book is intentionally short on big picture conclusions (as so many books purporting to deal with economic life seek to offer) and long on the kind of granular detail the entices subtle new readings of material culture, rural life, and the Roman economy. 

Rather than proceeding with a long (and probably tedious) review, there were a handful of things that stood out to me:

1. Consumer Culture. Bowes makes a compelling argument that the 90% enjoyed a kind of Roman consumer culture with a wide range of manufactured things in their possession. Metal objects for work, pleasure and adornment, glass plates, lamps, and glasses, ceramic table, cooking, and utility wares, various articles of clothing, and other perishable articles presumably made of wood would have created a world full of things. This means that the 90% had a disposable income and a desire to surround themselves with objects that demonstrated their taste. In short, the poor and middling of Roman society liked nice things too. They were not simply living at the subsistence level, even in the countryside, but engaged in a thriving material culture.

2. Roman Farms. Roman archaeologists know Bowes’s work on the rural landscape and farms with the Roman Peasant Project. In Surviving Rome, she is more cursory, but reminds us how densely populated the Roman rural landscape would have been even in places like northern Gaul and Britain. The number of farms indicated both the intensity of Roman agricultural exploitation of the landscape as well as existence of social and economic networks necessary to support the rural monetary economy and various forms of highly local economic exchange.

What is more important than that, however, is that Bowes definitively rejects any idea of subsistence agriculture in the Roman world. The small to midsized Roman farmer was immersed in a complex economy of trade and exchange, things, and as Bowes argues later credit and coins.    

3. Money. Bowes offers a great overview of the ubiquity of money and credit in the Roman world. She begins by reminding everyone that Romans used coins even for small transactions and that small issues — in bronze — were ubiquitous in urban and rural areas. She then expands this to discuss the way in which coins complemented other kinds of payments to allow the 90% to get by. Of particular interest is Bowes’s discussion of credit. Based largely on papyrus records from Egypt she demonstrates how even people of very modest means used credit to support not only their need for sustenance, but also consumer goods. What was remarkable is that many of the creditors were not of much greater social or economic standing than the debtors.

That all said, I do wonder whether there was a market for debt. It was interesting that there didn’t seem to be much of a concern (or at least a particularly prominent concern in the limited sources available) for repayment. It might be because these debts were sold on detaching socially the creditor from the debtor. 

4. Roman Bodies. The survey of Roman bodies based on bioarchaeological analysis is a nice survey that emphasizes as much what we don’t know about the health of ancient Romans as what we do know. She demonstrated that many earlier efforts to use bodies to understand Roman health overstated the links between certain skeletal traits and work. In the end, it seems simpler and more accurate (if not more precise) to say that most Romans used their bodies as tools and their bones preserve the signs of labor. Bowes does offer more precise observations from her dataset. For example, she concludes that Romans in cities had greater exposure to childhood diseases and higher childhood mortality, and this produced a more robust adult population. She also demonstrated the variation in diet between rural and urban dwellers with urbanites eating more meat and fish consumption being less tied to location as wealth. 

5. Seasons and Families. One thing that I would have loved to understand better is the seasonal variation in the economy. There were glimpses: references to the hungry time (the late winter and early spring months before the harvest), seasonal impacts of malaria on mortality, and such things. One wonders, however, whether there is more here in terms of borrowing (and lending), cash on hand, and times to speculate or scrimp. 

At times I also lost track of labor in Bowes’s book particularly at the scale of the family unit. Again there were glimpses: children whose parents gave them as indentured servants when they were very young. For some reason, I assumed that most families kept their labor closer to home and this meant changing quantities (and qualities of labor) over time. I also became curious about the elderly and how and whether they helped families in the 90% survive. Perhaps these things are so well-known (or that they follow such a predictable course) that they do not require study.

These issues are more about what the book is not rather than what the book is, and in that way, they’re a bit unfair. The book is good and worth reading. Check it out. 

Cyber Monday: One-Click Download from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota

People say to me all the time: Bill, I just can’t be bothered to click download every time a new free book comes out from your press.

This is an understandable concern. After all, clicking download five or six times a year might take as much as 20 seconds from your daily life. 

I’ve listened and I’ve created a Cyber Monday (whatever that is) One Click Download Collection from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. With one click you can download TEN free books from the press. Nine of them were published recently, and one is a quiet classic that I think more people should read an enjoy.

There is no catch. You don’t have to sign up. You don’t have to give me your email. You don’t have to pay anything, subscribe, enter your zip code, area code, or credit card number.

Just. Click. Here.

