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 ...

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...

Mixtec Evangelicals is a comparative ethnography of four Mixtec communities in Oaxaca, detailing the process by which economic migration and religious conversion combine to change the social and cultural makeup of predominantly folk-Catholic communities. The book describes the effects on the home communities of the Mixtecs who travel to northern Mexico and the United States in search of wage labor and return having converted from their rural Catholic roots to Evangelical Protestan...

Ancient Maya Commerce presents nearly two decades of multidisciplinary research at Chunchucmil, Yucatan, Mexico—a thriving Classic period Maya center organized around commercial exchange rather than agriculture. An urban center without a king and unable to sustain agrarian independence, Chunchucmil is a rare example of a Maya city in which economics, not political rituals, served as the engine of growth. Trade was the raison d’être of the city itself.Using a variety of evi...

As Americans try to better manage and protect the natural resources of our watersheds, is politics getting in the way? Why does watershed management end up being so political? In Embracing Watershed Politics, political scientists Edella Schlager and William Blomquist provide timely illustrations and thought-provoking explanations of why political considerations are essential, unavoidable, and in some ways even desirable elements of decision making about water and watersheds. With ...

The Valley of Oaxaca was unified under the rule of Monte Albán until its collapse around AD 800. Using findings from John Paddock’s long-term excavations at Lambityeco from 1961 to 1976, Michael Lind and Javier Urcid examine the political and social organization of the ancient community during the Xoo Phase (Late Classic period).Focusing on change within this single archaeological period rather than between time periods, The Lords of Lambityeco traces the changing political relati...

1497, Renaissance Rome: As the teenage daughter of Pope Alexander VI, Lucrezia Borgia is a young noblewoman immersed in all the glamor of the Vatican Palace.Yet after a brutal killing shocks the city, Lucrezia learns that a dark truth lies beneath the surface of the Papal Court: in their ruthless quest for power, her father and brother are willing to poison their enemies.Her family are murderers.After discovering that her new husband is next to die, Lucrezia struggl...

Drawing on ethnographic field work she conducted among Christians in her home state of North Carolina, Claudia Gould crafts stories that lay open the human heart and social complications of fundamentalist belief. These stories and the compelling characters who inhabit them draw us into the complex essence of religious experience among southern American Christians.

The Malice Domestic anthology series returns with a new take on mysteries in the Agatha Christie tradition—original tales with a theatrical bent! Included are:Preface, by Ellen HartThe Rock Star, by Frances AylorPerfectly Awry, by Anne Louise BannonThe Ghost in Balcony B, by Michele Bazan ReedDrama-Rama Flip Flop, by Cindy BrownIt’s Not O.K. Corral, by M. E. BrowningMary-Alice Imagines Her Life as a Movie, by Karen CantwellThe Ghost ...

The most handsome man of his era… yet also the most feared...Cesare Borgia was the most infamous member of history’s original crime family – the Borgias. Son of the scandalous Pope Alexander VI, and brother to the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, he rose above them all to become an icon of power. At the age of twenty-four, he was an accomplished murderer, at twenty-seven he had conquered most of Italy, and by thirty-one he lay dead on the battlefield. Described by some as ‘a rebel agains...

Before Canyonlands was a national park, before tourists discovered the wildness and wonder of the Maze and the Land of Standing Rocks, before the San Rafael Desert became a hive of the mineral exploration, the lands west of the Colorado and Green Rivers to the San Rafael Swell and from the Book Cliffs and San Rafael River south to the dirty Devil River and the Henry Mountains were pastures for the stock of hardscrabble cowboys and sheep ranchers.Often based in the nearby villages o...