front cover of Pachangas
Pachangas
Borderlands Music, U.S. Politics, and Transnational Marketing
By Margaret E. Dorsey
University of Texas Press, 2006

A uniquely Tejano version of the old-fashioned political barbeque, the traditional South Texas pachanga allowed politicians to connect with voters in a relaxed setting where all could enjoy live music and abundant food and drink along with political speeches and dealmaking. Today's pachanga still combines politics, music, and votes—along with a powerful new element. Corporate sponsorships have transformed the pachanga into a major marketing event, replete with celebrity performers and product giveaways, which can be recorded and broadcast on TV or radio to vastly increase the reach of the political—and the commercial—messages.

This book explores the growing convergence of politics, transnational marketing, and borderlands music in the South Texas pachanga. Anthropologist Margaret Dorsey has observed some one hundred pachangas and interviewed promoters, politicians, artists, and local people. She investigates how candidates and corporations market their products to Hispanic consumers, as well as how the use of traditional music for marketing is altering traditional forms such as the corrido. Her multifaceted study also shows clearly that the lines of influence run both ways—while corporate culture is transforming the traditions of the border, Tejano voters/consumers only respond to marketing appeals (whether for politicians or products) that resonate with their values and the realities of their lives. Far from being an example of how transnational marketing homogenizes culture, the pachanga demonstrates that local cultures can exert an equally strong influence on multinational corporations.

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PADRES
The National Chicano Priest Movement
By Richard Edward Martínez
University of Texas Press, 2005

From the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the 1960s, Mexican American Catholics experienced racism and discrimination within the U.S. Catholic church, as white priests and bishops maintained a racial divide in all areas of the church's ministry. To oppose this religious apartheid and challenge the church to minister fairly to all of its faithful, a group of Chicano priests formed PADRES (Padres Asociados para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos y Sociales, or Priests Associated for Religious, Educational, and Social Rights) in 1969. Over the next twenty years of its existence, PADRES became a powerful force for change within the Catholic church and for social justice within American society.

This book offers the first history of the founding, activism, victories, and defeats of PADRES. At the heart of the book are oral history interviews with the founders of PADRES, who describe how their ministries in poor Mexican American parishes, as well as their own experiences of racism and discrimination within and outside the church, galvanized them into starting and sustaining the movement. Richard Martínez traces the ways in which PADRES was inspired by the Chicano movement and other civil rights struggles of the 1960s and also probes its linkages with liberation theology in Latin America. He uses a combination of social movement theory and organizational theory to explain why the group emerged, flourished, and eventually disbanded in 1989.

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Paid to Care
Domestic Workers in Contemporary Latin American Culture
Rachel Randall
University of Texas Press, 2023

An insight into the struggles of paid domestic workers in Latin America through an exploration of films, texts, and digital media produced since the 1980s in collaboration with them or inspired by their experiences.

Paid domestic work in Latin America is often undervalued, underpaid, and underregulated. Exploring a wave of Latin American cultural texts since the 1980s that draw on the personal experiences of paid domestic work or intimate ties to domestic employees, Paid to Care offers insights into the struggles domestic workers face through an analysis of literary testimonials, documentary and fiction films, and works of digital media.

From domestic workers’ experiences of unionization in the 1980s to calls for their rights to be respected today, the cultural texts analyzed in Paid to Care provide additional insight into public debates about paid domestic work. Rachel Randall examines work made in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. The most recent of these texts respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, which put many domestic workers’ health and livelihoods at risk. Engaging with the legal histories of domestic work in multiple distinct national contexts, Randall demonstrates how the legacy of colonialism and slavery shapes the profession even today. Focusing on personal or coproduced cultural representations of domestic workers, Paid to Care explores complex ethical issues relating to consent, mediation, and appropriation.

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Painting Texas History to 1900
By Sam D. Ratcliffe
University of Texas Press, 1992

Certificate of Commendation, American Association for State and Local History, 1994
T. R. Fehrenbach Book Award, Texas Historical Commission, 1992
San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 1993

Dramatic historical events have frequently provided subject matter for artists, particularly in pre-twentieth-century Texas, where works portraying historical, often legendary, events and individuals predominated. Until now, however, these paintings of Texas history have never received the kind of study given to historical, fictional, and film versions of the same events. Painting Texas History to 1900 fills this gap with an interdisciplinary approach that explores these paintings both as works of art and as historical documents.

The author examines the works of more than forty artists, including Henry McArdle, Theodore Gentilz, Robert Onderdonk, William Huddle, Frederic Remington, Friedrich Richard Petri, Arthur T. Lee, Seth Eastman, Sarah Hardinge, Frank Reaugh, W. G. M. Samuel, Carl G. von Iwonski, and Julius Stockfleth. He places each work within its historical and cultural context to show why such subject matter was chosen, why it was depicted in a particular way, and why such a depiction gained popular acceptance. For example, paintings of heroic events of the Texas Revolution were especially popular in the years following the Civil War, when, in Ratcliffe's view, Texans needed such images to assuage the loss of the war and the humiliation of Reconstruction.

Though the paintings cut across traditional art history categories—from the pictographs of early historic Indians to European-inspired oil paintings—they are bound together by their artists' intent for them to function as historically evocative documents. With their visual narratives of events that characterized all of America's westward expansion—Indian encounters, military battles, farming, ranching, surveying, and the closing of the frontier—these works add an important chapter to the story of the American West.

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Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws
From Islamic Empires to the Taliban
By Shemeem Burney Abbas
University of Texas Press, 2013

Under the guise of Islamic law, the prophet Muhammad’s Islam, and the Qur’an, states such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh are using blasphemy laws to suppress freedom of speech. Yet the Prophet never tried or executed anyone for blasphemy, nor does the Qur’an authorize the practice. Asserting that blasphemy laws are neither Islamic nor Qur‘anic, Shemeem Burney Abbas traces the evolution of these laws from the Islamic empires that followed the death of the Prophet Muhammad to the present-day Taliban. Her pathfinding study on the shari’a and gender demonstrates that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are the inventions of a military state that manipulates discourse in the name of Islam to exclude minorities, women, free thinkers, and even children from the rights of citizenship.

Abbas herself was persecuted under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, so she writes from both personal experience and years of scholarly study. Her analysis exposes the questionable motives behind Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which were resurrected during General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime of 1977–1988—motives that encompassed gaining geopolitical control of the region, including Afghanistan, in order to weaken the Soviet Union. Abbas argues that these laws created a state-sponsored “infidel” ideology that now affects global security as militant groups such as the Taliban justify violence against all “infidels” who do not subscribe to their interpretation of Islam. She builds a strong case for the suspension of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and for a return to the Prophet’s peaceful vision of social justice.

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Palace Politics
How the Ruling Party Brought Crisis to Mexico
By Jonathan Schlefer
University of Texas Press, 2008

Bringing rare interviews and meticulous research to the cloaked world of Mexican politics in the mid-twentieth century, Palace Politics provides a captivating look at the authoritarian Mexican state—one of the longest-lived regimes of its kind in recent history—as well as the origins of political instability itself, with revelations that can be applied to a variety of contemporary political situations around the globe.

Culling a trove of remarkable firsthand accounts from former Mexican presidents, finance ministers, interior ministers, and other high officials from the 1950s through the 1980s, Jonathan Schlefer describes a world in which elite politics planted the seeds of a mammoth socioeconomic crisis. Palace Politics outlines the process by which political infighting among small rival factions of high officials drove Mexico to precarious situations at all levels of government. Schlefer also demonstrates how, earlier on, elite cooperation among these factions had helped sustain one of the most stable growth economies in Latin America, until all-or-nothing struggles began to tear the Mexican ruling party apart in the 1970s.

A vivid, seamlessly narrated history, Palace Politics is essential reading for anyone seeking to better understand not only the nation next door but also the workings of elite politics in general.

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front cover of Palaces and Power in the Americas
Palaces and Power in the Americas
From Peru to the Northwest Coast
Edited by Jessica Joyce Christie and Patricia Joan Sarro
University of Texas Press, 2006

Ancient American palaces still captivate those who stand before them. Even in their fallen and ruined condition, the palaces project such power that, according to the editors of this new collection, it must have been deliberately drawn into their formal designs, spatial layouts, and choice of locations. Such messages separated palaces from other elite architecture and reinforced the power and privilege of those residing in them. Indeed, as Christie and Sarro write, "the relation between political power and architecture is a pervasive and intriguing theme in the Americas."

Given the variety of cultures, time periods, and geographical locations examined within, the editors of this book have grouped the articles into four sections. The first looks at palaces in cultures where they have not previously been identified, including the Huaca of Moche Site, the Wari of Peru, and Chaco Canyon in the U.S. Southwest. The second section discusses palaces as "stage sets" that express power, such as those found among the Maya, among the Coast Salish of the Pacific Northwest, and at El Tajín on the Mexican Gulf Coast. The third part of the volume presents cases in which differences in elite residences imply differences in social status, with examples from Pasado de la Amada, the Valley of Oaxaca, Teotihuacan, and the Aztecs. The final section compares architectural strategies between cultures; the models here are Farfán, Peru, under both the Chimú and the Inka, and the separate states of the Maya and the Inka.

Such scope, and the quality of the scholarship, make Palaces and Power in the Americas a must-have work on the subject.

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front cover of Paleoindian Geoarchaeology of the Southern High Plains
Paleoindian Geoarchaeology of the Southern High Plains
By Vance T. Holliday
University of Texas Press, 1997

The Southern High Plains of northwestern Texas and eastern New Mexico are rich in Paleoindian archaeological sites, including such well-known ones as Clovis, Lubbock Lake, Plainview, and Midland. These sites have been extensively researched over decades, not only by archaeologists but also by geoscientists, whose studies of soils and stratigraphy have yielded important information about cultural chronology and paleoenvironments across the region.

In this book, Vance T. Holliday synthesizes the data from these earlier studies with his own recent research to offer the most current and comprehensive overview of the geoarchaeology of the Southern High Plains during the earliest human occupation. He delves into twenty sites in depth, integrating new and old data on site geomorphology, stratigraphy, soils, geochronology, and paleoenvironments. He also compares the Southern High Plains sites with other sites across the Great Plains, for a broader chronological and paleoenvironmental perspective.

With over ninety photographs, maps, cross sections, diagrams, and artifact drawings, this book will be essential reading for geoarchaeologists, archaeologists, and Quaternary geoscientists, as well as avocational archaeologists who take part in Paleoindian site study throughout the American West.

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Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution
By Nadia Yaqub
University of Texas Press, 2018

Palestinian cinema arose during the political cinema movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, yet it was unique as an institutionalized, though modest, film effort within the national liberation campaign of a stateless people. Filmmakers working within the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and through other channels filmed the revolution as it unfolded, including the Israeli bombings of Palestinian refugee camps, the Jordanian and Lebanese civil wars, and Palestinian life under Israeli occupation, attempting to create a cinematic language consonant with the revolution and its needs. They experimented with form both to make effective use of limited material and to process violent events and loss as a means of sustaining active engagement in the Palestinian political project.

Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution presents an in-depth study of films made between 1968 and 1982, the filmmakers and their practices, the political and cultural contexts in which the films were created and seen, and their afterlives among Palestinian refugees and young filmmakers in the twenty-first century. Nadia Yaqub discusses how early Palestinian cinema operated within emerging public-sector cinema industries in the Arab world, as well as through coproductions and solidarity networks. Her findings aid in understanding the development of alternative cinema in the Arab world. Yaqub also demonstrates that Palestinian filmmaking, as a cinema movement created and sustained under conditions of extraordinary precarity, offers important lessons on the nature and possibilities of political filmmaking more generally.

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Palestinian Lawyers and Israeli Rule
Law and Disorder in the West Bank
By George Emile Bisharat
University of Texas Press, 1989

As frequent intermediaries between Israeli military authorities and Palestinian citizens, Palestinian lawyers stand close to the fault line dividing Israeli and Palestinian societies. The conflicts and tensions they experience in their profession mirror the larger conflicts between the two societies. Thus, as George Bisharat reveals in Palestinian Lawyers and Israeli Rule, a careful study of the work and lives of Palestinian lawyers ultimately helps to illuminate the causes of the intifada, or uprising, that began in December 1987.

The study revolves around the central question of why the Palestinian legal profession declined during twenty years of Israeli occupation when, in other Third World countries, the legal profession has often reached its peak during a period of Western colonization. Bisharat answers this question with a wide-ranging inquiry into the historical origins of the legal profession and court system in Palestine, the tenuous grounding of these institutions in Palestinian society and culture, and the structure, style, and policies of the late-twentieth-century Israeli military government in the West Bank.

For general readers interested in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as well as specialists in such fields as legal anthropology, sociology of the professions, Third World law and development, and Middle Eastern studies, Palestinian Lawyers and Israeli Rule will be required reading.

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Palestinian Rituals of Identity
The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948
Awad Halabi
University of Texas Press, 2023

Members of Palestine’s Muslim community have long honored al-Nabi Musa, or the Prophet Moses. Since the thirteenth century, they have celebrated at a shrine near Jericho believed to be the location of Moses’s tomb; in the mid-nineteenth century, they organized a civic festival in Jerusalem to honor this prophet. Considered one of the most important occasions for Muslim pilgrims in Palestine, the Prophet Moses festival yearly attracted thousands of people who assembled to pray, conduct mystical forms of worship, and hold folk celebrations.

Palestinian Rituals of Identity takes an innovative approach to the study of Palestine’s modern history by focusing on the Prophet Moses festival from the late Ottoman period through the era of British rule. Halabi explores how the festival served as an arena of competing discourses, with various social groups attempting to control its symbols. Tackling questions about modernity, colonialism, gender relations, and identity, Halabi recounts how peasants, Bedouins, rural women, and Sufis sought to influence the festival even as Ottoman authorities, British colonists, Muslim clerics, and Palestinian national leaders did the same. Drawing on extensive research in Arabic newspapers and Islamic and colonial archives, Halabi reveals how the festival has encapsulated Palestinians’ responses to modernity, colonialism, and the nation’s growing national identity.

