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Arizona
A History, Revised Edition
Thomas E. Sheridan
University of Arizona Press, 2012

Hailed as a model state history thanks to Thomas E. Sheridan's thoughtful analysis and lively interpretation of the people and events shaping the Grand Canyon State, Arizona has become a standard in the field. Now, just in time for Arizona's centennial, Sheridan has revised and expanded this already top-tier state history to incorporate events and changes that have taken place in recent years. Addressing contemporary issues like land use, water rights, dramatic population increases, suburban sprawl, and the US-Mexico border, the new material makes the book more essential than ever. It successfully places the forty-eighth state's history within the context of national and global events. No other book on Arizona history is as integrative or comprehensive.

From stone spear points more than 10,000 years old to the boom and bust of the housing market in the first decade of this century, Arizona: A History explores the ways in which Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans, Asians, and Anglos have inhabited and exploited Arizona. Sheridan, a life-long resident of the state, puts forth new ideas about what a history should be, embracing a holistic view of the region and shattering the artificial line between prehistory and history. Other works on Arizona's history focus on government, business, or natural resources, but this is the only book to meld the ethnic and cultural complexities of the state's history into the main flow of the story.

A must read for anyone interested in Arizona's past or present, this extensive revision of the classic work will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers alike.

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The Border and Its Bodies
The Embodiment of Risk Along the U.S.-México Line
Edited by Thomas E. Sheridan and Randall H. McGuire
University of Arizona Press, 2019
The Border and Its Bodies examines the impact of migration from Central America and México to the United States on the most basic social unit possible: the human body. It explores the terrible toll migration takes on the bodies of migrants—those who cross the border and those who die along the way—and discusses the treatment of those bodies after their remains are discovered in the desert.

The increasingly militarized U.S.-México border is an intensely physical place, affecting the bodies of all who encounter it. The essays in this volume explore how crossing becomes embodied in individuals, how that embodiment transcends the crossing of the line, and how it varies depending on subject positions and identity categories, especially race, class, and citizenship.

Timely and wide-ranging, this book brings into focus the traumatic and real impact the border can have on those who attempt to cross it, and it offers new perspectives on the effects for rural communities and ranchers. An intimate and profoundly human look at migration, The Border and Its Bodies reminds us of the elemental fact that the border touches us all.

Contributors
Bruce E. Anderson
Jared Beatrice
Rebecca Crocker
Jason De León
Linda Green
Randall H. McGuire
Shaylih Muehlmann
Robin Reineke
Olivia T. Ruiz Marrujo
David Seibert
Thomas E. Sheridan
Angela Soler
Ruth M. Van Dyke
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Contested Ground
Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire
Edited by Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan
University of Arizona Press, 1998
The Spanish empire in the Americas spanned two continents and a vast diversity of peoples and landscapes. Yet intriguing parallels characterized conquest, colonization, and indigenous resistance along its northern and southern frontiers, from the role played by Jesuit missions in the subjugation of native peoples to the emergence of livestock industries, with their attendant cowboys and gauchos and threats of Indian raids. In this book, nine historians, three anthropologists, and one sociologist compare and contrast these fringes of New Spain between 1500 and 1880, showing that in each region the frontier represented contested ground where different cultures and polities clashed in ways heretofore little understood. The contributors reveal similarities in Indian-white relations, military policy, economic development, and social structure; and they show differences in instances such as the emergence of a major urban center in the south and the activities of rival powers. The authors also show how ecological and historical differences between the northern and southern frontiers produced intellectual differences as well. In North America, the frontier came to be viewed as a land of opportunity and a crucible of democracy; in the south, it was considered a spawning ground of barbarism and despotism. By exploring issues of ethnicity and gender as well as the different facets of indigenous resistance, both violent and nonviolent, these essays point up both the vitality and the volatility of the frontier as a place where power was constantly being contested and negotiated.
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Empire of Sand
The Seri Indians and the Struggle for Spanish Sonora, 1645–1803
Compiled and edited by Thomas E. Sheridan
University of Arizona Press, 1999
From the earliest days of their empire in the New World, the Spanish sought to gain control of the native peoples and lands of what is now Sonora. While missionaries were successful in pacifying many Indians, the Seris—independent groups of hunter-gatherers who lived on the desert shores and islands of the Gulf of California—steadfastly defied Spanish efforts to subjugate them.

