Free E-Book of the Week: Prehistory, Personality, and Place

April 22, 2020

In this time to read, we will be featuring one free e-Book each week. This week we’re highlighting our books in archaeology and offering Prehistory, Personality, and Place: Emil W. Haury and the Mogollon Controversy as the free e-Book of the week.

When Emil Haury defined the ancient Mogollon in the 1930s as a culture distinct from their Ancestral Pueblo and Hohokam neighbors, he triggered a major intellectual controversy in the history of southwestern archaeology, centering on whether the Mogollon were truly a different culture or merely a “backwoods variant” of a better-known people. In this book, archaeologists Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey tell the story of the remarkable individuals who uncovered the Mogollon culture, fought to validate it, and eventually resolved the controversy.

Download from our online shopping cart here. Available until 4/30/2020. Discount code is AZHAURY20.  

“Archeologists Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey ably chronicle this controversy and the personalities who drove it.”—American Archeology

Learn more 

Explore Our Recent Titles in Archaeology

April 22, 2020

We are missing the annual Society for American Archaeology meeting right now, so we are highlighting our recent archaeology titles that would have been displayed front-and-center at the meeting.

Use the code AZARCH20 to get 40% off all University of Arizona Press titles, plus free shipping! The code is valid through 7/11/2020.

Our senior editor, Allyson Carter, Ph.D., acquires in this field. To propose a project, contact her at acarter@uapress.arizona.edu.

The Global Spanish Empire tackles broad questions about indigenous cultural persistence, pluralism, and place making using a global comparative perspective grounded in the shared experience of Spanish colonialism. Through an expansive range of essays that look at Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific, this volume brings often-neglected regions into conversation.

Tewa Worlds offers an archaeological history of eight centuries of Tewa Pueblo history in the Rio Chama Valley through the lens of contemporary Pueblo philosophical and historical discourse. The result gives weight to the deep past, colonial encounters, and modern experiences. It challenges archaeologists to both critically reframe interpretation and to acknowledge the Tewa’s deep but ongoing connection with the land.

More than a history of coveted commodities, the unique story that unfolds in John R. Gust and Jennifer P. Mathews’s new history Sugarcane and Rum is told through the lens of Maya laborers who worked under brutal conditions on small haciendas to harvest sugarcane and produce rum in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.

Narratives of Persistence charts the remarkable persistence of California’s Ohlone and Paipai people over the past five centuries. Lee M. Panich draws connections between the events and processes of the deeper past and the way the Ohlone and Paipai today understand their own histories and identities.

Read an interview about the book with Lee Panich here.

The second of a two-volume series, Moquis and Kastiilam tells the story of the encounter between the Hopis, who the Spaniards called Moquis, and the Spaniards, who the Hopis called Kastiilam, from the Pueblo Revolt through 1781. Balancing historical documents with oral histories, it creates a fresh perspective on the interface of Spanish and Hopi peoples in the period of missionization.

Read about the first volume in the series here.

The increasingly militarized U.S.-México border is an intensely physical place, affecting the bodies of all who encounter it. The essays in The Border and Its Bodies explore how crossing becomes embodied in individuals on the most basic social unit possible: the human body.

Read an excerpt from the volume here.

The Continuous Path challenges archaeologists to take Pueblo concepts of movement seriously by privileging Pueblo concepts of being and becoming in the interpretation of anthropological data. The collaborative volume brings together Native community members, archaeologists, and anthropologists to weave multiple perspectives together to write the histories of Pueblo peoples past, present, and future.

Congratulations to the editors of the book, Samuel Duwe and Robert Preucel, as well as all of the contributors to the volume on winning the Historical Society of New Mexico’s 2020 Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá Award!

In The Davis Ranch Site, the results of Rex Gerald’s 1957 excavations at the Davis Ranch site in southeastern Arizona’s San Pedro River Valley are reported in their entirety for the first time. Annotations to Gerald’s original manuscript and newly written material place Gerald’s work in the context of what is currently known regarding the late thirteenth-century Kayenta diaspora and the relationship between Kayenta immigrants and the Salado phenomenon.

Challenging Colonial Narratives pushes postcolonial thinking in archaeology in socially and politically meaningful directions. Matthew A. Beaudoin calls for more nuanced interpretive frameworks and encourages archaeologists and scholars to focus on the different or similar aspects among sites to explore the nineteenth-century life of contemporaneous Indigenous and settler peoples.

Painting the Skin brings together exciting research on painted skins—human, animal, and vegetal—in Mesoamerica. It offers physicochemical analysis and interdisciplinary understandings of the materiality, uses, and cultural meanings of the colors applied on a multitude of skins, including bodies, codices, and even building “skins.”

