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Everyone with a professional interest in the flora of Texas will welcome this checklist of the vascular plants. This comprehensive list also includes crops, persistent perennials, and naturalized plants and encompasses over 1,000 changes to the previous (Hatch, 1990) checklist. The authors have arranged this checklist phylogenetically by classes following the Cronquist system.

Several features make this checklist especially useful. Chief among them is the relative synonymy (name history). An extensive index makes current classification and correct nomenclature readily accessible, while the botanical bibliography is the most extensive ever compiled for Texas. The authors also note which plants have been listed as threatened or endangered by the Texas Organization of Endangered Species, which are designated as Federal Noxious Weeds, and which have been chosen as state tree, flower, fruit, etc. by the Texas Legislature.

From Michael Pollan to locavores, Whole Foods to farmers' markets,  today cooks and foodies alike are paying more attention than ever before to the history of the food they bring into their kitchens—and especially to vegetables. Whether it’s an heirloom tomato, curled cabbage, or succulent squash, from a farmers' market or a backyard plot, the humble vegetable offers more than just nutrition—it also represents a link with long tradition of farming and gardening, nurturing and breeding.

In this charming new book, those veggies finally get their due. In capsule biographies of eleven different vegetables—artichokes, beans, chard, cabbage, cardoons, carrots, chili peppers, Jerusalem artichokes, peas, pumpkins, and tomatoes—Evelyne Bloch-Dano explores the world of vegetables in all its facets, from science and agriculture to history, culture, and, of course, cooking. From the importance of peppers in early international trade to the most recent findings in genetics, from the cultural cachet of cabbage to Proust’s devotion to beef-and-carrot stew, to the surprising array of vegetables that preceded the pumpkin as the avatar of All Hallow’s Eve, Bloch-Dano takes readers on a dazzling tour of the fascinating stories behind our daily repasts.

Spicing her cornucopia with an eye for anecdote and a ready wit, Bloch-Dano has created a feast that’s sure to satisfy gardeners, chefs, and eaters alike.

Premio al Mejor Libro en Humanidades, Latin American Studies Association, Nineteenth-Century Section, 2026

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth‑century Buenos Aires, elites attempted to tackle growing poverty and social problems with a suite of social, educational, and medical reforms, hoping to make the city and larger nation more “modern” and “progressive” on the world stage. Known as the “social question,” this turn-of-the-century preoccupation with the future of the city and nation was undergirded by a larger set of social Darwinist beliefs about the biological and racial inferiority of immigrants and the working class, linking them to higher susceptibility to alcoholism, sexual deviancy, insanity, and disease.

In Vida Zoo-cial, Ashley Elizabeth Kerr argues that the Buenos Aires Zoo and its many animal species were an important tool in attempts to remake Argentinian society. Elites used the zoo’s physical spaces, programming, and visual and literary representations of its animals to try to educate and “improve” the masses, especially immigrants and the poor, but stopped short of supporting more radical social transformations. Drawing upon extensive archival research from the zoo’s archive, including correspondence, municipal reports, receipts, and employment records, as well as a range of literary and popular culture sources, Kerr records these efforts, which included enlisting lionesses as object lessons in proper motherhood and elephants as model immigrants. Although some projects were successful, Kerr also documents the many ways others went awry when the zoo's animals and the humans who came to see them failed to cooperate.

Vida Zoo-cial is not only a story about how the poor and working class resisted elite efforts for social reform founded upon racialized beliefs and pseudoscience, but also one that challenges readers to rethink the relationship between humans and non‑humans.

Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty traces the vital and varied roles of science through the story of three generations of the eminent Exner family, whose members included Nobel Prize–winning biologist Karl Frisch, the teachers of Freud and of physicist Erwin Schrödinger, artists of the Vienna Secession, and a leader of Vienna’s women’s movement. Training her critical eye on the Exners through the rise and fall of Austrian liberalism and into the rise of the Third Reich, Deborah R. Coen demonstrates the interdependence of the family’s scientific and domestic lives, exploring the ways in which public notions of rationality, objectivity, and autonomy were formed in the private sphere. Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty presents the story of the Exners as a microcosm of the larger achievements and tragedies of Austrian political and scientific life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked—until now.

In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a window into the worlds of Enlightenment science, visual culture, and empire. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.