Search results for ""university of texas press""

Hurricane Katrina forced the largest and most abrupt displacement in U.S. history. About 1.5 million people evacuated from the Gulf Coast preceding Katrina’s landfall. New Orleans, a city of 500,000, was nearly emptied of life after the hurricane and flooding. Katrina survivors eventually scattered across all fifty states, and tens of thousands still remain displaced. Some are desperate to return to the Gulf Coast but cannot find the means. Others have chosen to make their homes elsewhere. Still others found a way to return home but were unable to stay due to the limited availability of social services, educational opportunities, health care options, and affordable housing.The contributors to Displaced have been following the lives of Katrina evacuees since 2005. In this illuminating book, they offer the first comprehensive analysis of the experiences of the displaced. Drawing on research in thirteen communities in seven states across the country, the contributors describe the struggles that evacuees have faced in securing life-sustaining resources and rebuilding their lives. They also recount the impact that the displaced have had on communities that initially welcomed them and then later experienced “Katrina fatigue” as the ongoing needs of evacuees strained local resources. Displaced reveals that Katrina took a particularly heavy toll on households headed by low-income African American women who lost the support provided by local networks of family and friends. It also shows the resilience and resourcefulness of Katrina evacuees who have built new networks and partnered with community organizations and religious institutions to create new lives in the diaspora.

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The prehistoric native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States shared a complex set of symbols and motifs that constituted one of the greatest artistic traditions of the pre-Columbian Americas. Traditionally known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, these artifacts of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood were the subject of the groundbreaking 2007 book Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, which presented a major reconstruction of the rituals, cosmology, ideology, and political structures of the Mississippian peoples.Visualizing the Sacred advances the study of Mississippian iconography by delving into the regional variations within what is now known as the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS). Bringing archaeological, ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and iconographic perspectives to the analysis of Mississippian art, contributors from several disciplines discuss variations in symbols and motifs among major sites and regions across a wide span of time and also consider what visual symbols reveal about elite status in diverse political environments. These findings represent the first formal identification of style regions within the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere and call for a new understanding of the MIIS as a network of localized, yet interrelated religious systems that experienced both continuity and change over time.

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On August 26, 1960, twenty-three-year-old Danish cyclist Knud Jensen, competing in that year's Rome Olympic Games, suddenly fell from his bike and fractured his skull. His death hours later led to rumors that performance-enhancing drugs were in his system. Though certainly not the first instance of doping in the Olympic Games, Jensen's death serves as the starting point for Thomas M. Hunt's thoroughly researched, chronological history of the modern relationship of doping to the Olympics. Utilizing concepts derived from international relations theory, diplomatic history, and administrative law, this work connects the issue to global political relations.During the Cold War, national governments had little reason to support effective anti-doping controls in the Olympics. Both the United States and the Soviet Union conceptualized power in sport as a means of impressing both friends and rivals abroad. The resulting medals race motivated nations on both sides of the Iron Curtain to allow drug regulatory powers to remain with private sport authorities. Given the costs involved in testing and the repercussions of drug scandals, these authorities tried to avoid the issue whenever possible. But toward the end of the Cold War, governments became more involved in the issue of testing. Having historically been a combined scientific, ethical, and political dilemma, obstacles to the elimination of doping in the Olympics are becoming less restrained by political inertia.

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Love was a central theme of Ernest Hemingway’s major works. And although his passages on sexual love and on romantic love may be widely remembered and frequently quoted, says Robert W. Lewis in this scholarly and detailed consideration, Hemingway’s later work revealed his ultimate belief that brotherly love was the supreme love of mankind. Eros, Hemingway concluded, was a neutral value, neither good nor bad in itself, but yet capable of complementing agape in giving man pleasure.By examining the forms and essences of the various kinds of love, Hemingway worked out an explanation and tentative solution to the troubles of the human condition. The tradition of romantic love that had prevailed in Western literature had challenged sexual love and brotherly love and had been confused with them since the Middle Ages. Hemingway’s early work was destructive of romantic love, says Lewis; the work of his middle career was crucial in his exploration for the supreme love and the means to whatever peace and happiness man may achieve. By the time he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, his ethic was formulated and he could write conclusively of the trial and lesson of love in Western civilization in a way that reflected his discovery that true love must be a reciprocal blend of eros and agape between man and woman, man and man, and man and his world.

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Smitten by the modernity of Cervantes and Borges at an early age, Carlos Fuentes has written extensively on the cultures of the Americas and elsewhere. His work includes over a dozen novels, among them The Death of Artemio Cruz, Christopher Unborn, The Old Gringo, and Terra Nostra, several volumes of short stories, numerous essays on literary, cultural, and political topics, and some theater.In this book, Raymond Leslie Williams traces the themes of history, culture, and identity in Fuentes' work, particularly in his complex, major novel Terra Nostra. He opens with a biography of Fuentes that links his works to his intellectual life. The heart of the study is Williams' extensive reading of the novel Terra Nostra, in which Fuentes explores the presence of Spanish culture and history in Latin America. Williams concludes with a look at how Fuentes' other fiction relates to Terra Nostra, including Fuentes' own division of his work into fourteen cycles that he calls "La Edad del Tiempo," and with an interview in which Fuentes discusses his concept of this cyclical division.

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"The natural world is a lot like a game of musical chairs," observes Pete Dunne. "Everywhere you turn, everywhere you go, there are places where living things sit down, niches that support their specific needs. But just as in musical chairs, there aren't enough places to go around. Our species keeps removing them—forcing other creatures to leave the game."In these twenty-nine essays, one of America's top nature writers trains his sights on the beauties and the vulnerabilities of the natural world. Writing to infuse others with a sense of the richness and diversity that nature holds, Pete Dunne ranges over topics from the wonder of the year's first snowfall to the lost art of stargazing to the mysterious forces that impel people to hunt—and not to hunt. Running like a thread through all the essays is Dunne's desire to preserve all that is "natural" in nature, to stop our unthinking destruction of wild places and wild creatures before we humans find ourselves with "the last chair, in an empty room" on an impoverished earth.

