Contemporary Cowboys: Reimagining an American Archetype in Popular Culture expands and develops an understanding of recent cultural shifts in representations of the American cowboy and “the West” as vital components of American identity and values. The chapters in this book examine they ways in which twenty-first century representations have updated the figure of the cowboy, considering not only traditionally analyzed sources, such as television, film, and literature, but also less studied...

The German naturalist and explorer chronicles his 1799 expedition to Central and South America in this classic work of natural history.While the influence of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) looms large over the natural sciences, his legacy reaches far beyond the field notebooks of naturalists. Humboldt's 1799–1804 research expedition to Central and South America with botanist Aimé Bonpland not only set the course for the great scientific surveys of the nineteenth...

Scratch the surface of North Texas and the stereotypes of wide-open Western spaces with lots of football disappear, replaced by an endless series of contrasting images. Gleaming glass towers rise over stockyards redolent with the smell of livestock. Suburbs full of families sit just a few blocks from neon-lit nightlife districts. In any given neighborhood, you might hear conjunto music competing with country and western tunes. There are grimy bars and gleaming churches, funky stores and ne...

John Engler, former Governor of Michigan, once claimed that redistricting is one of the purest actions a legislative body can take. Academicians and political leaders alike, however, have regularly debated the ideal way by to redistrict national and state legislatures. Rather than being the pure process that Governor Engler envisioned, redistricting has led to repeated court battles waged on such traditional democratic values as one person, one vote, and minority rights. Instead of being a...

Blockchain technology is a major technological innovation that promises to continue to work significant changes in the way we do business in several different fields. Those changes, in turn, will bring new legal challenges that our laws, courts, regulatory agencies, and other institutions will need to address. Although we expect blockchain technology to bring great change in many fields, we do not see it as a panacea.Blockchain technology offers concrete benefits over prior approac...

The book explores the claim that English local government exists in one of the most centralised relationships with national government. Such a position fundamentally undermines any notion of local self-government and makes the term ‘government’ in local government a misnomer. The book will examine how the erosion of the autonomy, powers, roles, functions and responsibilities of English local government came about, the arguments of centralisers and localisers to support their view of the co...

Step into the captivating world of "The Wing of Azrael, Volume 3" by Mona Caird, where mystery, magic, and adventure converge in a spellbinding narrative. As the third installment in this gripping series unfolds, readers are transported to a realm where ancient prophecies intertwine with the destinies of its compelling characters. In this audiobook, listeners will accompany the courageous protagonist on a journey fraught with peril and discovery as they navigate through treacherous landsca...

Writer/entertainer Garrison Keillor on “The Innocents Abroad”: “…one of the best selling travel books of all time.” When you dive into Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, you have to be ready to learn more about the unadorned, ungilded reality of 19th century “touring” than you might think you want to learn. This is a tough, literary journey. It was tough for Twain and his fellow “pilgrims”, both religious and otherwise. They set out, on a June day in 1867, to visit major tourist sites in E...