Set against the backdrop of the United States' raging Civil War, Irishman Perry Jameson finds himself to be a soldier of fortune, a mercenary fighting for what he knows will be a lost cause. In the midst of the fighting, Perry finds himself in the arms of several women of the war. Marie, a freed slave and practicing voodoo princess, is a skilled nurse who is highly in demand during the bloody conflict of brother against brother. There is also Ellen Anson, the wife of a wealthy plantation owner. When Perry becomes involved with both women, it is time to leave the relative comfort of his new found home and be off to fight with the Confederate troops- fighting what is perhaps the bloodiest battle of the war.

In the mid-nineteenth century, some of Cuba's most influential writers settled in U.S. cities and published a variety of newspapers, pamphlets, and books. Collaborating with military movements known as filibusters, this generation of exiled writers create

In honor of Benedict Anderson's many years as a teacher and his profound contributions to the field of Southeast Asian studies, the editors have collected essays from a number of the many scholars who studied with him. These articles deal with the literature, politics, history, and culture of Southeast Asia, addressing Benedict Anderson's broad concerns.

Under the current cartographies of globalism, where frontiers mutate, vacillate, and mark the contiguity of discourse, questioning the Spanish border seems a particularly urgent task. The volume engages a wide spectrum of ambivalent regions-subjects that currently are, or have been seen in the past, as spaces of negotiation and contestation. However, they converge in their perception of the "Spanish" nation-space as a historical and ideological construct that is perpetually going through transformations and reformations. This volume advocates the position that intellectual responsibility must lead us to engage openly in the issues underlying current social and political tensions.

On Friday, December 10, 2010, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders walked on to the floor of the United States Senate and began speaking. It turned out to be a very long speech, lasting over eight and a half hours. And it hit a nerve. Millions followed the speech online until the traffic crashed the Senate server. A huge, positive grassroots response tied up the phones in the senator's offices in Vermont and Washington. President Obama reportedly held an impromptu press conference with former President Clinton to deflect media attention away from Sanders' speech. Editorials and news coverage appeared throughout the world. In his speech, Sanders blasted the agreement that President Obama struck with Republicans, which extended the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, lowered estate tax rates for the very, very rich, and set a terrible precedent by establishing a "payroll tax holiday" diverting revenue away from the Social Security Trust Fund, threatening the fund's very future. But the speech was more than a critique of a particular piece of legislation. It was a dissection of the collapse of the American middle class and a well-researched attack on corporate greed and on public policy which, over the last several decades, has led to a huge growth in millionaires even as the United States has the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world. It was a plea for a fundamental change in national priorities, for government policy that reflects the needs of working families, and not just the wealthy and their lobbyists. Finally, Sanders' speech-published here in its entirety with a new introduction by the senator-is a call for action. It is a passionate statement informing us that the only people who will save the middle class of this country is the middle class itself, but only if it is informed, organized, and prepared to take on the enormously powerful special interests dominating Washington.

Bringing together the most exciting recent archival work in anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean studies, Raphael Dalleo constructs a new literary history of the region that is both comprehensive and innovative. He examines how changes in political, economic, and social structures have produced different sets of possibilities for writers to imagine their relationship to the institutions of the public sphere. In the process, he provides a new context for rereading such major writers as Mary Seacole, José Martí, Jacques Roumain, Claude McKay, Marie Chauvet, and George Lamming, while also drawing lesser-known figures into the story. Dalleo's comparative approach will be important to Caribbeanists from all of the region's linguistic traditions, and his book contributes even more broadly to debates in Latin American and postcolonial studies about postmodernity and globalization.

The Legacy of the Filibuster War: National Identity and Collective Memory in Central America analyzes the development of the Filibuster War as a symbol of Costa Rican national identity and presents several challenges to traditional theories of modernization and the creation of nationalism. By focusing on the development of cultural features defined by the transformation of collective memory, Marco Cabrera Geserick argues that national identity is a dynamic process defined according to local, national, and international contexts. Modernization theories connect the creation of symbols of official nationalism with the period of consolidation of the nation-state, yet the Filibuster War started its rise to Costa Rican national identity years later. Cabrera Geserick analyzes the threats to sovereignty and imperialist advances that served to promote the memory of the Filibuster War, while local social transformations—such as the abolition of the army, the rise of popular forces, and internal political conflict—have continued to force drastic changes on the interpretation of the war.