Christian evangelism was the ostensible motive for much of the early European interaction with the indigenous population of America. The religious orders of the Catholic Church were the front-line representatives of Western culture and the ones who met indigenous America face-to-face. They were also the primary agents of religious change. In this book, Nicholas Cushner provides the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the American missionary activities of the Jesuits. From the North American encounter with the Indians of Florida in 1565, through Mexico, New France, the Paraguay Reductions, Andean Perus, to contact with Native Americans in Maryland on the eve of the American Revolution, members of the order interacted with both native elites and colonizers. Drawing on the abundant documentation of and scholarship about these encounters, Cushner examines how the Jesuits behaved toward the indigenous population and analyzes the way in which native belief systems were replaced by Christianity. He seeks to understand how and why the initial European-Indian encounter changed not only the religion of the natives, but also their material culture, economic activity, social organization, and even their sexual behavior. Always sensitive to the influence of European "cultural filters" on Jesuit accounts, Cushner attempts as far as possible to discover the authentic voices of the Native Americans with whom they interacted. The result is a fascinating and highly accessible introduction to the earliest colonial encounters in the Americas.

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Nicholas P. Cushner - Why Have You Come Here, The Jesuits and the First Evangelization of Native Ame rica (2006).pdf

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David Monod - Settling Scores, German Music, Denaz ification, and the Americans, 1945-1953 (2005).jpg

Classical music was central to German national identity in the early twentieth century. The preeminence of composers such as Bach and Beethoven and artists such as conductor Wilhelm Furtwngler and pianist Walter Gieseking was cited by the Nazis as justification for German expansionism and as evidence of Aryan superiority. In the minds of many Americans, further German aggression could be prevented only if the population's faith in its moral and cultural superiority was shattered. In Settling Scores, David Monod examines the attempted "denazification" of the German music world by the Music Control Branch of the Information Control Division of Military Government. The occupying American forces barred from the stage and concert hall all former Nazi Party members and even anyone deemed to display an "authoritarian personality." They also imported new European and American music. These actions, however, divided American officials and outraged German audiences and performers. Nonetheless, Monod argues, the long-term effects were greater than has been previously recognized, as German government officials regained local control and voluntarily limited their involvement in artistic life while promoting "new" (anti-Nazi) music.

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David Monod - Settling Scores, German Music, Denaz ification, and the Americans, 1945-1953 (2005).pdf

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Robert H. Brunswig, Bonnie L. Pitblado, George C. Frison - Frontiers in Colorado Paleoindian Archaeo logy, From the Dent Site to the Rocky Mountains (2 007).jpg

USA Books - Robert H. Brunswig, Bonnie L. Pitblado, George C. Fris...ology, From the Dent Site to the Rocky Mountains 2007.jpg

As the Ice Age waned, Clovis hunter-gatherers began to explore and colonize the area now known as Colorado. Their descendents and later Paleoindian migrants spread throughout Colorado's plains and mountains, adapting to diverse landforms and the changing climate. In this new volume, Robert H. Brunswig and Bonnie L. Pitblado assemble experts in archaeology, paleoecology-climatology, and paleofaunal analysis to share new discoveries about these ancient people of Colorado.

The editors introduce the research with scientific context. A review of seventy-five years of Paleoindian archaeology in Colorado highlights the foundation on which new work builds, and a survey of Colorado's ancient climates and ecologies helps readers understand Paleoindian settlement patterns.

Eight essays discuss archaeological evidence from Plains to high Rocky Mountain sites. The book offers the most thorough analysis to date of Dent--the first Clovis site discovered. Essays on mountain sites show how advances in methodology and technology have allowed scholars to reconstruct settlement patterns and changing lifeways in this challenging environment.

Colorado has been home to key moments in human settlement and in the scientific study of our ancient past. Readers interested in the peopling of the New World as well as those passionate about the methods and history of archaeology will find new material and satisfying overviews in this book.

