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Most recent books about Chiapas, Mexico, focus on political conflicts and the indigenous movement for human rights at the macro level. None has explored those conflicts and struggles in-depth through an individual woman's life story. The Journey of a Tzotzil-Maya Woman of Chiapas, Mexico now offers that perspective in one woman's own words. Anthropologist Christine Eber met "Antonia" in 1986 and has followed her life's journey ever since. In this book, they recount Antonia's life story and also reflect on challenges and rewards they have experienced in working together, offering insight into the role of friendship in anthropological research, as well as into the transnational movement of solidarity with the indigenous people of Chiapas that began with the Zapatista uprising.

Antonia was born in 1962 in San Pedro Chenalhó, a Tzotzil-Maya township in highland Chiapas. Her story begins with memories of childhood and progresses to young adulthood, when Antonia began working with women in her community to form weaving cooperatives while also becoming involved in the Word of God, the progressive Catholic movement known elsewhere as Liberation Theology. In 1994, as a wife and mother of six children, she joined a support base for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Recounting her experiences in these three interwoven movements, Antonia offers a vivid and nuanced picture of working for social justice while trying to remain true to her people's traditions.

In the late sixteenth century, Spanish explorers described encounters with North American people they called "Jumanos." Although widespread contact with Jumanos is evident in accounts of exploration and colonization in New Mexico, Texas, and adjacent regions, their scattered distribution and scant documentation have led to long-standing disagreements: was "Jumano" simply a generic name loosely applied to a number of tribes, or were they an authentic, vanished people?

In the first full-length study of the Jumanos, anthropologist Nancy Hickerson proposes that they were indeed a distinctive tribe, their wide travel pattern linked over well-established itineraries. Drawing on extensive primary sources, Hickerson also explores their crucial role as traders in a network extending from the Rio Grande to the Caddoan tribes' confederacies of East Texas and Oklahoma.

Hickerson further concludes that the Jumanos eventually became agents for the Spanish colonies, drafted as mercenary fighters and intelligence-gatherers. Her findings reinterpret the cultural history of the South Plains region, bridging numerous gaps in the area's comprehensive history and in the chronicle of these elusive people.

As the first Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine the Great has long interested those studying the establishment of Christianity. But Constantine is also notable for his ability to control a sprawling empire and effect major changes. The Justice of Constantineexamines Constantine's judicial and administrative legislation and his efforts to maintain control over the imperial bureaucracy, to guarantee the working of Roman justice, and to keep the will of his subjects throughout the Roman Empire.

John Dillon first analyzes the record of Constantine's legislation and its relationship to prior legislation. His initial chapters also serve as an introduction to Roman law and administration in later antiquity. Dillon then considers Constantine's public edicts and internal communications about access to law, trials and procedure, corruption, and punishment for administrative abuses. How imperial officials relied on correspondence with Constantine to resolve legal questions is also considered. A study of Constantine's expedited appellate system, to ensure provincial justice, concludes the book.

Constantine's constitutions reveal much about the Theodosian Code and the laws included in it. Constantine consistently seeks direct sources of reliable information in order to enforce his will. In official correspondence, meanwhile, Constantine strives to maintain control over his officials through punishment; trusted agents; and the cultivation of accountability, rivalry, and suspicion among them.

Popular lore has long depicted the Karankawa Indians as primitive scavengers (perhaps even cannibals) who eked out a meager subsistence from fishing, hunting and gathering on the Texas coastal plains. That caricature, according to Robert Ricklis, hides the reality of a people who were well-adapted to their environment, skillful in using its resources, and successful in maintaining their culture until the arrival of Anglo-American settlers.

The Karankawa Indians of Texas is the first modern, well-researched history of the Karankawa from prehistoric times until their extinction in the nineteenth century. Blending archaeological and ethnohistorical data into a lively narrative history, Ricklis reveals the basic lifeway of the Karankawa, a seasonal pattern that took them from large coastal fishing camps in winter to small, dispersed hunting and gathering parties in summer. In a most important finding, he shows how, after initial hostilities, the Karankawa incorporated the Spanish missions into their subsistence pattern during the colonial period and coexisted peacefully with Euroamericans until the arrival of Anglo settlers in the 1820s and 1830s. These findings will be of wide interest to everyone studying the interactions of Native American and European peoples.

A bracing account of how our current planetary crisis emerged from the worst cataclysmic destruction in human history, which Clifton Crais terms the Mortecene—the killing age.
 
We are used to speaking of the Anthropocene and the outsized impact humans have had on the planet. But we sometimes lose sight of a fundamental truth at the heart of modern world history: the legacy of human predation, slavery, and imperialism that has devastated the natural world and led us to our present moment. As historian Clifton Crais shows in this magisterial work, the period that we most associate with human progress—which gave us the Enlightenment, the rise of democracies, the Industrial Revolution, and more—was at the same time catastrophically destructive.

In this bracing, landmark book, Crais urges us to view the growth of global capitalism between 1750 and the early 1900s not as the Anthropocene, but as the Mortecene: the Killing Age. Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as profiteering warlords committed mass-scale slaughter of humans and animals across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The newfound ease and profitability of killing created a disturbing network of global connections and economies, eliminating tens of millions of people and sparking an environmental crisis that remains the most urgent catastrophe facing the world today.

Drawing on years of scholarship and marshaling myriad sources across world history, The Killing Age turns our vision of past and present on its head, illuminating the Mortecene in all its horror—how it shaped who we are, what we value and fear, and the precarious present we inhabit today.

