Great towns and regional polities

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John Grenier

This book explores the evolution of American war, showing how the first war waged against Indian noncombatant populations and their agricultural resources became the standard method of war employed by early Americans and which ultimately defined their military heritage. The bloodthirsty American conquest of Indian communities east of the Mississippi River helps demonstrate how early Americans embraced warfare shaped by extravagant violence and focused on conquest. Grenier provides a major revision in understanding the place of warfare directed on noncombatants in the American military tradition, and his conclusions are relevant to understand US 'special operations' in the War on Terror.

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[by] Patrick Vinton Kirch

In How Chiefs Became Kings, PKirch addresses a central problem in anthropological archaeology: the emergence of "archaic states" whose distinctive feature was divine kingship. Kirch takes as his focus the Hawaiian archipelago, commonly regarded as the archetype of a complex chiefdom. Integrating anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, traditional history, and theory, and drawing on significant contributions from his own four decades of research, Kirch argues that Hawaiian polities had become states before the time of Captain Cook's voyage (1778-1779). The status of most archaic states is inferred from the archaeological record. But Kirch shows that because Hawai'i's kingdoms were established relatively recently, they could be observed and recorded by Cook and other European voyagers. Substantive and provocative, this book makes a major contribution to the literature of precontact Hawai'i and illuminates Hawai'i's importance in the global theory and literature about divine, kingship, archaic states, and sociopolitical evolution. --Jacket.

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Carlos Navajas Zubeldia prólogo, Paul Preston

Este libro trata acerca de la tragedia de los militares republicanos del Ejército español, haciendo una lectura de la misma inscrita en el largo plazo: desde el régimen de 1873 hasta lo que convencionalmente se suele denominar nuestros días, dominados por el debate sobre la llamada memoria histórica.

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Gregory Wilpert

Exposing the self-serving logic behind much middle-class opposition to Venezuela's elected leader, this book argues that the Chavez government has instituted one of the progressive constitutions, but warns that they have yet to overcome the dangerous spectres of the country's past.