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Palestinians Born in Exile
Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland
By Juliane Hammer
University of Texas Press, 2005

In the decade following the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, some 100,000 diasporic Palestinians returned to the West Bank and Gaza. Among them were children and young adults who were born in exile and whose sense of Palestinian identity was shaped not by lived experience but rather through the transmission and re-creation of memories, images, and history. As a result, "returning" to the homeland that had never actually been their home presented challenges and disappointments for these young Palestinians, who found their lifeways and values sometimes at odds with those of their new neighbors in the West Bank and Gaza.

This original ethnography records the experiences of Palestinians born in exile who have emigrated to the Palestinian homeland. Juliane Hammer interviews young adults between the ages of 16 and 35 to learn how their Palestinian identity has been affected by living in various Arab countries or the United States and then moving to the West Bank and Gaza. Their responses underscore how much the experience of living outside of Palestine has become integral to the Palestinian national character, even as Palestinians maintain an overwhelming sense of belonging to one another as a people.

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Pampa Grande and the Mochica Culture
By Izumi Shimada
University of Texas Press, 1994

Pampa Grande, the largest and most powerful city of the Mochica (Moche) culture on the north coast of Peru, was built, inhabited, and abandoned during the period A.D. 550-700. It is extremely important archaeologically as one of the few pre-Hispanic cities in South America for which there are enough reliable data to reconstruct a model of pre-Hispanic urbanism.

This book presents a "biography" of Pampa Grande that offers a reconstruction not only of the site itself but also of the sociocultural and economic environment in which it was built and abandoned. Izumi Shimada argues that Pampa Grande was established rapidly and without outside influence at a strategic position at the neck of the Lambayeque Valley that gave it control over intervalley canals and their agricultural potential and allowed it to gain political dominance over local populations. Study of the site itself leads him to posit a large resident population made up of transplanted Mochica and local non-Mochica groups with a social hierarchy of at least three tiers.

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Panama Odyssey
By William J. Jorden
University of Texas Press, 1984

The Panama Canal Treaties of 1977 were the most significant foreign policy achievement of the Carter administration. Most Latin American nations had regarded the 1903 treaty and its later minor modifications as vestiges of "American colonialism" and obstacles to any long-term, stable relationship with the United States. Hence, at a time when conflicts were mushrooming in Central America, the significance of the new Panama treaties cannot be overestimated.

Former Ambassador to Panama William J. Jorden has provided the definitive account of the long and often contentious negotiations that produced those treaties. It is a vividly written reconstruction of the complicated process that began in 1964 and ended with ratification of the new pacts in 1978. Based on his personal involvement behind the scenes in the White House (1972–1974) and in the United States Embassy in Panama (1974–1978), Jorden has produced a unique living history. Access to documents and the personalities of both governments and, equally important, Jorden's personal recollections of participants on both sides make this historical study an incomparable document of U. S. foreign relations.

Beyond the singular story of the treaties themselves—and how diplomats negotiate in the modern world—is the rare description of how the United States deals with a major foreign policy problem. How does a superpower cope with a tiny nation that happens to occupy a strategically critical position? And how does the U. S. Senate face up to its constitutionally assigned power to "advise and consent"? Once treaties are approved, does the House of Representatives help or hinder? Panama Odyssey also deals with another crucial element in the shaping of policy—public opinion: how is it informed or led astray?

In sum, this is a history, a handbook on diplomacy, a course in government, and a revelation of foreign policy in action, all based on a fascinating and controversial episode in the U. S. experience.

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The Pantarch
A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews
By Madeleine B. Stern
University of Texas Press, 1968

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.

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The Panza Monologues
Written, Compiled, and Collected by Virginia Grise and Irma Mayorga
University of Texas Press, 2014

The Panza Monologues is an original solo performance piece based on women's stories about their panzastú sabes—that roll of belly we all try to hide. Written, compiled, and collected by Virginia Grise and Irma Mayorga and fashioned into a tour-de-force solo performance, The Panza Monologues features the words of Chicanas speaking with humor and candor. Their stories boldly place the panza front and center as a symbol that reveals the lurking truths about women's thoughts, lives, loves, abuses, and living conditions.

This second edition of The Panza Monologues presents the performance script in its entirety, as well as a rich supporting cast of dramaturgical and pedagogical materials. These include a narrative history of the play’s development by the playwrights; critical materials that enhance and expand upon the script’s themes and ideas (a short introduction to San Antonio, where the play was developed; playwright autogeographies; and a manifesto on women of color making theater); and a selection of pedagogical and creative ideas, including guidelines and advice for staging a production of the play and for teaching it in the classroom, community-making activities (screenings, hosting “Panza Parties,” community/group discussions), and creative writing activities connected to the play.

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The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco
Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico
By Jeanette Favrot Peterson
University of Texas Press, 1993

Winner, Charles Rufus Morey Award, 1993

The valley of Malinalco, Mexico, long renowned for its monolithic Aztec temples, is a microcosm of the historical changes that occurred in the centuries preceding and following the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. In particular, the garden frescoes uncovered in 1974 at the Augustinian monastery of Malinalco document the collision of the European search for Utopia with the reality of colonial life.

In this study, Jeanette F. Peterson examines the murals within the dual heritage of pre-Hispanic and European muralism to reveal how the wall paintings promoted the political and religious agendas of the Spanish conquerors while preserving a record of pre-Columbian rituals and imagery. She finds that the utopian themes portrayed at Malinalco and other Augustinian monasteries were integrated into a religious and political ideology that, in part, camouflaged the harsh realities of colonial policies toward the native population.

That the murals were ultimately whitewashed at the end of the sixteenth century suggests that the "spiritual conquest" failed. Peterson argues that the incorporation of native features ultimately worked to undermine the orthodoxy of the Christian message. She places the murals' imagery within the pre-Columbian tlacuilo (scribe-painter) tradition, traces a "Sahagún connection" between the Malinalco muralists and the native artists working at the Franciscan school of Tlatelolco, and explores mural painting as an artistic response to acculturation.

The book is beautifully illustrated with 137 black-and-white figures, including photographs and line drawings. For everyone interested in the encounter between European and Native American cultures, it will be essential reading.

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Paraguay and the Triple Alliance
The Postwar Decade, 1869-1878
By Harris Gaylord Warren
University of Texas Press, 1978

In the War of the Triple Alliance—the most terrible conflict in South American history—Paraguay was almost annihilated by the armed forces of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. The chaotic postwar decade began with the Allied occupation of Asunción, which lasted seven years, and was marked by Brazilian-Argentine rivalry and interference in Paraguayan affairs and by the efforts of Paraguay’s governments to revive their stricken land, efforts often thwarted by corruption, factionalism, and revolutions. It ended with the arbitral award eliminating Argentina as a claimant to the Chaco Boreal and with the ascendancy of the Colorado Party, which dominated Paraguayan politics for most of the next century.

This is the first book in any language that examines political, economic, and social developments to provide a well-integrated study of this significant and eventful period. It is based on archival resources, largely unused before, in England, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, as well as on newspapers, books, pamphlets, and published documents in many libraries. As one historian has said, the study is “a masterpiece of sleuthing and historical synthesis.” It will be of interest not only to students of Paraguay but also to those concerned with Brazilian, Argentine, and Latin American history.

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Parks for Texas
Enduring Landscapes of the New Deal
By James Wright Steely
University of Texas Press, 1999

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.

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Parson Henry Renfro
Free Thinking on the Texas Frontier
By William C. Griggs
University of Texas Press, 1994

The years following the Texas Revolution held even more turbulent events as diverse droves of pioneers crossed the Sabine and Red Rivers to start new lives in Texas. Early Texas society contended with religious issues, family life in a rugged environment, and the Civil War. This cultural history was clearly reflected in the life of frontier preacher Henry C. Renfro.

Migrating to Texas in 1851, Renfro enrolled in the fledgling Baylor University and became a Baptist preacher. Eventually disillusioned with Baptist orthodoxy, Renfro was disenfranchised on charges of infidelity as he embraced the ideals of the Free Thought Movement, inspired by the writings of men such as Thomas Paine, Spinoza, and Robert Ingersoll.

Renfro's Civil War experience was no less unusual. Serving as both soldier and chaplain, Renfro left a valuable legacy of insight into the conflict, captured in a wealth of correspondence that is in itself significant.

Drawing on a vast body of letters, speeches, sermons, and oral histories that had never before been available, this chronological narrative of "The Parson's" life describes significant changes in Texas from 1850 to 1900, especially the volatile formation and growth of Baptist churches in North Central Texas. William Griggs' study yields numerous new details about the Free Thought Movement and depicts public reaction to sectarian leaders in nineteenth-century Texas.

The author also describes the developing Central Texas region known as the Cross Timbers, including the personal dynamics between a frontier family and its patriarch and encompassing such issues as property conflicts, divorce, and family reconciliation. This work unlocks an enlightening, engaging scene from Texas history.

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Party and Factional Division in Texas
By James R. Soukup, Clifton McCleskey, and Harry Holloway
University of Texas Press, 1964

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.

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Passage to Dusk
By Rashid al-Daif
University of Texas Press, 2001

Passage to Dusk deals with the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s in a postmodern, poetic style. The narrative focuses on the deranged, destabilized, confused, and hyper-perceptive state of mind created by living on the scene through a lengthy war. The story is filled with details that transcend the willed narcissism of the main character, while giving clues to the culture of the time. It is excellent fiction, written in a surrealistic mode, but faithful to the characters of the people of Lebanon, their behavior during the war, and their contradictions. Issues of gender and identity are acutely portrayed against Lebanon's shifting national landscape.

The English-language reader has not been much exposed to Lebanese literature in translation, and Rashid al-Daif is one of Lebanon's leading writers. He has been translated into eight languages, including French, German, Italian, Polish, and Spanish. Translator Nirvana Tanoukhi manages to preserve Daif's unusual, moving, and at times humorous style in her English rendition.

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The Passion of David Lynch
Wild at Heart in Hollywood
By Martha P. Nochimson
University of Texas Press, 1997

Filmmaker David Lynch asserts that when he is directing, ninety percent of the time he doesn't know what he is doing. To understand Lynch's films, Martha Nochimson believes, requires a similar method of being open to the subconscious, of resisting the logical reductiveness of language. In this innovative book, she draws on these strategies to offer close readings of Lynch's films, informed by unprecedented, in-depth interviews with Lynch himself.

Nochimson begins with a look at Lynch's visual influences—Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, and Edward Hopper—and his links to Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, then moves into the heart of her study, in-depth analyses of Lynch's films and television productions. These include Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Dune, The Elephant Man, Eraserhead, The Grandmother, The Alphabet, and Lynch's most recent, Lost Highway.

Nochimson's interpretations explode previous misconceptions of Lynch as a deviant filmmaker and misogynist. Instead, she shows how he subverts traditional Hollywood gender roles to offer an optimistic view that love and human connection are really possible.

[more]

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Past Climates
Tree Thermometers, Commodities, and People
By Leona Marshall Libby
University of Texas Press, 1983

Leona Marshall Libby was a pioneer in modern climatic research, a field that gained great impetus in the late twentieth century because of the promise it holds for predicting future climatic trends. Libby’s work led to remarkable new procedures for investigating long-term changes in precipitation and temperature and thereby greatly expanding our knowledge of past climates.

As Professor Rainer Berger writes in his foreword:

 “In recent years, tree ring–based temperature data have been collected which go far beyond the records available to historians. These data can be analyzed by Fourier transforms which identify certain periodicities. . . . Climatic changes detected by tree rings have been checked against historic records. . . . The correspondence is astonishing. . . .  

“At present weather forecasting is becoming more accurate for periods on the order of days, weeks, and months. Climatic prognoses have also been attempted for very long times of tens of thousands of years. But the intermediate range in the decades and centuries has so far been an enigma. It is here where tree ring thermometry plays its trump cards.

 “. . . Its potential is enormous in assessing worldwide crop yields, water inventory, heating requirements, stockpiling policies, and construction planning as well as political and military prospects.”

[more]

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Pastures of the Empty Page
Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry
George Getschow, editor
University of Texas Press, 2023

A collection of essays that offers an intimate view of Larry McMurtry, America’s preeminent western novelist, through the eyes of a pantheon of writers he helped shape through his work over the course of his unparalleled literary life.

When he died in 2021, Larry McMurtry was one of America’s most revered writers. The author of treasured novels such as Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show, and coauthor of the screenplays for Brokeback Mountain and Streets of Laredo, McMurtry created unforgettable characters and landscapes largely drawn from his life growing up on the family’s hardscrabble ranch outside his hometown of Archer City, Texas. Pastures of the Empty Page brings together fellow writers to honor the man and his impact on American letters.

Paulette Jiles, Stephen Harrigan, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, and Lawrence Wright take up McMurtry’s piercing and poetic vision—an elegiac literature of place that demolished old myths of cowboy culture and created new ones. Screenwriting partner Diana Ossana reflects on their thirty-year book and screenwriting partnership; other contributors explore McMurtry’s reading habits and his passion for bookselling. And brother Charlie McMurtry shares memories of their childhood on the ranch. In contrast to his curmudgeonly persona, Larry McMurtry emerges as a trustworthy friend and supportive mentor. McMurtry was famously self-deprecating, but as his admirers attest, this self-described “minor regional writer” was an artist for the ages.

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The Path to a Modern South
Northeast Texas between Reconstruction and the Great Depression
By Walter L. Buenger
University of Texas Press, 2001

The forces that turned Northeast Texas from a poverty-stricken region into a more economically prosperous area.

