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Designed as a corrective to colonial literary histories that have excluded Native voices, this anthology brings together a variety of primary texts produced by the Algonquian peoples of New England during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and very early nineteenth centuries. Included among these written materials and objects are letters, signatures, journals, baskets, pictographs, confessions, wills, and petitions, each of which represents a form of authorship. Together they demonstrate the continuing use of traditional forms of memory and communication and the lively engagement of Native peoples with alphabetic literacy during the colonial period. Each primary text is accompanied by an essay that places it in context and explores its significance. 

Written by leading scholars in the field, these readings draw on recent trends in literary analysis, history, and anthropology to provide an excellent overview of the field of early Native studies. They are also intended to provoke discussion and open avenues for further exploration by students and other interested readers. Above all, the texts and commentaries gathered in this volume provide an opportunity to see Native American literature as a continuity of expression that reflects choices made long before contact and colonization, rather than as a nineteenth—or even twentieth-century invention.

Contributors include Heidi Bohaker, Heather Bouwman, Joanna Brooks, Kristina Bross, Stephanie Fitzgerald, Sandra Gustafson, Laura Arnold Leibman, Kevin McBride, David Murray, Laura Murray, Jean O'Brien, Ann Marie Plane, Philip Round, Jodi Schorb, David Silverman, and Hilary E. Wyss.

The half-century between 1880 and 1930 saw rampant growth in many American cities and an equally rapid movement of women into the work force. In Los Angeles, the city not only grew from a dusty cow town to a major American metropolis but also offered its residents myriad new opportunities and challenges.Earning Power examines the role that women played in this growth as they attempted to make their financial way in a rapidly changing world. Los Angeles during these years was one of the most ethnically diverse and gender-balanced American cities. Moreover, its accelerated urban growth generated a great deal of economic, social, and political instability. In Earning Power, author Eileen V. Wallis examines how women negotiated issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class to gain access to professions and skilled work in Los Angeles. She also discusses the contributions they made to the region’s history as political and social players, employers and employees, and as members of families. Wallis reveals how the lives of women in the urban West differed in many ways from those of their sisters in more established eastern cities. She finds that the experiences of women workers force us to reconsider many assumptions about the nature of Los Angeles’s economy, as well as about the ways women participated in it. The book also considers how Angelenos responded to the larger national social debate about women’s work and the ways that American society would have to change in order to accommodate working women. Earning Power is a major contribution to our understanding of labor in the urban West during this transformative period and of the crucial role that women played in shaping western cities, economies, society, and politics.

For over 10,000 years, earth ovens (semi-subterranean, layered arrangements of heated rocks, packing material, and food stuffs capped by earth) have played important economic and social roles for Indigenous peoples living across the arid landscapes of western North America. From hunter-gatherers to formative horticulturalists, sedentary farmers, and contemporary Indigenous groups, earth ovens have been used to convert inedible plants into digestible food, fiber, and beverages.
 
The remains of earth ovens range from tight, circular clusters of burned rocks, generally labeled “hearths” by archaeologists, to the massive accumulations of fire-cracked rock referred to as earth oven facilities, roasting pits, or burned rock middens. Remnants of these oven forms are common across the arid and semi-arid landscapes that stretch from Texas to California and south into Mexico. Despite the ubiquity of earth ovens from late Paleoindian times until today, and their broad spatial and cultural distribution, these features remain an under-studied aspect of Indigenous lifeways.

This edited volume explores the longevity and diversity of earth oven baking and examines the subsistence strategies, technological paradigms, and social contexts within which earth ovens functioned. It is the first study to cover such a broad geographic area, reflecting an array of promising research that highlights ongoing efforts to understand the archaeological record of earth ovens.

The globetrotting story of how humans have harnessed the geographical landscape and written ourselves onto our surroundings.

Mountains, meridians, rivers, and borders—these are some of the features that divide the world on our maps and in our minds. But geography is far less set in stone than we might believe, and, as Maxim Samson’s Earth Shapers contends, in our relatively short time on this planet, humans have become experts at fundamentally reshaping our surroundings.