Book by its Cover: The Children of Neverville

Just a quick post today because I’m on the road (again) at the ASOR annual meeting.

Check out the book cover for the next book from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota and North Dakota Quarterly. 

Book cover by Kathleen Turley Cox.

More to come:

Three Things Thursday: Notebook Jotting from Bilbao

While in Bilbao, I found myself jotting in my little notebook a good bit. Sometimes these jottings with developed from papers or conversations during the conference. Sometimes they developed in my walks around town. You can read my larger reflections on the conference here.

Three little jottings in particular stood out and seems sufficient for a “Three Things Thursday.” These are not complete ideas, arguments, or assertions, but rather 

Thing the First

Archaeology’s and modernity’s need to fragment experience as an ethical response to the profound continuity between oil, capital, colonialism, imperialism. Through fragmentation, we create a point of critique by separating our own perspective from existing points in the network defined ultimately by the seemingly infinite and totalizing character of the flow. 

Modernism, for example, and its emphasis on the discontinuities that exist in the present, offered new critical, ontological, and epistemological perspectives.

Today, we can work to de-center the “master narrative” by encouraging communication as dialogue. This means embracing plurality and works that are open-ended.At the same time, it is insufficient to simply posit dialogue as an “outcome.” This is especially true for matters of ethical thinking. How do we not only allow discussion but also frame that discussion to encourage particular outcomes?

How have our perceptions been shifted because of our exposure to oil? Does this limit the kind of dialogues, outcomes, and ethical perspectives possible?

If this is the case, do “energy humanities” constitute a distinct epistemology or even the kind of ontology that provides an escape from our patterns of thought? Can we use music, film, fiction, or new forms of scholarly writing to find new ways of knowing?

Thing the Second

Erin Riggs gave an interesting paper on the art present in the Union Carbide corporate headquarters in Danbury, Connecticut in the 1980s. She argued that the art, which looked mostly like upscale hotel art, spoke to the company’s desire to project modernity, but also their colonial aspirations. This art, then, created a context for a kind of corporate colonialism that tragically culminated in the Bhopal disaster of December 1984.

After her talk, I got to thinking about North Dakota’s own Thomas Barger and the collection of artifacts associated with his exploration of Saudi Arabia’s desert interior in search of oil. These artifacts, which Barger published in Archaeology magazine, in the 1960s, connected the discovery of oil directly to the discovery of the Arabian peninsula’s archaeological past. While it appears that Barger kept and perhaps even displayed these artifacts at his home in the US, they eventually found their way back to Saudi Arabia as part of the Thomas C. Barger gallery at the national museum in Riyadh.

The repatriation of these artifacts paralleled the nationalization of ARAMCO in the 1970s and 1980s. The case of the Barger collection tells a slightly different corporate history from that of Union Carbide. While ARAMCO was every bit as colonial an enterprise as many other large 20th century corporation, Thomas Barger’s artifacts demonstrate the role that archaeology in private collections could play in negotiating the relationship between companies and the nation state.         

Thing the Third

As I walked across the city, I became fascinated by the the presence of small books stores each with their own collection of books and thematic emphasis. I know this is not rare in larger cities (and even in some small town), but I got to wondering whether these bookstores fostered communities of readers. In other words, are the customers of these shops aware of other customers and do they consider themselves a community? 

I have blogged about reading a book with students from my Roman history class next semester and while I hadn’t thought of it this way, I wonder if it could be an exercise in community building. 

Teaching Thursday: Roman History

Just a quick post today since I’m on the road.

I’ve been thinking a good bit about my Roman History course which I’ll offer this spring. There are three new Roman History books in the wind these days that are getting some buzz on my “socials.” I’ve not read any of these books, but they’re due at my house by the time I get back from Spain.

First is Ed Watts’s big new book The Romans (Basic Books 2025) which presumably is a companion volume to Roderick Beatons, The Greeks (2021). Unlike Beaton’s The Greeks, Watts’s book only goes through the 5th century AD. It is still 700+ pages and probably too long to use productively in a Roman history class, but it feels like a good bonus book to use in the future. 

Next is Kim Bowes’s Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (2025). Like Watts’s, Bowes’s book is a bit too long to productive assign to a big picture Roman history class (and I might still be slightly inclined to assign Sarah Bonds’s book Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire (2025) if only for its length, but I have a couple months to give Bowes’s book a read. 

