To a large degree, the story of Texas’ secession from Mexico has been undertaken by scholars of the state. Early twentieth century historians of the revolutionary period, most notably Eugene Barker and William Binkley, characterized the conflict as a clash of two opposing cultures, yet their exclusive focus on the region served to reinforce popular notions of a unique Texas past.Disconnected from a broader historiography, scholars have been left to ponder the most arcane details of...

In Anti-Capitalism, activist and scholar Ezequiel Adamovsky tells the story of the long-standing effort to build a better world, one without an abusive system at its heart. Backed up by arresting, lucid images from the radical artist group United Illustrators, Adamovsky details the struggle against rising corporate power, as that struggle unfolds in the halls of academia, in the pages of radical newspapers, and in the jungles and the streets. From Marx through the Battle of Seattle and bey...

A barrel of gunpowder is relatively safe until a match is put to it, and then theres a big bang and an awful mess. Set the barrel in an arsenal with other explosives and flammable materials, and theres no telling how bad that mess will be. In 1914 an Archduke was shot, not a very special murder in and of itself, but it set off World War I, and that spread across a continent ready and waiting for it to be started. Nearly 200 years later, in 2010, in keeping with the lowered tone of society,...

Few names in the lore of western gunmen are as recognizable. Few lives of the most notorious are as little known. Romanticized and made legendary, John Ringo fought and killed for what he believed was right. As a teenager, Ringo was rushed into sudden adulthood when his father was killed tragically in the midst of the family's overland trek to California. As a young man he became embroiled in the blood feud turbulence of post-Reconstruction Texas. The Mason County Hoo Doo War in Texas bega...

*Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2017*In 2011, many Syrians took to the streets of Damascus to demand the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Today, much of Syria has become a war zone where foreign journalists find it almost impossible to report on life in this devastated land.Burning Country explores the horrific and complicated reality of life in present-day Syria with unprecedented detail and sophistication, drawing on new first hand testimonies fr...

***José María de Jesús Carvajal***is both a biography of a Mexican postrevolutionary and a study of the development of a new border between Mexico and the United States during the crucial decades of the early to midnineteenth century. The work examines the challenges faced by Carvajal, a bilingual, bicultural character in confusing times, against the historical backdrop of the history of colonial Texas and northern Mexico.Chance has chosen to focus on a political-military figure w...

An Irish Volunteer is based on the true stories of Joe Plunkett and Grace Gifford. Joe is an eccentric, mystical poet and the Catholic son of a count. He joins a secret rebel organization of writers, professors, philosophers, and activists in a revolution against the British Empire. Theirs is a desperate bid for Ireland's freedom in 1916, as World War I rages in Europe. After hundreds of years of oppression, starvation, and abuse at the hands of the English, this unlikely group of rebels h...

How high energy consumption transformed postwar Phoenix and deepened inequalities in the American SouthwestIn 1940, Phoenix was a small, agricultural city of sixty-five thousand, and the Navajo Reservation was an open landscape of scattered sheepherders. Forty years later, Phoenix had blossomed into a metropolis of 1.5 million people and the territory of the Navajo Nation was home to two of the largest strip mines in the world. Five coal-burning power plants surrou...

Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson took pride in his heritage and in the Texas Hill Country roots of his pioneer ancestors. He delighted in showing guests the ancestral settlement, and his birthplace, boyhood home, and the family treasure: the LBJ Ranch and the home that became known as the Texas White House. LBJ generously gifted these cherished assets to the people of the United States. Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park holds more assets significant to an American president than any other ...

Using gender analysis and focusing on previously unexamined testimonies of women rebels, political scientist Lorraine Bayard de Volo shatters the prevailing masculine narrative of the Cuban Revolution. Contrary to the Cuban War story's mythology of an insurrection single-handedly won by bearded guerrillas, Bayard de Volo shows that revolutions are not won and lost only by bullets and battlefield heroics. Focusing on women's multiple forms of participation in the insurrection, especially th...

Published in 1922 at the peak of the brutal fascist squadristi targeting of the revolutionary agricultural and industrial workers, Luigi Fabbri’s ‘Preventive Counter-revolution’ is one of his most incisive and inspirational essays. The post-war elections had given an exaggerated and disproportionate view of the strength of the Italian left; with trams flying the red flag through the major cities, the striking workforce seemed poised to bring the system grinding to...

The Christian Right of the 1980s forged its political identity largely in response to what it perceived as liberal 'judicial activism'. Robert Daniel Rubin tells this story as it played out in Mobile, Alabama. There, a community conflict pitted a group of conservative evangelicals, a sympathetic federal judge, and a handful of conservative intellectuals against a religious agnostic opposed to prayer in schools, and a school system accused of promoting a religion called 'secular humanism'. ...