Mike Hudak traveled throughout the West speaking with former employees of wildlife and land management agencies, and citizens who have long advocated for better management of our public lands. Western Turf Wars is a compliation of these accounts - testimonies that reveal how and why the management agencies have failed to protect our public lands. Underlying that management failure is the cowboy myth's social and political legacies.

In the third volume of the acclaimed Turf Wars series, journalist and broadcaster Steve Tongue looks at the history of football in the West Midlands, where the world's first Football League was dreamed up and administered more than 130 years ago. Fierce rivalries had already emerged by then, and have remained as strong as anywhere. Aston Villa and Birmingham City (as Small Heath Alliance) were founded within a year of each other, only a few miles apart, as were equally bitter neighbours West Bromwich Albion and Wolves. And just as in London and Lancashire, turf wars were fought off the pitch too. In Burton and Walsall, the biggest local clubs once amalgamated to carry the name of their town forward. But what an outcry there was in the Potteries when Stoke City and Port Vale almost did the same. This is the story of them all, large and small, and non-league too with a colourful cast of characters - Stanley Matthews and Billy Wright, Major Frank Buckley and Ron Atkinson, William McGregor, Jimmy Hill and 'Deadly' Doug Ellis among them.

People of African descent living in the Colombian Andes had long been struggling, as peasants and workers, for political participation and equal citizenship. When the 1991 Colombian Constitution enabled them to claim territory as ethnic groups, their demands became part of a growing worldwide phenomenon of citizenship claims that are based on territory and expressed through cultural distinction. This book looks at two such claims pursued by Afro-Colombians in the 1990s and investigates how territory serves to connect and disconnect citizen and state in the context of today's changing state authority, legitimacy, and institutions.

In the late 1980s, a band of New York civic groups set out to stop Donald Trump from building his “masterpiece,” a half-mile of gargantuan buildings overlooking the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side. After five years of community organizing and strategic opposition, they defeated his proposal. The victorious civic groups had a radically different vision for the site – one that was suited to the community, environmentally sound, and financially feasible. Seeking a way forward, Trump quickly endorsed their concept. The civic groups then worked with him to finalize the design. The resulting Riverside South Master Plan achieved substantial public benefits on privately owned land. Within eighteen months of the city’s approval, Trump sold the property. As told by one of the key participants in this conflict, Turf War goes beyond the national headlines to reveal the personalities, politics, and economics that altered the development of this major waterfront property. These Manhattan activists were attached to their turf and were willing to fight for it. Cities and towns across America are facing similar assaults by developers who have little regard for the impact of their ambitions on the character of communities. There are lessons to be learned here.

Winner, 2019 National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Western Heritage Award for the Best Nonfiction Book Winner, 2019 Colorado Book Awards History Category, sponsored by Colorado Center for the Book In The Woolly West, historian Andrew Gulliford describes the sheep industry’s place in the history of Colorado and the American West. Tales of cowboys and cattlemen dominate western history—and even more so in popular culture. But in the competition for grazing lands, the sheep industry was as integral to the history of the American West as any trail drive. With vivid, elegant, and reflective prose, Gulliford explores the origins of sheep grazing in the region, the often-violent conflicts between the sheep and cattle industries, the creation of national forests, and ultimately the segmenting of grazing allotments with the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. Deeper into the twentieth century, Gulliford grapples with the challenges of ecological change and the politics of immigrant labor. And in the present day, as the public lands of the West are increasingly used for recreation, conflicts between hikers and dogs guarding flocks are again putting the sheep industry on the defensive. Between each chapter, Gulliford weaves an account of his personal interaction with what he calls the “sheepscape”—that is, the sheepherders’ landscape itself. Here he visits with Peruvian immigrant herders and Mormon families who have grazed sheep for generations, explores delicately balanced stone cairns assembled by shepherds now long gone, and ponders the meaning of arborglyphs carved into unending aspen forests. The Woolly West is the first book in decades devoted to the sheep industry and breaks new ground in the history of the Colorado Basque, Greek, and Hispano shepherding families whose ranching legacies continue to the present day.

Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place is the fascinating story of an urban neighborhood undergoing rapid gentrification. Explores how members of a multi-ethnic, multi-class Washington, DC, community deploy language to legitimize themselves as community members while discrediting others. Discusses such issues as public toilets and public urination, the "morality" of co-ops and condos, and characterizations of "good" girls and "bad" boys. Draws on linguistic anthropology and discourse analysis to provide insight into the ways that local activity shapes larger urban social processes. Draws also on cultural geography and urban anthropology.

One of the most surprising developments in Mexico's transition to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence. Why did Mexican drug cartels go to war as the country transitioned away from one-party rule? And why have criminal wars proliferated as democracy has consolidated and elections have become more competitive subnationally? In Votes, Drugs, and Violence, Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley develop a political theory of criminal violence in weak democracies that elucidates how democratic politics and the fragmentation of power fundamentally shape cartels' incentives for war and peace. Drawing on in-depth case studies and statistical analysis spanning more than two decades and multiple levels of government, Trejo and Ley show that electoral competition and partisan conflict were key drivers of the outbreak of Mexico's crime wars, the intensification of violence, and the expansion of war and violence to the spheres of local politics and civil society.