Finally, there’s Barry Strauss’s Jews vs. Rome (Simon & Schuster 2025) which has received as much buzz as one might imagine in the hands of its major publisher and in these days. It promises to be the most accessible book on the list and no one will easily doubt Strauss’s chops as an ancient historian. It feels like something that students could dig into as a way to get another perspective on both life in the provinces (or better hinterland) and the religious history of Rome. It could be a good counterpart to our discussion of Apuleius’s Metamorphosis.

These three books form quite a stack when places atop my interest in having at least some students read Ronald Syme’s Roman Revolution (1939) which I blogged about here. My students generally comment that I assign too much reading, but will sometimes also concede (begrudgingly and when looking for a letter of recommendation) that it is worth it. I don’t want to take this too far, however. I vividly remember in my first year teaching Greek History when my students approached me (with great [and in hindsight possibly affected] deference) and asked for less reading. It was a fair and reasonable request and I’d like to avoid that intervention in the future. 

Open Access Week 2025

It is Open Access Week 2025! 

This is a week where many OA presses do a bit more to make known their work. You can read my semi-regular post on North Dakota Quarterly and Open Access here. It also seems like as good a time as any to make visible the work of The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota over the past 12 months.

This past month, The Digital Press has become a member of the Radical Open Access Collective, and we hope that this alignment will help us share what we do more broadly and learn more about what’s going on in the broader open access world. 

We’ve also enjoyed some productive partnerships over the last year. We partnered with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens to publish David Pettegrew’s Corinthian Countrysides and with the Northern Plains Heritage Foundation to reprint Clell Gannon’s Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres. We worked with North Dakota Quarterly to publish the first English translation of Ismail Gaspirali’s The Muslims of Darürrahat. We are developing closers relationships with the brilliant students in UND’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing certificate program.

We’ve also continued our efforts to embrace the laboratory aspects of The Digital Press by publishing an article on Corinthian Countrysides in the Journal of Field Archaeology this fall: “Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for a Future of Reuse: Linked Open Data and the Scholar-Led Publication” with David Pettegrew.  

Curious about what else we’ve done over the past twelve months?

Here’s some of the late 2024 books: 

Ismail Gaspirali, The Muslims of Darürrahat. Translated by Çiğdem Pala Mull. Edited by Sharon Carson. 2024.

David K. Pettegrew, Corinthian Countrysides: Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. 2024. 

Jack Russell Weinstein, Israel, Palestine, and the Trolley Problem: On the Futility of the Search for the Moral High Ground. 2024.

Christopher Neal Price, Big Pandemic on the Prairie: Spanish Flu in North Dakota. 2024.

And here’s what we’ve done in 2025. This year has turned out to be a super exciting year for the press with five brilliant publications (and one more likely!). 

Wild Drawing (WD), Context and Content: The Art of WD. Edited by Kostis Kourelis. 2025.

Eric Burin, ed. Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition. 2025.

Clell Goebel Gannon, Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres. New Edition. With a forward by Tom Isern and an introduction by Aaron Barth. 2025.

Shawn Graham, Practical Necromancy for Beginners: A Short Incomplete Opinionated Introduction to Artificial Intelligence for Archaeology and History Students. 2025.

Michael G. Michlovic, An Archaeology of the Red River of the North. 2025.

Two Thing Tuesday: Esoteric Orientalism and Reparative Reading

This weekend, I read Mandarin Dubey’s short book in the Cambridge Elements series titled Esoteric Orientalism (2024). Being a Cambridge Elements title, this book offered a minimal commitment to helping my contextualize Blavatsky a bit more clearly in the 19th century context and offered an opportunity for a more sympathetic reading of her work which often stands as a kind of origin point for critiques of pseudo-archaeology. 

Thing the First

Esoteric Orientalism offers what Dubey sees as a reparative reading of Blavatsky that sought to unpack her ideas of race, language, culture, and religion in the context of late 19th century Orientalist thought. Dubey sets Blavatsky in opposition to German Orientalist Max Müller and argues that Blavatsky’s rejection of racial and linguistic categories as the basis for understanding religion offered an alternative to the emerging work on scientific linguistics and religious studies pioneered by Müller. Even the casual reader of Blavatsky will understand that she rejects the methods and conclusions associated with scientific linguistic and studies of religion. In their place, she proposes both the need to acquire esoteric knowledge and a mythic cosmology of race, language, and religion that is universal and totalizing. A reparative reading of Blavatsky allows one to see in her work a narrative that subverts the emerging discourse of scientific linguistics (and religion) which becomes an unfortunate basis for scientific race theory of the 20th century. For Blavatsky, scientific notions of race (as well as caste) were as irrelevant to her esoteric Orientalism as the unenlightened theories sprung forth from German university campuses. 

