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Cervantes in Transit explores how Cervantes’s texts embody movement, transformation, and boundary-crossing across multiple dimensions. Theorizing Cervantes as a figure at once of transit and in transit, the volume argues that the diverse and often disparate array of Cervantine interpretations is not simply a byproduct of modernity, but an inherent component of the author’s own writing. Cervantes transgressed boundaries of all sorts—mixing genres, blurring fiction and reality, and moving characters into paratextual spaces. The concept of transit encompasses both physical movement between places and fundamental change or metamorphosis, reflecting how Cervantes’s writing has traveled through temporal, geographical, and conceptual spaces while continuously transforming. The volume’s thirteen chapters explore five thematic clusters: “Impressions” examines material book history and paratextual borders; “Identities” analyzes racial, religious, gender, and class transgressions; “Ironies” considers humor as a boundary-crossing mode; “Influences” traces Cervantes’s engagement with literary traditions; and “Itineraries” maps geographical circulation and global networks.

Examines how centuries-old stagecraft shaped modern racial politics—and why the performance of whiteness still commands the spotlight.

From Shakespearean blackface to the alt-right’s khaki-clad protests, Clothed Villainy: Acting White in in Early Modern Drama by Jamie Paris confronts the uncomfortable truths of racial performance across centuries. Paris argues that whiteness is not a fixed identity but a precarious and performative construct—shaped and sustained through actions, appearances, and cultural scripts.

Drawing on critical race theory, performance studies, and Indigenous scholarship, Clothed Villainy traces how racial scripts—whether “playing Black,” “playing Indian,” or especially “playing white”—have been used to uphold white supremacy and erase marginalized identities. By examining the costuming and characterization of white actors portraying Black villains on the early modern stage, Paris reveals how these theatrical traditions continue to echo in contemporary racial politics.

Written with bold clarity and personal insight, this book opens space for reimagining race, history, and identity through a more critical and inclusive lens. Clothed Villainy is essential reading for scholars, students, and anyone seeking to understand the deep-rooted performance of race in society and how we might reimagine it for a more equitable future.

The contiguous river basins that flowed in Tlaxcala and San Juan Teotihuacan formed part of the agricultural heart of central Mexico. As the colonial project rose to a crescendo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Indigenous farmers of central Mexico faced long-term problems standard historical treatments had attributed to drought and soil degradation set off by Old World agriculture. Instead, Bradley Skopyk argues that a global climate event called the Little Ice Age brought cold temperatures and elevated rainfall to the watersheds of Tlaxcala and Teotihuacan. With the climatic shift came cataclysmic changes: great floods, human adaptations to these deluges, and then silted wetlands and massive soil erosion.

This book chases water and soil across the colonial Mexican landscape, through the fields and towns of New Spain’s Native subjects, and in and out of some of the strongest climate anomalies of the last thousand or more years. The pursuit identifies and explains the making of two unique ecological crises, the product of the interplay between climatic and anthropogenic processes. It charts how Native farmers responded to the challenges posed by these ecological rifts with creative use of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds, environmental engineering, and conflict within and beyond the courts. With a new reading of the colonial climate and by paying close attention to land, water, and agrarian ecologies forged by farmers, Skopyk argues that colonial cataclysms—forged during a critical conjuncture of truly unprecedented proportions, a crucible of human and natural forces—unhinged the customary ways in which humans organized, thought about, and used the Mexican environment.

This book inserts climate, earth, water, and ecology as significant forces shaping colonial affairs and challenges us to rethink both the environmental consequences of Spanish imperialism and the role of Indigenous peoples in shaping them.

European imperialists began to dream of other kinds of wealth besides gold in the New World

The Colonial Search for a Southern Eden compiles three insightful lectures delivered by renowned historian Louis B. Wright at the Dancy Foundation in 1951. Wright explores the 17th‑century English colonial vision for the American South—not as a gold rush, but as a fertile terrain primed for economic prosperity through well‑planned plantations and commercial crops. 

Across its concise 75 pages, Wright charts the transformation of settlers’ aspirations—from hopes of quick wealth to cultivated visions of tobacco, silk, sugar, and cotton plantations meant to create a utopian "Southern Eden". These were carefully cultivated not just for their profitability but to establish structured, enduring societies complementary to English economic goals. 

Wright—a Guggenheim Fellow, Benjamin Franklin Medalist, and former director of the Folger Shakespeare Library—brings scholarly precision and elegant prose to this study, making it accessible to both historians and general readers. Publishers and reviewers have praised it as “extremely interesting and well written,” highlighting its focused yet comprehensive interpretation of colonial Southern motivations and their long-term implications. This work stands as a pivotal contribution to early American economic and colonial history—offering a nuanced understanding of how idealistic and ideological goals shaped plantation culture and southern development in the Atlantic colonies. 

With its concise structure and authoritative voice, The Colonial Search for a Southern Eden is ideal for historians, students, and enthusiasts seeking to understand the ideological underpinnings of colonial Southern society.
 

A study of military tactics and strategy before the War of Independence, this book reexamines the conquest of the North American wilderness and its native peoples by colonial settlers. Historians have long believed that the peculiar conditions of the New World, coupled with the success of Indians tactics, forced the colonists to abandon traditional European methods of warfare and to develop a new “American” style of combat. By combining firearms with guerrilla-like native tactics, colonial commanders were able not only to subdue their Indian adversaries but eventually to prevail against more conventionally trained British forces during the American Revolution. Yet upon closer scrutiny, this common understanding of early American warfare turns out to be more myth than reality. 

As Guy Chet reveals, clashes between colonial and Indian forces during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not lead to a reevaluation and transformation of conventional military doctrine. On the contrary, the poor performance of the settlers during King Philip's War (1675–76) and King William's War (1689–1697) prompted colonial magistrates to address the shortcomings of their military forces through a greater reliance on British troops and imperial administrators. Thus, as the eighteenth century wore on, growing military success in the New England colonies reflected an increasing degree of British planning, administration, participation, and command. The colonies' military and political leadership, Chet argues, never rejected the time-tested principles of European warfare, and even during the American War of Independence, the republic's military leadership looked to Europe for guidance in the art of combat.