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Tales from the Big House: 400 Years of Its History and People
Par Stephen Wade. 2017
Tales from the Big House: Normanby Hall tells the story of a place known perhaps today mainly as the home…
where Samantha Cameron grew up, but historically it has been the seat of the Sheffield family, whose most famous member was arguably the Duke of Buckingham in the seventeenth century. As with most country houses, the Hall was used as a military hospital in the Great War, and in the Second World War there were military personnel based there again. It stands just a few miles from the great steelworks on the Brigg Road, which have always defined Scunthorpe, so it played its part in the history of steel-making also.The book includes biographies of the famous but also tells of the lives of the ordinary people who kept the house and the estate going, from the gamekeepers to the gardeners, and the cooks to the stable hands. All this is set against the social background through the centuries of its existence, up to the sale of the Hall to Scunthorpe Borough Council in 1964. The lives familiar to us today from Downton Abbey and similar family sagas are at the heart of Stephen Wades history. But along the way, the reader will meet such characters as Sir Berkeley Sheffield, model railway enthusiast, Walter Brierley, architect, Thomas Sumpter, the schoolmaster, John Fletcher, machine-maker, and perhaps most charismatically of all, Lady Arthur Grosvenor, an expert on gypsy caravans.The Borders: A History of the Borders from Earliest Times
Par Alistair Moffat. 2018
A &“beautifully written&” history of the Scottish Borders—from the Ice Age to present day—by the author of Scotland: A History…
from Earliest Times (Boston Sunday Herald). This is the story of the border: a place of beginnings and endings, of differences and similarities. It is the story of England and Scotland, told not from the remoteness of London or Edinburgh or in the tired terms of national histories, but up close and personal, toe to toe and eyeball to eyeball across the tweed, the Cheviots, the Esk, and the tidal races of the upper Solway. This is a tale told in blood, fun, and granite-hard memory. This is the story of an ancient place where hunter-gatherers penetrated into the virgin interior, where Celtic warlords ruled and the Romans came but could not conquer, where the glittering kingdom of Northumbria thrived, where David MacMalcolm raised great abbeys, and where Walter Scott sat at Abbotsford and brooded on the area&’s rich and historic legacy. &“Highly readable—a lively, clear style.&” —Northern History &“Quirky, learned and utterly absorbing.&” —Allan Massie, award-winning author of The Royal StuartsBourbon's Backroads: A Journey through Kentucky's Distilling Landscape
Par Karl Raitz. 2021
This history of bourbon explores how the shift from home distillers to commercial producers changed the culture and landscape of…
nineteenth-century Kentucky. As one of the commonwealth's signature industries, bourbon distilling has influenced the landscape and heritage of the region for more than two centuries. Blending several topics—tax revenue, railroads, the mechanics of brewing, geography, landscapes, and architecture—this primer and geographical guide presents a detailed history of Kentucky's distilling industry. Nineteenth-century distilling changed from an artisanal craft practiced by farmers and millers to a large-scale mechanized industry that practiced increasingly refined production techniques. Based on extensive archival research that includes private paper collections, newspapers, and period documents, this work places the distilling process in its environmental, geographical, and historical context.Bourbon's Backroads reveals the places where bourbon's heritage was made—from old and new distilleries, storage warehouses, railroad yards, and factories where copper fermenting vessels are made—and why the industry continues to thrive.United Nations: A History
Par Stanley Meisler. 1995
&“This is a definitive account of the United Nations for a general audience, told by a master.&” —Jim Hoagland, The…
Washington Post United Nations: A History begins with its creation in 1945. Although the organization was created to prevent war, many conflicts have arisen, ranging from the Korean War, to the Six-Day War, to genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda. Stanley Meisler&’s in-depth research examines the crises and many key political leaders. In this second edition, Meisler brings his popular history up to date with accounts of the power struggles of the last fifteen years, specifically spotlighting the terms of secretaries-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Kofi Annan, and Ban Ki-moon. This is an important, riveting, and impartial guide through the past and recent events of the sixty-five-year history of the United Nations. &“Balanced and insightful, this book is a must for anyone who wants to understand where the U.N. has been and, more importantly, how we might best use its potential for the future.&” —Thomas R. Pickering, former US ambassador to the UN&“Fascinating . . . [a] 300-plus year history of North America&” from the award-winning historian and author of The Holocaust:…
