The Red Planet has been a subject of fascination for humanity for thousands of years, becoming part of our folklore and popular culture. The most Earthlike of the planets in our solar system, Mars may have harbored some form of life in the past and may still possess an ecosystem in some underground refuge. The mysteries of this fourth planet from our Sun make it of central importance to NASA and its science goals for the twenty-first century.  

In the wake of the very public failures of the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999, NASA embarked on a complete reassessment of the Mars Program. Scott Hubbard was asked to lead this restructuring in 2000, becoming known as the "Mars Czar." His team's efforts resulted in a very successful decade-long series of missions—each building on the accomplishments of those before it—that adhered to the science adage "follow the water" when debating how to proceed. Hubbard's work created the Mars Odyssey mission, the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Phoenix mission, and most recently the planned launch of the Mars Science Laboratory. 

Now for the first time Scott Hubbard tells the complete story of how he fashioned this program, describing both the technical and political forces involved and bringing to life the national and international cast of characters engaged in this monumental endeavor.  Blending the exciting stories of the missions with the thrills of scientific discovery, Exploring Mars will intrigue anyone interested in the science, the engineering, or the policy of investigating other worlds.
 

While it was once believed that agriculture and pottery developed concurrently in prehistoric societies, modern research has concluded that agriculture preceded pottery making, since a sedentary life with greater food production led to both the need and time to create storage containers. Bruce Huckell has been at the forefront of a movement in Arizona archaeology that has greatly modified our understanding of the transition from the Archaic to the agricultural periods in the Southwest. Work done by Huckell and others at Matty Canyon has produced the most detailed account available of a Late Archaic village and has been extremely influential in suggesting that the cultivation of maize predated the appearance of pottery. Of Marshes and Maize presents archaeological information obtained from small-scale investigations at two deeply buried preceramic sites in the Cienega Creek Basin. Its report on excavations at the Donaldson Site and at Los Ojitos offers a thorough description of archaeological features and artifacts, floral and faunal remains, and their geological and chronological contexts. From this data, the author concludes that a major shift toward a sedentary lifeway dependent on maize agriculture had already occurred by Late Archaic times (c. 500 to 800 B.C.), demonstrating that previous research on late preceramic sites in this region has provided an inadequate picture of the period. This monograph represents the first full presentation in the literature of an important set of data that is well-known among researchers but has thus far not been easily accessible. It is a classic example of the use of fragmentary evidence in well-dated contexts to introduce new ideas, and will stand not only as an important record of the evidence but also as the primary reference for this significant new interpretation of the late Archaic and the introduction of agriculture into the Southwest.

Covering 130,000 square miles and a wide range of elevations from desert to alpine in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, the Colorado Plateau has long fascinated researchers. The Colorado Plateau VI provides readers with a plethora of updates and insights into land conservation and management questions currently surrounding the region.

The Colorado Plateau VI’s contributors show how new technologies for monitoring, spatial analysis, restoration, and collaboration improve our understanding, management, and conservation of outcomes at the appropriate landscape scale for the Colorado Plateau. The volume’s chapters fall into five major themes: monitoring as a key tool for addressing management challenges, restoration approaches to improving ecosystem condition and function, collaboration and organizational innovations to achieve conservation and management objectives, landscape-scale approaches to understanding, and managing key species and ecological communities.

Focusing on the integration of science into resource management issues over the Colorado Plateau, this volume includes contributions from dozens of leading scholars of the region. The Colorado Plateau VI proves a valuable resource to all interested in the conservation management, natural history, and cultural biological resources of the Colorado Plateau.

Crime exists in every society, revealing not only the way in which societies function but also exposing the standards that society holds about what is harmful and punishable. Criminalizing individuals and actions is not the exclusive domain of the state; it emerges from the collective consciousness—the judgments of individuals and groups who represent societal thinking and values. Studying how these individuals and groups construct, represent, perpetrate, and contest crime reveals how their message reinforces and also challenges historical and culturally specific notions of race, class, and gender.
 
