A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year"What a woman! And what a fabulous life to unearth. Zelia Nuttall was incredibly smart, determined, a divorced single mother in a man’s world, a great scholar, and an original thinker—yet today she’s completely forgotten. Merilee Grindle has dug deep into the archives and uncovered her fascinating story."—Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature"Zelia Nuttall comes alive...

Patronage systems in the public service are universally reviled as undemocratic and corrupt. Yet patronage was the prevailing method of staffing government for centuries, and in some countries it still is. In Jobs for the Boys, Merilee Grindle considers why patronage has been so ubiquitous in history and explores the political processes through which it is replaced by merit-based civil service systems. Such reforms are consistently resisted, she finds, because patronage systems, t...

Where do human societies come from? The drive to answer this question took on a new urgency in the nineteenth century, when a generation of archaeologists began to look beyond the bible for the origins of different cultures and civilizations. Zelia Nuttall threw herself into the study of Aztec customs and cosmology, eager to use the tools of the emerging science of anthropology to prove that modern Mexico was built over the ruins of ancient civilizations.Zelia was the first person ...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe "masterful chronicle" of the discovery of the legendary lost civilization of the Maya and the quest to unlock their secrets.Featuring a history and description of the major Maya sites, including **Chichen Itza, Tulum,**Palenque, Uxmal, Copan, and more. Illustrated with a map and more than 100 images.In 1839, rumors of extraordinary yet baffling ...

**AN ECONOMIST AND SMITHSONIAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A landmark work of narrative history that shatters our previous Eurocentric understanding of the Age of Discovery by telling the story of the Indigenous Americans who journeyed across the Atlantic to Europe after 1492"On Savage Shores not only changes how we think about the first contact between America and Europe but also sets the methodological standard for a new way of understanding the origin of t...

"Hiram Bingham and the Machu Picchu saga deserve no less than Cradle of Gold, Christopher Heaney's thorough, engrossing portrait." ― The Wall Street JournalIn 1911, a young Peruvian boy led an American explorer and Yale historian named Hiram Bingham into the ancient Incan citadel of Machu Picchu. Hidden amidst the breathtaking heights of the Andes, this settlement of temples, tombs and palaces was the Incas' greatest achievement. Tall, handsome, a...

A series of lectures on the ethnic and social fusion that makes Brazil the country it is today. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

An update of a popular work that takes on the myths of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas, featuring a new afterword. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest reveals how the Spanish invasions in the Americas have been conceived and presented, misrepresented and misunderstood, in the five centuries since Columbus first crossed the Atlantic. This book is a unique and provocative synthesis of ideas and themes that were for generations debated or perpetuated without que...

The Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs, the first of its kind, provides a current overview of recent research on the Aztec empire, the best documented prehispanic society in the Americas. Chapters span from the establishment of Aztec city-states to the encounter with the Spanish empire and the Colonial period that shaped the modern world. Articles in the Handbook take up new research trends and methodologies and current debates. The Handbook articles are divided into seven parts. Part ...

A "compelling and elegantly written" history of the fight for the Amazon basin and the work of a brilliant but overlooked Brazilian intellectual ( Times Literary Supplement, UK).The fortunes of the late nineteenth century's imperial powers depended on a single raw material—rubber—with only one source: the Amazon basin. This scenario ignited a decades-long conflict that found Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States fighting with and against the new n...

The Maya reveals how this ancient civilization – its buildings, ideas, objects and identities – has been perceived, portrayed and exploited over five hundred years in the Americas, Europe and beyond. Megan E. O’Neil summarizes ancient Maya art and history from the Preclassic period to the Spanish invasion, as well as the history of engagement with the ancient Maya, from Spanish invaders in the sixteenth century to later explorers and archaeologists. Taking in scientific literature...

Jack D. Forbes's monumental Africans and Native Americans has become a canonical text in the study of relations between the two groups. Forbes explores key issues relating to the evolution of racial terminology and European colonialists' perceptions of color, analyzing the development of color classification systems and the specific evolution of key terms such as black, mulatto, and mestizo--terms that no longer carry their original meanings. Forbes also presents strong evidence t...