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The series, established by one of the twentieth-century West's most distinguished historians, Leonard Arrington, has become a leading forum for prominent historians to address topics related to Mormon history. The first lecturer was Arrington himself. He was followed by Richard Lyman Bushman, Richard E. Bennett, Howard R. Lamar, Claudia L. Bushman, Kenneth W. Godfrey, Jan Shipps, Donald Worster, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and F. Ross Peterson. Utah State University hosts the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series. The University Libraries' Special Collections and Archives houses the Arrington collection. The state's land grant university began collecting records very early, and in the 1960s became a major depository for Utah and Mormon records. Leonard and his wife Grace joined the USU faculty and family in 1946, and the Arringtons and their colleagues worked to collect original diaries, journals, letters, and photographs.

Although trained as an economist at the University of North Carolina, Arrington became a Mormon historian of international repute. Working with numerous colleagues, the Twin Falls, Idaho, native produced the classic Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints in 1958. Utilizing available collections at USU, Arrington embarked on a prolific publishing and editing career. He and his close ally, Dr. S. George Ellsworth helped organize the Western History Association, and they created the Western Historical Quarterly as the scholarly voice of the WHA. While serving with Ellsworth as editor of the new journal, Arr ington also helped both the Mormon History Association and the independent journal Dialogue get established.

Between a River and a Mountain details American labor's surprisingly complex relationship to the American war in Vietnam. Breaking from the simplistic story of "hard hat patriotism," Wehrle uses newly released archival material to demonstrate the AFL-CIO's continuing dedication to social, political, and economic reform in Vietnam. The complex, sometimes turbulent, relationship between American union leaders and their counterparts in the Vietnamese Confederation of Labor (known as the CVT) led to dangerous political compromises: the AFL-CIO eventually accepted much-needed support for their Vietnamese activities from the CIA, while the CVT's need to sustain their relationship with the Americans lured them into entanglements with a succession of corrupt Saigon governments. Although the story's endpoint--the painfully divided and weakened labor movement of the 1970s--may be familiar, Wehrle offers an entirely new understanding of the historical forces leading up to that decline, unraveling his story with considerable sophistication and narrative skill.

"Stunning in its research and sophisticated in its analysis, Between a River and a Mountain is one of the best studies we have of labor and the Vietnam War."
--Robert K. Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations, Vassar College

"Skillfully blending diplomatic and labor history, Wehrle's book is a valuable contribution to the ever-widening literature on the Vietnam War."
--George Herring, University of Kentucky

"Wehrle has written a compelling and original study of the AFL-CIO, the South Vietnamese labor movement and the Vietnam War."
--Judith Stein, Professor of History, City College and Graduate School of the City University of New York

"With this important book, Edmund Wehrle gives us the first full-fledged scholarly examination of organized labor's relationship to the Vietnam War. Based on deep research in U.S. and foreign archives, and presented in clear and graceful prose, Between a River and a Mountain adds a great deal to our understanding of how the AFL-CIO approached the war and in turn was fundamentally altered by its staunch support for Americanization. Nor is it merely an American story that Wehrle tells, for he also presents fascinating information on the Vietnamese Confederation of Labor and its sometimes-strained relations with U.S. labor."
--Fredrik Logevall, Cornell University

Edmund F. Wehrle is Assistant Professor of History, Eastern Illinois University.

Dark family secrets follow Coe as he drops out of college and attempts to start a new life with fellow outlaws in the mountains of Wyoming. 

“Fleeing a mental illness diagnosis pushed by his family, Coe drops out of college and hits the road, ending up in Wyoming, where he falls in with a group living illegally on the mountain above a resort town. Here he works muscle jobs, climbs mountains, befriends a pair of brothers new to the sport, and slips under the spell of Benny, a Vietnam war vet who sleeps beneath a rocky overhang, ascends cliffs like a mountain goat, and seems to know things he shouldn't about Coe's French grandfather. At Benny's command, the group climbs routes well beyond the brothers' abilities and kicks off a dangerous vandalism war against the resort corporation. An old cook warns Coe away from Benny, suggesting the secret to his identity is encoded in a bible passage. Meanwhile, from letters sent by his great aunt, Coe receives contradictory accounts of his grandfather's past. As those close to Coe meet tragic ends, he is forced to confront the frightful notion that this Wyoming violence may connect to a crime committed a half century before. Is the old cook right about Benny and the biblical mystery? Is Coe slipping into mental illness? High on the mountain, alone with Benny, Coe must cast his lot.