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Commercial television deserves praise for its many achievements, but since its earliest days, almost everyone has agreed that it is also open to many criticisms. The Texas-Stanford Seminars, made possible by a grant from TV Guide magazine, were intended "to help bring about the general improvement of television," and to provide "a place and a climate for significant discussion." The vigorous and enthusiastic participation in the seminars by executives from the three major networks, from a number of group stations and independent producers, and from advertising agencies and some of the larger advertisers demonstrated the desire of the industry itself to recognize its own faults and to understand the complaints of its critics. The Meaning of Commercial Television collects the speeches presented at the second of these seminars, in April 1966. Contributors include Harry S. Ashmore, George Schaefer, August Priemer, Leonard S. Matthews, Thomas Moore, David M. Potter, Paul Goodman, Marshall McLuhan, and John R. Silber. Also in the book are summaries of the discussions which followed each of the speeches, and an examination of the overall impact of the meeting and the conclusions which might be drawn from it. Some of the topics discussed are "numbers" rating method of evaluating television programs; the position in the television industry of the independent producer, of the advertiser, and of the television network, and television itself with respect to its history, social perspective, and other aspects of American life to which it is related.

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Decades later, the Vietnam War remains a divisive memory for American society. Partisans on all sides still debate why the war was fought, how it could have been better fought, and whether it could have been won at all.In this major study, a noted expert on the war brings a needed objectivity to these debates by examining dispassionately how and why President Lyndon Johnson and his administration conducted the war as they did. Drawing on a wealth of newly released documents from the LBJ Library, including the Tom Johnson notes from the influential Tuesday Lunch Group, George Herring discusses the concept of limited war and how it affected President Johnson's decision making, Johnson's relations with his military commanders, the administration's pacification program of 1965-1967, the management of public opinion, and the "fighting while negotiating" strategy pursued after the Tet Offensive in 1968.The author's in-depth analysis exposes numerous flaws in Johnson's management of the war. In Herring's view, the Johnson administration lacked any overall strategy for conducting the war. No change in approach was ever discussed, despite popular and even administration dissatisfaction with the progress of the war, and no oversight committee coordinated the activities of the military services and various governmental agencies, which were left to follow their own, often conflicting, agendas.

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In the late sixteenth century, Spanish explorers described encounters with North American people they called "Jumanos." Although widespread contact with Jumanos is evident in accounts of exploration and colonization in New Mexico, Texas, and adjacent regions, their scattered distribution and scant documentation have led to long-standing disagreements: was "Jumano" simply a generic name loosely applied to a number of tribes, or were they an authentic, vanished people?In the first full-length study of the Jumanos, anthropologist Nancy Hickerson proposes that they were indeed a distinctive tribe, their wide travel pattern linked over well-established itineraries. Drawing on extensive primary sources, Hickerson also explores their crucial role as traders in a network extending from the Rio Grande to the Caddoan tribes' confederacies of East Texas and Oklahoma.Hickerson further concludes that the Jumanos eventually became agents for the Spanish colonies, drafted as mercenary fighters and intelligence-gatherers. Her findings reinterpret the cultural history of the South Plains region, bridging numerous gaps in the area's comprehensive history and in the chronicle of these elusive people.

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Since November 8, 1942, when American troops in Operation Torch first landed on the beaches of North Africa, almost a million Americans—military personnel and their dependents—have lived in Morocco. Their impact on the political and social evolution of Morocco has been significant, but historians and political scientists before this book had made little effort to chart its course or to assess its outcome. The naval base at Port Lyautey in Morocco was the first foreign base captured by American troops in World War II, and United States objectives in Morocco continued to be primarily military. In 1942, as the price for French support against the Axis, the United States pledged its support for the restoration of the prewar French colonial empire. In 1950, faced with the threat of Soviet aggression, the United States negotiated an agreement with France and built four United States Air Force bases in Morocco without consultation with or notification of the Moroccan government. In spite of its sterile diplomatic policy and both Communist and Moroccan nationalist demands for evacuation of United States military bases, the United States retained essential military facilities in Morocco for many years. Leon Blair concludes that American military personnel and their dependents favorably conditioned Moroccan public opinion. By their egalitarianism, humanitarianism, and evident interest, they reinforced the idealistic image of the United States that was held by the majority of Moroccans. These Americans were neither individually nor collectively conscious agents in a campaign to modify Moroccan public opinion; they were simply a Western window in the Arab world, through which two civilizations might view one another. In the long run, they made a greater contribution in peace than in war.

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Prehistoric farmers in Mexico invented irrigation, developed it into a science, and used it widely. Indeed, many of the canal systems still in use in Mexico today were originally begun well before the discovery of the New World. In this comprehensive study, William E. Doolittle synthesizes and extensively analyzes all that is currently known about the development and use of irrigation technology in prehistoric Mexico from about 1200 B.C. until the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century A.D. Unlike authors of previous studies who have focused on the political, economic, and social implications of irrigation, Doolittle considers it in a developmental context. He examines virtually all the known systems, from small canals that diverted runoff from ephemeral mountain streams to elaborate networks that involved numerous large canals to irrigate broad valley floors with water from perennial rivers. Throughout the discussion, he gives special emphasis to the technological elaborations that distinguish each system from its predecessors. He also traces the spread of canal technology into and through different ecological settings. This research substantially clarifies the relationship between irrigation technology in Mexico and the American Southwest and argues persuasively that much of the technology that has been attributed to the Spaniards was actually developed in Mexico by indigenous people. These findings will be important not only for archaeologists working in this area but also for geographers, historians, and engineers interested in agriculture, technology, and arid lands.

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It is 1842—a dramatic year in the history of Texas-Mexican relations. After five years of uneasy peace, of futile negotiations, of border raids and temporary, unofficial truces, a series of military actions upsets the precarious balance between the two countries. Once more the Mexican Army marches on Texas soil; once more the frontier settlers strengthen their strongholds for defense or gather their belongings for flight. Twice San Antonio falls to Mexican generals; twice the Texans assemble armies for the invasion of Mexico. It is 1842—a year of attack and counterattack. This is the story that Joseph Milton Nance relates, with a definitiveness and immediacy which come from many years of meticulous research. The exciting story of 1842 is a story of emotions which had simmered through the long, insecure years and which now boil out in blustery threats and demands for vengeance. The Texans threaten to march beyond the Sierra Madres and raise their flag at Monterrey; the Mexicans promise to subdue this upstart Texas and to teach its treacherous inhabitants their place. With communications poor and imaginations fertile, rumors magnify chance banditry into military raids, military raids into full-scale invasions. Newspapers incite their readers with superdramatic, intoxicating accounts of the events. Texans and Mexicans alike respond with a kind of madness that has little or no method. Texas solicits volunteers, calls out troops, plans invasions, and assembles her armies, completely disregarding the fact that her treasury is practically empty—there is little money to buy guns. Meanwhile, in Mexico, where gold and silver are needed for other purposes, “invasions” of Texas are launched—but they are only brief forays more suitable for impressive publicity than for permanent gains. Still, the conflicts of threat and retaliation, so often futile, are frequently dignified by idealism, friendship, courage, and determination. Both Mexicans and Texans are fighting and dying for liberty, defending their homes against foreign invaders, establishing and maintaining friendships that cross racial and national boundaries, struggling with conflicting loyalties, and—all the while—striving to wrest a living for themselves and their families from the grudging frontier. Attack and Counterattack, continuing the account which was begun in After San Jacinto, tells from original sources the full story of Texas-Mexican relations from the time of the Santa Fe Expedition through the return of the Somervell Expedition from the Rio Grande. These books examine in great detail and with careful accuracy a period of Texas history that had not heretofore been thoroughly studied and that had seldom been given unbiased treatment. The source materials compiled in the notes and bibliography—particularly the military reports, letters, diaries, contemporary newspapers, and broadsides—will be a valuable tool for any scholar who wishes to study this or related periods.

