More than two centuries after the Coronado Expedition first set foot in the region, the northern frontier of New Spain in the late 1770s was still under attack by Apache raiders. Mark Santiago’s gripping account of Spanish efforts to subdue the Apaches illuminates larger cultural and political issues in the colonial period of the Southwest and northern Mexico. To persuade the Apaches to abandon their homelands and accept Christian “civilization,” Spanish officials employed both the mailed fist of continuous war and the velvet glove of the reservation system. “Hostiles” captured by the Spanish would be deported, while Apaches who agreed to live in peace near the Spanish presidios would receive support. Santiago’s history of the deportation policy includes vivid descriptions of colleras, the chain gangs of Apache prisoners of war bound together for the two-month journey by mule and on foot from the northern frontier to Mexico City. The book’s arresting title, The Jar of Severed Hands, comes from a 1792 report documenting a desperate break for freedom made by a group of Apache prisoners. After subduing the prisoners and killing twelve Apache men, the Spanish soldiers verified the attempted breakout by amputating the left hands of the dead and preserving them in a jar for display to their superiors. Santiago’s nuanced analysis of deportation policy credits both the Apaches’ ability to exploit the Spanish government’s dual approach and the growing awareness on the Spaniards’ part that the peoples they referred to as Apaches were a disparate and complex assortment of tribes that could not easily be subjugated. The Jar of Severed Hands deepens our understanding of the dynamics of the relationship between Indian tribes and colonial powers in the Southwest borderlands.

The remarkable true story of an Indigenous family who fought back, over multiple generations, against the world-destroying power of settler colonial violence. Just weeks before police would kill him in Gallup, New Mexico, in March of 1973, Larry Casuse wrote that “never before have we faced an enemy such as this.” An Enemy Such as This, for the first time, tells the history of that colonial enemy through the simultaneously epic and intimate story of Larry Casuse and those, like him, who fought against it. From the genocidal Mexican war against the Apaches in the nineteenth century, through the collapse of European empires in the first half of the twentieth century, and culminating in the efforts of young Navajo activists and organizers in the second half of the twentieth century to confront settler colonialism in New Mexico, the book offers a resolutely Native-focused history of colonialism.

I didn't know if I was daydreaming or not, but I was quite sure that something just moved so fast behind my back. I guess it was my pet cat jack, but he was supposed to be sleeping in his little room right now. It was late at night and I had woken up to a strange noise in the parlour. This wasn't the first time I was hearing this noise...I was determined to know what is going on and why the noise kept coming. "Oh my God! What's that?" I shrieked in fear as I saw something standing below me in the darkness. I had a dim lighted lamp and before I could switch on the light, the thing had disappeared! That was certainly not jack my cat, or could it be him? I went straight to his room and saw him soundly asleep as expected. And just as I was about turning to go back to my room, I felt the presence of someone standing right before me. In fear, I slowly turned my face to look at it but before I could, what I heard startled me enough to not bother looking at it. "Your Soul Is Mine!" At that point, Jack woke up and I saw that his bright blue eyes had turned to pure black. He faced me and gritted his teeth, looking like a dog who wanted to tear an enemy into pieces.

Sheriff Luke McWhorter is back with another sharp supernatural procedural It was not Luke McWhorter’s plan to become a law enforcement officer when he left for Yale Divinity School. But three generations of his family had worn the star, and after graduation, the needs of his community called him home to serve and protect. His theological training and his seventeen-year career as sheriff suddenly collide when bodies start piling up in Flagler, Texas. Two pilots are found brutally murdered in McWhorter’s hometown, torn to pieces by their own plane’s propeller, next to an ominous warning written in blood on the hanger wall. In this fast-moving whodunit, McWhorter needs all the help he can get. He is joined by his chief deputy, Charles “Chuck” Del Emma; his FBI-agent girlfriend, Angie Steele; a precocious college student; and a 4,000-year-old mummy. Together, they tackle a crime spree that reaches all the way to the Middle East and back to the time of Noah’s Ark.

Introducing the social skins of the head in ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes / Vera Tiesler and María Cecilia Lozada -- What was being sealed? : cranial modification and ritual binding among the Maya / William N. Duncan and Gabrielle Vail -- Head shapes and group identity on the fringes of the Maya lowlands / Vera Tiesler and Alfonso Lacadena -- Head shaping and tooth modification among the classic Maya of the Usumacinta River kingdoms / Andrew K. Scherer -- Cultural modification of the head : the case of Teopancazco in Teotihuacan / Luis Adrián Alvarado-Viñas and Linda R. Manzanilla -- Face painting among the classic Maya elites : an iconographic study / María Luisa Vázquez de Ágredos Pascual, Cristina Vidal Lorenzo, and Patricia Horcajada Campos -- The importance of visage, facial treatment, and idiosyncratic traits in Maya royal portraiture during the reign of K'inich Janaab' Pakal of Palenque, 615-683 CE / Laura Filloy Nadal -- The representation of hair in the art of Chichén Itzá / Virginia E. Miller -- Effigies of death : representation, use, and reuse of human skulls at the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan / Ximena Chávez Balderas -- Emic perspectives on cultural practices pertaining to the head in Mesoamerica : a commentary and discussion of the chapters in part one / Gabrielle Vail -- Afterlives of the decapitated in ancient Peru / John W. Verano -- Head processing among La Ramada tradition of Southern Peru / María Cecilia Lozada, Alanna Warner-Smith, Rex C. Haydon, Hans Barnard, Augusto Cardona Rosas, and Raphael Greenberg -- From Wawa to "Trophy Head" : meaning, representation, and bioarchaeology of human heads from ancient Tiwanaku / Deborah E. Blom and Nicole C. Couture -- Cranial modification in the central Andes : person, language, political economy / Bruce Mannheim, Allison R. Davis, and Matthew C. Velasco -- Violence, power, and head extraction in the Kallawaya Region, Bolivia / Sara K. Becker and Sonia Alconini -- Semiotic portraits : expressions of communal identity in Wari faceneck vessels / Andrea Vazquez de Arthur -- Using their heads : the lives of crania in the Andes / Christine A. Hastorf

NYPD Detective Jack Yu was raised in Chinatown. Some of his old friends are criminals now; some are dead. He uses both modern police methods and an an ancient fortuneteller to bring a murderer and a serial rapist to justice.

After the end of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848, the Southwest Borderlands remained hotly contested territory. Over following decades, the United States government exerted control in the Southwest by containing, destroying, segregating, and deporting indigenous peoples—in essence conducting an extended military campaign that culminated with the capture of Geronimo and the forced removal of the Chiricahua Apaches in 1886. In this book, Janne Lahti charts these encounters and the cultural differences that shaped them. Wars for Empire offers a new perspective on the conduct, duration, intensity, and ultimate outcome of one of America's longest wars. Centuries of conflict with Spain and Mexico had honed Apache war-making abilities and encouraged a culture based in part on warrior values, from physical prowess and specialized skills to a shared belief in individual effort. In contrast, U.S. military forces lacked sufficient training and had little public support. The splintered, protracted, and ferocious warfare exposed the limitations of the U.S. military and of federal Indian policies, challenging narratives of American supremacy in the West. Lahti maps the ways in which these weaknesses undermined the U.S. advance. He also stresses how various Apache groups reacted differently to the U.S. invasion. Ultimately, new technologies, the expansion of Euro-American settlements, and decades of war and deception ended armed Apache resistance. By comparing competing martial cultures and examining violence in the Southwest, Wars for Empire provides a new understanding of critical decades of American imperial expansion and a moment in the history of settler colonialism with worldwide significance.