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The first century of Spanish colonization in Latin America witnessed the birth of cities that, while secondary to great metropolitan centers such as Mexico City and Lima, became important hubs for regional commerce. Santiago de Guatemala, the colonial capital of Central America, was one of these. A multiethnic and multicultural city from its beginning, Santiago grew into a vigorous trading center for agrarian goods such as cacao and cattle hides. With the wealth this commerce generated, Spaniards, natives, and African slaves built a city that any European of the period would have found familiar.

This book provides a more complete picture of society, culture, and economy in sixteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala than has ever before been drawn. Robinson Herrera uses previously unstudied primary sources, including testaments, promissory notes, and work contracts, to recreate the lives and economic activities of the non-elite sectors of society, including natives, African slaves, economically marginal Europeans, and people of mixed descent. His focus on these groups sheds light on the functioning of the economy at the lower levels and reveals how people of different ethnic groups formed alliances to create a vibrant local and regional economy based on credit. This portrait of Santiago also increases our understanding of how secondary Spanish American cities contributed vitally to the growth of the colonies.

WINNER OF THE SUSAN COLVER ROSENBERGER AWARD

A foundational work of educational history, Horace Mann Bond’s study reveals how race, labor, and power shaped Black schooling in Alabama—and why those lessons still matter today.

Originally published in 1939, Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel by Horace Mann Bond is a pioneering work of educational and social history. Drawing on extensive data and firsthand observation, Bond explores how the economic structures of the cotton South and the industrializing North influenced the development of Black education in Alabama. He examines disparities in funding, curriculum, and access, while also highlighting the resilience and agency of African American communities in pursuing educational advancement. This reissued edition preserves Bond’s critical insights and remains a vital resource for scholars of African American history, education policy, and Southern studies.

In Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico, artisanal fishing families and staff of Loreto Bay National Park face an array of choices as tourism, environmental concerns, and economic precarity challenge livelihoods and natural resource availability. In Net Values, Nicole D. Peterson offers a critical examination of how the idea of “choice” is understood, and what it means for policies, planning, and programs to ignore the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts surrounding these choices.

Anchored by more than twenty years of research, Peterson provides insight into the fishing community of Loreto and reveals an important role in decision-making that diverges from previous studies. She argues that decisions about fishing, natural resource management, and other aspects of life are influenced by context, values, and expectations in ways that go beyond the typical psychological or cognitive theories of choice. Instead, Net Values highlights the ways that choices are constrained and enabled by values and expectations of cultures, histories, relationships, and experiences, both personal and shared. Peterson answers questions such as “why do the fishermen fish?” or “what is the marine park staff doing?” These decisions and choices are related to the larger implication addressed by this book: that in order to make effective policies around natural resource management and other issues, we must understand how those potential policies interact with the decision processes already underway.

Divided into five chapters, Net Values is rich in ethnographic detail, drawing from real people to inform the narratives, chapters, and theoretical elaboration. Peterson’s interactions with fishers such as Don Javier and his family and friends support the ideas offered around choice, values, and strategies, connecting ideas to real experiences.

The discovery of the New World was initially a cause for celebration. But the vast amounts of gold that Columbus and other explorers claimed from these lands altered Spanish society. The influx of such wealth contributed to the expansion of the Spanish empire, but also it raised doubts and insecurities about the meaning and function of money, the ideals of court and civility, and the structure of commerce and credit. New World Gold shows that, far from being a stabilizing force, the flow of gold from the Americas created anxieties among Spaniards and shaped a host of distinct behaviors, cultural practices, and intellectual pursuits on both sides of the Atlantic.

Elvira Vilches examines economic treatises, stories of travel and conquest, moralist writings, fiction, poetry, and drama to reveal that New World gold ultimately became a problematic source of power that destabilized Spain’s sense of trust, truth, and worth. These cultural anxieties, she argues, rendered the discovery of gold paradoxically disastrous for Spanish society. Combining economic thought, social history, and literary theory in trans-Atlantic contexts, New World Gold unveils the dark side of Spain’s Golden Age.

California has long been mythologized as the quintessential land of opportunity and reinvention—a place where anyone, regardless of origin, can forge a new life and realize their aspirations. Yet beneath this gilded narrative lies a starker reality: California ranks among the most unequal states in one of the world's most unequal countries, where the middle class finds itself increasingly squeezed. Economic inequality is not an anomaly but part of a broader global phenomenon, as disparities deepen across the world. While we know a lot about its contours, its evolution over time and its intersections with race and immigration, we understand far less about how ordinary people interpret and internalize it. In Normalizing Inequality, sociologists G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel illuminate how middle-class Californians perceive and come to accept the inequalities that surround them.

Drawing on extensive interviews and surveys, Mora and Paschel uncover a profound paradox at the heart of middle-class consciousness. They find that Californians are keenly aware of the systemic causes of inequality—they recognize policies engineered to benefit the wealthy, they acknowledge how structural racism makes it hard for some groups to get ahead—yet they consistently minimize these forces. Instead, they gravitate toward explanations rooted in individualism, moral character, and the idea that things are worse in other places. Racism and racial inequality in California become palatable when framed as "not as bad as the South." Immigrant exploitation, however severe, transforms into evidence of the American Dream fulfilled simply upon arrival. Economic pressures that displace others become surmountable through personal industriousness and forbearance.

These beliefs about inequality grow more troubling still. Middle-class Californians sometimes blame disempowered people for their circumstances—acknowledging structural barriers facing homeless and undocumented populations while simultaneously faulting them for insufficient drive or criminal behavior that compounds their difficulties. When contemplating California's future, interviewees envision economic prosperity propelled by technological innovation, yet remain curiously unconcerned with how present inequalities might shape that tomorrow. Their imagined future is one where White and Asian American populations thrive, while Black, Latino, and economically marginalized Californians either vanish through displacement or fade into irrelevance. As respondents use these interpretive frameworks to make sense of inequality, they lean heavily on California's foundational narratives of opportunity, sanctuary and multiracial promise.

Normalizing Inequality offers an incisive examination of how ordinary citizens make sense of inequality and, through that very process of sense-making, how they tolerate and passively reproduce the conditions they often claim to deplore.