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There are 27 million slaves living in the world today—more than at any time in history. Three hundred thousand of them are impoverished children in Haiti, who "stay with" families as unpaid and uneducated domestic workers, subject to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. This practice, known locally as restavek ("staying with"), is so widespread that one in ten Haitian children is caught up in this form of slavery. Jean-Robert Cadet was a restavek in Haiti from the late 1950s until the early 1970s. He told the harrowing story of his youth in Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American—a landmark book that exposed ongoing child slavery in Haiti. Now in My Stone of Hope, Cadet continues his story from his early attempts to adjust to freedom in American society to his current life mission of eliminating child slavery through advocacy and education. As he recounts his own struggles to surmount the psychological wounds of slavery, Cadet puts a human face on the suffering that hundreds of thousands of Haitians still endure daily. He also builds a convincing case that child slavery is not just one among many problems that Haiti faces as the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation. Rather, he argues that the systematic abuse of so many of its children is Haiti's fundamental problem, because it creates damaged adults who seem incapable of governing the country justly or managing its economy productively. For everyone concerned about the fate of Haiti, the welfare of children, and the freedom of people around the globe, My Stone of Hope sounds an irresistible call to action.

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As the first full-length critical study of Edgar Lee Masters, Beyond Spoon River is important not only for its reevaluation of this American poet and his work but also for its valuable insights into central questions of aesthetics, regionalism, and the nature and meaning of literary influence. The inordinate popularity of Spoon River Anthology has for many years unfairly restricted Masters' reputation as a "one-book phenomenon," although between 1911 and 1942 he wrote over fifty other books—most of which were neglected or misinterpreted precisely because they attempted a large-scale rewriting of what he felt had been obscured or distorted in the Anglo-American tradition. Masters' wide reading in the whole of western literature shaped his own attitudes, themes, and style, and his detailed accounts of that reading and its effect on his work form the basis for this reinterpretation of his place in American poetry in this century. After reviewing Masters' own statements on literary influence and his role as a critic, Primeau devotes the main body of his study to the major influences on Masters' work—the Greeks, Goethe, Emerson, Whitman, Shelley, and Browning. For Masters, the composite of all these influences provided a corrective to the poetry and criticism of his time, which he little admired. Primeau concludes by exploring Masters' midwestern heritage in the light of recent reinterpretations of regionalism.

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Beginning with the 1979 publication of Alejo Carpentier's El arpa y la sombra, the New Historical Novel has become the dominant genre within Latin American fiction. In this at-times tongue-in-cheek postmodern study, Seymour Menton explores why the New Historical Novel has achieved such popularity and offers discerning readings of numerous works.Menton argues persuasively that the proximity of the Columbus Quincentennial triggered the rise of the New Historical Novel. After defining the historical novel in general, he identifies the distinguishing features of the New Historical Novel.Individual chapters delve deeply into such major works as Mario Vargas Llosa's La guerra del fin del mundo, Abel Posse's Los perros del paraíso, Gabriel García Márquez's El general en su laberinto, and Carlos Fuentes' La campaña. A chapter on the Jewish Latin American novel focuses on several works that deserve greater recognition, such as Pedro Orgambide's Aventuras de Edmund Ziller en tierras del Nuevo Mundo, Moacyr Scliar's A estranha nação de Rafael Mendes, and Angelina Muñiz's Tierra adentro.

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Knowledge of folk custom and folk belief can help to explain ways of thought and behavior in modern America. American Folklife, a unique collection of essays dedicated to the presentation of American tradition, broadens our understanding of the regional differences and ethnic folkways that color American life. Folklife research examines the entire context of everyday life in past and present. It includes every aspect of traditional life, from regional architecture through the full range of material culture into spiritual culture, folk religion, witchcraft, and other forms of folk belief. This collection is especially useful in its application to American society, where countless influences from European, American Indian, and African cultural backgrounds merge. American Folklife relates folklife research to history, anthropology, cultural geography, architectural history, ethnographic film, folk technology, folk belief, and ethnic tensions in American society. It documents the folk-cultural background that is the root of our society.

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Anthropology and History in Yucatán is a collection of ten essays that offer new evidence and interpretations of the survival and adaptation of lowland Maya culture from its earliest contact with the Spanish to the 1970s. These case studies reflect a growing interest in the use of historical approaches in the development of models of cultural change that will integrate archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data. The portrait of the Maya emerging from this collection is that of a remarkably vital people who have skillfully resisted total incorporation with their neighbors and who continue even today to emphasize their cultural independence and historical uniqueness. In his introduction, Grant D. Jones synthesizes previous studies of the anthropological history of Yucatán and summarizes the theoretical issues underlying the volume. Section I, which focuses on continuity and change in the boundaries of Maya ethnicity in Yucatán, includes contributions by the late Sir Eric Thompson, France V. Scholes, and O. Nigel Bolland. Section II presents comparative regional perspectives of Maya adaptations to external forces of change and contains essays by D. E. Dumond, Grant D. Jones, James W. Ryder, and Anne C. Collins. In the closing section, three articles, by Victoria Reifler Bricker, Allan F. Burns, and Irwin Press, treat Maya concepts of their own history. Throughout the book, the authors demonstrate that models far more complex than Robert Redfield’s folk-urban continuum must be developed to account for the great regional variations in responses by the Maya to the pressures of economic, cultural, and political control as exerted by Spanish, Mexican, Guatemalan, and British authorities over the past four centuries. The essays demonstrate a variety of methodological approaches that will be of interest to historians, ethnohistorians, ethnologists, archaeologists, and those who have a general interest in the survival of Maya culture.

