A Mother who nurtures, empathizes, and heals... a Warrior who defends, empowers, and resists oppression... the Virgin Mary plays many roles for the peoples of Spain and Spanish-speaking America. Devotion to the Virgin inspired and sustained medieval and Renaissance Spaniards as they liberated Spain from the Moors and set about the conquest of the New World. Devotion to the Virgin still inspires and sustains millions of believers today throughout the Americas.

This wide-ranging and highly readable book explores the veneration of the Virgin Mary in Spain and the Americas from the colonial period to the present. Linda Hall begins the story in Spain and follows it through the conquest and colonization of the New World, with a special focus on Mexico and the Andean highlands in Peru and Bolivia, where Marian devotion became combined with indigenous beliefs and rituals. Moving into the nineteenth century, Hall looks at national cults of the Virgin in Mexico, Bolivia, and Argentina, which were tied to independence movements. In the twentieth century, she examines how Eva Perón linked herself with Mary in the popular imagination; visits contemporary festivals with significant Marian content in Spain, Peru, and Mexico; and considers how Latinos/as in the United States draw on Marian devotion to maintain familial and cultural ties.

A tourist visiting the famous cathedral at Chartres might be surprised to discover an enormous labyrinth embedded in the thirteenth-century floor. Why is it there? In this fascinating book Craig Wright explores the complex symbolism of the labyrinth in architecture, religious thought, music, and dance from the Middle Ages to the present.

The mazes incorporated into church floors and illustrating religious books were symbolic of an epic journey through this sinful world to salvation. A savior figure typically led the way along this harrowing spiritual path. Wright looks at other meanings of the maze as well, from religious dancing on church labyrinths to pagan maze rituals outside the church. He demonstrates that the theme inherent in spiritual mazes is also present in medieval song, in the Armed Man Masses of the Renaissance, and in compositions of the Enlightenment, including the works of J. S. Bach. But the thread that binds the maze to the church, to music, and to dance also ties it to the therapeutic labyrinth that proliferates today. For as this richly interdisciplinary history reveals, the maze of the "new age" spiritualists also traces its lineage to the ancient myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. While the hero of the maze may change from one culture to the next, the symbol endures.

This book probes the narratives of poets who are exiled, tried or executed for their satire. Aesop, fabulist and riddle warrior, is assimilated to the pharmakos—the wretched human scapegoat who is expelled from the city or killed in response to a crisis—after satirizing the Delphians.

In much the same way, Dumezil's Indo-European heroes, Starkathr and Suibhne, are both warrior-poets persecuted by patron deities. This book views the scapegoat as a group's dominant warrior, sent out to confront predators or besieging forces. Both poets and warriors specialize in madness and aggression, are necessary to society, yet dangerous to society.

The colossal figures who shaped the politics of industrial America emerge in full scale in this engrossing comparative biography. In both the depth and sophistication of intellect that they brought to politics and in the titanic conflict they waged with each other, Roosevelt and Wilson were, like Hamilton and Jefferson before them, the political architects for an entire century.

All previous efforts to treat the philosophies and programs of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Wilson’s New Freedom have been partial and episodic. Now John Milton Cooper reconstructs in parallel lines the entire range of their ideologies and their struggles—their social identification in terms of class, education, and regional roots; the origins and evolution of their political thought; their party leadership roles; and their psychological characters.

After tracking the shared identities of young manhood, Cooper explains the conflict of their mature years that developed from opposing philosophies of government. Not until 1912, when Wilson ran for president, did they come together partially and briefly on common practical grounds of reform of the political process and efforts to curb big business in the public interest. Later, foreign policy in particular pitted them in a deeper conflict that consumed the rest of their lives.