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

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

One of the richest and most complex civilizations in ancient America evolved around Lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia. This work is a comprehensive synthesis of 4000 years of prehistory for the entire Titicaca region. more...

Price: $15.95

Anglophilia charts the phenomenon of the love of Britain that emerged after the Revolution and remains in the character of U.S. society and class, the style of academic life, and the idea of American intellectualism. But as Tamarkin shows, this Anglophilia was more than just an elite nostalgia; it was popular devotion that made reverence for British tradition instrumental to the psychological innovations of democracy. Anglophilia spoke to fantasies of cultural belonging, polite sociability, and, finally, deference itself as an affective practice within egalitarian politics. Tamarkin traces the wide-ranging effects of anglophilia on American literature, art and intellectual life in the early nineteenth century, as well as its influence in arguments against slavery, in the politics of Union, and in the dialectics of liberty and loyalty before the civil war. By working beyond narratives of British influence, Tamarkin highlights a more intricate culture of American response, one that included Whig elites, college students, radical democrats, urban immigrants, and African Americans. Ultimately, Anglophila argues that that the love of Britain was not simply a fetish or form of shame-a release from the burdens of American culture-but an anachronistic structure of attachement in which U.S. Identity was lived in other languages of national expression. more...

Price: $35.00

Though deeply entrenched in antebellum life, the artisans who lived and worked in Petersburg, Virginia in the 1800sincluding carpenters, blacksmiths, coach makers, bakers, and other skilled craftsmenhelped transform their planter-centered agricultural community into one of the most industrialized cities in the Upper South. These mechanics, as the artisans called themselves, successfully lobbied for new railroad lines and other amenities they needed to open their factories and shops, and turned a town whose livelihood once depended almost entirely on tobacco exports into a bustling modern city. In ARTISAN WORKERS IN THE UPPER SOUTH, Diane Barnes closely examines the relationships among Petersburg's skilled white, free black, and slave mechanics and the roles they played in southern Virginia's emerging market economy. She demonstrates that, despite studies that emphasize the backwardness of southern development, modern industry and the institution of slavery proved quite compatible in the Upper South. more...

Price: $37.50

This comprehensive volume is designed as a research guide that will both inform readers on the basics of US foreign policy from historical and political science perspectives and provide a look ahead at the means through which American policy makers will meet the future in an increasingly complex international system. more...

Price: $124.95