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Between 1974 and 1990 more than thirty countries in southern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe shifted from authoritarian to democratic systems of government. This global democratic revolution is probably the most important political trend in the late twentieth century. In The Third Wave, Samuel P. Huntington analyzes the causes and nature of these democratic transitions, evaluates the prospects for stability of the new democracies, and explores the possibility of more countries becoming democratic. The recent transitions, he argues, are the third major wave of democratization in the modem world. Each of the two previous waves was followed by a reverse wave in which some countries shifted back to authoritarian government. Using concrete examples, empirical evidence, and insightful analysis, Huntington provides neither a theory nor a history of the third wave, but an explanation of why and how it occurred.Factors responsible for the democratic trend include the legitimacy dilemmas of authoritarian regimes; economic and social development; the changed role of the Catholic Church; the impact of the United States, the European Community, and the Soviet Union; and the ""snowballing"" phenomenon: change in one country stimulating change in others. Five key elite groups within and outside the nondemocratic regime played roles in shaping the various ways democratization occurred. Compromise was key to all democratizations, and elections and nonviolent tactics also were central. New democracies must deal with the ""torturer problem"" and the ""praetorian problem"" and attempt to develop democratic values and processes. Disillusionment with democracy, Huntington argues, is necessary to consolidating democracy. He concludes the book with an analysis of the political, economic, and cultural factors that will decide whether or not the third wave continues.Several ""Guidelines for Democratizers"" offer specific, practical suggestions for initiating and carrying out reform. Huntington's emphasis on practical application makes this book a valuable tool for anyone engaged in the democratization process. At this volatile time in history, Huntington's assessment of the processes of democratization is indispensable to understanding the future of democracy in the world.

The Spanish invasion of Mexico in 1519, which led to the end of the Aztec Empire, was one of the most influential events in the history of the modern Atlantic world. But equally consequential, as this volume makes clear, were the ways the Conquest was portrayed.In essays spanning five centuries and three continents, The Conquest of Mexico: 500 Years of Reinventions explores how politicians, writers, artists, activists, and others have strategically reimagined the Conquest to influence and manipulate perceptions within a wide variety of controversies and debates, including those touching on indigeneity, nationalism, imperialism, modernity, and multiculturalism. Writing from a range of perspectives and disciplines, the authors demonstrate that the Conquest of Mexico, whose significance has ever been marked by fundamental ambiguity, has consistently influenced how people across the modern Atlantic world conceptualize themselves and their societies.After considering the looming, ubiquitous role of the Conquest in Mexican thought and discourse since the sixteenth century, the contributors go farther afield to examine the symbolic relevance of the Conquest in contexts as diverse as Tudor England, Bourbon France, postimperial Spain, modern Latin America, and even contemporary Hollywood. Highlighting the extent to which the Spanish-Aztec conflict inspired historical reimaginings, these essays reveal how the Conquest became such an iconic event—and a perennial medium by which both Europe and the Americas have, for centuries, endeavored to understand themselves as well as their relationship to others.A valuable contribution to ongoing efforts to demythologize and properly memorialize the Spanish-Aztec War of 1519–21, this volume also aptly illustrates how we make history of the past and how that history-making shapes our present—and possibly our future.

The massacre at Mountain Meadows on September 11, 1857, was the single most violent attack on a wagon train in the thirty-year history of the Oregon and California trails. Yet it has been all but forgotten. Will Bagley's Blood of the Prophets is an award-winning, riveting account of the attack on the Baker-Fancher wagon train by Mormons in the local militia and a few Paiute Indians. Based on extensive investigation of the events surrounding the murder of over 120 men, women, and children, and drawing from a wealth of primary sources, Bagley explains how the murders occurred, reveals the involvement of territorial governor Brigham Young, and explores the subsequent suppression and distortion of events related to the massacre by the Mormon Church and others.