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Domingo F. Sarmiento's classic 1845 essay Facundo, Civilizacion y Barbarie opened an inquiry into the nature of Argentinian culture that continues to the present day. In this elegantly written study, Diana Sorensen Goodrich explores the varied, and often conflicting, readings that Facundo has received since its publication and shows how these readings have contributed to the making and remaking of the Argentine nation and its culture.Goodrich's analysis sheds new light on the intersection between canon formation and nation-building. While much has been written about Facundo as a primary text in Latin American letters, this is the first study that locates it within the problematics of canon formation and the cultural, social, and political contexts in which conflicting interpretations are constructed.This new approach to Facundo illuminates the interactions among institutions, cultural ideologies, and political life. This book will be important reading for everyone interested in questions of national identity and the institutionalization of a national tradition.

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With the coming of glasnost to the Soviet Union, filmmakers began to explore previously forbidden themes, and distributors released films that were suppressed by pre-glasnost-era censors. Soviet cinema underwent a revolution, one that mirrors and helps interpret the social revolution that took place throughout the USSR. Glasnost—Soviet Cinema Responds is the first overall survey of the effects of this revolution on the work of Soviet filmmakers and their films.The book is structured as a series of three essays and a filmography of the directors of glasnost cinema. The first essay, "The Age of Perestroika," describes the changes that occurred in Soviet cinema as it freed itself from the legacy of Stalinism and socialist realism. It also considers the influence of film educator and director Mikhail Romm. "Youth in Turmoil" takes a sociological look at films about youth, the most dynamic and socially revealing of glasnost-era productions. "Odysseys in Inner Space" charts a new direction in Soviet cinema as it focuses on the inner world of individuals.The filmography includes thirty-three of the most significant glasnost-era directors, including Tengiz Abuladze, Karen Shakhnazarov, and Sergei Soloviev, with a comprehensive list of their films. Discussions of many individual films, such as Repentance, The Messenger Boy, and The Wild Pigeon, and interviews with the directors reveal the effects that glasnost and perestroika have had on the directors' lives and art.

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The looting of the Iraqi National Museum in April of 2003 provoked a world outcry at the loss of artifacts regarded as part of humanity's shared cultural patrimony. But though the losses were unprecedented in scale, the museum looting was hardly the first time that Iraqi heirlooms had been plundered or put to political uses. From the beginning of archaeology as a modern science in the nineteenth century, Europeans excavated and appropriated Iraqi antiquities as relics of the birth of Western civilization. Since Iraq was created in 1921, the modern state has used archaeology to forge a connection to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and/or Islamic empires and so build a sense of nationhood among Iraqis of differing religious traditions and ethnicities. This book delves into the ways that archaeology and politics intertwined in Iraq during the British Mandate and the first years of nationhood before World War II. Magnus Bernhardsson begins with the work of British archaeologists who conducted extensive excavations in Iraq and sent their finds to the museums of Europe. He then traces how Iraqis' growing sense of nationhood led them to confront the British over antiquities law and the division of archaeological finds between Iraq and foreign excavators. He shows how Iraq's control over its archaeological patrimony was directly tied to the balance of political power and how it increased as power shifted to the Iraqi government. Finally he examines how Iraqi leaders, including Saddam Hussein, have used archaeology and history to legitimize the state and its political actions.

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Art and technology have been converging rapidly in the past few years; an important example of this convergence is the alliance of neuroscience with aesthetics, which has produced the new field of neuroaesthetics. Irving Massey examines this alliance, in large part to allay the fears of artists and audiences alike that brain science may "explain away" the arts. The first part of the book shows how neuroscience can enhance our understanding of certain features of art. The second part of the book illustrates a humanistic approach to the arts; it is written entirely without recourse to neuroscience, in order to show the differences in methodology between the two approaches. The humanistic style is marked particularly by immersion in the individual work and by evaluation, rather than by detachment in the search for generalizations. In the final section Massey argues that, despite these differences, once the reality of imagination is accepted neuroscience can be seen as the collaborator, not the inquisitor, of the arts.

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Women Who Live Evil Lives documents the lives and practices of mixed-race, Black, Spanish, and Maya women sorcerers, spell-casters, magical healers, and midwives in the social relations of power in Santiago de Guatemala, the capital of colonial Central America. Men and women from all sectors of society consulted them to intervene in sexual and familial relations and disputes between neighbors and rival shop owners; to counter abusive colonial officials, employers, or husbands; and in cases of inexplicable illness.Applying historical, anthropological, and gender studies analysis, Martha Few argues that women's local practices of magic, curing, and religion revealed opportunities for women's cultural authority and power in colonial Guatemala. Few draws on archival research conducted in Guatemala, Mexico, and Spain to shed new light on women's critical public roles in Santiago, the cultural and social connections between the capital city and the countryside, and the gender dynamics of power in the ethnic and cultural contestation of Spanish colonial rule in daily life.

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Stories of ghostly spirits who return to this world to warn of danger, to prophesy, to take revenge, to request proper burial, or to comfort the living fascinated people in ancient times just as they do today. In this innovative, interdisciplinary study, the author combines a modern folkloric perspective with literary analysis of ghost stories from classical antiquity to shed new light on the stories' folk roots.The author begins by examining ancient Greek and Roman beliefs about death and the departed and the various kinds of ghost stories which arose from these beliefs. She then focuses on the longer stories of Plautus, Pliny, and Lucian, which concern haunted houses. Her analysis illuminates the oral and literary transmission and adaptation of folkloric motifs and the development of the ghost story as a literary form. In her concluding chapter, the author also traces the influence of ancient ghost stories on modern ghost story writers, a topic that will interest all readers and scholars of tales of hauntings.

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"Gender is an absolute ground zero for most human societies," writes David William Foster, "an absolute horizon of social subjectivity." In this book, he examines gender issues in thirteen Brazilian films made (with one exception) after the 1985 return to constitutional democracy and elimination of censorship to show how these issues arise from and comment on the sociohistorical reality of contemporary Brazilian society. Foster organizes his study around three broad themes: construction of masculinity, constructions of feminine and feminist identities, and same-sex positionings and social power. Within his discussions of individual films ranging from Jorge um brasileiro to A hora da estrela to Beijo no asfalto, he offers new ways of understanding national ideals and stereotypes, sexual dissidence (homoeroticism and transgenderism), heroic models, U.S./Brazilian relations, revolutionary struggle, and human rights violations. As the first study of Brazilian cinematic representations of gender ideology in English or Portuguese, this book will be important reading in film and cultural studies.