FINALIST FOR THE 2026 GEORGE WASHINGTON PRIZE

Winner of the 2026 Book of the Year Award, George Washington American Revolution Round Table, Washington, DC

The killing of Jane McCrea on July 26, 1777, on the outskirts of a village in the northern Hudson Valley, would unexpectedly rupture the British advance from Canada that was meant to crush the American Revolution in one knockout blow. On that day, twenty-five-year-old McCrea, an unremarkable person preparing for an impending marriage, was assaulted, scalped, and killed by a group of Native Americans in the employ of British general John Burgoyne. Though the murder was but one of many civilian deaths in a fierce war zone, McCrea’s killing had far-reaching consequences for each of the three major parties involved in the Northern Campaign of 1777. In America, she became the great cause célèbre of the Revolution, the sympathetic female victim of the war symbolizing the righteousness of The Cause. In Britain, she was a human-rights tragedy that tarnished the polished surface of British honor and galvanized Whig politicians who shouted out her name in Parliament as an example of how low the nation had fallen. For Native peoples, recruited by both the British and the Americans, and caught in the middle of a war staged on ancestral grounds, McCrea’s killing was the opening salvo in a vicious chain of bloody retribution that led to the disintegration of the venerable Iroquois Confederacy and the obliteration of Native homelands. After the war, the nightmarish image of a young Jane McCrea slaughtered on the New York frontier would obsess white Americans who came to fear Native peoples as irredeemable savages. Her murder would help justify the expulsion of Indigenous tribes and open the doors for an expansionary United States that was fully intent on transforming the American continent into its own image.
            The Killing of Jane McCrea: An American Tragedy on the Revolutionary Frontier by distinguished historian Paul Staiti undertakes for the first time a comprehensive investigation into McCrea’s life, death, and especially her long and strange afterlife. Using both visual arts and written records, the author reassembles the scattered fragments to illuminate a historical terrain long since shrouded in misinformation, mired in controversy, and relegated to mythology. Coming into view is a major portrait of the persons, cultures, actions, and motives that fatally converged on that hot July morning in 1777.

The history of the Middle Eastern family presents as many questions as there are currently answers. Who lived together in the household? Who married whom and for how long? Who got a piece of the patrimonial pie? These are the questions that Margaret Meriwether investigates in this groundbreaking study of family life among the upper classes of the Ottoman Empire in the pre-modern and early modern period.

Meriwether recreates Aleppo family life over time from records kept by the Islamic religious courts that held jurisdiction over all matters of family law and property transactions. From this research, she asserts that the stereotype of the large, patriarchal patrilineal family rarely existed in reality. Instead, Aleppo's notables organized their families in a great diversity of ways, despite the fact that they were all members of the same social class with widely shared cultural values, acting under the same system of family law. She concludes that this had important implications for gender relations and demonstrates that it gave women more authority and greater autonomy than is usually acknowledged.

Expanding previous notions of the monarchy and Britishness, this volume examines British identity in the late eighteenth century through the lens of the kitchen. 

Drawing on a large dataset of two royal household kitchen ledgers, this book studies the role and influence of food in understanding British identity in the late eighteenth century. Analyzing trade routes, migration, agricultural changes, recipes, and flavors, it argues that Britishness was more complex and multicultural than previously recognized. By situating national identity at the dinner table, the authors show how Britishness was an embodied identity that combined regional, national, and global elements. Combining digital humanities and data science approaches with social and cultural history, The King's Dinner also proposes a new way of understanding the monarchy's position within rather than above the cultural habitus of their subjects. 

The Klan Unmasked is a riveting exposé of one of the most daring undercover operations in American history. In the 1920s, journalist Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan at the height of its power, risking his life to expose the group’s secrets, rituals, and violent agenda. With the precision of a spy and the pen of a poet, Kennedy documented the Klan’s inner workings and fed intelligence to law enforcement and even popular radio shows—turning public opinion against the hooded order.

This book reads like a noir thriller, but its stakes are real and its impact profound. Kennedy’s fearless reporting helped dismantle one of the most dangerous hate groups in the country, making The Klan Unmasked not just a gripping narrative, but a landmark in anti-racist literature. It’s a testament to the power of truth, the necessity of resistance, and the enduring fight for justice.

Whether you're drawn to undercover intrigue or passionate about civil rights, this classic delivers both. It’s not just history—it’s a call to action, wrapped in suspense and driven by moral clarity. Few books are this brave. Fewer still are this urgent.

The Klan Unmasked is part of a three-book set that includes Southern Exposure and Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A., all available from the University of Alabama Press. 

Irony and satire in the contemporary American moment.

The second Trump administration has committed itself to upending the knowledge systems and deliberative institutions that have been essential to modern democracy, with the American university—site of scientific research and liberal education—a primary target.  In The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning, literary and film critic James Chandler spotlights an American tradition of such hostility to intellectual life, especially the nativist movement of the 1850s that persecuted Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany. Ironically, Steve Bannon, the self-proclaimed “Know-Nothing vulgarian” who long ago recruited candidate Trump to his anti-intellectual crusade, is himself the great-grandson of an Irish immigrant who would have faced Know-Nothing backlash in that era.

Such dark ironies define our moment, Chandler argues, and they call out not only for intellectual critique but also for satire. Yet in the midst of the MAGA campaign’s calamitous effects on American public discourse, even satire must confront the “kayfabe” practices imported by Trump from professional wrestling, which mix illusion and reality to turn political life into a “spectacle without thought.” Drawing widely on cultural critics from Jonathan Swift and Alexis de Tocqueville to Roland Barthes, Chandler’s pamphlet offers an elegant and bracing account of the MAGA campaign against higher learning and its transformative effects on criticism and democracy itself.