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A collection of essays on the ecology, biodiversity, and restoration of the Texas Hill Country. For most of five decades, evolutionary biologist David Hillis has studied the biodiversity of the Texas Hill Country. Since the 1990s, he has worked to restore the natural beauty and diversity of his Mason County ranch, the Double Helix. In his excursions around his ranch and across the Edwards Plateau, Hillis came to realize how little most people know about the plants and animals around them or their importance to our everyday lives. He began thinking about how natural history is connected to our enjoyment of life, especially in a place as beautiful and beloved as the Hill Country, which, not coincidentally, happens to be one of the most biodiverse parts of Texas. Featuring short nontechnical essays accompanied by vivid color photos, Armadillos to Ziziphus is a charming and casual introduction to the environment of the region. Whether walking the pasture with his Longhorn cattle, explaining the ecological significance of microscopic organisms in springtime mud puddles, or marveling at the local Ziziphus (aka Lotebush, a spiny shrub), Hillis guides first-time visitors and long-term residents alike in an appreciation for the Hill Country's natural beauty and diversity.

A groundbreaking account of the Secret Gospel of Mark, one of the most hotly debated documents in Christian history. In 1958, at the ancient Christian monastery of Mar Saba just outside Jerusalem, Columbia University scholar Morton Smith claimed to have unearthed a letter written by the Christian philosopher Clement of Alexandria and containing an excerpt from a previously unknown version of the canonical Gospel of Mark. This excerpt recounts a story of Jesus's apparent sexual encounter with a young, resurrected disciple. In recent years, an influential group of researchers has alleged that no Secret Gospel or letter of Clement existed in antiquity, and that the manuscript that Morton Smith "found" was a modern forgery--created by none other than Smith himself. In this book, Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau enter into the controversy surrounding this document and argue that the Secret Gospel of Mark is neither a first-century alternative gospel nor a twentieth-century forgery by the scholar who announced its discovery. Instead, this account is intimately bound up with the history of Mar Saba, one of the oldest monasteries in the Christian world. In this fascinating work, Smith and Landau present the realities and misconceptions surrounding not only the now-lost manuscript but also its brilliant, enigmatic, and acerbic discoverer, Morton Smith.

Anarchy and the Art of Listening is an ethnography of politics as it is practiced on the other side of the spoken word, in the act of listening. James Slotta explores how people in the Yopno Valley of Papua New Guinea cultivate their listening to exercise power, shape their futures, and sustain their communities in the face of ambitious leaders and powerful outside institutions. As in many parts of the global south, missionaries, NGO workers, educators, mining companies, politicians, development experts, and others have sought to transform life in and around the Yopno Valley. But as this book makes clear, people there have not been a passive and pliable audience for these efforts. They have brought their skills as "anarchic listeners" to these encounters, advancing political agendas of their own. To understand political life in the Yopno Valley, we need to look not only at political speech but at the practices that lie on the other side of the word in the act of listening. This, Slotta suggests, is also true well beyond the bounds of the Yopno Valley.

The story of how the Indian reformer Bhimrao Ambedkar reimagined John Dewey's pragmatism. In The Evolution of Pragmatism in India, Scott R. Stroud delivers a comprehensive exploration of the influence of John Dewey's pragmatism on Bhimrao Ambedkar, architect of the Republic of India's constitution. Stroud traces Ambedkar's development in Dewey's Columbia University classes in 1913-1916 through his final years in 1950s India when he rewrote the story of Buddhism. Stroud examines pragmatism's influence not only on the philosophical ideas underpinning Ambedkar's fight against caste oppression but also how his persuasive techniques drew on pragmatism's commitment to reconstruction and meliorism. At the same time, Stroud is careful to point out the ways that Ambedkar pushed back against Dewey's paradigm and developed his own approach to challenges in India. The result is a nuanced study of one of the most important figures in Indian history.

