Here is the first attempt by scholars to make a comprehensive analysis of voting patterns in Texas. Examining the results of fourteen elections from 1946 through 1962 and organizing a vast fund of statistics relative to Texas political parties and voters, the authors have laid a solid groundwork for further studies in this field.

The previously ineffectual Texas Republican Party made great strides in the twentieth century and became a competitor in state as well as national races. Specifically, the authors maintain that Texas in the 1960s was a “one and two-thirds party state.” Within the Democratic Party, factions analogous to warring camps immensely complicated the political struggle. Although the conservative elements within the Democratic Party still had a slight edge, growing liberal strength forced them to moderate their policies and tactics.

The authors also contend that there were significant changes in the nature of the issues and the modes of political operation. Though some of the old motivations and tactics lingered on in less significant rural areas, friendship-oriented campaigns appealing to regional and family-like sentiments were being quickly replaced by an organized politics in which political activists made strong ideological appeals to economic and social interests.

The Republicans, the conservative Democrats, and the liberal Democrats are each analyzed in relation to regionalism, demography, ethnic elements, and the economic system in Texas; and the history, present status, and future prospects of these factions are discussed in detail. Of special interest are the last two chapters, which analyze the 1962 elections and their bearings on evolving patterns of competition. The developments within the Republican Party and its challenge to the traditional Democratic Party are seen in the perspectives of the growing importance of minority groups and the impact of urbanization.

All those interested in Texas politics and the history of the rise of the Republican Party in the state will find this study indispensable for an intelligent appraisal of historical developments.

Lies and inaccurate information are as old as humanity, but never before have they been so easy to spread. Each moment of every day, the Internet and broadcast media purvey misinformation, either deliberately or accidentally, to a mass audience on subjects ranging from politics to consumer goods to science and medicine, among many others. Because misinformation now has the potential to affect behavior on a massive scale, it is urgently important to understand how it works and what can be done to mitigate its harmful effects.

Misinformation and Mass Audiences brings together evidence and ideas from communication research, public health, psychology, political science, environmental studies, and information science to investigate what constitutes misinformation, how it spreads, and how best to counter it. The expert contributors cover such topics as whether and to what extent audiences consciously notice misinformation, the possibilities for audience deception, the ethics of satire in journalism and public affairs programming, the diffusion of rumors, the role of Internet search behavior, and the evolving efforts to counteract misinformation, such as fact-checking programs. The first comprehensive social science volume exploring the prevalence and consequences of, and remedies for, misinformation as a mass communication phenomenon, Misinformation and Mass Audiences will be a crucial resource for students and faculty researching misinformation, policymakers grappling with questions of regulation and prevention, and anyone concerned about this troubling, yet perhaps unavoidable, dimension of current media systems.

Originally published in Brazil as O Diabo e a Terra de Santa Cruz, this translation from the Portuguese analyzes the nature of popular religion and the ways it was transferred to the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using richly detailed transcripts from Inquisition trials, Mello e Souza reconstructs how Iberian, indigenous, and African beliefs fused to create a syncretic and magical religious culture in Brazil.

Focusing on sorcery, the author argues that European traditions of witchcraft combined with practices of Indians and African slaves to form a uniquely Brazilian set of beliefs that became central to the lives of the people in the colony. Her work shows how the Inquisition reinforced the view held in Europe (particularly Portugal) that the colony was a purgatory where those who had sinned were exiled, a place where the Devil had a wide range of opportunities. Her focus on the three centuries of the colonial period, the multiple regions in Brazil, and the Indian, African, and Portuguese traditions of magic, witchcraft, and healing, make the book comprehensive in scope.

Stuart Schwartz of Yale University says, "It is arguably the best book of this genre about Latin America...all in all, a wonderful book." Alida Metcalf of Trinity University, San Antonio, says, "This book is a major contribution to the field of Brazilian history...the first serious study of popular religion in colonial Brazil...Mello e Souza is a wonderful writer."

A native Cuban who has lived in London since 1966, Guillermo Cabrera Infante is, in every sense, a multilingual and multicultural author. Equally at ease in both Spanish and English, he has distinguished himself with daring and innovative novels, essays, short stories, and film scripts written in both languages. His work has won major literary awards in France, Italy, and Spain, as well as a Guggenheim fellowship in the United States.

This biography is the first comprehensive exploration of the life and works of Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Drawing on wide-ranging interviews with the author and his family and friends, as well as extensive study of both published and unpublished works, Raymond D. Souza creates an intimate portrait of Cabrera Infante and the cultural and political milieus that shaped his writing, including Three Trapped Tigers (Tres tristes tigres), View of Dawn in the Tropics (Vista del amanecer en el trópico), Infante's Inferno (La Habana para un Infante difunto), Holy Smoke, A Twentieth Century Job (Un oficio del siglo XX), Writes of Passage (Así en la paz como en la guerra), and Mea Cuba.

Interest in goddess worship is growing in contemporary society, as women seek models for feminine spirituality and wholeness. New cults are developing around ancient goddesses from many cultures, although their modern adherents often envision and interpret the goddesses very differently than their original worshippers did.

In this thematic study of the Roman goddess Ceres, Barbette Spaeth explores the rich complexity of meanings and functions that grew up around the goddess from the prehistoric period to the Late Roman Empire. In particular, she examines two major concepts, fertility and liminality, and two social categories, the plebs and women, which were inextricably linked with Ceres in the Roman mind. Spaeth then analyzes an image of the goddess in a relief of the Ara Pacis, an important state monument of the Augustan period, showing how it incorporates all these varied roles and associations of Ceres. This interpretation represents a new contribution to art history.

With its use of literary, epigraphical, numismatic, artistic, and archaeological evidence, The Roman Goddess Ceres presents a more encompassing view of the goddess than was previously available. It will be important reading for all students of Classics, as well as for a general audience interested in New Age, feminist, or pagan spirituality.

In 2004, the United States, five Central American countries, and the Dominican Republic signed the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), signaling the region’s commitment to a neoliberal economic model. For many, however, neoliberalism had lost its luster as the new century dawned, and resistance movements began to gather force. Contesting Trade in Central America is the first book-length study of the debate over CAFTA, tracing the agreement’s drafting, its passage, and its aftermath across Central America.

Rose J. Spalding draws on nearly two hundred interviews with representatives from government, business, civil society, and social movements to analyze the relationship between the advance of free market reform in Central America and the parallel rise of resistance movements. She views this dynamic through the lens of Karl Polanyi’s “double movement” theory, which posits that significant shifts toward market economics will trigger oppositional, self-protective social countermovements. Examining the negotiations, political dynamics, and agents involved in the passage of CAFTA in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, Spalding argues that CAFTA served as a high-profile symbol against which Central American oppositions could rally. Ultimately, she writes, post-neoliberal reform “involves not just the design of appropriate policy mixes and sequences, but also the hard work of building sustainable and inclusive political coalitions, ones that prioritize the quality of social bonds over raw economic freedom.”

All young people need good role models, and black youth especially need positive and real examples beyond the famous and wealthy people they see on SportsCenter highlights and MTV Cribs. While success as a celebrity athlete or entertainer may seem like an achievable dream, the reality is that young African Americans have a much greater chance of succeeding in the professions through education and hard work—and a mentor to show them the path. Real Role Models introduces high school and college-age African Americans to twenty-three black professionals who have achieved a high level of success in their chosen fields and who tell their stories to inspire young people to pursue a professional career and do the work necessary to achieve their dreams.

Some of the individuals profiled by Joah Spearman and Louis Harrison, Jr., include Leonard Pitts, Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the Miami Herald; Melody Barnes, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council; Danyel Smith, editor-in-chief of Vibe; and Dr. Tim George, Chief of Pediatric Neuroscience at Dell Children's Medical Center of Central Texas. They and other interviewees describe their backgrounds, career paths, and desire to give back by helping others reach their goals. Representing a wide range of occupations, these real role models prove to African American youths that a whole world of successful, rewarding careers awaits them.

The Real Role Models

• Rufus Cormier, JD, Partner at the Baker Botts Law Firm, Houston, Texas
• Melody Barnes, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, Washington, D.C.
• Eric Motley, PhD, Managing Director of the Aspen Institute's Henry Crown Fellowship Program, Aspen, Colorado
• James McIntyre, Spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, D.C.
• Tracie Hall, Assistant Dean and Librarian at Dominican University, River Forest, Illinois
• Kimberlydawn Wisdom, MD, Surgeon General of the State of Michigan, Lansing, Michigan
• Timothy George, MD, Chief of Pediatric Neuroscience at Dell Children's Medical Center, Austin, Texas
• Victoria Holloway Barbosa, MD, Ethnic Dermatologist and Former Executive for L'Oreal, Chicago, Illinois
• Bill Douglas, White House Correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, Washington, D.C.
• Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for the Miami Herald, Miami, Florida
• Danyel Smith, Editor of Vibe Magazine, New York, New York
• Ed Stewart, Managing Director of External Communications for Delta Airlines, Atlanta, Georgia
• Lynn Tyson, Vice President of Investor Relations for Dell, Austin, Texas
• Willie Miles, Jr., Founder and CEO of Miles Wealth Management, Houston, Texas
• Horace Allen, Founder and CEO of TeamPact, Atlanta, Georgia
• Deavra Daughtry, President and CEO of Excellent Care Management, Houston, Texas
• Je'Caryous Johnson, Founder and CEO of I'm Ready Productions, Houston, Texas
• Steve Jones, Cofounder of a graphic design company, Oakland, California
• Isiah Warner, PhD, Chemistry Professor at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
• Gloria Ladson-Billings, PhD, Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
• Bernard Muir, Athletic Director at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
• Craig Littlepage, Athletic Director at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
• Beverly Kearney, Women's Track Coach at the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas

"This selection of twenty of Texas' proudest architectural achievements is a tiny sampling of the state's rich, but little-heralded, architectural heritage. The visual presentation of these buildings in Richard Payne's insightful photographs is evidence enough to any student of Texas culture that there are deep and meaningful tracks of our civilization in the state's built environment. . . . In the stones of the Alamo and the steel and glass of our downtown skyscrapers lie the silent embodiment of who we are and where we have been."
—from the Introduction

Texas architecture has never been, nor is it likely to be in the future, an easily digested whole. This collection, drawn from the 1983 Texas Society of Architects' exhibit "Creating Tomorrow's Heritage," provides a look at twenty of the most interesting responses to the challenges posed by Texas history and geography. It reveals that what Texas architecture lacks in cohesiveness, it more than compensates for in vitality. Variations in circumstance and background, coupled with the kind of freedom which heterogeneity breeds, have produced a lively climate for architectural development in Texas—a place where, in the absence of pat answers, intriguing questions have been raised. The same freedom which has produced a dearth of cohesion has encouraged exploration and invention. The same disparities which have made tidy categorization of historical movements or periods difficult have led to some evocative hybrids—new and telling syntheses which are genuinely of their place.

Of interest to anyone who has strolled the Paseo del Rio in San Antonio or admired the dramatically lit State Capitol at night, Landmarks of Texas Architecture is a book to be looked at and enjoyed, a place to start in creating one's own list of architectural favorites. Part of the growing interest in Texas history and culture, Landmarks adds to our understanding of the forces which shaped the Texas of yesterday and will build the Texas of tomorrow.

While western-derived legal codes have superseded Islamic law in many parts of the Muslim world, Islamic, Koran-based law still retains its force in the area of marriage and family relations, the area that is key to the status of women. This work makes available for the first time in English three compilations of responses to questions about family law given by two prominent Muslim jurists of the ninth century (third century of Islam)—Ahmad b. Hanbal, the eponymous founder of the Hanbali rite of Sunni Islam (the one dominant in Saudi Arabia), and Ishaq b. Rahwayh. These compilations are basic sources for the study of the development of legal thinking in Islam.

The introduction to the translation locates the compilations in a historical context and elucidates how the various issues of family law are treated. An appendix contains a collation of the significant variants among the manuscripts and printed versions of the Arabic texts. The volume concludes with a topical index and an index of names.

Yielding pivotal new perspectives on the indigenous women of Mexico, Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas presents a diverse collection of voices exploring the human rights and gender issues that gained international attention after the first public appearance of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in 1994.

Drawing from studies on topics ranging from the daily life of Zapatista women to the effect of transnational indigenous women in tipping geopolitical scales, the contributors explore both the personal and global implications of indigenous women's activism. The Zapatista movement and the Women's Revolutionary Law, a charter that came to have tremendous symbolic importance for thousands of indigenous women, created the potential for renegotiating gender roles in Zapatista communities. Drawing on the original research of scholars with long-term field experience in a range of Mayan communities in Chiapas and featuring several key documents written by indigenous women articulating their vision, Dissident Women brings fresh insight to the revolutionary crossroads at which Chiapas stands—and to the worldwide implications of this economic and political microcosm.

Samuel Bangs, the first printer in the territory that is now Texas, once owed his life to his printing press. One of the few survivors of the Mina Expedition to Mexico in 1817, Bangs wrote to Servando de Mier, “I had the good fortune, through the will of God, to have my life saved, as I was a printer.”

Bangs was not always so fortunate. Losses and disappointments plagued him throughout his career, and he spent many miserable months in Mexican jails. But his ingenuity in the face of adversity, his courage and charm, stamped him not only as a storybook hero but as a man whose virtues were large enough to be their own reward.

Lota Spell’s fine biography of Samuel Bangs is at the same time a fascinating history of northern Mexico (including Texas) in the first half of the nineteenth century. Through the successes and failures of an individual it presents the facts about the operation of a business during a time of important political and economic change.

