Book picks similar to
Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past by Richard F. Townsend
history
archaeology
mexico
pre-columbian-history
The Mexican Revolution
Adolfo Gilly - 1971
Written during the author’s time as a political prisoner in the famous penitentiary of Lecumberri in Mexico, it sold thousands of copies in its first edition, becoming widely accepted as the official textbook by history faculties in Mexico despite Gilly’s continued incarceration. It has gone through more than thirty editions in Mexico and been translated into French and Greek.This comprehensively revised and updated edition of the original text is now available with a foreword by Latin American history scholar Friedrich Katz and a new preface by the author. A true “people’s history,” The Mexican Revolution is a stirring, bottom-up account of an event whose reverberations are still felt throughout Latin America and the rest of the world.
Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain
Roy Morris Jr. - 2010
It’s a decision Huck’s creator already had made, albeit for somewhat different reasons, a quarter of a century earlier. He wasn’t even Mark Twain then, but as Huck might have said, “That ain’t no matter.” With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, twenty-five-year-old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his brother Orion’s offer to join him in Nevada Territory, far from the crimsoned battlefields of war.A rollicking, hilarious stagecoach journey across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six-year-long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Hawaii, with lengthy stopovers in Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco. By the time it was over, he would find himself reborn as Mark Twain, America’s best-loved, most influential writer. The “trouble,” as he famously promised, had begun.With a pitch-perfect blend of appreciative humor and critical authority, acclaimed literary biographer Roy Morris, Jr., sheds new light on this crucial but still largely unexamined period in Mark Twain’s life. Morris carefully sorts fact from fiction—never an easy task when dealing with Twain—to tell the story of a young genius finding his voice in the ramshackle mining camps, boomtowns, and newspaper offices of the wild and woolly West, while the Civil War rages half a continent away.With the frequent help of Twain’s own words, Morris follows his subject on a winding journey of selfdiscovery filled with high adventure and low comedy, as Clemens/Twain dodges Indians and gunfighters, receives marriage advice from Brigham Young, burns down a mountain with a frying pan, gets claim-jumped by rival miners, narrowly avoids fighting a duel, hikes across the floor of an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, and writes his first great literary success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”Lighting Out for the Territory is a fascinating, even inspiring, account of how an unemployed riverboat pilot, would-be Confederate guerrilla, failed prospector, neophyte newspaper reporter, and parttime San Francisco aesthete reinvented himself as America’s most famous and beloved writer. It’s a good story, and mostly true—with some stretchers thrown in for good measure.
Jesus and His World: The Archaeological Evidence
Craig A. Evans - 2012
Evans presents the most important archaeological discoveries that shed light on the world of Jesus of Nazareth. Evans takes on many sensational claims that have been proposed in recent books and peddled in the media, and uses actual archaeological findings to uncover the truth about several key pieces of Jesus' world. For example, what was the village of Nazareth actually like in the time of Jesus? Did synagogues really exist, as the Gospels say? What does archaeology tell us about the ruling priests who condemned Jesus to death? Has the tomb of Jesus really been found, as has been claimed? Evans's engaging prose enables readers to understand and critique the latest theories—both the sober and the sensational—about who Jesus was and what he lived and died for.
Kill or Cure: An Illustrated History of Medicine
Steve Parker - 2013
Diaries, notebooks, and other first-person accounts tell the fascinating stories from the perspective of people who witnessed medical history firsthand.
The Training Ground: Grant, Lee, Sherman, and Davis in the Mexican War, 1846-1848
Martin Dugard - 2008
Grant and Robert E. Lee. But less than two decades before they faced each other as enemies at Appomattox, they had been brothers -- both West Point graduates, both wearing blue, and both fighting in the same cadre in the Mexican War. They were not alone: Sherman, Davis, Jackson nearly all of the Civil War's greatest soldiers had been forged in the heat of Vera Cruz and Monterrey. The Mexican War has faded from our national memory, but it was a struggle of enormous significance: the first U.S. war waged on foreign soil; and it nearly doubled our nation. At this fascinating juncture of American history, a group of young men came together to fight as friends, only years later to fight as enemies. This is their story. Full of dramatic battles, daring rescues, secret missions, soaring triumphs and tragic losses, The Training Ground is history at its finest.
Wartime Farm
Peter Ginn - 2012
Accompanying an 8-part BBC series and written by the three presenters who spend a year living on a reconstructed farm from the era, Wartime Farm sets these changes within a historical context and looks at the day-to-day life of that time. Exploring a fascinating chapter in Britain's recent history, we see how our predecessors lived and thrived in difficult conditions with extreme frugality and ingenuity. From growing your own vegetables and keeping chickens in the back yard, to having to 'make do and mend', many of the challenges faced by wartime Britons have resonance today. Fascinating historical detail and atmospheric story-telling make this a truly compelling read.
Dark History of Hollywood: A Century of Greed, Corruption and Scandal behind the Movies
Kieron Connolly - 2014
But the drama on-screen has been matched, and often exceeded, by the lives off-screen."As the title suggests the book covers the history of Hollywood from its origins in the early part of the 20th century through its heyday under the studio system and finally to the Hollywood of CGI and summer blockbusters.
Metaphysical Bible Dictionary
Charles Fillmore - 1994
The ideas presented in this Bible reference book are based on the teachings of Jesus Christ and are presented in a cross-denominational format.
A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy
David M. Oshinsky - 1983
With a storyteller's eye for the dramatic and presentation of fact, and insightful interpretation of human complexity, Oshinsky uncovers the layers of myth to show the true McCarthy. His book reveals the senator from his humble beginnings as a hardworking Irish farmer's son in Wisconsin to his glory days as the architect of America's Cold War crusade against domestic subversion; a man whose advice if heeded, some believe, might have halted the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia and beyond.A Conspiracy So Immense reveals the internal and external forces that launched McCarthy on this political career, carried him to national prominence, and finally triggered his decline and fall. More than the life of an intensly- even pathologically- ambitious man however, this book is a fascinating portrait of America in the grip of Cold War fear, anger, suspician, and betrayal. Complete with a new Foreword, A Conspiracy So Immense will continue to keep in the spotlight this historical figure-a man who worked so hard to prosecute "criminals" whose ideals work against that of his- for America.
Lost Histories: Exploring the World's Most Famous Mysteries
Joel Levy - 2006
Proving that real mysteries can be found outside of movies and best-seller lists, the quests in this book are among the most famous: the sunken Atlantis, the never-found Amelia Earhart, the lost treasure of Captain Kidd, and that holy grail of all treasure hunters, the Holy Grail. The author sets out to bust the myths and debunk crazy theories as he tells the stories of the tomb raiders, quacks, and glory seekers of the past and presents the most up-to-date thoughts surrounding each of the mysteries investigated.
Porfirio Díaz
Paul Garner - 2001
Now this view is being challenged by a new generation of historians, who point out that Diaz originally rose to power in alliance with anti-conservative forces and was a modernising force as well as a dictator. Drawing together the threads of this revisionist reading of the Porfiriato, Garner reassesses a political career that spanned more than forty years, and examines the claims that post-revolutionary Mexico was not the break with the past that the revolutionary inheritors claimed.
China: A History (Volume 1): From Neolithic Cultures through the Great Qing Empire, (10,000 BCE - 1799 CE)
Harold M. Tanner - 2010
Volume 2: From the Great Qing Empire through the People's Republic of China (1644—2009).