From the Qhapaq Ñan, the Inca’s “great road,” and Mozambique’s colonial railways to a Saudi Arabian smart city, and from Korea’s sacred Baekdu-daegan mountain range and the Great Green Wall in Africa to the streets of Chicago, Samson explores how we mold the world around us. And how, as we etch our needs onto the natural landscape, we alter the course of history. These fascinating stories of connectivity show that in our desire to make geographical connections, humans have broken through boundaries of all kinds, conquered treacherous terrain, and carved up landscapes. We crave linkages, and though we do not always pay attention to the in-between, these pathways—these ways of “earth shaping,” in Samson’s words—are key to understanding our relationship with the planet we call home.

An immense work of cultural geography touching on ecology, sociology, history, and politics, Earth Shapers argues that, far from being constrained by geography, we are instead its creators.

This is the story of the largest Mexican-American community in the United States, the city within a city known as "East Los Angeles." How did this barrio of over one million men and women—occupying an area greater than Manhattan or Washington D.C.—come to be?

Although promoted early in this century as a workers' paradise, Los Angeles fared poorly in attracting European immigrants and American blue-collar workers. Wages were low, and these workers were understandably reluctant to come to a city which was also troubled by labor strife. Mexicans made up the difference, arriving in the city in massive numbers.

Who these Mexicans were and the conditions that caused them to leave their own country are revealed in East Los Angeles. The author examines how they adjusted to life in one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States, how they fared in this country's labor market, and the problems of segregation and prejudice they confronted.

In 1950 a million Texans—more than a tenth of the entire population of the state—lived in a region where one family in every two earned less than $2,000 a year. Composing that region are the thirty-two counties of northeastern Texas in which the lumber industry is concentrated. In eleven of these counties, 70 percent of family incomes were less than $2,000.

Until 1930 the Texas lumber industry furnished employment for more workers than any other manufacturing in the state. Though displaced in that year by oil refining, it still ranks near the top in the number of workers it hires. The aim of this study is to show how these people whose economic life has been dominated by a single industry have fared for eighty years in comparison with their fellow Texans and with lumber workers in the Pacific Northwest and the Lakes states.

Texas lumber workers have always been in many ways a peculiar people, conditioned by their historical roots, by isolation from the mainstream of national life, and by the deeply rural nature of their environment. A typical group portrait would show two of each three persons to be adult white males. One of three would be African American. It would not show any women. Here and there a face would bear the marks of alien birth. Most of the figures, however, would be natives not only of America but of East Texas.

In family background, in work experience, and in social and economic environment these people have been uniquely homogeneous. In the early 1950s the Congressional Committee on the Economic Report of the President designated the area as one of “deep poverty” and pinpointed it as one which had failed notably to reach the level of living achieved by the state and the nation. Its economic status has been lower than that of any other group in Texas except household servants, and its education level has been well below that of the state and nation and increasingly below the level of acceptance in any jobs other than those requiring a minimum of training and competence. The immediate past has shown not only no improvement but a positive deterioration.

Drawing upon personal investigation and state and federal reports, the author has put the contemporary situation in a historical setting. Her delineation is principally in terms of figures that weave a social fabric from which definite patterns emerge—insecure wages, illiteracy and inefficient production, unsuccessful attempts to achieve effective organization. Though the book is directed primarily toward those who should feel concern at its revelations, it also suggests a wealth of untapped sources for the ethnographer and the folklorist.

Eastern Arctic Kayaks is the product of years of kayak study by two of the world's experts. Combining analyses of form and function with historical background and illustrations of kayaking techniques, this volume is a storehouse of information for recreational kayakers and scholarly readers alike.

Drawing from his vast practical experience and extensive study of museum specimens, John D. Heath offers a comprehensive overview of the evolution and construction of Greenland kayaks supplemented with an illustrated series of rolling and sculling techniques. E. Arima examines kayaks of the eastern Canadian Arctic, covering woodworking tools, construction techniques, and the treatment of skins for the kayak cover.

Core chapters on Greenland and eastern Canada are accompanied by essential articles by Greg Stamer on the use of the Greenland paddle and two studies of kayaks in European museums by Harvey Golden and Hugh Collings. A valuable excerpt from John Brand's Little Kayak Book series makes this British publication available to American readers for the first time.