Winner, Texas State Historical Association Coral H. Tullis Memorial Award for best book on Texas history, 2001

Federal New Deal programs of the 1930s and World War II are often credited for transforming the South, including Texas, from a poverty-stricken region mired in Confederate mythology into a more modern and economically prosperous part of the United States. By contrast, this history of Northeast Texas, one of the most culturally southern areas of the state, offers persuasive evidence that political, economic, and social modernization began long before the 1930s and prepared Texans to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the New Deal and World War II.

Walter L. Buenger draws on extensive primary research to tell the story of change in Northeast Texas from 1887 to 1930. Moving beyond previous, more narrowly focused studies of the South, he traces and interconnects the significant changes that occurred in politics, race relations, business and the economy, and women's roles. He also reveals how altered memories of the past and the emergence of a stronger identification with Texas history affected all facets of life in Northeast Texas.

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Paths to Excellence
The Dell Medical School and Medical Education in Texas
Kenneth I. Shine and Amy Shaw Thomas
University of Texas Press, 2021
For more than a century, medical schools and academic campuses were largely separate in Texas. Though new medical technologies and drugs—conceivably, even a vaccine instrumental in the prevention of a pandemic—might be developed on an academic campus such as the University of Texas at Austin, there was no co-located medical school with which to collaborate. Faculty members were left to seek experts on distant campuses. That all changed on May 3, 2012, when the UT System Board of Regents voted to create the Dell Medical School in Austin.

This book tells in detail and for the first time the story of how this change came about: how dedicated administrators, alumni, business leaders, community organizers, doctors, legislators, professors, and researchers joined forces, overcame considerable resistance, and raised the funds to build a new medical school without any direct state monies. Funding was secured in large part by the unique willingness of the local community to tax itself to pay for the financial operations of the school. Kenneth I. Shine and Amy Shaw Thomas, who witnessed this process from their unique vantages as past and present vice chancellors for health affairs in the University of Texas System, offer a working model that will enable other leaders to more effectively seek solutions, avoid pitfalls, and build for the future.
[more]

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Peasant Cooperation and Capitalist Expansion in Central Peru
Edited by Norman Long and Bryan R. Roberts
University of Texas Press, 1978

This book brings together the research into regional development and social change carried out in highland Peru by a team of British and Latin American social anthropologists and sociologists. The area studied—the Mantaro Valley of central Peru—is one of the most densely populated and economically differentiated of highland zones; it is also notable for its community-based forms of cooperation and its high level of peasant political activity.

The book presents a series of case studies that examine cooperative forms of organization in relation to developments in the regional economy and to changes in national policy. The analysis attempts to avoid interpreting local processes merely as responses to externally initiated change. It stresses instead the need to consider the interplay of local and national forces, because local groups and processes themselves affect the pattern of regional and national development. The case studies cover a range of political and economic topics, from peasant movements to the achievements and shortcomings of government-sponsored agricultural and manufacturing cooperatives. The concluding chapter, by the editors, explores the theoretical implications of these studies.

[more]

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Peasants in Revolt
A Chilean Case Study, 1965–1971
By James Petras and Hugo Zemelman Merino; translated by Thomas Flory
University of Texas Press, 1973

Based on extended interviews at the Culiprán fundo in Chile with peasants who recount in their own terms their political evolution, this is an in-depth study of peasants in social and political action. It deals with two basic themes: first, the authoritarian structure within a traditional latifundio and its eventual replacement by a peasant-based elected committee, and second, the events shaping the emergence of political consciousness among the peasantry. Petras and Zemelman Merino trace the careers of local peasant leaders, followers, and opponents of the violent illegal land seizure in 1965 and the events that triggered the particular action.

The findings of this study challenge the oft-accepted assumption that peasants represent a passive, traditional, downtrodden group capable only of following urban-based elites. The peasant militants, while differing considerably in their ability to grasp complex political and social problems, show a great deal of political skill, calculate rationally on the possibility of success, and select and manipulate political allies on the basis of their own primary needs. The politicized peasantry lend their allegiance to those forces with whom they anticipate they have the most to gain—and under circumstances that minimize social costs. The authors identify the highly repressive political culture within the latifundio—reinforced by the national political system—as the key factor inhibiting overt expressions of political demands.

The emergence of revolutionary political consciousness is found to be the result of cumulative experiences and the breakdown of traditional institutions of control. The violent illegal seizure of the farm is perceived by the peasantry as a legitimate act based on self-interest as well as general principles of justice—in other words, the seizure is perceived as a “natural act,” suggesting that perhaps two sets of moralities functioned within the traditional system.

The book is divided into two parts: the first part contains a detailed analysis of peasant behavior; the second contains transcriptions of peasant interviews. Combined, they give the texture and flavor of insurgent peasant politics.

[more]

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Peasants on the Edge
Crop, Cult, and Crisis in the Andes
By William P. Mitchell
University of Texas Press, 1991

Throughout Latin America and the rest of the Third World, profound social problems are growing in response to burgeoning populations and unstable economic and political systems. In Peru, terrorist acts by the Shining Path guerilla movement are the most visible manifestation of social discontent, but rapid economic and religious changes have touched the lives of almost everyone, radically altering traditional lifeways. In this twenty-year study of the community of Quinua in the Department of Ayacucho, William Mitchell looks at changes provoked by population growth within a severely limited ecological and economic setting, including increasing conversion to a cash economy and out-migration, the decline of the Catholic fiesta system and the rise of Protestantism, and growing poverty and revolution.

When Mitchell first began his field studies in Quinua in 1966, farming was still the Quinueños' principal means of livelihood. But while the population was increasing rapidly, the amount of arable land in the community remained the same, creating increased food shortfalls. At the same time, government controls on food prices and subsidies of cheap food imports drove down the value of rural farm production. These ecological and economic factors forced many people to enter the nonfarm economy to feed themselves.

Using a materialist approach, Mitchell charts the new economic strategies that Quinueños use to confront the harsh pressures of their lives, including ceramic production, wage labor, petty commerce, and migration to cash work on the coat and in the eastern tropical forests. In addition, he shows how the growing conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism is also an economic strategy, since Protestant ideology offers acceptable reasons for redirecting the money that used to be spent on elaborate religious festivals to household needs and education.

The twenty-year span of this study makes it especially valuable for students of social change. Mitchell's unique, interdisciplinary approach, considering ecological, economic, and population factors simultaneously, offers a model that can be widely applied in many Third World areas. Additionally, the inclusion of an entire chapter of family histories reveals how economic and ecological forces are played out at the individual level.

[more]

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The Pecan
A History of America's Native Nut
By James McWilliams
University of Texas Press, 2013

What would Thanksgiving be without pecan pie? New Orleans without pecan pralines? Southern cooks would have to hang up their aprons without America’s native nut, whose popularity has spread far beyond the tree’s natural home. But as familiar as the pecan is, most people don’t know the fascinating story of how native pecan trees fed Americans for thousands of years until the nut was “improved” a little more than a century ago—and why that rapid domestication actually threatens the pecan’s long-term future.

In The Pecan, acclaimed writer and historian James McWilliams explores the history of America’s most important commercial nut. He describes how essential the pecan was for Native Americans—by some calculations, an average pecan harvest had the food value of nearly 150,000 bison. McWilliams explains that, because of its natural edibility, abundance, and ease of harvesting, the pecan was left in its natural state longer than any other commercial fruit or nut crop in America. Yet once the process of “improvement” began, it took less than a century for the pecan to be almost totally domesticated. Today, more than 300 million pounds of pecans are produced every year in the United States—and as much as half of that total might be exported to China, which has fallen in love with America’s native nut. McWilliams also warns that, as ubiquitous as the pecan has become, it is vulnerable to a “perfect storm” of economic threats and ecological disasters that could wipe it out within a generation. This lively history suggests why the pecan deserves to be recognized as a true American heirloom.

[more]

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The Peculiar Revolution
Rethinking the Peruvian Experiment Under Military Rule
Edited by Carlos Aguirre and Paulo Drinot
University of Texas Press, 2017

On October 3, 1968, a military junta led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado took over the government of Peru. In striking contrast to the right-wing, pro–United States/anti-Communist military dictatorships of that era, however, Velasco’s “Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces” set in motion a left-leaning nationalist project aimed at radically transforming Peruvian society by eliminating social injustice, breaking the cycle of foreign domination, redistributing land and wealth, and placing the destiny of Peruvians into their own hands. Although short-lived, the Velasco regime did indeed have a transformative effect on Peru, the meaning and legacy of which are still subjects of intense debate.

The Peculiar Revolution revisits this fascinating and idiosyncratic period of Latin American history. The book is organized into three sections that examine the era’s cultural politics, including not just developments directed by the Velasco regime but also those that it engendered but did not necessarily control; its specific policies and key institutions; and the local and regional dimensions of the social reforms it promoted. In a series of innovative chapters written by both prominent and rising historians, this volume illuminates the cultural dimensions of the revolutionary project and its legacies, the impact of structural reforms at the local level (including previously understudied areas of the country such as Piura, Chimbote, and the Amazonia), and the effects of state policies on ordinary citizens and labor and peasant organizations.

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A People Without a State
The Kurds from the Rise of Islam to the Dawn of Nationalism
By Michael Eppel
University of Texas Press, 2016

Numbering between 25 and 35 million worldwide, the Kurds are among the largest culturally and ethnically distinct people to remain stateless. A People Without a State offers an in-depth survey of an identity that has often been ignored in mainstream historiographies of the Middle East and brings to life the historical, social, and political developments in Kurdistani society over the past millennium.

Michael Eppel begins with the myths and realities of the origins of the Kurds, describes the effect upon them of medieval Muslim states under Arab, Persian, and Turkish dominance, and recounts the emergence of tribal-feudal dynasties. He explores in detail the subsequent rise of Kurdish emirates, as well as this people’s literary and linguistic developments, particularly the flourishing of poetry. The turning tides of the nineteenth century, including Ottoman reforms and fluctuating Russian influence after the Crimean War, set in motion an early Kurdish nationalism that further expressed a distinct cultural identity. Stateless, but rooted in the region, the Kurds never achieved independence because of geopolitical conditions, tribal rivalries, and obstacles on the way to modernization. A People Without a State captures the developments that nonetheless forged a vast sociopolitical system.

[more]

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The People’s Party in Texas
A Study in Third Party Politics
By Roscoe Martin
University of Texas Press, 1970

Roscoe Martin's study of the People's Party in Texas was a pioneering analysis of the state populist movements and long considered one of the best. The People's Party was an influential force in United States politics in the last decade of the nineteenth century, especially in the western and southern states. Martin's study of third-party politics in Texas, as well as being an important work in Texas history, provides much insight into the national radical movement of the 1890s.

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The Pepper Lady's Pocket Pepper Primer
Text and photographs by Jean Andrews
University of Texas Press, 1998

More than a quarter of the people on earth eat peppers every day of their lives, and true pepper lovers are always looking for better-tasting, hotter peppers. This handy, reliable guide makes finding them easy, as capsicum expert Jean Andrews shows you how to identify and use 42 peppers, both fresh and dried, commonly available in North American markets.

Andrews describes each pepper in detail, starting with its size, color, fruit shape, flesh, and pungency. She gives its common names, sources, and uses, and indicates other peppers that can substitute for it in recipes. Drawing on her vast store of pepper lore, she also includes notes and anecdotes about each pepper. Her color photographs illustrate all of the peppers.

In addition to the species descriptions, Andrews offers practical guidance on selecting and storing, roasting and rehydrating, and growing and harvesting peppers. She explains pepper nomenclature, describes the pungency factor, and notes the significance of color, aroma, flavor, and nutrition.

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Peregrina
Love and Death in Mexico
By Alma M. Reed
University of Texas Press, 2007

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.

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Peregrine Falcon
Stories of the Blue Meanie
By James H. Enderson
University of Texas Press, 2005

A superb success as a bird, combining great speed, aeronautical grace, and fearlessness...inhabitant of wild places, inaccessible cliffs, and skyscrapers...worldwide dweller, trans-equatorial migrant, and docile captive—the peregrine falcon stands alone among all others of its kind. Perhaps this is why so many varied people rushed to its aid when it faced decimation by pesticide poisoning.

In this personal and highly entertaining memoir, Jim Enderson tells stories of a lifetime spent studying, training, breeding, and simply enjoying peregrine falcons. He recalls how his boyhood interest in raptors grew into an ornithological career in which he became one of the leading experts who helped identity DDT as the cause of the peregrine falcon's sudden and massive decline across the United States. His stories reveal both the dedication that he and fellow researchers brought to the task of studying and restoring the peregrine and the hair-raising adventures that sometimes befell them along the way. Enderson also seamlessly weaves in the biology and natural history of the peregrine, as well as anecdotes about its traditional and widespread use in falconry as an aggressive yet tractable hunter, to offer a broad portrait of this splendid and intriguing falcon.

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Perennial Gardens for Texas
By Julie Ryan
University of Texas Press, 1998

A perennial garden is an ever-changing source of delight. Each season brings new colors and textures in flowers and foliage. As the years go by, perennial plantings mature and interweave into forms more beautiful and surprising than a season's growth of annuals can ever give. Best of all, a perennial garden can grow almost anywhere with plants suited to local soils, temperatures, and rainfall.

This book is a complete guide to perennial gardening in Texas and similar regions of eastern New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas. In Part One, Julie Ryan offers a historical sketch of cottage gardens and perennial borders, with a sampler of some of their modern variations. In Part Two, she defines the major ecological regions of Texas and, with words and color photographs, takes you on a tour of lovely public and private gardens in each region.

