After their daughter Maribel suffers a near-fatal accident, the Riveras leave Mexico and come to America. But upon settling at Redwood Apartments, a two-story cinderblock complex just off a highway in Delaware, they discover that Maribel's recovery -- the piece of the American Dream on which they've pinned all their hopes -- will not be easy. Every task seems to confront them with language, racial, and cultural obstacles. At Redwood also lives Mayor...

"In a completely original analysis, prize-winning historian Alfred W. McCoy explores America's rise as a world power--from the 1890s through the Cold War--and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century through a fusion of cyberwar, space warfare, trade pacts, and military alliances. McCoy then analyzes the marquee instruments of US hegemony--covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance....

Four years after the Revolutionary War, America's independence was still in doubt. The new nation needed money and a vital surge in trade. In 1787, a group of Boston merchants decided to send two ships on a desperate mission around Cape Horn and into the Pacific Ocean, to establish new trade with China, settle an outpost on territory claimed by the Spanish, and find the legendary Northwest Passage. The seven-year adventure, known as the Columbia Expedition,...

"Between the Spanish American War and World War I, the thrill of America's new international role in the world held the nation's capital in rapture. Visionaries gravitated to Washington and sought to make it the glorious equal to the great European capitals of the day. Remains of the period define Washington today--the monuments and great civic buildings on the Mall as well as the private mansions built on the avenues that now serve as embassies....

Includes the work of 201 Latino writers from the Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Dominican American traditions, as well as from the traditions of other Spanish-speaking countries. It traces five centuries of writing, from letters to the Spanish crown by sixteenth-century conquistadors to the cutting-edge expressions of twenty-first-century cartoonistas and artists of reggaetón.

"The wild world of adolescence has rarely been captured with as sharp an observational eye as in this refreshingly smart, frank spin on the teen comedy by director Amy Heckerling and screenwriter Cameron Crowe--for each of whom it kicked off a hugely successful film career. Based on Crowe's experiences going undercover as a student at a southern California high school, Fast Times at Ridgemont High blends hormone-fueled hilarity with an almost sociological...

Moving from Mexico to America when their daughter suffers a near-fatal accident, the Riveras confront cultural barriers, their daughter's difficult recovery and her developing relationship with a Panamanian boy. "Dos familias cuyas esperanzas chocan con el destino. Y una extraordinaria novela que nos ofrece una poderosa y nueva definición de lo que significa ser americano. Arturo y Alma Rivera han vivido toda la vida en México. Un día, Maribel,...

"In 1965, an impoverished elderly woman was found dead in Nice, France. Her death marked the end of an era; she was the last of the great courtesans. Known as La Belle Otero, she was a volcanic Spanish beauty whose patrons included Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) and Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia. She accumulated an enormous fortune, but gambled it all away. Scarlet Women tells her story and many more, including:Marie...

Inspired by a true story, follow the British Royal Navy's perilous voyage into unchartered territory as the crew attempts to discover the Northwest Passage. Faced with treacherous conditions, limited resources, dwindling hope and fear of the unknown, the crew is pushed to the brink of extinction. Frozen, isolated and stuck at the end of the earth, it highlights all that can go wrong when a group of men, desperate to survive, struggle not only with...

In The 1960s, as a response to segregation in the United States, the influential art patron Dominique de Menil began a research project and photo archive called The Image of the Black in Western Art. Now, fifty years later, as the first American president of African American descent serves his historic term in office, her mission has been re-invigorated through the collaboration of Harvard University Press and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African...