Kategoria BISAC: History >> Americas (North Central South West Indies)

• 22 original essays by expert scholars cover the most important features of American technology, including developments in automobiles, television, and computing
• Analyzes the ways in which technologies are organized, such as in the engineering profession, government, medicine and agriculture
• Includes discussions of how technologies interact with race, gender, class, and other organizing structures in...

The greatest accomplishment of Western civilization is arguably the achievement of individual liberty through limits on the power of the state. In the war-torn twentieth century, we rarely hear that one of the main costs of armed conflict is long-term loss of liberty to winners and losers alike. Beyond the obvious and direct costs of dead and wounded soldiers, there is the lifetime struggle of veterans to live with their nightmares and their injuries; the hidden economic costs of inflation, debts, and taxes; and more generally the damages caused to our culture, our morality, and to...

The dominant forces of American conservatism remain wedded, at all costs, to the Republican Party, but another movement, one with its roots in the pre-World War II era, has stepped forth to fill an intellectual vacuum on the right. This Old Right first rose in opposition to the New Deal, fighting both statism at home and the emergence of an American empire abroad. More recently this movement, sometimes called paleoconservatism, has provided the ideological backbone of modern populism and the opposition to globalization, with decisive effects on presidential politics. In Revolt from the...

The Paraguayan revolt of 1721-1735 was the first of sev-eral events that presaged the Hispanic American Inde-pendence movements of the early nineteenth century. Exist-ing works on the revolt, though, are either too short, superficial, or inaccurate. The Colonial History of Paraguay is an original contribution to the scholarship on this crucial period in Paraguay's history. More than a detailed account of the revolt, the work provides an overview of Paraguay in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, combining politics, eco-nomics, and social analysis into an integrated whole. It...

Most of us are fascinated by the conventional storybook account of Christopher Columbus' heroic discovery of America in 1492. Yet, should the credit for discovering America go to a man who insisted it was but a few islands off the shores of China?

In Terra Cognita, Eviatar Zerubavel argues that physical encounters are only one part of the complex, multifaceted process of discovery. Such encounters must be complemented by an understanding of the true identity of what is being discovered. The small group of islands claimed by Columbus to have been discovered off the shores of...

In this groundbreaking and lavishly illustrated volume edited by Dennis Reinhartz and Gerald D. Saxon, five leading scholars in history, geography, and cartography discuss the role Spanish explorers and mapmakers played in bringing knowledge of the New World to Europe. The entradas, of Panfilo de Narvaez and Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca (1527-37), Fray Marcos de Niza and Francisco Vasquez de Coronado (1539-42), and Hernando de Soto and Luis de Moscoso (1539-43), into the Greater Southwest of North America were crucial in the dissemination of information and images of the newly discovered...

"Stake s] out a position that will affect future discussions of the emergence of chiefdoms. . . . promises to greatly increase our understanding of the emergence of inequality and institutionalized leadership positions."--John Scarry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

These compelling essays about Native American chiefs and their rise to power break new ground in the study of chiefdoms and their origins. Archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists bring up to date the information about many complex chiefdoms that flourished throughout the Americas, in which numerous...

"A provocative explanation of how differences in slavery and later abolition movements produced different responses in post-abolition societies and contributed significantly to the creation of the southern myth."--Sylvia Frey, Tulane University

Providing new insights into the origins of benevolent myths about the Old South, Nathalie Dessens compares slave systems of the Caribbean and the American South from the early days of European colonization to the abolition of slavery.

Her uncommon combination of historical and literary scholarship in a broad comparative framework...