Americas category: 34066 books

Momentous changes swept Spain in the fifteenth century: royal marriage united its two largest kingdoms, the last Muslim emirate fell to Catholic armies, and conquests in the Americas were turning Spain into a great empire. Yet few people could define “Spanishness” concretely. Antonio Feros traces Spain’s evolving ideas of nationhood and ethnicity.

Discover how one spectacular building project revolutionized Miami, how one man's moxie helped turn a fractious tropical city into a cultural capital of the Americas. In Center of Dreams, New York Times bestselling author Les Standiford tells the inspiring story of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the...

During the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, coloniality emerged as a new structure of power as Europeans colonized the Americas and built on the ideas of Western civilization and modernity as the endpoints of historical time and Europe as the center of the world. Walter D. Mignolo argues that coloniality...

A provocative new book that shows us why we must put American history firmly in a global context--from 1492 to today Americans like to tell their country's story as if the United States were naturally autonomous and self-sufficient, with characters, ideas, and situations unique to itself. Thomas...

With surprising tales of vicious mutineers, imperial riches, and high-seas intrigue, Black Flags, Blue Waters vividly reanimates the “Golden Age” of piracy in the Americas. Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic and surprising history...

ABOUT THE BOOKEven 65 years after it happened, the murder of Elizabeth Short remains one of Americas most notorious unsolved mysteries. The utterly gruesome nature of the murder, combined with the incidents connection to the very in-vogue (at the time) Los Angeles art scene, make this a murder...

New concerns with the intersections of culture and power, historical agency, and the complexity of social and political life are producing new questions about the United States’ involvement with Latin America. Turning away from political-economic models that see only domination and resistance, exploiters...

As the postwar U.S. national security establishment required Middle Eastern expertise, it cultivated a beneficial relationship with universities. But by the time the Bush administration declared its Global War on Terror, Osamah Khalil shows, think tank agendas aligned with neoconservative goals were the drivers of America’s foreign policy.

One of the world’s poorest nations, Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Haiti proclaimed its independence from France on January 1, 1804 following the only successful slave revolt in the Americas. As a result of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), Haiti became the...

This book studies how the act of migration is a motivating constituent in the production of popular culture in both the homeland and the destination. It looks at the formations of cultures in the process of identity-making of approximately 200 million Indians scattered across the world, from colonial...

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, written in 1789, is the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano. It discusses his time spent in slavery, serving primarily on galleys, documents his attempts at becoming an independent man through his study of the Bible, and his eventual success in...

The American Crucible furnishes a vivid and authoritative history of the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas. For over three centuries enslavement promoted the rise of capitalism in the Atlantic world. The New World became the crucible for a succession of fateful experiments in colonization,...

The conquest and colonization of the Americas imposed new social, legal, and cultural categories upon vast and varied populations of indigenous people. The colonizers’ intent was to homogenize these cultures and make all of them “Indian.” The creation of those new identities is the subject of...

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia—unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican...