State birds, flowers, trees, and animals brought to board book form for the youngest book lovers. Toddlers will delight in these books filled with rhyming riddles framed by brightly painted clues, introducing elements that make each state so special.

Having played host to more than 60 Hollywood productions--from the early years of cinema through the 1970s--Sedona, Arizona's impact on the film industry is revealed here for the first time. Detailing its role as a silent but stunning backdrop to all types of movies, this volume covers the silent films, B westerns, World War II propaganda, and film noirs filmed on location in Arizona. Lavishly illustrated, this reference tells the story behind an anti-American Nazi propaganda western; the true history of filmmaking in Monument Valley; the first-ever inclusive guide to the location filming of Stagecoach; and descriptions of each Arizona production from conception through reception by critics and audiences, with plot summaries and complete details of cast and crew.

Little Idiot, Volume 2 continues the memoir of J. Marc. Merrill from 1988 to 2014. This second volume includes the author's return to teaching college English. He was first hired to teach part-time at Mesa Community College in Mesa, Arizona, and then at Arizona State Prison in Florence, having been hired by Central Arizona College, the campus of which is near Coolidge, the author's hometown. This volume also reveals how the author came to write the two volumes of Books Written in Stone: Enoch the Seer, the Pyramids of Giza, and the Last Days, the two volumes of Building Bridges of Time, Places, and People: Tombs, Temples & Cities of Egypt, Israel, Greece & Italy. as well as Behold the Man: Christ in The Iliad, Classical Greek Drama, Plato, and Greek Literature from Herculaneum. These five books lead to even more discoveries of ancient secrets that are supported by numerous photos, photos that will shock, amuse and possibly outrage some readers. While the photos in this second volume will surely interest people who are associated with Coolidge, Arizona, they should be of interest to people around the world.

How does a contemporary woman with a career as a poet, professor, and editor experience motherhood with one small child, another soon to be born, and her own mother suddenly diagnosed with a brain tumor and AlzheimerÕs? The dichotomy between life as a mother and life as an artist and professional is a major theme in modern literature because often the two seem irreconcilable. In Bring Down the Little Birds, Carmen GimŽnez Smith faces this seeming irreconcilability head-on, offering a powerful and necessary lyric memoir to shed light on the difficultiesÑand joysÑof being a mother juggling work, art, raising children, pregnancy, and being a daughter to an ailing mother, and, perhaps most important, offering a rigorous and intensely imaginative contemplation on the concept of motherhood as such. Writing in fragmented yet coherent sections, the author shares with us her interior monologue, affording the reader a uniquely honest, insightful, and deeply personal glimpse into a womanÕs first and second journeys into motherhood. GimŽnez Smith begins Bring Down the Little Birds by detailing the relationship with her own mother, from whom her own concept of motherhood originated, a conception the author continually reevaluates and questions over the course of the book. Combining fragments of thought, daydreams, entries from notebooks both real and imaginary, and real-life experiences, GimŽnez Smith interrogates everything involved in becoming and being a mother for both the first and second time, from wondering what her children will one day know about her own Òsecret lifeÓ to meditations on the physical effects of pregnancy as well as the myths, the nostalgia, and the glorification of motherhood. While GimŽnez Smith incorporates universal experiences of motherhood that other authors have detailed throughout literature, what separates her book from these many others is that her reflections are captured in a style that establishes an intimacy and immediacy between author and reader through which we come to know the secret life of a mother and are made to question our own conception of what motherhood really means.

The contiguous river basins that flowed in Tlaxcala and San Juan Teotihuacan formed part of the agricultural heart of central Mexico. As the colonial project rose to a crescendo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Indigenous farmers of central Mexico faced long-term problems standard historical treatments had attributed to drought and soil degradation set off by Old World agriculture. Instead, Bradley Skopyk argues that a global climate event called the Little Ice Age brought cold temperatures and elevated rainfall to the watersheds of Tlaxcala and Teotihuacan. With the climatic shift came cataclysmic changes: great floods, human adaptations to these deluges, and then silted wetlands and massive soil erosion. This book chases water and soil across the colonial Mexican landscape, through the fields and towns of New Spain’s Native subjects, and in and out of some of the strongest climate anomalies of the last thousand or more years. The pursuit identifies and explains the making of two unique ecological crises, the product of the interplay between climatic and anthropogenic processes. It charts how Native farmers responded to the challenges posed by these ecological rifts with creative use of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds, environmental engineering, and conflict within and beyond the courts. With a new reading of the colonial climate and by paying close attention to land, water, and agrarian ecologies forged by farmers, Skopyk argues that colonial cataclysms—forged during a critical conjuncture of truly unprecedented proportions, a crucible of human and natural forces—unhinged the customary ways in which humans organized, thought about, and used the Mexican environment. This book inserts climate, earth, water, and ecology as significant forces shaping colonial affairs and challenges us to rethink both the environmental consequences of Spanish imperialism and the role of Indigenous peoples in shaping them.

A charming natural history (inclined to botany) of the Rincon Mountains of SE Arizona. But the location is not carefully specified.

An appreciation of the Tohono O'odham (long known as the Papago) Indians, whose reservation is the second largest in the United States. "Fontana, who has lived at the edge of the Tohono O'odham (formerly Papago) Reservation for decades, provides sympathetic insight into the history and lifeways of these gentle desert dwellers. Schaefer's photographs, many of them portraits, add timeliness and immediate presence." --Books of the Southwest "An unsurpassed insight into the Papago world, past and present." --Arizona Highways