History & Memory (Military Heritage). Prize-winning author Jeremy Black traces the competition for control of North America from the landing of Spanish troops under Hernán Cortés in modern Mexico in 1519 to 1871 when, with the Treaty of Washington and the withdrawal of most British garrisons, Britain accepted American mastery in North America. In this wide-ranging narrative, Black makes clear that the process by which America gained supremacy was far from inevitable. The story Black tells is one of conflict, diplomacy, geopolitics, and politics. The eventual result was the creation of a United States of America that stretched from Atlantic to Pacific and dominated North America. The gradual withdrawal of France and Spain, the British accommodation to the expanding U.S. reality, the impact of the American Civil War, and the subjugation of Native peoples, are all carefully drawn out. Black emphasizes contingency not Manifest Destiny, and reconceptualizes American exceptionalism to take note of the pressures and impact of international competition. &“A refreshing take on Manifest Destiny . . . American (and Canadian) readers will learn a lot of new things and be led into new ways of viewing old ones. An important contribution.&”—Walter Nugent, author of Into the West: The Story of Its PeopleArctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos
Par Anna Westerstahl Stenport. 2019
A collection of essays analyzing the representation of the Arctic region in documentary films.Beginning with Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the…
North (1922), the majority of films that have been made in, about, and by filmmakers from the Arctic region have been documentary cinema. Focused on a hostile environment that few people visit, these documentaries have heavily shaped ideas about the contemporary global Far North. In Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos, contributors from a variety of scholarly and artistic backgrounds come together to provide a comprehensive study of Arctic documentary cinemas from a transnational perspective. This book offers a thorough analysis of the concept of the Arctic as it is represented in documentary filmmaking, while challenging the notion of “The Arctic” as a homogenous entity that obscures the environmental, historical, geographic, political, and cultural differences that characterize the region. By examining how the Arctic is imagined, understood, and appropriated in documentary work, the contributors argue that such films are key in contextualizing environmental, indigenous, political, cultural, sociological, and ethnographic understandings of the Arctic, from early cinema to the present. Understanding the role of these films becomes all the more urgent in the present day, as conversations around resource extraction, climate change, and sovereignty take center stage in the Arctic’s representation.“Highly recommended.” —Choice“A thorough exploration of the inexorable links between the circumpolar regions and historic and contemporary documentary filmmaking. It will b valuable to Arctic humanities specialists, particularly as a welcome addition to scholarship on visual depictions of the Arctic by authors such as Ann Fienup-Riordan, Richard Condon, Russell Potter, and Peter Geller, as well as Mackenzie and Westerstahl Steport’s earlier co-edited volume, Films on Ice. It will also be of use to anyone interested in ways of studying linkages between filmmaking, environments, and local and outsider communities.” —Sarah Pickman, Yale University, H-Environment, January 2020Environmental Justice in North America (Themes in Environmental History)
Par Paul C. Rosier. 2024
Emphasizing the voices of activists, this book’s diverse contributors examine communities’ common experiences with environmental injustice, how they organize to…
address it, and the ways in which their campaigns intersect with related movements such as Black Lives Matter and Indigenous sovereignty. The global COVID-19 pandemic exposed the ways in which BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities and white working-class communities have suffered disproportionately from the crisis due to sustained exposure to toxic land, air, and water, creating a new urgency for addressing underlying conditions of systemic racism and poverty in North America. In addition to exploring the historical roots of the Environmental Justice movement in the 1980s and 1990s, the volume offers coverage of recent events such as the DAPL pipeline controversy, the Flint water crisis, and the rise of climate justice. The collection incorporates the experiences of rural and urban communities, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and Indigenous peoples in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The chapters offer instructors, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers a range of accessible case studies that create opportunities for comparative and intersectional analysis across geographical and ethnic boundaries.After Eden: A Short History of the World
Par John Charles Chasteen. 2024
