Explore our groundbreaking books that facilitate teaching across disciplines. To request an exam copy, click on “Request an Exam or Desk Copy” on the book page, and this will take you to our distributor’s site where you can order your copy.
Shaped by the West: A History of North America, Volume 1 and 2
by William F. Deverell and Anne F. Hyde
This two-volume primary source reader rewrites the history of the United States through a western lens. America’s expansion west was the driving force for issues of democracy, politics, race, freedom, and property. The authors provide a nuanced look at the past, balancing topics in society and politics and representing all kinds of westerners—black and white, native and immigrant, male and female, powerful and powerless—from more than twenty states across the West and the shifting frontier. The sources included reflect the important role of the West in national narratives of American history, beginning with the pre-Columbian era in Volume 1 and taking us to the twenty-first century in Volume 2.
Key Features & Benefits:
- Expertly curated personal letters, government documents, editorials, photos, and never before published materials offer lively, vivid introductions to the tools of history.
- Annotations, captions, and brief essays provide accessible entry points to an extraordinarily wide range of themes—adding context and perspective from leaders in the field.
- Highlights connections between western and national histories to foster critical thinking about America’s diverse past and today’s challenging issues.
Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century
by A. Naomi Paik
Days after taking the White House, Donald Trump signed three executive orders—authorizing the Muslim Ban, the border wall, and ICE raids. These orders would define his administration’s approach toward noncitizens. An essential primer on how we got here, Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary shows that such barriers to immigration are embedded in the very foundation of the United States. A. Naomi Paik reveals that the forty-fifth president’s xenophobic, racist, ableist, patriarchal ascendancy is no aberration, but the consequence of two centuries of U.S. political, economic, and social culture. She deftly demonstrates that attacks against migrants are tightly bound to assaults against women, people of color, workers, ill and disabled people, and queer and gender nonconforming people. Against this history of barriers and assaults, this book mounts a rallying cry for a broad-based, abolitionist sanctuary movement for all.
Island of the Blue Dolphins:
The Complete Reader’s Edition
by Scott O’Dell
This special edition includes two excised chapters, published here for the first time, as well as a critical introduction and essays that offer new background on the archaeological, legal, and colonial histories of Native peoples in California. Sara L. Schwebel explores the composition history and editorial decisions made by author Scott O’Dell that ensured the success of Island of the Blue Dolphins at a time when second-wave feminism, the civil rights movement, and multicultural education increasingly influenced which books were taught. This edition also considers how readers might approach the book today, when new archaeological evidence is emerging about the “Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island,” on whom O’Dell’s story is based, and Native peoples are engaged in the reclamation of indigenous histories and ongoing struggles for political sovereignty.
Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger
by Julie Sze
In the United States and in the world, environmental injustices have manifested across racial and class divides in devastatingly disproportionate ways. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger examines mobilizations and movements, from protests at Standing Rock to activism in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Environmental justice movements fight, survive, love, and create in the face of violence that challenges the conditions of life itself. Exploring dispossession, deregulation, privatization, and inequality, this book is the essential primer on environmental justice, packed with cautiously hopeful stories for the future.
Water and Los Angeles: A Tale of Three Rivers, 1900-1941
by William F. Deverell and Tom Sitton
Los Angeles rose to significance in the first half of the twentieth century by way of its complex relationship to three rivers: the Los Angeles, the Owens, and the Colorado. The remarkable urban and suburban trajectory of southern California since then cannot be fully understood without reference to the ways in which each of these three river systems came to be connected to the future of the metropolitan region. This history of growth must be understood in full consideration of all three rivers and the challenges and opportunities they presented to those who would come to make Los Angeles a global power. Full of primary sources and original documents, Water and Los Angeles will be of interest to both students of Los Angeles and general readers interested in the origins of the city.
American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders
by Gary Y. Okihiro
A survey of U.S. history from its beginnings to the present, American History Unbound reveals our past through the lens of Asian American and Pacific Islander history. In so doing, it is a work of both history and anti-history, a narrative that fundamentally transforms and deepens our understanding of the United States. This text is accessible and filled with engaging stories and themes that draw attention to key theoretical and historical interpretations. Gary Y. Okihiro positions Asians and Pacific Islanders within a larger history of people of color in the United States and places the United States in the context of world history and oceanic worlds.
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