In the early 1870s, Hubert H. Bancroft and his assistants set out to record the memoirs of early Californios, one of them being eighty-three-year-old Don José María Amador, a former “Forty-Niner” during the California Gold Rush and soldado de cuera at the Presidio of San Francisco. Amador tells of reconnoitering expeditions into the interior of California, where he encountered local indigenous populations. He speaks of political events of Mexican California and the widespread confiscation of the Californios’ goods, livestock, and properties when the United States took control. A friend from Mission Santa Cruz, Lorenzo Asisara, also describes the harsh life and mistreatment the Indians faced from the priests. Both the Amador and Asisara narratives were used as sources in Bancroft’s writing but never published themselves. Gregorio Mora-Torres has now rescued them from obscurity and presents their voices in English translation (with annotations) and in the original Spanish on facing pages. This bilingual edition will be of great interest to historians of the West, California, and Mexican American studies. “This book presents a very convincing and interesting narrative about Mexican California. Its frankness and honesty are refreshing.”–Richard Griswold del Castillo, San Diego State University

In an era when the dominant ideology divided the world into separate public and private spheres and relegated women to the private, Anna J. Hardwicke Pennybacker ardently promoted progressive causes including public education, women's suffrage, social reform, and the League of Nations. A Texas educator, clubwoman, writer, lecturer, and social and political activist whose influence in the early twentieth century extended nationwide, Pennybacker wrote A New History of Texas, which was the state-adopted textbook for Texas history from 1898–1913 and remained in classroom use until the 1940s. She was also active in the burgeoning women’s club movement and served as president of both the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (1912–14). The latter position was considered by some to be the most powerful position for a woman in America at that time. Kelley King has mined the fifty-two linear feet of Pennybacker archives at the University of Texas Center for American History to reconstruct the "hidden history" of a feminist's life and work. There, she uncovered an impressive record of advocacy, interlaced with a moderate style and some old-fashioned biases. King's work offers insight into the personal and political choices Pennybacker made and the effects these choices had in her life and on the American culture at large.

Initially, when the government in Paris responded with force to the November 1, 1954 insurrection of Algerian nationalists, French public opinion offered all but unanimous support. Then it was revealed that hundreds of thousands of Muslims were herded into resettlement camps in Algeria; that Algerians suspected of nationalist sympathies were imprisoned in France; that conscientious objectors were denied their rights; and that a resolution to the conflict, either by force or by peaceful methods, was not forthcoming. When it was proven that the army was guilty of abuses, members of the Protestant minority protested and then laboured to educate their own communities as well as the public at large to the moral and spiritual perils of these actions.

Based on painstaking research and solid scholarship, The Call of Conscience: French Protestant Responses to the Algeria War, 1954-1962 reveals a rich portrait of the protest.

Based on conversations with women in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Lima, Peru, The Call of God explores how their faith provides them with an understanding amidst extreme poverty, violence, and displacement. Peru was the birthplace of liberation theology and the poor women of that country were instrumental in its original elucidation. This book introduces the women of El Agustino, where a diverse, dedicated and eloquent group have set out to answer questions, solve problems, and rebuild a society stricken with rampant inflation and terrorism, all in response to the call of God. Without much formal education, these women possess and espouse complex theological propositions with a high degree of independence and proficiency. A careful reading reveals an education of a different sort—one rooted in life’s changing experiences; one directed toward a different liberation.

Unlike earlier U.S. interventions in Latin America, the Reagan administration’s attempt to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua during the 1980s was not allowed to proceed quietly. Tens of thousands of American citizens organized and agitated against U.S. aid to the counterrevolutionary guerrillas, known as “contras.” Believing the Contra War to be unnecessary, immoral, and illegal, they challenged the administration’s Cold War stereotypes, warned of “another Vietnam,” and called on the United States to abide by international norms. A Call to Conscience offers the first comprehensive history of the anti–Contra War campaign and its Nicaragua connections. Roger Peace places this eight-year campaign in the context of previous American interventions in Latin America, the Cold War, and other grassroots oppositional movements. Based on interviews with American and Nicaraguan citizens and leaders, archival records of activist organizations, and official government documents, this book reveals activist motivations, analyzes the organizational dynamics of the anti–Contra War campaign, and contrasts perceptions of the campaign in Managua and Washington. Peace shows how a variety of civic groups and networks—religious, leftist, peace, veteran, labor, women’s rights—worked together in a decentralized campaign that involved extensive transnational cooperation.