In this sweeping chronicle of guarana--a glossy-leaved Amazonian vine packed with more caffeine than any other plant--Seth Garfield develops a wide-ranging approach to the history of Brazil itself. The story begins with guarana as the pre-Columbian cultivar of the Satere-Mawe people in the Lower Amazon region, where it figured centrally in the Indigenous nation's origin stories, dietary regimes, and communal ceremonies. During subsequent centuries of Portuguese colonialism and Brazilian rule, guarana was reformulated by settlers, scientists, folklorists, food technologists, and marketers. Whether in search of pleasure, profits, professional distinction, or patriotic markers, promoters imparted new meanings to guarana and found new uses for it. Today, it is the namesake ingredient of a multibillion-dollar soft drink industry and a beloved national symbol. Guarana's journey elucidates human impacts on Amazonian ecosystems; the circulation of knowledge, goods, and power; and the promise of modernity in Latin America's largest nation. For Garfield, the beverage's history reveals not only the structuring of inequalities in Brazil but also the mythmaking and ordering of social practices that constitute so-called traditional and modern societies.

Under what circumstances might climate change lead to negative security outcomes? Over the past fifteen years, a rapidly growing applied field and research community on climate security has emerged. While much progress has been made, we still don't have a clear understanding of why climate change might lead to violent conflict or humanitarian emergencies in some places and not others. Busby develops a novel argument - based on the combination of state capacity, political exclusion, and international assistance - to explain why climate leads to especially bad security outcomes in some places but not others. This argument is then demonstrated through application to case studies from sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. This book will provide an informative resource for students and scholars of international relations and environmental studies, especially those working on security, conflict and climate change, on the emergent practice and study of this topic, and identifies where policy and research should be headed.

In the aftermath of apartheid, South Africa undertook an ambitious revision of its intellectual property system. In Lion's Share Veit Erlmann traces the role of copyright law in this process and its impact on the South African music industry. Although the South African government tied the reform to its postapartheid agenda of redistributive justice and a turn to a postindustrial knowledge economy, Erlmann shows how the persistence of structural racism and Euro-modernist conceptions of copyright threaten the viability of the reform project. In case studies ranging from antipiracy police raids and the crafting of legislation to protect indigenous expressive practices to the landmark lawsuit against Disney for its appropriation of Solomon Linda's song "Mbube" for its hit "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" from The Lion King, Erlmann follows the intricacies of musical copyright through the criminal justice system, parliamentary committees, and the offices of a music licensing and royalty organization. Throughout, he demonstrates how copyright law is inextricably entwined with race, popular music, postcolonial governance, indigenous rights, and the struggle to create a more equitable society.

The Civil War may have ended on the battlefield, but the fight for equality never did. In 1865, the Confederacy was comprehensively defeated, its economy shattered, its leaders in exile or in jail. Yet in the years that followed, Lincoln's vision of a genuinely united country never took root. Apart from a few brief months, when the presence of the Union army in the South proved liberating for newly freed Black Americans, the military victory was squandered. Old white supremacist efforts returned, more ferocious than before. In Civil War by Other Means, Jeremi Suri shows how resistance to a more equal Union began immediately. From the first postwar riots to the return of Confederate exiles, to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, to the highly contested and consequential election of 1876, Suri explores the conflicts and questions Americans wrestled with as competing visions of democracy, race, and freedom came to a vicious breaking point. What emerges is a vivid and at times unsettling portrait of a country striving to rebuild itself, but unable to compromise on or adhere to the most basic democratic tenets. What should have been a moment of national renewal was ultimately wasted, with reverberations still felt today. The recent shocks to American democracy are rooted in this forgotten, urgent history.

This "landmark" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist) dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King transforms our understanding of the twentieth century's most iconic African American leaders. To most Americans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. represent contrasting ideals: self-defense versus nonviolence, Black Power versus civil rights, the sword versus the shield. The struggle for Black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. While nonviolent direct action is remembered as an unassailable part of American democracy, the movement's militancy is either vilified or erased outright. In, The Sword and the Shield, Peniel E. Joseph upends these misconceptions and reveals a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives. Now updated with a new afterword, this is a strikingly revisionist account of Malcolm and Martin, the era they defined, and their lasting impact on today's Movement for Black Lives.