Even more important is its contribution to our knowledge of printing and of the contemporary periodical press. Although first of all a printer, Samuel Bangs was also involved in the production of newspapers, making this book a detailed history of journalism in the Mexico and Texas of his day. His printing office also functioned as a typographer’s school, through which he instituted the apprentice system in the Southwest; and as a result of his interest in presses as a commodity of trade, the first business for merchandising and servicing printing presses in the area was developed.

This narrative, combining the story of a man’s life, the history of his times, and the development of his profession, fills a gap in our knowledge of Mexico and Texas, and does it with perception and charm.

Many societies assign sharply distinguished roles to men and women. Personality differences, as well as physical differences, between men and women are used to justify these different sex roles, and women are seen as more emotionally and interpersonally sensitive than men, while men are said to be more competent, achievement oriented, and assertive than women. A widely held view is that not only do men and women differ but that possession of "masculine" characteristics precludes possession of "feminine" characteristics. This bipolar conception has led to the definition of masculinity and femininity as opposites. Acceptance of this idea has caused social scientists and laypersons to consider men and women who possess cross-sex personality characteristics as less emotionally healthy and socially adjusted than those with sex-appropriate traits. Previous research by the authors and others, done almost exclusively with college students, has shown, however, that masculinity and femininity do not relate negatively to each other, thus supporting a dualistic rather than a bipolar conception of these two psychological dimensions.

Spence and Helmreich present data showing that the dualistic conception holds for a large number of groups, varying widely in age, geographical location, socioeconomic status, and patterns of interest, whose psychological masculinity and femininity were measured with an objective instrument, the Personality Attributes Questionnaire, devised by the authors. Many individuals are shown to be appropriately sex-typed; that is, men tend to be high in masculinity and low in femininity and women the reverse. However, a substantial number of men and women are androgynous—high in both masculine and feminine characteristics—while some are not high in either. Importantly, the authors find that androgynous individuals display more self-esteem, social competence, and achievement orientation than individuals who are strong in either masculinity or femininity or are not strong in either.

One of the major contributions of the work is the development of a new, multifaceted measure of achievement motivation (the Work and Family Orientation Questionnaire), which can be used successfully to predict behavior in both males and females and is related to masculinity and femininity in both sexes.

In addition to investigating the correlates of masculinity and femininity, the authors attempt to isolate parental factors that contribute to the development of these characteristics and achievement motivation. The book includes analyses of data from students on their perception of their parents, which enable the authors to examine the influence of parental masculinity and femininity and parental behaviors and child-rearing attitudes on the development of masculinity and femininity and achievement motivation characteristics in their children. The important implications of these findings for theories of sex roles, personality development, and achievement motivation are examined.

An engrossing memoir in which a photojournalist records both the precursors to today’s conflicts in the Middle East and her own deeply felt conviction that news coverage of the region actually increases the conflicts there.

"You're going where?" Carol Spencer Mitchell's father demanded as she set off in 1984 to cover the Middle East as a photojournalist for Newsweek and other publications. In this intensely thoughtful memoir, Spencer Mitchell probes the motivations that impelled her—a single Jewish woman—to document the turmoil roiling the Arab world in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as how her experiences as a photojournalist compelled her to set aside her cameras and reexamine the way images are created, scenes are framed, and "real life" is packaged for specific news stories.

In Danger Pay, Spencer Mitchell takes us on a harrowing journey to PLO military training camps for Palestinian children and to refugee camps in the Gaza Strip before, during, and after the first intifada. Through her eyes, we experience the media frenzy surrounding the 1985 hijackings of TWA Flight #847 and the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro. We meet Middle Eastern leaders, in particular Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan, with whom Spencer Mitchell developed close working relationships. And we witness Spencer Mitchell's growing conviction that the Western media's portrayal of conflicts in the Middle East actually helps to fuel those conflicts—a conviction that eventually, as she says, "shattered [her] career."

Although the events that Spencer Mitchell records took place decades ago, their repercussions reverberate in the MIddle Eastern conflicts of today. Likewise, her concern about "the triumph of image over reality" takes on greater urgency as our knowledge of the world becomes ever more filtered by virtual media.

The family history of the Russells of Georgia is a saga of the Westward Movement during the middle fifty years of the nineteenth century. The "Russell boys," as prospectors and miners, moved with the frontier as it followed fresh discoveries of gold, from Georgia to California to Colorado. Then, after the interlude of the Civil War, they settled in the new territories, turning their abilities and ruggedness of character to the development of careers on other frontiers—ranching, farming, land development, medicine—in Montana, Colorado, and Texas.

Elma Dill Russell Spencer, a descendant of one of these unusual brothers, relates their story as she learned it from family tradition transmitted by Grandma Russell, from family letters, from public documents, and from historical accounts of the exciting era.

The reader of her narrative sees the evolution of Western society in the vast wasteland of mountain and prairie from the viewpoint of the people who were making history, people too engrossed in their own problems to realize the far-reaching significance of their achievement. The reader sees the struggle to wrest gold from the streams and hills with primitive tools and techniques; the development of tent villages into populous towns affording most of the comforts of the East; the evolution of a code of mining laws, of protection from violence and crime; the building of schools; the emergence of sectional problems and divided loyalties; the Civil War, mostly through noncombatants' eyes; the progressive changes in transportation, until the railroads tied the West to the East. The reader also encounters Indians, who ride in and out of these pages, and other fascinating types of characters associated with "the wild, varied, and always unpredictable" frontier.

The odyssey of the Russell brothers as they struggle home to Georgia from Union-sympathizing Denver is particularly full of action, with tense moments in the account of narrowly escaped death—at the hands of Indians, through the ravages of disease, and from the enmity of Yankee foes.

This book was originally published as Gold Country in 1958; the University of Texas Press edition was completely revised and first published in 1966.

From his film festival debut Hard Eight to ambitious studio epics Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s unique cinematic vision focuses on postmodern excess and media culture. In Blossoms and Blood, Jason Sperb studies the filmmaker’s evolving aesthetic and its historical context to argue that Anderson’s films create new, often ambivalent, narratives of American identity in a media-saturated world.

Blossoms and Blood explores Anderson’s films in relation to the aesthetic and economic shifts within the film industry and to America’s changing social and political sensibilities since the mid-1990s. Sperb provides an auteur study with important implications for film history, media studies, cultural studies, and gender studies. He charts major themes in Anderson’s work, such as stardom, self-reflexivity, and masculinity and shows how they are indicative of trends in late twentieth-century American culture. One of the first books to focus on Anderson’s work, Blossoms and Blood reveals the development of an under-studied filmmaker attuned to the contradictions of a postmodern media culture.

The Walt Disney Company offers a vast universe of movies, television shows, theme parks, and merchandise, all carefully crafted to present an image of wholesome family entertainment. Yet Disney also produced one of the most infamous Hollywood films, Song of the South. Using cartoon characters and live actors to retell the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, SotS portrays a kindly black Uncle Remus who tells tales of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and the “Tar Baby” to adoring white children. Audiences and critics alike found its depiction of African Americans condescending and outdated when the film opened in 1946, but it grew in popularity—and controversy—with subsequent releases. Although Disney has withheld the film from American audiences since the late 1980s, SotS has an enthusiastic fan following, and pieces of the film—such as the Oscar-winning “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”—remain throughout Disney’s media universe.

Disney’s Most Notorious Film examines the racial and convergence histories of Song of the South to offer new insights into how audiences and Disney have negotiated the film’s controversies over the last seven decades. Jason Sperb skillfully traces the film’s reception history, showing how audience perceptions of SotS have reflected debates over race in the larger society. He also explores why and how Disney, while embargoing the film as a whole, has repurposed and repackaged elements of SotS so extensively that they linger throughout American culture, serving as everything from cultural metaphors to consumer products.

Last of the Spanish Renaissance men, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1504–1575) was a master of the humanist disciplines as well as an active diplomat whose correspondence provides insight into the workings of power politics in the first post-Machiavellian decades.

This account of Mendoza's diplomatic career is a living commentary on the mid-sixteenth century, the time of the Spanish Inquisition and the Reformation, with its upheavals in the European balance of power. Mendoza served as ambassador of Charles V to Venice and Rome and as governor of Siena. His political life complements the reign of the Emperor whose ambition was to become a universal monarch.

An interesting contradiction in Mendoza's thought—his humanist theories versus personal ambition—prevented him from successful implemention of tyrannical imperial policies. His role in the government of the Holy Roman Empire shows how the exertion of imperialist power, humanist ethics notwithstanding, inevitably entails corruption, hypocrisy, greed, and imbalance in the one who tries to wield this power.

Gifted to the point of universal genius, Mendoza was perhaps the foremost representative of the splendid but little-known epoch of Spanish humanism, the era between the death of Queen Isabel (1504) and the abdication of her grandson Charles V (1556). Spain's short-lived Renaissance came to an abrupt end with the accession of Philip II and the almost simultaneous onset of the Counter Reformation. To this changed Spain, under monolithic thought control now exacted and enforced by monarch and Inquisition, Mendoza returned to live the last third of his life, mostly in obscurity, and in the last few years in royal disgrace.

Based on primary sources, this first biography of Mendoza in English also examines the relevance of some of Don Diego's disputed literary works to the legend that grew up around him as a spokesman for latent unorthodox opinion.

Widely acclaimed as the greatest Western ever made, Lonesome Dove has become a true American epic. Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel was a New York Times best seller, with more than 2.5 million copies currently in print. The Lonesome Dove miniseries has drawn millions of viewers and won numerous awards, including seven Emmys.

A Book on the Making of Lonesome Dove takes you on a fascinating behind-the-scenes journey into the creation of the book, the miniseries, and the world of Lonesome Dove. Writer John Spong talks to forty of the key people involved, including author Larry McMurtry; actors Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Anjelica Huston, Diane Lane, Danny Glover, Ricky Schroder, D. B. Sweeney, Frederic Forrest, and Chris Cooper; executive producer and screenwriter Bill Wittliff; executive producer Suzanne de Passe; and director Simon Wincer. They and a host of others tell lively stories about McMurtry’s writing of the epic novel and the process of turning it into the miniseries Lonesome Dove. Accompanying their recollections are photographs of iconic props, costumes, set designs, and shooting scripts. Rounding out the book are continuity Polaroids used during filming and photographs taken on the set by Bill Wittliff, which place you behind the scenes in the middle of the action.

Designed as a companion for A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove, Wittliff’s magnificent fine art volume, A Book on the Making of Lonesome Dove is a must-have for every fan of this American epic.

"When Bill Faulkner came to New Orleans he was a skinny little guy, three years older than I, and was not taken very seriously except by a few of us." Thus the late William Spratling, popularly known as the Taxco "Silver King," recalled the mid-1920's, when Faulkner, a young man fresh from Oxford, Mississippi, roomed with Spratling in Pirates Alley.

"By the time I would be up, say at seven, Bill would already be out on the little balcony over the garden tapping away on his portable, an invariable glass of alcohol-and-water at hand."

A result of their friendship was a book depicting "various people who were then engaged … with the arts in New Orleans." It was based on firsthand observation.

"There were casual parties with wonderful conversation and with plenty of grand, or later to be grand, people." Some of the names, in addition to Sherwood Anderson, were Horace Liveright, Carl Van Doren, Carl Sandberg, John Dos Passos, Anita Loos, and Oliver La Farge.

Spratling supplied sharp caricatures of the people and Faulkner contributed succinct captions and a Foreword. It was all "sort of a private joke," but the four hundred copies were sold within a week and the original edition is now a collector's item. This book is a charming reminder of exciting days and talented people.

This book is an economic history of Texas at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1875, Texas was an agrarian state with limited industry. A generation later, agriculture was heavily commercialized, thousands of miles of railroads carried people and goods around the state, and urban populations increased rapidly. Even before the Spindletop gusher that irrevocably changed the state’s future, Texas had already moved far from its days as a Mexican and American frontier.

The love affair between humans and the machines that have made us faster and more powerful has expanded into cyberspace, where computer technology seems to offer both the promise of heightened erotic fulfillment and the threat of human obsolescence. In this pathfinding study, Claudia Springer explores the techno-erotic imagery in recent films, cyberpunk fiction, comic books, television, software, and writing on virtual reality and artificial intelligence to reveal how these futuristic images actually encode current debates concerning gender roles and sexuality.

Drawing on psychoanalytical and film theory, as well as the history of technology, Springer offers the first sustained analysis of eroticism and gender in such films as RoboCop, The Terminator, Eve of Destruction, and Lawnmower Man; cyberpunk books such as Neuromancer, Count Zero, Virtual Light, A Fire in the Sun, and Lady El; the comic books Cyberpunk and Interface, among others; and the television series Mann and Machine. Her analysis demonstrates that while new electronic technologies have inspired changes in some pop culture texts, others stubbornly recycle conventions from the past, refusing to come to terms with the new postmodern social order.

Written to be accessible and entertaining for students and general readers as well as scholars, Electronic Eros will be of interest to a wide interdisciplinary audience.

After the death of James Dean in 1955, the figure of the teen rebel permeated the globe, and its presence is still felt in the twenty-first century. Rebel iconography—which does not have to resemble James Dean himself, but merely incorporates his disaffected attitude—has become an advertising mainstay used to sell an array of merchandise and messages. Despite being overused in advertisements, it still has the power to surprise when used by authors and filmmakers in innovative and provocative ways.

The rebel figure has mass appeal precisely because of its ambiguities; it can mean anything to anyone. The global appropriation of rebel iconography has invested it with fresh meanings. Author Claudia Springer succeeds here in analyzing both ends of the spectrum—the rebel icon as a tool in upholding capitalism's cycle of consumption, and as a challenge to that cycle and its accompanying beliefs.

In this groundbreaking study of rebel iconography in international popular culture, Springer studies a variety of texts from the United States and abroad that use this imagery in contrasting and thought-provoking ways. Using a cultural studies approach, she analyzes films, fiction, poems, Web sites, and advertisements to determine the extent to which the icon's adaptations have been effective as a response to the actual social problems affecting contemporary adolescents around the world.

In the decades between the two World Wars, Greek writers and artists adopted surrealism both as an avant-garde means of overturning the stifling traditions of their classical heritage and also as a way of responding to the extremely unstable political situation in their country. Despite producing much first-rate work throughout the rest of the twentieth century, Greek surrealists have not been widely read outside of Greece. This volume seeks to remedy that omission by offering authoritative translations of the major works of the most important Greek surrealist writers.

Nikos Stabakis groups the Greek surrealists into three generations: the founders (such as Andreas Embirikos, Nikos Engonopoulos, and Nicolas Calas), the second generation, and the Pali Group, which formed around the magazine Pali. For each generation, he provides a very helpful introduction to the themes and concerns that animate their work, as well as concise biographies of each writer. Stabakis anthologizes translations of all the key surrealist works of each generation—poetry, prose, letters, and other documents—as well as a selection of rarer texts. His introduction to the volume places Greek surrealism within the context of the international movement, showing how Greek writers and artists used surrealism to express their own cultural and political realities.

Political, social, and aesthetic change marked Latin American society in the years between 1960 and 1985. In this book, Martin Stabb explores how these changes made their way into the essayistic writings of twenty-six Spanish American intellectuals.

Stabb posits that dissent—against ideology, against simplistic notions of technological progress, against urban values, and even against the direct linear expository style of the essay itself—characterizes the work of these contemporary essayists. He draws his examples from major canonical figures, including Paz, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and Cortázar, and from lesser-known writers who merit a wider readership, such as Monterroso, Zaid, Edwards, and Ibargüengoitia. This exploration overturns many conventional assumptions about Latin American intellectuals and also highlights some of the other achievements of authors famous primarily for novels or short stories.

Popular music was in a creative upheaval in the late 1970s. As the singer-songwriter and producer Chris Stamey remembers, “the old guard had become bloated, cartoonish, and widely co-opted by a search for maximum corporate profits, and we wanted none of it.” In A Spy in the House of Loud, he takes us back to the auteur explosion happening in New York clubs such as the Bowery’s CBGB as Television, Talking Heads, R.E.M., and other innovative bands were rewriting the rules. Just twenty-two years old and newly arrived from North Carolina, Stamey immersed himself in the action, playing a year with Alex Chilton before forming the dB’s and recording the albums Stands for deciBels and Repercussion, which still have an enthusiastic following.

A Spy in the House of Loud vividly captures the energy that drove the music scene as arena rock gave way to punk and other new streams of electric music. Stamey tells engrossing backstories about creating in the recording studio, describing both the inspiration and the harmonic decisions behind many of his compositions, as well as providing insights into other people’s music and the process of songwriting. Photos, mixer-channel and track assignment notes, and other inside-the-studio materials illustrate the stories. Revealing another side of the CBGB era, which has been stereotyped as punk rock, safety pins, and provocation, A Spy in the House of Loud portrays a southern artist’s coming-of-age in New York’s frontier abandon as he searches for new ways to break the rules and make some noise.

All societies around the world and through time value beauty highly. Tracing the evolutions of the Colombian standards of beauty since 1845, Michael Edward Stanfield explores their significance to and symbiotic relationship with violence and inequality in the country. Arguing that beauty holds not only social power but also economic and political power, he positions it as a pacific and inclusive influence in a country “ripped apart by violence, private armies, seizures of land, and abuse of governmental authority, one hoping that female beauty could save it from the ravages of the male beast.” One specific means of obscuring those harsh realities is the beauty pageant, of which Colombia has over 300 per year. Stanfield investigates the ways in which these pageants reveal the effects of European modernity and notions of ethnicity on Colombian women, and how beauty for Colombians has become an external representation of order and morality that can counter the pathological effects of violence, inequality, and exclusion in their country.

For more than two millennia prior to the Spanish conquest, the southern region of the central Andes was home to dozens of societies, ranging from modest chiefdoms to imperial states. Attempts to understand the political and economic dynamics of this complex region have included at least two major theories in Andean anthropology. In this pathfinding study, Charles Stanish shows that they are not exclusive and competing models, but rather can be understood as variations within a larger theoretical framework.

Stanish builds his arguments around a case study from the Moquequa region of Peru, augmented with data from Puno. He uses the "archaeological household" as his basic unit of analysis. This approach allows him to reconcile the now-classic model of zonal complementarity proposed by John Murra with the model of craft specialization and exchange offered by Maria Rostworowski de Diez Canseco. These models of political economy are analyzed with the concepts of economic anthropology in the tradition of Karl Polanyi.

For students of archaeology, Andean studies, anthropology, and economic history, Ancient Andean Political Economy will be important reading.

In this book, Dan Stanislawski studies the geography of various small towns in one Mexican state. He discusses the factors—landscape, buildings, culture groups, and so forth—that create a unique personality for each of these towns.

Many map users have wondered why Portugal, sharing with Spain the Iberian Peninsula, ever became a separate nation. That question is answered with remarkable clarity by Dan Stanislawski. This book also presents an analysis of the factors that produce separate nations and offers a study of the evolution of national cultures generally, especially as they apply to Portugal.

In a country of disparate parts and of long, unbroken historical experience, there may be one dominant feature, a clue to the character of its regions. In Portugal the vine serves as this clue.

The vine has been an important aspect of the Iberian landscape since prehistoric times, and farmers still use Roman methods of cultivation that have been adapted to regional physical conditions and to socioeconomic structure. Southern Portugal today is almost vineless, but in the north three areas can be distinguished by their vine forms and their products. Dan Stanislawski examines these areas in detail.

High tree-vines surround plots of grain in the Minho Province. The grains and the slightly acid Green Wines provide subsistence and cash for the densely settled area of owner-operated small farms.

In the hanging garden terrace of the Douro, vines grown on tawny, baked schist slopes yield world-famous Port Wine, a product that must conform to strict quantity and quality controls supervised by the central government.

Mature table wines are produced in the Dão, an isolated cul-de-sac where cordons of vines are planted on small, individually owned plots. Control of wine-making is exercised by a central governing group and by producers’ cooperatives.

Various wines originate in central Portugal. The lesser demarcated zones of Setubal, Colares, Carcavelos, and Bucelas yield fine wines. In other parts of the central region several wine types are produced in bulk. Some are used for blending and some for aging into quality table wines, but none is distinguished as a wine whose character is derived from its geographical location.

Dan Stanislawski demonstrates that vine form differences—and differences in the resulting product, wine—mirror the Portuguese historical experience and indicate regional distinctions in Portuguese life styles.

A land of long ago on the brink of tomorrow. That is the Algarve, the southernmost province of Portugal, a land that knew the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Moslems—and yet retained its own distinctive personality. In the 1950s it first felt the impact of industrialization, and from that situation the author developed this book.

In presenting this descriptive geography of the Algarve, Dan Stanislawski offers no thesis, except that geographers, economists, politicians, humanists—all those interested in the way the world is developing—should watch the small, culturally disparate areas of the world, to learn what they have of value to teach, to enjoy the qualities of their independent ways of living, and to observe and evaluate their reaction to modern change. This book, the result of detailed observation of one such region, is a valuable contribution to the knowledge necessary to form sound value judgments on the future development of these areas.

From this account the charm of the Algarve emerges in all of its picturesqueness. With the aid of Stanislawski's vivid descriptions, his eighteen helpful maps and graphs, and his more than ninety photographs, the reader moves leisurely through this appealing, but unpublicized, region: along roadways bordered by rock walls and blooming almonds, traveled by sturdy burros bearing their loads of produce; through colorful landscapes of the Lower Algarve, with their pastel-calcimined dwellings and their intensively cultivated plots of olives, figs, carobs, grain, and vegetables; along the rugged cliff coast near Portimão, and the boat-filled port of Faro; past the canyon gardens of the Caldeirão; along the Arade River with its cork barges; northward past Cape S. Vicente to the area of wind-sheared trees.

Guided by Stanislawski, the reader comes to understand Algarvian problems inherent in soils, topography, climate, location, and history. He sees the Algarvians following the occupational practices that have produced for them, in the midst of difficult conditions, a stable culture: fishing, netmaking, shipbuilding, farming, herding, and so on. He realizes that these people, with their unique cultural background and environment, desire to live, and to change, in their own way. Finally, he learns how it is possible to communicate effectively with the Algarvians and with millions of other people whose peculiar problems tend to isolate them from the rest of the world.

Modeled after the BBC, the Palestine Broadcasting Service was launched in 1936 to serve as the national radio station of Mandate Palestine, playing a pivotal role in shaping the culture of the emerging middle class in the region. Despite its significance, the PBS has become nearly forgotten by scholars of twentieth-century Middle Eastern studies. Drawn extensively from British and Israeli archival sources, “This Is Jerusalem Calling” traces the compelling history of the PBS’s twelve years of operation, illuminating crucial aspects of a period when Jewish and Arab national movements simultaneously took form.

Andrea L. Stanton describes the ways in which the mandate government used broadcasting to cater to varied audiences, including rural Arab listeners, in an attempt to promote a “modern” vision of Arab Palestine as an urbane, politically sophisticated region. In addition to programming designed for the education of the peasantry, religious broadcasting was created to appeal to all three main faith communities in Palestine, which ultimately may have had a disintegrating, separatist effect. Stanton’s research brings to light the manifestation of Britain’s attempts to prepare its mandate state for self-governance while supporting the aims of Zionists. While the PBS did not create the conflict between Arab Palestinians and Zionists, the service reflected, articulated, and magnified such tensions during an era when radio broadcasting was becoming a key communication tool for emerging national identities around the globe.

As archaeologists recover the lost treasures of Alexandria, the modern world is marveling at the latter-day glory of ancient Egypt and the Greeks who ruled it from the ascension of Ptolemy I in 306 B.C. to the death of Cleopatra the Great in 30 B.C. The abundance and magnificence of royal sculptures from this period testify to the power of the Ptolemaic dynasty and its influence on Egyptian artistic traditions that even then were more than two thousand years old.

In this book, Paul Edmund Stanwick undertakes the first complete study of Egyptian-style portraits of the Ptolemies. Examining one hundred and fifty sculptures from the vantage points of literary evidence, archaeology, history, religion, and stylistic development, he fully explores how they meld Egyptian and Greek cultural traditions and evoke surrounding social developments and political events. To do this, he develops a "visual vocabulary" for reading royal portraiture and discusses how the portraits helped legitimate the Ptolemies and advance their ideology. Stanwick also sheds new light on the chronology of the sculptures, giving dates to many previously undated ones and showing that others belong outside the Ptolemaic period.

In late 1842, Private William Preston Stapp and about three hundred other citizens of the Republic of Texas took it upon themselves to invade Mexico. They intended to retaliate for a recent Mexican attack on San Antonio and to humiliate President Sam Houston, who had been hesitant to seek revenge.

Stapp provides a closely observed, day-by-day narrative of the disastrous adventure later known as the Mier expedition. While his style might be described as "elegantly restrained" in comparison to the literary excesses of that early Victorian age, Stapp's flair for drama and description makes for colorful reading.

In response to the public outrage prompted by the San Antonio incident, Houston issued a presidential proclamation inviting volunteers for a retaliatory expedition across the Rio Grande. After the bloodless "capture" and pillage of two Mexican border towns, he called the volunteers back home. Most were relieved to comply, but some felt compelled to pursue the honor of the Republic further, and the Mier expedition was launched on December 20, 1842. On the day after Christmas, all save a forty-man camp guard were captured outside of Mier, a few miles across the Mexican border.

The prisoners faced a brutal forced march to Mexico City. Stapp was one of a large group that escaped along the way, became lost in the mountains, and suffered badly from hunger and thirst before recapture. He survived the notorious Black Bean Episode in which 17 of the 176 returned escapees were shot after drawing black beans in a lottery. The Texans were delivered to Perote Prison near Mexico City in September 1843, where a few of them tunneled to freedom and many more died in captivity. Mexico released the last of the prisoners in 1844, and Stapp was among them.

First published in 1845 and later issued in pamphlet form in 1933 by the La Grange Journal, The Prisoners of Perote is a fascinating view of a painful episode in Texas history.

The foreword by Joe B. Frantz provides a perspective on the Texas-Mexico relations during this period "when both countries were shaking down and had not yet found their way." He points out that The Prisoners of Perote provides some clues to the reasons behind the inherent tenseness that exists between Texas and Mexico today.

Towering above printers of his time and their successors for many years afterward was the figure of Robert Estienne, the great French lexicographer of the sixteenth century, whose contribution to knowledge and its dissemination is the subject of this authoritative book. The span of Robert Estienne's life (1503–1559) encompassed the historical epochs and events which shaped his career: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the invention of printing by movable type. His keen interest in the revival of ancient literatures and languages and his training in the art of printing pointed the road he would travel, and the climate of opinion in the Reformation determined his destiny.