To solve the problems of the twenty-first century, historian John Charles Chasteen argues that we must first know our shared…
human story. In After Eden, prominent Latin American historian John Charles Chasteen provided a concise history of the world, in which he explores the origins and persistence of the timeless phenomena of humanity’s inhumanity to itself. Where did it come from? Why has it been so prevalent throughout our history? And, most importantly, can we overcome it? Chasteen argues that to do so, we must understand our shared past. While much of that past is violent, we can look for inspiration from major periods when we strived to live more cooperatively, such as our early foraging periods, to the creation of universal religions and ethical systems, the birth of the ideas of individual liberty and freedom, the rise of socialism in response to the massive excesses of global capitalism, the civil rights and decolonization movements of the twentieth century, to the environmental and social justice movements of today. Once we understand who and what we are as a species and a people, we will be in the best position to figure out how to work together to tackle the greatest challenges we face today—mass global inequality and the destruction of our environment. Fully informed by the latest scholarship, After Eden presents a down-to earth, fast-paced narrative of world history, animated by stories of people from all walks of life and enriched by insightful analysis and the author’s extensive world travel.The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America
Par Timothy J. Nelson, Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer. 2020
A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on…
Almost Nothing in America. “This book forces you to see American poverty in a whole new light.” (Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, by America and Evicted) Three of the nation’s top scholars – known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there.This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas. Immersing themselves in these communities, poring over centuries of local history, attending parades and festivals, the authors trace the legacies of the deepest poverty in America—including inequalities shaping people’s health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families. Wrung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials, the “internal colonies” in these regions were exploited for their resources and then left to collapse. The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place is not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in common—a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nation’s places of deepest need.The Explorers Club: A Visual Journey Through the Past, Present, and Future of Exploration
Par The Explorers Club. 2023
Discover the extraordinary history and thrilling frontiers of exploration with this gorgeously illustrated guide from The Explorers Club, the esteemed…
home of the world's most prominent explorers.The discovery of the North and South Poles. The summiting of Everest. The moon landing. The (largely unknown) birth of climate change science. These are just some of the stories from The Explorers Club, the organization that, since its inception in 1904, has pushed the envelope of human curiosity.This guided tour of The Club&’s most riveting journeys includes hundreds of photos and fascinating anecdotes about The Club&’s distinguished members, including Teddy Roosevelt, Neil Armstrong, and Jane Goodall. From the darkest depths of the ocean to the highest points on Earth and to outer space and beyond, this book shares not just the inspirational history of modern exploration, but also reveals how it has evolved and continues to be relevant—even urgent—today.Einstein in Time and Space: A Life in 99 Particles
Par Samuel Graydon. 1995
Walter Isaacson&’s Einstein meets Craig Brown&’s 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, in this innovative biography of the famous physicist told…
in ninety-nine dazzling vignettes.Most of us would agree that Albert Einstein&’s name is synonymous with &“genius&” and that his likeness is often used as a shorthand for all scientists, appearing everywhere from cartoons to textbooks. He has become more myth than man. That being the case, how best to capture his essence? In Einstein in Time and Space, talented young science journalist Samuel Graydon answers that question with an illuminating mosaic—99 intriguingly different particles that cumulatively reveal Einstein&’s contradictory and multitudinous nature. Glimpsed among these shards: a slacker who failed every subject but math, a job seeker who couldn&’t get hired, a lothario who courted many women, and a charmer who was the life of the party. As brilliant as he was inconsistent, Einstein was simultaneously an avid supporter of the NAACP and the fight for civil rights and someone capable of great prejudice. He was loved by many, known by few, and inspirational to a generation of young physicists. Graydon reveals every corner of Einstein&’s world: the false reporting that rocketed Einstein to fame nearly overnight, his effect on people he met merely in passing, even the remarkable posthumous journey of the famed physicist&’s brain. Entertaining, comforting, bolstering, and shocking, Einstein in Time and Space is the unique story of a man who redefined how we view our universe and our place within it.Historical Explanation: An Anti-Causalist Approach (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy)