You'll find all the "how to" information for creating your own garden in Part Three. Ms. Ryan describes and pictures over 300 flowering perennials, bulbs, foliage plants, and old roses suitable for Texas gardens, with lists of companion annuals, vines, shrubs, and small trees. Accompanying charts provide quick reference to each plant's preferred regions and cultivation requirements. In addition, Ms. Ryan discusses how to design a garden and select plants, prepare the beds, and deal with garden pests. She concludes with substantial lists of resources, including mail-order suppliers of perennials, bulbs, and old roses.

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A Perfectly Good Guitar
Musicians on Their Favorite Instruments
By Chuck Holley
University of Texas Press, 2017

Ask guitar players about their instruments, and you’re likely to get a story—where the guitar came from, or what makes it unique, or why the player will never part with it. Most guitarists have strong feelings about their primary tool, and some are downright passionate about their axes. Chuck Holley is a professional photographer and writer who loves music and listening to musicians talk about their trade. For several years, he has been photographing guitarists with their prized instruments and collecting their stories. This beautifully illustrated book presents these stories in revelatory photographs and words.

The guitarists included in this book range from high-profile performers, including Rosanne Cash, Guy Clark, Laurence Juber, Jorma Kaukonen, JD Souther, Bill Frisell, Dave Alvin, and Kelly Willis, to renowned studio musicians and band members. Holley’s beautifully composed photographs portray them with their favorite guitar, including detail shots of the instrument. Accompanying the photographs are the musicians’ stories about the Gibsons, Fenders, Martins, and others that have become the guitar in their lives, the one that has a special lineage or intangible qualities of sustain, tone, clarity, and comfort that make it irreplaceable. Several musicians talk about how the guitar chose them, while others recount stories of guitars lost or stolen and then serendipitously recovered. Together, these photographs and stories underscore the great pleasure of performing with an instrument that’s become a trusted friend with a personality all its own.

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The Performer-Audience Connection
Emotion to Metaphor in Dance and Society
By Judith Lynne Hanna
University of Texas Press, 1983

The Performer-Audience Connection is a pioneering foray into one of the major puzzles of human communication: the communication of emotion in dance. It is the first attempt of its kind systematically to investigate what performers wish to convey and what audiences perceive in the performance of dance.

The centerpiece of this provocative book is an examination of performer intentions and audience response at eight dance performances in Washington, D.C. Part of the Smithsonian Institution Division of Performing Arts Dance Series, these concerts featured a variety of dance genres and cultures: American tap dance, Kathakali dance-drama from Kerala, India, Japanese Kabuki, contemporary avant-garde dance, Philippine folk dance, the Indian classical tradition of Kuchipudi, and modern dance to an AfroAmerican spiritual.

How did dancer and audience interact at the emotional level on these eight occasions? What affected performer-audience rapport? Through interviews of both spectators and dancers, Judith Lynne Hanna explores the performers' ways of imparting emotion through movement and audience members' expectations and responses. In doing so she casts new light on important issues of cultural identity, sex role, historic attitudes toward dance, and even marketing the arts today.

A landmark work not only for performers who wish to reach their audiences more effectively but also for choreographers, anthropologists, specialists in nonverbal communication, behavioral scientists, educators, and all who are fascinated by the arts and the special magic of the "performer-audience connection."

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Performing Kinship
Narrative, Gender, and the Intimacies of Power in the Andes
By Krista E. Van Vleet
University of Texas Press, 2008

In the highland region of Sullk'ata, located in the rural Bolivian Andes, habitual activities such as sharing food, work, and stories create a sense of relatedness among people. Through these day-to-day interactions—as well as more unusual events—individuals negotiate the affective bonds and hierarchies of their relationships. In Performing Kinship, Krista E. Van Vleet reveals the ways in which relatedness is evoked, performed, and recast among the women of Sullk'ata.

Portraying relationships of camaraderie and conflict, Van Vleet argues that narrative illuminates power relationships, which structure differences among women as well as between women and men. She also contends that in the Andes gender cannot be understood without attention to kinship.

Stories such as that of the young woman who migrates to the city to do domestic work and later returns to the highlands voicing a deep ambivalence about the traditional authority of her in-laws provide enlightening examples of the ways in which storytelling enables residents of Sullk'ata to make sense of events and link themselves to one another in a variety of relationships. A vibrant ethnography, Performing Kinship offers a rare glimpse into an compelling world.

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Performing Mexicanidad
Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage
By Laura G. Gutiérrez
University of Texas Press, 2010

Using interdisciplinary performance studies and cultural studies frameworks, Laura G. Gutiérrez examines the cultural representation of queer sexuality in the contemporary cultural production of Mexican female and Chicana performance and visual artists. In particular, she locates the analytical lenses of feminist theory and queer theory in a central position to interrogate Mexican female dissident sexualities in transnational public culture.

This is the first book-length study to wed performance studies and queer theory in examining the performative/performance work of important contemporary Mexicana and Chicana cultural workers. It proposes that the creations of several important artists—Chicana visual artist Alma López; the Mexican political cabareteras Astrid Hadad, Jesusa Rodríguez, Liliana Felipe, and Regina Orozco; the Chicana performance artist Nao Bustamante; and the Mexican video artist Ximena Cuevas—unsettle heterosexual national culture. In doing so, they are not only challenging heterosexist and nationalist discourses head-on, but are also participating in the construction of a queer world-making project. Treating the notion of dis-comfort as a productive category in these projects advances feminist and queer theories by offering an insightful critical movement suggesting that queer worlds are simultaneously spaces of desire, fear, and hope.

Gutiérrez demonstrates how arenas formerly closed to female performers are now providing both an artistic outlet and a powerful political tool that crosses not only geographic borders but social, sexual, political, and class boundaries as well, and deconstructs the relationships among media, hierarchies of power, and the cultures of privilege.

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Performing Piety
Singers and Actors in Egypt's Islamic Revival
By Karin van Nieuwkerk
University of Texas Press, 2013

In the 1980s, Egypt witnessed a growing revival of religiosity among large sectors of the population, including artists. Many pious stars retired from art, “repented” from “sinful” activities, and dedicated themselves to worship, preaching, and charity. Their public conversions were influential in spreading piety to the Egyptian upper class during the 1990s, which in turn enabled the development of pious markets for leisure and art, thus facilitating the return of artists as veiled actresses or religiously committed performers.

Revisiting the story she began in “A Trade like Any Other”: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt, Karin van Nieuwkerk draws on extensive fieldwork among performers to offer a unique history of the religious revival in Egypt through the lens of the performing arts. She highlights the narratives of celebrities who retired in the 1980s and early 1990s, including their spiritual journeys and their influence on the “pietization” of their fans, among whom are the wealthy, relatively secular, strata of Egyptian society. Van Nieuwkerk then turns to the emergence of a polemic public sphere in which secularists and Islamists debated Islam, art, and gender in the 1990s. Finally, she analyzes the Islamist project of “art with a mission” and the development of Islamic aesthetics, questioning whether the outcome has been to Islamize popular art or rather to popularize Islam. The result is an intimate thirty-year history of two spheres that have tremendous importance for Egypt—art production and piety.

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Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America
Intervening Acts
By Vicky Unruh
University of Texas Press, 2006

Women have always been the muses who inspire the creativity of men, but how do women become the creators of art themselves? This was the challenge faced by Latin American women who aspired to write in the 1920s and 1930s. Though women's roles were opening up during this time, women writers were not automatically welcomed by the Latin American literary avant-gardes, whose male members viewed women's participation in tertulias (literary gatherings) and publications as uncommon and even forbidding. How did Latin American women writers, celebrated by male writers as the "New Eve" but distrusted as fellow creators, find their intellectual homes and fashion their artistic missions?

In this innovative book, Vicky Unruh explores how women writers of the vanguard period often gained access to literary life as public performers. Using a novel, interdisciplinary synthesis of performance theory, she shows how Latin American women's work in theatre, poetry declamation, song, dance, oration, witty display, and bold journalistic self-portraiture helped them craft their public personas as writers and shaped their singular forms of analytical thought, cultural critique, and literary style. Concentrating on eleven writers from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, Unruh demonstrates that, as these women identified themselves as instigators of change rather than as passive muses, they unleashed penetrating critiques of projects for social and artistic modernization in Latin America.

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Pericles on Stage
Political Comedy in Aristophanes' Early Plays
By Michael Vickers
University of Texas Press, 1996

Since the eighteenth century, classical scholars have generally agreed that the Greek playwright Aristophanes did not as a matter of course write "political" plays. Yet, according to an anonymous Life of Aristophanes, when Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse wanted to know about the government of Athens, Plato sent him a copy of Aristophanes' Clouds.

In this boldly revisionist work, Michael Vickers convincingly argues that in his earlier plays, Aristophanes in fact commented on the day-to-day political concerns of Athenians. Vickers reads the first six of Aristophanes' eleven extant plays in a way that reveals the principal characters to be based in large part on Pericles and his ward Alcibiades.

According to Vickers, the plays of Aristophanes—far from being nonpolitical—actually allow us to gauge the reaction of the Athenian public to the events that followed Pericles' death in 429 B.C., to the struggle for the political succession, and to the problems presented by Alcibiades' emergence as one of the most powerful figures in the state. This view of Aristophanes reaffirms the central role of allegory in his work and challenges all students of ancient Greece to rethink long-held assumptions about this important playwright.

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Periklean Athens and Its Legacy
Problems and Perspectives
Edited by Judith M. Barringer and Jeffrey M. Hurwit
University of Texas Press, 2005

The late fifth century BC was the golden age of ancient Athens. Under the leadership of the renowned soldier-statesman Perikles, Athenians began rebuilding the Akropolis, where they created the still awe-inspiring Parthenon. Athenians also reached a zenith of artistic achievement in sculpture, vase painting, and architecture, which provided continuing inspiration for many succeeding generations.

The specially commissioned essays in this volume offer a fresh, innovative panorama of the art, architecture, history, culture, and influence of Periklean Athens. Written by leading experts in the field, the articles cover a wide range of topics, including:

  • An evaluation of Perikles' military leadership during the early stages of the Peloponnesian War.
  • Iconographical and iconological studies of vase paintings, wall paintings, and sculpture.
  • Explorations of the Parthenon and other monuments of the Athenian Akropolis.
  • The legacy of Periklean Athens and its influence upon later art.
  • Assessments of the modern reception of the Akropolis.

As a whole, this collection of essays proves that even a well-explored field such as Periklean Athens can yield new treasures when mined by perceptive and seasoned investigators.

[more]

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Personality Development in Children
Edited by Ira Iscoe and Harold Stevenson
University of Texas Press, 1960

This book presents penetrating observations by six authorities on the personality development of children for the enlightenment of parents, teachers, and others who have a vital interest in children.

In the first paper, the late Harold E. Jones, a professor of psychology and the director of the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, examines the development of personality over a long period of time. He discusses the child-rearing practices used with a number of babies, then follows through with observations made several years later to see the effects of these practices.

In another paper, John E. Anderson, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota and the former director of the Institute of Child Development and Welfare there, supports the theory that valid predictions of future personality adjustment can be made through an assessment of the present status of an individual.

Anderson’s findings are based on the results of tests administered to children of Nobles County, Minnesota, during the period 1950–1957, and on teacher-community-pupil ratings of these children.

Still other papers offer a variety of ideas. Dr. Milton J. E. Senn, Sterling Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry and the director of the Child Study Center at Yale University, suggests that there be greater harmony and more exchange of thought among people working toward a proper understanding of human nature. To a degree this entire book follows his suggestion.

Among several noteworthy observations made by Stanford University Professor of Psychology Robert R. Sears is the point that the development of conscience depends largely upon whether a child is loved or rejected by his or her parents.

John W. M. Whiting, professor of education and director of the Laboratory for Human Development at Harvard University, discusses, among other problems, the question of why children like to play grown-up roles and what happens when they are not permitted to do so. Orville Brim, a sociologist at the Russell Sage Foundation of New York City, explains personality in terms of demands, holding that one’s personality changes from situation to situation and from person to person.

[more]

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Perspectives of Roman Poetry
A Classics Symposium
Edited by G. Karl Galinsky
University of Texas Press, 1974

Written by leading specialists, the essays in Perspectives of Roman Poetry seek to provide a broad range of readers with a good understanding of some essential aspects of major Roman poets and poetic genres. The value of the essays is enhanced, for comparative purposes, by their extensive reference to modern authors. such as Shakespeare and Tolkien. For the modern reader, Latin quotations are accompanied by effective English translations.

The essays and their authors are as follows:

  • "The Woman's Role in Latin Love Poetry," by Georg Luck
  • "Autobiography and Art in Horace," by William S. Anderson
  • "Some Trees in Virgil and Tolkien," by Kenneth J. Reckford
  • "The Business of Roman Comedy," by Erich Segal
  • "Ovid's Metamorphosis of Myth," by G. Karl Galinsky
The preface and concluding panel discussion illumine the situation of literary criticism inthe classics and point out the need for diversity.

Perspectives of Roman Poetry resulted from a symposium held at the University of Texas at Austin in 1972. These essays offer different and, in some cases, heterodox interpretations that will serve as a basis for future discussions.

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Petroleum Politics and the Texas Railroad Commission
By David F. Prindle
University of Texas Press, 1981

The single most important domestic source of oil and gas is managed by the Texas Railroad Commission. As a result, the Commission has for decades exerted a profound influence on United States and world energy policy. This influence may even increase with the recent decision to remove price controls on oil and gas. Commission decisions determine where and when oil and gas wells are drilled, how much can be produced from them, and how the products can be transported. Since the 1930s the Commission has heavily influenced both the supply and the price of petroleum in the rest of the country simply because Texas provides such a large proportion of the United States' petroleum.

As might be expected with the management of resources worth billions of dollars, the Railroad Commission has been an arena of intense political maneuvering. David Prindle examines in detail seven policymaking episodes, covering five decades of the Commission's history. He recounts the economic and political cleavages arising from clashes of interest, the efforts of individuals and organizations to exert influence, the motives and methods underlying the policy choices of the Commissioners, and the political and economic consequences of those choices, both for Texas and for the rest of the country.