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Robert H. Brunswig, Bonnie L. Pitblado, George C. Frison - Frontiers in Colorado Paleoindian Archaeo logy, From the Dent Site to the Rocky Mountains (2 007).pdf

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Gwendolyn Wright - USA, Modern Architectures in Hi story (2008).jpg

From the Reliance Building and Coney Island to the Kimbell Museum and Disney Hall, the United States has been at the forefront of modern architecture. American life has generated many of the quintessential images of modern life, both generic types and particular buildings. Gwendolyn Wright’s USA is an engaging account of this evolution from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Upending conventional arguments about the origin of American modern architecture, Wright shows that it was not a mere offshoot of European modernism brought across the Atlantic Ocean by émigrés but rather an exciting, distinctive and mutable hybrid.

USA traces a history that spans from early skyscrapers and suburbs in the aftermath of the American Civil War up to the museums, schools and ‘green architecture’ of today. Wright takes account of diverse interests that affected design, ranging from politicians and developers to ambitious immigrants and middle-class citizens. Famous and lesser-known buildings across America come together--model dwellings for German workers in rural Massachusetts, New York’s Rockefeller Center, Cincinnati’s Carew Tower, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West in the Arizona desert, the University of Miami campus, the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Plant, and the Corning Museum of Glass, among others--to show an extraordinary range of innovation.

Ultimately, Wright reframes the history of American architecture as one of constantly evolving and volatile sensibilities, engaged with commerce, attuned to new media, exploring multiple concepts of freedom. The chapters are organized to show how changes in work life, home life and public life affected architecture--and vice versa. This book provides essential background for contemporary debates about affordable and luxury housing, avant-garde experiments, local identities, inspiring infrastructure and sustainable design.

A clear, concise and richly illustrated account of modern American architecture, this timely book will be essential for all those who wonder about the remarkable legacy of American modernity in its most potent cultural expression.

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Gwendolyn Wright - USA, Modern Architectures in Hi story (2008).pdf

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Laura L. Scheiber, Bonnie J. Clark - Archaeologica l Landscapes on the High Plains (2008).jpg

Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains combines history, anthropology, archaeology, and geography to take a closer look at the relationships between land and people in this unique North American region.

Focusing on long-term change, this book considers ethnographic literature, archaeological evidence, and environmental data spanning thousands of years of human presence to understand human perception and construction of landscape. The contributors offer cohesive and synthetic studies emphasizing hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers.

Using landscape as both reality and metaphor, Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains explores the different and changing ways that people interacted with place in this transitional zone between the Rocky Mountains and the eastern prairies.

The contemporary archaeologists working in this small area have chosen diverse approaches to understand the past and its relationship to the present. Through these ten case studies, this variety is highlighted but leads to a common theme--that the High Plains contains important locales to which people, over generations or millennia, return. Providing both data and theory on a region that has not previously received much attention from archaeologists, especially compared with other regions in North America, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature.

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Laura L. Scheiber, Bonnie J. Clark - Archaeologica l Landscapes on the High Plains (2008).pdf

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Sarah M. Nelson - Denver, An Archaeological Histor y (2008).jpg

"An innovative look at the archaeology of a region (the Central Great Plains) through a longitudinal study of human occupation in a specific place--Denver, Colorado. It is an exciting, well-written account that sheds light on how people have survived changes in climate, plant life, animals, and human events over the past 14,000 years."

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Sarah M. Nelson - Denver, An Archaeological Histor y (2008).pdf

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Thomas H. Lee, James J. Mongan - Chaos and Organiz ation in Health Care (2009).jpg

One of the most daunting challenges facing the new U.S. administration is health care reform. The size of the system, the number of stakeholders, and ever-rising costs make the problem seem almost intractable. But in Chaos and Organization in Health Care, two leading physicians offer an optimistic prognosis. In their frontline work as providers, Thomas Lee and James Mongan see the inefficiency, the missed opportunities, and the occasional harm that can result from the current system. The root cause of these problems, they argue, is chaos in the delivery of care. If the problem is chaos, the solution is organization, and in this timely and outspoken book, they offer a plan.

