This is a story of a young woman who travels by sailing ship around the Horn from Boston and makes a place for herself in Mexico's Monterey, California a few years before the U.S. conquest.

“OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY.” “No; I am not tired of life. Who could be on such a day? I am weary simply of this way of living. I want to get away—away from this stagnant hole. It is the same dull story over and over again, day after day, world without end, amen!” “Would you be a bit more contented in any other spot?” “I think so. I cannot believe that mankind in general is so selfish, so hypocritical, and, worst crime of all, so hopelessly stupid as it is here. The world is 25,000 miles in circumference. Why spend all one’s days in this split in the mountains?” “But, tell me, what is your ambition, then? Have you one?”

Under Three Flags; The Roots of Education in Illinois was transplanted by the first missionary explorer Jesuits who traversed the 17th century Illinois wilderness from the mouth of the Mississippi to the Great Lakes and terminating in Quebec Canada. The Jesuits founded an agricultural college before 1720. They experimented quite successfully with botany and animal husbandry. They developed and refined a French gaited carriage pony which was mistaken for a Hackney by coureur des bois and voyageur alike. Early American heroes such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and George Rogers Clarke among others are discussed with surprising revelations such as the only capture and surrender of George Washington to a group from Fort des Charters, Prairie du Rocher and Kaskaskia. While some Indians were hostile by reputation and actions; others tribes befriended the French and Jesuit explorers treating them as their brothers. The Illinois Confederacy consisting of the five tribes were the first Americans in Illinois.

In this sparkling new work, Benedict Anderson provides a radical recasting of themes from Imagined Communities, his classic book on nationalism, through an exploration of fin-de-siecle politics and culture that spans the Caribbean, Imperial Europe and the South China Sea. A jewelled pomegranate packed with nitroglycerine is primed to blow away Manila's 19th-century colonial elite at the climax of El Filibusterismo, whose author, the great political novelist Jose Rizal, was executed in 1896 by the Spanish authorities in the Philippines at the age of 35. Anderson explores the impact of avant-garde European literature and politics on Rizal and his contemporary, the pioneering folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes, who was imprisoned in Manila after the violent uprisings of 1896 and later incarcerated, together with Catalan anarchists, in the prison fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona. On his return to the Philippines, by now under American occupation, Isabelo formed the first militant trade unions under the influence of Malatesta and Bakunin. Anderson considers the complex intellectual interactions of these young Filipinos with the new "science" of anthropology in Germany and Austro-Hungary, and with post-Communard experimentalists in Paris, against a background of militant anarchism in Spain, France, Italy and the Americas, Jose Marti's armed uprising in Cuba and anti-imperialist protests in China and Japan. In doing so, he depicts the dense intertwining of anarchist internationalism and radical anti-colonialism. Under Three Flags is a brilliantly original work on the explosive history of national independence and global politics.