This detailed look at the Railroad Commission and the politics of petroleum in Texas will be of interest to the general public and all those involved in the oil and gas industry. Scholars and students in the field of policy studies, especially energy policy, will find this book to be an invaluable guide to an important sector of the American petroleum industry.

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Philip Freneau
Champion of Democracy
By Jacob Axelrad
University of Texas Press, 1967

Philip Freneau was a poet, editor, and mariner. A graduate of Princeton, he was the roommate of James Madison and a classmate of Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Aaron Burr. When the colonies rebelled against England, he supported his newly born nation as a privateer, spending some time in a British prison as a result. He also served, more effectively, as “the poet of the Revolution.” Later he became the journalistic voice of the democrats.

Ardently devoted to liberty, he believed himself to be a defender of the common man, for whom he fought selflessly and often vitriolicly throughout his life. In newspapers such as The Freeman’s Journal, The New York Daily Advertiser, The National Gazette, The Jersey Chronicle, and The Time-Piece, he published articles, letters, and poems, instructing the citizens of the new Republic about their rights, and attacking those who, he believed, were infringing on those rights. In the midst of the controversy in which he was so often involved, he also found time to write a small body of poetry whose sensitivity and beauty mark him as the poetic equal of his European contemporaries, and, in fact, as a precursor of the new Romantic movement

In Philip Freneau: Champion of Democracy Jacob Axelrad provides a detailed biography of this pensman of the Revolution and early Republic. He gives a sympathetic, imaginative, perceptive, yet objective interpretation of Freneau and his place in history, and at the same time he presents a delightfully readable and clear picture of the period during which the poet lived.

These pages not only re-create the battles between Whig and Tory, federalist and democrat, but they also are alive with the activities and philosophies of the men who made American history. James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, John Adams, James Monroe go about the business of creating and shaping a new country, and as they do, they move into and out of the life of the poet of Monmouth, influencing him in a variety of ways.

Above all, Axelrad brings to life for the reader the man Freneau: simple, direct, often uncritical in his devotion to the cause he believed in; courageous in sustaining his stand against strong opposition; disillusioned and pessimistic about human nature, yet boldly optimistic about the future of humanity and of his country. And always behind the furor the reader is aware of the man struggling to provide a living for himself and his family, and never quite succeeding.

[more]

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Photographing the Mexican Revolution
Commitments, Testimonies, Icons
By John Mraz
University of Texas Press, 2012

The Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 is among the world’s most visually documented revolutions. Coinciding with the birth of filmmaking and the increased mobility offered by the reflex camera, it received extraordinary coverage by photographers and cineastes—commercial and amateur, national and international. Many images of the Revolution remain iconic to this day—Francisco Villa galloping toward the camera; Villa lolling in the presidential chair next to Emiliano Zapata; and Zapata standing stolidly in charro raiment with a carbine in one hand and the other hand on a sword, to mention only a few. But the identities of those who created the thousands of extant images of the Mexican Revolution, and what their purposes were, remain a huge puzzle because photographers constantly plagiarized each other’s images.

In this pathfinding book, acclaimed photography historian John Mraz carries out a monumental analysis of photographs produced during the Mexican Revolution, focusing primarily on those made by Mexicans, in order to discover who took the images and why, to what ends, with what intentions, and for whom. He explores how photographers expressed their commitments visually, what aesthetic strategies they employed, and which identifications and identities they forged. Mraz demonstrates that, contrary to the myth that Agustín Víctor Casasola was “the photographer of the Revolution,” there were many who covered the long civil war, including women. He shows that specific photographers can even be linked to the contending forces and reveals a pattern of commitment that has been little commented upon in previous studies (and completely unexplored in the photography of other revolutions).

[more]

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Photopoetics at Tlatelolco
Afterimages of Mexico, 1968
By Samuel Steinberg
University of Texas Press, 2016

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.

[more]

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Physicians of the Future
Doctor-Influencers, Patient-Consumers, and the Business of Functional Medicine
Rosalynn A. Vega
University of Texas Press, 2024

The first scholarly exploration of the forums, practice, and economics of functional medicine.

Physicians of the Future interrogates the hidden logics of inclusion and exclusion in functional medicine (FM), a holistic form of personalized medicine that targets chronic disease. Rosalynn Vega uncovers how, as “wounded healers,” some FM practitioners who are former chronic disease sufferers turn their illness narratives into a form of social capital, leveraging social media to relate to patients and build practices as “doctor-influencers.” Arguing that power and authority operate distinctly in FM when compared to conventional medicine, largely because FM services are paid for out of pocket by socioeconomically privileged “clients,” Vega studies how FM practitioners engage in entrepreneurship of their own while critiquing the profit motives of the existing healthcare system, pharmaceutical industry, and insurance industry. Using data culled from online support groups, conferences, docuseries, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and TED Talks, as well as her own battles with chronic illness, Vega argues that FM practices prioritize the individual while inadvertently reinscribing inequities based on race and class. Ultimately, she opens avenues of possibility for FM interlocutors wrestling with their responsibility for making functional medicine accessible to all.

[more]

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Pictured Politics
Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections
By Emily Engel
University of Texas Press, 2020

The Spanish colonial period in South America saw artists develop the subgenre of official portraiture, or portraits of key individuals in the continent’s viceregal governments. Although these portraits appeared to illustrate a narrative of imperial splendor and absolutist governance, they instead became a visual record of the local history that emerged during the colonial occupation.

Using the official portrait collections accumulated between 1542 and 1830 in Lima, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá as a lens, Pictured Politics explores how official portraiture originated and evolved to become an essential component in the construction of Ibero-American political relationships. Through the surviving portraits and archival evidence—including political treatises, travel accounts, and early periodicals—Emily Engel demonstrates that these official portraits not only belie a singular interpretation as tools of imperial domination but also visualize the continent's multilayered history of colonial occupation. The first stand alone analysis of South American portraiture, Pictured Politics brings to light the historical relevance of political portraits in crafting the history of South American colonialism.

[more]

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Picturing Childhood
Youth in Transnational Comics
Edited by Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis, Foreword by Frederick Aldama
University of Texas Press, 2017

Comics and childhood have had a richly intertwined history for nearly a century. From Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, and Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie to Hergé’s Tintin (Belgium), José Escobar’s Zipi and Zape (Spain), and Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz (Germany), iconic child characters have given both kids and adults not only hours of entertainment but also an important vehicle for exploring children’s lives and the sometimes challenging realities that surround them.

Bringing together comic studies and childhood studies, this pioneering collection of essays provides the first wide-ranging account of how children and childhood, as well as the larger cultural forces behind their representations, have been depicted in comics from the 1930s to the present. The authors address issues such as how comics reflect a spectrum of cultural values concerning children, sometimes even resisting dominant cultural constructions of childhood; how sensitive social issues, such as racial discrimination or the construction and enforcement of gender roles, can be explored in comics through the use of child characters; and the ways in which comics use children as metaphors for other issues or concerns. Specific topics discussed in the book include diversity and inclusiveness in Little Audrey comics of the 1950s and 1960s, the fetishization of adolescent girls in Japanese manga, the use of children to build national unity in Finnish wartime comics, and how the animal/child hybrids in Sweet Tooth act as a metaphor for commodification.

[more]

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Picturing Texas Politics
A Photographic History from Sam Houston to Rick Perry
By Chuck Bailey; with historical text by Patrick Cox; introduction by John Anderson
University of Texas Press, 2015

With rare, previously unpublished photographs and iconic images of politicians from the state’s founders to Ann Richards, George W. Bush, and Rick Perry, here is the first-ever photographic album of Texas politicians and political campaigns.

The Republic of Texas was founded in 1839, around the time that photography was being invented. So while there were no photographers at the Alamo or San Jacinto, they arrived soon after to immortalize, on film, Sam Houston, David Burnett, Mirabeau Lamar, and many other founding fathers of the Lone Star State. Over the following nearly two centuries, Texas politics and politicians have provided reliable, often dramatic, and sometimes larger-than-life subjects for photographers to capture in the moment and add to the historical record.

Picturing Texas Politics presents the first photographic album of Texas politicians and political campaigns ever assembled. Chuck Bailey has searched archives, museums, libraries, and private collections to find photographs that have never been published, as well as iconic images, such as Russell Lee’s pictures of one of Ralph Yarborough’s campaigns. These photographs are arranged into four chronological sections, each one introduced by historian Patrick Cox, who also provides informative photo captions. The photographs display power and political savvy from the early Republic to Lyndon Johnson and Bob Bullock; unmatched dedication to Texas in the Hobby and Bush families; and the growing influence of women in politics, from Miriam “Ma” Ferguson to Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, and Kay Bailey Hutchison. With Sam Houston’s jaguar vest, W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel’s hillbilly band, a famous governor with an ostrich, and prominent Texans eating watermelons, shooting guns, and riding horses, this is Texas politics at its liveliest and best.

[more]

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Picturing the Proletariat
Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico, 1908–1940
By John Lear
University of Texas Press, 2017

Thomas McGann Memorial Prize, Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies, 2017
Runner-up, Humanities Book Prize, Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association, 2018

In the wake of Mexico’s revolution, artists played a fundamental role in constructing a national identity centered on working people and were hailed for their contributions to modern art. Picturing the Proletariat examines three aspects of this artistic legacy: the parallel paths of organized labor and artists’ collectives, the relations among these groups and the state, and visual narratives of the worker. Showcasing forgotten works and neglected media, John Lear explores how artists and labor unions participated in a cycle of revolutionary transformation from 1908 through the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940). Lear shows how middle-class artists, radicalized by the revolution and the Communist Party, fortified the legacy of the prerevolutionary print artisan José Guadalupe Posada by incorporating modernist, avant-garde, and nationalist elements in ways that supported and challenged unions and the state. By 1940, the state undermined the autonomy of radical artists and unions, while preserving the image of both as partners of the “institutionalized revolution.”

This interdisciplinary book explores the gendered representations of workers; the interplay of prints, photographs, and murals in journals, in posters, and on walls; the role of labor leaders; and the discursive impact of the Spanish Civil War. It considers “los tres grandes”—Rivera, Siquieros, and Orozco—while featuring lesser-known artists and their collectives, including Saturnino Herrán, Leopoldo Méndez, Santos Balmori, and the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (LEAR). The result is a new perspective on the art and politics of the revolution.

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Pillar of Salt
An Autobiography, with 19 Erotic Sonnets
By Salvador Novo, Translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz, Introduction by Carlos Monsiváis
University of Texas Press, 2014

Written with exquisite sensitivity and wit, this memoir by one of Mexico’s foremost men of letters describes coming of age during the violence of the Mexican Revolution and “living dangerously” as an openly homosexual man in a brutally machista society.

Salvador Novo (1904–1974) was a provocative and prolific cultural presence in Mexico City through much of the twentieth century. With his friend and fellow poet Xavier Villaurrutia, he cofounded Ulises and Contemporáneos, landmark avant-garde journals of the late 1920s and 1930s. At once “outsider” and “insider,” Novo held high posts at the Ministries of Culture and Public Education and wrote volumes about Mexican history, politics, literature, and culture. The author of numerous collections of poems, including XX poemas, Nuevo amor, Espejo, Dueño mío, and Poesía 1915–1955, Novo is also considered one of the finest, most original prose stylists of his generation.

Pillar of Salt is Novo’s incomparable memoir of growing up during and after the Mexican Revolution; shuttling north to escape the Zapatistas, only to see his uncle murdered at home by the troops of Pancho Villa; and his initiations into literature and love with colorful, poignant, complicated men of usually mutually exclusive social classes. Pillar of Salt portrays the codes, intrigues, and dynamics of what, decades later, would be called “a gay ghetto.” But in Novo’s Mexico City, there was no name for this parallel universe, as full of fear as it was canny and vibrant. Novo’s memoir plumbs the intricate subtleties of this world with startling frankness, sensitivity, and potential for hilarity. Also included in this volume are nineteen erotic sonnets, one of which was long thought to have been lost.

[more]

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Pink Gold
Women, Shrimp, and Work in Mexico
Maria L. Cruz-Torres
University of Texas Press, 2023

A rich, long-term ethnography of women seafood traders in Mexico.

The "shrimp ladies," locally known as changueras in southern Sinaloa, Mexico, sell seafood in open-air markets, forming an extralegal but key part of the economy built around this "pink gold.” Over time, they struggled to evolve from marginalized peddlers to local icons depicted in popular culture, even as they continue to work at an open-air street market.

Pink Gold documents the shrimp traders' resilience and resourcefulness, from their early conflicts with the city, state, and federal authorities and forming a union, to carving out a physical space for a seafood market, and even engaging in conflicts with the Mexican military. Drawing from her two decades of fieldwork, María L. Cruz-Torres explores the inspiring narrative of this overlooked group of women involving grassroots politics, trans-border and familial networking, debt and informal economic practices, personal sacrifices, and simple courage. She argues that, amid intense economic competition, their success relies on group solidarity that creates interlocking networks of mutual trust, or confianza, that in turn enable them to cross social and political boundaries that would typically be closed to them. Ultimately, Pink Gold offers fresh insights into issues of gender and labor, urban public space, the street economy, commodities, and globalization.

[more]

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Pioneer Printer
Samuel Bangs in Mexico and Texas
By Lota M. Spell
University of Texas Press, 1963

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.

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Pitching Democracy
Baseball and Politics in the Dominican Republic
April Yoder
University of Texas Press, 2023

How Dominicans contribute to Major League Baseball and what they receive in return.