In many ways, this chaos is caused by something good: the dramatic progress in medical science—the explosion of medical knowledge and the exponential increase in treatment options. Imposed on a fragmented system of small practices and individual patients with multiple providers, progress results in chaos. Lee and Mongan argue that attacking this chaos is even more important than whether health care is managed by government or controlled by market forces.

Some providers are already tightly organized, adapting management principles from business and offering care that is by many measures safer, better, and less costly. Lee and Mongan propose multiple strategies that can be adopted nationwide, including electronic medical records and information systems for sharing knowledge; team-based care, with doctors and other providers working together; and disease-management programs to coordinate care for the sickest patients.

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Thomas H. Lee, James J. Mongan - Chaos and Organiz ation in Health Care (2009).pdf

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Victor Davies Hanson - Mexifornia, A State of Beco ming (2003).jpg

"Massive illegal immigration from Mexico into California," Victor Davis Hanson writes, "coupled with a loss of confidence in the old melting pot model of transforming newcomers into Americans, is changing the very nature of state. Yet we Californians have been inadequate in meeting this challenge, both failing to control our borders with Mexico and to integrate the new alien population into our mainstream." Part history, part political analysis, and part memoir, "Mexifornia" is an intensely personal work by one of our most important writers. Hanson is perhaps known best for his military histories and especially his social commentary about America and its response to terror after 9/11. But he is also a fifth-generation Californian who runs a family farm in the Central Valley and has written eloquent elegies for the decline of the small farm such as "Fields Without Dreams" and "The Land Was Everything." Like these books, "Mexifornia" is an intensely personal look at what has changed in California over the last quarter century. In this case, however, Hanson's focus is on how not only California, the Southwest, and indeed the entire nation has been affected by America's hemorrhaging borders and how those hurt worst are the Mexican immigrants themselves.

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Victor Davies Hanson - Mexifornia, A State of Beco ming (2003).rar

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Patricia Klindienst - The Earth Knows My Name, Foo d, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of E thnic America (2006).jpg

USA Books - Patricia Klindienst - The Earth Knows My Name, Food, C... Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America 2006.jpg

“Why have we tamed the history of gardening in America?” Patricia Klindienst asks in The Earth Knows My Name. We are a democracy of gardeners yet, with few exceptions, the garden is presented as the province of the privileged and the white. Garden writing tends to exclude the stories of the ethnic peoples who have shaped our landscape for centuries. As a result, the idea of the garden has been stripped of its cultural weight. The Earth Knows My Name speaks directly to this gap in our understanding, exploring the deeper implications of what it means to cultivate a garden and to grow one’s own food.
The fifteen gardens presented in The Earth Knows My Name have all been fashioned by people usually thought of as other Americans: Native Americans, immigrants, and ethnic peoples who were here long before our national boundaries were drawn, including Hispanics of the Southwest, descended from the Conquistadors, and Gullah gardeners of South Carolina, descendants of West African slaves. All of these gardeners straddle two cultures—mainstream America and their culture of origin. Their stewardship of the land is an expression of the desire to preserve their heritage against all that threatens it. And so each garden becomes an island of hope and offers a model, on a truly sustainable scale, of a restorative ecology that renders justice to both the land and the people who cultivate it. Patricia Klindienst is a master gardener and an award-winning writing teacher. She lives and gardens in Guilford, Connecticut. This is her first book.

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Patricia Klindienst - The Earth Knows My Name, Foo d, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of E thnic America (2006).pdf

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David Robertson - Hard As the Rock Itself, Place A nd Identity in the American Mining Town (2006).jpg

The first intensive analysis of sense of place in American mining towns, Hard as the Rock Itself: Place and Identity in the American Mining Town provides rare insight into the struggles and rewards of life in these communities. David Robertson contends that these communities--often characterized in scholarly and literary works as derelict, as sources of debasing moral influence, and as scenes of environmental decay--have a strong and enduring sense of place and have even embraced some of the signs of so-called dereliction.

Robertson documents the history of Toluca, Illinois; Cokedale, Colorado; and Picher, Oklahoma, from the mineral discovery phase through mine closure, telling for the first time how these century-old mining towns have survived and how sense of place has played a vital role.