Thing the Second

Dubey’s reading of Blavatsky pushed me to return to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s brilliant 1997 paper “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You,” which she published as the introduction to her edited volume Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997). In this well-known essay, Sedgwick challenges the prevalence of paranoid reading. For Sedgwick paranoid reading privileges the revealing of institutional power both in the present and in the past (and its looming danger in the future). In its worst form, the result of this is that readers retroject the abuses and injustices of the present back onto texts of the past through genealogical analysis and this renders the present situation not only inevitable but also suggests that future injustice is essentially unavoidable. This allows the paranoid reader to remain unsurprised by the problems of the present that because they recognize that they have always already existed. Sedgwork is clear that such readings are often justified, accurate, and significant. Moreover, she is deeply sympathetic to many of the political positions of the authors whose work embraces paranoid reading. That said, she advocates for a form of reparative reading that goes beyond revealing the roots of institutional and structural injustice and instead emphasizes the power of texts to create new meanings, new positions, and by extension, new futures.  (This is a very ham-fisted reading of what is an incredibly rich and deeply sympathetic article).  

Dubey’s unorthodox reading of Blavatsky and her work to demonstrate how the esoteric texts of Theosophy offered (and offer?) a counter current to both 19th century scientific racism but also tacitly offered a position from which to critique various forms of contemporary social and cultural “exotericism” grounded in persistent Orientalism.

This resonated with me in part because it seems to me that 20th-century pseudoarchaeology offers any number of perspectives susceptible to genuinely reparative reading. An appeal to Sedgwick’s ideas allows me to recognize the value of paranoid readings (and the political and disciplinary positions that these reading occupy) while still offering a productive alternative to their perspectives. For pseudoarchaeology, this may be as simple a continuing to recognize the impact of pseudoarchaeological ideas on the production of disciplinary knowledge as a way to remind ourselves that such contributions are possible in the present and future.

Post Script

For various readings I read Dubey’s Esoteric Orientalism as a paper book. This was a miserable and slightly bizarre experience. First, the font was tiny and produced a massive text block on each page. This was not inviting to read. Second, the book itself was thin, cheaply made, and a rather unfriendly size. Finally, and most bizarrely, the bibliography was alphabetized by FIRST NAME. This is not standard in the Cambridge Elements series and suggest haste or simple carelessness in production.

I’m not naive and recognize that the Cambridge Elements series is designed to make profits for Cambridge University Press and mostly as a digital subscription service for libraries. This doesn’t even really bother me, but I do with that they did a bit more to obscure the corner cutting. This book had too much “Routledge” in its Cambridge.

Teaching Thursday: Roman History and Syme’s The Roman Revolution

Readers of this blog know that I have a mild obsession with Ronald Syme’s 1939 masterpiece, The Roman Revolution. My interest is as much as his extraordinary style as his intriguing analysis. 

There is, of course, also the chilling resonance of his volume in the contemporary world. 

Some of this might account for the continued interest in The Roman Revolution and Ronald Syme himself over the past 20 years. Of particular note are Christopher Pelling’s landmark article “Rhetoric of the Roman Revolution” Syllecta Classica 26.1 (2015) and just this year Federico Santangelo and Eugenia Vitello’s “The Politics of Syme’s Revolution” Revista de Historiografía 40 (2025). It would be worth adding Anthony Birley’s Select Correspondence of Ronald Syme, 1927–1939 (2020). It would be interesting to read Syme against the work of Arnaldo Momigliano especially through the lens of Oswyn Murray’s The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present (2024).

This would be a lot for a 300 level course at my institution. Moreover, my current model for teaching Roman History is an expansive one that stretched from the beginning of the Late Republic to the Seventh Century. There simply isn’t room to give this book its due.

This nudged me to consider another possibility. What if I created a one-credit reading course focused on The Roman Revolution. The book has 33 chapter so that would mean we’d have to read and discuss 2 per week. Since the class would only be one credit, we wouldn’t need to meet more than a hour a per week and the students could use the book as the basis for their book review in Roman History (allowing them to kill two birds with one stone).

The two questions are, of course, would any student be interested in doing this and would it fit into their schedule? Unfortunately, I teach a class immediately after my Roman History course (and it’s on the other side of campus!), so the easy offer to stay around for another hour isn’t there. I could, of course, run the class from 5-6 pm which is pretty unappealing for most students (and, cough, me) or hold it between 7-8 am on Thursday morning (this was when we read Latin last year).

The second question is whether the students would take it seriously enough to get something out of a class like this. My point isn’t just would they understand Syme, but would they see how Syme has relevance in our contemporary situation.