In 1937 an offi cial from the Mexican forest service visited the rugged Sierra Tarahumara mountains in southern Chihuahua, which even today remain one of the nation’s most isolated places. Th e landscape that greeted An-tonio H. Sosa was unlike anything he had seen in central Mexico. He ad-mired the “immensity, beauty, and potential” of the untouched Ponderosa and Montezuma pines tha…
When Europeans first arrived in North America, between five and eight million indigenous people were already living there. But how did they come to be here? What were their agricultural, spiritual, and hunting practices? How did their societies evolve and what challenges do they face today? Eminent historians Theda Perdue and Michael Green begin by describing how nomadic bands of hunter-gather…
For the past two decades, the Field Museum of Natural History has been a leader in the analysis, conservation, and preservation of archaeological and museum collections. There are an immeasurable number of researchers who have walked the museum’s halls, collaborated with museum scientists and curators, and advanced our understanding o…
Nativism is the idea that a certain group of people can be identied as original to, or the rightful heirs to, a geopolitical territory; consequently, “natives” claim the privilege of deciding who belongs and who counts as an “outsider” based on supposed foreign connections. The case could be made that nativism in this sense is universal. Nativist movements stress the …
Time and again since the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, public discourse in the US has revolved around society’s relationship with its soldiers. Apart from medialized farewell and welcome-home ceremonies, yellow-ribbon campaigns and “I-support-the-troops” bumper stickers, protagonists within this discourse have increasingly expressed concern about how soldiers come …
The first people to reach North America almost certainly did so without knowing they had crossed into a new continent. They would have been following game, as their ancestors had for thousands of years, along the Siberian coast and then across the land bridge. Once in Alaska, it would take these first North Americans thousands of years more to work their way through the openings in great glaci…
his book examines the pivotal role that silver and gold money played in the formation and working out of England’s Amer-ican colonial proj ect in the seventeenth century. The book argues, first, that money was the primum mobile, or prime mover, of En glish imperial action and overseas activity, including the impulse for colonization, the regulation of colonial trade, and the introduction…