Robert Estienne promoted classical learning by printing the works of good authors; to spread knowledge of ancient literature he compiled dictionaries and grammars which were adopted by most of the universities of Europe. His dictionary of proper names of Biblical and classical origin, the Dictionarium historicum ac poeticum, became one of the great source books for later compilers of dictionaries and for authors. His influence on English writers was pervasive. Ben Jonson showed familiarity with his texts; Spenser and Milton sometimes set trarislations of his phraseology directly into their poetry. Perpetuation of the few errors he made is one sure proof that his dictionaries were used and copied.

An exemplar of learning in the classics and scripture, he searched in ancient manuscripts to avoid repeating the numerous errors that had crept into Bible translations over hundreds of years. For his efforts he was called a heretic by docteurs de theologie in the Sorbonne, but was protected by the royal favor of Francis I of France. Between attacks of theologians on the one side and the King's protection on the other, he became a "controversial" figure and after many years of calumny and persecution finally took refuge in Geneva.

Estienne established a family tradition of printing correct and beautiful books, and the printing establishments which made the name of Estienne celebrated throughout the world continued for 162 years.

Between 1993 and 2003, more than 370 girls and women were murdered and their often-mutilated bodies dumped outside Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua, Mexico. The murders have continued at a rate of approximately thirty per year, yet law enforcement officials have made no breakthroughs in finding the perpetrator(s). Drawing on in-depth surveys, workshops, and interviews of Juárez women and border activists, Violence and Activism at the Border provides crucial links between these disturbing crimes and a broader history of violence against women in Mexico. In addition, the ways in which local feminist activists used the Juárez murders to create international publicity and expose police impunity provides a unique case study of social movements in the borderlands, especially as statistics reveal that the rates of femicide in Juárez are actually similar to other regions of Mexico.

Also examining how non-governmental organizations have responded in the face of Mexican law enforcement's "normalization" of domestic violence, Staudt's study is a landmark development in the realm of global human rights.

Ciudad Juárez has recently become infamous for its murder rate, which topped 3,000 in 2010 as competing drug cartels grew increasingly violent and the military responded with violence as well. Despite the atmosphere of intimidation by troops, police, and organized criminals, women have led the way in civil society activism, spurring the Juárez Resistance and forging powerful alliances with anti-militarization activists.

An in-depth examination of la Resistencia Juarense, Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez draws on ethnographic research to analyze the resistance’s focus on violence against women, as well as its clash with the war against drugs championed by Mexican President Felipe Calderón with the support of the United States. Through grounded insights, the authors trace the transformation of hidden discourses into public discourses that openly challenge the militarized border regimes. The authors also explore the advocacy carried on by social media, faith-based organizations, and peace-and-justice activist Javier Sicilia while Calderón faced U.S. political schisms over the role of border trade in this global manufacturing site.

Bringing to light on-the-ground strategies as well as current theories from the fields of sociology, political anthropology, and human rights, this illuminating study is particularly significant because of its emphasis on the role of women in local and transnational attempts to extinguish a hot zone. As they overcome intimidation to become game-changing activists, the figures featured in Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez offer the possibility of peace and justice in the wake of seemingly irreconcilable conflict.

Natives of the Iberian Peninsula and the twenty countries of Latin America, as well as their kinsfolk who've immigrated to the United States and around the world, share a common quality or identity characterized as la hispanidad. Or do they?

In this lively, provocative book, two distinguished intellectuals, a cultural critic and a historian, engage in a series of probing conversations in which they try to discern the nature of la hispanidad and debate whether any such shared identity binds the world's nearly half billion people who are "Hispanic." Their conversations range from La Reconquista and Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, who united the Spanish nation while expelling its remaining Moors and Jews, to the fervor for el fútbol (soccer) that has swept much of Latin America today. Along the way, they discuss a series of intriguing topics, including the complicated relationship between Latin America and the United States, Spanish language and the uses of Spanglish, complexities of race and ethnicity, nineteenth-century struggles for nationhood and twentieth-century identity politics, and popular culture from literary novels to telenovelas. Woven throughout are the authors' own enlightening experiences of crossing borders and cultures in Mexico and Chile and the United States.

Sure to provoke animated conversations among its readers, What is la hispanidad? makes a convincing case that "our hispanidad is rooted in a changing tradition, flexible enough to persist beyond boundaries and circumstances. Let us not fix it with a definition, but allow it instead to travel, always."

The student massacre at Tlatelolco in Mexico City on October 2, 1968, marked the beginning of an era of rapid social change in Mexico. In this illuminating study, Cynthia Steele explores how the writers of the next two decades responded to the massacre and to the social crisis it signaled in terms of political change and gender identity.

State parks across Texas offer a world of opportunities for recreation and education. Yet few park visitors or park managers know the remarkable story of how this magnificent state park system came into being during the depths of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Drawing on archival records and examining especially the political context of the New Deal, James Wright Steely here provides the first comprehensive history of the founding and building of the Texas state park system.

Steely's history begins in the 1880s with the movement to establish parks around historical sites from the Texas Revolution. He follows the fits-and-starts progress of park development through the early 1920s, when Governor Pat Neff envisioned the kind of park system that ultimately came into being between 1933 and 1942.

During the Depression an amazing cast of personalities from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson led, followed, or obstructed the drive to create this state park system. The New Deal federal-state partnerships for depression relief gave Texas the funding and personnel to build 52 recreational parks under the direction of the National Park Service. Steely focuses in detail on the activities of the Civilian Conservation Corps, whose members built parks from Caddo Lake in the east to the first park improvements in the Big Bend out west. An appendix lists and describes all the state parks in Texas through 1945, while Steely's epilogue brings the parks' story up to the present.

Cain has been ranked as one of the two best dramatic poems written in England in the nineteenth century. Because of its religious heterodoxy, which veiled a political iconoclasm, and also because of Byron’s notoriety, Cain stirred up a storm among Tories and clergymen “from Kentish town to Pisa.” From 1821 to 1830 more was printed about its eighteen hundred alarming lines than about the twenty thousand of Don Juan. One solemn Frenchman even translated the work in order to supply his countrymen with a text that he could then rewrite and confute.

After the initial controversy, readers began to regard Cain not merely as revolutionary propaganda but as a fictional portrait of common youthful experience: a sequence of aspiration, discontent, uncertainty, confusion, misunderstood isolation, fear, frustration, anger, and finally a rash, inevitable, but futile revolt that led to a future of hopeless regret.

Truman Guy Steffan here presents a text, arrived at by collation of the first and several later editions with the original manuscript (presently in the Stark Collection of the Miriam Lutcher Stark Library at the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin).

The first eight essays, which comprise Part I, cover a number of literary topics: Byron’s defense of his purposes in Cain and the relevance of his dramatic theory to the poem; the characterization that is an ideological confrontation, a revelation of personal conflict, as well as a rendering of individuals who have an existence independent of the author; the principles that controlled Byron’s absorption and expansion of biblical materials; the integration of the imagery with the dramatic substance; the incongruities of the language; the metrical heterodoxy; and a description of the manuscript and of Byron’s insertions.

Part II contains the text of Cain, accompanied by notes on the variants, the manuscript cancellations and additions, certain linguistic details, and the scansion of some unusual verses. Then follow annotations on allusions, sources, and analogues, and on a few passages of the play that have elicited unusual conflict over interpretation.

Part III provides a history of Cain criticism, from the opinions of Byron’s social and literary circle and of the major periodicals and pamphlets to the more complicated contribution of the twentieth century.

This important work stands not only as a valuable addition to Byron scholarship but also as an illuminating record of the changing critical and cultural attitudes from the early nineteenth century to the 1960s. Steffan has done a remarkable job in bringing together and synthesizing an enormous body of material.

What does it mean to be a westerner? With all the mythology that has grown up about the American West, is it even possible to describe "how it was, how it is, here, in the West—just that," in the words of Lynn Stegner? Starting with that challenge, Stegner and Russell Rowland invited several dozen members of the western literary tribe to write about living in the West and being a western writer in particular. West of 98 gathers sixty-six literary testimonies, in essays and poetry, from a stellar collection of writers who represent every state west of the 98th parallel—a kind of Greek chorus of the most prominent voices in western literature today, who seek to "characterize the West as each of us grew to know it, and, equally important, the West that is still becoming."

In West of 98, western writers speak to the ways in which the West imprints itself on the people who live there, as well as how the people of the West create the personality of the region. The writers explore the western landscape—how it has been revered and abused across centuries—and the inescapable limitations its aridity puts on all dreams of conquest and development. They dismantle the boosterism of manifest destiny and the cowboy and mountain man ethos of every-man-for-himself, and show instead how we must create new narratives of cooperation if we are to survive in this spare and beautiful country. The writers seek to define the essence of both actual and metaphoric wilderness as they journey toward a West that might honestly be called home.

A collective declaration not of our independence but of our interdependence with the land and with each other, West of 98 opens up a whole new panorama of the western experience.

During a distinguished military career, in which he rose to the rank of brigadier general and twice won the Medal of Honor, Frank Baldwin saw service in the Civil War, the Indian wars on the Great Plains, and the Spanish-American War. His wife, Alice Blackwood Baldwin, shared the "long march" with him, from his Plains service onward. In this first biography of the Baldwins, Robert Steinbach combines military and personal history to vividly portray a marriage that survived both the harshness of frontier army life and the restrictive Victorian concept of "separate spheres" for husband and wife.

Drawing on a wealth of diaries, letters, and other family papers, Steinbach re-creates the Baldwins' life on the Plains. Moving from post to post in Kansas, New Mexico, Montana, North Dakota, and Texas, they faced danger, excitement, separations, poverty, and many other hardships. Frequently they clashed over Alice's desire to be something more than "an ornament to society"—a wish eventually granted as Frank's long absences and chronic ill health required Allie to take responsibility for herself and their daughter.

With insights into military campaigns on the Great Plains in the years 1865–1890 and a revealing look at the human side of those campaigns, A Long March will appeal to a wide audience.

In the months leading up to the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, students took to the streets, calling for greater democratization and decrying crackdowns on political resistance by the ruling PRI party. During a mass meeting held at the Plaza of the Three Cultures in the Tlatelolco neighborhood, paramilitary forces opened fire on the gathering. The death toll from the massacre remains a contested number, ranging from an official count in the dozens to estimates in the hundreds by journalists and scholars. Rereading the legacy of this tragedy through diverse artistic-political interventions across the decades, Photopoetics at Tlatelolco explores the state’s dual repression—both the massacre’s crushing effects on the movement and the manipulation of cultural discourse and political thought in the aftermath.

Examining artifacts ranging from documentary photography and testimony to poetry, essays, chronicles, cinema, literary texts, video, and performance, Samuel Steinberg considers the broad photographic and photopoetic nature of modern witnessing as well as the specific elements of light (gunfire, flares, camera flashes) that ultimately defined the massacre. Steinberg also demonstrates the ways in which the labels of “massacre” and “sacrifice” inform contemporary perceptions of the state’s blatant and violent repression of unrest. With implications for similar processes throughout the rest of Latin America from the 1960s to the present day, Photopoetics at Tlatelolco provides a powerful new model for understanding the intersection of political history and cultural memory.

“Community and regional planning involve thinking ahead and formally envisioning the future for ourselves and others,” according to Frederick R. Steiner. “Improved plans can lead to healthier, safer, and more beautiful places to live for us and other species. We can also plan for places that are more just and more profitable. Plans can help us not only to sustain what we value but also to transcend sustainability by creating truly regenerative communities, that is, places with the capacity to restore, renew, and revitalize their own sources of energy and materials.”

In Making Plans, Steiner offers a primer on the planning process through a lively, firsthand account of developing plans for the city of Austin and the University of Texas campus. As dean of the UT School of Architecture, Steiner served on planning committees that addressed the future growth of the city and the university, growth that inevitably overlapped because of UT’s central location in Austin. As he walks readers through the planning processes, Steiner illustrates how large-scale planning requires setting goals and objectives, reading landscapes, determining best uses, designing options, selecting courses for moving forward, taking actions, and adjusting to changes. He also demonstrates that planning is an inherently political, sometimes messy, act, requiring the intelligence and ownership of the affected communities. Both wise and frank, Making Plans is an important philosophical and practical statement on planning by a leader in the field.

The Prague Linguistic Circle came into being on the afternoon of October 6, 1926, when five Czech and Russian linguists gathered to hear a lecture by a German colleague. From this international beginning, the interests of the group grew to first encompass language in all its functional heterogeneity and then finally all of culture, which the Circle conceived of as a structure of sign systems. Semiotics was thus the overarching discipline for the Prague School, serving to organize all phenomena shared and exchanged by a cultural community.

In recent years increasing attention has been paid to the importance of the Prague School, but writing about it has frequently been marred by misconceptions. The central aim of this volume is to correct those misconceptions and to present the diversity of interests within the Prague School—literary criticism, linguistics, theory of theater, folklore, and philosophy. These essays by Bogatyrëv, Jakobson, Karcevskij, Mukařovský, Rieger, Vodička, and Honzl are here translated into English for the first time. Some have a special historical value in illuminating critical stages of structuralist thinking; others reveal the timeliness of the School's contributions for the theoretical conflicts of our day. Each essay is accompanied by an informative introductory note, and the whole is followed by the editor's "Postscript," tracing the roots of structuralist aesthetics.

The notion of semiotics as a universal language that can encompass any object of perception makes it the focus of a revolutionary field of inquiry, the semiotics of art. This volume represents a unique gathering of semiotic approaches to art: from Saussurian linguistics to transformational grammar, from Prague School aesthetics to Peircean pragmatism, from structuralism to poststructuralism.

