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At the heart of this book is a deceptively simple question: What does “health” mean? The answer, historian Calloway B. Scott shows, is culturally contingent, and in ancient Greece the concept went well beyond the proper functioning of an individual’s body. Rather, “health” (Greek hygieia) furnished a key discursive and ritual tool for civic cohesion, religious praxis, and even cultural identity. The all-important polis, central to ancient Greek social and political life, fundamentally depended on this conception of good health as a communal and religious phenomenon, and its ritualization informed relationships not just between individuals but also between communities of humans and between the human and divine realms.

Scott employs an impressive array of sources, from technical medical treatises to poetry to material remains and sanctuary sites, to explore the “body politic” of the ancient Greek world—and to query exactly what keeping that body healthy meant. Health, political identity, social relationships, and religious praxis were all deeply entwined; thus rites, rituals, and healing spaces were public, bringing people together in cohesive, coherent, and, ideally, healthy communities.

This accessible, state-of-the-art review of Mayan hieroglyphics and cosmology also serves as a tribute to one of the field's most noted pioneers.

The core of this book focuses on the current study of Mayan hieroglyphics as inspired by the recently deceased Mayanist Linda Schele. As author or coauthor of more than 200 books or articles on the Maya, Schele served as the chief disseminator of knowledge to the general public about this ancient Mesoamerican culture, similar to the way in which Margaret Mead introduced anthropology and the people of Borneo to the English-speaking world.

Twenty-five contributors offer scholarly writings on subjects ranging from the ritual function of public space at the Olmec site and the gardens of the Great Goddess at Teotihuacan to the understanding of Jupiter in Maya astronomy and the meaning of the water throne of Quirigua Zoomorph P. The workshops on Maya history and writing that Schele conducted in Guatemala and Mexico for the highland people, modern descendants of the Mayan civilization, are thoroughly addressed as is the phenomenon termed "Maya mania"—the explosive growth of interest in Maya epigraphy, iconography, astronomy, and cosmology that Schele stimulated. An appendix provides a bibliography of Schele's publications and a collection of Scheleana, written memories of "the Rabbit Woman" by some of her colleagues and students.

Of interest to professionals as well as generalists, this collection will stand as a marker of the state of Mayan studies at the turn of the 21st century and as a tribute to the remarkable personality who guided a large part of that archaeological research for more than two decades.
 

A memoir of service, culture and transformation in a rural Panamanian village by a young American woman trained as a community forester for the Peace Corp.

In the storied fifty-year history of the US Peace Corps, Heart of Palms is the first Peace Corps memoir set in Panama, the slender isthmus that connects two continents and two oceans. In her memoir, Meredith Cornett transports readers to the remote village of Tranquilla, where dugout canoes are the mainstay of daily transportation, life and nature are permeated by witchcraft, and a restful night’s sleep may be disturbed by a raiding phalanx of army ants.

Cornett is sent to help counter the rapid deforestation that is destroying the ecosystem and livelihoods of the Panama Canal watershed region. Her first chapters chronicle her arrival and struggles not only with the social issues of language, loneliness, and insecurity, but also with the tragicomic basics of mastering open-fire cookery and intrusions by insects and poisonous snakes. As she grows to understand the region and its people, her keen eye discerns the overwhelming scope of her task. Unable to plant trees faster than they are lost, she writes with moving clarity about her sense of powerlessness.

Combating deforestation leads Cornett into an equally fierce battle against her own feelings of fear and isolation. Her journey to Panama becomes a parallel journey into herself. In this way, Heart of Palms is much more than a record of her Peace Corps service; it is also a moving environmental coming-of-age story and nuanced meditation on one village’s relationship to nature. When she returns home two years later, Cornett brings with her both skills and experience and a remarkable, newfound sense of confidence and mission.

Writing with rueful, self-deprecating humor, Cornett lets us ride along with her on a wave of naïve optimism, a wave that breaks not only on fear and intimidation, but also on tedium and isolation. Heart of Palms offers a bracing alternative to the romantic idealism common to Peace Corps memoirs and will be valued as a welcome addition to writing about the Peace Corps and environmental service.

A uniquely structured collection of essays from one of today’s most esteemed scholars of black studies

A thoughtfully curated selection of texts by preeminent black feminist scholar Katherine McKittrick, Heartbreak and Other Geographies showcases the remarkable depth of inquiry she has generated over twenty years. Edited by Brittany Meché and Camilla Hawthorne, this collection highlights McKittrick’s enduring commitment to ideas around radical placemaking and the creative articulations of and within the black diaspora.

McKittrick’s work is marked by a recurring engagement with anticolonialism, practices of liberation, and radical methodologies of black cultural production. Through discussions of figures such as Toni Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Édouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy, Nina Simone, and Sylvia Wynter, the writing in Heartbreak and Other Geographies spans the author’s investigations into scientific method, liberal modernity, the cycles that perpetuate racial violence, and the poetics and sonics of black livingness.

