The Black Friday to Cyber Monday holiday is such an orgy of consumerism that we had to invent “Giving Tuesday” to cleanse our collective conscience. 

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is doing its part to soften the blow of the holiday season by making available its entire catalogue of books on North Dakota or Archaeology for free downloads (including Eric Burin’s Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College (2017), which doesn’t really fit into a category!)

(Actually, all book published by The Digital Press are always free).

We’re particular excited to announce the open access version of Elwyn Robinson’s History of North Dakota. Originally published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1966 and since then reprinted by NDSU Press. In 2016, The Digital Press collaborated with the Northern Plains Heritage Foundation and NDSU Press to purchase the rights to publishing an open access digital version of the book. The Chester Fritz Library took over the project and brought the last chunk of funding to the table as part of their work to make open educational resources available to UND students and as a great early addition to our institutional repository. In sum, this publication is a great example of how a region’s cultural institutions can work together to make important resources available.

Go and download your copy of Robinson now to show that these kinds of initiatives matter! And check out North Dakota Quarterly’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of this book. 

If your tastes run more to the poetic, then head over to our friends at North Dakota Quarterly and check out their newly released NDQ Supplement of translated Tsotsil Maya poetry. Produced by an experimental poetry collective and translated by Paul M. Worley into English, it “represents one of the very first (if not THE first) Tsotsil Maya collections in English to be readily available online (thereby circumventing both censorship and traditional English language literary markets).” I’m particularly enamored with our digital cover designed to evoke the libro cartonero tradition of independent publishing in Mexico. What better way to subvert commercialism?

If you feel the need to spend money, go and pre-order a copy of The Beast slated to be published by our friends at Ad Astra Comix.

If the chaos of petroculture and experimental poetry rubs you the wrong way, embrace your inner (or outer) archaeologist (and persnickety attention to detail and method) by downloading a copy of Corinth Excavations Archaeological Manual. 

Or embrace entropy and chaos by downloading Micah Bloom’s Codex and David Haeselin’s reflection on the 1997 Red River flood, Haunted by Waters. 

And, finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention The Bakken: An Archaeology of an Industrial Landscape (2017), co-authored by our founding publisher Bill Caraher and once-and-future contributor Bret Weber and published by our friends and colleagues at NDSU Press.