Though concerned specifically with the semiotics of music and literature, the essays reveal the breadth of semiotics’ interdisciplinary appeal, involving specialists in musicology, ethnomusicology, jazz performance, literary criticism, poetics, aesthetics, rhetoric , linguistics, dance, and film. The diversity of authorial training and approach makes this collection a dramatic demonstration of the on-going debates in the field.

In many ways the semiotics of art is the testing ground of sign theory as a whole, and work in this subject is as vital to the interests of theoretical semioticians as to students of the arts. It is to both these interests that this volume is addressed.

In this compelling study, Rena Steinzor highlights the ways in which the government, over the past twenty years, has failed to protect children from harm caused by toxic chemicals. She believes these failures—under-funding, excessive and misguided use of cost/benefit analysis, distortion of science, and devolution of regulatory authority—have produced a situation in which harm that could be reduced or eliminated instead persists.

Steinzor states that, as a society, we are neglecting our children's health to an extent that we would find unthinkable as individual parents, primarily due to the erosion of the government's role in protecting public health and the environment. At this pace, she asserts, our children will inherit a planet under grave threat. We can arrest these developments if a critical mass of Americans become convinced that these problems are urgent and the solutions are near at hand.

By focusing on three specific case studies—mercury contamination through the human food chain, perchlorate (rocket fuel) in drinking water, and the effects of ozone (smog) on children playing outdoors—Steinzor creates an analysis grounded in law, economics, and science to prove her assertions about the existing dysfunctional system.

Steinzor then recommends a concise and realistic series of reforms that could reverse these detrimental trends and serve as a blueprint for restoring effective governmental intervention. She argues that these recommendations offer enough material to guide government officials and advocacy groups toward prompt implementation, for the sake of America's—and the world's—future generations.

As the coronavirus ravages the globe, its aftermaths have brought gender inequalities to the forefront of many conversations. Countries in the Middle East and North Africa have been slow to prepare for, adapt to, and mitigate the COVID-19 health crisis and its impacts on governance, economics, security, and rights. Women’s physical well-being, social safety nets, and economic participation have been disproportionately affected, and with widespread shutdowns and capricious social welfare programs, women are exiting the workplace and the classroom, carrying the caregiving burden.

With feminist foregrounding, Rita Stephan's collection COVID and Gender in the Middle East gathers an impressive group of local scholars, activists, and policy experts. The book examines a range of national and localized responses to gender-specific issues around COVID’s health impact and the economic fallout and resulting social vulnerabilities, including the magnified marginalization of Syrian refugees; the inequitable treatment of migrant workers in Bahrain; and the inadequate implementation of gender-based violence legislation in Morocco. An essential global resource, this book is the first to provide empirical evidence of COVID’s gendered effects.

Women's grassroots activism in Latin America combines a commitment to basic survival for women and their children with a challenge to women's subordination to men. Women activists insist that issues such as rape, battering, and reproductive control cannot be divorced from women's concerns about housing, food, land, and medical care.

This innovative, comparative study explores six cases of women's grassroots activism in Mexico, El Salvador, Brazil, and Chile. Lynn Stephen communicates the ideas, experiences, and perceptions of women who participate in collective action, while she explains the structural conditions and ideological discourses that set the context within which women act and interpret their experiences. She includes revealing interviews with activists, detailed histories of organizations and movements, and a theoretical discussion of gender, collective identity, and feminist anthropology and methods.

For fifty years the progressive Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company, popularly known as the Taft Ranch, led in the development of South Texas, and in the early twentieth century achieved national and international repute for its contributions to agriculture. The story of the ranch reaches its climax as the firm is absorbed into the community growing up around it—the same community the ranch had nurtured to an unprecedented prosperity.

In 1961 A. Ray Stephens visited Taft, Texas, and received permission to use the dust-covered records, which for thirty years had been closed to historians. These records, plus the valuable supplementary material in the Fulton Collection at the University of Texas, have enabled the author to tell the complete story of the ranch from its inception in 1880 to its dissolution in 1930.

In 1880, with a fifty-year charter, the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company was legally born as a private corporation. For the duration of its history this company aided the advancement of South Texas through effective utilization of the fertile land, through development of agriculture and related industries, and through encouragement of settlers and curious visitors to the Coastal Bend region. Its history is a long, determined fight against severe drought, cattle disease, and financial insolvency. Guided by farsighted men who believed in experimentation in agriculture—and who also promoted the establishment of stores, schools, colleges, churches, and industrial plants—the company not only survived but prospered, and by 1920 its owners could survey their vast properties with well-earned satisfaction. The struggling cattle firm of 1880 had expanded into a multi-interest, profitable corporation that had established and supervised most of the industries in Taft, Texas.

Stephens' well-documented 1964 study had been long needed. During the three decades preceding it, the ranch had been well-nigh forgotten; only the handful of people, then still living, who had worked on the ranch had kept its memory fresh, while the voluminous company records remained inaccessible. The author supplemented his study of company records and newspapers with archival material, government records, and information obtained during hours of interviewing. His book will insure for the Taft Ranch its deservedly prominent position in Texas history.

The lively introduction was written by Joe B. Frantz (1917–1993) who, in his role of Professor of History at the University of Texas, encouraged the study and watched its development.

On April 16, 1947, a small fire broke out among bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the hold of the ship Grandcamp as it lay docked at Texas City, Texas. Despite immediate attempts to extinguish the fire, it rapidly intensified until the Grandcamp exploded in a blast that caused massive loss of life and property. In the ensuing chaos, no one gave much thought to the ship in the next slip, the High Flyer. It exploded sixteen hours later.

The story of the Texas City explosions—America's worst industrial disaster in terms of casualties—has never been fully told until now. In this book, Hugh W. Stephens draws on official reports, newspaper and magazine articles, personal letters, and interviews with several dozen survivors to provide the first full account of the disaster at Texas City.

Stephens describes the two explosions and the heroic efforts of Southeast Texans to rescue survivors and cope with extensive property damage. At the same time, he explores why the disaster occurred, showing how a chain of indifference and negligence made a serious industrial accident almost inevitable, while a lack of emergency planning allowed it to escalate into a major catastrophe. This gripping, cautionary tale holds important lessons for a wide reading public.

In Andean Bolivia, racial and cultural differences are most visibly marked on women, who often still wear native dress and speak an indigenous language rather than Spanish. In this study of modernity in Bolivia, Marcia Stephenson explores how the state's desire for a racially and culturally homogenous society has been deployed through images of womanhood that promote the notion of an idealized, acculturated female body.

Stephenson engages a variety of texts—critical essays, novels, indigenous testimonials, education manuals, self-help pamphlets, and position papers of diverse women's organizations—to analyze how the interlocking tropes of fashion, motherhood, domestication, hygiene, and hunger are used as tools for the production of dominant, racialized ideologies of womanhood. At the same time, she also uncovers long-standing patterns of resistance to the modernizing impulse, especially in the large-scale mobilization of indigenous peoples who have made it clear that they will negotiate the terms of modernity, but always "as Indians."

Camelids are vital to the cultures and economies of the Andes. The animals have also been at the heart of ecological and social catastrophe: Europeans overhunted wild vicuña and guanaco and imposed husbandry and breeding practices that decimated llama and alpaca flocks that had been successfully tended by Indigenous peoples for generations. Yet the colonial encounter with these animals was not limited to the New World. Llamas beyond the Andes tells the five-hundred-year history of animals removed from their native habitats and transported overseas.

Initially Europeans prized camelids for the bezoar stones found in their guts: boluses of ingested matter that were thought to have curative powers. Then the animals themselves were shipped abroad as exotica. As Europeans and US Americans came to recognize the economic value of camelids, new questions emerged: What would these novel sources of protein and fiber mean for the sheep industry? And how best to cultivate herds? Andeans had the expertise, but knowledge sharing was rarely easy. Marcia Stephenson explores the myriad scientific, commercial, and cultural interests that have attended camelids globally, making these animals a critical meeting point for diverse groups from the North and South.

Part travelogue, part cookbook, Mercados takes us on a tour of Mexico’s most colorful destinations—its markets—led by an award-winning, preeminent guide whose passion for Mexican food attracted followers from around the globe. Just as David Sterling’s Yucatán earned him praise for his “meticulously researched knowledge” (Saveur) and for producing “a labor of love that well documents place, people and, yes, food” (Booklist), Mercados now invites readers to learn about local ingredients, meet vendors and cooks, and taste dishes that reflect Mexico’s distinctive regional cuisine.

Serving up more than one hundred recipes, Mercados presents unique versions of Oaxaca’s legendary moles and Michoacan’s carnitas, as well as little-known specialties such as the charcuterie of Chiapas, the wild anise of Pátzcuaro, and the seafood soups of Veracruz. Sumptuous color photographs transport us to the enormous forty-acre, 10,000-merchant Central de Abastos in Oaxaca as well as tiny tianguises in Tabasco. Blending immersive research and passionate appreciation, David Sterling’s final opus is at once a must-have cookbook and a literary feast for the gastronome.

Winner, James Beard Foundation Best Cookbook of the Year Award, 2015
James Beard Foundation Best International Cookbook Award, 2015
The Art of Eating Prize for Best Food Book of the Year, 2015

The Yucatán Peninsula is home to one of the world's great regional cuisines. With a foundation of native Maya dishes made from fresh local ingredients, it shares much of the same pantry of ingredients and many culinary practices with the rest of Mexico. Yet, due to its isolated peninsular location, it was also in a unique position to absorb the foods and flavors of such far-flung regions as Spain and Portugal, France, Holland, Lebanon and the Levant, Cuba and the Caribbean, and Africa. In recent years, gourmet magazines and celebrity chefs have popularized certain Yucatecan dishes and ingredients, such as Sopa de lima and achiote, and global gastronomes have made the pilgrimage to Yucatán to tantalize their taste buds with smoky pit barbecues, citrus-based pickles, and fiery chiles. But until now, the full depth and richness of this cuisine has remained little understood beyond Yucatán's borders.

An internationally recognized authority on Yucatecan cuisine, chef David Sterling takes you on a gastronomic tour of the peninsula in this unique cookbook, Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition. Presenting the food in the places where it’s savored, Sterling begins in jungle towns where Mayas concoct age-old recipes with a few simple ingredients they grow themselves. He travels over a thousand miles along the broad Yucatán coast to sample a bounty of seafood; shares “the people’s food”at bakeries, chicharronerías, street vendors, home restaurants, and cantinas; and highlights the cooking of the peninsula’s three largest cities—Campeche, Mérida, and Valladolid—as well as a variety of pueblos noted for signature dishes. Throughout the journey, Sterling serves up over 275 authentic, thoroughly tested recipes that will appeal to both novice and professional cooks. He also discusses pantry staples and basic cooking techniques and offers substitutions for local ingredients that may be hard to find elsewhere. Profusely illustrated and spiced with lively stories of the region’s people and places, Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition is the long-awaited definitive work on this distinctive cuisine.

Born on a farm near Anahuac, Texas, in 1875 and possessed of only a fourth-grade education, Ross Sterling was one of the most successful Texans of his generation. Driven by a relentless work ethic, he become a wealthy oilman, banker, newspaper publisher, and, from 1931 to 1933, one-term governor of Texas. Sterling was the principal founder of the Humble Oil and Refining Company, which eventually became the largest division of the ExxonMobil Corporation, as well as the owner of the Houston Post.

Eager to "preserve a narrative record of his life and deeds," Ross Sterling hired Ed Kilman, an old friend and editorial page editor of the Houston Post, to write his biography. Though the book was nearly finished before Sterling's death in 1949, it never found a publisher due to Kilman's florid writing style and overly hagiographic portrayal of Sterling.

In this volume, by contrast, editor Don Carleton uses the original oral history dictated by Ross Sterling to Ed Kilman to present the former governor's life story in his own words. Sterling vividly describes his formative years, early business ventures, and active role in developing the Texas oil industry. He also recalls his political career, from his appointment to the Texas Highway Commission to his term as governor, ending with his controversial defeat for reelection by "Ma" Ferguson. Sterling's reminiscences constitute an important primary source not only on the life of a Texan who deserves to be more widely remembered, but also on the history of Houston and the growth of the American oil industry.

An abolitionist and a champion of free love and women’s rights would seem decidedly out of place in nineteenth-century Texas, but such a man was Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812–1886), American reformer, civil rights proponent, pioneer in sociology, advocate of reformed spelling, lawyer, and eccentric philosopher. Since his life mirrored and often anticipated the various reform movements spawned not only in Texas but in the United States in the nineteenth century, this first biography of him sharply reflects and elucidates his times.

The extremely important role Andrews played in the abolition movement in this country has not heretofore been accorded him. After having witnessed slavery in Louisiana during the 1830s, Andrews came to Texas and began his career as an abolitionist with an audacious attempt to free the slaves there.

His singular career, however, comprised many more activities than abolitionism, and most have long been forgotten by historians. He introduced Pitman shorthand into the United States as a means of teaching the uneducated to read; his role in the community of Modern Times, Long Island, was as important as that of Josiah Warren, the “first American anarchist,” although Andrews’s participation in this communal venture, along with the significance of Modern Times itself, has been underestimated.

Other causes which Andrews supported included free love and the rights of women, dramatized by his journalistic debate with Horace Greeley and Henry James, Sr., and by his endorsement of Victoria Woodhull as the first woman candidate for the Presidency of the United States. These interests, together with his consequent involvement in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal, provide insight into some of the more colorful aspects of nineteenth-century American reform movements.