Empire of Sand is a documentary history of Spanish attempts to convert, control, and ultimately annihilate the Seris. These papers of religious, military, and government officials attest to the Seris’ resilience in the face of numerous Spanish attempts to conquer them and remove them from their lands. The documents include early observations of the Seris by Jesuit missionaries, descriptions of the collapse of the Seri mission system in 1748, accounts of the invasion of Tiburón Island in 1750 and the Sonora Expedition of 1767–71, and reports of late eighteenth-century Seri hostilities.

Thomas E. Sheridan’s introduction puts the documents in perspective, while his notes objectively clarify their significance. By skillfully weaving the documents into a coherent narrative of Spanish–Seri interaction, he has produced a compelling account of empire and resistance that speaks to anthropologists, historians, and all readers who take heart in stories of resistance to oppression.
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Landscapes of Fraud
Mission Tumacácori, the Baca Float, and the Betrayal of the O’odham
Thomas E. Sheridan
University of Arizona Press, 2006
From the actions of Europeans in the seventeenth century to the real estate deals of the modern era, people making a living off the land in southern Arizona have been repeatedly robbed of their way of life. History has recorded more than three centuries of speculative failures that never amounted to much but left dispossessed people in their wake. This book seeks to excavate those failures, to examine the new social spaces the schemers struggled to create and the existing social spaces they destroyed.

Landscapes of Fraud explores how the penetration of the evolving capitalist world-system created and destroyed communities in the Upper Santa Cruz Valley of Arizona from the late 1600s to the 1970s. Thomas Sheridan has melded history, anthropology, and critical geography to create a penetrating view of greed and power and their lasting effect on those left powerless.

Sheridan first examines how O’odham culture was fragmented by the arrival of the Spanish, telling how autonomous communities moving across landscapes in seasonal rounds were reduced to a mission world of subordination. Sheridan then considers the fate of the Tumacácori grant and Baca Float No. 3, another land grant. He tells the unbroken story of land fraud from Manuel María Gándara’s purchase of the “abandoned” Tumacácori grant at public auction in 1844 through the bankruptcy of the shady real estate developers who had fraudulently promoted housing projects at Rio Rico during the 1960s and ’70s.

As the Upper Santa Cruz Valley underwent a wrenching transition from a landscape of community to a landscape of fraud, the betrayal of the O’odham became complete when land, that most elemental form of human space, was transformed from a communal resource into a commodity bought and sold for its future value. Today, Mission Tumacácori stands as a romantic icon of the past while the landscapes that supported it lay buried under speculative schemes that continue to haunt our history.
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Last Water on the Devil's Highway
A Cultural and Natural History of Tinajas Altas
Bill Broyles, Gayle Harrison Hartmann, Thomas E. Sheridan, Gary Paul Nabhan, and Mary Charlotte Thurtle
University of Arizona Press, 2013
The Devil’s Highway—El Camino del Diablo—crosses hundreds of miles and thousands of years of Arizona and Southwest history. This heritage trail follows a torturous route along the U.S. Mexico border through a lonely landscape of cactus, desert flats, drifting sand dunes, ancient lava flows, and searing summer heat. The most famous waterhole along the way is Tinajas Altas, or High Tanks, a series of natural rock basins that are among the few reliable sources of water in this notoriously parched region.

Now an expert cast of authors describes, narrates, and explains the human and natural history of this special place in a thorough and readable account. Addressing the latest archaeological and historical findings, they reveal why Tinajas Altas was so important and how it related to other waterholes in the arid borderlands. Readers can feel like pioneers, following in the footsteps of early Native Americans, Spanish priests and soldiers, gold seekers and borderland explorers, tourists, and scholars.

