"William Hardin Burnley (1780-1850) was the largest slave owner in Trinidad during the nineteenth century. Born in the United States to English parents, he settled on the island in 1802 and became one of its most influential citizens and a prominent agent of the British Empire. A central figure among elite and moneyed transnational slave owners, Burnley moved easily through the Atlantic world of the Caribbean, the United States, Great Britain, and...

"Ten years after its first publication, Michael Reid's best-selling survey of the state of contemporary Latin America has been wholly updated to reflect the new realities of the "Forgotten Continent." The former Americas editor for the Economist, Reid suggests that much of Central and South America, though less poor, less unequal, and better educated than before, faces harder economic times now that the commodities boom of the 2000s is over. His revised,...

In Before the Great Spirit Julian Rice explores the spiritual values that informed Sioux attitudes surrounding warriors, tricksters, spirits, games, and conflict. Countering the widespread myths that both denigrate and appropriate Indian spirituality, Rice examines accounts written in the 1830s by Congregationalist ministers Samuel and Gideon Pond and Stephen R. Riggs; Ella Deloria, a Yankton Nakota linguist; Wilson D. Wallis, a Canadian anthropologist;...

"Not one dream but many unfold in J.M.G. Le Clezio's conjuring of the consciousness of Mexico, a powerful evocation of the imaginings that made and unmade an ancient culture. "What motivated me," Le Clezio has said, "was a sort of dream about what has disappeared and what could have been." A widely respected French novelist who for many years has studied pre-Columbian Mexico, Le Clezio imagined how the thought of early Indian civilizations might have...