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The people of Mexquitic, a town in the state of San Luis Potosí in rural northeastern Mexico, have redefined their sense of identity from "Indian" to "Mexican" over the last two centuries. In this ethnographic and historical study of Mexquitic, David Frye explores why and how this transformation occurred, thereby increasing our understanding of the cultural creation of "Indianness" throughout the Americas.Frye focuses on the local embodiments of national and regional processes that have transformed rural "Indians" into modern "Mexicans": parish priests, who always arrive with personal agendas in addition to their common ideological baggage; local haciendas; and local and regional representatives of royal and later of national power and control. He looks especially at the people of Mexquitic themselves, letting their own words describe the struggles they have endured while constructing their particular corner of Mexican national identity.This ethnography, the first for any town in northeastern Mexico, adds substantially to our knowledge of the forces that have rendered "Indians" almost invisible to European-origin peoples from the fifteenth century up to today. It will be important reading for a wide audience not only in anthropology and Latin American studies but also among the growing body of general readers interested in the multicultural heritage of the Americas.

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Contemporary Australian fiction is attracting a world audience, particularly in the United States, where a growing readership eagerly awaits new works. In Australian Voices, Ray Willbanks goes beyond the books to their authors, using sixteen interviews to reveal the state of fiction writing in Australia—what nags from the past, what engages the imagination for the future.Willbanks engages the writers in lively discussions of their own work, as well as topics of collective interest such as the past, including convict times; the nature of the land; the treatment of Aborigines; national identity and national flaws; Australian-British antipathy; sexuality and feminism; drama and film; writing, publishing, and criticism in Australia; and the continuous and pervasive influence of the United States on Australia.The interviews in Australian Voices are gossipy, often funny, and always informative, as Willbanks builds a structured conversation that reveals biography, personality, and significant insight into the works of each writer. They will be important for both scholars and the reading public.

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Lowland South American languages have been among the least studied ln the world. Consequently, their previous contribution to linguistic theory and language universals has been small. However, as this volume demonstrates, tremendous diversity and significance are found in the languages of this region.These nineteen essays, originally presented at a conference on Amazonian languages held at the University of Oregon, offer new information on the Tupian, Cariban, Jivaroan, Nambiquaran, Arawakan, Tucanoan, and Makuan languages and new analyses of previously recalcitrant Tupí-Guaraní verb agreement systems.The studies are descriptive, but typological and theoretical implications are consistently considered. Authors invariably indicate where previous claims must be adjusted based on the new information presented. This is true in the areas of nonlinear phonological theory, verb agreement systems and ergativity, grammatical relations and incorporation, and the uniqueness of Amazonian noun classification systems. The studies also contribute to the now extensive interest in grammatical change.

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The end of the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union reassured people around the world who had lived in fear of a nuclear confrontation between the superpowers. Yet the early euphoria over "peace dividends" and a "new world order" was premature. Conflicts within and between nation-states are springing up around the globe, challenging world leaders and ordinary citizens to find peaceful means for national, group, and individual self-determination.In this book of specially commissioned essays, twenty world leaders assess the possibilities and perils of the new strategic, political, and economic interrelationships that are emerging around the world. They tackle such fundamental questions as: What is the future of the international system as we approach the twenty-first century? What will be the fate of disintegrating nation-states, and how will the international community respond? Has the nation-state outlived its usefulness? Are we beginning to witness the complete breakdown of the international system?The contributors are: Ali Alatas (Indonesia) Tariq Aziz (Iraq) James A. Baker III (United States) Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan) Boutros Boutros-Ghali (United Nations) Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil) Osama El-Baz (Egypt) Eduardo Frei (Chile) Alberto Fujimori (Peru) Rachid Ghannouchi (eminent Islamic thinker) Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (Russian Federation) Kamal Kharrazi (Iran) Andrei Kozyrev (Russian Federation) Leonid Kuchma (Ukraine) Nelson Mandela (South Africa) Nursultan Nazarbayev (Kazakhstan) Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria) Muammar El-Qadhafi (Libya) Fidel Ramos (Philippines) Shri P. V. Narasimha Rao (India)

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Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, College Art Association, 2012The Gernsheim Collection is one of the most important collections of photography in the world. Amassed by the renowned husband-and-wife team of Helmut and Alison Gernsheim between 1945 and 1963, it contains an unparalleled range of images, beginning with the world's earliest-known photograph from nature, made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. The Gernsheim Collection includes some 35,000 major and representative photographs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; a research library of some 3,600 books, journals, and published articles; about 250 autographed letters and manuscripts; and more than 200 pieces of early photographic equipment. Its encyclopedic scope—as well as the expertise and taste with which the Gernsheims built the collection—makes the Gernsheim Collection one of the world's premier resources for the study and appreciation of the development of photography.Published to coincide with a landmark exhibition staged by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which owns the collection, this volume presents masterpieces of the Gernsheim Collection, along with lesser-known images of great historical significance. Arranged in chronological order, this selection effectively constitutes a visual history of photography from its beginnings to the mid-twentieth century. Each full-page image is accompanied by an extensive annotation in which Roy Flukinger describes the photograph's place in the evolution of photography and also within the Gernsheim Collection. Flukinger also provides an enlightening introduction in which he traces the Gernsheims' passionate careers as collectors and pioneering historians of photography, showing how their untiring efforts significantly contributed to the acceptance of photography as a fine art and as a field worthy of intellectual inquiry. Appreciations of the Gernsheim Collection by Alison Nordström and Mark Haworth-Booth confirm its singular importance as a collection of outstanding breadth and depth in the history of photography.

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Living in 2300 BCE, Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna became the first author of historical record by signing her name to a collection of hymns written for forty-two temples throughout the southern half of ancient Mesopotamia, the civilization now known as Sumer.Each of her hymns confirmed to the worshipers in each city the patron deity's unique character and significance. The collected hymns became part of the literary canon of the remarkable Sumerian culture and were copied by scribes in the temples for hundreds of years after Enheduanna's death.Betty De Shong Meador offers here the first collection of original translations of all forty-two hymns along with a lengthy examination of the relevant deity and city, as well as an analysis of the verses themselves. She introduces the volume with discussions of Sumerian history and mythology, as well as with what is known about Enheduanna, thought to be the first high priestess to the moon god Nanna, and daughter of Sargon, founder of one of the first empires in human history.

