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What this intriguing—and unsettling—apex predator reveals about Americans’ attempts to control and connect with the natural world.

Both a flesh-and-blood critter and the stuff of legend, the alligator inspires as much awe as it does fear. While this apex predator survives mainly on fish, birds, snakes, turtles, and small mammals, it will consume almost anything, including pets, livestock, and—in rare cases—humans. Though dreaded as a man-eater, the alligator has also been cast as a lucrative commodity, a popular roadside attraction, a prized hunting trophy, and even an unlikely household pet.

Gator! tells the riveting story of this iconic predator. Historian Mark V. Barrow, Jr.—a native of Florida, a state famous for its alligators—traces the reptile’s ancient lineage from the age of the dinosaurs to its current status as a cherished mascot and regional icon. He explores its role as a surrogate species, offering vital clues about the health of ecosystems, as well as its profound cultural weight as a totem for Indigenous communities, a mythical sewer-dweller in New York lore, and a disturbing tool of racial oppression used to dehumanize African Americans. Once over-hunted, the alligator has long been celebrated as a triumph of the federal Endangered Species Act. Barrow delves into the nuances of this comeback, one that offers both a cautionary tale of market-driven exploitation and a conservation success story.

An entertaining history of one of North America’s most charismatic animals, Gator! explores how this reptile became a Florida emblem and a national enigma, transforming humans and alligators in the process.

Ellen Bowie Holland grew up in a house at Weatherford, Texas, that had the "motherly look of a large and gallant hen hovering over too many chicks" and that was inhabited by a "lively, warm-hearted family." This book is her record of the "whole world of little things which enriched young lives" in her small town.

Blessed with a discerning and sympathetic eye, she had much happiness to remember and record, and she employs a charming combination of nostalgia and comedy as she brings to life again these bygone days. Her childhood experiences are illuminated by the wisdom of maturity, and the whole is infused with a deft humor, developed through her skilled use of fantasy and through her ability to laugh at the pretensions of the Victorian life she saw.

Holland's book also is memorable as a record of her unforgettable parents:

"Mother was born on Columbus Day, and she and Columbus had a lot in common. She liked to discover things for herself and nothing pleased her more than to nicely finish off a job that she had been told could not be done" . . . "She wasn't geared for solitary musing. Like a salmon at spawning time she liked to swim upstream against rushing waters and bash into boulders" . . . "Mother's pattern of neatness reached out in all directions" . . . "Mother, sheathed like an armadillo" . . .

"Father, silk-hatted, or swallow-tailed, distinguished almost beyond belief" . . . "I never heard him raise his voice or laugh aloud" . . . "Father was not witty but he had an absolutely delightful sense of nonsense. His humor came smoothly upon the scene" . . .

Throughout the book the reader shares the author's consciousness of the vast distance between her own childhood and that of the grandchildren to whom the book is dedicated—a distance created by rapid technological change.

"From my window I look over an air-conditioned city and I see jets streaking across the sky and occasionally I hear one of them breaking the sound barrier" . . . "When I really want to awe myself I think about the fact that only one generation ago Mother saw friendly or marauding Indians roaming these same acres" . . . "Those of my age have come into a span of years where living conditions of all kinds have changed so abruptly, where obsolescence sets in so rapidly, that there is little in common between our infancy and our present."

Born in Clear Lake, Wisconsin, in 1916, Gaylord grew up as immersed in his parents' political work and community service as he was in playing practical jokes and exploring the natural world surrounding his home town. Along the way he encountered experiences that would shape him in fundamental ways: as a man who stood up for what he believed in the face of opposition and yet who also understood how to treat his opponents with respect. Both traits would serve him well as he rose from law student to state senator to Wisconsin governor and finally to three terms as a United States Senator.

Nelson fought to treat all races equally and to condemn McCarthy-era paranoia, but his greatest contribution was to sound the alarm about another battle: the fight to save the natural world and the earth itself. It was his idea to use teach-ins to let people know that the environment needed their help. Thanks to him, more natural resources were conserved and new laws demanded clean air and water. Now, every year on April 22, people all over the world plant trees and pick up litter to celebrate Earth Day. The Earth and its inhabitants aren't safe yet, but Gaylord Nelson demonstrated that even one person can help to save the world.

Exposes complex intersections between genders and other identities in medieval cultures.

