Sonoran Strongman provides an in-depth look at a turbulent period in Mexico's history. During this era, Sonora was plagued with domestic unrest and threatened by foreign invasion. The state's citizens, hoping Ignacio Pesqueira would be the "man of action" capable of restoring order, elected him governor by an overwhelming vote. He became a virtual dictator and ruled Sonora from 1856 1876. Pesqueira was the product of troubled times, and the times shaped his destiny. Author Acuna presents an authoritative account of the "Strongman's" rise to power and vividly portrays the suffering of...

"For persons with a special interest in succulents, and cacti in particular, this book is a must. Others will find the volume of value not only as a means of naming these highly specialized plants but as a source of information on the structure and distribution of the various species." American Scientist
"Of tremendous value to the professional botanist and ecologist, and with layman English and careful instructions, the work provides the amateur botanist insight into a fascinating family." Garden Journal
"For the general desert lover as well as the botanist." Books...

For thirty years before the coming of the European missionaries, European explorers were able to observe Tahitian society as it had existed for centuries. Now Edwin Ferdon, Polynesian archaeologist and veteran of Thor Heyerdah's expedition to Easter Island, has interwoven their records to show us in fascinating detail what that society was like.

Scholars have long viewed histories of the Aztecs either as flawed chronologies plagued by internal inconsistencies and intersource discrepancies or as legends that indiscriminately mingle reality with the supernatural. But this new work draws fresh conclusions from these documents, proposing that Aztec dynastic history was recast by its sixteenth-century recorders not merely to glorify ancestors but to make sense out of the trauma of conquest and colonialism.
The Aztec Kings is the first major study to take into account the Aztec cyclical conception of time which required...

Bisbee, Arizona...July 12, 1917...6:30 a.m....
Just after dawn, two thousand armed vigilantes took to the streets of this remote Arizona mining town to round up members and sympathizers of the radical Industrial Workers of the World. Before the morning was over, nearly twelve hundred alleged Wobblies had been herded onto waiting boxcars. By day's end, they had been hauled off to New Mexico.
While the Bisbee Deportation was the most notorious of many vigilante actions of its day, it was more than the climax of a labor-management war it was the point at which Arizona donned the copper...

Although possessing a common physical heritage, the Sonoran Desert has taken on highly contrasting forms in its American and Mexican portions. This work does not, therefore, attempt a regional study in the usual sense of the term, but is rather an examination of disparate economic development, much influenced by contrasting technological achievements as well as the accidents of history.
Although the significance of geographic regionalism is implicit throughout this study, no attempt is made to show any overriding unity at work, geographical or otherwise, welding together a "desert...

John Spring, a Swiss volunteer wounded in Civil War action, was sent to Arizona with the Regular Army of 1866 and became the most versatile and articulate of frontier reporters. A fine education and a broad knowledge of the world combined with an urbane pen to enable this pioneer educator, desert farmer, sutler, and brewer to be also a court translator, a correspondent for metropolitan U.S. newspapers and European periodicals, and a hardy soldier amid Apache perils.
John Spring first saw Arizona from an encampment on the west side of the Colorado River at "a small town called Yuma . . ....

-For a calculated 1,400 years, Snaketown was a viable village, but unlike so many tells in the Near East, the people remained the same while their culture changed. The smoothly graded typological sequences for most attributes suggest to me that the ethnic identity of the inhabitants was not interrupted, that they were one and the same people experiencing normal internal evolutionary cultural modifications with occasional boosts of features and ideas newly arrived from the outside.- --Emil W. Haury

The Mission of Guevavi on the Santa Cruz River in what is now southern Arizona served as a focal point of Jesuit missionary endeavor among the Pima Indians on New Spain's far northwestern frontier.
For three-quarters of a century, from the first visit by the renowned Eusebio Francisco Kino in 1691 until the Jesuit Expulsion in 1767, the difficult process of replacing one culture with another the heart of the Spanish mission system went on at Guevavi. Yet all but the initial years presided over by Father Kino have been forgotten.
Drawing upon archival materials in Mexico, Spain, and...

The lively role of the newspaper in "telling history's story" comes across in An Arizona Chronology, Volume Two, the continued selection by the late veteran journalist, Douglas D. Martin, of reported highlights in Arizona's first two and a half decades as a state.
Here were the years in which Arizona's "bad men" virtually dropped out of sight, and the trigger-blast was displaced by the gavel-thumping sound of law and order as a Territory grew up and became a state. The problem of the Apache was no more, and the problem of water began to loom large. Depression and prohibition were...