Par Gunnar Schumann. 2024
This book is concerned with the appropriate form of explanations in historiography and the social sciences. It combines action theory…
and philosophy of historiography and develops a theory of teleological explanations of human actions based on late-Wittgensteinian and Ordinary Language Philosophy insights. In philosophy of action, many philosophers favor causal theories of human action. Additionally, in current philosophy of historiography the majority view is that historians should explain historical phenomena by their causes. This book pushes back against these mainstream views by reviving an anti-causal view of explanation of current and past human actions. The author argues that disciplines that deal with human actions require a certain form of explanation, namely a teleological or intentional explanation. This means that past human actions and their results will have to be explained by reasons of agents, not by causes. Therefore, historiography employs a method of explanation which is in stark contrast to the sciences. The author thus proposes a Verstehen (understanding) approach in historiography and the social sciences. Historical Explanation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of action, philosophy of history, and philosophy of the social sciences.The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts
Par Christopher De Hamel. 2022
The acclaimed author of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts introduces us to the extraordinary keepers and companions of medieval manuscripts over…
a thousand years of historyThe illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature. We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. However, we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made, collected and preserved them through the centuries, and to whom they owe their existence.This entrancing book describes some of the extraordinary people who have spent their lives among illuminated manuscripts over the last thousand years: a monk in Normandy, a prince of France, a Florentine bookseller, an English antiquary, a rabbi from central Europe, a French priest, a Keeper at the British Museum, a Greek forger, a German polymath, a British connoisseur and the woman who created the most spectacular library in America—all of them members of what Christopher de Hamel calls the Manuscripts Club.This exhilarating fraternity, and the fellow enthusiasts who come with it, throw new light on how manuscripts have survived and been used by very different kinds of people in many different circumstances. Christopher de Hamel&’s unexpected connections and discoveries reveal a passion that crosses the boundaries of time. We understand the manuscripts themselves better by knowing who their keepers and companions have been.In 1850 (or thereabouts) John Ruskin bought his first manuscript &“at a bookseller&’s in a back alley.&” This was his reaction: &“The new worlds which every leaf of this book opened to me, and the joy I had in counting their letters and unravelling their arabesques as if they had all been of beaten gold—as many of them were—cannot be told.&” The members of de Hamel&’s club share many such wonders, which he brings to us with scholarship, style and a lifetime&’s experience.We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World
Par Alex Rowell. 2024
A searing exploration of authoritarianism in the Middle East through the legacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s years in power in…
Cold War–era Egypt. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the larger-than-life Egyptian president who ruled for eighteen years between the coup d’état he led in 1952 and his death in 1970, is best known for wresting the Suez Canal from the British and French empires and befriending such iconic revolutionaries as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Yet there is a darker side to Nasser’s regime. He was a brutal authoritarian, whose legacy, Alex Rowell argues, lies at the heart of the violent and repressive order that still prevails throughout the Arab world today. We Are Your Soldiers examines seven countries—Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, and Libya—weaving the epic tale of Nasser’s dramatic encounters with each to reassess his impact in the Arab sphere. These engagements were often drenched in blood and destruction, leaving deep scars that endure to the present. Rowell shows how the Nasser years were crucial to the formation of regimes as varied as Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libya, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi’s Egypt. Crushing democracy at home while launching wars and slaying opponents abroad, Nasser ushered in the long political winter from which the region is still yet to emerge. Drawing on a deep reading of Arabic sources, extensive interviews, and material never before published in English, Rowell offers a necessary reexamination of Nasser’s rule and a new understanding of the politics of the Middle East.A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press