From Juan Marichal and Pedro Martínez to Albert Pujols and Juan Soto, Dominicans have long been among Major League Baseball’s best. How did this small Caribbean nation become a hothouse of baseball talent? To many fans, the answer is both obvious and disconcerting: pro teams use their riches to develop talent abroad, creating opportunities for superhuman athletes and corrupt officials, while the rest of the population sees little benefit.

Yet this interpretation of history is incomplete. April Yoder traces how baseball has empowered Dominicans in their struggles for democracy and social justice. While the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo saw the sport as a means of cementing its power at home and abroad, the Dominican people fashioned an emancipated civic sphere by seeing their potential for democratic success in their compatriots’ baseball success. Later, Dominicans articulated demands for democracy, economic opportunity, and civil rights through successful calls for public support of amateur and professional baseball. Today, Dominicans continue to demand that incentives for the baseball industry foster human as well as economic development. A revelatory and innovative history, Pitching Democracy restores agency to the Dominican people and honors their true love of the game.

[more]

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A Place in the Rain Forest
Settling the Costa Rican Frontier
By Darryl Cole-Christensen
University of Texas Press, 1997

In the 1950s, Darryl Cole-Christensen and his family were among the first settlers of the Coto Brus, an almost impenetrable, mountainous rain forest region of southeastern Costa Rica. In this evocative book, he captures the elemental struggles and rewards of settling a new frontier—an experience forever closed to most people in Western, urbanized society.

With the perspective of more than forty years' residence in the Coto Brus, Cole-Christensen ably describes both the settlers' dreams of bringing civilization and progress to the rain forest and the sweeping and irreversible changes they caused throughout the ecosystem as they cut the rain forest down. Writing neither to apologize for nor to defend their actions, he instead illuminates the personal and subjective factors that cause people to risk danger and hardship for the uncertain rewards of settling a frontier.

In his own words, Cole-Christensen says, "This is a book for the scientist who wants to recapture a sense of an incalculable world departed, for the student who asks: How is it that our forebears changed and restructured this land? For the adventurer who dreams of the expanse of frontiers, for every person who, having passed once through the darkening forest along a path in twilit stillness looks back to find that a blanket of murmurs remains."

[more]

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A Place of Darkness
The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema
By Kendall R. Phillips
University of Texas Press, 2018

Horror is one of the most enduringly popular genres in cinema. The term “horror film” was coined in 1931 between the premiere of Dracula and the release of Frankenstein, but monsters, ghosts, demons, and supernatural and horrific themes have been popular with American audiences since the emergence of novelty kinematographic attractions in the late 1890s. A Place of Darkness illuminates the prehistory of the horror genre by tracing the way horrific elements and stories were portrayed in films prior to the introduction of the term “horror film.”

Using a rhetorical approach that examines not only early films but also the promotional materials for them and critical responses to them, Kendall R. Phillips argues that the portrayal of horrific elements was enmeshed in broader social tensions around the emergence of American identity and, in turn, American cinema. He shows how early cinema linked monsters, ghosts, witches, and magicians with Old World superstitions and beliefs, in contrast to an American way of thinking that was pragmatic, reasonable, scientific, and progressive. Throughout the teens and twenties, Phillips finds, supernatural elements were almost always explained away as some hysterical mistake, humorous prank, or nefarious plot. The Great Depression of the 1930s, however, constituted a substantial upheaval in the system of American certainty and opened a space for the reemergence of Old World gothic within American popular discourse in the form of the horror genre, which has terrified and thrilled fans ever since.

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Places for Dead Bodies
By Gary J. Hausladen
University of Texas Press, 2000

From Tony Hillerman's Navajo Southwest to Martin Cruz Smith's Moscow, an exotic, vividly described locale is one of the great pleasures of many murder mysteries. Indeed, the sense of place, no less than the compelling character of the detective, is often what keeps authors writing and readers reading a particular series of mystery novels.

This book investigates how "police procedural" murder mysteries have been used to convey a sense of place. Gary Hausladen delves into the work of more than thirty authors, including Tony Hillerman, Martin Cruz Smith, James Lee Burke, David Lindsey, P. D. James, and many others. Arranging the authors by their region of choice, he discusses police procedurals set in America, the United Kingdom and Ireland, Europe, Moscow, Asia, and selected locales in other parts of the world, as well as in historical places ranging from the Roman Empire to turn-of-the-century Cairo.

[more]

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Places in the World a Person Could Walk
Family, Stories, Home, and Place in the Texas Hill Country
By David Syring
University of Texas Press, 2000

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.

[more]

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Plagues and Pencils
A Year of Pandemic Sketches
Edward Carey, with a foreword by Max Porter
University of Texas Press, 2022

Honorable Mention, 2022 Nonfiction Prize, Writers' League of Texas

A remarkable collection of words and illustrations documenting the first year of the pandemic.


In March 2020, as lockdowns were imposed around the world, author and illustrator Edward Carey raced home to Austin, Texas. The next day, he published on social media a sketch of “A Very Determined Young Man.” The day after, he posted another drawing. One year and one hundred and fifty Tombow B pencil stubs later, he was still drawing.

Carey’s pencil fills the page with the marvelous and intriguing, picturing people, characters, animals, monsters, and his favorite bird to draw, the grackle. He reaches into history and fiction to escape grim reality through flights of vivid imagination—until events demand the drawings “look straight on.”

Breonna Taylor, the Brontë sisters, John Lewis, King Lear, and even the portraits that mark the progress of the year for the Very Determined Young Man combine into a remarkable document of the pandemic and its politics. For Carey, though, trapped inside a home he loves, these portraits are something more, a way to chart time, an artist’s way of creating connection in isolation. With an introduction by Max Porter, this exceptional collection from the acclaimed author of Little marks a year of a man trapped with his pencil, determined to find solace amid uncertainty.

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Planning the Family in Egypt
New Bodies, New Selves
By Kamran Asdar Ali
University of Texas Press, 2002

In this ethnographic study, the author examines the policies and practices of family planning programs in Egypt to see how an elitist, Western-informed state attempts to create obliging citizens. The state sees voluntary compliance with the law for the common good as the cornerstone of modernity. Family planning programs are a training ground for the construction of self-disciplined individuals, and thus a rewarding area of study for the fate of social programs in developing countries.

Through a careful examination of state-endorsed family planning practices in urban and rural contexts, the author shows us the pervasive, high-pressure persuasion of women, who are encouraged to think as individual decision makers of their immediate families and their national interests. But what of the other forces at work in these women’s lives, binding them to their extended families and to their religious identities? And what of the laws that allow for polygamy and discriminate against women in marriage, inheritance, and as part of the workforce?

These forces operate against the received wisdom of the state. Is the Muslim community thought to end at the borders of Egypt? What about local constructions of masculinity when the state appeals to wives to decide for themselves? How does widespread labor migration to foreign countries affect attitudes toward family planning? How is female contraception viewed by the Islamic Brotherhood and other modern Muslim groups?

This book questions much that we have taken for granted and gives us grounds for reexamining our assumptions about family planning and the individual and state in developing countries such as Egypt.

[more]

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Plant Kin
A Multispecies Ethnography in Indigenous Brazil
By Theresa L. Miller
University of Texas Press, 2019

The Indigenous Canela inhabit a vibrant multispecies community of nearly 3,000 people and over 300 types of cultivated and wild plants living together in Maranhão State in the Brazilian Cerrado (savannah), a biome threatened with deforestation and climate change. In the face of these environmental threats, Canela women and men work to maintain riverbank and forest gardens and care for their growing crops, whom they consider to be, literally, children. This nurturing, loving relationship between people and plants—which offers a thought-provoking model for supporting multispecies survival and well-being throughout the world—is the focus of Plant Kin.

Theresa L. Miller shows how kinship develops between Canela people and plants through intimate, multi-sensory, and embodied relationships. Using an approach she calls “sensory ethnobotany,” Miller explores the Canela bio-sociocultural life-world, including Canela landscape aesthetics, ethnobotanical classification, mythical storytelling, historical and modern-day gardening practices, transmission of ecological knowledge through an education of affection for plant kin, shamanic engagements with plant friends and lovers, and myriad other human-nonhuman experiences. This multispecies ethnography reveals the transformations of Canela human-environment and human-plant engagements over the past two centuries and envisions possible futures for this Indigenous multispecies community as it reckons with the rapid environmental and climatic changes facing the Brazilian Cerrado as the Anthropocene epoch unfolds.

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front cover of Plantation Agriculture and Social Control in Northern Peru, 1875–1933
Plantation Agriculture and Social Control in Northern Peru, 1875–1933
By Michael J. Gonzales
University of Texas Press, 1985

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the social, economic, and political landscape of Peru was transformed profoundly. Within a decade of the country’s disastrous defeat by Chile during the War of the Pacific, the export economy was recovering on the strength of a variety of agricultural and mineral products. The sugar industry played a pivotal role in this process and produced wealthy and socially ambitious families who became prominent political leaders on the national level.

This study, based primarily on previously unavailable private records of sugarcane plantations, examines the external and internal dynamics of the sugar industry. It offers new insights into the process of land consolidation, the economics of sugar technology and production, the formation of the coastal elite, and the organization, recruitment, and control of labor. By focusing on the plantation Cayalti within a regional context, Gonzales presents one of the richest descriptions of the modern plantation for any region of Latin America. The book is a vivid social history of laborers from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, from Chinese to Peruvians of Indian, mestizo, and black heritage.

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Plants and Animals in the Life of the Kuna
By Jorge Ventocilla, Heraclio Herrera, & Valerio Núñez
University of Texas Press, 1995

"The earth is the mother of all things"; thus begins this original and accessible book on how the Kuna of Panama relate to the natural world. An integrative project involving Kuna traditional leaders and trained scholars, and fully illustrated by a Kuna artist, this translation of Plantas y animales en la vida del pueblo Kuna focuses on Kuna plant and animal life, social life, and social change as a means of saving traditional ecological knowledge and "returning" it to the community.

The authors hope to preserve the Kuna environment not only by reviving traditional technologies but also by educating the Kuna as to what needs protection. While the Kuna have a tradition of living in harmony with the land, the intrusion of the market economy is eroding the very basis of their sustainable way of life.

As a response to this crisis, this book seeks to develop native self-awareness and provide a model for collaboration. It will appeal to Latin Americanists, anthropologists, and ethnobotanists, as well as to a general readership in environmental issues.

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Plants for Houston and the Gulf Coast
By Howard Garrett
University of Texas Press, 2008

Whether you're a first-time homeowner, dedicated gardener, or landscape professional, if you're gardening on the Gulf Coast, you need Howard Garrett's Plants for Houston and the Gulf Coast. Garrett is one of Texas's top organic gardening experts, and gardeners rely on him for accurate, sensible advice about what to plant and how to maintain healthy yards and landscapes without synthetic fertilizers and toxic pesticides. In Plants for Houston and the Gulf Coast, Garrett presents nearly 400 plants, both native and adapted, that grow well in Southeast Texas.

Like all of Howard Garrett's books, Plants for Houston and the Gulf Coast is loaded with indispensable gardening information:

  • Nearly 400 trees, shrubs, groundcovers and vines, annuals and perennials, and grasses
  • 400 full-color, close-up photos of the plants
  • Expert information about each plant's appearance, growing requirements, landscape uses, potential problems, and other interesting facts
  • Precise, easy-to-follow instructions about how to design a garden, prepare the soil, install trees and other plants, grow grass and control weeds, and maintain the landscape and control pests
  • A detailed gardening calendar for Southeast Texas that lists specific plants to plant and maintenance tasks to perform each month

No other book currently available provides such extensive and reliable information for Texas Gulf Coast gardeners.

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Plants of the Rio Grande Delta
By Alfred Richardson
University of Texas Press, 1995

The Rio Grande Delta is fabulously rich in wildflowers and other plant life. Lying in the geographically and environmentally diverse region common to southern Texas and northern Mexico, it supports plants that also grow in Central America and throughout Mexico, the Gulf Coastal plains, the South Texas Plains, and the Chihuahuan Desert.

Plants of the Rio Grande Delta provides an accessible and reliable identification guide to all of the plants, excluding grasses, of the region—some 823 species. In clear, nontechnical language, Alfred Richardson gives a brief description of each species, along with its range, habitat, and general blooming time. Over two hundred superb color photographs offer quick and easy field identification, while line drawings illustrate notable characteristics of the plants.

This volume expands and updates Alfred Richardson's previous book, Plants of Southernmost Texas, published in 1990 by the Gorgas Science Foundation. It will be an essential field guide for everyone interested in South Texas flora, from winter visitors and Valley residents to professional botanists.

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Platero and I
By Juan Ramón Jiménez
University of Texas Press, 1957

This lyric portrait of life—and the little donkey, Platero—in a remote Andalusian village is the masterpiece of Juan Ramón Jiménez, the Spanish poet awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature.

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The Play of Mirrors
The Representation of Self Mirrored in the Other
By Sylvia Caiuby Novaes
University of Texas Press, 1997

Focusing on the Bororo people of west-central Brazil, this book addresses the construction of self-identity through interethnic interaction. By presenting the images the Bororo have of themselves as well as the images of others who have interacted with them, Brazilian anthropologist Sylvia Caiuby Novaes argues convincingly that Bororo self-images are constructed with the aid of a peculiar looking-glass—it is in the images of others that they see themselves.

Incorporating contributions from psychology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and semiotics, Play of Mirrors focuses on symbols, images, discourse, and meanings rather than solely on the problem of acculturation. It thus reflects the thinking of a new generation of Brazilian anthropologists who have shifted their focus from native communities as isolated entities to an examination of their embeddedness within broader national and international arenas.

