The University of Arizona Press
October 12, 2022
We are thrilled to be participating in the 2022 Western History Association meeting in San Antonio, Texas this week! Make sure to stop by our booth to browse our latest history titles, and meet with our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles. If you aren’t attending the meeting in person, check out some of our recent history titles below!
Use the code AZWHA22 for 30% off with free continental U.S. shipping through 11/15/22. To learn more about our publishing program, click here.
We are excited to be launching two new series, BorderVisions and Arizona Crossroads, this year! Learn more below.
BorderVisions, edited by Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Yvette J. Saavedra, engages the U.S.-Mexico borderlands’ dynamic histories and cultures and expands our understanding of the borderlands beyond a site of geopolitical inquiry. The series conceptualizes borderlands as both a place and a methodology and addresses the constraints of traditional fields, challenging authors to think creatively and critically about the expansive frameworks and possibilities of borderlands studies. This series will deepen our understanding of the ways in which gender, class, race, sexuality, and other intersectional concerns are reflected in humanities and humanistic social science borderlands scholarship. This series will publish monographs and edited collections by new and established authors who employ innovative interdisciplinary methodologies on topics reflecting both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. We seek to foster an intellectual space that envisions and manifests the multitude of perspectives for understanding the borderlands through interdisciplinary humanities and humanistic social sciences scholarship. We are especially interested in books that address the complexities and richness of borderlands experiences at different historical, cultural, and sociopolitical moments.
Watch a recording of the series launch for BorderVisions here.
Arizona Crossroads, edited by Anita Huizar-Hernández, Eric V. Meeks, and Katherine G. Morrissey, is a series in collaboration with the Arizona Historical Society that explores the history of peoples and cultures, events and struggles, ideas and practices in the place we know today as Arizona. Throughout its history, Arizona has long served as a crossroads between Native peoples, settler colonists, and immigrants from around the world. It has been a contested site among peoples, nations, and empires; it is also a place where events, decisions, and struggles have had far-reaching consequences beyond its shifting borders. As the series title suggests, we welcome books that deepen our understanding of Arizona as a diverse crossroads and meeting ground within broad national and transnational contexts, whether topical, thematic, or geographic (the region, the nation, the borderlands). Open to any topic within any time period of Arizona history, the series will publish scholarship that is cutting-edge and innovative, yet generally accessible and readable to an educated general audience. We are open to a variety of book formats: monographs, multi-authored works, and edited collections, as well as broader more synthetic works. Interdisciplinary projects that engage the past are encouraged.
Watch a recording of the series launch for Arizona Crossroads here.
For questions or to submit a proposal to either of these series, please contact Kristen Buckles, kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.
On the heels of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Diné Education, A History of Navajo Nation Education explains how the current Navajo educational system is a complex terrain of power relationships, competing agendas, and jurisdictional battles influenced by colonial pressures and tribal resistance. In providing the historical roots to today’s challenges, Wendy Shelly Greyeyes clears the path and provides a go-to reference to move discussions forward.
Read a brief interview with the author here.
A New Deal for Navajo Weaving by Jennifer McLerran provides a history of early to mid-twentieth-century Diné weaving projects by non-Natives who sought to improve the quality and marketability of Diné weaving but in so doing failed to understand the cultural significance of weaving and its role in the lives of Diné women.
The Greater San Rafael Swell by Stephen E. Strom and Jonathan T. Bailey offers the story of how citizens of a small county in the rural West – Emery County, Utah—resolved perhaps the most volatile issue in the region – the future of public lands.
Explore field notes from Jonathan T. Bailey here, and explore field notes from Stephen E. Strom here.
Visualizing Genocide, edited by Yve Chavez and Nancy Marie Mithlo, engages the often sparse and biased discourses of genocidal violence against Indigenous communities documented in exhibits, archives, and museums. Essayists and artists from a range of disciplines identify how Native knowledge can be effectively incorporated into memory spaces.
Nuclear Nuevo México recovers the voices and stories that have been lost or ignored in the telling of U.S. nuclear history. By recuperating these narratives, Myrriah Gómez tells a new story of New Mexico, one in which the nuclear history is not separate from the collective colonial history of Nuevo México but instead demonstrates how earlier eras of settler colonialism laid the foundation for nuclear colonialism in New Mexico.
World of Our Mothers by Miguel Montiel and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel highlights the largely forgotten stories of forty-five women immigrants in the early twentieth century. Through interviews in Arizona mining towns, Phoenix barrios, and selected areas of California, Texas, and the Midwest, we learn how they negotiated their lives with their circumstances.
Set in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, Bountiful Deserts foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples who harvested the desert as bountiful in its material resources and sacred spaces. Author Cynthia Radding uses the tools of history, anthropology, geography, and ecology to re-create the means of defending Indigenous worlds through colonial encounters, the formation of mixed societies, and the direct conflicts over forests, grasslands, streams, and coastal estuaries that sustained wildlife, horticulture, foraging, hunting, fishing, and—after European contact—livestock and extractive industries. She returns in each chapter to the spiritual power of nature and the enduring cultural significance of the worlds that Indigenous communities created and defended.