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From 1974 to the present, the Institute of Classical Archaeology (ICA) at the University of Texas at Austin has carried out archaeological excavations and surveys in ancient territories (chorae) in southern Italy. This wide-ranging investigation, which covers a large number of sites and a time period ranging from prehistory to the Middle Ages, has unearthed a wealth of new information about ancient rural economies and cultures in the region. These discoveries will be published in two multivolume series (Metaponto and Croton). This volume on the Neolithic settlement at Capo Alfiere is the first in the Croton series.The Chora of Croton 1 reports the excavation results of a remarkable Neolithic site at Capo Alfiere on the Ionian coast. Capo Alfiere is one of a very few early inhabitation sites in this area to have been excavated extensively, with a full team of scientific specialists providing interdisciplinary studies on early farming and animal husbandry. It provides comprehensive documentation of the economy, material culture, and way of life in the central Mediterranean in the sixth and fifth millennia BC. Most notable are the remains of a wattle-and-daub hut enclosed within a massive stone wall. Unique for this area, this well-preserved structure may have been used for special purposes such as ritual, as well as for habitation. The presence of Stentinello wares shows that the range of this pottery type extended further east than previously thought and casts new light on the development of ceramics in the area.

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No one has done more to introduce the world to the authentic, flavorful cuisines of Mexico than Diana Kennedy. Acclaimed as the Julia Child of Mexican cooking, Kennedy has been an intrepid, indefatigable student of Mexican foodways for more than fifty years and has published several classic books on the subject, including The Cuisines of Mexico (now available in The Essential Cuisines of Mexico, a compilation of her first three books), The Art of Mexican Cooking, My Mexico, and From My Mexican Kitchen. Her uncompromising insistence on using the proper local ingredients and preparation techniques has taught generations of cooks how to prepare—and savor—the delicious, subtle, and varied tastes of Mexico.In Oaxaca al Gusto, Kennedy takes us on an amazing journey into one of the most outstanding and colorful cuisines in the world. The state of Oaxaca is one of the most diverse in Mexico, with many different cultural and linguistic groups, often living in areas difficult to access. Each group has its own distinctive cuisine, and Diana Kennedy has spent many years traveling the length and breadth of Oaxaca to record in words and photographs "these little-known foods, both wild and cultivated, the way they were prepared, and the part they play in the daily or festive life of the communities I visited." Oaxaca al Gusto is the fruit of these labors—and the culmination of Diana Kennedy's life's work.Organized by regions, Oaxaca al Gusto presents some three hundred recipes—most from home cooks—for traditional Oaxacan dishes. Kennedy accompanies each recipe with fascinating notes about the ingredients, cooking techniques, and the food's place in family and communal life. Lovely color photographs illustrate the food and its preparation. A special feature of the book is a chapter devoted to the three pillars of the Oaxacan regional cuisines—chocolate, corn, and chiles. Notes to the cook, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index complete the volume.An irreplaceable record of the infinite world of Oaxacan gastronomy, Oaxaca al Gusto belongs on the shelf of everyone who treasures the world's traditional regional cuisines.

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Semifinalist, 22nd Annual Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, 2002 Finalist, Spur Award in western nonfiction biography, Western Writers of America, 2002Revered by many Texans and other Americans as "the People's Senator," Ralph Webster Yarborough (1903-1996) fought for "the little people" in a political career that places him in the ranks of the most influential leaders in Texas history. The only U. S. Senator representing a former Confederate state to vote for every significant piece of modern civil rights legislation, Yarborough became a cornerstone of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs in the areas of education, environmental preservation, and health care. In doing so, he played a major role in the social and economic modernization of Texas and the American South. He often defied conventional political wisdom with his stands against powerful political interests and with his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War. Yet to this day, his admirers speak of Yarborough as an inspiration for public service and a model of political independence and integrity.This biography offers the first in-depth look at the life and career of Ralph Yarborough. Patrick L. Cox draws on Yarborough's personal and professional papers, as well as on extensive interviews with the Senator and his associates, to follow Yarborough from his formative years in East Texas through his legal and judicial career in the 1930s, decorated military service in World War II, unsuccessful campaigns for Texas governor in the 1950s, distinguished tenure in the United States Senate from 1957 to 1970, and return to legal practice through the 1980s.Although Yarborough's liberal politics set him at odds with most of the Texas power brokers of his time, including Lyndon Johnson, his accomplishments have become part of the national fabric. Medicare recipients, beneficiaries of the Cold War G. I. Bill, and even beachcombers on Padre Island National Seashore all share in the lasting legacy of Senator Ralph Yarborough.

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Civic virtue and the type of education that produces publicly minded citizens became a topic of debate in American political discourse of the 1980s, as it once was among the intelligentsia of Classical Athens. Conservatives such as former National Endowment for the Humanities chairman William Bennett and his successor Lynn Cheney held up the Greek philosopher Aristotle as the model of a public-spirited, virtue-centered civic educator. But according to the contributors in this volume, a truer model, both in his own time and for ours, is Isocrates, one of the preeminent intellectual figures in Greece during the fourth century B.C. In this volume, ten leading scholars of Classics, rhetoric, and philosophy offer a pathfinding interdisciplinary study of Isocrates as a civic educator. Their essays are grouped into sections that investigate Isocrates' program in civic education in general (J. Ober, T. Poulakos) and in comparison to the Sophists (J. Poulakos, E. Haskins), Plato (D. Konstan, K. Morgan), Aristotle (D. Depew, E. Garver), and contemporary views about civic education (R. Hariman, M. Leff). The contributors show that Isocrates' rhetorical innovations carved out a deliberative process that attached moral choices to political questions and addressed ethical concerns as they could be realized concretely. His notions of civic education thus created perspectives that, unlike the elitism of Aristotle, could be used to strengthen democracy.

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The laments of captive women found in extant Athenian tragedy constitute a fundamentally subversive aspect of Greek drama. In performances supported by and intended for the male citizens of Athens, the songs of the captive women at the Dionysia gave a voice to classes who otherwise would have been marginalized and silenced in Athenian society: women, foreigners, and the enslaved. The Captive Woman's Lament in Greek Tragedy addresses the possible meanings ancient audiences might have attached to these songs. Casey Dué challenges long-held assumptions about the opposition between Greeks and barbarians in Greek thought by suggesting that, in viewing the plight of the captive women, Athenian audiences extended pity to those least like themselves. Dué asserts that tragic playwrights often used the lament to create an empathetic link that blurred the line between Greek and barbarian. After a brief overview of the role of lamentation in both modern and classical traditions, Dué focuses on the dramatic portrayal of women captured in the Trojan War, tracing their portrayal through time from the Homeric epics to Euripides' Athenian stage. The author shows how these laments evolved in their significance with the growth of the Athenian Empire. She concludes that while the Athenian polis may have created a merciless empire outside the theater, inside the theater they found themselves confronted by the essential similarities between themselves and those they sought to conquer.

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James Joyce has long been viewed as a literary modernist who helped define and uphold modernism's fundamental concepts of the artist as martyr to bourgeois sensibilities and of an idealistic faith in artistic freedom. In this revolutionary work, however, Margot Norris proposes that Joyce's art actually critiques these modernist tenets by revealing an awareness of the artist's connections to and constraints within bourgeois society.In sections organized around three mythologized and aestheticized figures in Joyce's works—artist, woman, and child—Norris' readings "unravel the web" of Joyce's early and late stories, novels, and experimental texts. She shows how Joyce's texts employ multiple mechanisms to expose their own distortions, silences, and lies and reveal connections between art and politics, and art and society.This ambitious new reading not only repositions Joyce within contemporary debates about the ideological assumptions behind modernism and postmodernism, but also urges reconsideration of the phenomenon of modernism itself. It will be of interest and importance to all literary scholars.

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In Fireflies, Keith Carter presents a magical gallery of photographs of children and the world they inhabit. The collection includes both new work and iconic images such as "Fireflies," "The Waltz," "Chicken Feathers," "Megan's New Shoes," and "Angel" selected from all of Carter's rare and out-of-print books. When making these images, Carter often asked the children, "do you have something you would like to be photographed with?" This creative collaboration between photographer and subject has produced images that conjure up stories, dreams, and imaginary worlds. Complementing the photographs is an essay in which Carter poetically traces the wellsprings of his interest in photographing children to his own childhood experiences in Beaumont, Texas. As he recalls days spent exploring in the woods and creeks, it becomes clear that his art flows from a deep reservoir of sights and sounds imprinted in early childhood. A lyrical meditation on the joys, wonders, and anxieties of childhood, Fireflies brings us back to the small truths that are often pushed aside or forgotten when we become adults.

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The role of athletics in ancient Greece extended well beyond the realms of kinesiology, competition, and entertainment. In teaching and philosophy, athletic practices overlapped with rhetorical ones and formed a shared mode of knowledge production. Bodily Arts examines this intriguing intersection, offering an important context for understanding the attitudes of ancient Greeks toward themselves and their environment. In classical society, rhetoric was an activity, one that was in essence "performed." Detailing how athletics came to be rhetoric's "twin art" in the bodily aspects of learning and performance, Bodily Arts draws on diverse orators and philosophers such as Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Plato, as well as medical treatises and a wealth of artifacts from the time, including statues and vases. Debra Hawhee's insightful study spotlights the notion of a classical gymnasium as the location for a habitual "mingling" of athletic and rhetorical performances, and the use of ancient athletic instruction to create rhetorical training based on rhythm, repetition, and response. Presenting her data against the backdrop of a broad cultural perspective rather than a narrow disciplinary one, Hawhee presents a pioneering interpretation of Greek civilization from the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE by observing its citizens in action.

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Healing roles and rituals involving alcohol are a major source of power and identity for women and men in Highland Chiapas, Mexico, where abstention from alcohol can bring a loss of meaningful roles and of a sense of community. Yet, as in other parts of the world, alcohol use sometimes leads to abuse, whose effects must then be combated by individuals and the community. In this pioneering ethnography, Christine Eber looks at women and drinking in the community of San Pedro Chenalhó to address the issues of women’s identities, roles, relationships, and sources of power. She explores various personal and social strategies women use to avoid problem drinking, including conversion to Protestant religions, membership in cooperatives or Catholic Action, and modification of ritual forms with substitute beverages. The book’s women-centered perspective reveals important data on women and drinking not reported in earlier ethnographies of Highland Chiapas communities. Eber’s reflexive approach, blending the women’s stories, analyses, songs, and prayers with her own and other ethnographers’ views, shows how Western, individualistic approaches to the problems of alcohol abuse are inadequate for understanding women’s experiences with problem and ritual drinking in a non-Western culture. In a new epilogue, Christine Eber describes how events of the last decade, including the Zapatista uprising, have strengthened women's resolve to gain greater control over their lives by controlling the effects of alcohol in the community.

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With over 25 percent of its land set aside in national parks and other protected areas, Costa Rica is renowned worldwide as "the green republic." In this very readable history of conservation in Costa Rica, Sterling Evans explores the establishment of the country's national park system as a response to the rapid destruction of its tropical ecosystems due to the expansion of export-related agriculture.Drawing on interviews with key players in the conservation movement, as well as archival research, Evans traces the emergence of a conservation ethic among Costa Ricans and the tangible forms it has taken. In Part I, he describes the development of the national park system and "the grand contradiction" that conservation occurred simultaneously with massive deforestation in unprotected areas. In Part II, he examines other aspects of Costa Rica's conservation experience, including the important roles played by environmental education and nongovernmental organizations, campesino and indigenous movements, ecotourism, and the work of the National Biodiversity Institute.

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China and Japan both have traditional art forms that have been highly developed and long studied. In these original essays, noted film and art scholars explore how the spatial consciousness, compositional techniques, and construction of images in these traditional and modern art forms also inform filmmaking in the two countries, so that film and art share the same culturally defined "methods of seeing."This first major study of the relationship between Chinese and Japanese art and film brings together writers from the United States, Europe, Australia, China, and Japan, including Japan's well-known film critic Sato Tadao and Beijing Film Academy's Ni Zhen, screenwriter of the Oscar-nominated film Raise the Red Lantern. The essays discuss the influence of the traditional arts, including scroll painting and printmaking, on Chinese and Japanese cinema and demonstrate that national cinemas cannot be completely understood without considering their indigenous traditions.

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An associate justice on the renowned Warren Court whose landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education overturned racial segregation in schools and other public facilities, Tom C. Clark was a crusader for justice throughout his long legal career. Among many tributes Clark received, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger opined that "no man in the past thirty years has contributed more to the improvement of justice than Tom Clark." Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark is the first biography of this important American jurist. Written by his daughter, Mimi Clark Gronlund, and based on interviews with many of Clark's judicial associates, friends, and family, as well as archival research, it offers a well-rounded portrait of a lawyer and judge who dealt with issues that remain in contention today—civil rights, the rights of the accused, school prayer, and censorship/pornography, among them. Gronlund explores the factors in her father's upbringing and education that helped form his judicial philosophy, then describes how that philosophy shaped his decisions on key issues and cases, including the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the investigation of war fraud, the Truman administration's loyalty program (an anti-communist effort), the Brown decision, Mapp v. Ohio (protections against unreasonable search and seizure), and Abington v. Schempp (which overturned a state law that required reading from the Bible each day in public schools).

