The U.S. war with Mexico was a pivotal event in American history, it set crucial wartime precedents and served as a precursor for the impending Civil War. With a powerful introduction and rich collection of documents, Ernesto Ch‡vez makes a convincing case that as an expansionist war, the U.S.-Mexico conflict set a new standard for the acquisition of foreign territory through war. Equally important, the war racialized the enemy, and in so doing accentuated the nature of whiteness and white male citizenship in the U.S., especially as it related to conquered Mexicans, Indians, slaves, and even women. The war, along with ongoing westward expansion, heightened public debates in the North and South about slavery and its place in newly-acquired territories. In addition, Ch‡vez shows how the political, economic and social development of each nation played a critical role in the path to war and its ultimate outcome. Both official and popular documents offer the events leading up to the war, the politics surrounding it, popular sentiment in both countries about it, and the war’s long-term impact on the future development and direction of these two nations. Headnotes, a chronology, maps and a selected bibliography enrich student understanding of this important historical moment.

The Critical Turn in Education traces the historical emergence and development of critical theories in the field of education, from the introduction of Marxist and other radical social theories in the 1960s to the contemporary critical landscape. The book begins by tracing the first waves of critical scholarship in the field through a close, contextual study of the intellectual and political projects of several core figures including, Paulo Freire, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Michael Apple, and Henry Giroux. Later chapters offer a discussion of feminist critiques, the influx of postmodernist and poststructuralist ideas in education, and critical theories of race. While grounded in U.S. scholarship, The Critical Turn in Education contextualizes the development of critical ideas and political projects within a larger international history, and charts the ongoing theoretical debates that seek to explain the relationship between school and society. Today, much of the language of this critical turn has now become commonplace—words such as "hegemony," "ideology," and the term "critical" itself—but by providing a historical analysis, The Critical Turn in Education illuminates the complexity and nuance of these theoretical tools, which offer ways of understanding the intersections between individual identities and structural forces in an attempt to engage and overturn social injustice.

New Mexico is a land with two faces. It is a land of enchantment, legendary for its natural beauty and rich cultural heritage. But it is also a land of paradox. In America, New Mexico, Robert Leonard Reid explores deep inside New Mexico's landscape to find the real New Mexico—with all of its gifts and challenges—within. Having traveled and hiked countless miles throughout the state, Reid knows New Mexico's breathtaking landscape intimately. But he knows the human landscape as well: its artists and poets, medicine men and businessmen, preachers and politicians, Hispanics and Anglos. He knows that amid the glittering mansions of Santa Fe there are homeless shelters, that the Indians of myth and legend combat alcoholism and poverty, and that toxic waste lurks beneath a land of almost surreal beauty. America, New Mexico is a book about land, sky, and hope by a writer whose passion and inspiring prose invite us to see the promise and possibilities of reconnecting with the natural world. It is unflinching in its depiction of the adversities facing New Mexicans and indeed all Americans. But above all, it searches behind and beyond these troubling issues to find, standing staunchly against them, a quiet and unshakable confidence rooted in New Mexico's natural world. For anyone who has ever been moved by the incomparable beauty of New Mexico, for anyone concerned with the landscape in which all Americans live, America, New Mexico is an unforgettable book.