Exploring the lives of the wide range of people who struggled to make a home for themselves in this harsh and unforgiving region.Including descriptions of how a variety of people lived their daily lives, from nomadic Indian tribes to Chinese immigrants and from cowboys to city-dwellers. It also conveys how those individual lives are reflected in the sweeping changes that occurred in a century that saw the West become the most modern and diverse of all the nation's ...

Texas history is often recounted through tales of revolution, oil booms, and cattle drives. But what if we considered a different lens—one shaped by wind and wildfire, rivers and drought, grasslands and pine forests?Nature and Place in Texas reimagines the Lone Star story by centering its ecosystems. This collection of essays by leading environmental historians reveals how the state’s natural features—its plains, deserts, rivers, forests, and coastlines—have shaped and bee...

The West, especially the Intermountain states, ranks among the whitest places in America, but this fact obscures the more complicated history of racial diversity in the region. In Making the White Man’s West, author Jason E. Pierce argues that since the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the American West has been a racially contested space. Using a nuanced theory of historical “whiteness,” he examines why and how Anglo-Americans dominated the region for a 120-year period.In ...

Numerous archaeological projects have found substantial evidence of the military nature of Maya society, and warfare is a frequent theme of Maya art. Maya Gods of War investigates the Classic period Maya gods who were associated with weapons of war and the flint and obsidian from which those weapons were made.Author Karen Bassie-Sweet traces the semantic markers used to distinguish flint from other types of stone, surveys various types of Chahk thunderbolt deities and thei...

From Ancient Rome to Colonial Mexico compares the Christianization of the Roman Empire with the evangelization of Mesoamerica, offering novel perspectives on the historical processes involved in the spread of Christianity. Combining concepts of empire and globalization with the notion of religion from a postcolonial perspective, the book proposes the method of analytical comparison as a point of departure to conceptualize historical affinities and differences between the ancient R...

YouTube hosts one billion visitors monthly and sees more than 400 hours of video uploaded every minute. In her award winning book, Thanks for Watching, Patricia G. Lange offers an anthropological perspective on this heavily mediated social environment by analyzing videos and the emotions that motivate sharing them. She demonstrates how core concepts from anthropology—participant-observation, reciprocity, and community—apply to sociality on YouTube. Lange's book reconceptualizes an...

Ancient Households on the North Coast of Peru provides insight into the organization of complex, urban, and state-level society in the region from a household perspective, using observations from diverse North Coast households to generate new understandings of broader social processes in and beyond Andean prehistory.Many volumes on this region are limited to one time period or civilization, often the Moche. While Ancient Households on the North Coast of Peru does ...

Historicizing Fear is a historical interrogation of the use of fear as a tool to vilify and persecute groups and individuals from a global perspective, offering an unflinching look at racism, fearful framing, oppression, and marginalization across human history.The book examines fear and Othering from a historical context, providing a better understanding of how power and oppression is used in the present day.Contributors ground their work in the theory of Othering—the red...

A companion volume to Environmental Conflict in Alaska, Pioneering Conservation in Alaska chronicles the central land and wildlife issues and the growth of environmental conservation in Alaska during its Russian and territorial eras.The Alaskan frontier tempted fur traders, whalers, salmon fishers, gold miners, hunters, and oilmen to take what they could without regard for long-term consequences. Wildlife species, ecosystems, and Native cultures suffered, sometime...

Years before Hitler unleashed the “Final Solution” to annihilate European Jews, he began a lesser-known campaign to eradicate the mentally ill, which facilitated the gassing and lethal injection of as many as 270,000 people and set a precedent for the mass murder of civilians. In Confronting the “Good Death” Michael Bryant analyzes the U.S. government and West German judiciary’s attempt to punish the euthanasia killers after the war.The first author to address the impact o...

This volume celebrates and examines the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center’s past, present, and future by providing a backdrop for the not-for-profit’s beginnings and highlighting key accomplishments in research, education, and American Indian initiatives over the past four decades. Specific themes include Crow Canyon’s contributions to projects focused on community and regional settlement patterns, human-environment relationships, public education pedagogy, and collaborative partnerships w...

Political authority contains an inherent contradiction. Rulers must reinforce social inequality and bolster their own unique position at the top of the sociopolitical hierarchy, yet simultaneously emphasize social similarities and the commonalities shared by all. Political Strategies in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica explores the different and complex ways that those who exercised authority in the region confronted this contradiction.New data from a variety of well-known schola...