Central American History

Ancient Night is a twist on two Nahuatl traditions: the rabbit which the Feathered Serpent placed on the moon, and Yaushu, the Lord Opossum who ruled the earth before humans came, and who stole fire from the gods to create the sun.

The Darkest Jungle tells the harrowing story of America's first ship canal exploration across a narrow piece of land in Central America called the Darien, a place that loomed large in the minds of the world's most courageous adventurers in the nineteenth century. With rivals from England and France days behind, the 27-member U.S. expedition landed on the Atlantic shore at Caledonia Bay in eastern Panama to begin their mad dash up the coast-hugging mountains of the Darien wilderness.

At fourteen years old, Carlotta Walls was the youngest member of the Little Rock Nine. The journey to integration in a place deeply against it would not be not easy. Yet Carlotta, her family, and the other eight students and their families answered the call to be part of the desegregation order issued by the US Supreme Court in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case.

In 1951, Carlotta Walls Lanier was one of the nine African-American students to integrate Little Rock High School, and the first to earn a diploma. Here she provides a firsthand account of her experiences - including the bombing that rocked her home, the constant threats she and her classmates faced, and the pressure and bullying her parents endured.

New Yorker journalist Jonathan Blitzer has been covering the immigration crisis at America’s southern border for nearly a decade, but the current emergency is the end of a much larger story. In this, his first book, Blitzer goes back to the beginning: to the shadowy civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s; to the American prison system in the 1990s and the policies of mass deportation that transformed local street criminals into international crime syndicates.

The Commander in Chief of the United States Central Command from July 2000 through July 2003, General Tommy Franks made history leading American and Coalition forces to victory in Afghanistan and Iraq, the decisive battles that launched the war on terrorism.

This riveting memoir follows a Lebanese Muslim American and 30-year US Marine veteran who suffered a six-month ordeal at the hands of a brutal regime in Yemen - and remained loyal to his country through it all.

In King of the Gunrunners, author James W. Miller reveals the untold story of a forgotten American whose adventures helped pave the way for the United States' emergence as an international power. This volume presents the story of Hart, the defiant king of the Cuban gunrunners, who prolonged a revolution, provoked a war, and left an indelible mark on history.

For this striking, stripped-down account of youth immigration, Villalobos interviewed teens at various stages of the immigration process to illustrate their stories - the physical and emotional difficulties of their travels. He then changed certain elements of these stories in order to protect the children's identities. Each chapter brings forth the voice of one young immigrant's experience, from crossing the Mexican desert to gang violence to the freezers at ICE detention centers.

In a feat of remarkable research and timely reclamation, Eric K. Washington uncovers the nearly forgotten life of James H. Williams (1878-1948), the chief porter of Grand Central Terminal's Red Caps - a multitude of Harlem-based Black men whom he organized into the essential labor force of America's most august railroad station. Washington reveals that despite the highly racialized and often exploitative nature of the work, the Red Cap was a highly coveted job for college-bound Black men determined to join New York's bourgeoning middle class.

The Pursuit is Plan Z is the unlikely origin story of the intelligence coup that led to the largest naval battle in history, in World War II's Pacific Theater, resulting in the most crushing defeat the U.S. Navy has ever inflicted on an enemy force.

In the early 1500s, Ponce de Leon was one of the most important Spanish military figures in the Caribbean. He made his first voyage across the Atlantic with Christopher Columbus and then, after years of battle with the native Taino, became the first governor of Puerto Rico. Although the story of his search for the Fountain of Youth is entirely fictional, his noteworthy expedition to—and naming of—Florida is one of his greatest legacies.

Fifteen thousand years before Europeans stepped foot in the Americas, people had already spread from tip to tip and coast to coast. Like all humans, these Native Americans sought to understand their place in the universe, the nature of their relationship with the divine, and the origin of the world into which their ancestors had emerged. The answers lay in their sacred stories. This collection of those stories - from nations and cultures across two continents, what the Aztecs called the Sea-Ringed World, from the edge of Argentina all the way up to Alaska - is a treasure.

Quince mil años antes de que los Europeos pisarán las Américas, la gente ya se había propagado de punta a punta y de costa a costa. Como todos los humanos, estos Nativos Americanos buscaban comprender su lugar en el universo, la naturaleza de su relación con lo divino, y el origen del mundo en el que habían emergido sus antepasados.Las respuestas se encuentran en sus historias sagradas.

In 2001, while vacationing on Panama’s Pacific coast, maritime archaeologist James P. Delgado came upon the hulk of a mysterious iron vessel, revealed by the ebbing tides in a small cove at Isla San Telmo. He learned that the wreck was the remains of one of the first successful deep-diving submersibles, built in 1864 by Julius H. Kroehl, an innovator during the Civil War. Delgado chronicles the confluence of technological advancement, entrepreneurial aspiration, American capitalist ambition, and ignorance of the physiological effects of deep diving in this compelling narrative.

On the morning of July 1, 1800, a surveyor and mapmaker named Cayetano Diaz opened the window of his study in Guatemala City to find a horrific sight: a pair of severed breasts. Offering a meticulously researched and evocative account of the quest to find the perpetrator and understand the motives behind such a brutal act, this volume pinpoints the sensational crime as a watershed moment in Guatemalan history that radically changed the nature of justice and the established social order.