Reputed to be the richest city of Etruria, Veii was one of the most important cities in the ancient Mediterranean world. It was located ten miles northwest of Rome, and the two cities were alternately allied and at war for over three hundred years until Veii fell to Rome in 396 BCE, although the city continued to be inhabited until the Middle Ages. Rediscovered in the seventeenth century, Veii has undergone the longest continuous excavation of any of the Etruscan cities.

The most complete volume on the city in English, Veii presents the research and interpretations of multiple generations of Etruscan scholars who are at the forefront of the discipline. Their essays are grouped into four parts. The first provides a general overview of archaeological excavation at Veii and discusses the different types of methodologies employed over the years. The second part narrates the history of Etruscan occupation of the city and its role in the greater Mediterranean world. The third section examines the surviving material culture of Veii, including pottery, painting, sculpture, metalworking, and architectural terracottas. Finally, the legacy of Veii is discussed, and a chronology of the site is presented. This pioneering research offers all students of the ancient Mediterranean a new understanding of the development of Veii and its territory from the late Bronze Age to the Roman conquest, as well as of the interactions of Veii with nearby sites and territories in central Tyrrhenian Italy.

All the world over, people tell stories to express their deepest feelings about such things as what makes a "real" man or woman; what true love, courage, or any other virtue is; what the proper relationships are between people. Often groups of people widely separated by space or time will tell the same basic story, but with differences in the details that reveal much about a particular group's worldview.

This book looks at differences in the telling of several common Hispanic folktales. James Taggart contrasts how two men—a Spaniard and an Aztec-speaking Mexican—tell such tales as "The Bear's Son." He explores how their stories present different ways of being a man in their respective cultures.

Taggart's analysis contributes to a revision of Freud's theory of gender, which was heavily grounded in biological determinism. Taggart focuses instead on how fathers reproduce different forms of masculinity in their sons. In particular, he shows how fathers who care for their infant sons teach them a relational masculinity based on a connected view of human relationships. Thus, The Bear and His Sons will be important reading not only in anthropology and folklore, but also in the growing field of men's studies.

First published in 1983, Nahuat Myth and Social Structure brings together an important collection of modern-day Aztec Indian folktales and vividly demonstrates how these tales have been shaped by the social structure of the communities in which they are told.

On October 15, 1983, a young mother of six was murdered while walking across her village of Huitzilan de Serdán, Mexico, with her infant son and one of her daughters. This woman, Victoria Bonilla, was among more than one hundred villagers who perished in violence that broke out soon after the Mexican army chopped down a cornfield that had been planted on an unused cattle pasture by forty Nahuat villagers.

In this anthropological account, based on years of fieldwork in Huitzilan, James M. Taggart turns to Victoria's husband, Nacho Angel Hernández, to try to understand how a community based on respect and cooperation descended into horrific violence and fratricide. When the army chopped down the cornfield at Talcuaco, the war that broke out resulted in the complete breakdown of the social and moral order of the community.

At its heart, this is a tragic love story, chronicling Nacho's feelings for Victoria spanning their courtship, marriage, family life, and her death. Nacho delivered his testimonio to the author in Nahuat, making it one of the few autobiographical love stories told in an Amerindian language, and a very rare account of love among the indigenous people of Mesoamerica. There is almost nothing in the literature on how a man develops and changes his feelings for his wife over his lifetime. This study contributes to the anthropology of emotion by focusing on how the Nahuat attempt to express love through language and ritual.

Syrian poet Samir Tahhan collected folktales from old men sitting outside their houses in Aleppo, drinking tea. Afraid these stories would disappear with the passing of this generation, Tahhan also went to halls and events to hear professional storytellers and record their performances. Anthropologist Andrea Rugh helped translate the resulting two volumes of stories from the original Arabic and wrote the informative introduction to this one-volume collection.

Some of the tales appeared in rhyming verse in Arabic and some were based on events that are said to have actually taken place in Aleppo. Rugh explains the concepts of the most popular types of Syrian story structures: the gissa, the hikaya, and the hudutha. With two of the poems, the Arabic and the English are shown side by side in order to demonstrate the internal poetic structures of the original rhymes.

With their emphasis on morality and social values, the tales will be familiar to Western audiences. Another value for the reader is finding the accepted social values and behaviors that Arab adults try to inculcate in their younger generation, often through complex characterizations. Teasing out these meanings gives the reader an appreciation for the act of translation and hints of the power of the Arabic language in prose and poetry.

Professional illustrator Douglas Rugh has provided the book's black-and-white prints based on the stories and his experiences as a child growing up in the Middle East.

Roman women were the procreators and nurturers of life, both in the domestic world of the family and in the larger sphere of the state. Although deterred from participating in most aspects of public life, women played an essential role in public religious ceremonies, taking part in rituals designed to ensure the fecundity and success of the agricultural cycle on which Roman society depended. Thus religion is a key area for understanding the contributions of women to Roman society and their importance beyond their homes and families.

In this book, Sarolta A. Takács offers a sweeping overview of Roman women's roles and functions in religion and, by extension, in Rome's history and culture from the republic through the empire. She begins with the religious calendar and the various festivals in which women played a significant role. She then examines major female deities and cults, including the Sibyl, Mater Magna, Isis, and the Vestal Virgins, to show how conservative Roman society adopted and integrated Greek culture into its mythic history, artistic expressions, and religion. Takács's discussion of the Bona Dea Festival of 62 BCE and of the Bacchantes, female worshippers of the god Bacchus or Dionysus, reveals how women could also jeopardize Rome's existence by stepping out of their assigned roles. Takács's examination of the provincial female flaminate and the Matres/Matronae demonstrates how women served to bind imperial Rome and its provinces into a cohesive society.

Capoeira, a Brazilian battle dance and national sport, has become popular all over the world. First brought to Brazil by African slaves and first documented in the late eighteenth century, capoeira has undergone many transformations as it has diffused throughout Brazilian society and beyond, taking on a multiplicity of meanings for those who participate in it and for the societies in which it is practiced. In this book, Maya Talmon-Chvaicer combines cultural history with anthropological research to offer an in-depth study of the development and meaning of capoeira, starting with the African cultures in which it originated and continuing up to the present day.

Using a wealth of primary sources, Talmon-Chvaicer analyzes the outlooks on life, symbols, and rituals of the three major cultures that inspired capoeira—the Congolese (the historic area known today as Congo-Angola), the Yoruban, and the Catholic Portuguese cultures. As she traces the evolution of capoeira through successive historical eras, Talmon-Chvaicer maintains a dual perspective, depicting capoeira as it was experienced, observed, and understood by both Europeans and Africans, as well as by their descendants. This dual perspective uncovers many covert aspects of capoeira that have been repressed by the dominant Brazilian culture.

This rich study reclaims the African origins and meanings of capoeira, while also acknowledging the many ways in which Catholic-Christian culture has contributed to it. The book will be fascinating reading not only for scholars but also for capoeira participants who may not know the deeper spiritual meanings of the customs, amulets, and rituals of this jogo da vida, "game of life."

With top billing at many film forums around the world, as well as a string of prestigious prizes, including consecutive nominations for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, Israeli films have become one of the most visible and promising cinemas in the first decade of the twenty-first century, an intriguing and vibrant site for the representation of Israeli realities. Yet two decades have passed since the last wide-ranging scholarly overview of Israeli cinema, creating a need for a new, state-of-the-art analysis of this exciting cinematic oeuvre.

The first anthology of its kind in English, Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion presents a collection of specially commissioned articles in which leading Israeli film scholars examine Israeli cinema as a prism that refracts collective Israeli identities through the medium and art of motion pictures. The contributors address several broad themes: the nation imagined on film; war, conflict, and trauma; gender, sexuality, and ethnicity; religion and Judaism; discourses of place in the age of globalism; filming the Palestinian Other; and new cinematic discourses. The authors' illuminating readings of Israeli films reveal that Israeli cinema offers rare visual and narrative insights into the complex national, social, and multicultural Israeli universe, transcending the partial and superficial images of this culture in world media.

From Notrees to Pine Island, from Scotland to Moscow, from Dickens to Tennyson, from Spur to Lariat, from Buck Naked to Bald Prairie—Texans are unsurpassed for the imaginative names they give their towns and cities. Fred Tarpley has chosen 1001 of the most unusual and interesting of the 75,000 place names that dot the Texas map.

The names of Texas communities and places can be traced to a number of basic sources, including people; landscapes; the Bible; literature and mythology; misunderstandings and errors; backward spellings and blends; and anecdotes and events. Each entry in 1001 Texas Place Names gives the official spelling of the name, phonetic pronunciation where necessary, dates of post office operation, and a short narrative about the origin of the name and the history of the place. Each of Texas's 254 counties is represented by at least two entries.

Theories of film have traditionally dealt with either narrative or industrial issues, with the consequence that the physical content of the graphic frame has often been ignored or relegated to the sidelines. By contrast, C. S. Tashiro foregrounds the visual aspect of cinema in this book, drawing on his experiences as a designer and filmmaker, as well as on contemporary theory, to show how production design can support or contradict narrative structure, or exist in an entirely parallel realm of meaning.

Tashiro looks at cinematic production design from a broadly interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing art and architecture theory, audience reception, narrative theory, and phenomenology, to arrive at a more encompassing definition of the process. He builds his argument around studies of several prominent history films, since design is central to historical representation, and explores the most pertinent issues raised by the topic, particularly commodity consumption. In his conclusion, he also offers possible solutions to some of the social problems raised by design.

Recently, scholars of Olmec visual culture have identified symbols for umbilical cords, bundles, and cave-wombs, as well as a significant number of women portrayed on monuments and as figurines. In this groundbreaking study, Carolyn Tate demonstrates that these subjects were part of a major emphasis on gestational imagery in Formative Period Mesoamerica. In Reconsidering Olmec Visual Culture, she identifies the presence of women, human embryos, and fetuses in monuments and portable objects dating from 1400 to 400 BC and originating throughout much of Mesoamerica. This highly original study sheds new light on the prominent roles that women and gestational beings played in Early Formative societies, revealing female shamanic practices, the generative concepts that motivated caching and bundling, and the expression of feminine knowledge in the 260-day cycle and related divinatory and ritual activities.

Reconsidering Olmec Visual Culture is the first study that situates the unique hollow babies of Formative Mesoamerica within the context of prominent females and the prevalent imagery of gestation and birth. It is also the first major art historical study of La Venta and the first to identify Mesoamerica's earliest creation narrative. It provides a more nuanced understanding of how later societies, including Teotihuacan and West Mexico, as well as the Maya, either rejected certain Formative Period visual forms, rituals, social roles, and concepts or adopted and transformed them into the enduring themes of Mesoamerican symbol systems.

As archaeologists peel away the jungle covering that has both obscured and preserved the ancient Maya cities of Mexico and Central America, other scholars have only a limited time to study and understand the sites before the jungle, weather, and human encroachment efface them again, perhaps forever. This urgency underlies Yaxchilan: The Design of a Maya Ceremonial City, Carolyn Tate's comprehensive catalog and analysis of all the city's extant buildings and sculptures.

During a year of field work, Tate fully documented the appearance of the site as of 1987. For each sculpture and building, she records its discovery, present location, condition, measurements, and astronomical orientation and reconstructs its Long Counts and Julian dates from Calendar Rounds. Line drawings and photographs provide a visual document of the art and architecture of Yaxchilan.

More than mere documentation, however, the book explores the phenomenon of art within Maya society. Tate establishes a general framework of cultural practices, spiritual beliefs, and knowledge likely to have been shared by eighth-century Maya people. The process of making public art is considered in relation to other modes of aesthetic expression, such as oral tradition and ritual. This kind of analysis is new in Maya studies and offers fresh insight into the function of these magnificent cities and the powerful role public art and architecture play in establishing cultural norms, in education in a semiliterate society, and in developing the personal and community identities of individuals.

Several chapters cover the specifics of art and iconography at Yaxchilan as a basis for examining the creation of the city in the Late Classic period. Individual sculptures are attributed to the hands of single artists and workshops, thus aiding in dating several of the monuments. The significance of headdresses, backracks, and other costume elements seen on monuments is tied to specific rituals and fashions, and influence from other sites is traced. These analyses lead to a history of the design of the city under the reigns of Shield Jaguar (A.D. 681-741) and Bird Jaguar IV (A.D. 752-772).

In Tate's view, Yaxchilan and other Maya cities were designed as both a theater for ritual activities and a nexus of public art and social structures that were crucial in defining the self within Maya society.