When Judith G. Coffin discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from Beauvoir's international readers, it inspired Coffin to explore the intimate bond between the famed author and her reading public. This correspondence, at the heart of Sex, Love, and Letters, immerses us in the tumultuous decades from the late 1940s to the 1970s--from the painful aftermath of World War II to the horror and shame of French colonial brutality in Algeria and through the dilemmas and exhilarations of the early gay liberation and feminist movements. The letters also provide a glimpse into the power of reading and the power of readers to seduce their favorite authors. The relationship between Beauvoir and her audience proved especially long, intimate, and vexed. Coffin traces this relationship, from the publication of Beauvoir's acclaimed The Second Sex to the release of the last volume of her memoirs, offering an unfamiliar perspective on one of the most magnetic and polarizing philosophers of the twentieth century. Along the way, we meet many of the greatest writers of Beauvoir's generation--Hannah Arendt; Dominique Aury, author of The Story of O; François Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize and nemesis of Albert Camus; Betty Friedan; and, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre--bringing the electrically charged salon experience to life. Sex, Love, and Letters lays bare the private lives and political emotions of the letter writers and of Beauvoir herself. Her readers did not simply pen fan letters but, as Coffin shows, engaged in a dialogue that revealed intellectual and literary life to be a joint and collaborative production. "This must happen to you often, doesn't it?" wrote one. "That people write to you and tell you about their lives?"

The scope of criminal justice surveillance has expanded rapidly in recent decades. At the same time, the use of big data has spread across a range of fields, including finance, politics, healthcare, and marketing. While law enforcement's use of big data is hotly contested, very little is known about how the police actually use it in daily operations and with what consequences. In Predict and Surveil, Sarah Brayne offers an unprecedented, inside look at how police use big data and new surveillance technologies, leveraging on-the-ground fieldwork with one of the most technologically advanced law enforcement agencies in the world--the Los Angeles Police Department. Drawing on original interviews and ethnographic observations, Brayne examines the causes and consequences of algorithmic control. She reveals how the police use predictive analytics to deploy resources, identify suspects, and conduct investigations; how the adoption of big data analytics transforms police organizational practices; and how the police themselves respond to these new data-intensive practices. Although big data analytics holds potential to reduce bias and increase efficiency, Brayne argues that it also reproduces and deepens existing patterns of social inequality, threatens privacy, and challenges civil liberties. A groundbreaking examination of the growing role of the private sector in public policing, this book challenges the way we think about the data-heavy supervision law enforcement increasingly imposes upon civilians in the name of objectivity, efficiency, and public safety.

Inca Apocalypse develops a new perspective on the European invasions of the Inca realm, and the way that the Spanish transformation of the Andes relates to broader changes occurring in the transition from medieval to early modern Europe. The book is structured to foreground some of the parallels in the imperial origins of the Incas and Spain, as well as some of the global processes affecting both societies during the first century of their interaction. The Spanish conquest of the Inca empire was more than a decisive victory at Cajamarca in 1532-it was an uneven process that failed to bring to pass the millenarian vision that set it in motion, yet it succeeded profoundly in some respects. The Incas and their Andean subjects were not passive victims of colonization, and indigenous complicity and resistance actively shaped Spanish colonial rule.As it describes the transformation of the Inca world, Inca Apocalypse attempts to build a more global context than previous accounts of the Spanish Conquest, and it seeks not to lose sight of the parallel changes occurring in Europe as Spain pursued state projects that complemented the colonial endeavors in the Americas. New archaeological and archival research makes it possible to frame a familiar story from a larger historical and geographical scale than has typically been considered. The new text will have solid scholarly foundations but a narrative intended to be accessible to non-academic readers.

A sweeping and enchanting new novel from the widely beloved, award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken about three generations of an unconventional New England family who own and operate a candlepin bowling alley. From the day she is discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery at the turn of the twentieth century--nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin, and fifteen pounds of gold on her person--Bertha Truitt is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts. She has no past to speak of, or at least none she is willing to reveal, and her mysterious origin scandalizes and intrigues the townspeople, as does her choice to marry and start a family with Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who revived her. But Bertha is plucky, tenacious, and entrepreneurial, and the bowling alley she opens quickly becomes Salford's most defining landmark--with Bertha its most notable resident. When Bertha dies in a freak accident, her past resurfaces in the form of a heretofore-unheard-of son, who arrives in Salford claiming he is heir apparent to Truitt Alleys. Soon it becomes clear that, even in her death, Bertha's defining spirit and the implications of her obfuscations live on, infecting and affecting future generations through inheritance battles, murky paternities, and hidden wills. In a voice laced with insight and her signature sharp humor, Elizabeth McCracken has written an epic family saga set against the backdrop of twentieth-century America. Bowlaway is both a stunning feat of language and a brilliant unraveling of a family's myths and secrets, its passions and betrayals, and the ties that bind and the rifts that divide.

Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, was no ordinary movie. Commissioned by Joseph Stalin in 1941 to justify state terror in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth, the film's politics, style, and epic scope aroused controversy even before it was released. In This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger offers a sweeping account of the conception, making, and reception of Ivan the Terrible that weaves together Eisenstein's expansive thinking and experimental practice with a groundbreaking new view of artistic production under Stalin. Drawing on Eisenstein's unpublished production notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts, Neuberger's riveting narrative chronicles Eisenstein's personal, creative, and political challenges and reveals the ways cinematic invention, artistic theory, political critique, and historical and psychological analysis went hand in hand in this famously complex film. Neuberger's bold arguments and daring insights into every aspect of Eisenstein's work during this period, together with her ability to lucidly connect his wide-ranging late theory with his work on Ivan, show the director exploiting the institutions of Soviet artistic production not only to expose the cruelties of Stalin and his circle but to challenge the fundamental principles of Soviet ideology itself. Ivan the Terrible, she argues, shows us one of the world's greatest filmmakers and one of the twentieth century's greatest artists observing the world around him and experimenting with every element of film art to explore the psychology of political ambition, uncover the history of recurring cycles of violence and lay bare the tragedy of absolute power.

Finance is an inescapable part of American life. From how one pursues an education, buys a home, runs a business, or saves for retirement, finance orders the lives of ordinary Americans. And as finance continues to expand, inequality soars. In Divested, Ken-Hou Lin and Megan Tobias Neely demonstrate why widening inequality cannot be understood without examining the rise of big finance. The growth of the financial sector has dramatically transformed the American economy by redistributing resources from workers and families into the hands of owners, executives, and financial professionals. The average American is now divested from a world driven by the maximization of financial profit. Lin and Neely provide systematic evidence to document how the ascendance of finance on Wall Street, Main Street, and among households is a fundamental cause of economic inequality. They argue that finance has reshaped the economy in three important ways. First, the financial sector extracts resources from the economy at large without providing economic benefits to those outside the financial services industry. Second, firms in other economic sectors have become increasingly involved in lending and investing, which weakens the demand for labor and the bargaining power of workers. And third, the escalating consumption of financial products by households shifts risks and uncertainties once shouldered by unions, corporations, and governments onto families. A clear, comprehensive, and convincing account of the forces driving economic inequality in America, Divested warns us that the most damaging consequence of the expanding financial system is not simply recurrent financial crises but a widening social divide between the have and have-nots.

In 1623, a Japanese mercenary called Shichizō; was arrested for asking suspicious questions about the defenses of a Dutch East India Company fort on Amboina, a remote set of islands in what is now eastern Indonesia. When he failed to provide an adequate explanation, he was tortured until he confessed that he had joined a plot orchestrated by a group of English merchants based nearby to seize control of the fortification and ultimately to rip the spice-rich islands from the Company's grasp. Two weeks later, Dutch authorities executed twenty-one alleged conspirators, sparking immediate outrage and a controversy that would endure for centuries to come. In this landmark study, Adam Clulow presents a new perspective on the Amboina case that aims to move beyond the standard debate over the guilt or innocence of the supposed plotters. Instead, Amboina, 1623 argues that the case was driven forward by a potent combination of genuine crisis and overpowering fear that propelled the rapid escalation from suspicion to torture, that gave shape and form to an imagined plot, and that pushed events forward to their final bloody conclusion. Based on an exhaustive analysis of original trial documents, letters, and depositions, this book offers a masterful reinterpretation of a trial that has divided opinion for centuries while presenting new insight into global history and the nature of European expansion across the early modern world.

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Geraldine Heng questions the common assumption that the concepts of race and racisms only began in the modern era. Examining Europe's encounters with Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani ('Gypsies'), from the 12th through 15th centuries, she shows how racial thinking, racial law, racial practices, and racial phenomena existed in medieval Europe before a recognizable vocabulary of race emerged in the West. Analysing sources in a variety of media, including stories, maps, statuary, illustrations, architectural features, history, saints' lives, religious commentary, laws, political and social institutions, and literature, she argues that religion - so much in play again today - enabled the positing of fundamental differences among humans that created strategic essentialisms to mark off human groups and populations for racialized treatment. Her ground-breaking study also shows how race figured in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe in this time.

