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Examining maps and placemaking during negotiations between Indigenous people and colonial settlers
 
Between 1500 and 1700, Indigenous and English mapmakers across the North Atlantic depicted present-day New England in markedly distinct ways, highlighting how differently their communities understood the landscape. While English cartographers relied on new mathematics and other developing scientific knowledge from Europe, as well as an overhead perspective of the world, Algonquian mapmakers drew on deep knowledge of the landscape, derived from their communities’ long history upon it. Nathan Braccio refers to this phenomenon as “parallel landscapes.”

Creating New England, Defending the Northeast asserts that Algonquian knowledge of the landscape represented a powerful and persistent alternative to English surveying and mapmaking in the Northeast. When English colonists and explorers recognized the unsuitability of their techniques for understanding New England’s unfamiliar landscape, they attempted to appropriate Indigenous knowledge and maps. Algonquian sachems used this as an opportunity to control and benefit from their new English neighbors. Later, as the English became insecure in their dependence on Indigenous people, they began to remake and mark the landscape. Algonquians adapted, maintaining control of important spatial knowledge, even in a place no longer entirely of their making. This story complicates narratives of conquest and highlights the Indigenous spatial knowledge too often overlooked.
 

A gripping exposé of what lawyers face when they defend prisoners in capital cases.

Legal cases are stories, and some of the most compelling-and the most disturbing-are those that take place on death row: the innocent man executed, juveniles and the mentally ill condemned to die, a smoking electric chair, a napping defense attorney, a senile hit man. These are the stories in which Michael Mello, as a capital public defender, played a crucial role, and they are the cases that make up Deathwork, a moment-by-moment, behind-the-scenes look at the life and work of a death row lawyer and his clients.

Part memoir, part legal casebook, Deathwork offers a gritty, often anguishing picture of what Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun called the American legal "machinery of death." The stories Mello tells raise questions about legal issues-from prosecutorial misconduct to the racial inequities of sentencing, from the rules of evidence to the rights of the mentally ill-that here take on a life-and-death urgency. They describe in detail how constitutional issues are raised postconviction, and how those issues are adjudicated by the courts and in accordance with bizarre claims of objectivity. And they show, with a painful immediacy and authenticity, what it is like to live and work under an impending death sentence, the adrenaline rush of the stay or unexpected success, the inconsolable sadness upon the execution of the sick, the afflicted, the innocent.As DNA reversals, last-minute confessions, and revelations of corruption are bringing capital punishment to the forefront of public debate nationwide, this firsthand account of the legalities and realities of the death penalty is as relevant as it is enthralling, as edifying as it is impossible to ignore.

Tracing grassroots activism in response to a devastating transnational oil spill
 
On the morning of June 23, 1976, the NEPCO 140 barge, carrying 8.7 million gallons of thick crude oil, ruptured twice while plying the swift straits of the St. Lawrence River’s Thousand Islands region. Before the spill was halted, 300,000 gallons of oil had leaked, polluting eighty miles of the river and ruining shorelines on both the New York and Canadian sides. It was the largest inland oil spill in United States history to that date, and the clean-up took 122 days and cost around $8 million. The disaster also prompted concerned citizens to form Save the River, one of the most enduring environmental organizations in North America.

In Defending a Borderland, environmental historian Neil S. Forkey examines environmental activism along the St. Lawrence River from both sides of the international border. He focuses on the period from the 1970s to the 1990s, when numerous citizen groups activated to protect the natural environment against pollution, development, and other perceived threats. Along with reacting to the “Slick of ’76,” their actions included stopping low-level military flights, preventing government land acquisition to create an extended park, and blocking new power lines through the countryside.

By considering the St. Lawrence Valley—a shared space between Canada, the United States, and Mohawk territory—Forkey brings a rare transnational approach to environmental analysis. He also highlights rural, local, and conservative perspectives, all of which are understudied. Using deep archival research and oral histories, Forkey reveals the myriad ways US and Canadian citizens organized before social media, gathering around kitchen tables, and in school auditoriums, to determine ways to reach government officials and neighbors and make lasting changes to protect the natural areas around them for future generations.
 

At the dawn of the 20th Century, several writers who were to become famous under the title of "Modernists" were advancing a deep agenda for reform in the faith and praxis of the Roman Catholic Church. But their agenda met with serious and scholarly opposition from another group of writers, whose essays are here made available in English. They include the historian and university rector Pierre Battifol, the biblical exegete M.J. Lagrange, OP, the Jesuit historical theologians Eugène Portalié and Léonce de Grandmaison, and the philosophers Eugène Franon and Joannès Wehrlé. All welcomed the historico-critical methods of research, and far from thinking them fatal to orthodoxy (as the Modernists did), they thought the Church's faith would survive and be strengthened by rigorous scholarship. These thinkers, then, are the true predecessors of Pius XII (Divino afflante Spiritu) and Vatican II (Dei Verbum). At the same time, these men thought outside the boxes drawn by 19th Century Positivism (Loisy), anti-intellectualist pragmatism (LeRoy), and romantic mysticism (Tyrrell). Their concerns hold new significance in the light of John Paul II's 1990 encyclical Fides et Ratio. Reading these too-long forgotten writers, then, deepens in a new way one's understanding of the Catholic Church's decision to decline and even condemn the Modernists' agenda, whether one ultimately applauds that decision or deplores it.

Mexican conservationists have sometimes observed that it is difficult to find a country less interested in the conservation of its natural resources than is Mexico. Yet, despite a long history dedicated to the pursuit of development regardless of its environmental consequences, Mexico has an equally long, though much less developed and appreciated, tradition of environmental conservation.

Lane Simonian here offers the first panoramic history of conservation in Mexico from pre-contact times to the current Mexican environmental movement. He explores the origins of conservation and environmental concerns in Mexico, the philosophies and endeavors of Mexican conservationists, and the enactment of important conservation laws and programs. This heretofore untold story, drawn from interviews with leading Mexican conservationists as well as archival research, will be important reading throughout the international community of activists, researchers, and concerned citizens interested in the intertwined issues of conservation and development.

In recent years, our constitutional order has increasingly come under attack as irredeemably undemocratic, racist, and oppressive. At the same time, it is increasingly obvious that politic practices in the United States have strayed very far from the founders’ designs and become deeply dysfunctional. The time is thus ripe for renewed reflection about the American political tradition. This volume reintroduces readers to the conservative tradition of political and constitutional discourse. It brings together prominent political scientists and legal scholars, all of whom were deeply influenced by the life and work of the eminent constitutional scholar George W. Carey. For over 40 years, Carey strove mightily to explain the nature and requirements of our political tradition. How it fostered meaningful, virtuous self-government, and how our constitutional tradition has been derailed by progressivist ideology. He is perhaps best known for his concept of “constitutional morality,” the understanding that our republican constitutional order can be sustained only by a combination of formal mechanisms (e.g., separation of powers) and unwritten norms (“standards of behavior”) that act to foster deliberation and consensus, as well as keep political actors within the boundaries of their constitutional offices. Contributors, including Francis Canavan, Claes G. Ryn, Paul Edward Gottfried, and Peter Augustine Lawler, discuss and develop Carey’s key insights, applying them to issues from the nature of majoritarian government to the purposes of constitutionalism to the decline of virtue that has accompanied the expansion of power among national and international elites. Each essay provides penetrating analysis of key aspects of our tradition, its inherent purposes, growth, and subsequent derailment, as well as the resources remaining within that tradition for the rebuilding of our constitutional order and a decent common life.