Swedish immigrants tell their own stories in this collection of letters, diaries, and memoirs--a perfect book for those interested in history, immigration, or just the daily lives of early Swedish-American settlers.

Elizabeth Crook's vast yet intimate novel of the Texas Revolution takes us beyond the traditional setpieces of the Alamo and San Jacinto to the other places where the war was fought—to the forest traces and prairies and Gulf Coast beaches, and to the hearts of the novel's vibrant characters. Among them: Domingo de la Rosa—the great Tejano ranchero, implacable and devout, for whom the fight against the Anglo "heretics" is nothing less than a holy war. Hugh Kenner—a physician whose son has run away to the war. Hugh will discover the heroic strength of his compassion, and also its brutal cost. Katie Kenner—Hugh's restless daughter, a refugee caught up in the massive human stampede known as The Runaway Scrape, who finds herself in love with a foreigner and responsible for the life of an orphan baby. Adelaido Pacheco—a dashing tobacco smuggler loyal to no cause but his own, a man without a country and in peril of becoming a man without a soul. Crucita Pacheco—Adelaido's beautiful sister who has lost her family, all but Adelaido, in the cholera epidemic of 1832. Feeling that God has forsaken her, she enters Domingo de la Rosa's employ as a spy against the Anglo rebels, and discovers an improbable love. Through these people and others, Promised Lands brings a myth-encrusted chapter of American history to authentic life. Elizabeth Crook demonstrates once again a stunning command of her period and a passionate regard for her characters. Promised Lands bears the hallmark of a master novelist: a grand vision, rendered on an unforgettably human scale.

Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan is a monumental and pathbreaking study of early Irish Protestant and Catholic migration to America. Through exhaustive research and sensitive analyses of the letters, memoirs, and other writings, the authors describe the variety and vitality of early Irish immigrant experiences, ranging from those of frontier farmers and seaport workers to revolutionaries and loyalists. Largely through the migrants own words, it brings to life the networks, work, and experiences of these immigrants who shaped the formative stages of American society and its Irish communities. The authors explore why Irishmen and women left home and how they adapted to colonial and revolutionary America, in the process creating modern Irish and Irish-American identities on the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan was the winner of the James S. Donnelly, Sr., Prize for Books on History and Social Sciences, American Council on Irish Studies.

After receiving his cancer diagnosis, Wangerin wrote letters about confronting his mortality, about living with the messiness of undone tasks and bodily weakness. These meditations present his testimony to faith, love, and the shocking reality of hope.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “A deeply reported, deeply personal history of Zionism and Israel that does something few books even attempt: It balances the strength and weakness, the idealism and the brutality, the hope and the horror, that has always been at Zionism’s heart.”—Ezra Klein, The New York Times Winner of the Natan Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Ari Shavit’s riveting work, now updated with new material, draws on historical documents, interviews, and private diaries and letters, as well as his own family’s story, to create a narrative larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and of profound historical dimension. As he examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, Shavit asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can it survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. Shavit’s analysis of Israeli history provides a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.

This first complete translation of the letters and relations of the Portuguese Jesuit António de Andrade concerning Tibet, along with an edition of two previously unpublished letters and a historical introduction, will serve as a valuable primary source on the mission Andrade founded in the western Tibetan kingdom of Guge. His vivid observations of the dangerous journey over the Himalayas and his impressions of Tibetan society and religion have informed the Western representation of Tibet and will be of interest to scholars and students of the Jesuit missions in Asia, pre-modern Tibetan history, and the first contacts between Western Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism.