The enigmatic and powerful Tlacaelel (1398-1487), wrote annalist Chimalpahin, was "the beginning and origin" of the Mexica monarchy in fifteenth-century Mesoamerica. Brother of the first Moteuczoma, Tlacaelel would become "the most powerful, feared, and esteemed man of all that the world had seen up to that time." But this outsize figure of Aztec ......
In The Mask Maker, Diane Glancy tells the story of Edith Lewis, a recently divorced mixed-blood American Indian, as she travels the state of Oklahoma teaching students the art and custom of mask-making. A complex, subtle tale about flesh-and-blood human beings, this enchanting novel shows how one woman copes with alienation, loss, and questions ......
Non-Indians have amassed extensive records of Shawnee leaders dating back to the era between the French and Indian War and the War of 1812. But academia has largely ignored the stories of these leaders' descendants-including accounts from the Shawnees' own perspectives. The Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma focuses on the nineteenth- and ......
Pacification in Phu Yen and the American War in Vietnam
By the end of the American War in Vietnam, the coastal province of PhU YEn was one of the least-secure provinces in the Republic of Vietnam. It was also a prominent target of the American strategy of pacification-an effort, purportedly separate and distinct from conventional warfare, to win the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese. In Robert J. ......
During the Great Depression, the Los Angeles area was rife with radical movements. Although many observers thought their ideas unworkable, even dangerous, Southern Californians voted for them by the tens of thousands. This book asks why. To find answers, author Errol Wayne Stevens takes readers through the history of such movements as the ......
If we do in fact "remember the Alamo," it is largely thanks to one person who witnessed the final assault and survived: the commanding officer's slave, a young man known simply as Joe. What Joe saw as the Alamo fell, recounted days later to the Texas Cabinet, has come down to us in records and newspaper reports. But who Joe was, where he came ......
Imagine a time when a killer disease took lives at a rate rivaling Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021, and continued that grim harvest year after year, decade after decade. Such a nightmare scenario played out in the state of Arkansas-and across the United States-throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, when the scourge of ......
Theater and Culture in the Pacific Northwest, 1890-1920
Like many western boomtowns at the turn of the twentieth century, Spokane, Washington, enjoyed a lively theatrical scene, ranging from plays, concerts, and operas to salacious variety and vaudeville shows. Yet even as Spokanites took pride in their city's reputation as a "good show town," the more genteel among them worried about its "Wild West" ......
Indigenous Education in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
The Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) was founded in 1709 by Scottish Lowlanders for the education of Highlanders: specifically to convert them from the Gaelic language to English, from the Episcopal faith to Presbyterianism, and from latent Jacobitism to loyalty to the crown. In a transatlantic translation of ......