The wry, macabre, unforgettable tale of an ambitious orphan in Revolutionary Paris, befriended by royalty and radicals, who transforms herself into the legendary Madame Tussaud. In 1761, a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess and saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling: The revolutionary mob is demanding heads, and . . . at the wax museum, heads are what they do. In the tradition of Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, Edward Carey's Little is a darkly endearing cavalcade of a novel--a story of art, class, determination, and how we hold on to what we love.

It is a curious and relatively little-known fact that for two decades-from the end of World War II until the late 1960s-existentialism's most fertile ground outside of Europe was in the Middle East, and Jean-Paul Sartre was the Arab intelligentsia's uncontested champion. In the Arab world, neither before nor since has another Western intellectual been so widely translated, debated, and celebrated. By closely following the remarkable career of Arab existentialism, Yoav Di-Capua reconstructs the cosmopolitan milieu of the generation that tried to articulate a political and philosophical vision for an egalitarian postcolonial world. He tells this story by touring a fascinating selection of Arabic and Hebrew archives, including unpublished diaries and interviews. Tragically, the warm and hopeful relationships forged between Arab intellectuals, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and others ended when, on the eve of the 1967 war, Sartre failed to embrace the Palestinian cause. Today, when the prospect of global ethical engagement seems to be slipping ever farther out of reach, No Exit provides a timely, humanistic account of the intellectual hopes, struggles, and victories that shaped the Arab experience of decolonization and a delightfully wide-ranging excavation of existentialism's non-Western history.

Texas has created more constitutional law than any other state. In any classroom nationwide, any basic constitutional law course can be taught using nothing but Texas cases. That, however, understates the history and politics behind the cases. Beyond representing all doctrinal areas of constitutional law, Texas cases deal with the major issues of the nation. Leading legal scholar and Supreme Court historian Lucas A. Powe, Jr., charts the rich and pervasive development of Texas-inspired constitutional law. From voting rights to railroad regulations, school finance to capital punishment, poverty to civil liberties, this wide-ranging and eminently readable book provides a window into the relationship between constitutional litigation and ordinary politics at the Supreme Court, illuminating how all of the fiercest national divides over what the Constitution means took shape in Texas.

This practical, interdisciplinary text draws from empirically grounded scholarship, survivor-centered practices, and an ecological perspective to help readers develop an understanding of the meaning and scope of human trafficking. Throughout the book, the authors address the specific vulnerabilities of human trafficking victims, their medical-psycho-social needs, and issues related to direct service delivery. They also address the identification of human trafficking crimes, traffickers, and the impact of this crime on the global economy. Using detailed case studies to illuminate real situations, the book covers national and international anti-trafficking policies, prevention and intervention strategies, promising practices to combat human trafficking, responses of law enforcement and service providers, organizational challenges, and the cost of trafficking to human wellbeing.

China's dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China's future rapid growth. Red China's Green Revolution tells the story of the commune's origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China's economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao's collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping--not rural residents--who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China's Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.

Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America. In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives--including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death--in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full "life cycle," historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating "ghost values" or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools. This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry's exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples' experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities. A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death.

Salt tectonics is the study of how and why salt structures evolve and the three-dimensional forms that result. A fascinating branch of geology in itself, salt tectonics is also vitally important to the petroleum industry. Covering the entire scale from the microscopic to the continental, this textbook is an unrivalled consolidation of all topics related to salt tectonics: evaporite deposition and flow, salt structures, salt systems, and practical applications. Coverage of the principles of salt tectonics is supported by more than 600 color illustrations, including 200 seismic images captured by state-of-the-art geophysical techniques and tectonic models from the Applied Geodynamics Laboratory at the University of Texas, Austin. These combine to provide a cohesive and wide-ranging insight into this extremely visual subject. This is the definitive practical handbook for professional geologists and geophysicists in the petroleum industry, an invaluable textbook for graduate students, and a reference textbook for researchers in various geoscience fields.

From a prize-winning historian, a new portrait of an extraordinary activist and the turbulent age in which she lived Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas-where she met her husband, the Haymarket "martyr" Albert Parsons-Lucy was a fearless advocate of First Amendment rights, a champion of the working classes, and one of the most prominent figures of African descent of her era. And yet, her life was riddled with contradictions-she advocated violence without apology, concocted a Hispanic-Indian identity for herself, and ignored the plight of African Americans. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, Jacqueline Jones presents not only the exceptional life of the famous American-born anarchist but also an authoritative account of her times-from slavery through the Great Depression.

A bold new history of the American presidency, arguing that the successful presidents of the past created unrealistic expectations for every president since JFK, with enormously problematic implications for American politics. In The Impossible Presidency, celebrated historian Jeremi Suri charts the rise and fall of the American presidency, from the limited role envisaged by the Founding Fathers to its current status as the most powerful job in the world. He argues that the presidency is a victim of its own success-the vastness of the job makes it almost impossible to fulfill the expectations placed upon it. As managers of the world's largest economy and military, contemporary presidents must react to a truly globalized world in a twenty-four-hour news cycle. There is little room left for bold vision. Suri traces America's disenchantment with our recent presidents to the inevitable mismatch between presidential promises and the structural limitations of the office. A masterful reassessment of presidential history, this book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand America's fraught political climate.

Unique among Western democracies in refusing to eradicate the death penalty, the United States has attempted instead to reform and rationalize state death penalty practices through federal constitutional law. Courting Death traces the unusual and distinctive history of top-down judicial regulation of capital punishment under the Constitution and its unanticipated consequences for our time. In the 1960s and 1970s, in the face of widespread abolition of the death penalty around the world, provisions for capital punishment that had long fallen under the purview of the states were challenged in federal courts. The U.S. Supreme Court intervened in two landmark decisions, first by constitutionally invalidating the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia (1972) on the grounds that it was capricious and discriminatory, followed four years later by restoring it in Gregg v. Georgia (1976). Since then, by neither retaining capital punishment in unfettered form nor abolishing it outright, the Supreme Court has created a complex regulatory apparatus that has brought executions in many states to a halt, while also failing to address the problems that led the Court to intervene in the first place. While execution chambers remain active in several states, constitutional regulation has contributed to the death penalty's new fragility. In the next decade or two, Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker argue, the fate of the American death penalty is likely to be sealed by this failed judicial experiment. Courting Death illuminates both the promise and pitfalls of constitutional regulation of contentious social issues.

The definitive behind-the-scenes history of one of Hollywood's most closely guarded cinematic secrets finally revealed - painted backdrops and the scenic artists who brought them to the big screen. The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop reveals the hidden world and creators of these masterpieces, long-guarded as a special effects secret by the major studios such as MGM, Warner Brothers, Universal, Columbia, 20th Century Fox and Paramount. In an effort to preserve the irreplaceable knowledge of scenic masters, Maness and Isackes have compiled the definitive history.

In 1968, Mexico prepared to host the Olympic games amid growing civil unrest. The spectacular sports facilities and urban redevelopment projects built by the government in Mexico City mirrored the country's rapid but uneven modernization. In the same year, a street-savvy democratization movement led by students emerged in the city. Throughout the summer, the '68 Movement staged protests underscoring a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement. Just ten days before the Olympics began, nearly three hundred student protestors were massacred by the military in a plaza at the core of a new public housing complex. In spite of institutional denial and censorship, the 1968 massacre remains a touchstone in contemporary Mexican culture thanks to the public memory work of survivors and Mexico's leftist intelligentsia. In this highly original study of the afterlives of the '68 Movement, George F. Flaherty explores how urban spaces--material but also literary, photographic, and cinematic--became an archive of 1968, providing a framework for de facto modes of justice for years to come.

How changing the way we think about water and energy can secure the long-term sustainability of both precious resources. Although it is widely understood that energy and water are the world's two most critical resources, their vital interconnections and vulnerabilities are less often recognized. This farsighted book offers a new, holistic way of thinking about energy and water-a big picture approach that reveals the interdependence of the two resources, identifies the seriousness of the challenges, and lays out an optimistic approach with an array of solutions to ensure the continuing sustainability of both. Michael Webber, a leader and teacher in the field of energy technology and policy, explains how energy and water supplies are linked and how problems in either can be crippling for the other. He shows that current population growth, economic growth, climate change, and short-sighted policies are likely to make things worse. Yet, Webber asserts, more integrated planning with long-term sustainability in mind can avert such a daunting future. Combining anecdotes and personal stories with insights into the latest science of energy and water, he identifies a hopeful path toward wise long-range water-energy decisions and a more reliable and abundant future for humanity.

