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

Lacking a written language, hard metals, the wheel, or draught animals, the Incas forged one of the greatest imperial states in history. This is a portrait of the ancient Andean empire from the earliest stages of its development to its final capitulation to Pizzarro in the mid-16th century. more...

Price: $105.00

California's earliest European colonists - Russian merchants and Franciscan missionaries - both depended heavily on Native American labor to build and maintain their colonies, but they did so in very different ways. This richly detailed book brings together disparate skeins of history - including little-known oral histories, native texts, ethnohistory, and archaeological excavations - to present a vivid new look at how native cultures fared under these two colonial systems. In addition to providing a new window on California's colonial past, Kent Lightfoot's innovative work, incorporating the holistic methods of historical anthropology, explores the surprising ramifications of these long-ago encounters for the political status of native people in the state today. more...

Price: $15.95

A number of indigenous religions, including those of the Lakota (North America), Maya (Central America), and the descendents of the Inca (South America) are examined. more...

Price: $35.00

In the late 1800s American entrepreneurs became participants in the 400-year history of European economic and ecological hegemony in the tropics. Beginning as buyers in the tropical ports of the Atlantic and Pacific, they evolved into land speculators, controlling and managing the areas where tropical crops were grown for carefully fostered consumer markets at home. more...

Price: $15.95

A compelling, intimate look at the founders—George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison—and the women who played essential roles in their livesWith his usual storytelling flair and unparalleled research, Tom Fleming examines the women who were at the center of the lives of the founding fathers. From hot-tempered Mary Ball Washington to promiscuous Rachel Lavien Hamilton, the founding fathers' mothers powerfully shaped their sons' visions of domestic life. But lovers and wives played more critical roles as friends and often partners in fame. We learn of the youthful Washington's tortured love for the coquettish Sarah Fairfax, wife of his close friend; of Franklin's two "wives," one in London and one in Philadelphia; of Adams's long absences, which required a lonely, deeply unhappy Abigail to keep home and family together for years on end; of Hamilton's adulterous betrayal of his wife and then their reconciliation; of how the brilliant Madison was jilted by a flirtatious fifteen-year-old and went on to marry the effervescent Dolley, who helped make this shy man into a popular president. Jefferson's controversial relationship to Sally Hemings is also examined, with a different vision of where his heart lay.Fleming nimbly takes us through a great deal of early American history, as his founding fathers strove to reconcile the private and public, often beset by a media every bit as gossip seeking and inflammatory as ours today. He offers a powerful look at the challenges women faced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While often brilliant and articulate, the wives of the founding fathers all struggled with the distractions and dangers of frequent childbearing and searing anxiety about infant mortality—Jefferson's wife, Martha, died from complications following labor, as did his daughter. All the more remarkable, then, that these women loome more...

Price: $21.99