Par Ayelet Brinn. 2023
A fascinating glimpse into the complex and often unexpected ways that women and ideas about women shaped widely read Jewish…
newspapersBetween the 1880s and 1920s, Yiddish-language newspapers rose from obscurity to become successful institutions integral to American Jewish life. During this period, Yiddish-speaking immigrants came to view newspapers as indispensable parts of their daily lives. For many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, acclimating to America became inextricably intertwined with becoming a devoted reader of the Yiddish periodical press, as the newspapers and their staffs became a fusion of friends, religious and political authorities, tour guides, matchmakers, and social welfare agencies.In A Revolution in Type, Ayelet Brinn argues that women were central to the emergence of the Yiddish press as a powerful, influential force in American Jewish culture. Through rhetorical debates about women readers and writers, the producers of the Yiddish press explored how to transform their newspapers to reach a large, diverse audience. The seemingly peripheral status of women’s columns and other newspaper features supposedly aimed at a female audience—but in reality, read with great interest by male and female readers alike—meant that editors and publishers often used these articles as testing grounds for the types of content their newspapers should encompass. The book explores the discovery of previously unknown work by female writers in the Yiddish press, whose contributions most often appeared without attribution; it also examines the work of men who wrote under women’s names in order to break into the press. Brinn shows that instead of framing issues of gender as marginal, we must view them as central to understanding how the American Yiddish press developed into the influential, complex, and diverse publication field it eventually became.Volcanic: Vesuvius in the Age of Revolutions
Par John Brewer. 2023
A vibrant, diverse history of Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples in the age of Romanticism Vesuvius is best…
known for its disastrous eruption of 79CE. But only after 1738, in the age of Enlightenment, did the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii reveal its full extent. In an era of groundbreaking scientific endeavour and violent revolution, Vesuvius became a focal point of strong emotions and political aspirations, an object of geological enquiry, and a powerful symbol of the Romantic obsession with nature. John Brewer charts the changing seismic and social dynamics of the mountain, and the meanings attached by travellers to their sublime confrontation with nature. The pyrotechnics of revolution and global warfare made volcanic activity the perfect political metaphor, fuelling revolutionary enthusiasm and conservative trepidation. From Swiss mercenaries to English entrepreneurs, French geologists to local Neapolitan guides, German painters to Scottish doctors, Vesuvius bubbled and seethed not just with lava, but with people whose passions, interests, and aims were as disparate as their origins.Beyond 1619: The Atlantic Origins of American Slavery (The Early Modern Americas)
Par Paul J. Polgar, Marc H. Lerner, and Jesse Cromwell. 2023
Beyond 1619 brings an Atlantic and hemispheric perspective to the year 1619 as a marker of American slavery’s origins and…
the beginnings of the Black experience in what would become the United States by situating the roots of racial slavery in a broader, comparative context.In recent years, an extensive public dialogue regarding the long shadow of racism in the United States has pushed Americans to confront the insidious history of race-based slavery and its aftermath, with 1619—the year that the first recorded enslaved persons of African descent arrived in British North America—taking center stage as its starting point. Yet this dialogue has inadvertently narrowed our understanding of slavery, race, and their repercussions to the U.S. context. Beyond 1619 showcases the fruitful results when scholars examine and put into conversation multiple empires, regions, peoples, and cultures to get a more complete view of the rise of racial slavery in the Americas.Painting racial slavery’s emergence on a hemispheric canvas, and in one compact volume, provides historical context beyond the 1619 moment for discussions of slavery, racism, antiracism, freedom, and lasting inequalities. In the process, this volume shines new light on these critical topics andillustrates the centrality of racial slavery, and contests over its rise, in nearly every corner of the early modern Atlantic World.Contributors: John N. Blanton, Jesse Cromwell, Erika Denise Edwards, Rebecca Anne Goetz, Rana Hogarth, Chloe L. Ireton, Marc H. Lerner, Paul J. Polgar, Brett Rushforth, Casey Schmitt, Jenny Shaw, James Sidbury.How Mexican and Latinx hackers apply concepts from coding to their lived experiencesIn Code Work, Héctor Beltrán examines Mexican and…
