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Montana has been the "last best place" for so many people. A century ago, Native Americans gathered here to perform the Ghost Dance—a last, doomed attempt to make white settlers vanish and bring back the old ways of life. Today, people are still pouring into Montana, looking for the pristine wilderness they saw in A River Runs through It.

The reality of Montana—indeed, of all the West—has never matched the myths, but this book eloquently explores how the search for a perfect place is driving growth, development, and resource exploitation in Big Sky country. In ten personal essays, John Wright looks at such things as Montana myths; old-timers; immigrants; elk; ways of seeing the landscape; land conservation and land trusts; the fate of the Blackfoot, Bitterroot, and Paradise valleys; and some means of preserving the last, best places.

These reflections offer a way of understanding Montana that goes far beyond the headlines about militia groups and celebrities' ranches. Montana never was or will be a pristine wilderness, but Wright believes that much can be saved if natives and newcomers alike see what stands to be lost. His book is a wake-up call, not a ghost dance.

One city. One war. A story of transformation at home and abroad.

Using newspaper accounts, interviews, letters, journals, and his own memory of the time, Wesley Newton reconstructs wartime-era Montgomery, Alabama--a sleepy southern capital that was transformed irreversibly during World War II.

The war affected every segment of Montgomery society: black and white, rich and poor, male and female, those who fought in Europe and the Pacific and those who stayed on the home front. Newton follows Montgomerians chronologically through the war from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima as they experience patriotism, draft and enlistment, rationing, scarcity drives, and the deaths of loved ones. His use of small vignettes based on personal recollections adds drama and poignancy to the story. 

Montgomery in the Good War is an important reminder that wars are waged at home as well as abroad and that their impact reverberates well beyond those who fight on the front lines. Those who came of age during the war will recognize themselves in this moving volume. It will also be enlightening to those who have lived in times of relative peace.

An exploration of how monuments—both physical and conceptual—shape memory, identity, and public debate across cultures and time.

This compelling volume invites readers to reimagine how monuments shape history, identity, and public space. Monumentality is explored as a dynamic and contested idea—one that moves beyond grand buildings and enduring structures to understand how societies remember the past and envision the future.

Engaging scholarly essays, accompanied by focused reflections on objects held in Getty collections, analyze the emotional, ideological, and technological dimensions of monuments by tracing their changing meanings across cultures and historical periods. Spanning themes of destruction, circulation, territorialization, and empire, the book investigates topics such as the ruin aesthetic of the Paris Commune, the material remnants of Buddhism in India, the construction of Cold War dams, and the influence of Almohad minaret architecture. Throughout, readers will encounter the enduring effects of colonialism, modernization, and settlements on societies around the world—from nineteenth-century West Africa to postwar Japan and Guam to present-day Israel and Ukraine.

Together, these studies integrate histories of art, architecture, and urban landscapes to examine the role of monuments in contemporary life. Monumentality offers fresh perspectives on what we choose to honor, why the past is preserved (or forgotten), and how the complex narratives embedded in memorials or public art condition our experience of the present.

From the very first weeks of Russia’s large-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022, Russian soldiers, politicians, and proxy administrators expended considerable effort interacting with monuments on newly occupied territory. Why did the invaders care enough about war memorials to divert scarce resources to destroying, maintaining, or building them amid a massive war? Why did they remove some memorials and spare others? What was the point of commemorating past victories and defeats while bombing Ukrainian cities, and how did commemorative ceremonies in the occupied territories

change over the first year of the war? What was the broader impact of monument-related practices beyond the local settings in which they occurred? And what does the Ukrainian case teach us more generally about how memorials to past wars can be used to justify new conquests? These are some of the questions this book explores, based on fieldwork in occupied Ukraine and online research.

How Africa was perceived in the early modern imaginary

In this first book to study Portuguese texts about Africa, Moorings brings an important but little-known body of European writings to bear on contemporary colonial thought. Images of Africa as monstrous, dangerous, and lush were created in early Portuguese imperial writings and dominated its representation in European literature. Moorings establishes these key works in their proper place: foundational to Western imperial discourse.

The second in a two-volume series, Moquis and Kastiilam, Volume II, 1680–1781 continues the story of the encounter between the Hopis, who the Spaniards called Moquis, and the Spaniards, who the Hopis called Kastiilam, from the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 through the Spanish expeditions in search of a land route to Alta California until about 1781. By comparing and contrasting Spanish documents with Hopi oral traditions, the editors present a balanced presentation of a shared past. Translations of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century documents written by Spanish explorers, colonial officials, and Franciscan missionaries tell the perspectives of the European visitors, and oral traditions recounted by Hopi elders reveal the Indigenous experience.

