front cover of Three Comedies
Three Comedies
G Racz
University Press of Colorado, 2004
Three Comedies represents the first English-language collection of plays by Jaime Salom, one of Spain's most important contemporary dramatists. His forty-plus works encompass an impressive array of sub-genres, including domestic dramas, mysteries,
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The History of the Death Penalty in Colorado
Michael Radelet
University Press of Colorado, 2017

In The History of the Death Penalty in Colorado, noted death penalty scholar Michael Radelet chronicles the details of each capital punishment trial and execution that has taken place in Colorado since 1859. The book describes the debates and struggles that Coloradans have had over the use of the death penalty, placing the cases of the 103 men whose sentences were carried out and 100 more who were never executed into the context of a gradual worldwide trend away from this form of punishment.

For more than 150 years, Coloradans have been deeply divided about the death penalty, with regular questions about whether it should be expanded, restricted, or eliminated. It has twice been abolished, but both times state lawmakers reinstated the contentious punitive measure. Prison administrators have contributed to this debate, with some refusing to participate in executions and some lending their voices to abolition efforts. Colorado has also had a rich history of experimenting with execution methods, first hanging prisoners in public and then, starting in 1890, using the "twitch-up gallows" for four decades. In 1933, Colorado began using a gas chamber and eventually moved to lethal injection in the 1990s.

Based on meticulous archival research in official state archives, library records, and multimedia sources, The History of the Death Penalty in Colorado, will inform the conversation on both sides of the issue anywhere the future of the death penalty is under debate.

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The House on Lemon Street
Japanese Pioneers and the American Dream
Mark Rawitsch
University Press of Colorado, 2013
In 1915, Jukichi and Ken Harada purchased a house on Lemon Street in Riverside, California. Close to their restaurant, church, and children's school, the house should have been a safe and healthy family home. Before the purchase, white neighbors objected because of the Haradas' Japanese ancestry, and the California Alien Land Law denied them real-estate ownership because they were not citizens. To bypass the law Mr. Harada bought the house in the names of his three youngest children, who were American-born citizens. Neighbors protested again, and the first Japanese American court test of the California Alien Land Law of 1913-The People of California v. Jukichi Harada-was the result.

Bringing this little-known story to light, The House on Lemon Street details the Haradas' decision to fight for the American dream. Chronicling their experiences from their immigration to the United States through their legal battle over their home, their incarceration during World War II, and their lives after the war, this book tells the story of the family's participation in the struggle for human and civil rights, social justice, property and legal rights, and fair treatment of immigrants in the United States.

The Harada family's quest for acceptance illuminates the deep underpinnings of anti-Asian animus, which set the stage for Executive Order 9066, and recognizes fundamental elements of our nation's anti-immigrant history that continue to shape the American story. It will be worthwhile for anyone interested in the Japanese American experience in the twentieth century, immigration history, public history, and law.

This publication was made possible with the support of Naomi, Kathleen, Ken, and Paul Harada, who donated funds in memory of their father, Harold Shigetaka Harada, honoring his quest for justice and civil rights. Additional support for this publication was also provided, in part, by UCLA's Aratani Endowed Chair as well as Wallace T. Kido, Joel B. Klein, Elizabeth A. Uno, and Rosalind K. Uno.

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Representation and Rebellion
The Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1914-1942
Jonathan H. Rees
University Press of Colorado, 2010
In response to the tragedy of the Ludlow Massacre, John D. Rockefeller Jr. introduced one of the nation’s first employee representation plans (ERPs) to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in 1915. With the advice of William Mackenzie King, who would go on to become prime minister of Canada, the plan—which came to be known as the Rockefeller Plan—was in use until 1942 and became the model for ERPs all over the world.In Representation and Rebellion Jonathan Rees uses a variety of primary sources—including records recently discovered at the company’s former headquarters in Pueblo, Colorado—to tell the story of the Rockefeller Plan and those who lived under it, as well as to detail its various successes and failures. Taken as a whole, the history of the Rockefeller Plan is not the story of ceaseless oppression and stifled militancy that its critics might imagine, but it is also not the story of the creation of a paternalist panacea for labor unrest that Rockefeller hoped it would be.Addressing key issues of how this early twentieth-century experiment fared from 1915 to 1942, Rees argues that the Rockefeller Plan was a limited but temporarily effective alternative to independent unionism in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre. The book will appeal to business and labor historians, political scientists, and sociologists, as well as those studying labor and industrial relations.
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Attitudes On Altitude
John T. Reeves
University Press of Colorado, 2001
John T Reeves and Robert F Grover have gathered together seven episodes narrating the exploits of innovative researchers that led to some extraordinary medical findings, altering the course of medicine in Colorado and throughout the world. From the summit
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The Friar and the Maya
Diego de Landa and the Account of the Things of Yucatan
Matthew Restall
University Press of Colorado, 2023
The Friar and the Maya offers a full study and new translation of the Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán (Account of the Things of Yucatan) by a unique set of eminent scholars, created by them over more than a decade from the original manuscript held by the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid. This critical and careful reading of the Account is long overdue in Maya studies and will forever change how this seminal text is understood and used.
 
