“The Southern Ocean is a wild and elusive place, an ocean like no other. With its waters lying between the Antarctic continent and the southern coastlines of Australia, New Zealand, South America, and South Africa, it is the most remote and inaccessible part of the planetary ocean, the only part that flows around Earth unimpeded by any landmass. It is notorious amongst sailors for its tempestuous winds and hazardous fog and ice. Yet it is a difficult ocean to pin down. Its southern boundary, defined by the icy continent of Antarctica, is constantly moving in a seasonal dance of freeze and thaw. To the north, its waters meet and mingle with those of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans along a fluid boundary that defies the neat lines of a cartographer.”

So begins Joy McCann’s Wild Sea, the remarkable story of the world’s remote Southern, or Antarctic, Ocean. Unlike the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic Oceans with their long maritime histories, little is known about the Southern Ocean. This book takes readers beyond the familiar heroic narratives of polar exploration to explore the nature of this stormy circumpolar ocean and its place in Western and Indigenous histories. Drawing from a vast archive of charts and maps, sea captains’ journals, whalers’ log books, missionaries’ correspondence, voyagers’ letters, scientific reports, stories, myths, and her own experiences, McCann embarks on a voyage of discovery across its surfaces and into its depths, revealing its distinctive physical and biological processes as well as the people, species, events, and ideas that have shaped our perceptions of it. The result is both a global story of changing scientific knowledge about oceans and their vulnerability to human actions and a local one, showing how the Southern Ocean has defined and sustained southern environments and people over time.

Beautifully and powerfully written, Wild Sea will raise a broader awareness and appreciation of the natural and cultural history of this little-known ocean and its emerging importance as a barometer of planetary climate change.
 

Soldier and explorer William H. Emory traveled the length and breadth of the United States and participated in some of the most significant events of the nineteenth century. This first complete biography of Emory offers new insights into an often-overlooked military figure and provides an important view of an expanding America.

Born in Maryland in 1811, Emory was a West Point graduate who resigned his commission to become a civil engineer and join the newly formed Corps of Topographical Engineers. After working along the Canadian boundary, he was selected to accompany Stephen Watts Kearny and the Army of the West in their trek to California in 1846, and his map from that expedition helped guide Forty-Niners bound for the goldfields.

Emory worked for nine years on the new border between the United States and Mexico after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase and was responsible for the survey and marking of the boundary. When the Civil War broke out, Emory refused a commission in the Confederate Army, instead commanding a regiment defending Washington, D.C. Later he saw action at Manassas, in the Red River campaign, and in the Shenandoah Valley, where he served under Phil Sheridan.

This biography draws on Emory’s personal papers to reveal other significant episodes of his life. While commanding a cavalry unit in Indian Territory, he was the only officer to bring an entire command out of insurrectionary territory. In hostile action of a different kind, he was a major witness in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson and offered testimony that helped save the president.

William H. Emory: Soldier-Scientist is an important resource for scholars of western expansion and the Civil War. More than that, it is a rousing story of an unsung but distinguished hero of his time.

The red rock canyon country of southeastern Utah and northeastern Arizona is one of the most isolated, wild, and beautiful regions of North America. Europeans and Americans over time have mostly avoided, disdained, or ignored it. Wrecks of Human Ambition illustrates how this landscape undercut notions and expectations of good, productive land held by the first explorers, settlers, and travelers who visited it. Even today, its aridity and sandy soils prevent widespread agricultural exploitation, and its cliffs, canyons, and rivers thwart quick travel in and through the landscape.
 
Most of the previous works regarding the history of this unique region have focused on either early exploration or twentieth-century controversies that erupted over mineral and water development and the creation of national parks and wilderness areas. This volume fills a gap in existing histories by focusing on early historical themes from the confrontation between Euro-Christian ideals and this challenging landscape. It centers on three interconnected interpretations of the area that unfolded when visitors from green, well-watered, productive lands approached this desert. The Judeo-Christian obligation to “make the desert bloom,” encompassed ideas of millenarianism and of Indian conversion and acculturation as well as the Old Testament symbolism of the “garden” and the “desert.” It was embodied in the efforts of Spanish missionaries who came to the canyon country from the 1500s to the 1700s, and in the experiences of Mormon settlers from about 1850 to 1909. Another conflicting sentiment saw the region simply as bad land to avoid, an idea strongly held by U.S. government explorers in the 1850s. This conclusion too was reinforced by the experiences of those who attempted to settle and exploit this country. Finally, though, the rise of tourism brought new ideas of wilderness reverence to the canyon country. The bad lands became valuable precisely because they were so distinct from traditionally settled landscapes.
 
In pursuing the conflict between Euro-Christian ideals and an arid, rugged, resistant landscape of deserts and canyons, Paul Nelson provides in clear, engaging language the most detailed examination yet published of colonial Spain’s encounter with the region and lays out some of Mormonism’s rare failures in settling the arid West. 

In Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier José Rabasa examines the conjunction between writing and violence that defined the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the Americas (particularly North America) and in doing so, he reveals why this conjunction remains relevent and influential today. Rabasa elaborates a critique of Spanish legislation that prescribed forms of converting Indians to Christianity and subjecting them to Spanish rule, which was referred to by some as “peaceful conquest.” He argues that the oxymoronic nature of this term demands an oppositional mode of inquiry based on an understanding of violence that expands beyond acts of war to include symbolism, interpretation, legislation, and other speech acts that he refers to as the “force of law.”
To advance his argument Rabasa analyzes visual and verbal representations, colonialist programs, and the theories of colonization that informed the historiography of sixteenth-century New Mexico and Florida, which includes the territory from the Pacific coast to Kansas, and from present-day Florida to Tennessee and Arkansas. Using little-known materials from the northern borderlands of Spanish imperial expansion, Rabasa works to complicate notions of violence and their relationship to writing. Understood in juxtaposition with modern texts on postcolonial theory, his description of the dual function of these colonial texts—to represent material acts of violence and to act as violence itself—also emphasizes the lingering effects of this phenomenon in contemporary intellectual work and everyday life. In this way Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier serves not only as an explanation of what colonialist texts do but also instigates new ways of thinking about colonial discourse.
This book will interest scholars of colonial studies and early North American history, as well as a broader audience interested in interdisciplinary perspectives on the topic of racial, ethnic, and literary violences.