After more than fifty years, Cycles of Conquest is still one of the best syntheses of more than four centuries of conquest, colonization, and resistance ever published. It explores how ten major Native groups in northern Mexico and what is now the United States responded to political incorporation, linguistic hegemony, community reorganization, religious conversion, and economic integration. Thomas E. Sheridan writes in the new foreword commissioned for this special edition that the book is “monumental in scope and magisterial in presentation.”

Cycles of Conquest remains a seminal work, deeply influencing how we have come to view the greater Southwest and its peoples.

Health is a major concern to all people. In this volume, four writers examine the medical arts of Yaqui, Anglo, Black and Mexican American communities to further understand the relationship between alternative and scientific medicine.

Edward H. Spicer's informative Introduction sets the stage for comparing "popular" and "scientific" medicine. "Graduates of medical schools have been taught that their body of knowledge is the one true medical tradition. The world has many medicines and thousands of practitioners who do not believe that "Western" medicine is a universal cure-all. These practitioners may be as certain that what they practice is the one true medical tradition," says Spicer. In the communities studied, the belief is that illnesses may be caused by overwork, withcraft or sin, and treatment may include herbs, prayer, or massage. Practitioners are successful and respected although they are not licenses in the legal sense.

In these alternative medical traditions, "Western" medicine may find a key to new growth and effectiveness. Ethnic Medicine in the Southwest is a fascinating look at commonly practiced arts that will interest not only ethnic and health services specialists but all those interested in cultural traditions.

This important final report of the War Relocation Authority, written in 1946 and now released in book form with a comprehensive introduction by Edward H. Spicer, describes the growth and changes in the community life and how attitudes of Japanese-American relocatees and WRA administrators evolved, adjusted, and affected one another on political, social, and psychological levels.

The Yaqui of Mexico were early converts to Christianity in New Spain. Yet they came to be regarded with hostility by the newly emerging Mexican government. Many Yaquis fled Mexico in the early twentieth century and established a settlement in Arizona where they resumed a peaceful existence centered around their ceremonial calendar.

Edward Spicer devoted most of his professional career to the study of the Yaquis and came to be regarded as a leading authority on that tribe. At the inception of his forty years of research stands Pascua, a firsthand description of daily village life.

“[People of Pascua] sketches the history and culture of the Tucson area Yaqui and contains case studies of a number of the informants. What constituted ‘Yaquiness’ in Pascua was mainly a common language, a shared historical tradition, and an aberrant form of Catholic Christianity laced with Yaqui concepts. This clearly and concisely written book is very important in its own terms both as an early example of the use of life histories in ethnology and as a significant contribution to Yaqui studies.”—Choice
 

Muriel Painter's account of Yaqui beliefs and ceremonies is based on her firsthand observations over the course of four decades. By the time Painter died in 1974, she was as familiar with Yaqui culture as on outsider could be and left behind the manuscript from which this volume arose. It was reviewed before the original publication in 1986 by a Yaqui committee and edited for publication by Edward Spicer.