Voices of Crime examines these official and unofficial perceptions of deviancy, justice, and social control in modern Latin America. As a collection of essays exploring histories of crime and justice, the book focuses on both cultural and social history and the interactions among state institutions, the press, and a variety of elite and non-elite social groups. Arguing that crime in Latin America is best understood as a product of ongoing negotiation between “top-down” and “bottom up” ideas (not just as the exercise of power from the state), the authors seek to document and illustrate the everyday experiences of crime in particular settings, emphasizing underresearched historical actors such as criminals, victims, and police officers.
 
The book examines how these social groups constructed, contested, navigated, and negotiated notions of crime, criminality, and justice. This reorientation—in contrast to much of the existing historical literature that focuses on elite and state actors—prompts the authors to critically examine the very definition of crime and its perpetrators, suggesting that “not only the actions of the poor and racial others but also the state can be termed as criminal.”

The devastating fire that swept through Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the spring of 2000 may have been caused by one controlled burn gone wild, but it was far from an isolated event. All through the twentieth century, our national forests have been under assault from all sides: first ranchers and loggers laid their claims to our national forests, then recreationists and environmentalists spoke up for their interests. Who are our national forests really for?

In this book, leading environmental historians show us what has been happening to these fragile woodlands. Taking us from lumber towns to Indian reservations to grazing lands, Forests under Fire reveals the interaction of Anglos, Hispanics, and Native Americans with the forests of the American Southwest. It examines recent controversies ranging from red squirrel conservation on Mt. Graham to increased tourism in our national forests. These case studies offer insights into human-forest relationships in places such as the Coconino National Forest, the Vallecitos Sustained Yield Unit, and the Gila Wilderness Area while also drawing on issues and concerns about similar biospheres in other parts of the West.

Over the past century, forest management has evolved from a field dominated by the "conservationist" perspective—with humans exploiting natural resources-to one that emphasizes biocentrism, in which forests are seen as dynamic ecosystems. Yet despite this progressive shift, the assault on our forests continues through overgrazing of rangelands, lumbering, eroding mountainsides, fire suppression, and threats to the habitats of endangered species. Forests under Fire takes a closer look at the people calling the shots in our national forests, from advocates of timber harvesting to champions of ecosystem management, and calls for a reassessment of our priorities—before our forests are gone.

Contents

Introduction: Toward a Twenty-First-Century Forest Ecosystem Management Strategy / Christopher J. Huggard
Industry and Indian Self-Determination: Northern Arizona’s Apache Lumbering Empire, 1870-1970 / Arthur R. Gómez
A Social History of McPhee: Colorado’s Largest Lumber Town / Duane A. Smith
The Vallecitos Federal Sustained-Yield Unit: The (All Too) Human Dimension of Forest Management in Northern New Mexico, 1945-1998 / Suzanne S. Forrest
Grazing the Southwest Borderlands: The Peloncillo-Animas District of the Coronado National Forest in Arizona and New Mexico, 1906-1996 / Diana Hadley
America’s First Wilderness Area: Aldo Leopold, the Forest Service, and the Gila of New Mexico, 1924-1980 / Christopher J. Huggard
"Where There’s Smoke": Wildfire Policy and Suppression in the American Southwest / John Herron
Struggle in an Endangered Empire: The Search for Total Ecosystem Management in the Forests of Southern Utah, 1976-1999 / Thomas G. Alexander
Biopolitics: A Case Study of Political Influence on Forest Management Decisions, Coronado National Forest, Arizona, 1980s-1990s / Paul W. Hirt
Epilogue: Seeing the Forest Not for the Trees: The Future of Southwestern Forests in Retrospect / Hal K. Rothman

Chili, stew, biscuits—it's all here in over a hundred old-time recipes, home remedies too! More than a cookbook, it's a treasure trove of ranch lore.

"This is a splendid collection of cowcamp cook tales and 112 authentic old-time dutch oven recipes." —Books of the Southwest

"It is a delightful combination of yarns, history, nostalgia, and solid information—all ingeniously brewed up and spiced by a lady who knows what she is about." —Journal of Arizona History

"We haven't had a book that was so much fun to read in a long time." —Journal of the West

"If you want a good change in your eating, this is the book for you." —True West

Between 1769 and 1834, an influx of Spanish, Russian, and then American colonists streamed into Alta California seeking new opportunities. Their arrival brought the imposition of foreign beliefs, practices, and constraints on Indigenous peoples.

Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California reorients understandings of this dynamic period, which challenged both Native and non-Native people to reimagine communities not only in different places and spaces but also in novel forms and practices. The contributors draw on archaeological and historical archival sources to analyze the generative processes and nature of communities of belonging in the face of rapid demographic change and perceived or enforced difference.

Contributors provide important historical background on the effects that colonialism, missions, and lives lived beyond mission walls had on Indigenous settlement, marriage patterns, trade, and interactions. They also show the agency with which Indigenous peoples make their own decisions as they construct and reconstruct their communities. With nine different case studies and an insightful epilogue, this book offers analyses that can be applied broadly across the Americas, deepening our understanding of colonialism and community.

Contributors:
Julienne Bernard
James F. Brooks
John Dietler
Stella D’Oro
John G. Douglass
John Ellison
Glenn Farris
Heather Gibson
Kathleen L. Hull
Linda Hylkema
John R. Johnson
Kent G. Lightfoot
Lee M. Panich
Sarah Peelo
Seetha N. Reddy
David W. Robinson
Tsim D. Schneider
Christina Spellman
Benjamin Vargas

No serious astronomical library can be complete without it.—Journal of the British Astronomical Association

"The book contains the results of the exploration of Venus by spacecraft during the period 1962-1978. . . . The book represents an excellent review of the principal results of Venus in the period covered."—Bulletin of the Astronomical Institute of Czechoslovakia

"A wealth of new information."—Science

"Strongly recommended."—Science Books & Films

The Pueblo IV period (AD 1275–1600) witnessed dramatic changes in regional settlement patterns and social configurations across the ancestral Pueblo Southwest. Early in this interval, Pueblo potters began making distinctive polychrome vessels, often decorated with technologically innovative glaze paints. Archaeologists have linked these ceramic innovations with the introduction of new ideologies and religious practices to the area. This research explores interaction networks among residents of settlement clusters in the Zuni region of westcentral New Mexico during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD. Using multiple analytical techniques, this research provides a case study for documenting multiple scales of interaction in prehistory. Ceramicists will find a wealth of technological and contextual data on glaze-decorated pottery, and archaeologists interested in power and leadership in ancestral Pueblo societies will be intrigued by the implication that strategies like the manipulation of interpueblo alliances or control over long-distance resources may have been used to concentrate social power.

The Great Plains, known for grasslands that stretch to the horizon, is a difficult region to define. Some classify it as the region beginning in the east at the ninety-eighth or one-hundredth meridian. Others identify the eastern boundary with annual precipitation lines, soil composition, or length of the grass. In The Big Empty, leading historian R. Douglas Hurt defines this region using the towns and cities—Denver, Lincoln, and Fort Worth—that made a difference in the history of the environment, politics, and agriculture of the Great Plains.

Using the voices of women homesteaders, agrarian socialists, Jewish farmers, Mexican meatpackers, New Dealers, and Native Americans, this book creates a sweeping survey of contested race relations, radical politics, and agricultural prosperity and decline during the twentieth century. This narrative shows that even though Great Plains history is fraught with personal and group tensions, violence, and distress, the twentieth century also brought about compelling social, economic, and political change.

The only book of its kind, this account will be of interest to historians studying the region and to anyone inspired by the story of the men and women who found an opportunity for a better life in the Great Plains.

