History : Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies)

This wide-ranging book illuminates the importance of the Western in American history. It explores the interconnections between the Western in both literature and film and the United States in the 20th century. Structured chronologically, the book traces the evolution of the Western as a uniquely American form. The author argues that America’s frontier past was quickly transformed into a set of symbols and myths, an American meta-narrative that came to underpin much of the ‘American century’. He details how and why this process occurred, the form and function of Western myths and symbols, the evolution of this mythology, and its subversions and reconstructions throughout 20th-century American history. The book engages with the full range of historical, literary and cinematic perspectives and texts, from the founding Western histories of Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick Jackson Turner to the New Western history of Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White. more...

Price: $31.99

The legacy of Columbus’s discovery of the New World and its subsequent colonization is a current focus of much historical investigation. Columbus himself continues to be a cipher like the signature he crafted for himself, a signature no one has been able to decode. What is certain, however, is that this signature symbolized the construction of a colonial imagery that is still operative and that the consequences of the violent encounter between the European and Amerindian civilizations are now being debated and reinterpreted.Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus examines the constitution of an Amerindian world of resistance against European cultural imperialism. The essays in this volume by literary critics, linguists, semioticians, and historians argue that in the long run the images constructed by the Amerindians to confront the consequences of their encounter with European culture will ensure the endurance of their own culture, that they modified rather than renounced their own imaginary to integrate the material ramifications of their conquest and Westernization. Amerindians in effect became their own Others, and in that process came to understand and accept the substantial alternity of the Other, ultimately realizing the impossibility of absolute assimilation. more...

Price: $90.00

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Price: $17.95

Anonimo Mexicano is the first publication of the full Nahuatl text and English translation of a rare and important Native history of preconquest Mexico. Written circa 1600 by an anonymous Tlaxcaltecan author, it is an epic account of the settling of central Mexico by Nahua peoples from the northern frontier. They developed a sophisticated culture with powerful city states and an agricultural economy, fought great wars, established dynasties, and recorded their history and legends in painted books. The Mexica became the most powerful of these nations until their conquest by the Spanish with the help of the Tlaxcalteca, who were rivals of the Mexica and whose national origin tale was recorded in Anonimo Mexicano. more...

Price: $34.95

On September 17, 1862, the single bloodiest day of the Civil War, the Army of the Potomac under George B. McClellan clashed with Lee's invading Army of Northern Virginia at Antietam Creek. General Francis W. Palfrey (1831-1889), then lieutenant colonel of the 20th Massachusetts and later a founding member of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, was severely wounded in the savage struggle that forced the Confederates to retreat across the Potomac. The Union victory, though costly and indecisive, was enough for Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. But less than three months later, the Battle of Fredericksburg (where droves of Union soldiers were slaughtered in Ambrose Burnside's vain, reckless attempt to storm the impregnable Confederate positions on Marye's Heights) ended the year with a resounding, grisly defeat. The Antietam and Fredericksburg (1882), part of The Army in the Civil War series, is invaluable for Palfrey's unique eyewitness perspective; his unsparing, provocative appraisals of Generals McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, and others; his careful, detailed description of the Antietam terrain (vastly altered over time); and his incisive analyses of the folly and fighting that determined two of the most pivotal, murderous battles of the Civil War. more...

Price: $4.95