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This anthology argues for the serious study of the literary oeuvre of Anne Rice, a major figure in today’s popular literature. The essays assert that Rice expands the conventions of the horror genre’s formula to examine important social issues. Like a handful of authors working in this genre, Rice manipulates its otherwise predictable narrative structures so that a larger, more interesting cultural mythology can be developed. Rice searches for philosophical truth, examining themes of good and evil, the influence on people and society of both nature and nurture, and the conflict and dependence of humanism and science.

In the tumultuous years following the Civil War, violence and lawlessness plagued the state of Texas, often overwhelming the ability of local law enforcement to maintain order. In response, Reconstruction-era governor Edmund J. Davis created a statewide police force that could be mobilized whenever and wherever local authorities were unable or unwilling to control lawlessness. During its three years (1870–1873) of existence, however, the Texas State Police was reviled as an arm of the Radical Republican party and widely condemned for being oppressive, arrogant, staffed with criminals and African Americans, and expensive to maintain, as well as for enforcing the new and unpopular laws that protected the rights of freed slaves.

Drawing extensively on the wealth of previously untouched records in the Texas State Archives, as well as other contemporary sources, Barry A. Crouch and Donaly E. Brice here offer the first major objective assessment of the Texas State Police and its role in maintaining law and order in Reconstruction Texas. Examining the activities of the force throughout its tenure and across the state, the authors find that the Texas State Police actually did much to solve the problem of violence in a largely lawless state. While acknowledging that much of the criticism the agency received was merited, the authors make a convincing case that the state police performed many of the same duties that the Texas Rangers later assumed and fulfilled the same need for a mobile, statewide law enforcement agency.

The United States government thought it could make Indians "vanish." After the Indian Wars ended in the 1880s, the government gave allotments of land to individual Native Americans in order to turn them into farmers and sent their children to boarding schools for indoctrination into the English language, Christianity, and the ways of white people. Federal officials believed that these policies would assimilate Native Americans into white society within a generation or two. But even after decades of governmental efforts to obliterate Indian culture, Native Americans refused to vanish into the mainstream, and tribal identities remained intact.

This revisionist history reveals how Native Americans' sense of identity and "peoplehood" helped them resist and eventually defeat the U.S. government's attempts to assimilate them into white society during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). Tom Holm discusses how Native Americans, though effectively colonial subjects without political power, nonetheless maintained their group identity through their native languages, religious practices, works of art, and sense of homeland and sacred history. He also describes how Euro-Americans became increasingly fascinated by and supportive of Native American culture, spirituality, and environmental consciousness. In the face of such Native resiliency and non-Native advocacy, the government's assimilation policy became irrelevant and inevitably collapsed. The great confusion in Indian affairs during the Progressive Era, Holm concludes, ultimately paved the way for Native American tribes to be recognized as nations with certain sovereign rights.

A revelatory economic history of America's Gilded Age—and how it wasn't just the Robber Barons who benefited.

The Gilded Age, spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was when Americans got rich. Or, rather, some Americans got rich. Because as much as the era is synonymous with staggering economic growth, it also doubles as America’s cautionary tale for the perils of leaving rich people and institutions unregulated. It was the time of extractive industrialists, worker exploitation, stifled economic mobility, and racial exclusion—lessons that the United States learned the hard way.

Vincent Geloso contests this traditional narrative by revisiting the math in this new empirical account of the Gilded Age. The Great Enrichment is an economic history of America’s rise to affluence, a period that doubled as a remarkable rise of the country’s economic floor. The conventional contrast of Robber Barons against huddled masses is, in Geloso’s analysis, unsubstantiated by economic data. The Gilded Age was the first egalitarian enrichment that humanity witnessed—a time when both rich and poor benefited in ways that were seismic, albeit unequal. Yet the net result was a great leap forward, not the lamentable birth of modern inequality.

Geloso marshals an expanded set of economic measures to account for factors not typically included in the Gilded Age economic story. The Great Enrichment sets a new standard for empirical history in one of America’s most consequential—and perhaps misunderstood—periods.

From the essential chronicler of the world economy, a portrait of the Great Powers in transition.

The world’s two great economic powers are on opposite trajectories. In the United States, decades of neoliberal policies produced a small class of rich elites and gutted the middle class. In China, the same global forces have created a massive new upper class. The result is the greatest reshuffling of global incomes since the Industrial Revolution—a dramatic shakeup of each country’s political order. As the two powers retreat from one another, the implications for their futures, and for the world economy, are uncertain.

In The Great Global Transformation, acclaimed economist Branko Milanovic draws on original research to chart how these seismic shifts will shape the next century of the global economy. As both the US and China retreat into protectionism, Milanovic shows how a new and multipolar world order will follow—and how rising nationalism will have dramatically different effects on the two countries. And he shows us the fight ahead: as plutocracy returns, global war threatens, and a new system silently shapes our nations, driving populist discontent to the breaking point.

A worthy successor to Capitalism, Alone and his other landmark works, Milanovic’s new book announces the arrival of a new era he terms “national market liberalism,” in which liberalism survives in domestic economies, but not necessarily in the social arena. The Great Global Transformation is Milanovic’s indispensable account of the new twenty-first century now underway.
 

Southern Arizona is a world-renown hummingbird destination. The Great Hummingbird Chase chronicles John P. Schaefer and Ken Lamberton’s passionate quest to photograph all fifteen of Arizona’s hummingbird species.