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Playas of the Great Plains
By Loren M. Smith
University of Texas Press, 2003

Winner, Wildlife Publications Award — Outstanding Book Category, The Wildlife Society, 2004
Texas Tech University President's Book Award, 2005

Shallow wetlands that occur primarily in semi-arid to arid environments, playas are keystone ecosystems in the western Great Plains of North America. Providing irreplaceable habitat for native plants and animals, including migratory birds, they are essential for the maintenance of biotic diversity throughout the region. Playas also serve to recharge the aquifer that supplies much of the water for the Plains states. At the same time, however, large-scale habitat changes have endangered playas across the Great Plains, making urgent the need to understand their ecology and implement effective conservation measures.

This book provides a state-of-the-art survey of all that is currently known about Great Plains playa ecology and conservation. Loren Smith synthesizes his own extensive research with other published studies to define playas and characterize their origin, development, flora, fauna, structure, function, and diversity. He also thoroughly explores the human relationship with playas from prehistoric times, when they served as campsites for the Clovis peoples, to today's threats to playa ecosystems from agricultural activities and global climate change. A blueprint for government agencies, private conservation groups, and concerned citizens to save these unique prairie ecosystems concludes this landmark study.

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Playback
By Richard "Cactus" Pryor
University of Texas Press, 1995

From the town that brought you Molly Ivins, Liz Carpenter, John Henry Faulk, and Greater Tuna, here's Cactus Pryor. For decades, Cactus' wit and wisdom have delighted radio listeners, as well as the many social, political, business, and philanthropic groups throughout the United States whose functions have been enlivened by this accomplished master of ceremonies and after-dinner speaker.

Now the University of Texas Press takes great pleasure in bringing you this quintessential Texas humorist. Playback gathers over forty of Cactus Pryor's favorite radio essays, translating "ear words into eye words," as he puts it. In these pieces, Cactus paints vivid word pictures of people and places, offering readers the same "you are there" immediacy that makes his radio broadcasts so popular. In them, you'll take a sentimental journey with Cactus and his wife to the Maui grave site of Charles Lindbergh—discover how legendary University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal faced the agony of defeat with humor—meet unsung heroes like the 104-year-old who's teaching himself to read and write—get acquainted with the notable folks Cactus has known, including Lady Bird Johnson, John Wayne, Jane Fonda, and James Michener—and, of course, share Cactus' love of family, friends, and the Texas coast.

As Bailey White's essays on National Public Radio have introduced listeners across the country to the lifeways of the Deep South, so Cactus Pryor offers a humorous, revealing look at how we Texans view ourselves, our neighbors, and the world. Read Playback now, and see what you've been missing.

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Playing the Percentages
How Film Distribution Made the Hollywood Studio System
Derek Long
University of Texas Press, 2024

A history of film distribution in the United States from the 1910s to the 1930s, concentrating on booking, circuiting, and packaging marketing practices.

Told not as a “golden age” narrative of films, stars, or individual studios but as an economic history of the industry’s film distribution practices, Playing the Percentages is the story of how Hollywood’s vertically integrated studio system came to be. Studying the history of distribution during the growth of Hollywood, Derek Long makes a case for the domination of the studio system as the result of struggles over distribution practices.

Through a combination of archival research, critical surveys of the film industry trade press, and economic analysis, Long uncovers a complex and ever-shifting system of wrangling between distributors and exhibitors. Challenging the overemphasis within scholarship on “block booking” as a monolithic distribution mode, and attending to distribution practices beyond simple circulation, Long highlights the crucial changes in film distribution brought about by live theater, the rise of features, and the transition to sound. Playing the Percentages is a comprehensive history of film distribution in the United States during the silent era that illustrates the importance of power struggles between distributors and exhibitors over booking, pricing, and playing time.

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Playing with Things
Engaging the Moche Sex Pots
By Mary Weismantel
University of Texas Press, 2021

Winner, Association for Latin American Art-Arvey Foundation Book Award, 2022

More than a thousand years ago on the north coast of Peru, Indigenous Moche artists created a large and significant corpus of sexually explicit ceramic works of art. They depicted a diversity of sex organs and sex acts, and an array of solitary and interconnected human and nonhuman bodies. To the modern eye, these Moche “sex pots,” as Mary Weismantel calls them, are lively and provocative but also enigmatic creations whose import to their original owners seems impossible to grasp.

In Playing with Things, Weismantel shows that there is much to be learned from these ancient artifacts, not merely as inert objects from a long-dead past but as vibrant Indigenous things, alive in their own inhuman temporality. From a new materialist perspective, she fills the gaps left by other analyses of the sex pots in pre-Columbian studies, where sexuality remains marginalized, and in sexuality studies, where non-Western art is largely absent. Taking a decolonial approach toward an archaeology of sexuality and breaking with long-dominant iconographic traditions, this book explores how the pots "play jokes," "make babies," "give power," and "hold water,” considering the sex pots as actual ceramic bodies that interact with fleshly bodies, now and in the ancient past. A beautifully written study that will be welcomed by students as well as specialists, Playing with Things is a model for archaeological and art historical engagement with the liberating power of queer theory and Indigenous studies.

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Please Pass the Biscuits, Pappy
Pictures of Governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel
By Bill Crawford
University of Texas Press, 2004

Long before movie stars Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger became governors of California, a popular radio personality with no previous political experience—who wasn't even registered to vote—swept into the governor's office of Texas. W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel was a 1930s businessman who discovered the power of radio to sell flour. His musical shows with the Light Crust Doughboys (which launched the career of Bob Wills) and his radio homilies extolling family and Christian values found a vast, enthusiastic audience in Depression-era Texas. When Pappy decided to run for governor in 1938 as a way to sell more flour—a fact he proudly proclaimed throughout the campaign—the people of Texas voted for him in record numbers. And despite the ineptitude for politics he displayed once in office, Texans returned him to the governorship in 1940 and then elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1941 in a special election in which he defeated Lyndon Johnson, as well as to a full term as senator in 1942.

While the hit film O Brother, Where Art Thou? celebrated a fictional "Please Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel, this book captures the essence of the real man through photographs taken by employees of the Texas Department of Public Safety, most of which are previously unpublished. Reminiscent of the work of WPA photographers such as Russell Lee and Dorothea Lange, these photos record the last unscripted era of politics when a charismatic candidate could still address a crowd from an unpainted front porch or a mobile bandstand in the back of a truck. They strikingly confirm that Pappy O'Daniel's ability to connect with people was as great in person as on the radio.

To set the photos in context, Bill Crawford has written an entertaining text that discusses the political landscape in Texas and the United States in the 1930s, as well as the rise of radio as mass medium for advertising and entertainment. He also provides extensive captions for each picture. John Anderson, Photo Archivist of the Texas State Archives, discusses the work of Joel Tisdale and the other DPS photographers who left this extraordinary record of the greatest vote-getter in Texas history, who became one of America's first celebrities to cross the line from entertainment to political office.

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The Pleasure of Miss Pym
By Charles Burkhart
University of Texas Press, 1987

When British writers Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil named Barbara Pym one of the twentieth century's most underrated authors in a 1977 Times Literary Supplement survey, they started a Barbara Pym revival that continued unabated in Great Britain and the United States. Barbara Pym's delightful tales of jumble sales and parish meetings, her ironic insights into the relationships between women and men, have won a devoted following. Indeed she is often compared to that most accomplished author of comedies of manners, Jane Austen.

The Pleasure of Miss Pym is a critical study of Pym as comic writer and of the links between her life and autobiographical writings and her fiction, written with a liveliness of style and tone that matches Pym's own. Not only does Charles Burkhart provide perceptive discussions of Pym's life and novels, he also illuminates the worldview represented in her work, the unique nature of her comedy, her religion, her place within the history of the novel, and her penetrating insights into male-female relationships. All of Pym's work, including the 1986 posthumous publication, An Academic Question, is intelligently surveyed here. Scholars of contemporary English literature will derive both instruction and pleasure from this elegantly written study, as will Pym's admiring readers, for whom it is also intended.

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Pobre Raza!
Violence, Justice, and Mobilization among México Lindo Immigrants, 1900-1936
By F. Arturo Rosales
University of Texas Press, 1999

Fleeing the social and political turmoil spawned by the Mexican Revolution, massive numbers of Mexican immigrants entered the southwestern United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. But instead of finding refuge, many encountered harsh, anti-Mexican attitudes and violence from an Anglo population frightened by the influx of foreigners and angered by anti-American sentiments in Mexico.

This book examines the response of Mexican immigrants to Anglo American prejudice and violence early in the twentieth century. Drawing on archival sources from both sides of the border, Arturo Rosales traces the rise of "México Lindo" nationalism and the efforts of Mexican consuls to help poor Mexican immigrants defend themselves against abuses and flagrant civil rights violations by Anglo citizens, police, and the U.S. judicial system. This research illuminates a dark era in which civilian and police brutality, prejudice in the courtroom, and disproportionate arrest, conviction, and capital punishment rates too often characterized justice for Mexican Americans.

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The Poetic Edda
Translated by Lee M. Hollander
University of Texas Press, 1962

The Poetic Edda comprises a treasure trove of mythic and spiritual verse holding an important place in Nordic culture, literature, and heritage. Its tales of strife and death form a repository, in poetic form, of Norse mythology and heroic lore, embodying both the ethical views and the cultural life of the North during the late heathen and early Christian times.

Collected by an unidentified Icelander, probably during the twelfth or thirteenth century, The Poetic Edda was rediscovered in Iceland in the seventeenth century by Danish scholars. Even then its value as poetry, as a source of historical information, and as a collection of entertaining stories was recognized. This meticulous translation succeeds in reproducing the verse patterns, the rhythm, the mood, and the dignity of the original in a revision that Scandinavian Studies says "may well grace anyone's bookshelf."

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Poetic Justice
An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry
By Deborah Kapchan
University of Texas Press, 2019

Poetic Justice is the first anthology of contemporary Moroccan poetry in English. The work is primarily composed of poets who began writing after Moroccan independence in 1956 and includes work written in Moroccan Arabic (darija), classical Arabic, French, and Tamazight.

Why Poetic Justice? Moroccan poetry (and especially zajal, oral poetry now written in Moroccan Arabic) is often published in newspapers and journals and is thus a vibrant form of social commentary; what’s more, there is a law, a justice, in the aesthetic act that speaks back to the law of the land. Poetic Justice because literature has the power to shape the cultural and moral imagination in profound and just ways.

Reading this oeuvre from independence until the new millennium and beyond, it is clear that what poet Driss Mesnaoui calls the “letters of time” have long been in the hands of Moroccan poets, as they write their ethics, their aesthetics, as well as their gendered and political lives into poetic being.

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A Poetics for Screenwriters
By Lance Lee
University of Texas Press, 2001

Writing successful screenplays that capture the public imagination and richly reward the screenwriter requires more than simply following the formulas prescribed by the dozens of screenwriting manuals currently in print. Learning the "how-tos" is important, but understanding the dramatic elements that make up a good screenplay is equally crucial for writing a memorable movie. In A Poetics for Screenwriters, veteran writer and teacher Lance Lee offers aspiring and professional screenwriters a thorough overview of all the dramatic elements of screenplays, unbiased toward any particular screenwriting method.

Lee explores each aspect of screenwriting in detail. He covers primary plot elements, dramatic reality, storytelling stance and plot types, character, mind in drama, spectacle and other elements, and developing and filming the story. Relevant examples from dozens of American and foreign films, including Rear Window, Blue, Witness, The Usual Suspects, Virgin Spring, Fanny and Alexander, The Godfather, and On the Waterfront, as well as from dramas ranging from the Greek tragedies to the plays of Shakespeare and Ibsen, illustrate all of his points.

This new overview of the dramatic art provides a highly useful update for all students and professionals who have tried to adapt the principles of Aristotle's Poetics to the needs of modern screenwriting. By explaining "why" good screenplays work, this book is the indispensable companion for all the "how-to" guides.

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front cover of The Poetics of Appearance in the Attic Korai
The Poetics of Appearance in the Attic Korai
By Mary Stieber
University of Texas Press, 2004

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.

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Poetics of Change
The New Spanish-American Narrative
By Julio Ortega
University of Texas Press, 1986

Too often literary criticism is academic exercise rather than creative act. For the multifaceted Julio Ortega—respected poet, dramatist, and novelist in his own right—the act of criticism becomes profoundly creative, his incisive readings of the text far transcending the pedantry that may falsely pass for imagination, intelligence, and rigor. Nearly every Spanish-American writer of consequence, from Paz to Fuentes, Cortázar to Lezama Lima, has extolled Ortega’s criticism as not merely a reflection but an essential part of the renaissance that took place in Spanish-American letters during the late twentieth century.

Poetics of Change brings together Ortega’s most penetrating and insightful analyses of the fiction of Borges, Fuentes, García Márquez, Carpentier, Rulfo, Cabrera Infante, and others responsible for great writing from Spanish America. Ortega concerns himself most with the semantic innovations of these masters of the modern narrative and their play with form, language, and the traditional boundaries of genre. Mapping their creative territory, he finds that the poetics of Spanish-American writing is that of a dynamically changing genre that has set exploration at its very heart.

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front cover of The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945
The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945
By Emily Stipes Watts
University of Texas Press, 1977

American women have created an especially vigorous and innovative poetry, beginning in 1632 when Anne Bradstreet set aside her needle and picked up her "poet's pen." The topics of American women poets have been various, their images their own, and their modes of expression original.

Emily Stipes Watts does not imply that the work of American men and that of American women are two different kinds of poetry, although they have been treated as such in the past. It is her aim, rather, to delineate and define the poetic tradition of women as crucial to the understanding of American poetry as a whole.

By 1850, American women of all colors, religions, and social classes were writing and publishing poetry. Within the critical category of "female poetry," developed from 1800 to 1850, these women experimented boldly and prepared the way for the achievement of such women as Emily Dickinson in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed at times—for example from 1860 through 1910—it was women who were at the outer edge of prosodic experimentation and innovation in American poetry.