The editors argue that only the Hopi perspective can balance the story recounted in the Spanish documentary record, which is biased, distorted, and incomplete (as is the documentary record of any European or Euro-American colonial power). The only hope of correcting those weaknesses and the enormous silences about the Hopi responses to Spanish missionization and colonization is to record and analyze Hopi oral traditions, which have been passed down from generation to generation since 1540, and to give voice to Hopi values and social memories of what was a traumatic period in their past.

Volume I documented Spanish abuses during missionization, which the editors address specifically and directly as the sexual exploitation of Hopi women, suppression of Hopi ceremonies, and forced labor of Hopi men and women. These abuses drove Hopis to the breaking point, inspiring a Hopi revitalization that led them to participate in the Pueblo Revolt and to rebuff all subsequent efforts to reestablish Franciscan missions and Spanish control. Volume II portrays the Hopi struggle to remain independent at its most effective—a mixture of diplomacy, negotiation, evasion, and armed resistance. Nonetheless, the abuses of Franciscan missionaries, the bloodshed of the Pueblo Revolt, and the subsequent destruction of the Hopi community of Awat’ovi on Antelope Mesa remain historical traumas that still wound Hopi society today.

Collecting the interpretations of outstanding writers on the literature and history of modern Britain, this book deals with a rich variety of themes, some familiar, many unexpected, taking the reader on a highly engaging excursion through British life and intellectual biography. The scope includes not only the personalities, politics, and culture of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, but also the interaction of British and other societies throughout the world.

2022 Art in Service to the Environment Award, Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter
Honorable Mention, 2022 Nonfiction Prize, Writers' League of Texas

Writers explore a city’s relationship with chronic catastrophic flooding.

Shortly after Hurricane Harvey dumped a record 61 inches of rain on Houston in 2017, celebrated writer and Bayou City resident Lacy M. Johnson began collecting flood stories. Although these stories attested to the infinite variety of experience in America’s most diverse city, they also pointed to a consistent question: What does catastrophic flooding reveal about this city, and what does it obscure?

More City than Water brings together essays, conversations, and personal narratives from climate scientists, marine ecologists, housing activists, urban planners, artists, poets, and historians as they reflect on the human geography of a region increasingly defined by flooding. Both a literary and a cartographic anthology, More City than Water features striking maps of Houston’s floodplains, waterways, drainage systems, reservoirs, and inundated neighborhoods. Designed by University of Houston seniors from the Graphic Design program, each map, imaginative and precise, shifts our understanding of the flooding, the public’s relationship to it, and the fraught reality of rebuilding. Evocative and unique, this is an atlas that uncovers the changing nature of living where the waters rise.

More Nights Than Days is a unique exploration of the experience of children who survived the Holocaust—including Roma and Sinti victims—and the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Children are among the principal victims of armed conflicts and slaughters; nonetheless, they perceive events through the prism of their unique perspective and have a range of coping techniques adults don't possess.

This overview of writings of ninety-one child survivors bears evidence from a wide range of human ruthlessness. The author presents little-known texts along with famous memoirs and autobiographical fiction, with abundant quotations. Many of these are not only compelling as historical testimony, but poetic and stirringly expressive. Yudit Kiss has not written a historical study or literary criticism of the children’s books. She explores, instead, what the authors went through and what they felt and understood about their experience. An accessible and captivating reading, this volume presents a close-up, human size dimension of the destruction. The books written by child survivors also describe the resources and means that helped them to remain human even in the deepest well of inhumanity, offering precious lessons about resistance and resilience.M

How discipline and conscience displaced anger and reputation in the early US Navy’s crucible of leadership

More Real Courage: Transforming Honor at the Early Naval Academy is a work of narrative history that traces a hard-fought moral transformation within the United States Navy’s officer corps. Samuel J. Limneos reveals an institutional struggle between competing ideals of courage, as traditional notions of offense, reputation, and aggression collided with emerging values of restraint, loyalty, and duty. Through intensely human stories of conflict, discipline, and conscience, the book shows how honor was contested, defended, and ultimately reshaped into a standard grounded in moral courage and professional responsibility.

Set across three pivotal decades at the Naval Academy, the study examines how midshipmen learned to navigate a culture inherited from European martial traditions while serving a rapidly changing republic. Limneos illuminates the professionalization of naval officers during the mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating how commitment, longsuffering, and performance of duty gradually displaced volatile codes of personal honor. Bridging social, cultural, and institutional history, More Real Courage fills a significant gap in naval historiography and speaks directly to enduring debates over character, leadership, and education in the armed forces. The book offers enduring moral lessons for naval historians, military professionals, and readers seeking to understand how national character is forged amid conflict, reform, and cultural change.