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An engrossing memoir in which a photojournalist records both the precursors to today’s conflicts in the Middle East and her own deeply felt conviction that news coverage of the region actually increases the conflicts there.

"You're going where?" Carol Spencer Mitchell's father demanded as she set off in 1984 to cover the Middle East as a photojournalist for Newsweek and other publications. In this intensely thoughtful memoir, Spencer Mitchell probes the motivations that impelled her—a single Jewish woman—to document the turmoil roiling the Arab world in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as how her experiences as a photojournalist compelled her to set aside her cameras and reexamine the way images are created, scenes are framed, and "real life" is packaged for specific news stories.

In Danger Pay, Spencer Mitchell takes us on a harrowing journey to PLO military training camps for Palestinian children and to refugee camps in the Gaza Strip before, during, and after the first intifada. Through her eyes, we experience the media frenzy surrounding the 1985 hijackings of TWA Flight #847 and the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro. We meet Middle Eastern leaders, in particular Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan, with whom Spencer Mitchell developed close working relationships. And we witness Spencer Mitchell's growing conviction that the Western media's portrayal of conflicts in the Middle East actually helps to fuel those conflicts—a conviction that eventually, as she says, "shattered [her] career."

Although the events that Spencer Mitchell records took place decades ago, their repercussions reverberate in the MIddle Eastern conflicts of today. Likewise, her concern about "the triumph of image over reality" takes on greater urgency as our knowledge of the world becomes ever more filtered by virtual media.

Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands brings to life one of the most significant (but under examined) figures in the history of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Worcester, a scientist who had traveled twice to the Philippines on zoological expeditions, established himself as one of America’s leading experts on the Philippines. Over a fourteen-year career as a member of the U.S. colonial regime, Worcester devoted much of his time and energy to traveling among and photographing non-Christian minority groups in the Philippines. He amassed an archive of several thousand photographs taken by him or by government photographers. Worcester deployed those photographs in books, magazine articles, and lectures to promote his belief that the United States should maintain control of the Philippines for decades to come. While many historians have examined American colonial photography in the Philippines, this book is the first lengthy treatment of Worcester’s role in shaping American perceptions of the Philippines in the early twentieth century.

In the aftermath of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Mexico, Spanish friars and authorities partnered with indigenous rulers and savants to gather detailed information on Aztec history, religious beliefs, and culture. The pictorial books they created served the Spanish as aids to evangelization and governance, but their content came from the native intellectuals, painters, and writers who helped to create them. Examining the nine major surviving texts, preeminent Latin American art historian Elizabeth Hill Boone explores how indigenous artists and writers documented their ancestral culture.

Analyzing the texts as one distinct corpus, Boone shows how they combined European and indigenous traditions of documentation and considers questions of motive, authorship, and audience. For Spanish authorities, she shows, the books revealed Aztec ideology and practice, while for the indigenous community, they preserved venerated ways of pictorial expression as well as rhetorical and linguistic features of ancient discourses. The first comparative analysis of these encyclopedias, Descendants of Aztec Pictography analyzes how the painted compilations embraced artistic traditions from both sides of the Atlantic.

Striking photographs and stories from more than two decades on the frontlines by a groundbreaking photojournalist—and the first female American war correspondent to be killed in action.

In 1941, twenty-two-year-old Georgette "Dickey" Chapelle sold her first photo essay to Look magazine. A year later, with World War II underway, she was photographing American soldiers in combat training in Panama. By the end of the war, she had captured the devastation at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and in the ensuing decades, Dickey and her camera were on the scene at many of the world’s hotspots—from Cuba and the Dominican Republic to Algeria and Lebanon to Vietnam and Laos. Dickey Chapelle Under Fire exposes her remarkable story and shares over 150 stunning images from her extraordinary career as a photojournalist.

In the male-dominated world of war journalism, Chapelle fought to be taken seriously. She eventually earned the respect of many of her male colleagues and broke down barriers for future generations of female journalists. She embedded herself with military units on frontlines around the globe, capturing not only the horrors of war but also the camaraderie and everyday routines of service men and women.

Always one to follow the action, Chapelle traveled with Algerian rebels across the North African desert and with Fidel Castro through the jungles of Cuba. She spent two months in a Hungarian prison after being caught smuggling aid to refugees fleeing a Soviet invasion. Beginning in 1961, Chapelle set her lens and viewfinder on Southeast Asia, capturing the growing conflict there, until she was killed while on patrol with marines in Vietnam in April 1965—making her the first female American war correspondent to be killed in action.

For twenty-five years, Chapelle's photographs graced the pages of National Geographic, the National Observer, Life, and other major publications. Despite her tragic end, Chapelle’s tenacity, courage, and compassion shine throughout her work, highlighting the human impact of war while revealing the larger stories beyond the battlefield. Her legacy lives on through this powerful collection. 

Many people dream of "someday buying a small quaint place in the country, to own two cows and watch the birds," in the words of Texas ranchwoman Amanda Spenrath Geistweidt. But only a few are cut out for the unrelenting work that makes a family ranching operation successful. Don't Make Me Go to Town presents an eloquent photo-documentary of eight women who have chosen to make ranching in the Texas Hill Country their way of life. Ranging from young mothers to elderly grandmothers, these women offer vivid accounts of raising livestock in a rugged land, cut off from amenities and amusements that most people take for granted, and loving the hard lives they've chosen.

Rhonda Lashley Lopez began making photographic portraits of Texas Hill Country ranchwomen in 1993 and has followed their lives through the intervening years. She presents their stories through her images and the women's own words, listening in as the ranchwomen describe the pleasures and difficulties of raising sheep, Angora goats, and cattle on the Edwards Plateau west of Austin and north of San Antonio. Their stories record the struggles that all ranchers face—vagaries of weather and livestock markets, among them—as well as the extra challenges of being women raising families and keeping things going on the home front while also riding the range. Yet, to a woman, they all passionately embrace family ranching as a way of life and describe their efforts to pass it on to future generations.