Bringing together recent texts, influential pieces, and lesser-known essays, the unconventional format of Heartbreak and Other Geographies includes an introductory conversation with McKittrick as well as a series of creative interludes from the editors throughout the book. Innovative in both form and content, this wide-ranging volume invites us to rethink the boundaries between disciplines and the ways that scholarship can embody a more collaborative form of worldmaking.

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When the Spaniards conquered the Yucatan Peninsula in the early 1500s, they made a great effort to destroy or Christianize the native cultures flourishing there. That they were in large part unsuccessful is evidenced by the survival of a number of documents written in Maya and preserved and added to by literate Mayas up to the 1830s. The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel is such a document, literally the history of Yucatan written by and for Mayas, and it contains much information not available from Spanish sources because it was part of an underground resistance movement of which the Spanish were largely unaware.

Well known to Mayanists, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel is presented here in Munro S. Edmonson's English translation, extensively annotated. Edmonson reinterprets the book as literature and as history, placing it in chronological order and translating it as poetry. The ritual nature of Mayan history clearly emerges and casts new light on Mexican and Spanish acculturation of the Yucatecan Maya in the post-Classic and colonial periods.

Centered in the city of Merida, the Chumayel provides the western (Xiu) perspective on Yucatecan history, as Edmonson's earlier book The Ancient Future of the Itza: The Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin presented the eastern (Itza) viewpoint. Both document the changing calendar of the colonial period and the continuing vitality of pre-Columbian ritual thought down to the nineteenth century. Perhaps the biggest surprise is the survival of the long-count dating system down to the Baktun Ceremonial of 1618 (12.0.0.0.0). But there are others: the use of rebus writing, the survival of the tun until 1752, graphic if oblique accounts of Mayan ceremonial drama, and the depiction of the Spanish conquest as a long-term inter-Mayan civil war.

The ultrawealthy largely own and guide the newspaper system in the United States. Through entities like hedge funds and private equity firms, this investor class continues to dismantle the one institution meant to give voice to average citizens in a democracy.

Margot Susca reveals the little-known history of how private investment took over the newspaper industry. Drawing on a political economy of media, Susca’s analysis uses in-depth interviews and documentary evidence to examine issues surrounding ownership and power. Susca also traces the scorched-earth policies of layoffs, debt, cash-outs, and wholesale newspaper closings left behind by private investors and the effects of the devastation on the future of news and information. Throughout, Susca reveals an industry rocked less by external forces like lost ad revenue and more by ownership and management obsessed with profit and beholden to private fund interests that feel no responsibility toward journalism or the public it is meant to serve.

Along the winding banks of the Middle Kuskokwim River, stories live in the languages of the land. Shared from our Elders, around kitchen tables on long winter nights and beside summer campfires, these teachings carry the wisdom of the people who have called this place home for generations. Held in Memory, Shared in Story gathers these voices into a collection, a record of resilience and the deep relationship we share with world around us. This book captures the knowledge, shared in writing and orally, of our region and celebrates the storytellers, the listeners, and all who keep these traditions alive. To read these stories is to walk beside the people of the Middle Kuskokwim, to see through their eyes, to hear their laughter, and to understand that the heart of a culture lives in the stories shared across generations.

For 50 years, Paul Hagen lived the dream of being a beat writer covering the Dodgers, Rangers, and Phillies. But, as Hell of a Way to Make a Living demonstrates, the enviable job isn’t always as glamorous as it seems.

This insider’s account gives readers an all-access pass to the press box, clubhouse, and dugout to discover what the experience is really about. It’s both a clear-eyed dissection of the daily grind and a breezy, occasionally gossipy, account of being to paid to watch baseball games.

Hagen features entertaining and insightful anecdotes such as confirming to manager Terry Francona that the Phillies were going to fire him two weeks before it happened and building trust with players from the last man on the roster to future Hall of Famers like Mike Schmidt, Ferguson Jenkins, Billy Wagner, and Scott Rolen. He also addresses the changing media landscape, what’s on the record and off, the ethics of reporting on a team fairly, and how sports writing has changed over the decades.

Covering all the bases, Hell of a Way to Make a Living is an ode to the importance of conscientious beat writing and building trust with readers.

Hend is a young Saudi Arabian woman struggling to challenge her conservative society, which is represented by various soldiers, real and metaphorical, in her life. After a failed arranged marriage to an army officer, she is determined to establish herself as a writer and make her own choices in love. Her mother, a firm supporter of their society’s traditional norms, works to block her efforts. As Hend engages with her mother, stories of her past and those of other female relatives reveal the extent of the suffering previous generations of women have endured while living in such a patriarchal society. Hend also comes to understand how such traditions have adversely affected the men in her family, including one brother who flees to the West and another who finds comradeship among the members of al-Qaeda.