From the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, Mexican cinema became the most successful Latin American cinema and the leading Spanish-language film industry in the world. Many Cine de Oro (Golden Age cinema) films adhered to the dominant Hollywood model, but a small yet formidable filmmaking faction rejected Hollywood's paradigm outright. Directors Fernando de Fuentes, Emilio Fernández, Luis Buñuel, Juan Bustillo Oro, Adolfo Best Maugard, and Julio Bracho sought to create a unique national cinema that, through the stories it told and the ways it told them, was wholly Mexican. The Classical Mexican Cinema traces the emergence and evolution of this Mexican cinematic aesthetic, a distinctive film form designed to express lo mexicano. Charles Ramírez Berg begins by locating the classical style's pre-cinematic roots in the work of popular Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada at the turn of the twentieth century. He also looks at the dawning of Mexican classicism in the poetics of Enrique Rosas' El Automóvil Gris, the crowning achievement of Mexico's silent filmmaking era and the film that set the stage for the Golden Age films. Berg then analyzes mature examples of classical Mexican filmmaking by the predominant Golden Age auteurs of three successive decades. Drawing on neoformalism and neoauteurism within a cultural studies framework, he brilliantly reveals how the poetics of Classical Mexican Cinema deviated from the formal norms of the Golden Age to express a uniquely Mexican sensibility thematically, stylistically, and ideologically.

Pakistan today stands at a critical juncture in its short history of existence. While much has been written about Pakistan, little is known about Communism or left-leaning politics in the country post-Partition, which played a key role in shaping Pakistani politics today. Kamran Asdar Ali here presents the first extensive look at Pakistan's communist and working-class movement. The author critically engages with the history of Pakistan's early years while paying special attention to the rise and fall of the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP), from Partition in 1947 to the aftermath of Bangladeshi independence in 1971. Since its formation in 1947 as a homeland for South Asian Muslims, Pakistan has been a configuration of shifting alliances and competing political and social ideologies. Pakistan has experienced three military takeovers and is plagued with geopolitical conflict - from Kashmir to Baluchistan, Waziristan - and while these aspects of Pakistan make headlines, in order to understand the complexities of these events, it is vital to understand the state's relationship throughout history with its divergent political and ethnic voices. One dominant feature of the state, along with its emphasis on the Islamic nature of its polity, has been the non-resolution of its ethnic problem - while the history of Pakistan is often viewed through the lense of unified Muslim nationalism, the author here also explores the history of Pakistan's often tense relationship with its various ethnic groups - Baluch, Pathan, Sindhis, Punjabis and Bengalis. Shedding light on a vital and little-researched aspect of Pakistani history, this book shows that military coups, Islamic radicalization, and terrorist activities do not constitute the sum total of Pakistan's history; that it, too, has had a history that included the activities of communist intellectuals and activists.

Conventionally, US immigration history has been understood through the lens of restriction and those who have been barred from getting in. In contrast, The Good Immigrants considers immigration from the perspective of Chinese elites--intellectuals, businessmen, and students--who gained entrance because of immigration exemptions. Exploring a century of Chinese migrations, Madeline Hsu looks at how the model minority characteristics of many Asian Americans resulted from US policies that screened for those with the highest credentials in the most employable fields, enhancing American economic competitiveness. The earliest US immigration restrictions targeted Chinese people but exempted students as well as individuals who might extend America's influence in China. Western-educated Chinese such as Madame Chiang Kai-shek became symbols of the US impact on China, even as they patriotically advocated for China's modernization. World War II and the rise of communism transformed Chinese students abroad into refugees, and the Cold War magnified the importance of their talent and training. As a result, Congress legislated piecemeal legal measures to enable Chinese of good standing with professional skills to become citizens. Pressures mounted to reform American discriminatory immigration laws, culminating with the 1965 Immigration Act. Filled with narratives featuring such renowned Chinese immigrants as I. M. Pei, The Good Immigrants examines the shifts in immigration laws and perceptions of cultural traits that enabled Asians to remain in the United States as exemplary, productive Americans.

The United States Constitution insures that all persons born in the US are citizens with equal protection under the law. But in today's America, the US-born children of undocumented immigrants--over four million of them--do not enjoy fully the benefits of citizenship or of feeling that they belong. Children in mixed-status families are forgotten in the loud and discordant immigration debate. They live under the constant threat that their parents will suddenly be deported. Their parents face impossible decisions: make their children exiles or make them orphans. In Forgotten Citizens, Luis Zayas holds a mirror to a nation in crisis, providing invaluable perspectives for anyone brave enough to look. Zayas draws on his extensive work as a mental health clinician and researcher to present the most complete picture yet of how immigration policy subverts children's rights, harms their mental health, and leaves lasting psychological trauma. We meet Virginia, a kindergartener so terrified of revealing her family's status that she took her father's warning don't say anything so literally she hadn't spoken in school in over a year. We hear from Brandon, exiled with his family to Mexico, who worries that his father will die in the desert trying to immigrate again. Children like Virginia and Brandon have been silenced and their stories largely overlooked in the broader debates about immigration policy. As this book demonstrates, we can no longer afford to ignore them.