Andrews’s attacks upon whatever infringed on individual freedom brought him into diverse arenas—economic, sociological, and philosophical. The philosophical system he developed included among its tenets the sovereignty of the individual, a science of society, a universal language (his Alwato long preceded Esperanto), the unity of the sciences, and a “Pantarchal United States of the World.” His philosophy has never before been epitomized nor have its applications to later thought been considered.

“I have made it the business of my life to study social laws,” Andrews wrote. “I see now a new age beginning to appear.” This biography of the dynamic reformer examines those social laws and that still-unembodied new age. It reanimates a heretofore neglected American reformer and casts new light upon previously unexplored bypaths of nineteenth-century American social history. The biography is fully documented, based in part upon a corpus of unpublished material in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

2022 PROSE Award Finalist in Classics

Although the era of the Enlightenment witnessed the rise of philosophical debates around benevolent social practice, the origins of European humane discourse date further back, to Classical Athens. The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights analyzes the parallel confluences of cultural factors facing ancient Greeks and eighteenth-century Europeans that facilitated the creation and transmission of humane values across history. Rachel Hall Sternberg argues that precursors to the concept of human rights exist in the ancient articulation of emotion, though the ancient Greeks, much like eighteenth-century European societies, often failed to live up to those values.

Merging the history of ideas with cultural history, Sternberg examines literary themes upholding empathy and human dignity from Thucydides’s and Xenophon’s histories to Voltaire’s Candide, and from Greek tragic drama to the eighteenth-century novel. She describes shared impacts of the trauma of war, the appeal to reason, and the public acceptance of emotion that encouraged the birth and rebirth of humane values.

Humane ideals were central to the image Athenians had of themselves and their city during the classical period. Tragic plays, which formed a part of civic education, often promoted pity and compassion. But it is less clear to what extent Athenians embraced such ideals in daily life. How were they expected to respond, emotionally and pragmatically, to the suffering of other people? Under what circumstances? At what risk to themselves?

In this book, Rachel Hall Sternberg draws on evidence from Greek oratory and historiography of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE to study the moral universe of the ancient Athenians: how citizens may have treated one another in times of adversity, when and how they were expected to help. She develops case studies in five spheres of everyday life: home nursing, the ransom of captives, intervention in street crimes, the long-distance transport of sick and wounded soldiers, and slave torture. Her close reading of selected narratives suggests that Athenians embraced high standards for helping behavior—at least toward relatives, friends, and some fellow citizens. Meanwhile, a subtle discourse of moral obligation strengthened the bonds that held Athenian society together, encouraging individuals to bring their personal behavior into line with the ideals of the city-state.

Some of the loveliest works of Archaic art were the Athenian korai—sculptures of beautiful young women presenting offerings to the goddess Athena that stood on the Acropolis. Sculpted in the sixth and early fifth centuries B.C., they served as votives until Persians sacked the citadel in 480/79 B.C. Subsequently, they were buried as a group and forgotten for nearly twenty-four centuries, until archaeologists excavated them in the 1880s. Today, they are among the treasures of the Acropolis Museum.

Mary Stieber takes a fresh look at the Attic korai in this book. Challenging the longstanding view that the sculptures are generic female images, she persuasively argues that they are instead highly individualized, mimetically realistic representations of Archaic young women, perhaps even portraits of real people. Marshalling a wide array of visual and literary evidence to support her claims, she shows that while the korai lack the naturalism that characterizes later Classical art, they display a wealth and realism of detail that makes it impossible to view them as generic, idealized images. This iconoclastic interpretation of the Attic korai adds a new dimension to our understanding of Archaic art and to the distinction between realism and naturalism in the art of all periods.

There is an old song that goes, "Look down, look down, that lonesome road, before you travel on." Facing that lonesome road, the adult might travel on. Often, the child can't.

During her twenty-year career as a school social worker, Anne Stilwell worked with two thousand "problem" children. She and her husband, professional writer Hart Stilwell, present here twenty-one factual accounts of children who suffered rejection in the public schools.

Some of the children in these accounts are unusually bright and some are mentally retarded. They are belligerent and destructive or withdrawn. They are from broken homes or happy homes, from the slums or Middle America. They are blacks, Chicanos, and Anglos. There is only one common denominator among these children—tragedy.

Every classroom teacher will gain from this sympathetic evaluation of the problems faced by children in the public schools. No one who reads this book can remain unaware of major areas that call for deep concern on the part of educators and parents. The Stilwells have described school children and their problems and at the same time offered telling portraits of the families of which the youngsters are a part. In the struggle to see that the problem child has a chance to develop and advance within the limits of his or her ability, parents, teachers, administrators, and social workers must work together or all fail. When they fail, the child must walk alone.

The authors' objective in presenting these cases is to show what has happened and does happen, and to encourage others to work for change. A prominent educator describes their account as "an exceptionally worthwhile teaching document—stimulating, touching, well written, and honest."

While this book was originally written in 1972, the issue of rejection in the public schools is, sadly, still timely.

The Cold War claimed many lives and inflicted tremendous psychological pain throughout the Americas. The extreme polarization that resulted from pitting capitalism against communism held most of the creative and productive energy of the twentieth century captive. Many artists responded to Cold War struggles by engaging in activist art practice, using creative expression to mobilize social change. The Art of Solidarity examines how these creative practices in the arts and culture contributed to transnational solidarity campaigns that connected people across the Americas from the early twentieth century through the Cold War and its immediate aftermath.

This collection of original essays is divided into four chronological sections: cultural and artistic production in the pre–Cold War era that set the stage for transnational solidarity organizing; early artistic responses to the rise of Cold War polarization and state repression; the centrality of cultural and artistic production in social movements of solidarity; and solidarity activism beyond movements. Essay topics range widely across regions and social groups, from the work of lesbian activists in Mexico City in the late 1970s and 1980s, to the exchanges and transmissions of folk-music practices from Cuba to the United States, to the uses of Chilean arpilleras to oppose and protest the military dictatorship. While previous studies have focused on politically engaged artists or examined how artist communities have created solidarity movements, this book is one of the first to merge both perspectives.

Texas has one of the largest Jewish populations in the South and West, comprising an often-overlooked vestige of the Diaspora. The Chosen Folks brings this rich aspect of the past to light, going beyond single biographies and photographic histories to explore the full evolution of the Jewish experience in Texas.

Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and synthesizing earlier research, Bryan Edward Stone begins with the crypto-Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in the late sixteenth century and then discusses the unique Texas-Jewish communities that flourished far from the acknowledged centers of Jewish history and culture. The effects of this peripheral identity are explored in depth, from the days when geographic distance created physical divides to the redefinitions of "frontier" that marked the twentieth century. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the creation of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust, and the civil rights movement are covered as well, raising provocative questions about the attributes that enabled Texas Jews to forge a distinctive identity on the national and world stage. Brimming with memorable narratives, The Chosen Folks brings to life a cast of vibrant pioneers.

An important new way of viewing the prehistoric art of the Americas, The Jaguar Within demonstrates that understanding a work of art’s connection with shamanic trance can lead to an appreciation of it as an extremely creative solution to the inherent challenge of giving material form to nonmaterial realities and states of being.

Shamanism—the practice of entering a trance state to experience visions of a reality beyond the ordinary and to gain esoteric knowledge—has been an important part of life for indigenous societies throughout the Americas from prehistoric times until the present. Much has been written about shamanism in both scholarly and popular literature, but few authors have linked it to another significant visual realm—art. In this pioneering study, Rebecca R. Stone considers how deep familiarity with, and profound respect for, the extra-ordinary visionary experiences of shamanism profoundly affected the artistic output of indigenous cultures in Central and South America before the European invasions of the sixteenth century.

Using ethnographic accounts of shamanic trance experiences, Stone defines a core set of trance vision characteristics, including enhanced senses, ego dissolution, bodily distortions, flying, spinning and undulating sensations, synaesthesia, and physical transformation from the human self into animal and other states of being. Stone then traces these visionary characteristics in ancient artworks from Costa Rica and Peru. She makes a convincing case that these works, especially those of the Moche, depict shamans in a trance state or else convey the perceptual experience of visions by creating deliberately chaotic and distorted conglomerations of partial, inverted, and incoherent images.

The abundance of seafood available from the northwest Gulf of Mexico includes hundreds of delicious species that are often overlooked by consumers. Celebrating this regional bounty, Texas Seafood showcases the expertise of longtime fishmongers and chefs PJ and "Apple Srimart" Stoops. Readers will find familiar fish like Red Snapper along with dozens of little-known finfish and invertebrates, including tunas, mackerels, rays, and skates, as well as bivalves, shrimps, crabs, and other varieties, many of which are considered “bycatch” (seafood that a fisher didn’t intend to catch), but that are no more difficult to prepare and just as delicious as those commonly found at your local supermarket.

The Stoopses provide a complete primer on sourcing these wild-caught delicacies, with fascinating details about habitats and life cycles as well as practical advice on how to discern quality. Texas Seafood concludes with simple, delectable recipes, many infused with the flavors of Apple’s Thai heritage. Dishes such as Steamed Curried Crab, Crispy White Shrimp, Escolar on a Grill with Green Mango Salad, Cast-Iron-Roasted Shortfin Mako Shark with Rio Grande Grapefruit, and Chicken-Fried Ribbonfish are just a few ways to savor the best of the Gulf.

The industrialization process in Mexico began before that of any other nation in Latin America except Argentina, with the most rapid expansion of new industrial firms occurring in the 1930s and 1940s, and import substitution in capital goods evident as early as the late 1930s. Though Mexico’s trade relations have always been dependent on the United States, successive Mexican presidents in the postwar period attempted to control the penetration of foreign capital into Mexican markets.

In Industry, the State, and Public Policy in Mexico, Dale Story, recognizing the significance of the Mexican industrial sector, analyzes the political and economic role of industrial entrepreneurs in postwar Mexico. He uses two original data sets—industrial production data for 1929–1983 and a survey of the political attitudes of leaders of the two most important industrial organizations in Mexico—to address two major theoretical arguments relating to Latin American development: the meaning of late and dependent development and the nature of the authoritarian state. Story accepts the general relevance of these themes to Mexico but asserts that the country is an important variant of both.

With regard to the authoritarian thesis, the Mexican authoritarian state has demonstrated some crucial distinctions, especially between popular and elite sectors. The incorporation of the popular sector groups has closely fit the characteristics of authoritarianism, but the elite sectors have operated fairly independently of state controls, and the government has employed incentives or inducements to try to win their cooperation.

In short, industrialists have performed important functions, not only in accumulating capital and organizing economic enterprises but also by bringing together the forces of social change. Industrial entrepreneurs have emerged as a major force influencing the politics of growth, and the public policy arena has become a primary focus of attention for industrialists since the end of World War II.

Starting in the 1950s, Americans eagerly built the planet’s largest public work: the 42,795-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Before the concrete was dry on the new roads, however, a specter began haunting them—the highway killer. He went by many names: the “Hitcher,” the “Freeway Killer,” the “Killer on the Road,” the “I-5 Strangler,” and the “Beltway Sniper.” Some of these criminals were imagined, but many were real. The nation’s murder rate shot up as its expressways were built. America became more violent and more mobile at the same time.

Killer on the Road tells the entwined stories of America’s highways and its highway killers. There’s the hot-rodding juvenile delinquent who led the National Guard on a multistate manhunt; the wannabe highway patrolman who murdered hitchhiking coeds; the record promoter who preyed on “ghetto kids” in a city reshaped by freeways; the nondescript married man who stalked the interstates seeking women with car trouble; and the trucker who delivered death with his cargo. Thudding away behind these grisly crime sprees is the story of the interstates—how they were sold, how they were built, how they reshaped the nation, and how we came to equate them with violence.

Through the stories of highway killers, we see how the “killer on the road,” like the train robber, the gangster, and the mobster, entered the cast of American outlaws, and how the freeway—conceived as a road to utopia—came to be feared as a highway to hell.

Reaching the top in any sport requires a long, hard climb. But when you start with the baggage of years of family dysfunction and incarceration in a hellish mental hospital, the climb is especially steep. Yet even with such weights to carry, Anissa Zamarron won not one, but two, world championships in women's boxing. Her story, as dramatically intense as the Clint Eastwood film Million Dollar Baby, is one of tremendous courage and determination to overcome the odds against her as a Latina and as a woman working through mental illness and addiction—a fight in which Zamarron has been as powerful and successful as she has been in the boxing ring.

In this compelling biography, acclaimed author W. K. "Kip" Stratton collaborates with Zamarron to tell the story of her unlikely rise to the pinnacle of women's boxing. With searing honesty, Zamarron describes how the chaotic breakup of her childhood family caused her to develop "demons" that drove her to aggressive behavior in school, an addiction to self-destructive habits, including cutting, and eventually to a corrupt for-profit mental hospital in which she spent eighteen months tied to a bed. She explains how boxing became her salvation as an adult; she learned how to turn her anger and aggression into motivation to train hard and excel at her sport, not only becoming the first woman to fight as a professional in a sanctioned fight in New York, but also fighting more ten-round fights than any other woman in history. A gripping account of Zamarron's 2005 upset win over Maribel Zurita to claim her second world championship caps the book.

Over the past few decades, Austin, Texas, has made a concerted effort to develop into a “technopolis,” becoming home to companies such as Dell and numerous start-ups in the 1990s. It has been a model for other cities across the nation that wish to become high-tech centers while still retaining the livability to attract residents. Nevertheless, this expansion and boom left poorer residents behind, many of them African American or Latino, despite local and federal efforts to increase lower-income and minority access to technology.