For generations, scholars used (and misused) the Account as the sole eyewitness insight into an ancient civilization. It is credited to the sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscan, monastic inquisitor, and bishop Diego de Landa, whose legacy is complex and contested. His extensive writings on Maya culture and history were lost in the seventeenth century, save for the fragment that is the Account, discovered in the nineteenth century, and accorded near-biblical status in the twentieth as the first “ethnography” of the Maya. However, the Account is not authored by Landa alone; it is a compilation of excerpts, many from writings by other Spaniards—a significant revelation made here for the first time.
 
This new translation accurately reflects the style and vocabulary of the original manuscript. It is augmented by a monograph—comprising an introductory chapter, seven essays, and hundreds of notes—that describes, explains, and analyzes the life and times of Diego de Landa, the Account, and the role it has played in the development of modern Maya studies. The Friar and the Maya is an innovative presentation on an important and previously misunderstood primary source.
 
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Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos
Middle Preclassic Lowland Maya Figurines, Ritual, and Time
Prudence M. Rice
University Press of Colorado, 2019
Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos explores the sociocultural significance of more than three hundred Middle Preclassic Maya figurines uncovered at the site of Nixtun-Ch'ich' on Lake Petén Itzá in northern Guatemala. In this careful, holistic, and detailed analysis of the Petén lakes figurines—hand-modeled, terracotta anthropomorphic fragments, animal figures, and musical instruments such as whistles and ocarinas—Prudence M. Rice engages with a broad swath of theory and comparative data on Maya ritual practice.
 
Presenting original data, Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos offers insight into the synchronous appearance of fired-clay figurines with the emergence of societal complexity in and beyond Mesoamerica. Rice situates these Preclassic Maya figurines in the broader context of Mesoamerican human figural representation, identifies possible connections between anthropomorphic figurine heads and the origins of calendrics and other writing in Mesoamerica, and examines the role of anthropomorphic figurines and zoomorphic musical instruments in Preclassic Maya ritual. The volume shows how community rituals involving the figurines helped to mitigate the uncertainties of societal transitions, including the beginnings of settled agricultural life, the emergence of social differentiation and inequalities, and the centralization of political power and decision-making in the Petén lowlands.
 
Literature on Maya ritual, cosmology, and specialized artifacts has traditionally focused on the Classic period, with little research centering on the very beginnings of Maya sociopolitical organization and ideological beliefs in the Middle Preclassic. Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos is a welcome contribution to the understanding of the earliest Maya and will be significant to Mayanists and Mesoamericanists as well as nonspecialists with interest in these early figurines
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Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua
Prudence M. Rice
University Press of Colorado, 2024
In this rich study of the construction and reconstruction of a colonized landscape, Prudence M. Rice takes an implicit political ecology approach in exploring encounters of colonization in Moquegua, a small valley of southern Peru. Building on theories of spatiality, spatialization, and place, she examines how politically mediated human interaction transformed the physical landscape, the people who inhabited it, and the resources and goods produced in this poorly known area.

Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua looks at the encounters between existing populations and newcomers from successive waves of colonization, from indigenous expansion states (Wari, Tiwanaku, and Inka) to the foreign Spaniards, and the way each group “re-spatialized” the landscape according to its own political and economic ends. Viewing these spatializations from political, economic, and religious perspectives, Rice considers both the ideological and material occurrences.

Concluding with a special focus on the multiple space-time considerations involved in Spanish-inspired ceramics from the region, Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua integrates the local and rural with the global and urban in analyzing the events and processes of colonialism. It is a vital contribution to the literature of Andean studies and will appeal to students and scholars of archaeology, historical archaeology, history, ethnohistory, and globalization.