Prudentius (b. 348 c.e.), one of the greatest Latin poets of late antiquity, was also a devoted Christian. His allegorical masterpiece, Psychomachia, combines epic language and theological speculation to offer a powerful vision of Roman and Christian triumphalism. Yet this important work - one of the most popular and influential poems of the Middle Ages - is unfamiliar to most contemporary students of Latin. This edition, featuring the first full-length English commentary on the poem, makes Psychomachia accessible to modern learners.In his wide-ranging introduction, Aaron Pelttari examines the life of Prudentius, the world of late antiquity, and the structure of Psychomachia, along with its aims, reception, and manuscript transmission. The Latin text includes an apparatus criticus, and the corresponding commentary covers points of textual, grammatical, literary, and historical interest. Following the commentary are two appendices: an explanation of the poem's meter, and a glossary of rhetorical and literary terms. A bibliography and a complete Latin-to-English glossary round out the volume. Ten illustrations enrich the text by showcasing medieval illuminations and early editions of the poem.Ideally suited for intermediate and advanced students of Latin, this volume is also useful for instructors and scholars, who will welcome its lucid interpretation of the poem and expert guidance on difficult passages. With its concise yet carefully considered format, The Psychomachia of Prudentius will be a welcome addition to scholarship on late antique Latin literature.

While the Western was dying a slow death across the cultural landscape, it was blazing back to life as a video game in the early twenty-first century. Rockstar Games’ Red Dead franchise, beginning with Red Dead Revolver in 2004, has grown into one of the most critically acclaimed video game franchises of the twenty-first century. Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth, and Violence in the Video Game West offers a critical, interdisciplinary look at this cultural phenomenon at the intersection of game studies and American history.Drawing on game studies, western history, American studies, and cultural studies, the authors train a wide-ranging, deeply informed analytic perspective on the Red Dead franchise—from its earliest incarnation to the latest, Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). Their intersecting chapters put the series in the context of American history, culture, and contemporary media, with inquiries into issues of authenticity, realism, the meaning of play and commercial promotion, and the relationship between the game and the wider cultural iterations of the classic Western. The contributors also delve into the role the series’ development has played in recent debates around working conditions in the gaming industry and gaming culture.In its redeployment and reinvention of the Western’s myth and memes, the Red Dead franchise speaks to broader aspects of American culture—the hold of the frontier myth and the “Wild West” over the popular imagination, the role of gun culture in society, depictions of gender and ethnicity in mass media, and the increasing allure of digital escapism—all of which come in for scrutiny here, making this volume a vital, sweeping, and deeply revealing cultural intervention.

With the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s Russia seems to have stepped out of time, reverting to an imperial era of conquest and expansion. But as Roger Reese points out in this comprehensive new history, Russia’s way of war has changed little from one century to the next, one regime to another, from the army of the tsar to the army of today. Russia’s Army reveals how the Imperial Russian Army and its successors, the Soviet Army and the army of the Russian Federation, confronted the state’s foreign policy challenges—projecting power and defending the empire—and the domestic challenge of containing internal unrest generated by nationalism, competing ethnic and religious identities, and political discontent. These twin challenges, in turn, drove defense policy and the planning and conduct of war.From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the development of the army was driven by shifts in the European balance of power and changes in global diplomacy, politics, economics, and society. Reese identifies themes that weave their way through this military history: the adoption of a strategy to maintain a defensive posture in the West, an offensive strategy in the Balkans, and an expansionist policy in the East; maintenance of a large standing army; and a consistent unease about the army’s and non-Russian minorities’ loyalty to the state. These themes, he shows, have emerged in times of peace and war, as heads of state have made operational and strategic military decisions while managing civil-military relations—from the times of tsarist Russia through the collapse of the Soviet empire, when Putin sought to restore authoritarian rule and hegemony over the former Soviet states of the USSR.A comprehensive account of the history of the Russian army from 1801 to 2022, Reese’s is the first book to link Russian military history across three distinct eras and to situate this history within the context of military strategy and doctrine, as reflected in specific campaigns, issues of manning and maintaining an army, and relations between army and society, at home and in the “near abroad.”

Say you found that a few dozen people, operating at the highest levels of society, conspired to create a false ancient history of the American continent to promote a religious, white-supremacist agenda in the service of supposedly patriotic ideals. Would you call it fake news? In nineteenth-century America, this was in fact a powerful truth that shaped Manifest Destiny. The Mound Builder Myth is the first book to chronicle the attempt to recast the Native American burial mounds as the work of a lost white race of ""true"" native Americans.Thomas Jefferson's pioneering archaeology concluded that the earthen mounds were the work of Native Americans. In the 1894 report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Cyrus Thomas concurred, drawing on two decades of research. But in the century in between, the lie took hold, with Presidents Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Abraham Lincoln adding their approval and the Mormon Church among those benefiting. Jason Colavito traces this monumental deception from the farthest reaches of the frontier to the halls of Congress, mapping a century-long conspiracy to fabricate and promote a false ancient history - and enumerating its devastating consequences for contemporary Native people.Built upon primary sources and first-person accounts, the story that The Mound Builder Myth tells is a forgotten chapter of American history - but one that reads like the Da Vinci Code as it plays out at the upper reaches of government, religion, and science. And as far-fetched as it now might seem that a lost white race once ruled prehistoric America, the damage done by this ""ancient"" myth has clear echoes in today's arguments over white nationalism, multiculturalism, ""alternative facts,"" and the role of science and the control of knowledge in public life.