This book was born of a ten-year longitudinal study of the digital divide in Austin—a study that gradually evolved into a broader inquiry into Austin’s history as a segregated city, its turn toward becoming a technopolis, what the city and various groups did to address the digital divide, and how the most disadvantaged groups and individuals were affected by those programs.

The editors examine the impact of national and statewide digital inclusion programs created in the 1990s, as well as what happened when those programs were gradually cut back by conservative administrations after 2000. They also examine how the city of Austin persisted in its own efforts for digital inclusion by working with its public libraries and a number of local nonprofits, and the positive impact those programs had.

Houston completely transformed itself during the twentieth century, burgeoning from a regional hub into a world-class international powerhouse. This remarkable metamorphosis is captured in the Bob Bailey Studios Photographic Archive, an unparalleled visual record of Houston life from the 1930s to the early 1990s. Founded by the commercial photographer Bob Bailey in 1929, the Bailey Studios produced more than 500,000 photographs and fifty-two 16 mm films, making its archive the largest and most comprehensive collection of images ever taken in and around Houston. The Bob Bailey Studios Archive is now owned by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Houston on the Move presents over two hundred of the Bailey archive’s most memorable and important photographs with extended captions that detail the photos’ subjects and the reasons for their significance. These images, most never before published, document everything from key events in Houston’s modern history—World War II; the Texas City Disaster; the building of the Astrodome; and the development of the Ship Channel, Medical Center, and Johnson Space Center—to nostalgic scenes of daily life. Bob Bailey’s expertly composed photographs reveal a great city in the making: a downtown striving to be the best, biggest, and tallest; birthday parties, snow days, celebrations, and rodeos; opulent department stores; Hollywood stars and political leaders; rapid industrial and commercial growth; and the inexorable march of the suburbs. An irresistible “remember that?” book for long-time Houstonians, Houston on the Move will also be an essential reference for historians, photographers, designers, and city planners.

From prehistory to the present, the Indigenous peoples of the Andes have used a visual symbol system—that is, art—to express their sense of the sacred and its immanence in the natural world. Many visual motifs that originated prior to the Incas still appear in Andean art today, despite the onslaught of cultural disruption that native Andeans have endured over several centuries. Indeed, art has always been a unifying power through which Andeans maintain their spirituality, pride, and culture while resisting the oppression of the dominant society.

In this book, Mary Strong takes a significantly new approach to Andean art that links prehistoric to contemporary forms through an ethnographic understanding of Indigenous Andean culture. In the first part of the book, she provides a broad historical survey of Andean art that explores how Andean religious concepts have been expressed in art and how artists have responded to cultural encounters and impositions, ranging from invasion and conquest to international labor migration and the internet. In the second part, Strong looks at eight contemporary art types—the scissors dance (danza de tijeras), home altars (retablos), carved gourds (mates), ceramics (ceramica), painted boards (tablas), weavings (textiles), tinware (hojalateria), and Huamanga stone carvings (piedra de Huamanga). She includes prehistoric and historic information about each art form, its religious meaning, the natural environment and sociopolitical processes that help to shape its expression, and how it is constructed or performed by today’s artists, many of whom are quoted in the book.

Early in its history, anthropology was a visual as well as verbal discipline. But as time passed, visually oriented professionals became a minority among their colleagues, and most anthropologists used written words rather than audiovisual modes as their professional means of communication. Today, however, contemporary electronic and interactive media once more place visual anthropologists and anthropologically oriented artists within the mainstream. Digital media, small-sized and easy-to-use equipment, and the Internet, with its interactive and public forum websites, democratize roles once relegated to highly trained professionals alone. However, having access to a good set of tools does not guarantee accurate and reliable work. Visual anthropology involves much more than media alone.

This book presents visual anthropology as a work-in-progress, open to the myriad innovations that the new audiovisual communications technologies bring to the field. It is intended to aid in contextualizing, explaining, and humanizing the storehouse of visual knowledge that university students and general readers now encounter, and to help inform them about how these new media tools can be used for intellectually and socially beneficial purposes.

Concentrating on documentary photography and ethnographic film, as well as lesser-known areas of study and presentation including dance, painting, architecture, archaeology, and primate research, the book's fifteen contributors feature populations living on all of the world's continents as well as within the United States. The final chapter gives readers practical advice about how to use the most current digital and interactive technologies to present research findings.

Summerfield G. Roberts Award for a Work of Creative Writing, Sons of the Texas Republic, 2013

First published in Germany in 1867, this fascinating autobiographical novel of German immigrants on the antebellum Texas frontier provides a trove of revelations about the myriad communities that once called the Hill Country home.

Founded in 1846, Fredericksburg, Texas, was established by German noblemen who enticed thousands of their compatriots to flee their overcrowded homeland with the prospect of free land in a place that was portrayed as a new Garden of Eden. Few of the settlers, however, were prepared for the harsh realities of the Texas frontier or for confrontation with the Comanche. In his 1867 novel Friedrichsburg, Friedrich Armand Strubberg, a.k.a. Dr. Schubbert, interwove his personal story with a fictional romance to capture the flavor of Fredericksburg, Texas, during its founding years when he served as the first colonial director.

Now available in a contemporary translation, Friedrichsburg brings to life the little-known aspects of life among these determined but often ill-equipped settlers who sought to make the transition to a new home and community on the Texas frontier. Opening just as a peace treaty is being negotiated between the German newcomers and the Comanches, the novel describes the unlikely survival of these fledgling homesteads and provides evidence that support from the Delaware Indians, as well as the nearby Mormon community of Zodiac, was key to the Germans’ success. Along the way, Strubberg also depicts the laying of the cornerstone to the Vereinskirche, the blazing of an important new road to Austin, exciting hunting scenes, and an admirable spirit of cultural cohesion and determined resilience. In so doing, he resurrects a fascinating lost world.

During the brief history of the Republic of Texas (1836-1845), over 10,000 Germans emigrated to Texas. Perhaps best remembered today are the farmers who settled the Texas Hill Country, yet many of the German immigrants were merchants and businesspeople who helped make Galveston a thriving international port and Houston an early Texas business center. This book tells their story.

Drawing on extensive research on both sides of the Atlantic, Walter Struve explores the conditions that led nineteenth-century Europeans to establish themselves on the North American frontier. In particular, he traces the similarity in social, economic, and cultural conditions in Germany and the Republic of Texas and shows how these similarities encouraged German emigration and allowed some immigrants to prosper in their new home. Particularly interesting is the translation of a collection of letters from Charles Giesecke to his brother in Germany which provide insight into the business and familial concerns of a German merchant and farmer.

This wealth of information illuminates previously neglected aspects of intercontinental migration in the nineteenth century. The book will be important reading for a wide public and scholarly audience.

Beginning with the dim prehistory of the mythical gods and their descendants, Heimskringla recounts the history of the kings of Norway through the reign of Olaf Haraldsson, who became Norway's patron saint. Once found in most homes and schools and still regarded as a national treasure, Heimskringla influenced the thinking and literary style of Scandinavia over several centuries.

How changing depictions of pregnancy in comedy from the start of the twentieth century to the present show an evolution in attitudes toward women’s reproductive roles and rights.

Pregnancy and the politics surrounding it are serious matters, but humor has been a revealing and transformative means of engaging the subject. Victoria Sturtevant examines productions from I Love Lucy to Junior, Jane the Virgin to Murphy Brown, finding that comedic films and television programs have articulated and altered public anxieties, expectations, and hypocrisies concerning reproduction. Evolving—and sometimes stubborn—attitudes toward pregnancy owe much to representational strategies that turn the social discomforts of childbirth into something we can laugh at.

On-screen comedy offers a fascinating lens on the role of pregnancy in defining American womanhood, as studio-era censorship gave way to fetishization of sentimental childbirth in the 1950s; the pill and legalized abortion spiked media interest in nonmarital pregnancy; the patriarchal entrenchment of the 1980s and ’90s turned attention to biological clocks; and more recent film and television shows have moved toward medically and socially candid depictions of pregnancy. It's All in the Delivery argues that representational breakthroughs were enabled by comedy’s capacity to violate restrictive norms, introducing greater candor, courage, and critique into popular notions of the embodiment of pregnancy on-screen.

Ronnie Earle was a Texas legend. During his three decades as the district attorney responsible for Austin and surrounding Travis County, he prosecuted corrupt corporate executives and state officials, including the notorious US congressman Tom DeLay. But Earle maintained that the biggest case of his career was the one involving Frank Hughey Smith, the ex-convict millionaire, alleged criminal mastermind, and Dixie Mafia figure.

With the help of corrupt local authorities, Smith spent the 1970s building a criminal empire in auto salvage and bail bonds. But there was one problem: a rival in the salvage business threatened his dominance. Smith hired arsonists to destroy the rival; when they botched the job, he sent three gunmen, but the robbery they planned was a bloody fiasco. Investigators were convinced that Smith was guilty, but many were skeptical that the newly elected and inexperienced Earle could get a conviction. Amid the courtroom drama and underworld plots the book describes, Willie Nelson makes a cameo. So do the private eyes, hired guns, and madams who kept Austin not only weird but also riddled with vice. An extraordinary true story, Last Gangster in Austin paints an unusual picture of the Texas capital as a place that was wild, wonderful, and as crooked as the dirt road to paradise.

A history of two centuries of interactions among the areas bordering the western Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, and Africa.

Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean—“the green sea,” as it was known to Arabic speakers—had increasing contact through commerce, including a slave trade, and underwent cultural exchange and transformation. Using a variety of texts and documents in multiple Asian and European languages, Across the Green Sea looks at the history of the ocean from a variety of shifting viewpoints: western India; the Red Sea and Mecca; the Persian Gulf; East Africa; and Kerala.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam sets the scene for this region starting with the withdrawal of China's Ming Dynasty and explores how the western Indian Ocean was transformed by the growth and increasing prominence of the Ottoman Empire and the continued spread of Islam into East Africa. He examines how several cities, including Mecca and the vital Indian port of Surat, grew and changed during these centuries, when various powers interacted until famines and other disturbances upended the region in the seventeenth century. Rather than proposing an artificial model of a dominant center and its dominated peripheries, Across the Green Sea demonstrates the complexity of a truly dynamic and polycentric system through the use of connected histories, a method pioneered by Subrahmanyam himself.

In the spring of 1881, W. M. D. Lee and Lucien B. Scott, wealthy businessmen of Leavenworth, Kansas, purchased land in the upper Texas Panhandle to establish the Lee-Scott Cattle Company. Their range sprawled across four Texas counties and extended into eastern New Mexico. About six months later, fifty thousand head of mixed cattle, branded LS, grazed those thousands of acres of free grass.

This book is the story of Lee and Scott’s LS Ranch from the tempestuous years of the open range to the era of “bob wire.” It is also the story of the pioneer men and women whose efforts developed the LS into a cattle empire: W. M. D. and Lena Lee, Lucien and Julia Scott, “Mister Mac” and “Miss Annie” McAllister, and Charles and Pauline Whitman.

Here are accounts of chuck wagons and wagon bosses; prairie fires, blizzards, and bog holes; ranch management problems and cowboys on strike; lobo wolves and romance; wild sprees in Tascosa and its “Hogtown” sector; LS cowboys fighting against a gang of organized rustlers in a feud that ended in tragedy; and those same cowboys on the long trails to Dodge City and Montana.

Drawing upon stories told to her by men and women who were with the LS during the 1880’s and later years, Dulcie Sullivan presents her narrative in a clear, straightforward, but sympathetic manner that gives the reader a vivid sense of how life was really lived there in those times. Especially telling is her occasional use of an almost poetic incident: the steers bedding down around a campfire to listen to the chuck-wagon cook play his fiddle, or the suit of Spanish armor found in a spring, or the hail-battered trees attempting to renew themselves, despite their grotesque shapes.

Unemployment levels have received a great deal of attention and discussion in recent years. However, another labor category—underemployment—has virtually been ignored. Underutilized or underemployed workers are those who are experiencing inadequate hours of work, insufficient levels of income, and mismatch of occupation and skills. Marginal Workers, Marginal Jobs addresses two principal issues: how can we measure underemployment, and how can we explain its prevalence?

To answer the first question, Teresa Sullivan examines yardsticks in use, demonstrates their inadequacy, and develops a different measure that is easy to interpret and is usable by both demographers and economists. In answering the second, she analyzes 1960 and 1970 census data to determine the relative effects of population composition and job structure on levels of employment.

One of the important contributions of Sullivan's study is to distinguish between marginal workers and marginal jobs in explaining underutilization. Previous explanations, including the widely used dual market theory, have not stressed this analytic distinction. In addition, her work accounts separately for the various types of marginality and seeks to show the condition of workers who are marginal on more than one count—for example, those who are both young and black, or old and female.

A provocative study based on large samples of the U.S. population, this book raises important questions about a critical subject and makes a significant contribution to the theory of underutilization.

At thirteen, George Miksch Sutton planned a school of ornithology centered around his collection of bird skins, feathers, bones, nests, eggs, and a prized stuffed crow. As an adult, he became one of the most prominent ornithologists and bird artists of the twentieth century. He describes his metamorphosis from amateur to professional in Bird Student.

Born in 1898, Sutton gives us his clearest memories of his boyhood in Nebraska, Minnesota, Oregon, Illinois, Texas, and West Virginia with his closely knit family. Recognizing birds, identifying them correctly, drawing them, and writing about them became more and more important to him. His intense admiration for Louis Agassiz Fuertes had a good deal to do with his beginning to draw birds in earnest, and his correspondence and his 1916 summer visit with the generous Fuertes taught him to look at birds with the eyes of a professional artist and to consider the possibility of making ornithology his career.

