Kategoria BISAC: History >> North American

Zinacantan, Chamula, and Chenalho are neighboring Mayan communities situated in highland Chiapas, Mexico, near the city of San Cristobal Las Casas. The inhabitants of the three communities speak dialects of the Tzotzil language. Five religious fiestas, celebrated by these communities in honor of their saints, provide the data for Victoria Bricker's comparative study of ritual humor.

In Chenalho and Chamula performances of ritual humor are concentrated in the five-day period of a single fiesta, while in Zanacantan similar performances are distributed over threee fiestas. In these...

How was frontier expansion rationalized in the Americas during the late nineteenth century? As new states fleshed out expanded national maps, how did they represent their advances? Were there any distinct pan-American patterns? The renowned anthropologist and human rights advocate David Maybury-Lewis saw the Latin American frontiers as relatively unknown physical spaces as well as unexplored academic territory. He invited eight specialists to explore public narratives of the expansion of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the western regions of Canada and the United States during the late...

Invaluable both for reference and collection development (with a 150-page bibliography), this guide to mainly prehistoric sites, cultures, and artifacts in the United States and Canada features some 1800 signed entries by 151 expert contributors that highlight the information upon which present North American prehistory is based. A scholarly achievement.

"Library Journal"

This dictionary of more than 1800 entries represents a collaboration of 159 archaeologists, each an authority on a particular region. The result is a source of basic information on the major prehistorical cultures,...

Although much has been written about Columbus's life in Italy and Spain, little has been written about his formative years in Portugal. This work is the first book-length analysis of Columbus's stay in Portugal and Madeira from 1476 to 1485 and his later experiences in the Portuguese islands of the Azores and the Madeiras. The work stresses the influence the Portuguese had in educating Columbus about the sea, and it depicts his famous voyage to the New World as a logical sequence of the pioneering voyages of the Portuguese in the North Atlantic and along the West Coast of Africa. The work...

One of Canada's longest unresolved issues is the historical and present-day failure of the country's governments to recognize treaties made between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown. Compact, Contract, Covenant is renowned historian of Native-newcomer relations J.R. Miller's exploration and explanation of more than four centuries of treaty-making. The first historical account of treaty-making in Canada, Miller untangles the complicated threads of treaties, pacts, and arrangements with the Hudson's Bay Company and the Crown, as well as modern treaties to provide a remarkably clear and...

North America is more a political and an economic invention than a place people call home. Nonetheless, the region shared by the United States and its closest neighbors, North America, is an intriguing frame for comparative American studies. "Continental Divides" is the first book to study the patterns of contact, exchange, conflict, and disavowal among cultures that span the borders of Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

Rachel Adams considers a broad range of literary, filmic, and visual texts that exemplify cultural traffic across North American borders. She investigates how our...

This collection is an interdisciplinary edited volume that examines the circulation of Darwinian ideas in the Atlantic space as they impacted systems of Western thought and culture. Specifically, the book explores the influence of the principle tenets of Darwinism -- such as the theory of evolution, the ape-man theory of human origins, and the principle of sexual selection -- on established transatlantic intellectual traditions and cultural practices. In doing so, it pays particular attention to how Darwinism reconfigured discourses on race, gender, and sexuality in a transnational...

During the past 30 years, the relationship between humans and the environment has changed more drastically than during any previous period in human history. Local sustainable exploitation of natural resources has been overridden by global interests indifferent to the detrimental impact of their activities on local environments and their inhabitants. Increasingly efficient technology has reduced the need for human labor, but improved medical treatment favors reproduction and survival, creating a growing imbalance between population density and food supply. Rapid transportation is...