San Antonio College Library

Chronicles conditions and events during the last two decades of Spanish colonial rule and emerging Anglo-American influence.

From the Publisher: Two thousand years ago, the island of Madagascar was likely uninhabited. Its unique flora and fauna had gone totally undisturbed by human contact until the first navigators landed on its shores. No one knows where those first inhabitants hailed from, but over the centuries Madagascar developed its own distinctive language and cultural systems. The only recent history of its kind in English, Madagascar, traces two millennia of human...

From its prehistory in the biological theories of racial difference formulated in the 1800s to its current position in academic debate, Richard W. Rees investigates the diverse fields of scholarship from which the multifaceted understanding of the term ethnicity is derived. At the same time, Rees traces the broader historical forces that shaped the needs to which the concept of ethnicity responded and the social purposes to which it was applied. Centrally,...

"Anglo-Americans wrestled with some profound cultural contradictions as they shifted from the hierarchical and patriarchal society of the seventeenth-century frontier to the modern and fluid class democracy of the mid-nineteenth century. How could traditional inequality be maintained in the socially leveling environment of the early colonial wilderness? And how could nineteenth-century Americans pretend to be equal in an increasingly unequal society?"...

"From its first glimmerings in the 1950s, the software industry has evolved to become the fourth largest industrial sector of the U.S. economy. Starting with a handful of software contractors who produced specialized programs for the few existing machines, the industry grew to include producers of corporate software packages and then makers of mass-market products and recreational software. This book tells the story of each of these types of firm,...

"In this first in-depth study of the sport of ballroom dance, dancer and dance historian Juliet McMains explains the "Glamour Machine" that drives the thriving industry, delving into both the pleasures and perils of its seductions. She further explores the broader social issues invoked by American DanceSport: representation of Latinness, economics that often foster inequality, and issues of identity, including gender, race, class, and sexuality."--Jacket....

"[This book] is an authoritative political history of one of the world's most important empires on the road to decolonisation. Ronald Hyam offers a major reassessment of the end of empire which combines a study of British policy-making with case studies on the experience of decolonisation across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. He describes the often dysfunctional policies of an imperial system coping with postwar, interwar and wartime crises from...