Grace Paley is a "writer's writer," admired by both scholars and the reading public for her originality and unique voice. In this first book-length study of her work, Jacqueline Taylor explores the source of Paley's originality, locating it in the way Paley transforms language to create strongly woman-centered stories.

Drawing on interviews with the author, as well as the stories themselves, Taylor emphasizes Paley's awareness that women's voices have been muted and their stories ignored or left untold in our culture's male-oriented dominant discourse. She watches Paley in the process of reshaping language at both the semantic and narrative levels to make it express women's perceptions and experiences. In Paley's stories, it becomes possible to ignore traditional heroic and dramatic themes and instead talk about women and children in such everyday settings as the playground, the kitchen, and the grocery store.

Some of the specific techniques Paley uses to accomplish this include identifying and repudiating sexist language in the dominant discourse and redefining ordinary words from the perspective of women. At the narrative level, Taylor reveals how she draws on women's oral traditions to tell open-ended stories that resist rigid beginning-middle-and-end structuring.

This transformed language enables Paley to construct a social world where woman-centered meanings can flourish. In her nontraditional stories, no single narrator or version of events dominates. Anyone can be a storyteller and no one has the last word.

When a ten-year-old boy befriends a mysterious hobo in his southern Colorado hometown in the early 1940s, he learns about evil in his community and takes his first steps toward manhood by attempting to protect his new friend from corrupt officials. Though a fictional story, Alex and the Hobo is written out of the life experiences of its author, José Inez (Joe) Taylor, and it realistically portrays a boy's coming-of-age as a Spanish-speaking man who must carve out an honorable place for himself in a class-stratified and Anglo-dominated society.

In this innovative ethnography, anthropologist James Taggart collaborates with Joe Taylor to explore how Alex and the Hobo sprang from Taylor's life experiences and how it presents an insider's view of Mexicano culture and its constructions of manhood. They frame the story (included in its entirety) with chapters that discuss how it encapsulates notions that Taylor learned from the Chicano movement, the farmworkers' union, his community, his father, his mother, and his religion. Taggart gives the ethnography a solid theoretical underpinning by discussing how the story and Taylor's account of how he created it represent an act of resistance to the class system that Taylor perceives as destroying his native culture.

The art of furniture making flourished in Texas during the mid-nineteenth century. To document this rich heritage of locally made furniture, Miss Ima Hogg, the well-known philanthropist and collector of American decorative arts, enlisted Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren to research early Texas furniture and its makers. After more than a decade of investigation, they published Texas Furniture in 1975, and it quickly became the authoritative reference on this subject. An updated edition, Texas Furniture, Volume One, was issued in the spring of 2012.

Texas Furniture, Volume Two presents over 150 additional pieces of furniture that were not included in Volume One, each superbly photographed in color and accompanied by detailed descriptions of the piece’s maker, date, materials, measurements, history, and owner, as well as an analysis by the authors. Taylor and Warren have also written a new introduction for this volume, in which they amplify the story of early Texas furniture. In particular, they compare and contrast the two important traditions of cabinetmaking in Texas, Anglo-American and German, and identify previously unknown artisans. The authors also discuss nineteenth-century Texans’ desire for refinement and gentility in furniture, non-commercial furniture making, and marquetry work. And they pay tribute to the twentieth-century collectors who first recognized the value of locally made Texas furniture and worked to preserve it. A checklist of Texas cabinetmakers, which contains biographical information on approximately nine hundred men who made furniture in Texas, completes the volume.

The art of furniture making flourished in Texas during the mid-nineteenth century. To document this rich heritage of locally made furniture, Miss Ima Hogg, the well-known philanthropist and collector of American decorative arts, enlisted Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren to research early Texas Furniture and its makers. They spent more than a decade working with museums and private collectors throughout the state to examine and photograph representative examples. They also combed census records, newspapers, and archives for information about cabinetmakers. These efforts resulted in the 1975 publication of Texas Furniture, which quickly became the authoritative reference on this subject.

Now updated with an expanded Index of Texas Cabinetmakers that includes information that has come to light since the original publication and corrects errors, Texas Furniture presents a catalog of more than two hundred pieces of furniture, each superbly photographed and accompanied by detailed descriptions of the piece’s maker, date, materials, measurements, history, and owner, as well as an analysis by the authors. The book also includes chapters on the material culture of nineteenth-century Texas and on the tools and techniques of nineteenth-century Texas cabinetmakers, with a special emphasis on the German immigrant cabinetmakers of the Hill Country and Central Texas. The index of Texas cabinetmakers contains biographical information on approximately nine hundred men who made furniture in Texas, and appendices list information on the state’s largest cabinet shops taken from the United States census records.

Woody plants and cacti are vital staple foods for cattle, deer, and other wildlife in drought-prone South Texas. Ranchers, hunters, and land managers who need to identify these plants relied on A Field Guide to Common South Texas Shrubs (published by Texas Parks & Wildlife Press and distributed by UT Press), which is no longer in print. Responding to ongoing demand for the book, Richard B. Taylor has completely updated and expanded it with seven new species, new photographs, and a quick plant identification key.

Common Woody Plants and Cacti of South Texas is an easy-to-use plant identification field guide to fifty species that comprise an estimated 90 percent of the region’s woody canopy cover north of the Rio Grande Valley. The species accounts include photographs, descriptions, values to livestock and wildlife, and nutritional information. The book also provides historical perspectives and information on brush management techniques and strategies, as well as habitat appraisal. All of these resources will enable readers to analyze stocking rates for deer and cattle, evaluate a prospective hunting lease, or buy property.

The Franco-Texan Land Company was formed, ostensibly, by the French bondholders of the Memphis, El Paso, and Pacific Railroad in an attempt to salvage their investments through sale of lands in the railroad's Texas land grant. Most of the land company's wealth, however, went into the pockets of unscrupulous local managers and directors, and another railroad eventually built a road across Texas along the Memphis, El Paso, and Pacific right of way.

Despite their unsavory histories, the land company and its railroad parent played an important part in the development of Northwest Texas. Virginia Taylor's account of their activities furthers the study of the role of land companies in the settlement of the United States and adds interesting sidelights on one of the immigrant groups that left the imprint of Europe on frontier Texas.

"In order to talk with the dead
you have to know how to wait:
they are fearful
like the first steps of a child.
But if we are patient
one day they will answer us
with a poplar leaf trapped in a broken mirror,
with a flame that suddenly revives in the fireplace,
with a dark return of birds
before the glance of a girl
who waits motionless on the threshold."

—from "In Order to Talk with the Dead"

Reared in the rainy forests of Chile's "La Frontera" region which had nurtured Pablo Neruda a generation earlier, Jorge Teillier has become one of Chile's leading contemporary poets, whose work is widely read in Latin America and Europe along with the poetry of his well-known contemporaries Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn. This English-Spanish bilingual anthology now introduces English-speaking readers to Teillier, with a representative selection of his best work from all phases of his career.

Carolyne Wright has translated poems from the volumes Muertes y maravillas (1971), Para un pueblo fantasma (1978), and Cartas para reinas de otras primaveras (1985). Avoiding the bravura effects of some of his contemporaries, Teillier writes from a life lived directly and simply, returning time and again in his poetry to the timeless and mythic South of his boyhood, the "Land of Nevermore."

Natural habitats for wildlife in Texas and the many species they support are dwindling at an alarming rate as an ever-growing population continues to develop the land for commercial, industrial, and agricultural uses. To take stock of our current wildlife and land resources, identify challenges facing them, and offer strategies for future management and conservation, this book presents over twenty-five essays by experts from a wide range of governmental and private organizations involved in wildlife policy and management.

Modeled on the proceedings of a 1982 wildlife symposium published by the Texas Chapter of The Wildlife Society, this book updates and expands the issues involved in wildlife and land use. The chapters are grouped into five sections-perspectives on Texas wildlife resources, future expectations in land use, the public and future demands for wildlife, wildlife management and research, and wildlife management on public lands. The diverse and sometimes competing viewpoints presented here will be important reading for everyone concerned with managing land for wildlife.

"Play it again, Sam" is the motto of cult film enthusiasts, who will watch their favorite movie over and over, "beyond all reason." What is the appeal of cult movies? Why do fans turn up in droves at midnight movies or sit through the same three-hanky classics from Hollywood's golden era? These are some of the questions J. P. Telotte and twelve other noted film scholars consider in this groundbreaking study of the cult film.

The book identifies two basic types of cult films—older Hollywood movies, such as Casablanca, that have developed a cult following and "midnight movies," most notably The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Telotte, Bruce Kawin, and Timothy Corrigan offer thought-provoking discussions about why these two types of movies become cult films, the sort of audience they attract, and the needs they fulfill for that audience. Subsequent essays employ a variety of cultural, feminist, ideological, and poststructural strategies for exploring these films.

In a section on the classical cult film, the movie Casablanca receives extensive treatment. An essay by T. J. Ross considers Beat the Devil as a send-up of cult films, while another essay by Wade Jennings analyzes the cult star phenomenon as personified in Judy Garland.

"Midnight movie madness" is explored in essays on The Rocky Horror Picture Show, movie satires of the 1950s, science fiction double features, and horror thrillers.

Illustrated with scenes from favorite movies and written for both fans and scholars, The Cult Film Experience will appeal to a wider audience than the "usual suspects."

How science fiction films in the 1950s were marketed and helped create the broader genre itself.

For Hollywood, the golden age of science fiction was also an age of anxiety. Amid rising competition, fluid audience habits, and increasing government regulation, studios of the 1950s struggled to make and sell the kinds of films that once were surefire winners. These conditions, the leading media scholar J. P. Telotte argues, catalyzed the incredible rise of science fiction.

Though science fiction films had existed since the earliest days of cinema, the SF genre as a whole continued to resist easy definition through the 1950s. In grappling with this developing genre, the industry began to consider new marketing approaches that viewed films as fluid texts and audiences as ever-changing. Drawing on trade reports, film reviews, pressbooks, trailers, and other archival materials, Selling Science Fiction Cinema reconstructs studio efforts to market a promising new genre and, in the process, shows how salesmanship influenced what that genre would become. Telotte uses such films as The Thing from Another World, Forbidden Planet, and The Blob, as well as the influx of Japanese monster movies, to explore the shifting ways in which the industry reframed the SF genre to market to no-longer static audience expectations. Science fiction transformed the way Hollywood does business, just as Hollywood transformed the meaning of science fiction.

Offering a unique perspective on the very notions and practices of storytelling, history, memory, and language, Clio’s Laws collects ten essays (some new and some previously published in Spanish) by a revered voice in global history. Taking its title from the Greek muse of history, this opus considers issues related to the historian’s craft, including nationalism and identity, and draws on Tenorio-Trillo’s own lifetime of experiences as a historian with deep roots in both Mexico and the United States. By turns deeply ironic, provocative, and experimental, and covering topics both lowbrow and highbrow, the essays form a dialogue with Clio about idiosyncratic yet profound matters.

Tenorio-Trillo presents his own version of an ars historica (what history is, why we write it, and how we abuse it) alongside a very personal essay on the relationship between poetry and history. Other selections include an exploration of the effects of a historian’s autobiography, a critique of history’s celebratory obsession, and a guide to reading history in an era of internet searches and too many books. A self-described exile, Tenorio-Trillo has produced a singular tour of the historical imagination and its universal traits.

The Sheik—E. M. Hull’s best-selling novel that became a wildly popular film starring Rudolph Valentino—kindled “sheik fever” across the Western world in the 1920s. A craze for all things romantically “Oriental” swept through fashion, film, and literature, spawning imitations and parodies without number. While that fervor has largely subsided, tales of passion between Western women and Arab men continue to enthrall readers of today’s mass-market romance novels. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Hsu-Ming Teo traces the literary lineage of these desert romances and historical bodice rippers from the twelfth to the twenty-first century and explores the gendered cultural and political purposes that they have served at various historical moments.

Drawing on “high” literature, erotica, and popular romance fiction and films, Teo examines the changing meanings of Orientalist tropes such as crusades and conversion, abduction by Barbary pirates, sexual slavery, the fear of renegades, the Oriental despot and his harem, the figure of the powerful Western concubine, and fantasies of escape from the harem. She analyzes the impact of imperialism, decolonization, sexual liberation, feminism, and American involvement in the Middle East on women’s Orientalist fiction. Teo suggests that the rise of female-authored romance novels dramatically transformed the nature of Orientalism because it feminized the discourse; made white women central as producers, consumers, and imagined actors; and revised, reversed, or collapsed the binaries inherent in traditional analyses of Orientalism.

