A narrow path to the breadth to the human spirit. A collection of science-fiction short stories in English and Spanish.

The Ibero-American Baroque is an interdisciplinary, empirically-grounded contribution to the understanding of cultural exchanges in the early modern Iberian world.

In 1912 the United States sent troops into a Nicaraguan civil war, solidifying a decades-long era of military occupations in Latin America driven by the desire to rewrite the political rules of the hemisphere. In this definitive account of the resistance to the three longest occupations-in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic-Alan McPherson analyzes these events from the perspective of the invaded themselves, showing why people resisted and why the troops eventually left. Confronting the assumption that nationalism primarily drove resistance, McPherson finds more concrete-yet also more passionate-motivations: hatred for the brutality of the marines, fear of losing land, outrage at cultural impositions, and thirst for political power. These motivations blended into a potent mix of anger and resentment among both rural and urban occupied populations. Rejecting the view that Washington withdrew from Latin American occupations for moral reasons, McPherson details how the invaded forced the Yankees to leave, underscoring day-to-day resistance and the transnational network that linked New York, Havana, Mexico City, and other cities. Political culture, he argues, mattered more than military or economic motives, as U.S. marines were determined to transform political values and occupied peoples fought to conserve them. Occupiers tried to speed up the modernization and centralization of these poor, rural societies and, ironically, to build nationalism where they found it lacking. Based on rarely seen documents in three languages and five countries, this lively narrative recasts the very nature of occupation as a colossal tragedy, doomed from the outset to fail. In doing so, it offers broad lessons for today's invaders and invaded.

"Ultimately, I propose that considering internalization as embodiment is a critical methodological shift in understanding mystical methods in general, and especially for probing recollection mysticism in depth. The inner man as opposed to the outer man is a Pauline and Lutheran commonplace that is too frequently taken out of context, leading historians of the Renaissance in general, and of Spanish Renaissance religion in particular, to value references to internal (or mental) methods of spirituality as an improvement over external (or bodily) rituals. This book takes its cue from the recent 'cognitive turn' in medieval studies that complicates studies of the body in religion by focusing on the embodied aspects of cognition, claiming a continuum between body and soul rather than a hierarchy. I argue that medieval theories of cognition made the divorce of the body from the soul impossible for a Galenic doctor, even one who spoke of the body and the world with contempt, and by implication impossible for his Castilian audience. Without serious consideration of Laredo's reliance on an embodied soul rather than on a body-soul dualism, therefore, no proper assessment of the unitive stage of recogimiento ... can be made."--Introduction, p. 6-7.