Nothing less than a rethinking of what we mean when we talk about "men" and "women" of the medieval period, this volume demonstrates how the idea of gender-in the Middle Ages no less than now-intersected in subtle and complex ways with other categories of difference. Responding to the insights of postcolonial and feminist theory, the authors show that medieval identities emerged through shifting paradigms-that fluidity, conflict, and contingency characterized not only gender, but also sexuality, social status, and religion. This view emerges through essays that delve into a wide variety of cultures and draw on a broad range of disciplinary and theoretical approaches. Scholars in the fields of history as well as literary and religious studies consider gendered hierarchies in western Christian, Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic areas of the medieval world.

Born in colonial Havana to an aristocratic Creole family, the future countess of Merlin left Cuba for Spain at an early age. Later, her marriage to the French count Antoine Christophe Merlin and the invasion of French Napoleonic troops precipitated another move to France, where she became one of the belle dames of Paris and began her literary career. She returned only once to Cuba after the death of her husband in 1840, a journey that produced Viaje a la Habana. Upon her return to Paris, Merlin expanded this into La Havane, an ambitious three-volume account of the political, social, and economic organization of the island.

From the viewpoint of feminist and psychoanalytical theory, Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba brilliantly explores the many ways in which issues of gender have contributed to Merlin's virtual absence from the canons of literature and from the discourses on Cuban national identity. Merlin's double identity as both Cuban and French is symbolic of the Cuban exiled condition, a fact taken up by contemporary exiled Cuban writers who see the countess as an alter-ego.

Mendez Rodenas seeks to restore Merlin as the first woman writer in Cuban literary history to articulate a sense of national identity, as well as being Cuba's first female historian. She focuses on Merlin's travel writings because they examine such issues as slavery, independence, nationhood, the role of women, education, and local literature. Together her writings construct an alternative, gendered history of nineteenth-century Cuba that must be acknowledged as both functional and authentic.

By situating Merlin at the intersection of the discourses of gender and nationalism, Mendez Rodenas reveals not only her pioneering role but also the need to expand current critical categories to account for the specificity of the Latin American literary tradition. In the process of restoring Merlin to her appropriate place in the canon of Latin American literature, she broadens our understanding of colonial Cuban history and expands our knowledge of the ways in which travel writing can influence a country's national literature .

"Gender is an absolute ground zero for most human societies," writes David William Foster, "an absolute horizon of social subjectivity." In this book, he examines gender issues in thirteen Brazilian films made (with one exception) after the 1985 return to constitutional democracy and elimination of censorship to show how these issues arise from and comment on the sociohistorical reality of contemporary Brazilian society.

Foster organizes his study around three broad themes: construction of masculinity, constructions of feminine and feminist identities, and same-sex positionings and social power. Within his discussions of individual films ranging from Jorge um brasileiro to A hora da estrela to Beijo no asfalto, he offers new ways of understanding national ideals and stereotypes, sexual dissidence (homoeroticism and transgenderism), heroic models, U.S./Brazilian relations, revolutionary struggle, and human rights violations. As the first study of Brazilian cinematic representations of gender ideology in English or Portuguese, this book will be important reading in film and cultural studies.

Revealing the Gothic foundations of Edith Wharton's vision of gender and identity.

Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton is an innovative study that provides fresh insights into Wharton’s male characters while at the same time showing how Wharton’s imagining of a fe/male self evolves throughout her career. Using feminist archetypal theory and theory of the female Gothic, Kathy A. Fedorko shows how Wharton, in sixteen short stories and six major novels written during four distinct periods of her life, adopts and adapts Gothic elements to explore the nature of feminine and masculine ways of knowing and being and to dramatize the tension between them.

Edith Wharton’s contradictory views of women and men—her attitudes toward the feminine and the masculine—reflect a complicated interweaving of family and social environment, historical time, and individual psychology. Studies of Wharton have exhibited this same kind of contradiction, with some seeing her as disparaging men and the masculine and others depicting her as disparaging women and the feminine. The use of Gothic elements in her fiction provided Wharton, who was often considered the consummate realist, with a way to dramatize the conflict between feminine and masculine selves as she experienced them and to evolve an alternative to the dualism.

Fedorko’s work is unique in its careful consideration of Wharton’s sixteen Gothic works, which are seldom discussed. Further, the revelation of how these Gothic stories are reflected in her major realistic novels. In the novels with Gothic texts, Wharton draws multiple parallels between male and female protagonists, indicating the commonalities between women and men and the potential for a female self. Eventually, in her last completed novel and her last short story, Wharton imagines human beings who are comfortable with both gender selves.