In 1870, Bart Young heads for the New Mexico Territory, where he's heard men were making fortunes overnight in land speculation on the old Spanish grants. He figures to be a rich land baron before the year is out. But the ranchers are stubborn and the local officials corrupt, and many men were there ahead of him. Bart's dream seems hopeless until he stumbles onto evidence of a lost grant bigger than he could have ever imagined: the entire Sacramento Mountain Range--over a million acres.
We discover what civil war, revolution and counter-revolution actually felt like from inside both camps. The contours of the war take shape through the words of the eyewitnesses. The atmosphere of events is vividly recaptured. And though the lived experience of the participants is revealed the uniquely tragic essence of all civil war. 'Fascinating and brilliantly unorthodox. ' Hugh Thomas, author of THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO.
Impurity of Blood analyzes the proposition of Spanish racial thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that racial strength came from a fusion of different groups, rather than from a kind of racial purity. By providing a history of ethnic thought in Spain in the medieval and early modern era, and by studying the formation of racial thought in Spain's nascent human sciences and its political and cultural manifestations leading into the Franco regime, it provides a new view of racial thought in Europe and its connections to the larger twentieth century formation of racial thought in the West.
In the late nineteenth century, Spain’s most prominent writers – Juan Valera, Leopoldo Alas, and Benito Pérez Galdós – made blood a crucial feature of their fiction. Blood Novels examines the cultural and literary significance of blood, unsettling the dominant assumption of the period that blood no longer played a decisive role in social hierarchies. By examining fictional works through the rubric of "blood novels," Julia H. Chang identifies a shared fascination with blood that probes the limits of realism through blood’s dual nature of matter and metaphor. Situating the literature within broader cultural and theoretical debates, Blood Novels attends to the aesthetic contours of material blood and in particular how bleeding is inflected by gender, caste, and race. Critically engaging with feminist theory, theories of race and whiteness, literary criticism, and medical literature, this innovative study makes a case for treating blood as a critical analytic tool that not only sheds new light on Spanish realism but, more broadly, challenges our understanding of gendered and racialized embodiment in Spain.
The essays of this collection explore how ideas about 'blood' in science and literature have supported, at various points in history and in various places in the circum-Atlantic world, fantasies of human embodiment and human difference that serve to naturalize existing hierarchies.
"Laura Briggs has given us a very smart book. She's opened my eyes to Puerto Rican women's centrality to the entire American imperial enterprise. Pay attention to prostitution—debates about it, maneuvers to control it, reliance on it—and we'll gain a more realistic sense of political life. Briggs shows us how true that is. I'm going to recommend this book to everyone."—Cynthia Enloe, author of Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives "A superb analysis of how U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico had profound effects on sex, gender, and racial formations in both nations. Briggs sets new standards for the study of race and gender in U.S. women's history."—Peggy Pascoe, University of Oregon
