In the Yucatán, they never forgot Alma Reed. She arrived for the first time in 1923, on assignment for the New York Times Sunday Magazine to cover an archaeological survey of Mayan ruins. It was a contemporary Maya, however, who stole her heart. Felipe Carrillo Puerto, said to be descended from Mayan kings, had recently been elected governor of the Yucatán on a platform emphasizing egalitarian reforms and indigenous rights. The entrenched aristocracy was enraged; Reed was infatuated—as was Carrillo Puerto. He and Reed were engaged within months. Yet less than a year later—only eleven days before their intended wedding—Carrillo Puerto was assassinated. He had earned his place in the history books, but Reed had won a place in the hearts of Mexicans: the bolero "La Peregrina" remains one of the Yucatán's most famous ballads.

Alma Reed recovered from her tragic romance to lead a long, successful life. She eventually returned to Mexico, where her work in journalism, archaeology, and art earned her entry into the Orden del Aguila Azteca (Order of the Aztec Eagle). Her time with Carrillo Puerto, however, was the most intense of her life, and when she was encouraged (by Hollywood, especially) to write her autobiography, she began with that special period. Her manuscript, which disappeared immediately after her sudden death in 1966, mingled her legendary love affair with a biography of Carrillo Puerto and the political history of the Yucatán. As such, it has long been sought by scholars as well as romantics. In 2001, historian Michael Schuessler discovered the manuscript in an abandoned apartment in Mexico City. An absolutely compelling memoir, Peregrina restores Reed's place in Mexican history in her own words.

What it’s really like to be a parent in the world of higher education, and how academia can make this hard climb a little less steep

Academia has a big problem. For many parents—especially mothers—the idea of “work-life balance” is a work-life myth. Parents and caregivers work harder than ever to grow and thrive in their careers while juggling the additional responsibilities that accompany parenthood. Sudden disruptions and daily constraints such as breastfeeding, sick days that keep children home from school, and the sleep deprivation that plagues the early years of parenting threaten to derail careers. Some experience bias and harassment related to pregnancy or parental leave. The result is an academic Chutes and Ladders, where career advancement is nearly impossible for parents who lack access to formal or informal support systems.

In The PhD Parenthood Trap, Kerry F. Crawford and Leah C. Windsor reveal the realities of raising kids, on or off the tenure track, and suggest reforms to help support parents throughout their careers. Insights from their original survey data and poignant vignettes from scholars across disciplines make it clear that universities lack understanding, uniform policies, and flexibility for family formation, hurting the career development of parent-scholars. Each chapter includes recommendations for best practices and policy changes that will help make academia an exemplar of progressive family-leave policies. Topics covered include pregnancy, adoption, miscarriage and infant loss, postpartum depression, family leave, breastfeeding, daily parenting challenges, the tenure clock, and more. The book concludes with advice to new or soon-to-be parents to help them better navigate parenthood in academia.

The PhD Parenthood Trap provides scholars, academic mentors, and university administrators with empirical evidence and steps to break down personal and structural barriers between parenthood and scholarly careers.

The indigenous people of the hemisphere have resisted a five-hundred-year assault, fighting to maintain their cultural identities. During this time, authorities in the Americas have insisted that the toleration of indigenous societies and cultures would undermine their respective states. In recent years, however, the nations of the Americas have started to reverse themselves. They are altering their constitutions and proclaiming themselves multiethnic. Why is this happening now? The Politics of Ethnicity: Indigenous Peoples in Latin American States, edited by David Maybury-Lewis, helps us understand the reasons and history behind these times of transition.

The book provides a valuable overview of current problems facing indigenous peoples in their relation with national states in Latin America, from the highlands of Mexico to the jungles of Brazil. The traditional, sometimes centuries old, relations between states and indigenous peoples are now changing and being rediscussed. The collection, authored by U.S. and Latin American anthropologists using interdisciplinary approaches, enables the reader to understand these recent developments in a comparative framework. An ambitious and quite thorough collection, it is brought together skillfully by one of the discipline’s maître penseurs.