The first illustrated, architectural history of the 'Alid shrines, increasingly endangered by the conflict in Syria. The 'Alids (descendants of the Prophet Muhammad) are among the most revered figures in Islam, beloved by virtually all Muslims, regardless of sectarian affiliation. This study argues that despite the common identification of shrines as 'Shi'i' spaces, they have in fact always been unique places of pragmatic intersectarian exchange and shared piety, even - and perhaps especially - during periods of sectarian conflict. Using a rich variety of previously unexplored sources, including textual, archaeological, architectural, and epigraphic evidence, Stephennie Mulder shows how these shrines created a unifying Muslim 'holy land' in medieval Syria, and proposes a fresh conceptual approach to thinking about landscape in Islamic art. In doing so, she argues against a common paradigm of medieval sectarian conflict, complicates the notion of Sunni Revival, and provides new evidence for the negotiated complexity of sectarian interactions in the period.

They were the healers, teachers, and writers, the "wise ones" of Nahuatl-speaking cultures in Mexico, remembered in painted codices and early colonial manuscripts of Mesoamerica as the guardians of knowledge. Yet they very often seem bound to an unrecoverable past, as stereotypes prevent some from linking the words "indigenous" and "intellectual" together. Not so, according to author Kelly S. McDonough, at least not for native speakers of Nahuatl, one of the most widely spoken and best-documented indigenous languages of the Americas. This book focuses on how Nahuas have been deeply engaged with the written word ever since the introduction of the Roman alphabet in the early sixteenth century. Dipping into distinct time periods of the past five hundred years, this broad perspective allows McDonough to show the heterogeneity of Nahua knowledge and writing as Nahuas took up the pen as agents of their own discourses and agendas. McDonough worked collaboratively with contemporary Nahua researchers and students, reconnecting the theorization of a population with the population itself. The Learned Ones describes the experience of reading historic text with native speakers today, some encountering Nahua intellectuals and their writing for the very first time. It intertwines the written word with oral traditions and embodied knowledge, aiming to retie the strand of alphabetic writing to the dynamic trajectory of Nahua intellectual work.

Charlie Chaplin was one of the cinema's consummate comic performers, yet he has long been criticized as a lackluster film director. In this groundbreaking work--the first to analyze Chaplin's directorial style--Donna Kornhaber radically recasts his status as a filmmaker. Spanning Chaplin's career, Kornhaber discovers a sophisticated "Chaplinesque" visual style that draws from early cinema and slapstick and stands markedly apart from later, "classical" stylistic conventions. His is a manner of filmmaking that values space over time and simultaneity over sequence, crafting narrative and meaning through careful arrangement within the frame rather than cuts between frames. Opening up aesthetic possibilities beyond the typical boundaries of the classical Hollywood film, Chaplin's filmmaking would profoundly influence directors from Fellini to Truffaut. To view Chaplin seriously as a director is to re-understand him as an artist and to reconsider the nature and breadth of his legacy.

Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia is an introductory text on the issues, polemics, and works that represent the complex processes of political, economic, and cultural modernization in the twentieth century. The number and types of projects varied greatly from country to country, but, as a whole, the region produced a significant body of architecture that has never before been presented in a single volume in any language. Modern Architecture in Latin America is the first comprehensive history of this important production. Designed as a survey and focused on key examples/paradigms arranged chronologically from 1903 to 2003, this volume covers a myriad of countries, historical, social, and political conditions, and projects/developments that range from small houses to urban plans to architectural movements. The book is structured so that it can be read in a variety of ways--as a historically developed narrative of modern architecture in Latin America, as a country-specific chronology, or as a treatment of traditions centered on issues of art, technology, or utopia. This structure allows readers to see the development of multiple and parallel branches/historical strands of architecture and, at times, their interconnections across countries. The authors provide a critical evaluation of the movements presented in relationship to their overall goals and architectural transformations.