Daughter of Damascus presents a personal account of a Syrian woman's youth in the Suq Saruja ("old city") quarter of Damascus in the 1940s. Siham Tergeman wrote this book to preserve the details of a "genuine Arab past" for Syrian young people. In it, she relates the customs pertaining to marriage, birth, circumcision, and death. She writes of Ramadan festivities, family picnics to the orchards of the Ghuta, weekly trips to the public bath, her school experiences, Damascene cooking, peddlers' calls, and proverbs. She includes the well-known dramatic skits, songs, and tales of the Syrian Hakawati storytellers. And, through the words of her father, she describes the difficult period when Syrians were involved in the Balkans War and World War I. All this wealth of ethnographic detail is set in real-life vignettes that make the book lively and entertaining reading.

Little has been published about modern Syrian social life. In this English translation of an Arabic memoir originally published in Syria in 1978, Tergeman appeals to a wide audience. General readers will find a charming story, while scholars can find source material for university courses in anthropology, sociology, family and women's studies, and Middle Eastern area studies. The introduction by anthropologist Andrea Rugh portrays Syrian social life for Western readers and points out some of the nuances that might escape the attention of those unacquainted with Arab culture.

In the twenty-first century, we are continually confronted with the existential side of technology—the relationships between identity and the mechanizations that have become extensions of the self. Focusing on one of humanity’s most ubiquitous machines, Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art combines critical theory and new media theory to form the first philosophical analysis of the car within works of conceptual art. These works are broadly defined to encompass a wide range of creative expressions, particularly in car-based conceptual art by both older, established artists and younger, emerging artists, including Ed Ruscha, Martha Rosler, Richard Prince, Sylvie Fleury, Yael Bartana, Jeremy Deller, and Jonathan Schipper.

At its core, the book offers an alternative formation of conceptual art understood according to technology, the body moving through space, and what art historian, curator, and artist Jack Burnham calls “relations.” This thought-provoking study illuminates the ways in which the automobile becomes a naturalized extension of the human body, incarnating new forms of “car art” and spurring a technological reframing of conceptual art. Steeped in a sophisticated take on the image and semiotics of the car, the chapters probe the politics of materialism as well as high/low debates about taste, culture, and art. The result is a highly innovative approach to contemporary intersections of art and technology.

From reviews of the newest, hippest restaurants in cities across Texas to stories about the comfort foods we all love, Texans have long relied on Texas Monthly to dish up some of the best writing about food in the Lone Star state. This anthology brings together twenty-eight classic articles about food in Texas and the culture that surrounds it—markets that purvey exotic and traditional foods, well-known chefs, tributes to the cooks and cookbooks of days gone by, and even a feature on how to open a restaurant. Many of the articles are by Patricia Sharpe, Texas Monthly's longtime restaurant critic and winner of the James Beard Journalism Award for Magazine Feature Writing without Recipes. Joining her are Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith and contributors Gary Cartwright, Jordan MacKay, Skip Hollandsworth, Pamela Colloff, Anne Dingus, Suzy Banks, Joe Nick Patoski, and Prudence Mackintosh.

Since 1973, one magazine has covered crime in Texas like no one else, delving deep into stories that may turn your stomach—but won't let you turn away. Texas Monthly On... Texas True Crime is a high-speed read around Texas, chasing criminals from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods, through gated mansions and trailer parks, from 1938 to the twenty-first century. The stories, which originally appeared as articles in the magazine, come from some of its most notable writers: Cecilia Ballí investigates the drug-fueled violence of the border; Pamela Colloff reports on Amarillo's lethal feud between jocks and punks; Michael Hall re-visits the legend of Joe Ball, a saloon owner who allegedly fed his waitresses to pet alligators; Skip Hollandsworth uncovers the computer nerd who became Dallas' most notorious jewel thief; and Katy Vine tracks a pair of teenage lesbians inspired by Thelma and Louise.

Texas Monthly On... Texas True Crime is the second in a series of books in which the editors of Texas Monthly offer the magazine's inimitable perspective on various aspects of Texas culture, including food, politics, travel, and music, among other topics. Texas Monthly On... Texas Women was released in 2006.

Since 1973, Texas Monthly has spotlighted hundreds of Texans who, for better or worse, make this state like no place else. TEXAS MONTHLY On . . . Texas Women profiles thirteen women who are not only fascinating in their own right, but also representative of the legions of women who have contributed to the character and uniqueness of Texas. They range from First Ladies Laura Bush and Lady Bird Johnson to pop culture icons such as Candy Barr and Janis Joplin—and all of them exemplify the qualities that make Texas women distinctive. The women's profiles originally appeared as articles in the magazine, authored by some of Texas Monthly's notable writers—Cecilia Ballí, Gary Cartwright, Paul Burka, Mimi Swartz, Jan Jarboe Russell, Skip Hollandsworth, Robert Draper, William Broyles Jr., Jan Reid, Joe Nick Patoski, Pamela Colloff, and Helen Thorpe. The writers also introduce their pieces with headnotes that update the stories or, in some cases, tell the story behind the story.

TEXAS MONTHLY On . . . Texas Women is the first in a series of books in which the editors of Texas Monthly will offer the magazine's inimitable perspective on various aspects of Texas culture, including food, politics, travel, and music, among other topics.

Moderation theory describes the process through which radical political actors develop commitments to electoral competition, political pluralism, human rights, and rule of law and come to prefer negotiation, reconciliation, and electoral politics over provocation, confrontation, and contentious action. Revisiting this theory through an examination of two of the most prominent moderate Islamic political forces in recent history, Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey analyzes the gains made and methods implemented by the Reform Front in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Justice and Development Party in Turkey.

Both of these groups represent Muslim reformers who came into continual conflict with unelected adversaries who attempted to block their reformist agendas. Based on extensive field research in both locales, Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey argues that behavioral moderation as practiced by these groups may actually inhibit democratic progress. Political scientist Güneş Murat Tezcür observes that the ability to implement conciliatory tactics, organize electoral parties, and make political compromises impeded democracy when pursued by the Reform Front and the Justice and Development Party. Challenging conventional wisdom, Tezcür's findings have broad implications for the dynamics of democratic progress.

When the Adjutant General's Office published Raphael Thian's "notes" on U.S. military geography in 1880, it produced an invaluable research tool for generations of military historians to come. In this single documented reference volume, Chief Clerk Thian traced the confusing mutations through which the divisions, departments, and districts of the Army's command had evolved since 1813.

The volume is divided into three parts, beginning with the names of the United States Army Continental Commands, the date and authority for their creation, location of the headquarters, geographical changes and discontinuances, and other details including the geographical boundaries embracing each division, department, and district. Part II is filled with background information on states and territories, and Part III lists the maps contained in The Military Atlas of the United States.

The Addenda to this edition expand and update Thian's work. Notes made by Francis B. Heitman to keep his personal copy current are included, as is the Memorandum published by the government in 1906. This addition lists all changes from 1898 through 1905.

In this comprehensive account of olfactory communication and territorial behavior in the Mongolian gerbil, Del Thiessen and PaulineYahr provide the first detailed study of the neurological and physiological mechanisms that control these basic functions. In addition to explaining the links between hormones, genes, olfactory cues, and territorial acts, they also offer a more general picture of gerbil behavior, as well as a brief look at other mammalian species that communicate social status by way of olfactory messages.

Territorial behavior, as defined by the authors, includes all acts that are restricted to a particular area and are crucial for successful reproduction. In the Mongolian gerbil, and probably in other mammals as well, territoriality is controlled by sex hormones acting on specific areas of the central nervous system. Hormones from the gonads apparently act in the brain by altering the genetic apparatus controlling biochemicals used in neural communication. Without these hormones, the animal is socially inert and unable to transmit genes to the next generation. The authors conclude from the results of over ten years of investigation that the most complex social interactions depend on the integrity of the hormone system and its constant tuning by olfactory stimuli.

The book incorporates a review of all previously known studies of gerbil behavior and representative data for many other scent-marking species. A stereotaxic brain atlas for the gerbil is a feature that will be especially helpful to other researchers. The book's eclectic nature should make it valuable to anyone concerned with territorial behavior, hormones and behavior, or brain processes, as well as to those who are specifically interested in the Mongolian gerbil.

Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, an annual anthology of exceptional short fiction rooted in the western United States, debuted in 1988 and continued publication until 1992. Recognizing that the West remains rewarding territory for literary explorations, James Thomas and Seth Horton are now reviving the series in Best of the West 2009.

Thomas and Horton combed some 250 literary journals and magazines to gather these eighteen stories published since the fall of 2007. They come from both emerging and established writers, including Lee K. Abbott, Louise Erdrich, Dagoberto Gilb, Antonya Nelson, Joyce Carol Oates, and Annie Proulx. Like Bass, the editors believe "the Western short story" inhabits a wide territory; the subjects in this collection range from illegal immigrants tending illegal crops in California's national forests, to mismatched Mormon missionaries on the conversion trail in Nevada, to a Native American college student exploring her sexuality, to Papa Hemingway's meditations as he loads the shotgun in his Idaho cabin. As these stories make clear, the West continues to shape our literary landscape. Thomas and Horton have preserved the best of that work in this vital anthology.

Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, an annual anthology of exceptional short fiction rooted in the western United States, debuted in 1988 and continued publication until 1992. Recognizing that the West remains rewarding territory for literary explorations, James Thomas and D. Seth Horton revived the series in 2009.

Best of the West 2011: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri is the latest volume in what has become one of the nation's most important anthologies. Editors Horton and Thomas have chosen twenty stories by writers including Rick Bass, T. C. Boyle, Ron Carlson, Philipp Meyer, Dagoberto Gilb, Yiyun Li, Antonya Nelson, and Sam Shepard. Subjects vary from an Idaho family that breeds lions and tigers with disastrous results, to a Mormon veteran whose mind is taken over by a nineteenth-century consciousness, to a Texas boy who spends an afternoon with Bonnie and Clyde shortly before their deaths. Taken together, these stories suggest that the West has become one of the most exciting and diverse literary regions in the twenty-first century.

Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, an annual anthology of exceptional short fiction rooted in the western United States, debuted in 1988 and continued publication until 1992. Recognizing that the West remains rewarding territory for literary explorations, James Thomas and D. Seth Horton revived the series in 2009.

Best of the West 2010 brings together established and emerging writers who reinterpret this most vital of literary regions and create, as Kent Meyers puts it in his foreword, "gift[s] the nation needs right now." Editors Horton and Thomas have chosen nineteen stories by writers including Sherman Alexie, Rick Bass, Ron Carlson, Julia Glass, William Kittredge, Kent Nelson, and Deb Olin Unferth. Their subjects vary from a Greek community in Wyoming dealing with a suicide, to a re-creation of Christ's crucifixion in New Mexico, to an unlikely friendship that peaks at a burial ground in Alaska. Best of the West 2010 is the latest indication that the West has become one of the most crucial settings for contemporary American fiction.

Contributors:

• Sherman Alexie
• Rick Bass
• John Blanchard
• Elea Carey
• Ron Carlson
• Natalie Diaz
• Darren Dillman
• Ben Ehrenreich
• Julia Glass
• Dina Guidubaldi
• Ben Kostival
• William Kittredge
• Paul Mihas
• Kent Nelson
• Daniel Orozco
• Kirstin Valdez Quade
• Aurelie Sheehan
• Justin St. Germain
• Deb Olin Unferth

Every society builds, and many, if not all, utilize architectural structures as markers to define place, patron, or experience. Often we consider these architectural markers as “monuments” or “monumental” buildings. Ancient Rome, in particular, is a society recognized for the monumentality of its buildings. While few would deny that the term “monumental” is appropriate for ancient Roman architecture, the nature of this characterization and its development in pre-Roman Italy is rarely considered carefully. What is “monumental” about Etruscan and early Roman architecture?

Delving into the crucial period before the zenith of Imperial Roman building, Monumentality in Etruscan and Early Roman Architecture addresses such questions as, “What factors drove the emergence of scale as a defining element of ancient Italian architecture?” and “How did monumentality arise as a key feature of Roman architecture?” Contributors Elizabeth Colantoni, Anthony Tuck, Nancy A. Winter, P. Gregory Warden, John N. Hopkins, Penelope J. E. Davies, and Ingrid Edlund-Berry reflect on the ways in which ancient Etruscans and Romans utilized the concepts of commemoration, durability, and visibility to achieve monumentality. The editors’ preface and introduction underscore the notion of architectural evolution toward monumentality as being connected to the changing social and political strategies of the ruling elites.