Latinx coders&’ personal strategies of self-making as they navigate a transnational economy of tech work. Beltrán shows how these hackers apply concepts from the code worlds to their lived experiences, deploying batches, loose coupling, iterative processing (looping), hacking, prototyping, and full-stack development in their daily social interactions—at home, in the workplace, on the dating scene, and in their understanding of the economy, culture, and geopolitics. Merging ethnographic analysis with systems thinking, he draws on his eight years of research in México and the United States—during which he participated in and observed hackathons, hacker schools, and tech entrepreneurship conferences—to unpack the conundrums faced by workers in a tech economy that stretches from villages in rural México to Silicon Valley.Beltrán chronicles the tension between the transformative promise of hacking—the idea that coding will reconfigure the boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, and gender—and the reality of a neoliberal capitalist economy divided and structured by the US/México border. Young hackers, many of whom approach coding in a spirit of playfulness and exploration, are encouraged to appropriate the discourses of flexibility and self-management even as they remain outside formal employment. Beltrán explores the ways that &“innovative culture&” is seen as central in curing México&’s social ills, showing that when innovation is linked to technological development, other kinds of development are neglected. Beltrán&’s highly original, wide-ranging analysis uniquely connects technology studies, the anthropology of capitalism, and Latinx and Latin American studies.A richly detailed history of the Bacris and the Busnachs, two renowned Jewish families whose influence and reputation shook the…
capitals of Europe and AmericaAt the height of the Napoleonic Wars, the Bacri brothers and their nephew, Naphtali Busnach, were perhaps the most notorious Jews in the Mediterranean. Based in the strategic port of Algiers, their interconnected families traded in raw goods and luxury items, brokered diplomatic relations with the Ottomans, and lent vital capital to warring nations. For the French, British, and Americans, who competed fiercely for access to trade and influence in the region, there was no getting around the Bacris and the Busnachs. The Kings of Algiers traces the rise and fall of these two trading families over four tumultuous decades in the nineteenth century.In this panoramic book, Julie Kalman restores their story—and Jewish history more broadly—to the histories of trade, corsairing, and high-stakes diplomacy in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath. Jacob Bacri dined with Napoleon himself. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Horatio Nelson considered strategies to circumvent the Bacris’ influence. As the families’ ambitions grew, so did the perils, from imprisonment and assassination to fraud and family collapse.The Kings of Algiers brings vividly to life an age of competitive imperialism and nascent nationalism and demonstrates how people and events on the periphery shaped perceptions and decisions in the distant metropoles of the world’s great nations.Indigenous Autocracy: Power, Race, and Resources in Porfirian Tlaxcala, Mexico
Par Jaclyn Sumner. 2023
When General Porfirio Díaz assumed power in 1876, he ushered in Mexico's first prolonged period of political stability and national…
economic growth—though "progress" came at the cost of democracy. Indigenous Autocracy presents a new story about how regional actors negotiated between national authoritarian rule and local circumstances by explaining how an Indigenous person held state-level power in Mexico during the thirty-five-year dictatorship that preceded the Mexican Revolution (the Porfiriato), and the apogee of scientific racism across Latin America. Although he was one of few recognizably Indigenous persons in office, Próspero Cahuantzi of Tlaxcala kept his position (1885–1911) longer than any other gubernatorial appointee under Porfirio Díaz's transformative but highly oppressive dictatorship (1876–1911). Cahuantzi leveraged his identity and his region's Indigenous heritage to ingratiate himself to Díaz and other nation-building elites. Locally, Cahuantzi navigated between national directives aimed at modernizing Mexico, often at the expense of the impoverished rural majority, and strategic management of Tlaxcala's natural resources—in particular, balancing growing industrial demand for water with the needs of the local population. Jaclyn Ann Sumner shows how this intermediary actor brokered national expectations and local conditions to maintain state power, challenging the idea that governors during the Porfirian dictatorship were little more than provincial stewards who repressed dissent. Drawing upon documentation from more than a dozen Mexican archives, the book brings Porfirian-era Mexico into critical conversations about race and environmental politics in Latin America.