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Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on the Itzas of Petén, Guatemala
Prudence M. Rice
University Press of Colorado, 2018

Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on the Itzas of Petén, Guatemala is the first exhaustively detailed and thorough account of the Itzas—a Maya group that dominated much of the western lowland area of tropical forest, swamps, and grasslands in Petén, Guatemala. Examining archaeological and historical evidence, Prudence Rice and Don Rice present a theoretical perspective on the Itzas’ origins and an overview of the social, political, linguistic, and environmental history of the area; explain the Spanish view of the Itzas during the Conquest; and explore the material culture of the Itzas as it has been revealed in recent surveys and excavations.

The long but fragmented history of the Petén Itzas requires investigation across multiple periods and regions. Chapters in this six-part overview interweave varying data pertaining to this group—archaeological, artifactual, indigenous textual, Spanish historical—from multiple languages and academic fields, such as anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, ecology, and history. Part I introduces the lowland Itzas, northern and southern, with an emphasis on those of the central Petén lakes area. Part II discusses general Itza origins and identities in the Epiclassic period, while part III reviews Spanish perceptions and misconceptions of the Petén Itzas in their Contact-period writings. With these temporal anchors, parts IV and V present the archaeology and artifacts of the Petén Itzas, including pottery, architecture, and arrow points, from varied sites and excavations but primarily focusing on the island capital of Tayza/Nojpetén. Part VI summarizes key data and themes of the preceding chapters for a new understanding of the Petén Itzas.

A companion volume to The Kowoj—a similar treatment of the Petén Itzas’ regional neighbors—Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on the Itzas of Petén, Guatemala demonstrates the unique physical, cultural, and social framework that was home to the Petén Itza, along with their backstory in northern Yucatán. Archaeologists, historians, art historians, and geographers who specialize in the Maya and the Postclassic, Contact, and Colonial periods will find this book of particular interest.

Contributors: Mark Brenner, Leslie G. Cecil, Charles Andrew Hofling, Nathan J. Meissner, Timothy W. Pugh, Yuko Shiratori

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The Kowoj
Identity, Migration, and Geopolitics in Late Postclassic Petén, Guatemala
Prudence M. Rice
University Press of Colorado, 2009
Neighbors of the better-known Itza in the central Petén lakes region of Guatemala, the Kowoj Maya have been studied for little more than a decade. The Kowoj: Identity, Migration, and Geopolitics in Late Postclassic Petén, Guatemala summarizes the results of recent research into this ethno-political group conducted by Prudence Rice, Don Rice, and their colleagues.

Chapters in The Kowoj address the question "Who are the Kowoj?" from varied viewpoints: archaeological, archival, linguistic, ethnographic, and bioarchaeological. Using data drawn primarily from the peninsular site of Zacpetén, the authors illuminate Kowoj history, ritual components of their self-expressed identity, and their archaeological identification. These data support the Kowoj claim of migration from Mayapán in Yucatán, where they were probably affiliated with the Xiw, in opposition to the Itza. These enmities extended into Petén, culminating in civil warfare by the time of final Spanish conquest in 1697.

The first volume to consider Postclassic Petén from broadly integrative anthropological, archaeological, and historical perspectives, The Kowoj is an important addition to the literature on late Maya culture and history in the southern lowlands. It will be of particular interest to archaeologists, historians, ethnohistorians, art historians, and epigraphers.

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Histories of Infamy
Francisco López de Gómara and the Ethics of Spanish Imperialism
Cristián A. Roa-de-la-Carrera
University Press of Colorado, 2005
"Roa-de-la-Carrera convincingly shows that Gómara, as well as other historians in the period, cannot easily ignore nor erase the contradictions of the Spanish colonial project."
- Luis Fernando Restrepo, University of Arkansas

“In an eloquent and thorough exegesis, Roa-de-la-Carrera reveals how and why López de Gómara, having written the best of all possible books in exultation of Spanish imperialism, nevertheless failed to convince the readers of his time."
- Susan Schroeder, Tulane University

In Histories of Infamy, Cristián Roa-de-la-Carrera explores Francisco López de Gómara's (1511-ca.1559) attempt to ethically reconcile Spain's civilizing mission with the conquistadors' abuse and exploitation of Native peoples.