Lavishly illustrated with drawings and historic photographs, Eastern Arctic Kayaks is a landmark study in the history of watercraft--an essential resource for recreational kayakers and maritime historians and for anyone interested in northern Native material culture.

A sweeping history of the American invention of modern money.

Economists endlessly debate the nature of legal tender monetary systems—coins and bills issued by a government or other authority. Yet the origins of these currencies have received little attention.

Dror Goldberg tells the story of modern money in North America through the Massachusetts colony during the seventeenth century. As the young settlement transitioned to self-governance and its economy grew, the need to formalize a smooth exchange emerged. Printing local money followed.

Easy Money illustrates how colonists invented contemporary currency by shifting its foundation from intrinsically valuable goods—such as silver—to the taxation of the state. Goldberg traces how this structure grew into a worldwide system in which, monetarily, we are all Massachusetts. Weaving economics, law, and American history, Easy Money is a new touchstone in the story of monetary systems.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

A sweeping history of the American invention of modern money.

Economists endlessly debate the nature of legal tender monetary systems—coins and bills issued by a government or other authority. Yet the origins of these currencies have received little attention.

Dror Goldberg tells the story of modern money in North America through the Massachusetts colony during the seventeenth century. As the young settlement transitioned to self-governance and its economy grew, the need to formalize a smooth exchange emerged. Printing local money followed.

Easy Money illustrates how colonists invented contemporary currency by shifting its foundation from intrinsically valuable goods—such as silver—to the taxation of the state. Goldberg traces how this structure grew into a worldwide system in which, monetarily, we are all Massachusetts. Weaving economics, law, and American history, Easy Money is a new touchstone in the story of monetary systems.

An approachable ethnography of how grasshoppers are harvested, sold, and consumed in Oaxaca.

Chapulines (toasted grasshoppers) are not a delicacy in Oaxaca. They are just food—good food—and a protein-rich seasonal snack that is the product of a long-standing industry based overwhelmingly on the labor of women. Jeffrey Cohen has interviewed dozens of these chapulineras, who harvest insects from corn and alfalfa fields, prepare them, and sell them in urban and rural marketplaces. An accessible ethnography, Eating Grasshoppers tells their story alongside the broader history of chapulines.

For tourists, chapulines are an experience—a gateway to the “real” Oaxaca. For locals, they are ordinary fare, but also a reminder of Indigenous stability and rural survival. In a sense, eating chapulines is a declaration of independence from a government that has condemned eating insects as backward. Yet, while chapulines are a generations-old favorite, eating them is not an act of preservation. Cohen shows that the business of this traditional food is thoroughly modern and ever evolving, with entrepreneurial chapulineras responding nimbly to complex and dynamic markets. From alfalfa fields to online markets, Eating Grasshoppers takes readers inside one of the world’s most fascinating food cultures.

Discovering Singaporean identity through cooking and cuisine

While eating is a universal experience, for Singaporeans it carries strong national connotations. The popular Singaporean-English phrase "Die die must try" is not so much hyperbole as it is a reflection of the lengths that Singaporeans will go to find great dishes.

In Eating Her Curries and Kway: A Cultural History of Food in Singapore, Nicole Tarulevicz argues that in a society that has undergone substantial change in a relatively short amount of time, food serves Singaporeans as a poignant connection to the past. Eating has provided a unifying practice for a diverse society, a metaphor for multiracialism and recognizable national symbols for a fledgling state. Covering the period from British settlement in 1819 to the present and focusing on the post–1965 postcolonial era, Tarulevicz tells the story of Singapore through the production and consumption of food.

Analyzing a variety of sources that range from cookbooks to architectural and city plans, Tarulevicz offer a thematic history of this unusual country, which was colonized by the British and operated as a port within Malaya. Connecting food culture to the larger history of Singapore, she discusses various topics including domesticity and home economics, housing and architecture, advertising, and the regulation of food-related manners and public behavior such as hawking, littering, and chewing gum. Moving away from the predominantly political and economic focus of other histories of Singapore, Eating Her Curries and Kway provides an important alternative reading of Singaporean society.