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"A distinctive and skillful effort to bring facets of Illinois history to a popular as well as an academic audience."—John Hoffman, Illinois Historical Survey, University of Illinois Library

Historic Sites and Markers
  is an indispensable guide for travelers who wish to retrace the various frontier
  routes taken by the Mormons and other pioneers in their treks westward. Traversing
  fifteen states from New York to California, Stanley Kimball presents some of
  America's most famous trails--the Mormon, the Oregon-California, the Santa Fe,
  the Overland, and many others--and describes important points of interest, including
  forts, trail centers, and museums.
"An important contribution
  to the history of the West and perhaps the most comprehensive mile-by-mile guide
  to trail markers and historical sites ever prepared."
  -- Brigham D. Madsen, author of The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear
  River Massacre
 

New Jersey has a varied and fascinating history-from its earliest Native American settlements, through its central role in the Revolutionary War, to its strategic position in the major events of our country's past. In History Walks in New Jersey, Lucy D. Rosenfeld and Marina Harrison treat readers to a comprehensive statewide guidebook that includes detailed information on forty-eight of the best sites for historical walks. These outings take the history enthusiast through beautiful green landscapes, natural preserves, and picturesque settlements.
  
 Whether you are an amateur historian, a weekend walker, or a teacher planning a class trip, this book will be an essential resource for ideas and information. Walks include the Kingston Loop, a long canal where George Washington, pen in hand, composed his post-Revolutionary War speech, "Farewell Orders to the Armies of the United States." Also included is a mountain walk that traces Native American Leni-Lenape history and one that wends its way into an old Moravian village in the town of Hope. A pirate cove, stops on the Underground Railroad, a Civil War cemetery, and the sites of duels, mines, canals, architectural innovations, estates and resorts, centuries-old agricultural and fishing settlements, and the Hindenburg crash are all here.

Each walk includes directions, information on tours, a brief history, and suggestions for additional places to visit in the area. Whether a New Jersey native or a visitor to the Garden State, readers will enjoy going beyond the highways and suburban towns to learn about history while discovering the state's natural beauty.

The democratic election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1994 marked the demise of apartheid and the beginning of a new struggle to define the nation’s past. History after Apartheid analyzes how, in the midst of the momentous shift to an inclusive democracy, South Africa’s visual and material culture represented the past while at the same time contributing to the process of social transformation. Considering attempts to invent and recover historical icons and narratives, art historian Annie E. Coombes examines how strategies for embodying different models of historical knowledge and experience are negotiated in public culture—in monuments, museums, and contemporary fine art.

History after Apartheid explores the dilemmas posed by a wide range of visual and material culture including key South African heritage sites. How prominent should Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress be in the museum at the infamous political prison on Robben Island? How should the postapartheid government deal with the Voortrekker Monument mythologizing the Boer Trek of 1838? Coombes highlights the contradictory investment in these sites among competing constituencies and the tensions involved in the rush to produce new histories for the “new” South Africa.

She reveals how artists and museum officials struggled to adequately represent painful and difficult histories ignored or disavowed under apartheid, including slavery, homelessness, and the attempted destruction of KhoiSan hunter-gatherers. Describing how contemporary South African artists address historical memory and the ambiguities uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Coombes illuminates a body of work dedicated to the struggle to simultaneously remember the past and move forward into the future.

On September 11, 1857, some 120 men, women, and children from the Arkansas hills were murdered in the remote desert valley of Mountain Meadows, Utah. This notorious massacre was, in fact, a mass execution: having surrendered their weapons, the victims were bludgeoned to death or shot at point-blank range. The perpetrators were local Mormon militiamen whose motives have been fiercely debated for 150 years.

In House of Mourning, Shannon A. Novak goes beyond the question of motive to the question of loss. Who were the victims at Mountain Meadows? How had they settled and raised their families in the American South, and why were they moving west once again? What were they hoping to find or make for themselves at the end of the trail? By integrating archival records and oral histories with the first analysis of skeletal remains from the massacre site, Novak offers a detailed and sensitive portrait of the victims as individuals, family members, cultural beings, and living bodies.

The history of the massacre has often been treated as a morality tale whose chief purpose was to vilify (or to glorify) some collective body. Resisting this tendency to oversimplify the past, Novak explores Mountain Meadows as a busy and dangerous intersection of cultural and material forces in antebellum America. House of Mourning is a bold experiment in a new kind of history, the biocultural analysis of complex events.

Winner of the Society for Historical Archaeology James Deetz Book Award. 
 

Discusses the concepts of “home,” “house,” and “household” in past societies

Because archaeology seeks to understand past societies, the concepts of "home," "house," and "household" are important. Yet they can be the most elusive of ideas. Are they the space occupied by a nuclear family or by an extended one? Is it a built structure or the sum of its contents? Is it a shelter against the elements, a gendered space, or an ephemeral place tied to emotion? We somehow believe that the household is a basic unit of culture but have failed to develop a theory for understanding the diversity of households in the historic (and prehistoric) periods.

In an effort to clarify these questions, this volume examines a broad range of households—a Spanish colonial rancho along the Rio Grande, Andrew Jackson's Hermitage in Tennessee, plantations in South Carolina and the Bahamas, a Colorado coal camp, a frontier Arkansas farm, a Freedman's Town eventually swallowed by Dallas, and plantations across the South—to define and theorize domestic space. The essays devolve from many disciplines, but all approach households from an archaeological perspective, looking at landscape analysis, excavations, reanalyzed collections, or archival records. Together, the essays present a body of knowledge that takes the identification, analysis, and interpretation of households far beyond current conceptions.