The most widely read account of the conquest in its time, Gómara's Historia general de las Indias y Conquista de México rationalized the conquistadors' crimes as unavoidable evils in the task of bringing "civilization" to the New World. Through an elaborate defense of Spanish imperialism, Gómara aimed to convince his readers of the merits of the conquest, regardless of the devastation it had wrought upon Spain's new subjects. Despite his efforts, Gómara's apologist text quickly fell into disrepute and became ammunition for Spain's critics. Evaluating the effectiveness of ideologies of colonization, Roa-de-la-Carrera's analysis will appeal to scholars in colonial studies and readers interested in the history of the Americas.

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Hard as the Rock Itself
Place and Identity in the American Mining Town
David Robertson
University Press of Colorado, 2006
The first intensive analysis of sense of place in American mining towns, Hard as the Rock Itself: Place and Identity in the American Mining Town provides rare insight into the struggles and rewards of life in these communities. David Robertson contends that these communities - often characterized in scholarly and literary works as derelict, as sources of debasing moral influence, and as scenes of environmental decay - have a strong and enduring sense of place and have even embraced some of the signs of so-called dereliction.

Robertson documents the history of Toluca, Illinois; Cokedale, Colorado; and Picher, Oklahoma, from the mineral discovery phase through mine closure, telling for the first time how these century-old mining towns have survived and how sense of place has played a vital role.

Acknowledging the hardships that mining's social, environmental, and economic legacies have created for current residents, Robertson argues that the industry's influences also have contributed to the creation of strong, cohesive communities in which residents have always identified with the severe landscape and challenging, but rewarding way of life.

Robertson contends that the tough, unpretentious appearance of mining landscapes mirrors qualities that residents value in themselves, confirming that a strong sense of place in mining regions, as elsewhere, is not necessarily wedded to an attractive aesthetic or even to a thriving economy.

Mining historians, geographers, and other students of place in the American landscape will find fascinating material in Hard As the Rock Itself.
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Blue Heron
Elizabeth Robinson
University Press of Colorado, 2013
The poems in Blue Heron delineate a passage through grief and change. Here, personal loss is continuous with threats to other species and landscapes. In response, Robinson has uprooted the terrain of language, “what / bestows itself from / the almost-invisible / and its stain.” If these uprootings are casualties of a poetics seeking to redress imbalance and “pollution,” then they are also opportunities to rethink what can exist in the field of poetic language as “roots also quicken, bruise their plural pronouns, lose tune, / forsake terrain by moving through and on it.” And so Blue Heron links poetic process with organic process, presence with the gap we know as hauntedness. The page is not only a resonant physical field, but also a site of dialogue between human and landscape, between lack and manifestation. If these poems constitute a poetics of loss, they are equally a movement toward a poetics of openness, risk, and renewed balance in which poetry shifts as “a form of weather, a form/of following, falling from the form/as it twists.”
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The Great Unknown
Japanese American Sketches
Greg Robinson
University Press of Colorado, 2016
In TheGreat Unknown, award-winning historian and journalist Greg Robinson offers a fascinating and compulsively readable collection of biographical portraits of extraordinary but unheralded figures in Japanese American history: men and women who made remarkable contributions in the arts, literature, law, sports, and other fields. Recovering and celebrating the stories of noteworthy Issei and Nisei and of their supporters, TheGreat Unknown provides powerful evidence of the diverse experiences and substantial cultural, political, and intellectual contributions of Nikkei throughout the country and over multiple decades.
 
What is more, The Great Unknown reshapes our understanding of the Asian American experience. By focusing attention on exceptional figures who deviated from social norms, Robinson subverts stereotypes of ethnic Japanese and other Asians as conformist or colorless. The collection also highlights a set of recurring themes absent from conventional histories—including the lives of Japanese Americans outside the West Coast, the role of women in shaping community life, encounters between Japanese American and African American communities during the struggle for civil rights, and the evolving status of queer community members.
 
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Predatory Bureaucracy
The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West
Michael Robinson
University Press of Colorado, 2005
Predatory Bureaucracy is the definitive history of America's wolves and our policies toward predators. Tracking wolves from the days of the conquistadors to the present, author Michael Robinson shows that their story merges with that of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey. This federal agency was chartered to research insects and birds but - because of various pressures - morphed into a political powerhouse dedicated to killing wolves and other wildlife.

Robinson follows wolves' successful adaptation to the arrival of explorers, mountain men, and bounty hunters, through their disastrous century-long entanglement with the federal government. He shares the parallel story of the Biological Survey's rise, detailing the personal, social, geographic, and political forces that allowed it to thrive despite opposition from hunters, animal lovers, scientists, environmentalists, and presidents.