What does it mean to be Chicana/o? That question might not be answered the same as it was a generation ago.

As the United States witnesses a major shift in its population—from a white majority to a country where no single group predominates—the new mix not only affects relations between ethnic groups but also influences how individuals view themselves. This book addresses the development of individual and social identity within the context of these new demographic and cultural shifts. It identifies the contemporary forces that shape group identity in order to show how Chicana/os' sense of personal identity and social identity develops and how these identities are affected by changes in social relations.

The authors, both nationally recognized experts in social psychology, are concerned with the subjective definitions individuals have about the social groups with which they identify, as well as with linguistic, cultural, and social contexts. Their analysis reveals what the majority of Chicanas/os experience, using examples from music, movies, and the arts to illustrate complex concepts. In considering ¿Quién Soy? ("Who Am I?"), they discuss how individuals develop a positive sense of who they are as Chicanas/os, with an emphasis on the influence of family, schools, and community. Regarding ¿Quiénes Somos? ("Who Are We?"), they explore Chicanas/os' different group memberships that define who they are as a people, particularly reviewing the colonization history of the American Southwest to show how Chicanas/os' group identity is influenced by this history. A chapter on "Language, Culture, and Community" looks at how Chicanas/os define their social identities inside and outside their communities, whether in the classroom, neighborhood, or region. In a final chapter, the authors speculate how Chicana/o identity will change as Chicanas/os become a significant proportion of the U.S. population and as such factors as immigration, intermarriage, and improvements in social standing influence the process of identification. At the end of each chapter is an engaging exercise that reinforces its main argument and shows how psychological approaches are applicable to real life. Chicana/o Identity in a Changing U.S. Society is an unprecedented introduction to psychological issues that students can relate to and understand. It complements other titles in the Mexican American Experience series to provide a balanced view of issues that affect Mexican Americans today.

Salsa and merengue are now so popular that they are household words for Americans of all ethnic backgrounds. Recent media attention is helping other Caribbean music styles like bachata to attain a similar status. Yet popular Mexican American dances remain unknown and invisible to most non-Latinos. Quebradita, meaning “little break,” is a modern Mexican American dance style that became hugely popular in Los Angeles and across the southwestern United States during the early to mid 1990s. Over the decade of its popularity, this dance craze offered insights into the social and cultural experience of Mexican American youth. Accompanied by banda, an energetic brass band music style, quebradita is recognizable by its western clothing, hat tricks, and daring flips. The dance’s combination of Mexican, Anglo, and African American influences represented a new sensibility that appealed to thousands of young people. Hutchinson argues that, though short-lived, the dance filled political and sociocultural functions, emerging as it did in response to the anti-immigrant and English-only legislation that was then being enacted in California. Her fieldwork and interviews yield rich personal testimony as to the inner workings of the quebradita’s aesthetic development and social significance. The emergence of pasito duranguense, a related yet distinct style originating in Chicago, marks the evolution of the Mexican American youth dance scene. Like the quebradita before it, pasito duranguense has picked up the task of demonstrating the relevance of regional Mexican music and dance within the U.S. context.

This comprehensive history of copper mining tells the full story of the industry that produces one of America's most important metals. The first inclusive account of U.S. copper in one volume, Copper for America relates the discovery and development of America's major copper-producing areas—the eastern United States, Tennessee, Michigan, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Alaska—from colonial times to the present.

Starting with the predominance of New England and the Middle Atlantic states in the early nineteenth century, Copper for America traces the industry's migration to Michigan in mid-century and to Montana, Arizona, and other western states in the late nineteenth century. The book also examines the U.S. copper industry's decline in the twentieth century, studying the effects of strong competition from foreign copper industries and unforeseen changes in the national and global copper markets.

An extensively documented chronicle of the rise and fall of individual mines, companies, and regions, Copper for America will prove an essential resource for economic and business historians, historians of technology and mining, and western historians.