By also considering technical components, this collection emphasizes the development and the ideological significance of Etruscan and early Roman monumentality from a variety of viewpoints and disciplines. The result is a broad range of interpretations celebrating both ancient and modern perspectives.

Texans love the morning meal, whether it’s bacon and eggs (often eaten in a breakfast taco) or something as distinctively nontraditional as saag paneer omelets, pon haus, or goat curry. A Lone Star breakfast can be a time for eating healthy, or for indulging in decadent food and drink. And with Texas’s rich regional and cultural diversity, an amazing variety of dishes graces the state’s breakfast and brunch tables. The first Texas cookbook dedicated exclusively to the morning meal, Breakfast in Texas gathers nearly one hundred recipes that range from perfectly prepared classics to the breakfast foods of our regional cuisines (Southern, Mexican, German, Czech, Indian, and Asian among them) to stand-out dishes from the state’s established and rising chefs and restaurants.

Terry Thompson-Anderson organizes the book into sections that cover breakfast and brunch libations (with and without alcohol); simple, classic, and fancy egg presentations; pancakes, French toast, and waffles; meat lover’s dishes; seafood and shellfish; vegan dishes and sides; and pastries. The recipes reference locally sourced ingredients whenever possible, and Thompson-Anderson provides enjoyable notes about the chefs who created them or the cultural history they represent. She also offers an expert primer on cooking eggs, featuring an encounter with Julia Child, as well as a selection of theme brunches (the boozy brunch, the make-ahead brunch, New Year’s Day brunch, Mother’s Day brunch with seasonal ingredients, teenage daughter’s post-slumber party breakfast, and more). Sandy Wilson’s color photographs of many of the dishes and the chefs and restaurants who serve them provide a lovely visual counterpoint to the appetizing text.

With a bounty of locally grown meats and produce, artisanal cheeses, and a flourishing wine culture, it’s a luscious time to be cooking in Texas. From restaurant chefs to home cooks, Texans are going to local dairies, orchards, farmers’ markets, ranches, vineyards, and seafood sellers to buy the very freshest ingredients, whether we’re cooking traditional favorites or the latest haute cuisine. We’ve discovered that Texas terroir—our rich variety of climates and soils, as well as our diverse ethnic cultures—creates a unique “taste of place” that gives Texas food a flavor all its own.

Written by one of Texas’s leading cookbook authors, Terry Thompson-Anderson, Texas on the Table presents 150 new and classic recipes, along with stories of the people—farmers, ranchers, shrimpers, cheesemakers, winemakers, and chefs—who inspired so many of them and who are changing the taste of Texas food. The recipes span the full range from finger foods and first courses to soups and breads, salads, seafood, chicken, meat (including wild game), sides and vegetarian dishes, and sweets. Some of the recipes come from the state’s most renowned chefs, and all are user-friendly for home cooks. Finally, the authors and winemakers tell which recipes they turn to when opening their favorite wines.

This delicious compilation of recipes and stories of the people behind them, illustrated with Sandy Wilson’s beautiful photographs, makes Texas on the Table the must-have cookbook for everyone who relishes the flavors of the Lone Star State.

This collection of essays presents a stimulating and challenging examination of the nature of institutional adjustment, its history and its future, its problems and its purposes. The focus is on the pioneer work done by the late Clarence Ayres, of the University of Texas, in the study of the processes of change and growth and the nature of modern industrialized economies. The opening essay, a provocative discussion of “The Theory of Institutional Adjustment,” is Ayres’s contribution.

The succeeding essays examine several aspects of institutional adjustment:

• Kenneth H. Parsons discusses “The Institutional Basis of a Progressive Approach to Economic Development.”
• Wendell Gordon considers “Orthodox Economics and Institutionalized Behavior.”
• Gunnar Myrdal brings the breadth of his knowledge of many different economies and the institutional contexts within which they operate to a study of the “Adjustment of Economic Institutions in Contemporary America.”
• Forest Hill provides a historical survey of the process of growth and change in his essay “The Government and Institutional Adjustment: The American Experience.”
• Wolfgang Friedmann discusses some legal aspects of the subject in “Creative Legal Interpretation and the Process of Institutional Adjustment.”
• Rounding out this collection of essays, Morris A. Copeland and Gardiner C. Means offer proposals for guiding adjustment and change in specific areas: “Implementing the Objective of Full Employment in Our Free Enterprise System” and “Monetary Institutions to Serve the Modern Economy.”

These essays were originally read at a conference sponsored by the Department of Economics of the University of Texas at Austin in April and May of 1965.

“We were trying to change the vision and the conversation about border fears.”

Border Odyssey takes us on a drive toward understanding the U.S./Mexico divide: all 1,969 miles—from Boca Chica to Tijuana—pressing on with the useful fiction of a map.

“We needed to go to the place where countless innocent people had been kicked, cussed, spit on, arrested, detained, trafficked, and killed. It would become clear that the border, la frontera, was more multifaceted and profound than anything we could have invented about it from afar.”

Along the journey, five centuries of cultural history (indigenous, French, Spanish, Mexican, African American, colonist, and U.S.), wars, and legislation unfold. And through observation, conversation, and meditation, Border Odyssey scopes the stories of the people and towns on both sides.

“Stories are the opposite of walls: they demand release, retelling, showing, connecting, each image chipping away at boundaries. Walls are full stops. But stories are like commas, always making possible the next clause.”

Among the terrain traversed: walls and more walls, unexpected roadblocks and patrol officers; a golf course (you could drive a ball across the border); a Civil War battlefield (you could camp there); the southernmost plantation in the United States; a hand-drawn ferry, a road-runner tracked desert, and a breathtaking national park; barbed wire, bridges, and a trucking-trade thoroughfare; ghosts with guns; obscured, unmarked, and unpaved roads; a Catholic priest and his dogs, artwork, icons, and political cartoons; a sheriff and a chain-smoking mayor; a Tex-Mex eatery empty of customers and a B&B shuttering its doors; murder-laden newspaper headlines at breakfast; the kindness of the border-crossing underground; and too many elderly, impoverished, ex-U.S. farmworkers, braceros, lined up to have Thompson take their photograph.

Finding fresh fruits and vegetables is as easy as going to the grocery store for most Americans—which makes it all too easy to forget that our food is cultivated, harvested, and packaged by farmworkers who labor for less pay, fewer benefits, and under more dangerous conditions than workers in almost any other sector of the U.S. economy. Seeking to end the public's ignorance and improve workers' living and working conditions, this book addresses the major factors that affect farmworkers' lives while offering practical strategies for action on farmworker issues.

The contributors to this book are all farmworker advocates—student and community activists and farmworkers themselves. Focusing on workers in the Southeast United States, a previously understudied region, they cover a range of issues, from labor organizing, to the rise of agribusiness, to current health, educational, and legal challenges faced by farmworkers. The authors blend coverage of each issue with practical suggestions for working with farmworkers and other advocates to achieve justice in our food system both regionally and nationally.

Studies in Upplandic Runography is a detailed treatment of the runic inscriptions from the province of Uppland, Sweden, where runic art reached a high point in A.D. 1200 and where runic inscriptions are most numerous. Most of the runic monuments discussed are from the eleventh century, an important period when Sweden was making the transition from paganism to Christianity.

The names of nearly fifty rune-carvers (runographers), professional and amateur, are known. However, many of the inscriptions were left unsigned. Claiborne Thompson examines the major problem of how an unsigned inscription is attributed to a known carver. Since each carver had a distinctive style which must be delineated, the book contains an exhaustive survey of the norms of Upplandic runography. In order to match the inscriptions with their carvers, Thompson analyzes the entire corpus of inscriptions from Uppland, their formation, the artistic designs they bear, the shapes of the runes on them, the orthography and language on them, and the manner in which they were carved.

Thompson then establishes a set of criteria for determining the authorship of a runic monument, stressing rune forms. All of the criteria are used in an extensive discussion of the carvings of Asmund Karasun, an interesting and influential carver from the first half of the eleventh century.

In addition, Thompson’s review of research describes scholarly interest in the problems of runography beginning in the early seventeenth century. The book includes an introductory sketch of the cultural background of Uppland and relates the runic tradition to historical and cultural traditions in eleventh-century Sweden.

Following in the footsteps of Napoleon's army, Europeans invaded Egypt in the early nineteenth century to gaze in wonder at the massive, inscrutable remains of its ancient civilizations. One of these travelers was a twenty-four-year-old Englishman, John Gardner Wilkinson. His copious observations of ancient and modern Egyptian places, artifacts, and lifeways, recorded in such widely read publications as Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians and Handbook for Travellers in Egypt, made him the leading early Victorian authority on ancient Egypt and paved the way for thc scientific study of Egyptology.

In this first full-scale biography of Wilkinson (1797-1875), Jason Thompson skillfully portrays both the man and his era. He follows Wilkinson during his initial sojourn in Egypt (1821-1833) as Wilkinson immersed himself in a contemporary Egyptian lifestyle and in study of its ancient past. He shows Wilkinson in his circle of friends—among them Edward William Lane, Robert Hay and Frederick Catherwood. And he traces how Wilkinson continued to use his Egyptian material in the decades following his return to England.

With the rise of professional Egyptology in the middle and later nineteenth century, Sir Gardner Wilkinson came to be viewed as an amateur and his popularity diminished. Drawing upon recently opened sources, Thompson returns Wilkinson to his rightful place within centuries of Egyptian scholarship and assesses both the vision and the limitations of his work. The result is a compelling portrait of a Victorian "gentleman-scholar" and his cultural milieu.

First published in 1979, this guide has become the standard resource for scientists, divers, and spearfishers interested in the fishes of the tropical Pacific Coast. The authors have revised and updated this edition to include the most current taxonomic information, additional species descriptions, and new illustrations.

In November 1960, the Democratic party dominated Texas. The newly elected vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was a Texan. Democrats held all thirty statewide elective positions. The state legislature had 181 Democrats and no Republicans or anyone else. Then fast forward fifty years to November 2010. Texas has not voted for a Democratic president since 1976. Every statewide elective office is held by Republicans. Representing Texas in Washington is a congressional delegation of twenty-five Republicans and nine Democrats. Republicans control the Texas Senate by a margin of nineteen to twelve and the Texas House of Representatives by 101 to 49.

Red State explores why this transformation of Texas politics took place and what these changes imply for the future. As both a political scientist and a Republican party insider, Wayne Thorburn is especially qualified to explain how a solidly one-party Democratic state has become a Republican stronghold. He analyzes a wealth of data to show how changes in the state’s demographics—including an influx of new residents, the shift from rural to urban, and the growth of the Mexican American population—have moved Texas through three stages of party competition, from two-tiered politics, to two-party competition between Democrats and Republicans, and then to the return to one-party dominance, this time by Republicans. His findings reveal that the shift from Democratic to Republican governance has been driven not by any change in Texans’ ideological perspective or public policy orientation—even when Texans were voting Democrat, conservatives outnumbered liberals or moderates—but by the Republican party’s increasing identification with conservatism since 1960.

On July 4, 1867, a group of men assembled in Houston to establish the Republican Party of Texas. Combatting entrenched statewide support for the Democratic Party and their own internal divisions, Republicans struggled to gain a foothold in the Lone Star State, which had sided with the Confederacy and aligned with the Democratic platform. In The Republican Party of Texas, Wayne Thorburn, former executive director of the Texas GOP, chronicles over one hundred and fifty years of the defeats and victories of the party that became the dominant political force in Texas in the modern era.

Thorburn documents the organizational structure of the Texas GOP, drawing attention to prominent names, such as Harry Wurzbach and George W. Bush, alongside lesser-known community leaders who bolstered local support. The 1960s and 1970s proved a watershed era for Texas Republicans as they shored up ideological divides and elected the first Republican governor and more state senators and congressional representatives than ever before. From decisions about candidates and shifting allegiances and political stances, to race-based divisions and strategic cooperation with leaders in the Democratic Party, Thorburn unearths the development of the GOP in Texas to understand the unique Texan conservatism that prevails today.