This groundbreaking historical account documents the little-known but significant conflict that erupted among Maine lobstermen in the 1950s—a pivotal clash that pitted independent small-scale fishermen against powerful dealers and federal government regulators. Written by distinguished historian Ronald P. Formisano, this work reconstructs a dramatic struggle over prices and economic power within Maine's vital lobster fishery.

Capturing the reality of the Lobster War strike and its subsequent legal proceedings, Formisano's narrative explores how independent owner-operators of the Maine lobster fishery, facing economic pressures from middlemen dealers and federal intervention, banded together in a coordinated effort to secure fair prices and maintain control over their livelihoods. 

Through meticulous historical research, Formisano illuminates the economic realities of commercial fishing, the dynamics between laborers and processors, and the role of government regulation in shaping resource management policies.The Great Lobster War serves as both a detailed historical study and an accessible story of working-class agency and collective action in the postwar era.

CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE

Tracing the Southern Origins of Modern American Conservatism.

Audacious in its scope, subtle in its analysis, and persuasive in its arguments, The Great Melding is the second book in Glenn Feldman’s magisterial recounting of the South’s transformation from a Reconstruction-era citadel of Democratic Party inertia to a cauldron of GOP agitation. In this pioneering study, Feldman shows how the transitional years after World War II, the Dixiecrat episode, and the early 1950s formed a pivotal sequence of events that altered America’s political landscape in profound, fundamental, and unexpected ways.

Feldman’s landmark work The Irony of the Solid South dismantled the myth of the New Deal consensus, proving it to be only a fleeting alliance of fissiparous factions; The Great Melding further examines how the South broke away from that consensus. Exploring issues of race and white supremacy, Feldman documents and explains the roles of economics, religion, and emotive appeals to patriotism in southern voting patterns. His probing and original analysis includes a discussion of the limits of southern liberalism and a fresh examination of the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948.

Feldman convincingly argues that the Dixiecrats—often dismissed as a transitory footnote in American politics—served as a template for the modern conservative movement. Now a predictable Republican stronghold, Alabama at the time was viewed by national political strategists as a battleground and bellwether. Masterfully synthesizing a vast range of sources, Feldman shows that Alabama was then one of the few states where voters made unpredictable choices between the competing ideologies of the Democrats, Republicans, and Dixiecrats.

Writing in his lively and provocative style, Feldman demonstrates that the events he recounts in Alabama between 1942 and Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 election encapsulate a rare moment of fluidity in American politics, one in which the New Deal consensus shattered and the Democratic and Republican parties fought off a third-party revolt only to find themselves irrevocably altered by their success. The Great Melding will fascinate historians, political scientists, political strategists, and readers of political nonfiction.

Where Black people live has long been an important determinant of their ability to participate in political processes. The Great Migration significantly changed the way Democratic Party elites interacted with Black communities in northern cities, Detroit, New York, and Chicago. Many white Democratic politicians came to believe the growing pool of Black voters could help them reach their electoral goals—and these politicians often changed their campaign strategies and positions to secure Black support. Furthermore, Black migrants were able to participate in politics because there were fewer barriers to Black political participations outside the South.

The Great Migration and the Democratic Party frames the Great Migration as an important economic and social event that also had serious political consequences. Keneshia Grant created one of the first listings of Black elected officials that classifies them based on their status as participants in the Great Migration. She also describes some of the policy/political concerns of the migrants. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party lays the groundwork for ways of thinking about the contemporary impact of Black migration on American politics.

Among the many difficulties the newly formed Confederate States of America endured in the summer of 1861 was the failure of its post office department to provide sufficient numbers of that item most crucial to its service: the postage stamp. Faced with the resulting din of customer complaints, a handful of industrious Texas postmasters solved the problem by simply making their own homemade stamps.

In this thoroughly researched history of these rare and highly coveted stamps, The Great Texas Stamp Collection traces their journey from creation through their rediscovery years later by local, and then international, stamp collectors—a journey that culminated in the sale of a few pieces at a recent auction in New York that fetched more than $250,000. Weaving the larger contexts of Texas and U.S. postal history together with individual tales of greed, intrigue, forgery, and discovery, Deaton’s book is rich with characters from European royalty to early stamp dealers to common criminals, while also providing detailed examinations of the stamps themselves, including a complete census of the stamps now known as the Texas Confederate Postmasters’ Provisionals.

Appealing at once to devoted philatelists, Texas and U.S. history buffs, and amateur collectors of all kinds, The Great Texas Stamp Collection offers a unique vantage point from which to view our history as well as the very nature of collecting.

In the late 1990s, West Texas was full of rundown towns and pumpjacks, aging reminders of the oil rush of an earlier era. Today, the towns are thriving as 300-foot-tall wind turbines tower above those pumpjacks. Wind energy has become Texas’s latest boom, with the Lone Star State now leading the nation. How did this dramatic transformation happen in a place that fights federal environmental policies at every turn? In The Great Texas Wind Rush, environmental reporters Kate Galbraith and Asher Price tell the compelling story of a group of unlikely dreamers and innovators, politicos and profiteers.

The tale spans a generation and more, and it begins with the early wind pioneers, precocious idealists who saw opportunity after the 1970s oil crisis. Operating in an economy accustomed to exploiting natural resources and always looking for the next big thing, their ideas eventually led to surprising partnerships between entrepreneurs and environmentalists, as everyone from Enron executives to T. Boone Pickens, as well as Ann Richards, George W. Bush and Rick Perry, ended up backing the new technology. In this down-to-earth account, the authors explain the policies and science that propelled the “windcatters” to reap the great harvest of Texas wind. They also explore what the future holds for this relentless resource that is changing the face of Texas energy.