Acknowledging the hardships that mining's social, environmental, and economic legacies have created for current residents, Robertson argues that the industry's influences also have contributed to the creation of strong, cohesive communities in which residents have always identified with the severe landscape and challenging, but rewarding way of life.

Robertson contends that the tough, unpretentious appearance of mining landscapes mirrors qualities that residents value in themselves, confirming that a strong sense of place in mining regions, as elsewhere, is not necessarily wedded to an attractive aesthetic or even to a thriving economy.

Mining historians, geographers, and other students of place in the American landscape will find fascinating material in Hard As the Rock Itself.

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Amos Jay Cummings - A Remarkable Curiosity, Dispat ches from a New York City Journalist's 1873 Railro ad Trip (2008).jpg

USA Books - Amos Jay Cummings - A Remarkable Curiosity, Dispatches...om a New York City Journalists 1873 Railroad Trip 2008.jpg

In 1873, Amos Jay Cummings, a decorated Civil War veteran and journalist for the New York Sun newspaper, set out on a westward journey aboard the newly completed transcontinental railroad. For some time, miners, settlers, and entrepreneurs had already been heading west to make their fortunes, and Cummings made the trip in part to see what all the fuss was about. During his six-month expedition from Kansas to California, Cummings sent extraordinary and engaging accounts of the American West back to his readers in New York.

Collected in this volume for the first time are Cummings's portraits of a land and its assortment of characters unlike anything back East. Characters like Pedro Armijo, the New Mexican sheep tycoon who took Denver by storm, and more prominently the Mormon prophet Brigham Young and his 19th wife, Ann Eliza Young, who was filing for divorce at the time of Cummings's arrival.

Although today he is virtually unknown, during his lifetime Cummings was one of the most famous newspapermen in the United States, in part because of stories like these. Complete with a biographical sketch and historical introduction, A Remarkable Curiosity is an enjoyable read for anybody interested in the American West in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

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Amos Jay Cummings - A Remarkable Curiosity, Dispat ches from a New York City Journalist's 1873 Railro ad Trip (2008).pdf

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Robert C. Fuller - Spiritual, but not Religious, U nderstanding Unchurched America (2001).jpg

Over the past 30 years, sociologists of religion have coined the phrase "spiritual seeker" to describe those who are unaffiliated with organized religion but who are nonetheless looking for ways to enhance their understanding of religious questions. Fuller (Alternative Medicine in American Religious Life) observes that these seekers differentiate between spirituality and religion, connecting the former with a privately expressed faith and the latter with the creeds and rituals publicly expressed in religious institutions. These "spiritual but not religious" individuals, Fuller writes, pick and choose elements from a variety of beliefs and practices as they construct an individualized spirituality.

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Robert C. Fuller - Spiritual, but not Religious, U nderstanding Unchurched America (2001).pdf

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Franklyn S. Haiman - Religious Expression and the American Constitution (2003).jpg

This work focuses on the state of American law with respect to a broad range of controversial issues affecting religious expression, both verbal and nonverbal, along with a review of the up-to-date history of each issue to provide a full understanding.

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Franklyn S. Haiman - Religious Expression and the American Constitution (2003).pdf

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Alexander Tsesis - The Thirteenth Amendment and Am erican Freedom, A Legal History (2004).jpg

In this narrative history and contextual analysis of the Thirteenth Amendment, slavery and freedom take center stage. Alexander Tsesis demonstrates how entrenched slavery was in pre-Civil War America, how central it was to the political events that resulted in the Civil War, and how it was the driving force that led to the adoption of an amendment that ultimately provided a substantive assurance of freedom for all American citizens.

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Alexander Tsesis - The Thirteenth Amendment and Am erican Freedom, A Legal History (2004).pdf

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Warschip 15 - USN Commander W. H. Cracknell - USS Enterprise, (CVAN-65) Nuclear Attack Carrier (1972 ).jpg

One of a series of booklets covering individual warships from around the world with an authoritative text and many black and white illustrations. Color profile center spread.

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