From Belize to Brazil, the forests of the American neotropics are home to an astonishing array of birds—over 3,700 different species, or nearly 40 percent of all the birds on earth. Because of this overwhelming abundance, birders come from all over the world to try to catch glimpses of species that can be found nowhere else, such as toucans and antbirds, motmots and manakins, bellbirds and cocks-of-the-rock, and practically all of the planet's hummingbirds. Two such birding enthusiasts are Vera and Bob Thornton, who have spent fifteen years photographing these special and exotic birds in the rainforests of eleven different countries of Central and South America. In this book, you'll find more than a hundred spectacular color photographs they took during their travels, along with a highly entertaining account of their adventures—and misadventures—in chasing these exotic neotropicals.

The birds pictured here are among the Thorntons' personal favorites—birds that, in their words, "either dazzled us with their beauty, or charmed us by their behavior, or, in a few cases, simply challenged us by the mystique of their rarity." This latter category includes such elusive and sought-after birds as the Black-crowned Antpitta, the Zigzag Heron, the Rufous-vented Ground-Cuckoo, the Bare-necked Umbrellabird, and the monkey-eating Harpy Eagle. In the accompanying text, Bob Thornton engagingly describes the challenges as well as the magic of negotiating the neotropical rainforests in search of colorful birds to photograph. For those who would like to follow in the Thorntons' footsteps, there are also helpful tips about photographic gear and techniques, preferred places to see the birds, lodging, and guides. For everyone who enjoys excellent nature photography, Chasing Neotropical Birds is a must-have volume on the coffee table or in the library.

Honorable Mention, Southern Books Competition, 1999

Known to many as "the butterflies of the bird world," wood warblers allure even the most experienced and discriminating birders. Their annual migrations to and from nesting areas in the United States and Canada draw thousands of birders to places such as High Island, Texas; Crane Creek, Ohio; and Point Pelee, Ontario, where warblers stop to rest and feed during the long journey. There birders have a chance to see and photograph these colorful, elusive songbirds whose quick, darting flight among high branches and thick cover makes them some of the most challenging birds to observe and identify.

In this entertaining, beautifully illustrated book, Bob Thornton recounts his and Vera Thornton's cross-continent adventures in finding and photographing all 52 species of wood warblers that nest in the United States. In addition to describing where and how they photographed each species, Thornton tells marvelous stories of the colorful characters they encountered along the way. He also touches on the current human threats to wood warblers that come from loss of habitat.

A study of Maya dental modification from archaeological sites spanning three millennia.

Dental modification was common across ancient societies, but perhaps none were more avid practitioners than the Maya. They filed their teeth flat or pointy, polished and drilled them, and crafted decorative inlays of jade and pyrite. Unusually, Maya of all social classes, ages, and professions engaged in dental modification. What did it mean to them?

Ancient Maya Teeth is the most comprehensive study of Maya dental modification ever published, based on thousands of teeth recovered from 130 sites spanning three millennia. Esteemed archaeologist Vera Tiesler sifts the evidence, much of it gathered with her own hands and illustrated here with more than a hundred photographs. Exploring the underlying theory and practice of dental modification, Tiesler raises key questions. How did modifications vary across the individual’s lifespan? What tools were used? How did the Maya deal with pain—and malpractice? How did they keep their dentitions healthy, functioning, and beautiful? What were the relationships among gender, social identity, and particular dental-modification choices? Addressing these and other issues, Ancient Maya Teeth reveals how dental-modification customs shifted over the centuries, indexing other significant developments in Mayan cultural history.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book

Flip through the channels at any hour of the day or night, and a television talk show is almost certainly on. Whether it offers late-night entertainment with David Letterman, share-your-pain empathy with Oprah Winfrey, trash talk with Jerry Springer, or intellectual give-and-take with Bill Moyers, the talk show is one of television's most popular and enduring formats, with a history as old as the medium itself.

Bernard Timberg here offers a comprehensive history of the first fifty years of television talk, replete with memorable moments from a wide range of classic talk shows, as well as many of today's most popular programs. Dividing the history into five eras, he shows how the evolution of the television talk show is connected to both broad patterns in American culture and the economic, regulatory, technological, and social history of the broadcasting industry. Robert Erler's "A Guide to Television Talk" complements the text with an extensive "who's who" listing of important people and programs in the history of television talk.

Billie Timmons was fourteen when he met Charles Goodnight—over a wagonload of manure that had been jammed on a gatepost—and he went to work on the Goodnight Cross J Ranch shortly thereafter. The spirit of helpfulness that led Mr. Goodnight to strip off his coat and lift the wagon free for a lad in need sets the tone of this book, in which the author unwinds a spool of recollections of range-riding in Texas and North Dakota over an eighteen-year period.

When Billie Timmons went to work for Mr. Goodnight in 1892, Texas was undergoing a rapid transition from open range to fences. But around Texas campfires he heard tales about the northern range, told by cowboys who had ridden there and who had seen the northern lights, the tall free grass, swollen streams, and stampeding cattle. A longing to see that exciting country took hold of young Timmons.

His chance came when four buffaloes from the Goodnight ranch needed a nursemaid for their freight car trip to Yellowstone Park. Once in the northern country, Timmons stayed, casting his lot with the cowmen of North Dakota. He became the protégé of an extraordinary man, William Ray; he was foreman, friend, and confidant of banker-rancher Wilse Richards, a member of the Cowboy Hall of Fame. But even during his days in North Dakota he never lost touch with Charles Goodnight, a lifelong friend, and his portrayal of Goodnight provides much insight into the character of the man whose name belongs to the West.

In this book you experience the terror of being lost in the dead-white expanse of a North Dakota snowstorm; the gaiety of cowboy dances, for which there were never enough women available; the excitement of a near-riot in a Hebron, North Dakota, saloon, where cowboys from the 75 Ranch drank up or poured out all the liquor, then smashed all the glasses and bottles—one day before the state became bone-dry; and the loneliness of work on the range, where a flickering lantern on the side of a chuck wagon on a stormy night meant home for many a cowboy. Running like a bright thread through the narrative is Billie Timmons’s love of horses, from whom he learned the wisdom that some horses and some men are to be handled with great care and others are not to be handled at all. His chapter on Buck, his best-loved horse, is memorable.

In North Dakota, as in Texas, fences brought the end of the big herds and the end of cowboying for a man who enjoyed it to the hilt.

The practice of reading aloud has a long history, and the tradition still survives in Cuba as a hard-won right deeply embedded in cigar factory workers' culture. In El Lector, Araceli Tinajero deftly traces the evolution of the reader from nineteenth-century Cuba to the present and its eventual dissemination to Tampa, Key West, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. In interviews with present-day and retired readers, she records testimonies that otherwise would have been lost forever, creating a valuable archive for future historians.

Through a close examination of journals, newspapers, and personal interviews, Tinajero relates how the reading was organized, how the readers and readings were selected, and how the process affected the relationship between workers and factory owners. Because of the reader, cigar factory workers were far more cultured and in touch with the political currents of the day than other workers. But it was not only the reading material, which provided political and literary information that yielded self-education, that influenced the workers; the act of being read to increased the discipline and timing of the artisan's job.

From the mountainous area bordering Arizona and New Mexico, the western range of the Sierra Madres reaches south into Mexico to the state of Jalisco. The eastern range stretches from the Texas border down to Morelia and the Valley of Mexico. Ben Tinker spent years exploring this rugged wilderness and the vast deserts of Sonora and Baja California. Mexican Wilderness and Wildlife condenses a lifetime of outdoor lore and learning.

Tinker provides detailed life sketches of Mexico's Desert Bighorn Sheep, Pronghorn Antelope, Mule Deer, Whitetail Deer, Peccary, Grizzly and Black Bears, Wild Turkey, Jaguar, Mountain Lion, Timber Wolf, Coyote, and Bobcat. Each is illustrated by wildlife artist Doris Tischler, and Tinker describes their habitats, habits, reproduction, and peculiarities. Information is supplied on the physical measurements of several species of major wildlife. Tinker's observations are laced with anecdotes about his experiences in Mexico's remote backcountry—encounters with bandits, survival in the desert mountains, and the chance discovery of archaeological ruins.

The book describes the terrain and flora of the four life zones inhabited by major game and predatory animals. The section on desert water is a fascinating account of how animals thrive among cacti, thorn trees, and creosote bush remote from streams and waterholes. There is also a brief discussion of conservation efforts in Mexico, chapters on trout fishing in the Sierra Madre Occidental and Baja California, and a guide to big game habitats. This volume will be valuable to hunters, conservationists, naturalists, and others interested in the wilderness and wildlife of Mexico.

Ben Tinker collected much of the material for this book during the years he roamed northern Mexico as Federal Game Guardian. Though an American, Tinker had long been familiar with Mexican wildlife through his Sonoran ranching operation and was known for his interest in conservation when he was appointed by Alvaro Obregón in 1922.

Wherever cattle have been raised on a large scale horsemen have been there to handle them; and wherever these horsemen have existed they have left an indelible mark upon the history of the land. Frequently they have been ignorant, violent, and brutal. Always they have been vigorous and individualistic. They have taken their herds into frontier areas, opened new country, fought and driven off earlier inhabitants, participated in revolutions, battled among themselves, and generally lived lives which, colorful and somewhat frightening to their contemporaries, have become robust legends to those who followed them.

Edward Larocque Tinker portrays the life of these people in the two Americas, the conditions which created them, and those that ultimately destroyed or transformed them.

"Ever since I was a small boy, when my parents returned from Mexico bringing me a charro outfit complete with saddle and bridle, Latin America has beckoned with the finger of romance," Mr. Tinker recalls. "As soon as I was old enough, I made many trips to Mexico and, in the days of Porfirio Díaz, learned to know it from the border to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. During the Revolution I was with General Álvaro Obregón when he was a Teniente Coronel in his Sonora Campaign, and, although I was only a lawyer on a holiday, took care of his wounded in the battel of San Joaquín. Later, in Pancho Villa's train, I was present at Celaya when he was defeated by Obregón.

"Always an ardent horseman, I worked many a roundup with the vaqueros of Sonora and Chihuahua, and with the cowboys of our Southwest. . . .

"I saw the similarity between the American cowboy, the Argentine Gaucho, and the Vaquero of Mexico. They all received their gear and technique of cattle handling from Spain, and developed the same independence, courage, and hardihood. I thought if these qualities were better known they might serve as a bridge to closer understanding throughout the Americas."

From his study of the lives of these horsemen, Tinker proceeds to an examination of the literature that evolved among and then about them.

The first and largest part of the book deals with the gaucho of Argentina and Uruguay. The second and third sections examine the charro of Mexico and the cowboy of the United States.

Making headlines when it was launched in 2015, Omise’eke Tinsley’s undergraduate course “Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism” has inspired students from all walks of life. In Beyoncé in Formation, Tinsley now takes her rich observations beyond the classroom, using the blockbuster album and video Lemonade as a soundtrack for vital new-millennium narratives.

Woven with candid observations about her life as a feminist scholar of African studies and a cisgender femme married to a trans spouse, Tinsley’s “Femme-onade” mixtape explores myriad facets of black women’s sexuality and gender. Turning to Beyoncé’s “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” Tinsley assesses black feminist critiques of marriage and then considers the models of motherhood offered in “Daddy Lessons,” interspersing these passages with memories from Tinsley’s multiracial family history. Her chapters on nontraditional bonds culminate in a discussion of contemporary LGBT politics through the lens of the internet-breaking video “Formation,” underscoring why Beyoncé’s black femme-inism isn’t only for ciswomen. From pleasure politics and the struggle for black women’s reproductive justice to the subtext of blues and country music traditions, the landscape in this tour is populated by activists and artists (including Loretta Lynn) and infused with vibrant interpretations of Queen Bey’s provocative, peerless imagery and lyrics.

In the tradition of Roxanne Gay’s Bad Feminist and Jill Lepore’s best-selling cultural histories, Beyoncé in Formation is the work of a daring intellectual who is poised to spark a new conversation about freedom and identity in America.

2023 John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular and American Culture Association (PACA) / Popular Culture Association (PCA)

2023 Honorable Mention, Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, Popular and American Culture Association (PACA) / Popular Culture Association (PCA)

A celebration of the distinctive and politically defiant art of Black queer, cis-, and transfemmes, from the work of Janelle Monáe and Janet Mock to that of Indya Moore and Kelsey Lu.

The Color Pynk is a passionate exploration of Black femme poetics of survival. Sidelined by liberal feminists and invisible to mainstream civil rights movements, Black femmes spent the Trump years doing what they so often do best: creating politically engaged art, entertainment, and ideas. In the first full-length study of Black queer, cis-, and trans-femininity, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley argues that this creative work offers a distinctive challenge to power structures that limit how we color, gender, and explore freedom.