Of all the U.S. Army posts in the West, none witnessed more history than Fort Laramie, positioned where the northern Great Plains join the Rocky Mountains. From its beginnings as a trading post in 1834 to its abandonment by the army in 1890, it was involved in the buffalo hide trade, overland migrations, Indian wars and treaties, the Utah War, Confederate maneuvering, and the coming of the telegraph and first transcontinental railroad.Douglas C. McChristian has written the first complete history of Fort Laramie, chronicling every critical stage in its existence, including its addition to the National Park System. He draws on an extraordinary array of archival materials-including those at Fort Laramie National Historic Site-to present new data about the fort and new interpretations of historical events.Emphasizing the fort's military history, McChristian documents the army's vital role in ending challenges posed by American Indians to U.S. occupation and settlement of the region, and he expands on the fort's interactions with the many Native peoples of the Central Plains and Rocky Mountains. He provides a particularly lucid description of the infamous Grattan fight of 1854, which initiated a generation of strife between Indians and U.S. soldiers, and he recounts the 1851 Horse Creek and 1868 Fort Laramie treaties.Meticulously researched and gracefully told, this is a long-overdue military history of one of the American West's most venerable historic places.

Western Apaches have long regarded the corner of Arizona encompassing Aravaipa Canyon as their sacred homeland. This book examines the evolving relationship between this people and this place, illustrating the enduring power of Aravaipa to shape and sustain contemporary Apache society.Big Sycamore Stands Alone: The Western Apaches, Aravaipa, and the Struggle for Place articulates Aravaipa's cultural legacy as seen through the eyes of some of its descendants, bringing Apache voices, knowledge, and perspectives to the fore. Focusing on the Camp Grant Massacre as its narrative centerpiece, Ian Record employs a unique approach that reflects how the Apaches conceptualize their history and identity, interweaving four distinct narrative threads: contemporary oral histories of individuals from the San Carlos reservation, historic documentation of Apache relationships to Aravaipa following the reservation's establishment, descriptions of pre-reservation subsistence practices, and a history of early Apache struggles to maintain their connection with Aravaipa in the face of hostility from outsiders.In addition, Record has mined the research notes of Grenville Goodwin to document important elements of Apache economic, political, and social organization in pre-reservation times.A landmark ethnohistory, Big Sycamore Stands Alone documents a story that goes far beyond Cochise, Geronimo, and the Chiricahuas. Record's work is a trailblazing synthesis of historical and anthropological materials that lends new insight into the relationship between people and place.

Apache Mothers and Daughters, an illustrated family history of four generations of Chiricahua Apache women from 1848 to the present, is an eloquent testimonial to the strength and the stamina of Apache women.  Over the course of thirty-five years, anthropologist Ruth McDonald Boyer collected the remembrances of Narcissus Duffy Gayton, great-great-granddaughter of the Apache chief Victorio. This intimate record of Apache life, told from an Apache perspective, highlights the key roles women play in tribal life.The story begins with Dilth-cheyhen, Victorio's daughter, whose life encompassed much of the traditional cultures of the Tchi-hèné band of the Chiricahua Apaches. Her daughter, Beshád-e, was just sixteen in 1886 when the twenty-seven-year incarceration of the Chiricahuas began. Beshád-e and her family were forced to move to Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma, and then New Mexico, where the Mescalero Apaches remain today. When Beshád-e's daughter Christine died of tuberculosis in her twenties, she left her daughter Narcissus in Beshád-e's care.  After struggling to complete her education, Narcissus returned to serve her tribe as a registered nurse and an advocate for health care.This account documents rituals such as the puberty rite and the cradle-making ceremony, the importance of religion (traditional as well as Anglo) in Apache life, and the intense bond between Apache mothers and daughters.

