Home Away From Home
Home Away From Home

Author: Jeronima Echeverria

Publisher: University of Nevada Press

Published: 1999-11-01

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0874173914

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In this meticulously researched study of Basque boardinghouses in the United States, Jeronima Echeverria offers a compelling history of the institution that most deeply shaped Basque immigrant life and served as the center of Basque communities throughout the West. She weaves into her narrative the stories of the boarding house owners and operators and the ways they made their establishments a home away from home for their fellow compatriots, as well as the stories of the young Basques who left the security of their beloved homeland to find work in the United States.

The Mandaean Book of John
The Mandaean Book of John

Author: Charles G. Häberl

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-11-18

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 3110487861

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Given the degree of popular fascination with Gnostic religions, it is surprising how few pay attention to the one such religion that has survived from antiquity until the present day: Mandaism. Mandaeans, who esteem John the Baptist as the most famous adherent to their religion, have in our time found themselves driven from their historic homelands by war and oppression. Today, they are a community in crisis, but they provide us with unparalleled access to a library of ancient Gnostic scriptures, as part of the living tradition that has sustained them across the centuries. Gnostic texts such as these have caught popular interest in recent times, as traditional assumptions about the original forms and cultural contexts of related religious traditions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have been called into question. However, we can learn only so much from texts in isolation from their own contexts. Mandaean literature uniquely allows us not only to increase our knowledge about Gnosticism, and by extension all these other religions, but also to observe the relationship between Gnostic texts, rituals, beliefs, and living practices, both historically and in the present day.

Amerikanuak
Amerikanuak

Author: William A. Douglass

Publisher: University of Nevada Press

Published: 2005-07-26

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 0874176751

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This work, by William Douglass (who helped initiate the Basque Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Reno) and Jon Bilbao (author of several Basque reference works), is the most accessible overview of the Basque diaspora in the Western Hemisphere. Amerikanuak is a pioneering study of one of the American West’s most important ethnic minorities, an engaging, comprehensive survey of Basque migration and settlement in the Americas, and an essential introduction to the history of the Basque people and their five centuries of involvement in the New World. Research for the book took the authors through ten states of the American West, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela as they traced the exploits of Basque whalers in the medieval Atlantic, the Basque conquistadors, missionaries, colonists, and sheepherders who formed a dramatic part of the history of Spanish America. They also follow the story of the Basques back to their mysterious origins in prehistory to provide background for understanding the Basques’ character and their homeland in the Pyrenean mountains and seacoasts between France and Spain. This is a revised and updated edition of the original 1975 publication. New preface by William A. Douglass.

The Ever-changing View
The Ever-changing View

Author: Anthony Godfrey

Publisher: U.S. Government Printing Office

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 688

ISBN-13:

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"United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Region"

Through the Language Glass
Through the Language Glass

Author: Guy Deutscher

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2010-08-31

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1429970111

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A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how—and whether—culture shapes language and language, culture Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence language—and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"? Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions is—yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water—a "she"—becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery.

The Dreamt Land
The Dreamt Land

Author: Mark Arax

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2019-05-21

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 1101875216

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A vivid, searching journey into California's capture of water and soil—the epic story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Land, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, that is straining to keep up with California's relentless growth. The Dreamt Land weaves reportage, history and memoir to confront the "Golden State" myth in riveting fashion. No other chronicler of the West has so deeply delved into the empires of agriculture that drink so much of the water. The nation's biggest farmers—the nut king, grape king and citrus queen—tell their story here for the first time. Arax, the native son, is persistent and tough as he treks from desert to delta, mountain to valley. What he finds is hard earned, awe-inspiring, tragic and revelatory. In the end, his compassion for the land becomes an elegy to the dream that created California and now threatens to undo it.