The Photographs, Memories, and History from McDade, Texas
Thirty-five miles east of Austin, McDade, Texas is quintessential small-town America. McDade's colorful history, from its founding in 1871 as a Wild West boomtown and continuing to the much quieter present day, comes to life in The Soul of a Small Texas Town. David Wharton's contemporary photographs of the community and its residents and his ......
The Great Basin, a stark and beautiful desert filled with sagebrush deserts and mountain ranges, is the epicenter for public lands conflicts. Arising out of the multiple, often incompatible uses created throughout the twentieth century, these struggles reveal the tension inherent within the multiple use concept, a management philosophy that ......
The Evolution of Procedural Warfare in the Modern U.S. Senate
With its rock-bottom approval ratings, acrimonious partisan battles, and apparent inability to do its legislative business, the U.S. Senate might easily be deemed unworthy of attention, if not downright irrelevant. This book tells us that would be a mistake. Because the Senate has become the place where the policy-making process most frequently ......
When it adopted a new constitution in 1969, the Seminole Nation was the first of the Five Tribes in Oklahoma to formally reorganize its government. In the face of an American legal system that sought either to destroy its nationhood or to impede its self-government, the Seminole Nation tenaciously retained its internal autonomy, cultural vitality, ......
Who were the First Americans? Where did they come from? When did they get here? Are they the ancestors of modern Native Americans? These questions might seem straightforward, but scientists in competing fields have failed to convince one another with their theories and evidence, much less Native American peoples. The practice of science in its ......
The People's Republic of China is the only large country in the world that does not have a "national" military; its military answers only to a political party, the Chinese Communist Party. For a brief period in the mid-twentieth century, China had the makings of a professional, apolitical military force. The Rise and Fall of an Officer Corps tells ......
The Contra War and the Iran-Contra affair that shook the Reagan presidency were center stage on the U.S. political scene for nearly a decade. According to most observers, the main Contra army, or the Fuerza Democratica Nicaragueense (FDN), was a mercenary force hired by the CIA to oppose the Sandinista socialist revolution.The Real Contra War ......
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, 32 states passed laws allowing involuntary sterilization on those deemed biologically "unfit": convicted criminals, the disabled, the poor, and people of color. Texas, despite a history of violent racism, was not one of them. In The Purifying Knife, Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf explore this ......
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 ......