Federal predator control nearly eliminated wolves throughout the United States and Mexico and radically changed American lands and wildlife populations. It undercut the livelihoods of countless homestead families in order to benefit an emerging western elite of livestock owners. The extermination of predators led to problems associated with prey overpopulation, but, as Robinson reveals, extermination and control programs still continue. Predatory Bureaucracy will fascinate readers interested in wildlife, ecosystems, agriculture, and environmental politics.

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Oaxaca
Arqueología de una Región Mesoamericana
Nelly M. Robles García
University Press of Colorado, 2019
Este libro (SAA Press Current Perspectives Series) ofrece una visión general de la arqueología de la región oaxaqueña, abordada desde sus orígenes, con los científicos del siglo XIX, hasta los estudios más recientes en la época moderna. Ubicada en el sur de México, esta región mesoamericana ha sido considerada como cuna de civilizaciones debido a su ininterrumpido desarrollo cultural, desde la prehistoria hasta nuestros días. El libro se presenta organizado en una manera cronológica, a fin de que el lector pueda comprender el desarrollo de las antiguas culturas que han convivido a lo largo de varios siglos en este agreste territorio. Ofrece una compilación de los conocimientos emanados de los varios proyectos arqueológicos que se han realizado permanentemente en Oaxaca, que han permitido ir construyendo la historia de los grupos humanos asentados desde la etapa lítica hasta la llegada de la conquista europea en las diversas sub-regiones. Muestra también los diversos enfoques de la arqueología mexicana y norteamericana que la han modelado, y que se han complementado de manera afortunada para hacer de Oaxaca una de las regiones más estudiadas de Mesoamérica.
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Late Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers and Farmers of the Jornada Mogollon
Thomas R. Rocek
University Press of Colorado, 2023
Often seen as geographically marginal and of limited research interest to archaeologists, the Jornada Mogollon region of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico deserves broader attention. Late Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers and Farmers of the Jornada Mogollon presents the major issues being addressed in Jornada research and reveals the complex, dynamic nature of Jornada prehistory.
 
The Jornada branch of the Mogollon culture and its inhabitants played a significant economic, political, and social role at multiple scales. This volume draws together results from recent large-scale CRM work that has amassed among the largest data sets in the Southwest with up-to-date chronological, architectural, faunal, ceramic, obsidian sourcing, and other specialized studies. Chapters by some of the most active researchers in the area address topics that reach beyond the American Southwest, such as mobility, forager adaptations, the transition to farming, responses to environmental challenges, and patterns of social interaction.
 
Late Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers and Farmers of the Jornada Mogollon is an up-to-date summary of the major developments in the region and their implications for Southwest archaeology in particular and anthropological archaeological research more generally.
 
The publication of this book is supported in part by the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society and the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware.
 
Contributors: Rafael Cruz Antillón, Douglas H. M. Boggess, Peter C. Condon, Linda Scott Cummings, Moira Ernst, Tim Graves, David V. Hill, Nancy A. Kenmotsu, Shaun M. Lynch, Arthur C. MacWilliams, Mary Malainey, Timothy D. Maxwell, Myles R. Miller, John Montgomery, Jim A. Railey, Thomas R. Rocek, Matt Swanson, Christopher A. Turnbow, Javier Vasquez, Regge N. Wiseman, Chad L. Yost
 
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Writing as a Human Activity
Implications and Applications of the Work of Charles Bazerman
Paul M. Rogers
University Press of Colorado, 2023
Writing As a Human Activity offers a collection of original essays that attempt to account for Charles Bazerman’s shaping influence on the field of writing studies. Through scholarly engagement with his ideas, the 16 chapters—written by authors from Asia, Europe, North America, and South America—address Bazerman’s foundational scholarship on academic and scientific writing, genre theory, activity theory, writing research, writing across the curriculum, writing pedagogy, the sociology of knowledge, new media and technology, and international aspects of writing. Collectively, the authors use Bazerman’s work as a touchstone to consider contemporary contexts of writing as a human activity.
 
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Aspen
The History of a Silver Mining Town, 1879 - 1893
Malcolm J. Rohrbough
University Press of Colorado, 2000

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Rituals of the Past
Prehispanic and Colonial Case Studies in Andean Archaeology
Silvana Rosenfeld
University Press of Colorado, 2017

Rituals of the Past explores the various approaches archaeologists use to identify ritual in the material record and discusses the influence ritual had on the formation, reproduction, and transformation of community life in past Andean societies. A diverse group of established and rising scholars from across the globe investigates how ritual influenced, permeated, and altered political authority, economic production, shamanic practice, landscape cognition, and religion in the Andes over a period of three thousand years.