Combining authoritative writing with a rich array of more than 180 illustrations and maps as well as detailed appendixes providing up-to-date information on the wildlife and plants that live in the area, Last Water on the Devil’s Highway allows readers to uncover the secrets of this fascinating place, revealing why it still attracts intrepid tourists and campers today.
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Los Tucsonenses
The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854–1941
Thomas E. Sheridan
University of Arizona Press, 1986
Originally a presidio on the frontier of New Spain, Tucson was a Mexican community before the arrival of Anglo settlers. Unlike most cities in California and Texas, Tucson was not initially overwhelmed by Anglo immigrants, so that even until the early 1900s Mexicans made up a majority of the town's population. Indeed, it was through the efforts of Mexican businessmen and politicians that Tucson became a commercial center of the Southwest. Los Tucsonenses celebrates the efforts of these early entrepreneurs as it traces the Mexican community's gradual loss of economic and political power. Drawing on both statistical archives and pioneer reminiscences, Thomas Sheridan has written a history of Tucson's Mexican community that is both rigorous in its factual analysis and passionate in its portrayal of historic personages.
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Moquis and Kastiilam
Hopis, Spaniards, and the Trauma of History, Volume I, 1540–1679
Edited by Thomas E. Sheridan, Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, Anton Daughters, Dale S. Brenneman, T. J. Ferguson, Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, and Lee Wayne Lomayestewa
University of Arizona Press, 2015
The first of a two-volume series, Moquis and Kastiilam tells the story of the encounter between the Hopis, who the Spaniards called Moquis, and the Spaniards, who the Hopis called Kastiilam, from the first encounter in 1540 until the eve of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. By comparing and contrasting Spanish documents with Hopi oral traditions, the editors portray a balanced presentation of their shared past. Translations of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century documents written by Spanish explorers, colonial officials, and Franciscan missionaries tell the perspectives of the European visitors, and oral traditions recounted by Hopi elders reveal the Indigenous experience.

The editors argue that the Spanish record is incomplete, and only the Hopi perspective can balance the story. The Spanish documentary record (and by extension the documentary record of any European or Euro-American colonial power) is biased and distorted, according to the editors, who assert there are enormous silences about Hopi responses to Spanish missionization and colonization. The only hope of correcting those weaknesses is to record and analyze Hopi oral traditions, which have been passed down from generation to generation, and give voice to Hopi values and Hopi social memories of what was a traumatic period in their past.

Spanish abuses during missionization—which the editors address specifically and directly as the sexual exploitation of Hopi women, suppression of Hopi ceremonies, and forced labor of Hopis—drove Hopis to the breaking point, inspiring a Hopi revitalization that led them to participate in the Pueblo Revolt. Those abuses, the revolt, and the resistance that followed remain as open wounds in Hopi society today.
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Moquis and Kastiilam
Hopis, Spaniards, and the Trauma of History, Volume II, 1680–1781
Edited by Thomas E. Sheridan, Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, Anton Daughters, Dale S. Brenneman, T. J. Ferguson, Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, and Lee Wayne Lomayestewa
University of Arizona Press, 2020

The second in a two-volume series, Moquis and Kastiilam, Volume II, 1680–1781 continues the story of the encounter between the Hopis, who the Spaniards called Moquis, and the Spaniards, who the Hopis called Kastiilam, from the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 through the Spanish expeditions in search of a land route to Alta California until about 1781. By comparing and contrasting Spanish documents with Hopi oral traditions, the editors present a balanced presentation of a shared past. Translations of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century documents written by Spanish explorers, colonial officials, and Franciscan missionaries tell the perspectives of the European visitors, and oral traditions recounted by Hopi elders reveal the Indigenous experience.

The editors argue that only the Hopi perspective can balance the story recounted in the Spanish documentary record, which is biased, distorted, and incomplete (as is the documentary record of any European or Euro-American colonial power). The only hope of correcting those weaknesses and the enormous silences about the Hopi responses to Spanish missionization and colonization is to record and analyze Hopi oral traditions, which have been passed down from generation to generation since 1540, and to give voice to Hopi values and social memories of what was a traumatic period in their past.

Volume I documented Spanish abuses during missionization, which the editors address specifically and directly as the sexual exploitation of Hopi women, suppression of Hopi ceremonies, and forced labor of Hopi men and women. These abuses drove Hopis to the breaking point, inspiring a Hopi revitalization that led them to participate in the Pueblo Revolt and to rebuff all subsequent efforts to reestablish Franciscan missions and Spanish control. Volume II portrays the Hopi struggle to remain independent at its most effective—a mixture of diplomacy, negotiation, evasion, and armed resistance. Nonetheless, the abuses of Franciscan missionaries, the bloodshed of the Pueblo Revolt, and the subsequent destruction of the Hopi community of Awat’ovi on Antelope Mesa remain historical traumas that still wound Hopi society today.

