San Antonio College Library

In this era of ever-increasing globalization and communication across national borders, Cuba remains an isolated island oddly out of step with the rest of the world. And yet, Cuba is beginning to evolve via the important if still insufficient changes instituted by Raul Castro, who became president in 2008. This book supplies a uniquely independent, accurate, and critical perspective in order to evaluate these changes in the context of the island's...

"Three noted Texan writers combine forces to tell the real story of the Alamo, dispelling the myths, exploring why they had their day for so long, and explaining why the ugly fight about its meaning is now coming to a head. Every nation needs its creation myth, and since Texas was a nation before it was a state, it's no surprise that its myths bite deep. There's no piece of history more important to Texans than the Battle of the Alamo, when Davy Crockett...

The author argues that a moment long understood as sitting at the crux of American political history - the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago - is also crucial to understanding the country's media history. By scrutinizing those events and broadcasts in precise detail, the author documents the emergence of the idea that the media are inherently liberal. As she shows, the public was unwilling to accept what was happening, and when exposed...

"An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South--and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America"--Provided by publisher. "We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions,...

"Following Rivers of Gold and The Golden Empire and building on five centuries of scholarship, World Without End is the epic conclusion of an unprecedented three-volume history of the Spanish Empire from 'one of the most productive and wide-ranging historians of modern times' (The New York Times Book Review). The legacy of imperial Spain was shaped by many hands. But the dramatic human story of the extraordinary projection of Spanish might in the...

Peering from space via satellite, tapping telephone lines, computer networks, and cell phone frequencies around the globe, the National Security Agency monitors enemy states, terror suspects, and friendly nations alike. Some 60 percent of the presidents daily intelligence briefing comes from this one agency. From Eastern Europe to Korea to Iraq and Afghanistan, the NSA has played a key role in America's geopolitical successes, and some of its failures....

"Impassioned antislavery activists, writers, and orators made antebellum Boston famous as the nation's hub of radical abolitionism. For its Black workers, however, Boston was far from a beacon of equality. In No Right to an Honest Living, Bancroft Prize-winning historian Jacqueline Jones offers a searing portrait of Black labor and white hypocrisy in nineteenth-century Boston. The city, she reveals, was the United States writ small: A place where...

"From bestselling author Jeff Guinn, the dramatic story of how U.S.-Mexico border tensions erupted into open warfare in 1916, as a U.S. military expedition crossed the border to try to capture Mexican guerrilla Pancho Villa -- a military incursion whose effects still haunt the border region to this day"-- In 1916, after Pancho Villa's bloody raid on a small US border town, the "Punitive Expedition" was launched in retaliation. Under Pershing's command...

Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with...

"From the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art. In the eyes of 18-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken-with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity-is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, a first-generation...