Published between 1762 and 1765, these writings are the last works Rousseau wrote for publication during his lifetime. Responding in each to the censorship and burning of Emile and Social Contract, Rousseau airs his views on censorship, religion, and the relation between theory and practice in politics. The Letter to Beaumont is a response to a Pastoral Letter by Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris (also included in this volume), which attacks the religious teaching in Emile. Rousseau’s response concerns the general theme of the relation between reason and revelation and contains his most explicit and boldest discussions of the Christian doctrines of creation, miracles, and original sin. In Letters Written from the Mountain, a response to the political crisis in Rousseau’s homeland of Geneva caused by a dispute over the burning of his works, Rousseau extends his discussion of Christianity and shows how the political principles of the Social Contract can be applied to a concrete constitutional crisis. One of his most important statements on the relation between political philosophy and political practice, it is accompanied by a fragmentary “History of the Government of Geneva.” Finally, “Vision of Peter of the Mountain, Called the Seer” is a humorous response to a resident of Motiers who had been inciting attacks on Rousseau during his exile there. Taking the form of a scriptural account of a vision, it is one of the rare examples of satire from Rousseau’s pen and the only work he published anonymously after his decision in the early 1750s to put his name on all his published works. Within its satirical form, the “Vision” contains Rousseau’s last public reflections on religious issues. Neither the Letter to Beaumont nor the Letters Written from the Mountain has been translated into English since defective translations that appeared shortly after their appearance in French. These are the first translations of both the “History” and the “Vision.”

Martin Harrison traveled widely in Asia Minor from his youth onward, and he was always fascinated by the questions of how and why the great and elegant cities of classical antiquity declined, and what happened to the descendants of the people who lived in them. Over nearly forty years he returned again and again to remote Lycia, where the ruins of monasteries and churches, villages, hamlets, and towns remained largely inaccessible and unexplored. His interest eventually led him to undertake the excavation of the Phrygian city of Amorium, whose importance became greater as the classical cities declined. At its peak it was considered second only to Byzantium, until it fell to the Arab invasions.
The present study is the fruit of years of excavation and research by the author. The manuscript was largely sketched out when Martin Harrison unexpectedly passed away, and the volume has been finished and prepared for press by his long-time assistant Wendy Young, with further guidance from friends and colleagues with whom he had discussed the project.
The resulting volume explores Martin Harrison's belief that the coastal cities of Lycia declined after the fifth century C.E., and that smaller settlements (monasteries, villages, and towns) appeared in the mountains and further inland. In addition he considered that there was a demographic shift of masons and sculptors from the cities to serve these new settlements. This beautifully illustrated study provides convincing evidence from architecture, sculpture, and inscriptional sources to support this theory. It also contains a description of Amorium in Phrygia, as revealed in survey and excavation seasons from 1987 until the author's untimely death half a dozen years later. The volume includes a preface by Stephen Hill and an appendix by Michael Ballance and Charlotte Roueché on three special inscriptions from Ovacik.
The volume will be of interest to historians of the Near East and classical antiquity, to archaeologists, and to students of architectural history.
Martin Harrison was Professor of Archaeology, University of Oxford. Wendy Young was Research Assistant to the author until his death.

Moving the Mountain tells the story of the struggles and triumphs of thousands of activists who achieved "half a revolution" between 1960 and 1990. In this award-winning book, the most complete history of the women's movement to date, Flora Davis presents a grass-roots view of the small steps and giant leaps that have changed laws and institutions as well as the prejudices and unspoken rules governing a woman's place in American society. Looking at every major feminist issue from the point of view of the participants in the struggle, Moving the Mountain conveys the excitement, the frustration, and the creative chaos of feminism's Second Wave. A new afterword assesses the movement's progress in the 1990s and prospects for the new century.
 

The vast and beautiful landscape of the American Southwest has long haunted artists and writers seeking to understand the mysteries of the deep affinity between the land and the Native Americans who have lived on it for centuries. In this pioneering study, art historian Vincent Scully explores the inhabitants' understanding of the natural world in an entirely original way—by observing and analyzing the complex yet visible relationships between the landscape of mountain and desert, the ancient ruins and the pueblos, and the ceremonial dances that take place with them. Scully sees these intricate dances as the most profound works of art yet produced on the American continent—as human action entwined with the natural world and framed by architectural forms, in which the Pueblos express their belief in the unity of all earthly things.

Scully's observations, presented in lively prose and exciting photographs, are based on his own personal experiences of the Southwest; on his exploration of the region of the Rio Grande and the Hopi mesas; on his witnessing of the dances and ceremonies of the Pueblos and others; and on his research into their culture and history. He draws on the vast literature inspired by the Native Americans—from early exploration narratives to the writing of D. H. Lawrence to recent scholarship—to enrich and support his unique approach to the subject.

To this second edition Scully has added a new preface that raises issues of preservation and development. He has also written an extensive postscript that reassesses the relationship between nature and culture in Native American tradition and its relevance to contemporary architecture and landscape.

"Coming to Pueblo architecture as he does from a provocative study of sacred architecture in ancient Greece, Scully has much to say that is both striking and moving of the Pueblo attitudes toward sacred places, the arrangement of structures in space, the lives of men and beasts, and man's relation to rain, earth, vegetation."—Robert M. Adams, New York Review of Books

Silence on the Mountain is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala’s thirty-six-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of some 200,000 people, the vast majority of whom died (or were “disappeared”) at the hands of the U.S.-backed military government. Written by Daniel Wilkinson, a young human rights worker, the story begins in 1993, when the author decides to investigate the arson of a coffee plantation’s manor house by a band of guerrillas. The questions surrounding this incident soon broaden into a complex mystery whose solution requires Wilkinson to dig up the largely unwritten history of the country’s recent civil war, following its roots back to a land reform movement that was derailed by a U.S.-sponsored military coup in 1954 and to the origins of a plantation system that put Guatemala’s Mayan Indians to work picking coffee beans for the American and European markets.