In the fifteen years prior to the American Civil War, the U.S. Army established a presence in southern New Mexico, the homeland of Mescalero, Mimbres, and Mogollon bands of the Apache Indians. From the army's perspective, the Apaches presented an obstacle to be overcome in making the region - newly acquired in the Mexican-American War - safe for Anglo settlers. In Dragoons in Apacheland, William S. Kiser recounts the conflicts that ensued and examines how both Apache warriors and American troops shaped the future of the Southwest Borderlands.Kiser narrates two distinct contests. The Apaches were defending their territory against the encroachment of soldiers and settlers. At the same time, the Anglo-Americans maneuvered against one another in a competition for political and economic power and for Apache territory. Cross-cultural misunderstandings, political corruption in Santa Fe and Washington, anti-Indian racism, troublemakers among both Apaches and settlers, irresponsible army officers and troops, corrupt American and Mexican traders, and policy disagreements among government officials all contributed to the ongoing hostilities. Kiser examines the behaviors and motivations of individuals involved in all aspects of these local, regional, and national disputes.Kiser is one of only a few historians to deal with this crucial period in Indian-white relations in the Southwest - and the first to detail the experiences of the First and Second United States Dragoons, elite mounted troops better equipped and trained than infantry to confront Apache guerrilla warriors more accustomed to the southwestern environment. Often led by the Gila leader Mangas Coloradas, the Apaches fought desperately to protect their lands and way of life. The Americans, Kiser shows, used unauthorized tactics of total warfare, encouraging field units to attack villages and destroy crops and livestock, particularly when the Apaches refused to engage the troops in pitched battles.Kiser's insights into the pre-Civil War conflicts in southern New Mexico are essential to a deeper understanding of the larger U.S.-Apache war that culminated in the heroic resistance of Cochise, Victorio, and Geronimo.

Scholarship in Mormon studies has often focused on a few key events and individuals in Mormon history. The essays collected by Quincy D. Newell and Eric F. Mason in this interdisciplinary volume expand the conversation.One of the main purposes of this volume is to define and cross boundaries. Part 1 addresses internal boundaries - walls that divide some Mormons from others. One chapter examines Joseph Smith's writings on economic matters and argues that he sought to make social distinctions irrelevant. Another considers Jane James, an African American Latter-day Saint, and her experiences at the intersection of religious and racial identityIn part 2, contributors consider Mormonism's influence on Pentecostal leader John Alexander Dowie and relationships between Mormonism and other religious movements, including Methodism and Presbyterianism. Other chapters compare Mormonism and Islam and examine the group Ex-Mormons for Jesus/Saints Alive in Jesus.Part 3 deals with Mormonism in the academy and the ongoing evolution of Mormon studies. Written by contributors from a variety of backgrounds, these essays will spark scholarly dialogue across the disciplines.

Fort Sill, located in the heart of the old Kiowa-Comanche Indian country in southwestern Oklahoma, is known to a modern generation as the Field Artillery School of the United States Army. To students of American frontier history, it is known as the focal point of one of the most interesting, dramatic, and sustained series of conflicts in the records of western warfare.From 1833 to 1875, in a theater of action extending from Kansas to Mexico, the strife was almost uninterrupted. The U.S. Army, Kansas militia, Texas Rangers, and white pioneers and traders were arrayed against the fierce and heroic bands of the Kiowas, Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and Kiowa-Apaches.The savage skirmishes with the southwestern Indians before the Civil War provided many army officers with a kind of training that proved indispensable to them in that later, prolonged conflict. When hostilities ceased, Sherman, Sheridan, Dodge, Custer, Grierson, and other commanders again resumed the harsh field of guerrilla warfare against their Indian foes - tough, hard fighters.With the inauguration of the so-called Quaker Peace Policy during President Grant's first administration, the hands of the army were tied. The Fort Sill reservation became a place of refuge for the marauding bands that went forth unmolested to raid in Texas, Oklahoma, and Mexico. The toll in human life reached such proportions that the government finally turned the southwestern Indians over to the army for discipline, and a permanent settlement of the bands was achieved by 1875.From extensive research, conversations with both Indian and white eyewitnesses, and his familiarity with Indian life and army affairs, Captain Nye has written an unforgettable account of these stirring times. The delineation of character and the reconstruction of colorful scenes, so often absent in historical writing, are to be found here in abundance. His Indians are made to live again: his scenes of post life could have been written only by an army man.

