BiblioVault - Books about Years

Florentine Codex

Book 7: Book 7: The Sun, the Moon and Stars, and the Binding of the Years

Bernardino de Sahagun

University of Utah Press, 1953

Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.

Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.

The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.

Book Seven tells the origin stories of the sun, the moon, and the stars—which gods created them, what powers they each embody, and how they are related to Aztec astrology. This book also discusses the meaning and cause behind hail, lightning, rainbows, wind, and different types of weather.

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John Steinbeck

The Years of Greatness, 1936-1939

Tetsumaro Hayashi

University of Alabama Press, 1993

This volume is derived from papers presented by the North American delegates at the Third International Steinbeck Congress, held in May 1990 in Honolulu, Hawaii, under the co-sponsorship of the Steinbeck Society of Japan and the International Steinbeck Society. These ten essays, arranged in two parts, seek to provide a clearer understanding of Steinbeck's life and work during his most productive period. Part I discusses Steinbeck's women, with emphasis on the function of the feminine from original perspectives. It uses recent research sources, including some of the Steinbeck-Gwyn love letters and poems. Part II explores the Depression trilogy—"In Dubious Battle", "Of Mice and Men," and "The Grapes of Wrath"—Steinbeck's major works of the late 1930s.

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Never without a Song

The Years and Songs of Jennie Devlin, 1865-1952

Katharine D. Newman

University of Illinois Press, 1995

Never Without a Song focuses on the centrality of folksong in the life of Jennie Devlin, a woman who worked for fourteen years as a "bound-out girl," or serving maid, along the New York-Pennsylvania border in the late 1800s. Largely ignored and unwanted, Devlin persevered through Dickensian misfortunes to find love and raise a family (often alone) in Philadelphia and Gloucester, New Jersey. Katharine Newman met Devlin in 1936 and compiled information about the older woman's life and music. Half a century later, Newman returned to her collection in retirement, with her own perspective of age. The result is a unique biography of an American working-class woman, told with depth and candor. Newman also includes "I Wish I'd Been Born a Boy," "James Bird," "Martha Decker," "My Grandmother's Old Armchair," and other pieces, both British and American, most with tunes.

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Nicaragua's Mosquito Shore

The Years of British and American Presence

Craig L. Dozier

University of Alabama Press, 1985

Nicaragua’s Mosquito Shore provides a general history of eastern Nicaragua from the time of the first British entry in 1633 to the present. The territory is populated chiefly by Mosquito Indians, who speak their own language and some Mosquito.

Separated from Nicaragua’s Pacific plain by mountains, the Atlantic coastal plain extends between 70 and 100 miles into the interior. Early Spanish settlers were ousted by the British, who engaged in the mahogany trade, and who also hoped for trade with Americans seeking a short route to California. In 1850, with the signing of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, the U.S. and Britain agreed that neither country would seek to acquire exclusive control over a Nicaraguan canal. Plans for the development of a Nicaraguan canal had a marked influence on the region for the next 100 years.

During the second half of the 19th century both rubber and bananas were produced commercially in eastern Nicaragua, and the Standard Fruit Company of New Orleans became the larges single commercial influence in the region. The first over American intervention in eastern Nicaragua occurred in 1912, when a contingent of Marines was dispatched to protect American commercial interests. The Marines remained for thirteen years.

Dozier develops the history of the current political troubles in Nicaragua, which had their origin in the early 1930s and which center about the control of the rich area inhabited by the Mosquitos. His book presents the historical background for the tragic events that are now taking place in that region.

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The Open Door

One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of "Poetry" Magazine

Edited by Don Share and Christian Wiman

University of Chicago Press, 2012

When Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912, she began with an image: the Open Door. “May the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius!” For a century, the most important and enduring poets have walked through that door—William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens in its first years, Rae Armantrout and Kay Ryan in 2011. And at the same time, Poetry continues to discover the new voices who will be read a century from now.

Poetry’s archives are incomparable, and to celebrate the magazine’s centennial, editors Don Share and Christian Wiman combed them to create a new kind of anthology, energized by the self-imposed limitation to one hundred poems. Rather than attempting to be exhaustive or definitive—or even to offer the most familiar works—they have assembled a collection of poems that, in their juxtaposition, echo across a century of poetry. Adrienne Rich appears alongside Charles Bukowski; poems by Isaac Rosenberg and Randall Jarrell on the two world wars flank a devastating Vietnam War poem by the lesser-known George Starbuck; August Kleinzahler’s “The Hereafter” precedes “Prufrock,” casting Eliot’s masterpiece in a new light. Short extracts from Poetry’s letters and criticism punctuate the verse selections, hinting at themes and threads and serving as guides, interlocutors, or dissenting voices.

The resulting volume is an anthology like no other, a celebration of idiosyncrasy and invention, a vital monument to an institution that refuses to be static, and, most of all, a book that lovers of poetry will devour, debate, and keep close at hand.

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Quinine and Quarantine

Missouri Medicine through the Years

Loren Humphrey

University of Missouri Press, 2000

Presenting a fascinating overview of medicine in Missouri from the early days of epidemics to present-day technological advances, Quinine and Quarantine approaches the history of medicine as an integral part of the state's development.

Examining the changing environmental risks and diseases that threatened Missouri over the years and the role of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers as prime routes for the spread of diseases and innovations, Loren Humphrey discusses the efforts of citizens, legislators, and health officials confronting various medical challenges. He offers intriguing medical details of the past two centuries interspersed with the stories of significant historical figures and Missourians' personal accounts. He tells of the pioneers' struggles to use natural remedies acquired from Native Americans, the gory and unsanitary attempts to treat early gunshot wounds, and the common afflictions and diseases such as "swamp fever," measles, mumps, consumption, dysentery, smallpox, and typhoid that seemed beyond medicine's effects. Humphrey also discusses the significance of the discovery and reluctant acceptance of the "antifever" breakthrough now famous as quinine, as well as the lessons learned as a result of Civil War medical techniques.

Quinine and Quarantine takes readers on a remarkable journey that concludes in the present, arguably the most exciting and controversial era for medical advances. Humphrey explores new imaging techniques, laparoscopic surgery, and research on ways to overcome bacterial resistance to antibiotics. He challenges the reader to consider such compelling issues as the escalating cost of health care and the threats posed by environmental hazards. He also identifies topics over which Missourians will likely struggle well into the next century, such as transplants, managed care, abortion, and assisted suicide.

Organized chronologically in fifty-year segments and written in language free of jargon, Quinine and Quarantine offers readers a broad historical view of the medical problems and solutions faced by the people of Missouri, preparing them to cope with medical issues of the new millennium.

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The Years of Blood

Stories from a Reporting Life in Latin America

Alma Guillermoprieto

Duke University Press, 2025

For forty years and more Alma Guillermoprieto has wandered tirelessly over the countries of Latin America, interviewing assassins and the families of their victims, talking to street sweepers and artists, rowdy carnival makers and thoughtful politicians (and plenty of rowdy politicians as well). Guillermoprieto draws out common threads in different contexts, like the effects of The War on Drugs in rural and poverty-stricken regions and the experiences of people mixed up in the fray of state- or cartel-sponsored violence. At the same time, she shows how Latin American art translates nostalgia and pain into great beauty. In The Years of Blood, the third volume of her collected reporting, she completes her complex and always compelling portrait of the Latin America of our times, in all its tragedy and glory, as it enters a new era of populism and demagoguery, and tries, yet again, to answer the great unsolved question: How do we change our future so that it does not so exhaustingly resemble our past?

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