The archaeological record of the Northern Rio Grande exhibits the hallmarks of economic development, but Pueblo economies were organized in radically different ways than modern industrialized and capitalist economies. Contributors to Reframing the Northern Rio Grande Pueblo Economy explore the patterns and determinants of economic development in pre-Hispanic Rio Grande Pueblo society, building a platform for more broadly informed research on this critical process.

Don’t forget, the University of Arizona Press is offering 40% off all e-books right now! If you would prefer an e-book instead of a physical copy, use the code AZEBOOK40 at checkout. Also, keep an eye on our social media for a different free e-book of the week every week!

We Can All Use Some Daniel Chacón Right Now, You’re Welcome

April 17, 2020

University of Arizona Press author Daniel Chacón was recently interviewed by poet and authors ire’ne lara silva for The Rumpus on Kafka in a Skirt and more:

The characters in Daniel Chacón’s Kafka in a Skirt: Stories from the Wall® live at the intersection of technology and the unfathomable nature of time and existence. It’s not that the rules of physics cease to exist but that we, as readers, are allowed to peer into all of the ways that they’ve never really existed. Unexpectedly tender and inquisitive, these stories explore identity, life on the border, childhood, maturity, creation, and connection.

The interview dives into metaphor and metaphysics, and is a delightful read and window into Chacón’s world as an artist. Find the interview here.

Like many of us, Chacón, a creative writing professor at the University of Texas, El Paso, is home with his family. He’s making the most of this COVID-19 life posting “a new story a day, every day, five days a week throughout the month of April or until this virus passes and we are free to wander again.”

The stories are posted on Chacón’s website: Lockdown Stories During the Quarantine. (Seeing the Elephants), are like The Rumpus interview, another great ride inside Chacón’s writing mind.

Free E-Book of the Week: Crossing with the Virgin

April 14, 2020

In this time to read, we will be featuring one free e-Book each week. This week we’re highlighting our books about the border and offering Crossing with the Virgin: Stories from the Migrant Trail as the free e-Book of the week.

When it was published exactly ten years ago this week, the book was the first of it’s kind. Not only did it share thirty-nine first-hand accounts of migrants crossing the Arizona desert, it also shared the stories of the Samaritans involved in humanitarian work in the borderlands.

Crossing with the Virgin is not only a window into the migrants’ plight but also a look at the challenges faced by volunteers in sometimes compromising situations—and at their own humanizing process. This is a story that is more poignant than ever as we hear stories of Samaritans all around us.

Download from our online shopping cart here. Available until 4/21/2020. Discount code is AZCROSS20.  

“Trading off chapters, the authors deliver immigrants’ stories calmly and objectively, but their compassionate message is clear, and especially timely. Though difficult to read, this important collection provides vital, humanizing perspective on a divisive issue, with stories that will stick with readers for a long time.”—Publishers Weekly starred review

Learn more 

Free E-Book of the Week: Leaving Tulsa

April 8, 2020

In this time to read, we will be featuring one free e-book each week. This week we’re offering a book from our Sun Tracks Series, which focuses on the creative works of Indigenous and Native artists and writers. This week, we’re featuring Leaving Tulsa by Jennifer Elise Foerster, who is also the author of Bright Raft in the Afterweather.

Download from our online shopping cart here. Available until 4/12/2020. Discount code is AZTULSA.  

“For a book that unfurled like a wild, restless road trip, I took great delight in Jennifer Foerster’s Leaving Tulsa. Sensuous, generous, full of beginnings and endings, this map of America flapping in the dark meditates on Foerster’s Muskegee ancestry, the American prairie, the loss of her grandmother’s land, and her shard-like rediscovery in California.”—Tess Taylor, NPR

Book Description: Leaving Tulsa, a book of road elegies and laments, travels from Oklahoma to the edges of the American continent through landscapes at once stark and lush, ancient and apocalyptic. Each poem gives the collection a rich lyrical-dramatic texture. Ultimately, these brave and luminous poems engage and shatter the boundaries of time, self, and continent. Learn more 

Free E-Book of the Week: Sor Juana

April 1, 2020

In this time to read, we will be featuring one free e-book each week. This week we’re offering a book from our Latinx Pop Culture Series, which sheds light on all aspects of Latinx cultural production and consumption as well as the Latinx presence globally in popular cultural. This week, we’re featuring Sor Juana: Or, the Persistence of Pop by Ilan Stavans. 

Download from our online shopping cart here. Available until 4/8/2020. Discount code is AZJUANA.  

“Stavans introduces readers to a woman who, in the crucible of Spanish monastic life, forged a poetic idiom for writing verse between the identities of Europe and America.”–Los Angeles Review of Books

Book Description: Sor Juana: Or, The Persistence of Pop encapsulates the life, times, and legacy of seventeenth-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Ilan Stavans provides a biographical and meditative picture of how popular perceptions of her life and work both shape and reflect Latinx culture.  Learn more 

 

Free E-Book of the Week: Chasing Arizona

March 26, 2020

In this time to read, we will be featuring one free e-book each week. To kick off the series, we’re offering one of our best-selling books from the Tucson Festival of Books, Chasing Arizona by Bisbee local Ken Lamberton

Download from our online shopping cart here. Available until 3/31/2020. Simply use discount code AZChase.

