The special relationship between the United Kingdom, an established and secure power, and the United States, a rising one, began after the War of 1812, as the former enemies sought accommodation with, rather than the annihilation of, one another. At the same time, Mexico, also a rising power, was not so fortunate. Its relationship with Spain, an established but declining power, turned hostile with Spain’s final exit from North America after Mexico’s War of Independence, leaving its former colony isolated, internally unstable, and vulnerable to external attack. Significantly, Mexico posed little threat to its northern neighbor. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, then, the fate of North America was largely discernable.

Nevertheless, the three-century journey to get to this point had been anything but predictable. The United States’ rise as a regional power was very much conditioned by constantly shifting transcontinental, transpacific, and above all transatlantic factors, all of which influenced North America’s three interactive cultural spheres: the Indigenous, the Hispano, and the Anglo. And while the United States profoundly shaped the history of Canada and Mexico, so, too, did these two transcontinental countries likewise shape the course of U.S. history.

In this ground-breaking work, Kevin Fernlund shows us that any society’s social development is directly related to its own social power and, just as crucially, to the protective extension or destructive intrusion of the social power of other societies.

In part a tour of California as a virtual laboratory for refining the circulation of capital, and in part an investigation of how the state's literati, with rare exception, reconceived economy in the name of class, gender, and racial privilege, this study will appeal to all students and scholars of California's—and the American West's—economic, environmental, and cultural past.

With its dignified courthouse set among shade trees and lawns dotted with monuments to prominent citizens and fallen veterans, the courthouse square remains the civic center in a majority of the county seats of Texas. Yet the squares themselves vary in form and layout, reflecting the different town-planning traditions that settlers brought from Europe, Mexico, and the United States. In fact, one way to trace settlement patterns and ethnic dispersion in Texas is by mapping the different types of courthouse squares.

This book offers the first complete inventory of Texas courthouse squares, drawn from extensive archival research and site visits to 139 of the 254 county seats. Robert Veselka classifies every existing plan by type and origin, including patterns and variants not previously identified. He also explores the social and symbolic functions of these plans as he discusses the historical and modern uses of the squares. He draws interesting new conclusions about why the courthouse square remains the hub of commercial and civic activity in the smaller county seats, when it has lost its prominence in others.

Discover the lost towns that shaped Alabama’s earliest history.

This encyclopedic work is a listing of 398 ancient towns recorded within the present boundaries of the state of Alabama, containing basic information on each village's ethnic affiliation, time period, geographic location, descriptions, and (if any) movements. While publications dating back to 1901 have attempted to compile such a listing, none until now has so exhaustively harvested the 214 historic maps drawn between 1544, when Hernando de Soto's entourage first came through the southeastern territory, and 1846, when Indian removal to the Oklahoma Territory was complete. Wright combines the map data with a keen awareness of both previously published information and archival sources, such as colonial town lists, census information, and travel narratives.

The towns are listed alphabetically, and the text of each entry develops chronologically. While only a few of these towns have been accurately located by archaeologists, this volume provides a wealth of information for the future study of cultural geography, southeastern archaeology, and ethnohistory. It will be an enduring reference source for many years to come.

SAMPLE ENTRY, 

ALIBAMA TOWN (Alibama)
The Alibama consisted of several towns—Mucclassa, Tawasa, Tomopa, Koarsati (Knight 1981, 27:48). Pickett ([1851] 1962:81) adds Ecanchati, Pawokti, and Autauga. The Alibama Town can also be added. Many maps show the Alibama as a group, but one map, 1796 Thomas and Andrews, locates the "Alabama Town"on the east bank of the Coosa just below Wetumpka.

Swanton ([1922] 1970a:209) wrote that the Tuskegee at the Alabama forks may have been known as the "Alabama Town"; however, this is unlikely, as Major W. Blue, a removal agent, wrote in July 1835 that Coosada, Alabama Town, and Tuskegee were ready to emigrate and they all lived adjoining each other in Macon County (ASP, Military Affairs 1861,6:731).

On 6 July 1838, some twenty-seven towns, including "Alibama" (NA M234 R225), attended the Creek council held in Indian Territory. Thomas Bibb, brother to Alabama territorial govenor William Wyatt Bibb, and others, including Nashville investors, founded the town of Alabama in 1817 at Ten Mile Bluff in Montgomery County (Moser 1980-94, 4:131). The town soon disappeared into history.

A new history of Brazil told through the lens of the often-overlooked interior regions.

In colonial Brazil, observers frequently complained that Portuguese settlers appeared content to remain “clinging to the coastline, like crabs.” From their perspective, the vast Brazilian interior seemed like an untapped expanse waiting to be explored and colonized. This divide between a thriving coastal area and a less-developed hinterland has become deeply ingrained in the nation’s collective imagination, perpetuating the notion of the interior as a homogeneous, stagnant periphery awaiting the dynamic influence of coastal Brazil.

The Interior challenges these narratives and reexamines the history of Brazil using an “interior history” perspective. This approach aims to reverse the conventional conceptual and geographical boundaries often employed to study Brazilian history, and, by extension, Latin America as a whole. Through the work of twelve leading scholars, the volume highlights how the people and spaces within the interior have played a pivotal role in shaping national identities, politics, the economy, and culture. The Interior goes beyond the traditional boundaries of borderland and frontier history, expands on the current wave of scholarship on regionalism in Brazil, and, by asking new questions about space and nation, provides a fresh perspective on Brazil’s history.

    Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic explores the origins and lasting influences of two contesting but intertwined discourses that persist today when we use the words landscape, country, scenery, nature, national. In the first sense, the land is a physical and bounded body of terrain upon which the nation state is constructed (e.g., the purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain, from sea to shining sea). In the second, the country is constituted through its people and established through time and precedence (e.g., land where our fathers died, land of the Pilgrims’ pride). Kenneth Robert Olwig’s extended exploration of these discourses is a masterful work of scholarship both broad and deep, which opens up new avenues of thinking in the areas of geography, literature, theater, history, political science, law, and environmental studies.
    Olwig tracks these ideas though Anglo-American history, starting with seventeenth-century conflicts between the Stuart kings and the English Parliament, and the Stuart dream of uniting Scotland with England and Wales into one nation on the island of Britain. He uses a royal production of a Ben Jonson masque, with stage sets by architect Inigo Jones, as a touchstone for exploring how the notion of "landscape" expands from artful stage scenery to a geopolitical ideal. Olwig pursues these contested concepts of the body politic from Europe to America and to global politics, illuminating a host of topics, from national parks and environmental planning to theories of polity and virulent nationalistic movements.

The birth of the world’s great megacities is the surest and starkest harbinger of the “urban age” inaugurated in the twentieth century. As the world’s urban population achieves majority for the first time in recorded history, theories proliferate on the nature of urban politics, including the shape and quality of urban democracy, the role of urban social and political movements, and the prospects for progressive and emancipatory change from the corridors of powerful states to the routinized rhythms of everyday life. At stake are both the ways in which the rapidly changing urban world is understood and the urban futures being negotiated by the governments and populations struggling to contend with these changes and forge a place in contemporary cities.

Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City’s turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth-century urbanization and political revolution. Substantive ethnographic chapters trace the emergence and decline of the political language of “the right to the city,” the establishment and contestation of a “postpolitical” governance regime, and the culmination of a century of urban politics in the processes of “political reform” by which Mexico City finally wrested back significant political autonomy and local democracy from the federal state.

A four-fold transection of the revolutionary structure of feeling that pervades the city in this historic moment illustrates the complex and contradictory sentiments, appraisals, and motivations through which contemporary politics are understood and enacted. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the “urban age” even beyond Mexico City.

When geologist Roseanne Chambers made her first visit to Machu Picchu in 2006, it sparked a deep fascination with the geology and culture of the Peruvian Andes. Amid the plethora of information available about the Andes Mountains, as well as the Incas and their ancestors, she was unable to find a book that specifically traced the geologic history of that landscape and how this history shaped ancient Andean societies. Consequently, she decided to write that book herself.

At once approachable and informative, The Monumental Andes tells the history of the lofty mountains and civilizations that characterize the Central Andes. The book explores many interconnected aspects of ancient Andean life, including climate, topography, agricultural methods, natural hazards, the construction of monumental structures, the creation of sophisticated art objects, and the plant-based hallucinogens and narcotics used in religious rituals. From earthquake-resistant structures to shrines on the tops of active volcanoes, ancient Andeans left behind relics that amaze and inspire today.

This persistent prioritization of liberty at the heart of Colorado Springs’s identity, specifically the freedom to conduct business and generate profits in a relatively unconstrained setting, has directed the urban sprawl of the built landscape and molded the region’s political culture. Profiting from the Peak will be of interest to historical and urban geographers, historians of Colorado and the American West, and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the cultural identity of Colorado Springs.
 

A geographical and historical analysis of Russian perspectives on the expansion of Russia.

Focusing on geographical practices—such as exploring, observing, describing, and mapping—Reconnoitring Russia explains how Russia’s rulers and public came to understand the expanse of their territory. It adopts a broad chronological framework and compares the Russian experience to the concurrent realities of other European countries between 1613, the emergence of the Romanov dynasty, and 1825, the conclusion of Alexander I’s reign.

2025 Second Place, Presidio La Bahía Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas
2026 Ron Tyler Award for Best Illustrated Book on Texas History and Culture, Texas State Historical Association (TSHA)

A comprehensive volume on historical mapping in Texas.

The Texas General Land Office’s map collection contains over 45,000 maps, some dating from the sixteenth century, making it one of the most important cartographic archives in Texas. As products and agents of history drawn by cartographers with motives and means as diverse as the places they document, maps provide a unique perspective on geopolitical, cultural, and economic processes. The maps of the GLO offer key insights into Texas’s sprawling history. They speak to issues of changing borders, social and political upheaval, and questions of sovereignty and power.

Texas Takes Shape offers an illuminating selection from the GLO archive: over one hundred maps that tell—and sometimes obscure—the stories of European colonization, Spanish and Mexican rule, the Republic of Texas, and the modern US state. There are maps here of every scale, from the hemispheric visions of European explorers to individual survey plats. Accompanying essays offer fascinating lessons on topics ranging from Indigenous cartography to military and railroad mapmaking and frontier surveys. Artful and informative, Texas Takes Shape examines a unique place through the eyes and imaginations of those who sought to govern it, profit from it, understand it, and call it home.