One of the great tribes of the Southwest Plains, the Kiowas were militantly defiant toward white intruders in their territory and killed more during seventy-five years of raiding than any other tribe. Now settled in southwestern Oklahoma, they are today one of the most progressive Indian groups in the area. In Bad Medicine and Good, Wilbur Sturtevant Nye collects forty-four stories covering Kiowa history from the 1700s through the 1940s, all gleaned from interviews with Kiowas (who actually took part in the events or recalled them from the accounts of their elders), and from the notes of Captain Hugh L Scott at Fort Sill. They cover such topics as the organization and conduct of a raiding party, the brave deeds of war chiefs, the treatment of white captives, the Grandmother gods, the Kiowa sun dance, and the problems of adjusting to white society.

A common stereotype about American Indians is that for centuries they lived in stataic harmony with nature in a pristine wilderness that remained unchanged until European colonization. Omer C. Stewart was one of the first anthropologists to recognize that Native Americans made significant impact across a wide range of environments. Most important, they regularly used fire to manage plant communities and associated animal species through varied and localized habitat burning. In Forgotten Fires, editors Henry T. Lewis and M. Kat Anderson present Stewart's original research and insights, presented in the 1950s yet still provocative today.Significant portions of Stewart's text have not been available until now, and Lewis and Anderson set Stewart's findings in the context of current knowledge about Native hunter-gathers and their uses of fire. This volume shows that for thousands of years, the North American landscape has been regularly shaped and renewed by the land and fire management practices of North American Indians.

A fur trader from 1878 to 1904, Schultz married a Pikuni (Blackfoot) woman, became a member of the tribe, and was given the Blackfoot name Apikuni. With the disappearance of the buffalo it was as difficult for Schultz to adjust to the new way of life as it was for the other Blackfeet. He took to the mountains and explored the eastern slope of the Rockies, hunting game and guiding other hunters and explorers, including George Bird Grinnell, the Baring brothers, and Ralph Pulitzer. He named mountains, glaciers, and lakes; he was the first to identify the mountain goat; and through his and Grinnell's efforts the northern portion of the American Rockies was set apart as Glacier National Park.

Among the operations known as Plan Bodyguard, the deception devised to cover the Allies’ Normandy landing, was the little known but critical Plan Zeppelin, the largest and most complex of the Bodyguard plans. Zeppelin, in conjunction with the Mediterranean Strategy, succeeded in pinning down sixty German divisions from southern France to the Balkans in time for D-Day. This was the work of “A” Force, Britain’s only military organization tasked with carrying out both strategic and tactical deception in World War II. Whitney T. Bendeck’s Diversion and Deception finds “A” Force at its finest hour, as the war shifted from North Africa to Europe.Focusing on the years 1943 to 1945, Bendeck describes how “A” Force, under the leadership of Dudley Clarke, orchestrated both strategic and tactical deception plans to create notional threats across the southern perimeter of Europe, with the chief objective of keeping the Germans pinned down across the Mediterranean. Her work offers a close and clarifying look at “A” Force’s structure and command, operations and methods, and successes and failures and, consequently, its undeniable contribution to the Allies’ victory in World War II. By shining a light on the often overlooked Mediterranean theater and its direct connection to European plans and operations, Diversion and Deception also provides a deeper understanding of Allied grand strategy in the war.Combining military and deception histories—so often viewed in isolation—this book provides context for the deceptions and adds a layer of knowledge regarding the  planning of military operations. The result is a more complete and nuanced view of Allied operations than is to be found in most histories of World War II.

Be careful trying to place blame, or it might come back to you,"" Ceng Guangxian's father warns him after the first time his good intentions end in ruin. Yet time and again as Guangxian comes of age, bad luck and his own desires for a bigger, better future wreak havoc upon his family, fortune, and social reputation, leaving him scrambling to find the causes of the mishaps that define his life. Dong Xi's Record of Regret, here in its first English translation, introduces readers to a masterpiece of contemporary Chinese literature, and to the unparalleled tragicomic style of one of China's most celebrated writers.Set in the wake of China's Cultural Revolution, the novel follows Guangxian from his days as a middle school student to adulthood as a lonely, middle-aged man. Guangxian's path of misery - which he meticulously documents - is driven by absurdity: his discovery of two dogs mating leads to his father's infidelity with a neighbor; Guangxian's attempts to court a woman with the gift of a new dress result in his imprisonment for rape; he selects a spouse through a catastrophic game of chance, drawing from a set of names scrawled on crumpled pieces of paper. Guangxian's guilty conscience and youthful understanding of morality compound these disasters.Translated by Dylan Levi King to preserve the tone and engaging style of Dong Xi's original text, Record of Regret provides English readers a look into a darkly humorous landscape of dubious loyalties and lessons, seen through the eyes of a man trying to find his place in an upside-down world.

