Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2022 -

It is rare when a respected researcher revisits her work and comes to a totally different conclusion about its meaning. However, that is exactly what Roller (Colgate Univ.) has done in her important new book. She originally concluded that distinct differences existed between Indigenous groups that had been "incorporated into the colonial system ... and those who were not" (p. 3). Roller now eschews that notion in favor of a view that advances Native inhabitants' autonomy rather than their resilience. She argues that peace must be understood from a "Native perspective" (p. 88), not just a colonialist one, and that peace treaties were not fixed but "tested, renegotiated, and sometimes nearly broken" (p. 89) by Indigenous agency. The result is nothing less than a total revision in thinking about Brazilian Native groups' colonialist/Indigenous strategies. Roller's analysis continues through the independence period of the 19th century, with its numerous attempts to force Indigenous inhabitants off the land, to the present day in which Native groups strategize to celebrate their cultures. This work is more than informative: it is imperative reading for all Brazilianists and Latin American scholars of the colonial and modern periods.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

In this important study, Vergara (Georgia Institute of Technology) explains Mexico's uneven transition from a solar energy regime to oil dependency. In 1850, Mexico's energy came from the sun--draft animals, forests, water, and wind provided power. As the nation industrialized, these natural energies proved insufficient, and, to complicate matters, the country did not possess enough coal to mimic US or British energy practices. Mexico was nonetheless well situated to take advantage of the global transition to oil in the first half of the 20th century, enabling it to pursue economic development at unprecedented levels. Importantly, the private sector and its government allies sponsored this transition. Formerly produced mainly for kerosene and lubricants, oil dramatically transformed Mexican politics and society despite popular reluctance to use it at home. Major cities could grow only so large under the old solar energy regime, and oil-based development facilitated patchy urbanization, heightened social differences, and underlay the green revolution. Currently, the same actors who encouraged Mexico's transition to oil largely oppose returning to renewable energies. This highly accessible study is a must read for students of modern Mexican and environmental history.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

Cowan's work is a major milestone in the recent history of the religious Right. Moving away from a traditional focus on the US, Cowan's masterfully researched monograph illustrates how the rise of evangelicalism in the late 20th century was a truly transnational phenomenon, one in which Brazil was a major contributor. Beginning with a conservative minority of bishops' resistance to the Second Vatican Council, Cowan (Univ. of California, San Diego) demonstrates that, beginning in the 1960s, Brazilians domestically and internationally laid the groundwork for modern evangelical conservative politics--based on anti-communism, anti-ecumenism, anti-modernism, anti-rationalism, anti-egalitarianism, and eventually, neoliberalism--that would shape the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Such efforts benefited from the support of Brazil's military dictatorship (1964-85), whose own ideological attitudes among both leadership and the security apparatuses overlapped with evangelical conservative religious attitudes. Drawing on archives in the US and Brazil, Cowan's work shows how the religious Right's entrance onto the political stage was a truly transnational phenomenon that brought Brazilian and US actors into dialogue with one another and shaped each other's movements. The result is a book that transforms readers' understanding of recent religious history and politics.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Murphy (Syracuse Univ.) focuses on the Lesser Antilles during the Colonial period, detailing how the societal climate in Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago developed in the face of British and French attempts to establish plantation-based colonies much like those in Jamaica and Barbados. Murphy traces the linkages among these small islands by establishing the ways in which indigenous travel and settlement led to a more interconnected political, economic, and social outlook. At the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the European powers pursued a more aggressive path to sovereignty in the archipelago. The region's inhabitants, used to a higher degree of independence than many other colonies, pushed back in various ways, ranging from diplomacy to violence. This well-researched account, which thoughtfully includes transatlantic archival work, posits a new way of thinking about the archipelago linked by travel, settlement, race, and culture. This truly insightful study adds to a number of historical fields and is a must-read for those interested in colonial, regional, or Caribbean history.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

In this thought-provoking collection, contributors reconstruct the lives of individual healers whose enduring contributions reshape understandings of how medical knowledge evolved and circulated in Latin America. Through 12 biographical narratives spanning five centuries, The Gray Zones of Medicine provides insight into how individual health practitioners negotiated their way through what editors Armus (Swarthmore College) and Gomez (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) refer to as the "interstitial spaces" of medicine. Examining themes such as how non-traditional practitioners often wielded power that threatened their licensed counterparts and how they negotiated healing within the confines of slavery while challenging cultural norms, Gray Zones reveals how these practitioners often learned their craft through trial and error, so healing practices were usually defined by local knowledge of the environment. By contextualizing each individual in a unique time and space, this work reveals the rich interactions that transcended social and ethnic classes as well as urban and rural environments and how this multifaceted generational transmission of knowledge continues to upend gender norms and serve indigenous populations. This collection makes a landmark contribution to the history of medicine and Latin American history.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

This fascinating book explores the unique circumstances of white slaveholding women in 19th-century Cuba and the enslaved peoples they controlled. The subject of women slaveholders and their interactions with their enslaved workers has been largely overlooked in broader discussions of Cuban cultural history. These complex relationships were negotiated differently between urban contexts, such as Havana, and the rural contexts of coffee and sugar plantations. The urban/rural dichotomy outlined here examines the occupational differences of enslaved workers and reveals distinct strategies slaveholding women used to navigate the patriarchal structures of 19th-century Cuban society. Unlike their male counterparts, slaveholding women were anomalous, yet they actively upheld the coercive structures of slavery. Prados-Torreira (Columbia College Chicago) skillfully investigates newspapers, travelers' accounts, government documents, and other documentary sources to build her study. Chapter 4 is dedicated entirely to the examination of slaveholding women's wills, which sheds new light on the dynamics of Cuban slavery and offers new avenues for illuminating the lives of slaveholding Cuban women. This is a must read for scholars of the Caribbean and the African diaspora.Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty; professionals.