Decades of terror-inspired fear have led the Guatemalans to adopt a survival strategy of silence so complete that it verges on collective amnesia. The author’s great triumph is that he finds a way for people to tell their stories, and it is through these stories—dramatic, intimate, heartbreaking—that we are shown the anatomy of a thwarted revolution that has relevance not only to Guatemala but also to countless places around the world where terror has been used as a political tool.

In The Mountain, geographers Bernard Debarbieux and Gilles Rudaz trace the origins of the very concept of a mountain, showing how it is not a mere geographic feature but ultimately an idea, one that has evolved over time, influenced by changes in political climates and cultural attitudes. To truly understand mountains, they argue, we must view them not only as material realities but as social constructs, ones that can mean radically different things to different people in different settings.
 
From the Enlightenment to the present day, and using a variety of case studies from all the continents, the authors show us how our ideas of and about mountains have changed with the times and how a wide range of policies, from border delineation to forestry as well as nature protection and social programs, have been shaped according to them. A rich hybrid analysis of geography, history, culture, and politics, the book promises to forever change the way we look at mountains.

When initially published more than twenty years ago, Thinking Like a Mountain was the first of a handful of efforts to capture the work and thought of America's most significant environmental thinker, Aldo Leopold.  This new edition of Susan Flader's masterful account of Leopold's philosophical journey, including a new preface reviewing recent Leopold scholarship, makes this classic case study available again and brings much-deserved attention to the continuing influence and importance of Leopold today.
    Thinking Like a Mountain unfolds with Flader's close analysis of Leopold's essay of the same title, which explores issues of predation by studying the interrelationships between deer, wolves, and forests.  Flader shows how his approach to wildlife management and species preservation evolved from his experiences restoring the deer population in the Southwestern United States, his study of the German system of forest and wildlife management, and his efforts to combat the overpopulation of deer in Wisconsin.  His own intellectual development parallels the formation of the conservation movement, reflecting his struggle to understand the relationship between the land and its human and animal inhabitants.
    Drawing from the entire corpus of Leopold's works, including published and unpublished writing, correspondence, field notes, and journals, Flader places Leopold in his historical context.  In addition, a biographical sketch draws on personal interviews with family, friends, and colleagues to illuminate his many roles as scientist, philosopher, citizen, policy maker, and teacher.  Flader's insight and profound appreciation of the issues make Thinking Like a Mountain a standard source for readers interested in Leopold scholarship and the development of ecology and conservation in the twentieth century.

With a foreword by Denise Giardina

On April 5, 2010, an explosion ripped through Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine, killing twenty-nine coal miners. This tragedy was the deadliest mine disaster in the United States in forty years—a disaster that never should have happened. These deaths were rooted in the cynical corporate culture of Massey and its notorious former CEO Don Blankenship, and were part of an endless cycle of poverty, exploitation, and environmental abuse that has dominated the Appalachian coalfields since coal was first discovered there. And the cycle continues unabated as coal companies bury the most insidious dangers deep underground, all in search of higher profits, and hide the true costs from regulators, unions, and investors alike. But the disaster at Upper Big Branch goes beyond the coalfields of West Virginia. It casts a global shadow, calling into bitter question why coal miners in the United States are sacrificed to erect cities on the other side of the world, why the coal wars have been allowed to rage, polarizing the country, and how the world’s voracious appetite for energy is satisfied at such horrendous cost.

With Thunder on the Mountain, Peter A. Galuszka pieces together the true story of greed and negligence behind the tragedy at the Upper Big Branch Mine, and in doing so he has created a devastating portrait of an entire industry that exposes the coal-black motivations that led to the death of twenty-nine miners and fuel the ongoing war for the world’s energy future.

This paperback edition contains a foreword by Denise Giardinia that provides an update on Massey Energy and Donald Blankenship, Chairman and CEO of Massey Energy Company during the UBB disaster, and recounts her own experiences with Massey Energy and the United Mine Workers Association in the 1980s. This edition also includes a notes section and a bibliography.

This collection of vignettes about life in Central Nevada is much more than a historical document. According to author Molly Knudtsen, “These are the stories neighbors and families tell, where fact grows just a little larger than life. This is the stuff of legend.” The book focuses on a time when splendorous houses decorated the windswept valleys of Central Nevada; where fearless, stouthearted men and women braved the elements to survive and seek their fortune; and when people who loved the land clung to it and gave it a character all its own. These tales capture the spirit and folklore of early-day Central Nevada and illustrate the effect on its present-day inhabitants. Molly Knudtsen shares the experience of riding horseback through some of the great archaeological finds of the valley. She divulges the secret of converting flour, yeast, and potato water into a perfect loaf of bread. And through colorful anecdotes, she passes along the legendary accounts of Colonel Dave Buel.