In Power in Modernity, Isaac Ariail Reed proposes a bold new theory of power that describes overlapping networks of delegation and domination.  Chains of power and their representation, linking together groups and individuals across time and space, create a vast network of intersecting alliances, subordinations, redistributions, and violent exclusions. Reed traces the common action of “sending someone else to do something for you” as it expands outward into the hierarchies that control territories, persons, artifacts, minds, and money.

He mobilizes this theory to investigate the onset of modernity in the Atlantic world, with a focus on rebellion, revolution, and state formation in colonial North America, the early American Republic, the English Civil War, and French Revolution. Modernity, Reed argues, dismantled the “King’s Two Bodies”—the monarch’s physical body and his ethereal, sacred second body that encompassed the body politic—as a schema of representation for forging power relations. Reed’s account then offers a new understanding of the democratic possibilities and violent exclusions forged in the name of “the people,” as revolutionaries sought new ways to secure delegation, build hierarchy, and attack alterity.

Reconsidering the role of myth in modern politics, Reed proposes to see the creative destruction and eternal recurrence of the King’s Two Bodies as constitutive of the modern attitude, and thus as a new starting point for critical theory. Modernity poses in a new way an eternal human question: what does it mean to be the author of one’s own actions?

The monumental Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups is the most authoritative single source available on the history, culture, and distinctive characteristics of ethnic groups in the United States. The Dimensions of Ethnicity series is designed to make this landmark scholarship available to everyone in a series of handy paperbound student editions. Selections in this series will include outstanding articles that illuminate the social dynamics of a pluralistic nation or masterfully summarize the experience of key groups.

Written by the best-qualified scholars in each field, Dimensions of Ethnicity titles will reflect the complex interplay between assimilation and pluralism that is a central theme of the American experience.

In Prejudice, the history and psychology of discriminatory policies is contrasted with efforts to overcome discrimination.

For almost four centuries, the indigenous Chiripá (Guaraní) people of eastern Paraguay have maintained themselves as a distinct society and culture, despite continual and often intense relations with Paraguayan society and the international economy. In this study, Richard K. Reed explores the economic and social basis for this ethnic autonomy.

Reed finds that Chiripá economic power derives from their practice of commercial agroforestry. Unlike Latin American indigenous societies that have been forced to clear land for commercial agriculture, the Chiripá continue to harvest and sell forest products, such as caffeinated yerba mate, without destroying the forests. Reed also explores the relation of this complex economy to Chiripá social organization and shows how flexible kin ties allowed the Chiripá to adapt to the pressure and opportunities of the commercial economy without adopting the authoritarian nature of rural Paraguayan society.

These findings offer important insights into the relations among indigenous groups, nation-states, and the international economy. They also provide a timely alternative model for sustainable management of subtropical forests that will be of interest in the fields of development and environmental studies.

This book--first published in 1958, and designed for courses on abnormal psychology and psychiatry--is intended to supplement the usual textbook material in abnormal psychology. Papers have been selected to introduce the student to the active and complex enterprise of investigation and hypothesis in this wide field. Conflicting evidence and allegiances, riddles and ingenuity, are displayed in order to stimulate an appreciation of the task of discovery in behavioral science.

Five general areas are represented in the selections: (i) the problem of the effects of early experience on psychological development; (2) psychosomatic disorders and neurosis; (3) schizophrenic psychosis; (4) somatic factors in psychopathology; and (5) the social context and its effects on the phenomena of behavior. Against a background of systematic study, the graduate or undergraduate student will find in the forty-six papers included here an instructive sampling of the periodical literature.

Says Robert W. White in his introduction to the book: "There is no longer an air that the problem of schizophrenia, or of neurosis, or of psychosomatic disorder is going to be solved by a stroke of insight and a simple theory. Where once it was hoped to unlock the secret of a disorder, we now know that we must creep up slowly upon its many secrets and that we must use to the utmost the help provided by scientific method. In this new climate the present book is an indispensable teaching aid."