Contributors deal with theoretical and methodological concerns including non-human and human agency; the development and maintenance of political and religious authority, ideology, cosmologies, and social memory; and relationships with ritual action. The authors use a diverse array of archaeological, ethnographic, and linguistic data and historical documents to demonstrate the role ritual played in prehispanic, colonial, and post-colonial Andean societies throughout the regions of Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. By providing a diachronic and widely regional perspective, Rituals of the Past shows how ritual is vital to understanding many aspects of the formation, reproduction, and change of past lifeways in Andean societies.

Contributors: Sarah Abraham, Carlos Angiorama, Florencia Avila, Camila Capriata Estrada, David Chicoine, Daniel Contreras, Matthew Edwards, Francesca Fernandini, Matthew Helmer, Hugo Ikehara, Enrique Lopez-Hurtado, Jerry Moore, Axel Nielsen, Yoshio Onuki, John Rick, Mario Ruales, Koichiro Shibata, Hendrik Van Gijseghem, Rafael Vega-Centeno, Verity Whalen

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Pioneering Conservation in Alaska
Ken Ross
University Press of Colorado, 2006
A companion volume to Environmental Conflict in Alaska, Pioneering Conservation in Alaska chronicles the central land and wildlife issues and the growth of environmental conservation in Alaska during its Russian and territorial eras.

The Alaskan frontier tempted fur traders, whalers, salmon fishers, gold miners, hunters, and oilmen to take what they could without regard for long-term consequences. Wildlife species, ecosystems, and Native cultures suffered, sometimes irreparably. Damage to wildlife and lands drew the attention of environmentalists, including John Muir, who applied their influence to enact wildlife protection laws and set aside lands for conservation. Alaska served as a testing ground for emergent national resource policy in the United States, as environmental values of species and ecosystem sustainability replaced the unrestrained exploitation of Alaska's early frontier days.

Efforts of conservation leaders and the territory's isolation, small human population, and late development prevented widespread destruction and gave Americans a unique opportunity to protect some of the world's most pristine wilderness.

Enhanced by more than 100 photographs, Pioneering Conservation in Alaska illustrates the historical precedents for current natural resource disputes in Alaska and will fascinate readers interested in wildlife and conservation.

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A History of Mortgage Banking in the West
Financing America's Dreams
E. Michael Rosser
University Press of Colorado, 2017

Part economic history, part public history, A History of Mortgage Banking in the West is an insider’s account of how the mortgage banking sector worked over the last 150 years, including analysis of the causes of the 2007 mortgage crisis. Beginning with the land and railroad development acts that encouraged settlement in the west, E. Michael Rosser and Diane M. Sanders trace the laws, institutions, and individuals that contributed to the economic growth of the region.

Using Colorado and the west as a case study for the nation’s economic and property development as a whole since the late nineteenth century, Rosser and Sanders explain how farm mortgages and agricultural lending steadily gave way to urban development and housing mortgages, all while the large mortgage and investment firms financed the development of some of the state’s most important water resources and railroad networks. Rosser uses his personal experience as a lifelong practitioner and educator of mortgage banking, along with a plethora of primary sources, academic archives, and industry publications, to analyze the causes of economic booms and busts as they relate to real estate and development.

Rosser’s professional acumen combined with Sanders’s research experience makes A History of Mortgage Banking in the West a rich and nuanced account of the region’s most significant economic events. It will be an important work for scholars and practitioners in regional and financial history, mortgage market practice and development, government housing and mortgage policy, and financial stability and of great significance to anyone curious about the role of the federal government in national housing policy and the inherent risk in mortgages.

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Carrying the Word
The Concheros Dance in Mexico City
Susanna Rostas
University Press of Colorado, 2009
In Carrying the Word: The Concheros Dance in Mexico City, the first full length study of the Concheros dancers, Susanna Rostas explores the experience of this unique group, whose use of dance links rural religious practices with urban post-modern innovation in distinctive ways even within Mexican culture, which is rife with ritual dances.

The Concheros blend Catholic and indigenous traditions in their performances, but are not governed by a predetermined set of beliefs; rather they are bound together by long standing interpersonal connections framed by the discipline of their tradition. The Concheros manifest their spirituality by means of the dance. Rostas traces how they construct their identity and beliefs, both individual and communal, by its means. The book offers new insights into the experience of dancing as a Conchero while also exploring their history, organization and practices.

