The late French anthropologist Pierre Clastres describes in novelistic detail his encounter with a now vanished Paraguayan tribe.

Pierre Clastres (1934-1979) was one of the most respected political anthropologists of our time. Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians is an account of his first fieldwork in the early 1960s--an encounter with a small, unique, and now vanished Paraguayan tribe. From "Birth" to "The End," Clastres follows the Guayakis in their everyday lives, determined to record every detail of their history, ritual, myths, and culture in order to answer the many q...
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This book traces the history of the Maya Indians of Yucatan, Mexico,
during a four-hundred-year period from late preconquest times through
the end of Spanish rule in 1821. Nancy Farriss combines the tools of the
historian and the anthropologist to reconstruct colonial Maya society and
culture as a web of interlocking systems, from ecology and modes of
subsistence through the corporate family and the community to the realm
of the sacred. She shows how the Maya adapted to Spanish domination,
changing in ways that embodied Maya principles as they applied their
traditi...
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The concentration of power in the caudillo (leader) is as much a formative element of Mexican culture and politics as the historical legacy of the Aztec emperors, Cortez, the Spanish Crown, the Mother Church and the mixing of the Spanish and Indian population into a mestizo culture. Krauze shows how history becomes biography during the century of caudillos from the insurgent priests in 1810 to Porfirio and the Revolution in 1910. The Revolutionary era, ending in 1940, was dominated by the lives of seven presidents -- Madero, Zapata, Villa, Carranza, Obregon, Calles and Cardenas. Since 1940,...
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A deeply engaging new history of how European settlements in the post-Colombian Americas shaped the world, from the bestselling author of 1491.

Presenting the latest research by biologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Mann shows how the post-Columbian network of ecological and economic exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Mexico City--where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted--the center of the world. In this history, Mann uncovers the germ o...
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El Salvador and Honduras have had the highest homicide rates in the world over the past ten years, with Guatemala close behind. Every day more than 1,000 people--men, women, and children--flee these three countries for North America. scar Mart nez, author of The Beast, named one of the best books of the year by the Economist, Mother Jones, and the Financial Times, fleshes out these stark figures with true stories, producing a jarringly beautiful and immersive account of life in deadly locatio...
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"Everything You Need to Know About Latino History" covers the contributions of Spaniards, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, and Central and South Americans whose cultures have given us everything from chocolate to chil...
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Using a wide array of sources, historian Matthew Restall highlights seven key myths, uncovering the source of the inaccuracies and exploding the fallacies and misconceptions behind each myth. This vividly written and authoritative book shows, for instance, that native Americans did not ta...
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