Tinsley engages 2017–2020 Black femme cultural production that colorfully and provocatively imagines freedom in the stark white face of its impossibility. Looking to the music of Janelle Monáe and Kelsey Lu, Janet Mock’s writing for the television show Pose, the fashion of Indya Moore and (F)empower, and the films of Tourmaline and Juliana Huxtable, as well as poetry and novels, The Color Pynk conceptualizes Black femme as a set of consciously, continually rescripted cultural and aesthetic practices that disrupts conventional meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. There is an exuberant defiance in queer Black femininity, Tinsley finds—so that Black femmes continue to love themselves wildly in a world that resists their joy.

Winner, James Beard Foundation Book Award, 2016
Art of Eating Prize, 2015
BCALA Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation, Black Caucus of the American Library Association, 2016

Women of African descent have contributed to America’s food culture for centuries, but their rich and varied involvement is still overshadowed by the demeaning stereotype of an illiterate “Aunt Jemima” who cooked mostly by natural instinct. To discover the true role of black women in the creation of American, and especially southern, cuisine, Toni Tipton-Martin has spent years amassing one of the world’s largest private collections of cookbooks published by African American authors, looking for evidence of their impact on American food, families, and communities and for ways we might use that knowledge to inspire community wellness of every kind.

The Jemima Code presents more than 150 black cookbooks that range from a rare 1827 house servant’s manual, the first book published by an African American in the trade, to modern classics by authors such as Edna Lewis and Vertamae Grosvenor. The books are arranged chronologically and illustrated with photos of their covers; many also display selected interior pages, including recipes. Tipton-Martin provides notes on the authors and their contributions and the significance of each book, while her chapter introductions summarize the cultural history reflected in the books that follow. These cookbooks offer firsthand evidence that African Americans cooked creative masterpieces from meager provisions, educated young chefs, operated food businesses, and nourished the African American community through the long struggle for human rights. The Jemima Code transforms America’s most maligned kitchen servant into an inspirational and powerful model of culinary wisdom and cultural authority.

With a wide variety of habitats ranging from southeastern swamps to western deserts, Texas is home to numerous species of frogs, toads, and salamanders. Each area of Texas has a particular set of species that has evolved there over thousands of years. Indeed, most amphibians are not very mobile, and many live their entire lives within a few square meters. This makes them particularly vulnerable to environmental degradation and habitat destruction.

Texas Amphibians is the only field guide focused exclusively on the state’s frogs, toads, and salamanders. It presents brief, general accounts of the two orders and fifteen families. Then it identifies each of the seventy-two species in detail, including size, description, voice (if applicable), similar species, distribution (with maps), natural history, reproduction, subspecies (if applicable), and comments and conservation information. Color photographs illustrate the species.

The book also includes a general introduction to amphibian natural history, conservation, observation and collection, maintenance in captivity, museum and preserved specimens, and scientific and common names, as well as scientific keys to Texas salamanders and frogs and a generic key to amphibian larvae. This wealth of information, compiled by a team of experts who collectively have over a century of experience in field herpetology, will increase our appreciation for amphibians and the vital role they play as an early indicator of threats to the quality of the environment that we all share.

Walter Prescott Webb became one of the best known interpreters of the American West following the publication of The Great Plains in 1931. That book remained one of the outstanding studies of the region for decades and attracted considerable attention over the years for its unusual emphasis on the impact of geographic factors on the process of settlement. Using manuscript sources, some of which had not previously been available, Gregory M. Tobin has traced the elements that went into the planning and writing of The Great Plains and that account for its distinctive approach to the writing of a regional history.

Tobin emphasizes two aspects of Webb's life that molded the historian's outlook: his early family life and community connections in West Texas and his admiration for the ideas of scholar Lindley Miller Keasbey. Webb reacted strongly against the assumption that the only cultural values of any real worth emanated from the urban and sophisticated East; he was determined to write the history of his own people in a way that would reveal the scale of their anonymous contribution to American civilization. By reverting to Keasbey's stress on the relationship between natural environment and social institutions, Webb broadened his study to take in what he believed to be a distinct geographic environment. The result was The Great Plains, an assertion of individual and regional identity by a man with a personal stake in establishing the image of a distinctive Plains civilization.

Although The Making of a History is not a full biography of Walter Prescott Webb, it is the first biographically oriented study of a man regarded as one of the twentieth century's major western historians. It places his development within the framework of his intellectual and social setting and, in a sense, subjects his career to the same type of scrutiny that he advocated as the basis of the study of evolving cultures.

This is the second volume in the Oratory of Classical Greece series. Planned for publication over several years, the series will present all of the surviving speeches from the late fifth and fourth centuries B.C. in new translations prepared by classical scholars who are at the forefront of the discipline. These translations are especially designed for the needs and interests of today's undergraduates, Greekless scholars in other disciplines, and the general public.

Classical oratory is an invaluable resource for the study of ancient Greek life and culture. The speeches offer evidence on Greek moral views, social and economic conditions, political and social ideology, and other aspects of Athenian culture that have been largely ignored: women and family life, slavery, and religion, to name just a few.

This volume contains all the complete works and eleven of the largest fragments attributed to Lysias, the leading speechwriter of the generation (403-380 B.C.) after the Peloponnesian War, who was also one of the finest and most deceptive storytellers of all time. As a noncitizen resident in Athens, Lysias could take no direct part in politics, but his speeches, written for clients to deliver in court, paint vivid pictures of various private and public disputes: one speaker defends himself on a charge of murdering his wife's lover, while another is accused of having caused the deaths of democratic activists under the short-lived oligarchy of the Thirty (404/3), despite his claim to be protected by the amnesty that accompanied the restoration of democracy in 403.

The story of Sir Guy, once as familiar as the tales of King Arthur, is now largely forgotten.

Originally composed about 1240 A.D., this heroic romance early circulated in countless manuscripts, first in poetic, then in expanded prose form. Later, in 1525, the extended version was printed in French, and later still, in 1821, it was rendered into English. That last essential act unfortunately served little purpose, since the translation was thereafter available only to successive descendants of the family that prepared it. In 1959, however, The University of Texas acquired this unique translation, followed by a copy of the rare 1525 issue in 1963, and with both texts rejoined now offers, through William B. Todd, one final service: an edition for present readers.

So rescued from oblivion, Guy of Warwick emerges as a grand exemplum of chivalric conduct. Perhaps even more than Arthur, or Launcelot, or Galahad, the hero is a very proper knight, displaying at once all the mundane attributes of nobility: unswerving loyalty to kin, kith, and king; the ready rescue of damsels in distress; the prompt dispatch of dragons, giants, or other enemies of the realm—and in aftertime exhibiting also all the spiritual qualities of true gentility: defense of the faith against every infidel, mortification of the flesh, and final withdrawal to a hermitage. Thus Guy may rightly deserve not only his early accolade as the "Hercules of England" but also some measure of the tribute usually reserved for a patron saint. However regarded, this knight's exploits must necessarily rank as one of the great "matters of Britain" and again become an essential part of Western cultural heritage.

Thomas James Wise (1859–1937), though destined to receive in his own lifetime practically every honor the world of letters could bestow, is remembered today as perhaps the greatest malefactor in all of literary history. From 1934 to 1957 various enquiries have implicated him first in the manufacture of more than fifty predated "original" editions of eminent Victorian authors, then in seven additional forgeries, later in countless piracies of other nineteenth-century work, and finally in repeated acts of vandalism upon forty-one seventeenth-century plays. It is fitting that Wise himself appears as a contributor to this volume. Included are his original introduction to the Browning Library, his letters to bookseller J. E. Cornish, his extraordinary letter to Sir Edmund Gosse, and a note to H. Buxton Forman.

These Centenary Studies review the course of research over twenty-five years, designate topics requiring further investigation, and assess new evidence of Wise's villainies. One more forgery is identified, the provenance of others reexamined, the forger's method of purveying his wares closely appraised, his association with H. Buxton Forman and Sir Edmund Gosse more precisely defined, and the range of his activities summarized in an annotated handlist. The record includes at least 400 printings directly attributed to Wise, as well as 23 suppressed or abortive issues, and 29 others in which he seems to be somewhat involved. Through these perspectives the culprit appears even more contemptible and, possibly for this very reason, ever more intriguing as a cause célèbre in literary scholarship.

The illustration on the cover of this book reproduces, through a magnifying glass, the peculiar question mark appearing in certain forgeries printed for Wise by the firm of Richard Clay & Sons. The mark may also implicate Wise in other irregular printings, including The Death of Balder.

It was like a remake of The Cowboy and the Lady, except that this time they weren't friends. The 1990 Texas governor's race pitted Republican Clayton Williams, a politically conservative rancher and oil millionaire, against Democrat Ann Richards, an experienced progressive politician noted for her toughness and quick wit. Their differences offered voters a choice not only of policies and programs but also of stereotypes and myths of men's and women's proper roles.

Claytie and the Lady is the first in-depth look at how gender affected the 1990 governor's race. The authors' analysis reveals that Ann Richards' victory was a result of a unique combination of characteristics. She was simultaneously tough enough to convince voters that she could lead and feminine enough to put them at ease. At the same time, she remained committed to the progressive and women's issues that had won her the early support of feminists and progressives. The authors also show how Clayton Williams' appeal to the Texas cowboy myth backfired when he broke the cowboy code of chivalry to women.

The authors set their discussion within the historical context of twentieth-century Texas politics and the theoretical context of gender politics in order to pose a number of thought-provoking questions about the effects of women's participation in political life. Interviews with key players in the 1990 election, including Governor Ann Richards, add a lively and insightful counterpoint to the text.

While there are numerous film studies that focus on one particular grouping of films—by nationality, by era, or by technique—here is the first single volume that incorporates all of the above, offering a broad overview of experimental Latin American film produced over the last twenty years.

Analyzing seventeen recent films by eleven different filmmakers from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru, Cynthia Tompkins uses a comparative approach that finds commonalities among the disparate works in terms of their influences, aesthetics, and techniques. Tompkins introduces each film first in its sociohistorical context before summarizing it and then subverting its canonical interpretation. Pivotal to her close readings of the films and their convergences as a collective cinema is Tompkins’s application of Deleuzian film theory and the concept of the time-image as it pertains to the treatment of time and repetition. Tompkins also explores such topics as the theme of decolonization, the consistent use of montage, paratactically structured narratives, and the fusion of documentary conventions and neorealism with drama. An invaluable contribution to any dialogue on the avant-garde in general and to filmmaking both in and out of Latin America, Experimental Latin American Cinema is also a welcome and insightful addition to Latin American studies as a whole.

Lucy Pier Stevens, a twenty-one-year-old woman from Ohio, began a visit to her aunt’s family near Bellville, Texas, on Christmas Day, 1859. Little did she know how drastically her life would change on April 4, 1861, when the outbreak of the Civil War made returning home impossible. Stranded in enemy territory for the duration of the war, how would she reconcile her Northern upbringing with the Southern sentiments surrounding her?

Lucy Stevens’s diary—one of few women’s diaries from Civil War–era Texas and the only one written by a Northerner—offers a unique perspective on daily life at the fringes of America’s bloodiest conflict. An articulate, educated, and keen observer, Stevens took note seemingly of everything—the weather, illnesses, food shortages, parties, church attendance, chores, schools, childbirth, death, the family’s slaves, and political and military news. As she confided her private thoughts to her journal, she unwittingly revealed how her love for her Texas family and the Confederate soldier boys she came to care for blurred her loyalties, even as she continued to long for her home in Ohio. Showing how the ties of heritage, kinship, friendship, and community transcended the sharpest division in US history, this rare diary and Vicki Adams Tongate’s insightful historical commentary on it provide a trove of information on women’s history, Texas history, and Civil War history.

In this first overview of the Brazilian republican state based on extensive primary source material, Steven Topik demonstrates that well before the disruption of the export economy in 1929, the Brazilian state was one of the most interventionist in Latin America. This study counters the previous general belief that before 1930 Brazil was dominated by an export oligarchy comprised of European and North American capitalists and that only later did the state become prominent in the country’s economic development.

Topik examines the state’s performance during the First Republic (1889–1930) in four sectors—finance, the coffee trade, railroads, and industry. By looking at the controversies in these areas, he explains how domestic interclass and international struggles shaped policy and notes the degree to which the state acted relatively independently of civil society.

Topik’s primary concern is the actions of state officials and whether their decisions reflected the demands of the ruling class. He shows that conflicting interests of fractions of the ruling class and foreign investors gradually led to far greater state participation than any of the participants originally desired, and that the structure of the economy and of society—not the intentions of the actors—best explains the state’s economic presence.