Carrying the Word provides a new way for audiences to understand the Conchero's dance tradition, and will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary Mesoamerica. Those studying identity, religion, and tradition will find this social-anthropological work particularly enlightening.

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Coffee House Positano
A Bohemian Oasis in Malibu, 1957–1962
Jay Ruby
University Press of Colorado, 2013
This unique auto-ethnographic study of life at the Coffee House Positano—a Bohemian coffee house in Malibu, California—during the late 1950s and early 1960s is a combination of historical reconstruction and personal memoir. An ebook consisting of a collection of memories expressed through multiple formats—text, image, audio, and video—it describes in illuminating detail the great range of people who frequented Positano and the activities that took place there over its short but influential existence.

As an ethnographer analyzing his own culture, author Jay Ruby uses a unique ethnographic method known as “studying sideways.” He combines the exploration of self and others with the theoretical framework of anthropology to provide deep insight into the counterculture of late 1950s and early 1960s America. He shares his connection to Positano, where he lived and worked from 1957 to 1959 and again in 1963, and reflects on Positano in the context of US counterculture and the greater role of countercultures in society.

This intimate and significant work will be of interest to anthropologists as well as scholars and the general reader interested in California history, Beat culture, and countercultural movements.

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Skywatching in the Ancient World
New Perspectives in Cultural Astronomy
Clive Ruggles
University Press of Colorado, 2007
Compiled in honor of Anthony F. Aveni, America's leading archaeoastronomer, Skywatching in the Ancient World offers state-of-the-art work in cultural astronomy by well-known experts in Mayan glyphic studies, cultural history, ethnohistory, and the history of science and of religions.

This collection's wide range of outstanding scholarship reveals that cultural astronomy has come into its own. The diverse topics addressed by the contributors include the correlation between Colonial Northern Zapotec and Gregorian calendars, the period of use of the Dresden Codex Venus table and the significance of the Lunar Almanacs that precede it, a new interpretation of an Inka tapestry mantle as a commemorative calendar, temple orientations in Hawai'i and church orientations in Medieval England, and the connection in cultural imagery between astronomers (science) and wizards (magic).

Contributors include: Harvey M. Bricker, Victoria R. Bricker, Edward E. Calnek, Clemency Coggins, John Justeson, Edwin C. Krupp, Stephen C. McCluskey, Susan Milbrath, Clive Ruggles, David Tavárez, Barbara Tedlock, Dennis Tedlock, Gary Urton, and R. Tom Zuidema. Mesoamerican Worlds Series

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front cover of Reshaping New Spain
Reshaping New Spain
Government and Private Interests in the Colonial Bureaucracy, 1535-1550
Ethelia Ruiz Medrano
University Press of Colorado, 2006
Originally published in Mexico as Gobierno y Sociedad en Nueva Espana, Ethelia Ruiz Medrano's seminal study Reshaping New Spain is now available in an updated English edition.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Ruiz examines the developing colonial institutions in Mexico and how they changed indigenous land ownership and labor laws to favor the new bureaucrats. This portrait of the emerging government in New Spain fills a critical niche in Latin American studies.

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front cover of Mexico's Indigenous Communities
Mexico's Indigenous Communities
Their Lands and Histories, 1500-2010
Ethelia Ruiz Medrano
University Press of Colorado, 2010
A rich and detailed account of indigenous history in central and southern Mexico from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, Mexico's Indigenous Communities is an expansive work that destroys the notion that Indians were victims of forces beyond their control and today have little connection with their ancient past. Indian communities continue to remember and tell their own local histories, recovering and rewriting versions of their past in light of their lived present.

Ethelia Ruiz Medrano focuses on a series of individual cases, falling within successive historical epochs, that illustrate how the practice of drawing up and preserving historical documents-in particular, maps, oral accounts, and painted manuscripts-has been a determining factor in the history of Mexico's Indian communities for a variety of purposes, including the significant issue of land and its rightful ownership. Since the sixteenth century, numerous Indian pueblos have presented colonial and national courts with historical evidence that defends their landholdings.