This is a true story of a float trip down the Missouri. It compares, in some ways, to the most famous float trip in American literature, the one that Huck Finn took down the Mississippi.At the end of his trip, young Huck says, ""…I reckon I got to Light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and civilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.""That young escapee, to extend the comparison, is epitomized in James Willard Schultz. Just expelled from military school, the seventeen-year-old Schultz goes West, stays, grows up and lives among the Indians, marries into the Blackfoot tribe, and lived the kind of life he loved.In the fall of 1901, Apikuni and his Piegan wife, Nataki, took a long float trip down the Missouri. They camped out and lived off the land for the entire trip, from Fort Benton to the juncture off the Missouri and Milk rivers. The account of that trip is presented here in book form for the first time.Like Huck's adventure, this was something more than a simple float trip. It was a trip through space and time through memories of early experiences along the river, of friends and enemies (Assiniboines, Crees, Sioux, and others), of early white trappers and traders, of carefree days of the buffalo hunt, of a naturalist's dream world populated with the deer, eagle, antelope, fish, bear, wolf, and animals known only in Indian mythology.This idyll was nostalgic trip that could not be repeated, for the river and world were changing, Apikuni and Nataki knew first-hand the many changes of the past and sensed the momentous changes coming.With the advance of the white man's world, with the dams and reservoirs, it would be impossible for today's adventurer to duplicate the trip described here. But, for the armchair adventurer, it is still possible, though the account that has been left for us, to take this remarkable trip.

At the turn of the twentieth century, James Willard Schultz wrote a series of tales centering on the adventures of a Blackfoot Indian boy and his Anglo friend in the days just prior to the end of the buffalo era on the western plains. All the tales appeared between 1910 and 1927 in the pages of the popular family weekly The Youth's Companion. The stories featured the sort of spirited adventure popular at the time, but Schultz was more conscientious than other writers of the day in his depiction of American Indian life.Schultz first encountered the Blackfeet in Montana Territory in 1877, when he was seventeen, and he lived among them for the next seventy years until his death. These tales are based on his experiences with the Blackfeet, who gave him the name Apikuni. Apikuni plays a role in many of the stories, usually under the name Spotted Robe. Although he was neither a historian nor an ethnologist, Schultz filled his stories with history, and with detailed descriptions of the Blackfoot daily life and culture.David C. Andrews has gathered these tales, the last of Schultz's to be published in book form, and arranged in the order in which they were written.

When originally published in 1993, Ruined City (Fei Du) was promptly banned by China's State Publishing Administration, ostensibly for its explicit sexual content. Since then, award-winning author Jia Pingwa's vivid portrayal of contemporary China's social and economic transformation has become a classic, viewed by critics and scholars of Chinese literature as one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Howard Goldblatt's deft translation now gives English-speaking readers their first chance to enjoy this masterpiece of social satire by one of China's most provocative writers.While eroticism, exoticism, and esoteric minutiae - the ""pornography"" that earned the opprobrium of Chinese officials - pervade Ruined City, this tale of a famous contemporary writer's sexual and legal imbroglios is an incisive portrait of politics and culture in a rapidly changing China. In a narrative that ranges from political allegory to parody, Jia Pingwa tracks his antihero Zhuang Zhidie through progressively more involved and inevitably disappointing sexual liaisons. Set in a modern metropolis rife with power politics, corruption, and capitalist schemes, the novel evokes an unrequited romantic longing for China's premodern, rural past, even as unfolding events caution against the trap of nostalgia. Amid comedy and chaos, the author subtly injects his concerns about the place of intellectual seriousness, censorship, and artistic integrity in the changing conditions of Chinese society.Rich with detailed description and vivid imagery, Ruined City transports readers into a world abounding with the absurdities and harshness of modern life.