Moving chronologically, Professor Watts broadly characterizes the state of American poetry for each period, citing the dominant male poets; she then focuses on women contemporaries, singling out and analyzing their best work. This volume not only brings to light several important women poets but also represents the discovery of a tradition of women writers. This is a unique and invaluable contribution to the history of American literature.

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Poets and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England
By Norman K. Farmer, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 1984

In the twentieth century, the pioneering work of such art historians as Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind heightened our awareness of the relationship between Renaissance literature and the visual arts. By focusing on that relationship in the work of such poets as Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Richard Crashaw, Edmund Waller, and Robert Herrick, Norman K. Farmer, Jr., convincingly shows that they and other writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England wrote with a lively and creative sense of the visual—a sense richly informed by the theory and practice of Renaissance art.

Farmer begins by describing the powerful visual matrix that underlies the narrative structure of Sidney's New Arcadia. He compares the role of the visual in the poetry of Donne and Ben Jonson, and demonstrates how works by both Thomas Carew and Lord Herbert exhibit poetic invention according to familiar Renaissance pictorial themes. Herrick's Hesperides is shown to be the major seventeenth-century poetic application of the Horatian idea ut pictura poesis.

A special feature of this gracefully written and enlightening volume is Farmer's discussion of Lady Drury's oratory at Hawstead Hall. Published here for the first time are photographs of this uniquely decorated oratory, in which themes from a variety of English and Continental emblem books were painted on the walls of a room apparently designed for private meditation.

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Poggio Civitate (Murlo)
By Anthony Tuck
University of Texas Press, 2021

Poggio Civitate in Murlo, Tuscany, is home to one of the best-preserved Etruscan communities of the eighth through the sixth centuries BCE. In this book, Anthony Tuck, the director of excavations, provides a broad synthesis of decades of data from the site.

The results of many years of excavation at Poggio Civitate tell a story of growth, urbanization, ancient industrialization, and dissolution. The site preserves traces of aristocratic domestic buildings, including some of the most evocative and enigmatic architectural sculpture in the region, along with remnants of non-elite domestic spaces, enabling illuminating comparisons across social strata. The settlement also features evidence of large-scale production systems, including tools and other objects that reflect the daily experiences of laborers. Finally, the site contains the story of its own destruction. Tuck finds in the data clear indications that Poggio Civitate was methodically dismantled, and he posits hypotheses concerning the circumstances around this violent social and political act.

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Pois não
Brazilian Portuguese Course for Spanish Speakers, with Basic Reference Grammar
By Antônio Roberto Monteiro Simões
University of Texas Press, 2008

Spanish speakers can learn Brazilian Portuguese much more rapidly than any other language, and thousands of students have used Antônio Simões's text/workbook Com licença: Brazilian Portuguese for Spanish Speakers to make the transition between the two languages. Recognizing the need for a text that incorporates current cultural references and the latest language pedagogy, Simões now offers Pois não: Brazilian Portuguese Course for Spanish Speakers, with Basic Reference Grammar.

Pois não contrasts Portuguese and Spanish, which accomplishes two main goals. It teaches the equivalent of one year of college Portuguese in one semester, three times a week, to Spanish speakers who also have a solid understanding of English. Additionally, the book serves as a basic reference guide to Brazilian Portuguese for the same audience.

Pois não can be used by students in the classroom or by independent learners. Users of the book may focus on the drills alone, concentrate on both the explanations and drills, or use the book as a reference for consultation only. Answers to all of the exercises are included in the book. Audio and video recordings by native Brazilian speakers of dialogues that appear in the book can be downloaded at https://utexas.box.com/v/PoisNaoAudio.

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Poison Arrows
North American Indian Hunting and Warfare
By David E. Jones
University of Texas Press, 2007

Biological warfare is a menacing twenty-first-century issue, but its origins extend to antiquity. While the recorded use of toxins in warfare in some ancient populations is rarely disputed (the use of arsenical smoke in China, which dates to at least 1000 BC, for example) the use of "poison arrows" and other deadly substances by Native American groups has been fraught with contradiction. At last revealing clear documentation to support these theories, anthropologist David Jones transforms the realm of ethnobotany in Poison Arrows.

Examining evidence within the few extant descriptive accounts of Native American warfare, along with grooved arrowheads and clues from botanical knowledge, Jones builds a solid case to indicate widespread and very effective use of many types of toxins. He argues that various groups applied them to not only warfare but also to hunting, and even as an early form of insect extermination. Culling extensive ethnological, historical, and archaeological data, Jones provides a thoroughly comprehensive survey of the use of ethnobotanical and entomological compounds applied in wide-ranging ways, including homicide and suicide. Although many narratives from the contact period in North America deny such uses, Jones now offers conclusive documentation to prove otherwise.

A groundbreaking study of a subject that has been long overlooked, Poison Arrows imparts an extraordinary new perspective to the history of warfare, weaponry, and deadly human ingenuity.

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The Poisonous Pen of Agatha Christie
By Michael C. Gerald
University of Texas Press, 1993

Poisoning occurs in over half of Agatha Christie's many novels and stories. In fact, she used a larger number and broader selection of poisons and medicines, for a wider variety of purposes, with greater frequency, ingenuity, and scientific accuracy than any other detective fiction writer. Yet very little has been written on the use of drugs, poisons, and chemicals in Christie's fiction.

The Poisonous Pen of Agatha Christie entertainingly and authoritatively fills this gap. Michael Gerald explores the use of poisons and drugs in Christie's fiction not only to commit murder and suicide but also to incapacitate a victim, alter behavior, treat disease, or support addiction. He also analyzes her views, as expressed in her fiction and autobiography, on drug addiction, the health professions, the value of medicines, and scientific discoveries.

Especially valuable is Gerald's exhaustive listing of all drugs, poisons, and chemicals mentioned in Christie's novels and stories, with references to the work(s) in which each appears and the ways in which each is used. Other tables list all the novels and short stories and the chemicals that are used in each. Throughout, the properties of all drugs are clearly explained so that the reader needs no special scientific or medical knowledge.

The Poisonous Pen of Agatha Christie illuminates the fictional uses Christie made of her real-life experiences as a hospital drug dispenser and as a provider of nursing care. It will be of interest to fans and scholars alike.

[more]

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Political Attitudes in Venezuela
Societal Cleavages and Political Opinion
By Enrique A. Baloyra and John D. Martz
University of Texas Press, 1979

Here is a benchmark study of voter attitudes in a Latin American country. This volume is based on extensive survey research conducted during the Venezuelan elections of 1973. The methods employed by Baloyra and Martz to poll an "unpollable" society successfully challenge previously established paradigms.

The authors interviewed a representative sample of over 1,500 voters to determine relationships between class, status, community, context, religion, ideology, and partisanship on the one hand and political attitudes and preferences on the other. They found that the Venezuelan electorate is defined by a series of contradictory tendencies, and they place their conclusions in the context of contemporary political science literature regarding class and party, ideology and party, and inequality and participation.

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The Political Economy of Brazil
Public Policies in an Era of Transition
Edited by Lawrence S. Graham and Robert H. Wilson
University of Texas Press, 1992

The transition from authoritarian to democratic government in Brazil unleashed profound changes in government and society that cannot be adequately understood from any single theoretical perspective. The great need, say Graham and Wilson, is a holistic vision of what occurred in Brazil, one that opens political and economic analysis to new vistas. This need is answered in The Political Economy of Brazil, a groundbreaking study of late twentieth-century Brazilian issues from a policy perspective.

The book was an outgrowth of a year-long policy research project undertaken jointly by the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, both at the University of Texas at Austin. In this book, several noted scholars focus on specific issues central to an understanding of the political and economic choices that were under debate in Brazil. Their findings reveal that for Brazil the break with the past—the authoritarian regime—could not be complete due to economic choices made in the 1960s and 1970s, and also the way in which economic resources committed at that time locked the government into a relatively limited number of options in balancing external and internal pressures.

These conclusions will be important for everyone working in Latin American and Third World development.

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front cover of The Political Economy of Latin America in the Postwar Period
The Political Economy of Latin America in the Postwar Period
Edited by Laura Randall
University of Texas Press, 1998

The historic and increasing interdependence of the Latin American and U.S. economies makes an understanding of the political economies of Latin American nations particularly timely and important. After World War II, many nations initially implemented import substituting industrialization policies. Their outcomes, and the shift in policies, are related to the domestic policies and world economic conditions that led to government deficits, inflation, foreign borrowing, debt renegotiation, and renewed emphasis on common markets and other devices to stimulate trade and investment.

In The Political Economy of Latin America in the Postwar Period, important policy measures are evaluated, such as indexation of prices and contracts; special provisions for financing the government through the Central Bank; stabilization; and deregulation of the economy.

The introduction presents trends in Latin American growth and the factors that influence them. This is followed by parallel studies of the economic development of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru from 1945 to the mid-1990s. Noted experts bring their considerable experience to analyzing the content and impact of the economic theories that guided policymaking and their effects on output, income, and quality of life.

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front cover of The Political Economy of the Brazilian State, 1889–1930
The Political Economy of the Brazilian State, 1889–1930
By Steven Topik
University of Texas Press, 1987

In this first overview of the Brazilian republican state based on extensive primary source material, Steven Topik demonstrates that well before the disruption of the export economy in 1929, the Brazilian state was one of the most interventionist in Latin America. This study counters the previous general belief that before 1930 Brazil was dominated by an export oligarchy comprised of European and North American capitalists and that only later did the state become prominent in the country’s economic development.

Topik examines the state’s performance during the First Republic (1889–1930) in four sectors—finance, the coffee trade, railroads, and industry. By looking at the controversies in these areas, he explains how domestic interclass and international struggles shaped policy and notes the degree to which the state acted relatively independently of civil society.

Topik’s primary concern is the actions of state officials and whether their decisions reflected the demands of the ruling class. He shows that conflicting interests of fractions of the ruling class and foreign investors gradually led to far greater state participation than any of the participants originally desired, and that the structure of the economy and of society—not the intentions of the actors—best explains the state’s economic presence.

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front cover of A Political Education
A Political Education
A Washington Memoir
By Harry McPherson
University of Texas Press, 1995

This insider's view of Washington in the 1950s and 1960s, of the tumultuous presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and of the conflicts and factions of the president's staff has become a political classic since its original publication in 1972. In this reissue, Harry McPherson adds a new preface in which he reflects on changes in Washington since the Johnson era and on the lessons Bill Clinton could learn from the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

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front cover of The Political Evolution of the Mexican People
The Political Evolution of the Mexican People
By Justo Sierra
University of Texas Press, 1969

Are the Mexican people the children of Moctezuma or the children of Cortés? This question, long the central problem of Mexican historians, Justo Sierra answered by saying, "The Mexicans are the sons of the two peoples, of the two races … to this we owe our soul."

Because Sierra recognized the dual parentage, he was able to view his country's history as an evolutionary process. Formed in both the indigenous past and the colonial past, the Mexican people, after three hundred years of slow and painful gestation, were finally born with the arrival of Independence. They came of age when the Reform, the Republic, and the nation achieved a single identity.

This classical synthesis, written on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, gave direction to the generation that furnished the Revolution's intellectual leaders. Although the author was Secretary of Public Instruction in the dictatorial regime of Porfirio Díaz, he was the first historian to show sympathy for the plight of the masses, and his book ends with the warning that political evolution has lost its way unless the result is freedom.

As Edmundo O'Gorman points out in an important essay on Mexican historiography, written especially for this edition, Sierra was also the first to write a history of his nation in a sincere endeavor to get at the truth, instead of shaping his account to prove a thesis or to preach some political faith. And yet, his work "owes its originality and its lasting merit to his vigorous interpretation of Mexico's history in the light of his convictions, of his keen insight, even of his fears." Though the chapters on the pre-Columbian Indian have been rendered obsolete by later archeological discoveries, the rest of the history is still valid and needs only to be brought up to date.

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Political Groups in Chile
The Dialogue between Order and Change
By Ben G. Burnett
University of Texas Press, 1970

Before the Pinochet coup in 1973, Chile had a lengthy history of constitutionalism. Early in the republican era the aristocracy established order in the political system; a century later the emergent middle sectors infused politics with wider democratic practices and, relative to most of Latin America, a level of pluralism came to characterize group politics.

Despite the distinctive advantages that embellished Chile’s political system, however, certain unfulfilled promises still marred the actual picture in the early 1960s. As the lower economic strata of society were continually passed over by most of the social reforms and economic advances that bettered the general outlook of the nation, their frustrations were brought out into the open and their votes were appealed to by reformist and radical political parties anxious to break the political hegemony of moderates and conservatives.

Thus, the 1960s stood out as a high-water mark in the confrontation between, on the one side, those desirous of maintaining the status quo, or at most admitting to prescriptive change, and, on the other, progressive elements demanding deep structural alterations in the entire social fabric. This study seeks to analyze the sources of alienation, the styles and objectives of the participants in the confrontation, and the relative ability of groups to gain satisfaction of their claims upon the political system. Ben G. Burnett delineates this dialogue between order and change as it inexorably pushed toward a showdown in the presidential elections of 1964 and the congressional elections of 1965.

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front cover of A Political History of the Texas Republic, 1836-1845
A Political History of the Texas Republic, 1836-1845
By Stanley Siegel
University of Texas Press, 1956

This book is unique among the histories of the Texas Republic: it is the first to examine the fledgling nation from the point of view of its dynamic political life. Policies with far-reaching results were formulated in the nine years of Texas' independence, and the author clearly presents the many thorny issues that were to plague Texas for generations.

The political history of the Republic is one of strong figures vying with each other for popular support of their divergent policies. The author details the personal feuds and animosities that resulted and shows the effects of these differences on the governing of the nation. Thoughtful use of diaries, memoirs, and other contemporary sources gives the reader an excellent understanding of the sense of personal concern the citizens of the Republic felt toward the political issues of the day.

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