During the summer of 1862, a Confederate resurgence threatened to turn the tide of the Civil War. Benjamin Franklin Cooling tells this story in Counter-Thrust, recounting in harrowing detail Robert E. Lee’s flouting of his antagonist George B. McClellan’s drive to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond and describing the Confederate hero’s long-dreamt-of offensive to reclaim central and northern Virginia before crossing the Potomac.

In Powhatan Lords of Life and Death, an incisive structuralist perspective and an impressive synthesis and reinterpretation of available records by anthropologist Margaret Holmes Williamson provides a more complex and culturally appropriate view of the realm of Powhatan during the crucial early decades of the seventeenth century.

Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians, originally published in 1908 by the American Museum of Natural History, introduces such figures as Old Man, Scar-Face, Blood-Clot, and the Seven Brothers. These narratives were collected early in the twentieth century from the Piegans in Montana and from the North Piegans, the Bloods, and the Northern Blackfoot in Canada. Most were translated by D. C. Duvall and revised for Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians by Clark Wissler. Darrell Kipp provides an introduction to the new Bison Books edition.

In The Four Hills of Life Jeffrey D. Anderson masterfully draws together many different aspects of the Northern Arapahos' world—myth, language, art, ritual, identity, and history—to offer a compelling picture of a culture that has endured and changed over time. Arapaho culture is seen dynamically through the ways that members of the community in the past and present experience their unique world in everyday life.

This comprehensive volume celebrates the 150th anniversary of the 1855 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass with twenty essays by preeminent scholars representing a variety of critical perspectives that focus exclusively on the original edition. Once regarded as primarily a collector’s item, this edition is now viewed as the poet’s most bold and compelling articulation of the possibilities of American democracy.

One of the central figures in modern thought, Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) was the director of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt and guided the activities of the Frankfurt School from its origins in Germany through its exile in the United States during World War II. These letters show how Horkheimer’s thought was influenced by and engaged with the historical events of the twentieth century, particularly the Holocaust and the Vietnam War.

Through a careful examination of judicial records, newspapers, government documents, and travelers’ accounts, The Imagined Underworld uncovers the truth behind six of nineteenth-century Mexico’s most infamous crimes, including those of the serial killer “El Chalequero.” By analyzing the cases used to forge the underworld and those that defied its myth, Garza uncovers the complex reality that existed beyond the Porfirian ideals of order and progress.

Endgame 1758 is a tale of two empires in collision on the shores of mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic Canada, where rival European visions of predominance clashed headlong with each other and with the region’s Aboriginal peoples. The entire history comes to life in a tale of what turned out to be the first major British victory in the Seven Years’ War.

Coastal Encounters brings together leading experts and emerging scholars to provide a portrait of the Gulf South in the eighteenth century. The contributors depict the remarkable transformations that took place—demographic, cultural, social, political, and economic—and examine the changes from multiple perspectives, including those of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans; colonizers and colonized; men and women. The outstanding essays in this book argue for the central place of this dynamic region in colonial history.

The remarkable autobiographies in Queer Lives, translated into English for the first time here, give present-day readers a rare glimpse into otherwise shrouded existences. They relate the experiences of a man about town, a cross-dressing entertainer, a troubled adolescent, and two fetishists, among others.

Violence: most of us would be happy if we never had to experience it, and many are driven by the belief that nonviolent spaces exist. In Violent Affect, however, Marco Abel starts from a different, potentially controversial assumption: namely that violence is all-pervasive by ontological necessity. In order to work through the implications of this provocation, Abel turns to literary and cinematic works, contending that we do not even know what violent images are, let alone how they work and what they do.

At a crucial time in American history, narratives of women in command or imperiled at sea contributed to the construction of a national rhetoric. Robin Miskolcze makes her case by way of careful readings of images of women at sea before the Civil War in her book Women and Children First.

Food and agriculture are in the news daily. Stories in the media highlight issues of abundance, deprivation, pleasure, risk, health, community, and identity. Remaking the North American Food System examines the resurgence of interest in rebuilding the links between agricultural production and food consumption as a way to overcome some of the negative implications of industrial and globalizing trends in the food and agricultural system.