Between 1850 and 1930, Latin America's integration into the world economy through the export of raw materials transformed the region. This encounter was nearly as dramatic as the conquistadors' epic confrontation with Native American civilizations centuries before. An emphasis on foreign markets and capital replaced protectionism and self-sufficiency as the hemisphere's guiding principles. In many ways, the means employed during this period to tie Latin America more closely to western Europe and North America resemble strategies currently in vogue. Much can be learned from analyzing the first time that Latin Americans embraced export-led growth.

This book focuses on the impact of three key export commodities: coffee, henequen, and petroleum. The authors concentrate on these rather than on national economies because they illustrate more concretely the interaction between the environment, natural and human resources, and the world economy. By analyzing how different products spun complex webs of relationships with their respective markets, the essays in this book illuminate the tensions and contradictions found in the often conflictive relationship between the local and the global, between agency and the not-so-invisible hand. Ultimately, the contributors argue that the results of the "second conquest" were not one-sided as Latin Americans and foreigners together forged a new economic order—one riddled with contradictions that Latin America is still attempting to resolve today.

First published in Chile in 1969 as Interpretación del desarrollo social centroamericano, this classic is now available in English. The first attempt at an integrated analysis of modern Central America's socioeconomic structure, Torres Rivas's work traces the social development of Central America from independence (1871) up to the 1960s.

Using a dependency framework, but not limited by it, Torres Rivas describes the various divisions of Central American society and their evolution within the liberal development model that has been so much a part of the past century of Central American economic history. The book is compelling in its explanation of the relationship between foreign and native elements in the social development of the region. Torres Rivas describes and analyzes the resulting long-term problems this development has posed for Central America. With a new chapter added for the English edition, History and Society in Central America remains vital for readers interested in the region.

Following completion of the U.S. air base in Natal, Brazil, in 1942, U.S. airmen departing for North Africa during World War II communicated with Brazilian mechanics with a thumbs-up before starting their engines. This sign soon replaced the Brazilian tradition of touching the earlobe to indicate agreement, friendship, and all that was positive and good—yet another indication of the Americanization of Brazil under way during this period.

In this translation of O Imperialismo Sedutor, Antonio Pedro Tota considers both the Good Neighbor Policy and broader cultural influences to argue against simplistic theories of U.S. cultural imperialism and exploitation. He shows that Brazilians actively interpreted, negotiated, and reconfigured U.S. culture in a process of cultural recombination. The market, he argues, was far more important in determining the nature of this cultural exchange than state-directed propaganda efforts because Brazil already was primed to adopt and disseminate American culture within the framework of its own rapidly expanding market for mass culture. By examining the motives and strategies behind rising U.S. influence and its relationship to a simultaneous process of cultural and political centralization in Brazil, Tota shows that these processes were not contradictory, but rather mutually reinforcing.

The Seduction of Brazil brings greater sophistication to both Brazilian and American understanding of the forces at play during this period, and should appeal to historians as well as students of Latin America, culture, and communications.

Set in the High Atlas in pre-modern Morocco, Moon and Henna Tree chronicles the rise and fall of a local potentate, Hmmu. Not content with the territory left to him upon his father’s death, Hmmu, under the influence of his scheming advisor, Ibn al-Zara, begins a campaign to acquire those lands that adjoin his, either through marriage or physical force.

Ahmed Toufiq’s subtle investigation of the abuse of power and its effects on those who suffer under its tyranny also provides a unique look at Amazigh (Berber) culture. While most of Toufiq’s contemporaries focus on modern urban Morocco, he provides a fascinating, and accurate, account of the customs and traditions of a large, yet often ignored, segment of the population. Moon and Henna Tree (in the original Arabic) won the Moroccan Book Prize in 1989.

With a common heritage as former colonies of Europe, why did the United States so outstrip Latin America in terms of economic development in the nineteenth century? In this innovative study, Camilla Townsend challenges the traditional view that North Americans succeeded because of better attitudes toward work—the Protestant work ethic—and argues instead that they prospered because of differences in attitudes towards workers that evolved in the colonial era.

Townsend builds her study around workers' lives in two very similar port cities in the 1820s and 1830s. Through the eyes of the young Frederick Douglass in Baltimore, Maryland, and an Indian woman named Ana Yagual in Guayaquil, Ecuador, she shows how differing attitudes towards race and class in North and South America affected local ways of doing business. This empirical research significantly clarifies the relationship between economic culture and racial identity and its long-term effects.

This is the fourteenth volume in the Oratory of Classical Greece. This series presents all of the surviving speeches from the late fifth and fourth centuries BC in new translations prepared by classical scholars who are at the forefront of the discipline. These translations are especially designed for the needs and interests of today's undergraduates, Greekless scholars in other disciplines, and the general public.

Classical oratory is an invaluable resource for the study of ancient Greek life and culture. The speeches offer evidence on Greek moral views, social and economic conditions, political and social ideology, law and legal procedure, and other aspects of Athenian culture that have recently been attracting particular interest: women and family life, slavery, and religion, to name just a few.

This volume contains translations of all the surviving deliberative speeches of Demosthenes (plus two that are almost certainly not his, although they have been passed down as part of his corpus), as well as the text of a letter from Philip of Macedon to the Athenians. All of the speeches were purportedly written to be delivered to the Athenian assembly and are in fact almost the only examples in Attic oratory of the genre of deliberative oratory. In the Olynthiac and Philippic speeches, Demosthenes identifies the Macedonian king Philip as a major threat to Athens and urges direct action against him. The Philippic speeches later inspired the Roman orator Cicero in his own attacks against Mark Antony, and became one of Demosthenes' claims to fame throughout history.

A remarkably perceptive portrait of the Lone Star State, this collection of pieces from the New Yorker, the Nation, and other publications presents highlights of bestselling author Calvin Trillin’s classic writing on Texas subjects.

"Yes, I do have a Texas connection, but, as we say in the Midwest, where I grew up, not so's you'd know it." So Calvin Trillin introduces this collection of articles and poems about a place that turns up surprisingly often when he's ostensibly writing about something else. Whether reporting on the American scene for the New Yorker, penning comic verse and political commentary for the Nation, or writing his memoirs, Trillin has bumped into Texas again and again. He insists that "this has not been by design . . . there has simply been a lot going on in Texas." Astute readers will note, however, that Trillin's family immigrated to the United States through the port of Galveston, and, after reading this book, many will believe that the Lone Star State has somehow imprinted itself in the family's imagination.

Trillin on Texas gathers some of Trillin's best writing on subjects near to his heart—politics, true crime, food, and rare books, among them—which also have a Texas connection. Indulging his penchant for making "snide and underhanded jokes about respectable public officials," he offers his signature sardonic take on the Bush dynasty and their tendency toward fractured syntax; a faux, but quite believable, LBJ speech; and wry portraits of assorted Texas county judges, small town sheriffs, and Houston immigration lawyers. Trillin takes us on a mouthwatering pilgrimage to the barbecue joint that Texas Monthly proclaimed the best in Texas and describes scouting for books with Larry McMurtry—who rejects all of his "sleepers." He tells the stories of two teenagers who dug up half a million dollars in an ice chest on a South Texas ranch and of rare book dealer Johnny Jenkins, who was found floating in the Colorado River with a bullet wound in the back of his head. And he recounts how redneck movie reviewer "Joe Bob Briggs" fueled a war between Dallas's daily newspapers and pays tribute to two courageous Texas women who spoke truth to power—Molly Ivins and Sissy Farenthold.

Sure to entertain Texans and other folks alike, Trillin on Texas proves once again that Calvin Trillin is one of America's shrewdest observers and wittiest writers.

Winner, Ottis Lock Endowment Award for the best book on East Texas, East Texas Historical Association, 1985
Texas Literary Festival Award for Nonfiction (Southwestern Booksellers Association & Dallas Times Herald), 1985
Annual Publication Award, Texas Chapter of the Wildlife Society, 1984

The story of the land, wildlife, and ecology of East Texas.

Decades after the U.S. Supreme Court and certain governmental actions struck down racial segregation in the larger society, American prison administrators still boldly adhered to discriminatory practices. Not until 1975 did legislation prohibit racial segregation and discrimination in Texas prisons. However, vestiges of this practice endured behind prison walls. Charting the transformation from segregation to desegregation in Texas prisons—which resulted in Texas prisons becoming one of the most desegregated places in America—First Available Cell chronicles the pivotal steps in the process, including prison director George J. Beto's 1965 decision to allow inmates of different races to co-exist in the same prison setting, defying Southern norms.

The authors also clarify the significant impetus for change that emerged in 1972, when a Texas inmate filed a lawsuit alleging racial segregation and discrimination in the Texas Department of Corrections. Perhaps surprisingly, a multiracial group of prisoners sided with the TDC, fearing that desegregated housing would unleash racial violence. Members of the security staff also feared and predicted severe racial violence. Nearly two decades after the 1972 lawsuit, one vestige of segregation remained in place: the double cell. Revealing the aftermath of racial desegregation within that 9 x 5 foot space, First Available Cell tells the story of one of the greatest social experiments with racial desegregation in American history.

Byzantine rule over Anatolia ended in the eleventh century, leaving the population and its Turkish rulers to build social and economic institutions throughout the region. The emerging Anatolian society comprised a highly heterogeneous population of Christians and Muslims whose literati produced legal documents in Arabic, literary texts in Persian, and some of the earliest written works in the Turkish language. Yet the cultural landscape that emerged as a result has received very little attention—until now.

Investigating daily life in Anatolia during the fourteenth century, Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia draws on a creative array of sources, including hagiographies, archaeological evidence, Sufi poetry, and endowment deeds, to present an accessible portrait of a severely under-documented period. Grounded in the many ways food enters the human experience, Nicolas Trépanier’s comprehensive study delves into the Anatolian preparation of meals and the social interactions that mealtime entails—from a villager’s family supper to an elaborately arranged banquet—as well as the production activities of peasants and gardeners; the marketplace exchanges of food between commoners, merchants, and political rulers; and the religious landscape that unfolded around food-related beliefs and practices. Brimming with enlightening details on such diverse topics as agriculture, nomadism, pastoralism, medicine, hospitality, and festival rituals, Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia presents a new understanding of communities that lived at a key juncture of world history.

An examination of director Todd Haynes and his Bob Dylan biopic.

As the first and only Bob Dylan “biopic,” I’m Not There caused a stir when released in 2007. Offering a surreal retelling of moments from Dylan’s life and career, the film is perhaps best known for its distinctive approach to casting, including Cate Blanchett and Marcus Carl Franklin, a Black child actor, as versions of Dylan though none of the characters bear his name. Greenlit by Bob Dylan himself, the film uses Dylan’s music as a score, a triumph for famed queer filmmaker Todd Haynes after encountering issues with copyright in previous projects.

Noah Tsika eloquently characterizes all the ways that Dylan and Haynes harmonize in their methods and sensibilities, interpreting the rule-breaking film as a biography that refuses chronology, disdains factual accuracy, flirts with libel, and cannibalizes Western cinema. Fitting the film’s inspiration, creation, and reception alongside its continuing afterlife, Tsika examines Dylan’s music in the film through the context of intellectual property, raising questions about who owns artistic material and artistic identities and how such material can be reused and repurposed. Tsika’s adventurous analysis touches on gender, race, queerness, celebrity, popular culture, and the law, while offering much to Haynes and Dylan fans alike.

All around us there are wild plants useful for food, medicine, and clothing, but most of us don’t know how to identify or use them. Delena Tull amply supplies that knowledge in this book, which she has now expanded to more thoroughly address plants found in New Mexico and Arizona, as well as Texas.

Extensively illustrated with black-and-white drawings and color photos, this book includes the following special features:

• Recipes for foods made from edible wild plants
• Wild teas and spices
• Wild plant dyes, with instructions for preparing the plants and dying wool, cotton, and other materials
• Instructions for preparing fibers for use in making baskets, textiles, and paper
• Information on wild plants used for making rubber, wax, oil, and soap
• Information on medicinal uses of plants
• Details on hay fever plants and plants that cause rashes
• Instructions for distinguishing edible from poisonous berries
• Detailed information on poisonous plants, including poison ivy, oak, and sumac, as well as herbal treatments for their rashes

Among Mesoamericanists, the agricultural basis of the ancient Maya civilization of the Yucatan Peninsula has been an important topic of research—and controversy. Interest in the agricultural system of the Maya greatly increased as new discoveries showed that the lowland Maya were not limited to slash-and-burn technology, as had been previously believed, but used a variety of more sophisticated agricultural techniques and practices, including terracing, raised fields, and, perhaps, irrigation. Because of the nature of the data and because this form of agricultural technology had been key to explanations of state formation elsewhere in Mesoamerica, raised-field agriculture became a particular focus of investigation.