Badriah Albeshr represents a growing number of women writers from the Arabian Peninsula who refuse to shy away from the taboo topics of religion and sexuality, which makes Hend and the Soldiers a valuable read for those seeking insights into the complexities surrounding these issues.

For the ancient Maya, food was both sustenance and a tool for building a complex society. This collection, the first to focus exclusively on the social uses of food in Classic Maya culture, deploys a variety of theoretical approaches to examine the meaning of food beyond diet—ritual offerings and restrictions, medicinal preparations, and the role of nostalgia around food, among other topics. For instance, how did Maya feasts build community while also reinforcing social hierarchy? What psychoactive substances were the elite Maya drinking in their caves, and why? Which dogs were good for eating, and which breeds became companions? Why did even some non-elite Maya enjoy cacao, but rarely meat? Why was meat more available for urban Maya than for those closer to hunting grounds on the fringes of cities? How did the molcajete become a vital tool and symbol in Maya gastronomy?

These chapters, written by some of the leading scholars in the field, showcase a variety of approaches and present new evidence from faunal remains, hieroglyphic texts, chemical analyses, and art. Thoughtful and revealing, Her Cup for Sweet Cacao unlocks a more comprehensive understanding of how food was instrumental to the development of ancient Maya culture.

Her Oxford looks at the people and the political and social forces that produced this dramatic transformation. Drawing on a vast array of biographies, histories, obituaries, and archives, Batson traces not only the institutional struggles over privileges and disciplinary rules for women, but also the rich texture of everyday life-women's amateur theatricals, debating societies, sports, and college escapades (Dorothy Sayers is the subject of quite a few). She tells the stories of women's active roles in two war efforts and in the suffrage movement.

An unusual feature of the book is the set of 120 biographical profiles of women who attended Oxford between 1879 and 1960. They constitute a Who's Who of women scientists, anthropologists, psychotherapists, educators, novelists, and social reformers in the English-speaking world.

In the late 1800s, archaeologists began discovering engraved stone plaques in Neolithic (3500-2500 BC) graves in southern Portugal and Spain. About the size of one's palm, usually made of slate, and incised with geometric or, more rarely, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic designs, these plaques have mystified generations of researchers. What do their symbols signify? How were the plaques produced? Were they worn during an individual's lifetime, or only made at the time of their death? Why, indeed, were the plaques made at all?

Employing an eclectic range of theoretical and methodological lenses, Katina Lillios surveys all that is currently known about the Iberian engraved stone plaques and advances her own carefully considered hypotheses about their manufacture and meanings. After analyzing data on the plaques' workmanship and distribution, she builds a convincing case that the majority of the Iberian plaques were genealogical records of the dead that served as durable markers of regional and local group identities. Such records, she argues, would have contributed toward legitimating and perpetuating an ideology of inherited social difference in the Iberian Late Neolithic.

When capitalism is clearly catastrophically out of control and its excesses cannot be sustained socially or ecologically, the ideas of Herbert Marcuse become as relevant as they were in the 1960s. This is the first English introduction to Marcuse to be published for decades, and deals specifically with his aesthetic theories and their relation to a critical theory of society.

Although Marcuse is best known as a critic of consumer society, epitomised in the classic One-Dimensional Man, Malcolm Miles provides an insight into how Marcuse's aesthetic theories evolved within his broader attitudes, from his anxiety at the rise of fascism in the 1930s through heady optimism of the 1960s, to acceptance in the 1970s that radical art becomes an invaluable progressive force when political change has become deadlocked.

Marcuse's aesthetics of liberation, in which art assumes a primary role in interrupting the operation of capitalism, made him a key figure for the student movement in the 1960s. As diverse forms of resistance rise once more, a new generation of students, scholars and activists will find Marcuse’s radical theory essential to their struggle.

Winner of the 2023 New England Society Book Award in the Historical Nonfiction category
Winner of an Award of Excellence, American Association for State and Local History (AASLH)

In 1822, settlers pushed north from Massachusetts and other parts of New England into Monson, Maine. On land taken from the Penobscot people, they established prosperous farms and businesses. Focusing on the microhistory of this village, Andrew Witmer reveals the sometimes surprising ways that this small New England town engaged with the wider world across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Townspeople fought and died in distant wars, transformed the economy and landscape with quarries and mills, and used railroads, highways, print, and new technologies to forge connections with the rest of the nation.

Here and Everywhere Else starts with Monson’s incorporation in the early nineteenth century, when central Maine was considered the northern frontier and over 90 percent of Americans still lived in rural areas; it ends with present-day attempts to revive this declining Maine town into an artists’ colony. Engagingly written, with colorful portraits of local characters and landmarks, this study illustrates how the residents of this remote place have remade their town by integrating (and resisting) external influences.