Compares the privileged educational experience offered to the children of relocated Nazi scientists in Texas with the educational disadvantages faced by Mexican American students living in the same city. Educating the Enemy begins with the 144 children of Nazi scientists who moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1946 as part of the military program called Operation Paperclip. These German children were bused daily from a military outpost to four El Paso public schools. Though born into a fascist enemy nation, the German children were quickly integrated into the schools and, by proxy, American society. Their rapid assimilation offered evidence that American public schools played a vital role in ensuring the victory of democracy over fascism. Jonna Perrillo not only tells this fascinating story of Cold War educational policy, but she draws an important contrast with another, much more numerous population of children in the El Paso public schools: Mexican Americans. Like everywhere else in the Southwest, Mexican American children in El Paso were segregated into “Mexican” schools, where the children received a vastly different educational experience. Not only were they penalized for speaking Spanish—the only language all but a few spoke due to segregation—they were tracked for low-wage and low-prestige careers, with limited opportunities for economic success. Educating the Enemy charts what two groups of children—one that might have been considered the enemy, the other that was treated as such—reveal about the ways political assimilation has been treated by schools as an easier, more viable project than racial or ethnic assimilation. Listen to an interview with the author here.

At least 200,000 people have died in Mexico’s so-called drug war, and the worst suffering has been in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. How did it get so bad? After three decades studying that question, Howard Campbell doesn’t believe there is any one answer. Misguided policies, corruption, criminality, and the borderland economy are all factors. But none explains how violence in downtown Juárez has become heartbreakingly “normal.” A rigorous yet moving account, Downtown Juárez is informed by the sex workers, addicts, hustlers, bar owners, human smugglers, migrants, and down-and-out workers struggling to survive in an underworld where horrifying abuses have come to seem like the natural way of things. Even as Juárez’s elite northeast section thrives on the profits of multinational corporations, and law-abiding citizens across the city mobilize against crime and official malfeasance, downtown’s cantinas, barrios, and brothels are tyrannized by misery. Campbell’s is a chilling perspective, suggesting that, over time, violent acts feed off each other, losing their connection to any specific cause. Downtown Juárez documents this banality of evil—and confronts it—with the stories of those most affected.

Solve engineering and scientific partial differential equation applications using the PDE2D software developed by the author Solving Partial Differential Equation Applications with PDE2D derives and solves a range of ordinary and partial differential equation (PDE) applications. This book describes an easy-to-use, general purpose, and time-tested PDE solver developed by the author that can be applied to a wide variety of science and engineering problems. The equations studied include many time-dependent, steady-state and eigenvalue applications such as diffusion, heat conduction and convection, image processing, math finance, fluid flow, and elasticity and quantum mechanics, in one, two, and three space dimensions. The author begins with some simple "0D" problems that give the reader an opportunity to become familiar with PDE2D before proceeding to more difficult problems. The book ends with the solution of a very difficult nonlinear problem, which requires a moving adaptive grid because the solution has sharp, moving peaks. This important book: Describes a finite-element program, PDE2D, developed by the author over the course of 40 years Derives the ordinary and partial differential equations, with appropriate initial and boundary conditions, for a wide variety of applications Offers free access to the Windows version of the PDE2D software through the author’s website at www.pde2d.com Offers free access to the Linux and MacOSX versions of the PDE2D software also, for instructors who adopt the book for their course and contact the author at www.pde2d.com Written for graduate applied mathematics or computational science classes, Solving Partial Differential Equation Applications with PDE2D offers students the opportunity to actually solve interesting engineering and scientific applications using the accessible PDE2D.

What causes some people to stand in solidarity with those from other races, religions, or nationalities, even when that solidarity does not seem to benefit the individual or their group? Seeing Us in Them examines outgroup empathy as a powerful predisposition in politics that pushes individuals to see past social divisions and work together in complex, multicultural societies. It also reveals racial/ethnic intergroup differences in this predisposition, rooted in early patterns of socialization and collective memory. Outgroup empathy explains why African Americans vehemently oppose the border wall and profiling of Arabs, why Latinos are welcoming of Syrian refugees and support humanitarian assistance, why some white Americans march in support of Black Lives Matter through a pandemic, and even why many British citizens oppose Brexit. Outgroup empathy is not naïve; rather it is a rational and necessary force that helps build trust and maintain stable democratic norms of compromise and reciprocity.

This book is a richly detailed examination of social interaction in the city of Chihuahua, a major silver mining center of colonial Mexico. Founded at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the city attracted people from all over New Spain, all summoned "by the voices of the mines of Chihuahua." These included aspiring miners and merchants, mestizo and mulato workers and drifters, Tarahumara Indians indigenous to the area, Yaquis from Sonora, and Apaches from New Mexico. Several hundred Spaniards, principally from Northern Spain, also arrived, hoping to make their fortunes in the New World.

Beata Halicka's masterly narrated biography is the story of an extraordinary man and leading intellectual in the Polish-American community. Z. Anthony Kruszewski was first a Polish scout fighting in World War II against the Nazi occupiers, then Prisoner of War/Displaced Person in Western Europe. He stranded as a penniless immigrant in post-war America and eventually became a world-renowned academic. Kruszewski's almost incredible life stands out from his entire generation. His story is a microcosm of the 20th-century history, covering various theatres and incorporating key events and individuals. Kruszewski walks a stage very few people have even stood on, both as an eye-witness at the centre of the Second World War, and later as vice-president of the Polish American Congress, and a professor and political scientist at world-class universities in the USA. Not only did he become a pioneer and a leading figure in Borderland Studies, but he is a borderlander in every sense of the word.