By 1918, Sutton had talked himself into a job at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, which gave him fresh opportunities to learn and travel, and his 1920 field trip to the Labrador Peninsula stimulated his lifelong interest in arctic birds. Further expeditions to James Bay, the east coast of Hudson Bay—on leave from his job as state ornithologist of Pennsylvania—and Southampton Island at the north end of Hudson Bay, in search of the elusive blue goose and its nesting grounds, give us glimpses of field methods before the days of sophisticated equipment. Sutton ends his autobiography in 1935, with an account of his graduate days at Cornell University and his position as curator of the Fuertes Memorial Collection of Birds.

Bird Student is about raising young roadrunners and owls and prairie dogs, sailing (and being stranded) in arctic waters, preparing specimens in the hold of a ship, hunting birds and caribou and bears in almost inaccessible regions, canoeing in the Far North, camping in Florida, and delivering speeches in Pennsylvania. Sutton's gift for mixing facts and philosophy lets us see the evolution of a naturalist, as his inherent curiosity and innocent enjoyment of beauty led to a permanent desire to preserve this beauty.

As Austin grew from a college and government town of the 1950s into the sprawling city of 2010, two ideas of Austin as a place came into conflict. Many who promoted the ideology of growth believed Austin would be defined by economic output, money, and wealth. But many others thought Austin was instead defined by its quality of life. Because the natural environment contributed so much to Austin's quality of life, a social movement that wanted to preserve the city's environment became the leading edge of a larger movement that wanted to retain a unique sense of place. The "environmental movement" in Austin became the political and symbolic arm of the more general movement for place.

This is a history of the environmental movement in Austin—how it began; what it did; and how it promoted ideas about the relationships between people, cities, and the environment. It is also about a deeper movement to retain a sense of place that is Austin, and how that deeper movement continues to shape the way Austin is built today. The city it helped to create is now on the forefront of national efforts to rethink how we build our cities, reduce global warming, and find ways that humans and the environment can coexist in a big city.

Alexander Edwin Sweet (1841-1901) is Texas's own "Sifter," whose humorous columns appeared in the Galveston Daily News in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In his wickedly funny, tongue-in-cheek sketches, readers learned of an astonishing variety of frontier phenomena, some familiar, others downright odd. For example, there was the typical nineteenth-century custom of New Year's Day receptions for bachelor guests only, with refreshments consisting largely of strong drink and equally strong fruitcake. Imbibing a bit more cheer at each stop, according to Sweet, the bachelors brought the last prospective sweethearts they visited New Year's greetings as incoherent as they were heartfelt.

At times Sweet parodied the Yankee image of the typical Texan, whom he described as "half alligator, half human," eating raw buffalo and toting an arsenal of weaponry like a "perambulating gun-rack." But he also did as much as any writer to establish and enlarge upon the national image of Texas and Texans. Even the irascible red ant and the other "critters" in Sweet's column were Texas big and Texas-fabulous!

In 1881 Sweet co-founded Texas Siftings, a humor magazine that moved from Austin to New York to become one of the most popular periodicals of its kind in the United States. From Texas Siftings, from Sweet's two published books (one called by John Jenkins in Basic Texas Books the "best volume of 19th century Texas humor"), and from many never-before-collected newspaper columns, editor Virginia Eisenhour has assembled an Alex Sweet sampler that presents the very best of the timeless humorist's work. The result—Alex Sweet's Texas—clearly demonstrates why the New York Journal pronounced Sweet "second to no living writer in freshness, originality, sparkling wit, and refined humor." A century later, that wit still sparkles and is guaranteed to delight Texans present as it once did Texans past.

You probably knew Molly Ivins as an unabashed civil libertarian who used her rapier wit and good ole Texas horse sense to excoriate political figures she deemed unworthy of our trust and respect. But did you also know that Molly was one helluva cook? And we're not just talking chili and chicken-fried steak, either. Molly Ivins honed her culinary skills on visits to France—often returning with perfected techniques for saumon en papillote or delectable clafouti aux cerises. Friends who had the privilege of sharing Molly's table got not only a heaping helping of her insights into the political shenanigans of the day, but also a mouth-watering meal, prepared from scratch with the finest ingredients and assembled with the same meticulous attention to detail that Molly devoted to skewering a political recalcitrant.

In Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins, her longtime friend, fellow reporter, and frequent sous-chef Ellen Sweets takes us into the kitchen with Molly and introduces us to the private woman behind the public figure. She serves up her own and others' favorite stories about Ivins as she recalls the fabulous meals they shared, complete with recipes for thirty-five of Molly's signature dishes. These stories reveal a woman who was even more fascinating and complex than the "professional Texan" she enjoyed playing in public. Friends who ate with Molly knew a cultured woman who was a fluent French speaker, voracious reader, rugged outdoors aficionado, music lover, loyal and loving friend, and surrogate mom to many of her friends' children, as well as to her super-spoiled poodle. They also came to revere the courageous woman who refused to let cancer stop her from doing what she wanted, when she wanted. This is the Molly you'll be delighted to meet in Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins.

The Ethereal Aether is a historical narrative of one of the great experiments in modern physical science. The fame of the 1887 Michelson-Morley aether-drift test on the relative motion of the earth and the luminiferous aether derives largely from the role it is popularly supposed to have played in the origins, and later in the justification, of Albert Einstein’s first theory of relativity; its importance is its own.

As a case history of the intermittent performance of an experiment in physical optics from 1880 to 1930 and of the men whose work it was, this study describes chronologically the conception, experimental design, first trials, repetitions, influence on physical theory, and eventual climax of the optical experiment. Michelson, Morley, and their colleague Miller were the prime actors in this half-century drama of confrontation between experimental and theoretical physics.

The issue concerned the relative motion of “Spaceship Earth” and the Universe, as measured against the background of a luminiferous medium supposedly filling all interstellar space. At stake, it seemed, were the phenomena of astronomical aberration, the wave theory of light, and the Newtonian concepts of absolute space and time.

James Clerk Maxwell’s suggestion for a test of his electromagnetic theory was translated by Michelson into an experimental design in 1881, redesigned and reaffirmed as a null result with Morley in 1887, thereafter modified and partially repeated by Morley and Miller, finally completed in 1926 by Miller alone, then by Michelson’s team again in the late 1920s.

Meanwhile Helmholtz, Kelvin, Rayleigh, FitzGerald, Lodge, Larmor, Lorentz, and Poincaré—most of the great names in theoretical physics at the turn of the twentieth century—had wrestled with the anomaly presented by Michelson’s experiment. As the relativity and quantum theories matured, wave-particle duality was accepted by a new generation of physicists. The aether-drift tests disproved the old and verified the new theories of light and electromagnetism. By 1930 they seemed to explain Einstein, relativity, and space-time. But in historical fact, the aether died only with its believers.

To say that the entirety of human experience can be a novelist’s theme is to voice an absurdity. But, as Peter Swiggart convincingly argues, Faulkner’s work can be viewed as an extraordinary attempt to transform the panorama of man’s social experience into thematic material. Faulkner’s two-dimensional characters, his rhetorical circumlocutions, and his technical experiments are efforts to achieve a dramatic focus upon material too unwieldy, at least in principle, for any kind of fictional condensation.

Faulkner makes use of devices of stylization that apply to virtually every aspect of his successful novels. For example, the complex facts of Southern history and culture are reduced to the scale of a simplified and yet grandiose social mythology: the degeneration of the white aristocracy, the rise of Snopesism, and the white Southerner’s gradual recognition of his latent sense of racial guilt. Within Faulkner’s fictional universe, human psychology takes the form of absolute distinctions between puritan and nonpuritan characters, between individuals corrupted by moral rationality and those who are simultaneously free of moral corruption and social involvement. In this way Faulkner is able to create the impression of a comprehensive treatment of important social concerns and universal moral issues.

Like Henry James, he makes as much as he can of clearly defined dramatic events, until they seem to echo the potential complexity and depth of situations outside the realm of fiction. When this technique is successful the reader is left with the impression that he knows a Faulkner character far better than he could know an actual person. At the same time, the character retains the atmosphere of complexity and mystery imposed upon it by Faulkner’s handling of style and structure.

This method of characterization reflects Faulkner’s simplifications of experience and yet suggests the inadequacy of any rigid interpretation of actual behavior. The reader is supplied with special eyeglasses through which the tragedy of the South, as well as humanity’s general inhumanity to itself, can be viewed in a perspective of simultaneous mystery and symbolic clarity.

In a new approach to interdisciplinary literary theory, Literature, Analytically Speaking integrates literary studies with analytic aesthetics, girded by neo-Darwinian evolution. Scrutinizing narrative fiction through a lens provided by analytic philosophy, revered literary theorist Peter Swirski puts new life into literary theory while fashioning a set of practical guidelines for critics in the interpretive trenches.

Dismissing critical inquirers who deny intention its key role in the study of literary reception, Swirski extends the defense of intentionality to art and to human behavior in general. In the process, Swirski takes stock of the recent work in evolutionary theory, arguing that the analysis of narrative truth may be grounded in the neo-Darwinian paradigm which forms the empirical backbone behind his analytic approach. Literature, Analytically Speaking provides a series of precepts designed to capture the ways in which we do interpret (and ought to interpret) works of literature. Reflecting a resounding shift from the poststructuralist paradigm, Swirski's lively and colorful presentation, backed up by a dazzling variety of examples and case studies, reconceptualizes the aesthetics of literature and literary studies.

The Alabama language, a member of the Muskogean language family, is spoken today by the several hundred inhabitants of the Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation in Polk County, Texas. This dictionary of Alabama was begun over fifty years ago by tribe member Cora Sylestine. She was aided after 1980 by linguists Heather K. Hardy and Timothy Montler, who completed work on the dictionary after her death.

This state-of-the-art analytical dictionary contains over 8,000 entries of roots, stems, and compounds in the Alabama-English section. Each entry contains precise definitions, full grammatical analyses, agreement and other part-of-speech classifications, variant pronunciations, example sentences, and extensive cross-references to stem entries. The Alabama-English section is followed by a thorough English-Alabama finder list that functions as a full index to the definitions in the Alabama-English section.

Spring-fed creeks. Old stone houses. Cedar brakes and bleached limestone. The Hill Country holds powerful sway over the imagination of Texans. So many of us dream of having our own little place in the limestone hills. The Hill Country feels just like home, even if you've never lived there.

This beautifully written book explores what the Hill Country has meant as a homeplace to the author, his family, and longtime residents of the area, as well as to newcomers. David Syring listens to the stories that his aunts, uncles, and cousins tell about life in the Hill Country and grapples with their meaning for his own search for a place to belong. He also collects short stories focused around Honey Creek Church to consider how places become containers for memory. And he draws upon several years of living in Fredericksburg to talk about the problems and opportunities created by heritage tourism and the development of the town as a "home" for German Americans. These interconnected stories illuminate what it means to belong to a place and why the Texas Hill Country has become the spiritual, if not actual, home of many people.

Highlighting globalization’s effects on humanity through the lens of Ecuador’s indigenous Saraguro people, With the Saraguros marks a compelling departure from conventional approaches to ethnography. While documenting and exploring the social patterns among the Saraguro, with an emphasis on the role of women beadworkers, David Syring blends storytelling, dialogue, poetry, and memoir to describe his own realm as a fieldworker in anthropology. As he considers the influence of women’s labor in a community in which the artistry of beadwork is richly symbolic, he also considers how the Saraguro view their observers—the anthropologists.

Probing the role of researchers in a time when basic humanistic questions now often reflect a critical balance between commerce and sustainability, With the Saraguros asks, “What does it mean to live ‘the good life’ in different cultural contexts, and how does our work life relate to this pursuit?” For those who have chosen a work life of anthropology, Syring captures the impact of fieldwork—which uproots the researcher from his or her daily routine—and its potential to deliver new levels of consciousness. The result constitutes more than just the first English-language book dedicated to the dynamic creativity of the Saraguro, contextualized by their social and political history; Syring’s work, which ranges from the ecological imagination to the metaphors of trade, is also a profound meditation on the ways we experience boundaries now that borders no longer create sharply drawn divides between cultural worlds, and “distant” no longer means “separate.”

Comparatively little critical attention has been devoted to narrative technique in modern fiction, and formal analysis of the work of Kafka, Beckett, and Robbe-Grillet in particular has for the most part been limited to short studies in journals, many of these in languages other than English. The criticism written in English has dealt primarily with theme with metaphysics and myth and ignored structure and style.

Yet it is structure and style that offer the reader a way into the often bewildering and disturbing fictional worlds these three writers present. The problem confronting writers since the middle of the nineteenth century has been how to cope artistically with an increasingly alienating and mechanized world. As George Szanto sees it, Kafka, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet conclude, by the example of their fictions, that the writer's province is no longer this impossible environment. Instead, the writer must work within the only knowledge available to any one person: the knowledge attained through perceptions. The proper study for a storyteller is thus the search for the unique details, the describable perceptions a person chooses from the outside world and brings into their mind, which in the end define their nature. The shape of the story is determined by the narrating consciousness, that single character through whose awareness the details are filtered. Thus, in a very special sense, the tale and the telling are one.

Szanto's meticulous and thoughtful study of the major fiction of Kafka, Beckett, and Robbe-Grillet searches out these details and examines the manner in which each author, through the minds of his characters, has selected and ordered them. His structural approach not only leads the reader directly into the works under scrutiny, but also provides an understanding of the workings of the art itself.

In the appendices, the author surveys the different ways in which criticism has treated these three writers. His extensive bibliography provides a valuable research tool.