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Artist, educator, curator, and critic Luis Camnitzer has been writing about contemporary art ever since he left his native Uruguay in 1964 for a fellowship in New York City. As a transplant from the "periphery" to the "center," Camnitzer has had to confront fundamental questions about making art in the Americas, asking himself and others: What is "Latin American art"? How does it relate (if it does) to art created in the centers of New York and Europe? What is the role of the artist in exile? Writing about issues of such personal, cultural, and indeed political import has long been an integral part of Camnitzer's artistic project, a way of developing an idiosyncratic art history in which to work out his own place in the picture.This volume gathers Camnitzer's most thought-provoking essays—"texts written to make something happen," in the words of volume editor Rachel Weiss. They elaborate themes that appear persistently throughout Camnitzer's work: art world systems versus an art of commitment; artistic genealogies and how they are consecrated; and, most insistently, the possibilities for artistic agency. The theme of "translation" informs the texts in the first part of the book, with Camnitzer asking such questions as "What is Latin America, and who asks the question? Who is the artist, there and here?" The texts in the second section are more historically than geographically oriented, exploring little-known moments, works, and events that compose the legacy that Camnitzer draws on and offers to his readers.

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The Mexican aristocracy today is simultaneously an anachronism and a testimony to the persistence of social institutions. Shut out from political power by the democratization movements of the twentieth century, stripped of the basis of its great wealth by land reforms in the 1930s, the aristocracy nonetheless maintains a strong sense of group identity through the deeply held belief that their ancestors were the architects and rulers of Mexico for nearly four hundred years. This expressive ethnography describes the transformation of the Mexican aristocracy from the onset of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when the aristocracy was unquestionably Mexico's highest-ranking social class, until the end of the twentieth century, when it had almost ceased to function as a superordinate social group. Drawing on extensive interviews with group members, Nutini maps out the expressive aspects of aristocratic culture in such areas as perceptions of class and race, city and country living, education and professional occupations, political participation, religion, kinship, marriage and divorce, and social ranking. His findings explain why social elites persist even when they have lost their status as ruling and political classes and also illuminate the relationship between the aristocracy and Mexico's new political and economic plutocracy.

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Educational policy in a democracy goes beyond teaching literacy and numeracy. It also supports teaching moral reasoning, political tolerance, respect for diversity, and citizenship. Education policy should encourage liberty and equality of opportunity, hold educational institutions accountable, and be efficient. School Choice Tradeoffs examines the tradeoffs among these goals when government affords parents the means to select the schools their children attend. Godwin and Kemerer compare current policy that uses family residence to assign students to schools with alternative policies that range from expanding public choice options to school vouchers. They identify the benefits and costs of each policy approach through a review of past empirical literature, the presentation of new empirical work, and legal and philosophic analysis. The authors offer a balanced perspective that goes beyond rhetoric and ideology to offer policymakers and the public insight into the complex tradeoffs that are inherent in the design and implementation of school choice policies. While all policies create winners and losers, the key questions concern who these individuals are and how much they gain or lose. By placing school choice within a broader context, this book will stimulate reflective thought in all readers.

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Analyzing slavery and other forms of servitude in six non-state indigenous societies of tropical America at the time of European contact, Vital Enemies offers a fascinating new approach to the study of slavery based on the notion of "political economy of life." Fernando Santos-Granero draws on the earliest available historical sources to provide novel information on Amerindian regimes of servitude, sociologies of submission, and ideologies of capture. Estimating that captive slaves represented up to 20 percent of the total population and up to 40 percent when combined with other forms of servitude, Santos-Granero argues that native forms of servitude fulfill the modern understandings of slavery, though Amerindian contexts provide crucial distinctions with slavery as it developed in the American South. The Amerindian understanding of life forces as being finite, scarce, unequally distributed, and in constant circulation yields a concept of all living beings as competing for vital energy. The capture of human beings is an extreme manifestation of this understanding, but it marks an important element in the ways Amerindian "captive slavery" was misconstrued by European conquistadors. Illuminating a cultural facet that has been widely overlooked or miscast for centuries, Vital Enemies makes possible new dialogues regarding hierarchies in the field of native studies, as well as a provocative re-framing of pre- and post-contact America.

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Like their regal counterparts in societies around the globe, ancient Maya rulers departed this world with elaborate burial ceremonies and lavish grave goods, which often included ceramics, red pigments, earflares, stingray spines, jades, pearls, obsidian blades, and mosaics. Archaeological investigation of these burials, as well as the decipherment of inscriptions that record Maya rulers' funerary rites, have opened a fascinating window on how the ancient Maya envisaged the ruler's passage from the world of the living to the realm of the ancestors.Focusing on the Classic Period (AD 250-900), James Fitzsimmons examines and compares textual and archaeological evidence for rites of death and burial in the Maya lowlands, from which he creates models of royal Maya funerary behavior. Exploring ancient Maya attitudes toward death expressed at well-known sites such as Tikal, Guatemala, and Copan, Honduras, as well as less-explored archaeological locations, Fitzsimmons reconstructs royal mortuary rites and expands our understanding of key Maya concepts including the afterlife and ancestor veneration.

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Immigration has become one of the most important and contentious issues of our time. But even as policy makers in the United States and Mexico argue over what to do about the half million or more Mexicans who cross the border illegally each year to work in the United States, one fact has become indisputable. Illegal immigration has enhanced the lives of poor people more than any policy attempted by either the U.S. or the Mexican governments. Immigrants sent home $23 billion dollars in 2006 alone, rivaling what Mexico earned from selling oil. But the human cost of migration is equally high. Border crossers risk injury, attack, rape, and death, while undocumented workers often toil under dangerous and exploitative conditions in the United States. These harsh realities constitute the heart of Exodus/Éxodo, a powerful collaboration between writer Charles Bowden and photographer Julián Cardona that puts a human face on the issue of illegal immigration. Expanding on their award-winning 2006 Mother Jones article titled "Exodus: Border-Crossers Forge a New America," Bowden and Cardona take us to border towns, in which impoverished men and women hire "coyotes" to get them across the line; to Ciudad Juárez, where hundreds of young women maquiladora workers have been murdered and their families still seek justice; to Minutemen camps along the border, where citizen vigilantes keep watch; to New Orleans, North Carolina, and California, where migrants find back-breaking work in construction, agriculture, and other industries; to protest marches, as immigrants assert their right to stay in the United States; and to villages in Mexico, in which remitted dollars are building homes as lavish as the dreams that fuel the migrations.

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