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Paths of Life
American Indians of the Southwest and Northern Mexico
Edited by Thomas E. Sheridan and Nancy J. Parezo
University of Arizona Press, 1996
This monograph marks the first presentation of a detailed Classic period ceramic chronology for central and southern Veracruz, the first detailed study of a Gulf Coast pottery production locale, and the first sourcing-distribution study of a Gulf Coast pottery complex.
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front cover of The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain
The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain
A Documentary History, Volume Two, Part One: The Californias and Sinaloa-Sonora, 1700-1765
Edited by Charles W. Polzer and Thomas E. Sheridan
University of Arizona Press, 1997
Acclaimed by readers and reviewers alike, the first volume of The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain was a landmark in the documentary study of seventeenth-century Spanish Colonial Mexico. Here, Charles W. Polzer and Thomas E. Sheridan bring the same incisive scholarship and careful editing to long-awaited Volume Two, covering the years 1700-1765.The two-part second volume looks at the Spanish expansion as occurring in four north-south corridors that carried the main components of social and political activity. Divided geographically, materials in this book (part 1) relate to the two westernmost corridors, while those in the projected book (part 2) will cover the corridors north to New Mexico and northeast into Texas. Documents in both books demonstrate the importance of regional hostilities rather than exterior threats in the establishment of presidios.Materials in this book relate to events and episodes in the Californias (the peninsula of Baja California) where the situation of the presidial forces was unique in New Spain. By bringing into focus the ways that civil-religious relations affected the military garrison there, these documents contribute immeasurably to a greater understanding of how California itself emerged in history. Also covering Sinaloa and Sonora, the mainland of the west coast of New Spain, records in the book reveal how the Sinaloa coastal forces differed from those in the interior and how they were depended upon for protection in the northern expansion, both civil and missionary.Because documents on the presidios in northern New Spain are vast in number and varied in content, these selections are meant to provide for the reader or researcher a framework around which more elaborate studies might be constructed. All of the records have been translated from the Spanish language into readable, modern English and are accompanied by transcribed versions of the originals.Valuable to both non-specialists and specialists, here is an unparalleled resource important not only for the careful selection, preparation, and presentation of documents, but also for the excellent background information that puts them into context and makes them come alive.
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Stitching the West Back Together
Conservation of Working Landscapes
Edited by Susan Charnley, Thomas E. Sheridan, and Gary P. Nabhan
University of Chicago Press, 2014
News headlines would often have us believe that conservationists are inevitably locked in conflict with the people who live and work on the lands they seek to protect. Not so. Across the western expanses of the United States, conservationists, ranchers, and forest workers are bucking preconceptions to establish common ground. As they join together to protect the wide open spaces, diverse habitats, and working landscapes upon which people, plants, and animals depend, a new vision of management is emerging in which the conservation of biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, and sustainable resource use are seen not as antithetical, but as compatible, even symbiotic goals.

Featuring contributions from an impressive array of scientists, conservationists, scholars, ranchers, and foresters, Stitching the West Back Together explores that expanded, inclusive vision of environmentalism as it delves into the history and evolution of Western land use policy and of the working landscapes themselves. Chapters include detailed case studies of efforts to promote both environmental and economic sustainability, with lessons learned; descriptions of emerging institutional frameworks for conserving Western working landscapes; and implications for best practices and policies crucial to the future of the West’s working forests and rangelands. As economic and demographic forces threaten these lands with fragmentation and destruction, this book encourages a hopeful balance between production and conservation on the large, interconnected landscapes required for maintaining cultural and biological diversity over the longterm.
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Where the Dove Calls
The Political Ecology of a Peasant Corporate Community in Northwestern Mexico
Thomas E. Sheridan
University of Arizona Press, 1988
Thomas Sheridan's study of the municipio of Cucurpe, Sonora, offers new insight into the ability of peasants to respond to ecological and political change. In order to survive as small rancher-farmers, the Cucurpeños battle aridity and one another in a society characterized by sharp economic inequality and long-standing conflict over the distribution of land and water.

Sheridan has written an ethnography of resource control, one that weds the approaches of political economy and cultural ecology in order to focus upon both the external linkages and internal adaptations that shape three peasant corporate communities. He examines the ecological and economic constraints which scarce and necessary resources place upon households in Cucurpe, and then investigates why many such households have formed corporate communities to insure their access to resources beyond their control. Finally, he identifies the class differences that exist within the corporate communities as well as between members of those organizations and the private ranchers who surround them.

Where the Dove Calls (the meaning of "Cucurpe" in the language of the Opata Indians), an important contribution to peasant studies, reveals the household as the basic unit of Cucurpe society. By viewing Cucurpe's corporate communities as organizations of fiercely independent domestic units rather than as expressions of communal solidarity, Sheridan shows that peasants are among the exploiters as well as the exploited. Cucurpe¤os struggle to maintain the autonomy of their households even as they join together to protect corporate grazing lands and irrigation water. Any attempt to weaken or destroy that independence is met with opposition that ranges from passive resistance to violence.
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