Because of its sweeping scope, groundbreaking research, and the author's intimate knowledge of specific communities, Mexico's Indigenous Communities is a unique and exceptional contribution to Mexican history. It will appeal to students and specialists of history, indigenous studies, ethnohistory, and anthropology of Latin America and Mexico

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front cover of Negotiation within Domination
Negotiation within Domination
New Spain's Indian Pueblos Confront the Spanish State
Ethelia Ruiz Medrano
University Press of Colorado, 2016
Although indigenous communities reacted to Spanish presence with significant acts of resistance and rebellion, they also turned to negotiation to deal with conflicts and ameliorate the consequences of colonial rule. This affected not only the development of legal systems in New Spain and Mexico but also the survival and continuation of traditional cultures.

 Bringing together work by Mexican and North American historians, this collection is a crucially important and rare contribution to the field. Negotiation within Domination is a valuable resource for native peoples as they seek to redefine and revitalize their identities and assert their rights relating to language and religion, ownership of lands and natural resources, rights of self-determination and self-government, and protection of cultural and intellectual property. It will be of interest primarily to specialists in the field of colonial studies and historians and ethnohistorians of New Spain.

Contributors: R. Jovita Baber, José Manuel A. Chávez-Gómez, Susan Kellogg, Edward W. Osowski, María de los Ángeles Romero Frizzi, Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, Cuauhtémoc Velasco Ávila, Yanna P. Yannakakis

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front cover of Situating Writing Processes
Situating Writing Processes
Physicality, Improvisation, and the Teaching of Writing
Hannah Rule
University Press of Colorado, 2020
What should it mean today to "teach writing as a process"? In Situating Writing Processes, Hannah J. Rule takes stock of this familiar commonplace in composition studies, arguing for a renewed understanding of process that emphasizes situatedness. To situate processes is to physically locate them: to observe the infinite ways they are shaped by particular bodies and affects, environments and spaces, others near and distant, and various tools or objects. When we call attention to the physical, material, and located dimensions of processes, we foreground the differences, contingencies, and lived experiences of composing. Doing so is critical, Rule argues, to finally letting go of discrete skills and instead teaching writing as experience in seeing and responding to ranging constraints immediate and distant, material and social. Situating processes ultimately emphasizes vulnerability: how all writing involves risk, uncertainty, and the possibility of failure, as processes are susceptible to the participation and control of forces on ranging scales and always in excess of the writer alone. Accounting for context, difference, and improvisation, Situating Writing Processes helps writing teachers and scholars freshly reimagine the histories and potential of an enduring concept.
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front cover of Yellowstone Cougars
Yellowstone Cougars
Ecology before and during Wolf Restoration
Toni K. Ruth
University Press of Colorado, 2018
Yellowstone Cougars examines the effect of wolf restoration on the cougar population in Yellowstone National Park—one of the largest national parks in the American West. No other study has ever specifically addressed the theoretical and practical aspects of competition between large carnivores in North America. The authors provide a thorough analysis of cougar ecology, how they interact with and are influenced by wolves—their main competitor—and how this knowledge informs management and conservation of both species across the West.
 
Of practical importance, Yellowstone Cougars addresses the management and conservation of multiple carnivores in increasingly human-dominated landscapes. The authors move beyond a single-species approach to cougar management and conservation to one that considers multiple species, which was impossible to untangle before wolf reestablishment in the Yellowstone area provided biologists with this research opportunity.
 
Yellowstone Cougars provides objective scientific data at the forefront of understanding cougars and large carnivore community structure and management issues in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, as well as in other areas where wolves and cougars are reestablishing. Intended for an audience of scientists, wildlife managers, conservationists, and academics, the book also sets a theoretical precedent for writing about competition between carnivorous mammals.
 
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front cover of Research, Education and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center
Research, Education and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center
Susan C. Ryan
University Press of Colorado, 2023
This volume celebrates and examines the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center’s past, present, and future by providing a backdrop for the not-for-profit’s beginnings and highlighting key accomplishments in research, education, and American Indian initiatives over the past four decades. Specific themes include Crow Canyon’s contributions to projects focused on community and regional settlement patterns, human-environment relationships, public education pedagogy, and collaborative partnerships with Indigenous communities. Contributing authors, deeply familiar with the center and its surrounding central Mesa Verde region, include Crow Canyon researchers, educators, and Indigenous scholars inspired by the organization’s mission to further develop and share knowledge of the human past for the betterment of societies.
 
Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center guides Southwestern archaeology and public education beyond current practices—particularly regarding Indigenous partnerships—and provides a strategic handbook for readers into and through the mid-twenty-first century.
 
Open access edition supported by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center King Family Fund and subvention supported in part by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center and the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society.
 
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