Kategoria BISAC: History >> Latin America - Mexico

Hidden high in the Sierra de Guatemala mountain range of northeastern Mexico in the state of Tamaulipas is the northernmost tropical cloud forest of the Western Hemisphere. Within its humid oak-sweetgum woodlands, tropical and temperate species of plants and animals mingle in rare diversity, creating a mecca for birders and other naturalists.

Fred and Marie Webster first visited Rancho del Cielo, cloud forest home of Canadian immigrant Frank Harrison, in 1964, drawn by the opportunity to see such exotic birds as tinamous, trogons, motmots, and woodcreepers only 500 miles from their...

Without a doubt, the drug war is real. In the last six years, over 60,000 people have been murdered in narco-related crimes. But, there is far more to Mexico's story than this gruesome...

The Olmecs are renowned for their massive carved stone heads and other sculptures, the first stone monuments produced in Mesoamerica. Seven decades of archaeological research have given us many insights into the lifeways of the Olmecs, who inhabited parts of the modern Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco from around 1150 to 400 BC, and there are several good books that summarize the current interpretations of Olmec prehistory. But these formal studies don't describe the field experiences of the archaeologists who made the discoveries. What was it like to endure the Olmec region's heat,...

Ciudad Juarez has recently become infamous for its murder rate, which topped 3,000 in 2010 as competing drug cartels grew increasingly violent and the military responded with violence as well. Despite the atmosphere of intimidation by troops, police, and organized criminals, women have led the way in civil society activism, spurring the Juarez Resistance and forging powerful alliances with anti-militarization activists.

An in-depth examination of la Resistencia Juarense, Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juarez draws on ethnographic research to analyze the...

A Land Between Waters explores the relationship between the people and the environment in Mexico. It heralds the arrival of environmental history as a major area of study within the field of Mexican history. This...

In the wake of its early twentieth-century civil wars, Mexico strove to present itself to the world as unified and prosperous. The preparation in Mexico City for the 1968 Summer Olympics was arguably the most ambitious of a sequence of design projects that aimed to signal Mexico's arrival in the developed world. In Spectacular Mexico, Luis M. Castaneda demonstrates how these projects were used to create a spectacle of social harmony and ultimately to guide the nation's capital into becoming the powerful megacity we know today.

Not only the first Latin American country...

In the wake of its early twentieth-century civil wars, Mexico strove to present itself to the world as unified and prosperous. The preparation in Mexico City for the 1968 Summer Olympics was arguably the most ambitious of a sequence of design projects that aimed to signal Mexico's arrival in the developed world. In Spectacular Mexico, Luis M. Castaneda demonstrates how these projects were used to create a spectacle of social harmony and ultimately to guide the nation's capital into becoming the powerful megacity we know today.

Not only the first Latin American country...

"The ordinary tortilla was an extraordinary bond between the human and divine. . . . From birthdays to religious ceremonies, the people of Mesoamerica commemorated important events with tortillas. One Maya tribe even buried their dead with tortillas so that the dogs eaten as dinner during life would not bite the deceased in revenge."--from Tortillas: A Cultural History

For centuries tortillas have remained a staple of the Mexican diet, but the rich significance of this unleavened flatbread stretches far beyond food. Today the tortilla crosses cultures and borders as part of an...

In 2012, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)--which had governed Mexico with an iron grip for 71 years before being ousted in 2000--was surprisingly returned to power. In Mexico's Evolving Democracy, a team of distinguished political scientists delivers an exceptional analysis of the remarkable 2012 Mexican elections. Extending the scholarship that the editors generated in their panel studies of the 2000 and 2006 elections, the book assesses all three elections from both traditional and nontraditional vantage points, seeking fuller answers to the lingering question of why...

Maya hieroglyphic writing may seem impossibly opaque to beginning students, but scholar Scott A. J. Johnson presents it as a regular and comprehensible system in this engaging, easy-to-follow textbook. The only comprehensive introduction designed specifically for those new to the study, "Translating Maya Hieroglyphs" uses a hands-on approach to teach learners the current state of Maya epigraphy.

Johnson shows readers step by step how to translate ancient Maya glyphs. He begins by describing how to break down a Mayan text into individual glyphs in the correct reading order, and then...

Drawing on an...

Not so, according to author Kelly S. McDonough, at least not for native speakers of Nahuatl, one of the most widely spoken and best-documented indigenous languages of the Americas. This book focuses on how Nahuas have been deeply...

Mexico and the United States each have a constitution and a federal system of government. This fact has led many historians to assume that the Mexican system of government, established in the 1820s, is an imitation of the U.S. model. But it is not.

First published in Spanish in 1955 and now translated by the author and amplified with new material, this interpretation of the independence movement tells the true story of Mexico's transition from colonial status to federal state. Benson traces the Mexican government's beginning to events in Spain in 1808-1810, when provincial...

In this study of the life of a Spaniard who came to Mexico as a conquistador and remained as a civilian citizen of New Spain, C. Harvey Gardiner gives his readers a fresh view of the warfare between Spaniard and Indian and of the less dramatic processes of colonization which established European culture in America.

Conquest and colonization, usually treated separately in the histories of the period, are here shown as phases in the life of a man who was not conspicuous among the conquerors, but was representative of the Spaniards of his generation who came to the new world in search...

What lies at the center of the Mexican colonial experience? Should Mexican colonial society be construed as a theoretical monolith, capitalist from its inception, or was it essentially feudal, as traditional historiography viewed it? In this pathfinding study, Enrique Semo offers a fresh vision: that the conflicting social formations of capitalism, feudalism, and tributary despotism provided the basic dynamic of Mexico's social and economic development.

Responding to questions raised by contemporary Mexican society, Semo sees the origin of both backwardness and development not in...