Sugar, coffee, corn, and chocolate have long dominated the study of Central American commerce, and researchers tend to overlook one other equally significant commodity: alcohol. Often illicitly produced and consumed, aguardiente (distilled sugar cane spirits or rum) was central to Guatemalan daily life, though scholars have often neglected its fundamental role in the country's development.

Throughout world history, alcohol has helped build family livelihoods, boost local economies, and forge nations. The alcohol economy also helped shape Guatemala's turbulent categories of ethnicity, race, class, and gender, as these essays demonstrate. Established and emerging Guatemalan historians investigate aguardiente's role from the colonial era to the twentieth century, drawing from archival documents, oral histories, and ethnographic sources. Topics include women in the alcohol trade, taverns as places of social unrest, and tension between Maya and State authority.

By tracing Guatemala's past, people, and national development through the channel of an alcoholic beverage, Distilling the Influence of Alcohol opens new directions for Central American historical and anthropological research.

A companion volume to The Convergence of Judaism and Islam, this collection of essays explores the Jewish-Muslim relationship from the nineteenth century to the present. While that earlier work focused on the shared cultures and often peaceful relations between the two religions in the medieval and early modern periods, this book reveals how the paths of Jews and Muslims began to diverge two centuries ago.

The essays in this volume examine how each group reacted quite differently to colonial rule, how the Palestine Question and the Arab-Israeli crisis have soured relations, and how the rise of nationalism has contributed to the growing tensions. With contributors from a wide variety of scholarly disciplines, this book offers a broad but in-depth analysis of the Jewish-Muslim relationship in recent times.

Previously published histories and primary source collections on the Iraqi experience tend to be topically focused or dedicated to presenting a top-down approach. By contrast, Stacy Holden's A Documentary History of Modern Iraq gives voice to ordinary Iraqis, clarifying the experience of the Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Jews, and women over the past century.

Through varied documents ranging from short stories to treaties, political speeches to memoirs, and newspaper articles to book excerpts, the work synthesizes previously marginalized perspectives of minorities and women with the voices of the political elite to provide an integrated picture of political change from the Ottoman Empire in 1903 to the end of the second Bush administration in 2008. Covering a broad range of topics, this bottom-up approach allows readers to fully immerse themselves in the lives of everyday Iraqis as they navigate regime shifts from the British to the Hashemite monarchy, the political upheaval of the Persian Gulf wars, and beyond. Brief introductions to each excerpt provide context and suggest questions for classroom discussion.

This collection offers raw history, untainted and unfiltered by modern political framework and thought, representing a refreshing new approach to the study of Iraq.

Aparicio examines the ways first- and second-generation Dominican-Americans in the dynamic northern Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights have shaped a new Dominican presence in local New York City politics. Through community organizing, they have formed coalitions with people of different national and ethnic backgrounds and other people of color, tackled local concerns, and created new routes for empowerment.

The character of Dominican-American politics has changed since the first large wave of Dominican immigrants arrived in New York in the 1960s. Aparicio shows how second-generation activists, raised and educated in public institutions in the city, have expanded their network to include fellow Dominicans—both in the United States and abroad--as well as other ethnic and racial minorities, such as Puerto Ricans and African-Americans, who share common goals. Offering the perspectives of local organizers and members of Dominican-American organizations, Aparicio documents their thoughts on such issues as education, police brutality, civic participation, and politics. She also explores the ways in which they experience, reflect upon, and organize around issues of race and racialization processes, and how their experiences influence their political agendas and actions.

This new story of immigration and empowerment highlights the complexity of any group’s political development, making it useful for students of U.S. Latino and youth culture, as well as scholars of urban studies and politics, race, immigration, and transnationalism.

How did the political party of Lincoln--of emancipation--become the party of the South and of white resentment? How did Jefferson Davis’s old party become the preferred choice for most southern blacks? Most scholars date these transformations to the administrations of Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. Edward Frantz challenges this myopic view by closely examining the complex and often contradictory rhetoric and symbolism utilized by Republicans between 1877 and 1933.

Presidential journeys throughout the South were public rituals that provided a platform for the issues of race, religion, and Republicanism for both white and black southerners. Frantz skillfully notes the common themes and questions scrutinized during this time and finely crafts comparisons between the presidents’ speeches and strategies while they debated the power dynamics that underlay their society.

This fresh and fast-paced volume brings new voices to the forefront by utilizing the rich resources of the African American press during the administrations of Presidents Hayes, Harrison, McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Hoover. Although these Republicans ultimately failed to build lasting coalitions in the states of the former Confederacy, their tours provided the background for future GOP victories.

For more than two thousand years, drinking has played a critical role in Andean societies. This collection provides a unique look at the history, ethnography, and archaeology of one of the most important traditional indigenous commodities in Andean South America--fermented plant beverages collectively known as chicha.

The authors investigate how these forms of alcohol have played a huge role in maintaining gender roles, kinship bonds, ethnic identities, exchange relationships, and status hierarchies. They also consider how shifts in alcohol production, exchange, and consumption have precipitated social change.

Unique among foodways studies for its extensive temporal coverage, Drink, Power, and Society in the Andes also brings together scholars from diverse theoretical, methodological, and regional perspectives.

In studies of ancient civilizations, the focus is often on the temples, palaces, and buildings created and then left behind, both because they survive and because of the awe they still inspire today. From the Mississippian mounds in the United States to the early pyramids of Peru, these monuments have been well-documented, but less attention has been paid to analyzing the logistical complexity involved in their creation.

In this collection, prominent archaeologists explore the sophisticated political and logistical organizations that were required to plan and complete these architectural marvels. They discuss the long-term political, social, and military impacts these projects had on their respective civilizations, and illuminate the significance of monumentality among early complex societies in the Americas.

Early New World Monumentality is ultimately a study of labor and its mobilization, as well as the long-term spiritual awe and political organization that motivated and were enhanced by such undertakings. Mounds and other impressive monuments left behind by earlier civilizations continue to reveal their secrets, offering profound insights into the development of complex societies throughout the New World.

From the rainforests of Costa Rica and the Amazon to the windswept lands of Tierra del Fuego, Laura Barbas-Rhoden discusses the natural settings within contemporary Latin American novels as they depict key moments of environmental change or crisis in the region from the nineteenth-century imperialism to the present.

By integrating the use of futuristic novels, Barbas-Rhoden pushes the ecocriticism discussion beyond the realm of "nature writing." She avoids the clichés of literary nature and reminds readers that today’s urban centers are also part of Latin America and its environmental crisis.

One of the first writers to apply ecocriticism to Latin American fiction, Barbas-Rhoden argues that literature can offer readers a deeper understanding of the natural world and humanity’s place in it. She demonstrates that ecocritical readings of Latin American topics must take into account social, racial, and gender injustices. She also addresses postapocalyptic science fiction that speaks to a fear of environmental collapse and reminds North American readers that the environments of Latin America are rich and diverse, encompassing both rural and urban extremes.

For millennia, Malta has always been considered a site of strategic importance. From the arrival of the Phoenicians through rule under Carthage, Rome, Sicilian Arabs, Normans, and Genovese, to the Order of St. John ("Knights of Malta"), the advent of the Napoleonic Wars, and even World Wars I and II, the Maltese islands have served as re-provisioning stations, military bases, and refuges for pirates and privateers.

Building on her systematic underwater archaeological survey of the Maltese archipelago, Ayse Atauz presents a sweeping, groundbreaking, interdisciplinary approach to maritime history in the Mediterranean. Offering a general overview of essential facts, including geographical and oceanographic factors that would have affected the navigation of historic ships, major relevant historical texts and documents, the logistical possibilities of ancient ship design, a detailed study of sea currents and wind patterns, and especially the archaeological remains (or scarcity thereof) around the Maltese maritime perimeter, she builds a convincing argument that Malta mattered far less in maritime history than has been previously asserted.

Atauz's conclusions are of great importance to the history of Malta and of the Mediterranean in general, and her archaeological discoveries about ships are a major contribution to the history of shipbuilding and naval architecture.

Though they were born a generation apart, Joseph Conrad and James Joyce shared similar life experiences and similar literary preoccupations. Both left their home countries at a relatively young age and remained lifelong expatriates.

Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce offers a fresh look at these two modernist writers, revealing how their rejection of organized religion and the colonial presence in their native countries allowed them to destabilize traditional notions of power, colonialism, and individual freedom in their texts. Throughout, Agata Szczeszak-Brewer ably demonstrates the ways in which these authors grapple with the same issues--the grand narrative, paralysis, hegemonic practices, the individual's pilgrimage toward unencumbered self-definition--within the rigid bounds of imperial ideologies and myths. The result is an engaging and enlightening investigation of the writings of Conrad and Joyce and of the larger literary movement to which they belonged.