Pulltrouser Swamp conclusively demonstrates the existence of hydraulic, raised-field agriculture in the Maya lowlands between 150 B.C. and A.D. 850. It presents the findings of the University of Oklahoma's Pulltrouser SwampProject, an NSF-supported interdisciplinary study that combined the talents of archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, paleobotanists, biologists, and zoologists to investigate the remains of the Maya agricultural system in the swampy region of northern Belize.

By examining soils, fossil pollen and other plant remains, gastropods, relic settlements, ceramics, lithics, and other important evidence, the Pulltrouser Swamp team has clearly demonstrated that the features under investigation are relics of Maya-made raised and channelized fields and associated canals. Other data suggest the nature of the swamps in which the fields were constructed, the tools used for construction and cultivation, the possible crops cultivated, and at least one type of settlement near the fields, with its chronology. This verification of raised fields provides dramatic evidence of a large and probably organized workforce engaged in sophisticated and complex agricultural technology. As record of this evidence, Pulltrouser Swamp is a work of seminal importance for all students and scholars of New World prehistory.

During the Golden Age of Islam (seventh through seventeenth centuries A.D.), Muslim philosophers and poets, artists and scientists, princes and laborers created a unique culture that has influenced societies on every continent. This book offers a fully illustrated, highly accessible introduction to an important aspect of that culture—the scientific achievements of medieval Islam.

Howard Turner opens with a historical overview of the spread of Islamic civilization from the Arabian peninsula eastward to India and westward across northern Africa into Spain. He describes how a passion for knowledge led the Muslims during their centuries of empire-building to assimilate and expand the scientific knowledge of older cultures, including those of Greece, India, and China. He explores medieval Islamic accomplishments in cosmology, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, geography, medicine, natural sciences, alchemy, and optics. He also indicates the ways in which Muslim scientific achievement influenced the advance of science in the Western world from the Renaissance to the modern era. This survey of historic Muslim scientific achievements offers students and general readers a window into one of the world's great cultures, one which is experiencing a remarkable resurgence as a religious, political, and social force in our own time.

American historians preoccupied with the stirring events of the Mexican Revolution and the years following tend to neglect the basic causes of the conflict. John Kenneth Turner—a crusading California newspaperman—presents these causes with brilliance and passion in Barbarous Mexico, his exposé of the Díaz regime. Published serially beginning in the fall of 1909, his articles received scores of favorable reviews. The Rochester Times wrote: "The abolitionists in our own ante bellum days did not formulate an indictment as repulsive as that brought against Mexico by this impassioned writer." A British periodical called Turner "an American humanitarian who deserves the thanks of civilisation." Mexican President Francisco I. Madero himself said that Barbarous Mexico contributed greatly to the success of the Revolution.

Despite its fame early in the twentieth century, Barbarous Mexico was out of print for close to sixty years. The present edition, with an introductory biographical essay on Turner by Sinclair Snow and photographs of the principal characters involved, not only reemphasizes the causes of the Mexican Revolution, but provides both lay reader and scholar with a vivid and exciting account of life in Mexico under Porfirio Díaz.

With some 6,000 species of plants, Texas has extraordinary botanical wealth and diversity. Learning to identify plants is the first step in understanding their vital role in nature, and many field guides have been published for that purpose. But to fully appreciate how Texas's native plants have sustained people and animals from prehistoric times to the present, you need Remarkable Plants of Texas.

In this intriguing book, Matt Warnock Turner explores the little-known facts—be they archaeological, historical, material, medicinal, culinary, or cultural—behind our familiar botanical landscape. In sixty-five entries that cover over eighty of our most common native plants from trees, shrubs, and wildflowers to grasses, cacti, vines, and aquatics, he traces our vast array of connections with plants. Turner looks at how people have used plants for food, shelter, medicine, and economic subsistence; how plants have figured in the historical record and in Texas folklore; how plants nourish wildlife; and how some plants have unusual ecological or biological characteristics. Illustrated with over one hundred color photos and organized for easy reference, Remarkable Plants of Texas can function as a guide to individual species as well as an enjoyable natural history of our most fascinating native plants.

All her life, Sugar Turner has had to hustle to survive. An African American woman living in the inner city, she has been a single mother juggling welfare checks, food stamps, boyfriends and husbands, illegal jobs, and home businesses to make ends meet for herself and her five children. Her life's path has also wandered through the wilderness of crack addiction and prostitution, but her strong faith in God and her willingness to work hard for a better life pulled her through. Today, Turner is off welfare and is completing her education. She is computer literate, holds a job in the local school system, has sent three of her children to college, and is happily married.

In this engrossing book, Sugar Turner collaborates with anthropologist Tracy Bachrach Ehlers in telling her story. Through conversations with Ehlers, diary entries, and letters, Turner vividly and openly describes all aspects of her life, including motherhood, relationships with men, welfare and work, and her attachment to her friends, family, and life in the "hood." Ehlers also gives her reactions to Turner's story, discussing not only how it belies the "welfare queen" stereotype, but also how it forced her to confront her own lingering confusions about race, her own bigotry.

What emerges from this book is a fascinating story of two women from radically different backgrounds becoming equal witnesses to each other's lives. By allowing us into the real world of an inner-city African American mother, they replace with compassion and insight the stereotypes, half-truths, and scorn that too often dominate public discourse.

How one company created the dominant aesthetic of digital realism.

Just about every major film now comes to us with an assist from digital effects. The results are obvious in superhero fantasies, yet dramas like Roma also rely on computer-generated imagery to enhance the verisimilitude of scenes. But the realism of digital effects is not actually true to life. It is a realism invented by Hollywood—by one company specifically: Industrial Light & Magic.

The Empire of Effects shows how the effects company known for the puppets and space battles of the original Star Wars went on to develop the dominant aesthetic of digital realism. Julie A. Turnock finds that ILM borrowed its technique from the New Hollywood of the 1970s, incorporating lens flares, wobbly camerawork, haphazard framing, and other cinematography that called attention to the person behind the camera. In the context of digital imagery, however, these aesthetic strategies had the opposite effect, heightening the sense of realism by calling on tropes suggesting the authenticity to which viewers were accustomed. ILM’s style, on display in the most successful films of the 1980s and beyond, was so convincing that other studios were forced to follow suit, and today, ILM is a victim of its own success, having fostered a cinematic monoculture in which it is but one player among many.

Mexico and Mexicans have been involved in every aspect of making the United States from colonial times until the present. Yet our shared history is a largely untold story, eclipsed by headlines about illegal immigration and the drug war. Placing Mexicans and Mexico in the center of American history, this volume elucidates how economic, social, and cultural legacies grounded in colonial New Spain shaped both Mexico and the United States, as well as how Mexican Americans have constructively participated in North American ways of production, politics, social relations, and cultural understandings.

Combining historical, sociological, and cultural perspectives, the contributors to this volume explore the following topics: the Hispanic foundations of North American capitalism; indigenous peoples’ actions and adaptations to living between Mexico and the United States; U.S. literary constructions of a Mexican “other” during the U.S.-Mexican War and the Civil War; the Mexican cotton trade, which helped sustain the Confederacy during the Civil War; the transformation of the Arizona borderlands from a multiethnic Mexican frontier into an industrializing place of “whites” and “Mexicans”; the early-twentieth-century roles of indigenous Mexicans in organizing to demand rights for all workers; the rise of Mexican Americans to claim middle-class lives during and after World War II; and the persistence of a Mexican tradition of racial/ethnic mixing—mestizaje—as an alternative to the racial polarities so long at the center of American life.

Prior to the millennium, economists and policy makers argued that free trade between the United States and Mexico would benefit both Americans and Mexicans. They believed that NAFTA would be a “win-win” proposition that would offer U.S. companies new markets for their products and Mexicans the hope of living in a more developed country with the modern conveniences of wealthier nations. Blending rigorous economic and statistical analysis with concern for the people affected, Mexican Women in American Factories offers the first assessment of whether NAFTA has fulfilled these expectations by examining its socioeconomic impact on workers in a Mexican border town.

Carolyn Tuttle led a group that interviewed 620 women maquila workers in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. The responses from this representative sample refute many of the hopeful predictions made by scholars before NAFTA and reveal instead that little has improved for maquila workers. The women’s stories make it plain that free trade has created more low-paying jobs in sweatshops where workers are exploited. Families of maquila workers live in one- or two-room houses with no running water, no drainage, and no heat. The multinational companies who operate the maquilas consistently break Mexican labor laws by requiring women to work more than nine hours a day, six days a week, without medical benefits, while the minimum wage they pay workers is insufficient to feed their families. These findings will make a crucial contribution to debates over free trade, CAFTA-DR, and the impact of globalization.

Since its first publication in 1988, America's Neighborhood Bats has changed the way we look at bats by underscoring their harmless and beneficial nature. In this second revised edition, Merlin Tuttle offers bat aficionados the most up-to-date bat facts, including a wealth of new information on bat house design and current threats to bat survival.

Throughout Mexico's history, women have been subjected to a dual standard: exalted in myth, they remain subordinated in their social role by their biology. But this dualism is not so much a battle between the sexes as the product of a social system. The injustices of this system have led Mexican women to conclude that they deserve a better world, one worth struggling for.

Published originally in Spanish as Mujeres en México: Una historia olvidada, this work examines the role of Mexican women from pre-Cortés to the 1980s, addressing the interplay between myth and history and the gap between theory and practice. Pointing to such varied prototypes as the Virgin of Guadalupe, La Malinche, and Sor Juana, Tuñón contrasts what these women represent with more realistic but less-exalted counterparts such as Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, La Güera Rodríguez, and Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza. She also discusses the identity transformation by which indigenous women come to see themselves as Mexicanas, and analyzes such issues as women's economic dislocation in the labor force, education, and self-image.

In challenging the illusion that historians have created of women in Mexico's history, Tuñón hopes to recover feminism—with its strengths and weaknesses, its vision of the world that is both intellectual and full of feeling. By examining the social world of Mexico, she also hopes to determine those situations that cause oppression, exploitation, and marginalization of women.

All across the country, butterflies are becoming as popular as birds and wildflowers, especially among people seeking to enjoy the rich natural resources that Texas possesses. John and Gloria Tveten have been studying butterflies in Southeast Texas for thirty-five years, and here they offer their considerable knowledge to everyone who shares their passion for butterflies.

In this easy-to-use field guide, the Tvetens describe and illustrate more than 100 species of butterflies that live in Southeast Texas and can often be found across the state. Striking color photographs of living butterflies and caterpillars (a unique addition) show the key marks and characteristics necessary for field identification. The Tvetens' enjoyable and authoritative text describes each species' life history, habits, flight patterns, and characteristic markings.

An account of the different butterfly families, from swallowtails to longwings to skippers, precedes the descriptions of the species within each family. The Tvetens also include an interesting discussion of butterfly biology, a complete checklist of area butterflies, an index of butterfly-attracting plants, and pointers to other butterfly resources.

This field guide is the first to focus exclusively on Southeast Texas butterflies. It will be the essential reference for everyone seeking a reliable way to identify these butterflies, from field observers to apartment dwellers who wonder what is fluttering around the pot plants on the balcony.

You'll find them throughout the year in Houston—lyre-leaf sage, Drummond skullcap, silver-leaf nightshade, snow-on-the-prairie, lemon beebalm, scarlet pimpernel, plains wild indigo, spring ladies'-tresses, deer pea vetch.

These wildflowers and hundreds of other species flourish in this part of Texas, but until this book was published in 1993 no guide had focused exclusively on the Houston area. John and Gloria Tveten spent years seeking out both the common and the rare flowers. They describe here more than 200 plants. A color photograph of each one will make identification easy.

The guide is arranged by color, with each entry tracing the history and lore of a species. Many plants—for example, prairie Indian plantain and self-heal—were used by Native Americans for medicinal purposes. Others, like poke-weed and wapato, are edible. Southern dewberry and giant ragweed are used as natural dyes. And some, like rattlebush and milkweed, are poisonous.

At the end of each species account is a list of key identifying characteristics for quick reference in the field. Summaries of plant families are also included, as well as tips on where and when to look for wildflowers.