The great goddesses of Egypt inspired magnificent temples and art and a literature that speaks of their supreme importance to the ancients--men and women, royalty and commoners. In this book Barbara S. Lesko follows the changing fortunes, over thousands of years, of the seven most significant Egyptian goddesses: Nut, Neith, Nekhbet, Wadjet, Hathor, Mut, and Isis. Some appeared in prehistory, and some were later political creations. One became a universally revered goddess of the Greco-Roman world who successfully held her own against Christianity for five hundred years.Although they often assumed human form, some goddesses were associated with animals that Lesko traces back to African clan divinities. Understood as the sun's heat, the Milky Way, the flood, and the mother of the king of Egypt, the great goddesses also assumed the caring role of protector for deserving humans, assisting with careers, romance, and fertility. They held out the promise of eternal life, and records show that they won fierce loyalty from their followers.

The Athenian democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. is the most famous and perhaps the most nearly perfect example of direct democracy. Covering the period 403-322 B.C., Mogens Herman Hansen focuses on the crucial last thirty years, which coincided with the political career of Demosthenes. Hansen distinguishes between the city's seven political institutions: the Assembly, the nomothetai, the People's Court, the boards of magistrates, the Council of Five Hundred, the Areopagos, and ho boulomenos. He discusses how Athenians conceived liberty both as the ability to participate in the decision-making process and as the right to live without oppression from the state or other citizens.

The battlefield reputation of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, long recognized as a formidable warrior, has been shaped by one infamous wartime incident. At Fort Pillow in 1864, the attack by Confederate forces under Forrest's command left many of the Tennessee Unionists and black soldiers garrisoned there dead in a confrontation widely labeled as a ""massacre."" In The River Was Dyed with Blood, best-selling Forrest biographer Brian Steel Wills argues that although atrocities did occur after the fall of the fort, Forrest did not order or intend a systematic execution of its defenders. Rather, the general's great failing was losing control of his troops.A prewar slave trader and owner, Forrest was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime. Because the attack on Fort Pillow - which, as Forrest wrote, left the nearby waters ""dyed with blood"" - occurred in an election year, Republicans used him as a convenient Confederate scapegoat to marshal support for the war. After the war he also became closely associated with the spread of the Ku Klux Klan. Consequently, the man himself, and the truth about Fort Pillow, has remained buried beneath myths, legends, popular depictions, and disputes about the events themselves.Wills sets what took place at Fort Pillow in the context of other wartime excesses from the American Revolution to World War II and Vietnam, as well as the cultural transformations brought on by the Civil War. Confederates viewed black Union soldiers as the embodiment of slave rebellion and reacted accordingly. Nevertheless, Wills concludes that the engagement was neither a massacre carried out deliberately by Forrest, as charged by a congressional committee, nor solely a northern fabrication meant to discredit him and the Confederate States of America, as pro-Southern apologists have suggested. The battle-scarred fighter with his homespun aphorisms was neither an infallible warrior nor a heartless butcher, but a product of his time and his heritage.

While the Western was dying a slow death across the cultural landscape, it was blazing back to life as a video game in the early twenty-first century. Rockstar Games’ Red Dead franchise, beginning with Red Dead Revolver in 2004, has grown into one of the most critically acclaimed video game franchises of the twenty-first century. Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth, and Violence in the Video Game West offers a critical, interdisciplinary look at this cultural phenomenon at the intersection of game studies and American history.Drawing on game studies, western history, American studies, and cultural studies, the authors train a wide-ranging, deeply informed analytic perspective on the Red Dead franchise—from its earliest incarnation to the latest, Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). Their intersecting chapters put the series in the context of American history, culture, and contemporary media, with inquiries into issues of authenticity, realism, the meaning of play and commercial promotion, and the relationship between the game and the wider cultural iterations of the classic Western. The contributors also delve into the role the series’ development has played in recent debates around working conditions in the gaming industry and gaming culture.In its redeployment and reinvention of the Western’s myth and memes, the Red Dead franchise speaks to broader aspects of American culture—the hold of the frontier myth and the “Wild West” over the popular imagination, the role of gun culture in society, depictions of gender and ethnicity in mass media, and the increasing allure of digital escapism—all of which come in for scrutiny here, making this volume a vital, sweeping, and deeply revealing cultural intervention.