The Call to Read is the first full-length study to situate the surviving oeuvre of Reginald Pecock in the context of current scholarship on English vernacular theology of the late medieval period. Kirsty Campbell examines the important and innovative contribution Pecock made to late medieval debates about the roles of the Bible, the Church, the faculty of reason, and practices of devotion in fostering a vital, productive, and stable Christian community. Campbell argues that Pecock’s fascinating attempt to educate the laity is more than an effort to supply religious reading material: it is an attempt to establish and unite a community of readers around his books, to influence and thus change the ways they understand their faith, the world, and their place in it. The aim of Pecock’s educational project is to harness the power of texts to effect religious change. Combining traditional approaches with innovative thinking on moral philosophy, devotional exercises, and theological doctrine, Pecock’s works of religious instruction are his attempt to reform a Christian community threatened by heresy through reshaping meaningful Christian practices and forms of belief. Campbell’s book will be of interest to scholars and students of medieval literature and culture, especially those interested in fifteenth-century religious history and culture.

CALLALOO, the premier African Diaspora literary journal, publishes original works by, and critical studies of, black writers worldwide. The journal offers a rich mixture of fiction, poetry, plays, critical essays, cultural studies, interviews, and visual art. Frequent annotated bibliographies, special thematic issues, and original art and photography are some of the features of this highly acclaimed international showcase of arts and letters.

In recent decades, the concepts of race, gender, and culture have come to function as “calling cards,” the terms by which we announce ourselves as professionals and negotiate acceptance and/or rejection in the academic marketplace. In this volume, contributors from composition, literature, rhetoric, literacy, and cultural studies share their experiences and insights as researchers, scholars, and teachers who centralize these concepts in their work. Reflecting deliberately on their own research and classroom practices, the contributors share theoretical frameworks, processes, and methodologies; consider the quality of the knowledge and the understanding that their theoretical approaches generate; and address various challenges related to what it actually means to perform this type of work both professionally and personally, especially in light of the ways in which we are all raced, gendered, and acculturated.

Calling Down Fire examines the social and cultural influence of Jefferson County, New York, an isolated, agrarian setting, on the formation of Charles Grandison Finney’s theology and revival methods. Finney, who later became president of Oberlin College, was arguably the most innovative and influential revivalist of the Second Great Awakening. He pioneered methods which were widely adopted and promoted a theology that emphasized the ability of evangelists to save souls and the importance of free will in the salvation process. Marianne Perciaccante follows the course of religious enthusiasm and the evolution of the reform impulse in Jefferson County following Finney’s departure for more influential pulpits. When Finney began to preach in Jefferson County, he brought Baptist and Methodist piety to the Presbyterians of the northern section of the county. This pious fervor eventually was adopted widely by middle-class Presbyterians and Congregationalists and constituted an acceptance by elites of tempered, non-elite piety.

Unique in both scope and perspective, Calling for Change investigates the status of women within the Canadian legal profession ten years after the first national report on the subject was published by the Canadian Bar Association. Elizabeth Sheehy and Sheila McIntyre bring together essays that investigate a wide range of topics, from the status of women in law schools, the practising bar, and on the bench, to women's grassroots engagement with law and with female lawyers from the frontlines. Contributors not only reflect critically on the gains, losses, and barriers to change of the past decade, but also provide blueprints for political action. Academics, community activists, practitioners, law students, women litigants, and law society benchers and staff explore how egalitarian change is occurring and/or being impeded in their particular contexts. Each of these unique voices offers lessons from their individual, collective, and institutional efforts to confront and counter the interrelated forms of systemic inequality that compromise women's access to education and employment equity within legal institutions and, ultimately, to equal justice in Canada.