“Ken is not only a master storyteller who spews out lovely sentences at nearly every turn but is an enthusiastic fan of Arizona history. This is quite simply a keeper-enjoyable without being silly, and well-researched without being stuffy.”

–Gary P. Nabhan

Book Description:

It seemed like a simple plan-visit fifty-two places in fifty-two weeks. But for author Ken Lamberton, a forty-five-year veteran of life in the Sonoran Desert, the entertaining results were anything but easy. Chasing Arizona takes readers on a yearlong, twenty-thousand-mile joy ride across Arizona during its centennial, racking up more than two hundred points of interest along the way. This book is an adventure story, a tale of Arizona, and a celebration of what makes the state a great place to visit and live.  

Learn more  

The Press Opens Up Access to Monographs, Textbooks in Response to COVID-19 Crisis

March 25, 2020

In an effort to support instructors and students as they transition to remote learning arrangements in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Arizona Press has opened up access to its digital scholarly monographs, including its widely adopted Latinx Pop Culture Series, Arizona: A History, and titles in its award-winning Sun Tracks Series, a literary series focused on Indigenous artists and authors, through the end of June. The monographs will be open and free to use on Project MUSE and JSTOR.

“This move is in support of instructors, students, and their institutions who have had to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances due to the COVID-19 crisis,” said Kathryn Conrad, director of the University of Arizona Press. “We want to continue to support the scholarly enterprise, as we have done for more than sixty years. This is a way university presses, in this unprecedented time, can connect scholarship and creative expression to students and instructors.”

Through this program, more than six hundred titles will become immediately available on partner platforms. As higher education institutions have quickly transitioned to remote learning, the Press and the University Libraries are working tirelessly to support the international academic community.

“Monographs published by the University of Arizona Press are heavily used in courses around the world on a variety of subjects,” said Shan Sutton, dean of University Libraries. “This shift will ensure that these works continue to positively impact student learning and research. Both the University of Arizona Press, and its parent organization the University of Arizona Libraries, are actively pursuing new strategies to continue our vital roles in teaching and learning in this new environment.”

Brief Video for Our Authors

March 17, 2020

Video text:

Hey everybody this is Abby Mogollón. I’m the marketing manager at the U of A press and we just wanted to let you know that we’re really thinking about all of our authors right now and trying to think of new ways that we can continue to do the good work of helping you share your scholarship and your books with audiences.

Like many of you, we also are getting used to working from home offices and getting used to being in front of digital devices for zoom meetings, and so forth, and we thought we’d make a quick video to show you how easy it is to make something. We really want to encourage you to make short videos. If you’re a poet, record one of your poems. If you are a chapter author, maybe pick out an excerpt and read some of it if you’d like.

Mari, Savannah, and I can send you five questions and you can respond to them, or perhaps instead if your text is for course adoption you can record a short video explaining how you use your work in your teaching.

Just three things to remember when you’re making videos:
1. Hold the camera close.
2. Please speak loudly.
3. And try to have as much light as possible.

We can’t wait to hear from you.

–The University of Arizona Press Marketing Team

Abby Mogollon, amogollon@uapress.arizona.edu
Mari Herreras, mherreras@uapress.arizona.edu
Savannah Hicks, shicks@uapress.arizona.edu

Spicer, Bee, and Whiting Titles Available in Open Arizona

March 11, 2020

We are pleased to announce the availability of three important new contributions to Open Arizona. Selected by an advisory board of scholars and community members, the new additions include Edward H. Spicer’s seminal work Cycles of Conquest; Robert L. Bee’s Crosscurrents Along the Colorado; and Whiting, Weber, and Seaman’s Havasupai Habitat.

Open Arizona is a collection of open-access University of Arizona Press titles made available through the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The scholarship, histories, and approaches in the selected titles emphasize the relevance of the southwestern United States to understanding contemporary American life.

Cycles of Conquest
By Edward Spicer

After more than fifty years, Cycles of Conquest is still one of the best syntheses of more than four centuries of conquest, colonization, and resistance ever published. Thomas E. Sheridan writes in the new foreword commissioned for this special edition that the book is “monumental in scope and magisterial in presentation.”

Crosscurrents Along the Colorado
By Robert L. Bee

This intriguing book, original published in 1981, considers the Quechans as a case history of the frequent discrepancy between benevolently phrased national intention and exploitative local action.

Havasupai Habitat
By A. F. Whiting
Edited by Steven A. Weber and P. David Seaman

Published in 1985, Havasupai Habitat offers a rich ethnography on lifeways of the Havasupai people.

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