The 1970s were a decade of historic American energy crises—major interruptions in oil supplies from the Middle East, the country’s most dangerous nuclear accident, and chronic shortages of natural gas. In Energy Crises, Jay Hakes brings his expertise in energy and presidential history to bear on the questions of why these crises occurred, how different choices might have prevented or ameliorated them, and what they have meant for the half-century since—and likely the half-century ahead.Hakes deftly intertwines the domestic and international aspects of the long-misunderstood fuel shortages that still affect our lives today. This approach, drawing on previously unavailable and inaccessible records, affords an insider’s view of decision-making by three U.S. presidents, the influence of their sometimes-combative aides, and their often tortuous relations with the rulers of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Hakes skillfully dissects inept federal attempts to regulate oil prices and allocation, but also identifies the decade’s more positive legacies—from the nation’s first massive commitment to the development of alternative energy sources other than nuclear power, to the initial movement toward a less polluting, more efficient energy economy.The 1970s brought about a tectonic shift in the world of energy. Tracing these consequences to their origins in policy and practice, Hakes makes their lessons available at a critical moment—as the nation faces the challenge of climate change resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.

Sanora Babb's long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers' plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author's firsthand experience. This clear-eyed and unsentimental story centers on the fictional Dunne family as they struggle to survive and endure while never losing faith in themselves. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, Milt, Julia, their two little girls, and Milt's father, Konkie, share a life of cramped circumstances in a one-room dugout with never enough to eat. Yet buried in the drudgery of their everyday life are aspirations, failed dreams, and fleeting moments of hope. The land is their dream. The Duanne family and the farmers around them fight desperately for the land they love, but the droughts of the thirties force them to abandon their fields. When they join the exodus to the irrigated valleys of California, they discover not the promised land, but an abusive labor system arrayed against destitute immigrants. The system labels all farmers like them as worthless ""Okies"" and earmarks them for beatings and worse when hardworking men and women, such as Milt and Julia, object to wages so low they can't possibly feed their children. The informal communal relations these dryland farmers knew on the High Plains gradually coalesce into a shared determination to resist. Realizing that a unified community is their best hope for survival, the Dunnes join with their fellow workers and begin the struggle to improve migrant working conditions through democratic organization and collective protest. Babb wrote Whose Names are Unknown in the 1930s while working with refugee farmers in the Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps of California. Originally from the Oklahoma Panhandle are herself, Babb, who had first come to Los Angeles in 1929 as a journalist, joined FSA camp administrator Tom Collins in 1938 to help the uprooted farmers. As Lawrence R. Rodgers notes in his foreword, Babb submitted the manuscript for this book to Random House for consideration in 1939. Editor Bennett Cerf planned to publish this ""exceptionally fine"" novel but when John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath swept the nation, Cerf explained that the market could not support two books on the subject. Babb has since shared her manuscript with interested scholars who have deemed it a classic in its own right. In an era when the country was deeply divided on social legislation issues and millions drifted unemployed and homeless, Babb recorded the stories of the people she greatly respected, those ""whose names are unknown."" In doing so, she returned to them their identities and dignity, and put a human face on economic disaster and social distress.

New Mexico's long and dramatic history was in many ways predestined by its location, vast size, and abundant mineral resources. Treasure-hunting Spanish explorers tramped across its plains and scaled its mountains in search of the Seven Cities of Cíbola in the sixteenth century. In clashing with descendants of the prehistoric Indian population, the Spanish began three centuries of struggles that lasted through the nineteenth century when the steamroller of United States expansion arrived. The history of New Mexico is the story of the blending of the three cultures - Hispanic, Indian, and Anglo.In this volume, a historian and a cartographer collaborate to depict specific aspects of the state's geography and events of its history, with the narrative illustrated through maps. Topics include geographical data (from topography to weather), sites of prehistoric civilizations, Spanish and United States expeditions, first towns, historic trails, the Civil War, stagecoach lines, railroads, county boundaries, principal cities and roads, state and national parks and monuments, and state judicial districts.

An essential step in learning and using any language is the acquisition of a working vocabulary. Many methods have been devised to help with this acquisition, all of them stressing the fundamental importance of mastering the words most frequently used. The Owen and Goodspeed word-lists - in which Homeric terms are arranged according to frequency of usage, divided into categories according to parts of speech, and presented in an easy-to-use format - are particularly helpful.The word-lists are based in part upon Gehring's famed Index Homericus and are designed to help the student learn Homeric words in a systematic way, thereby marking the reading of Homer a rewarding and natural experience.