San Antonio College Library

Publisher description: Based on their enormously complex calendars that recorded cycles of many kinds, the Aztecs and other ancient Mesoamerican civilizations are generally believed to have had a cyclical, rather than linear, conception of time and history. This boldly revisionist book challenges that understanding. Ross Hassig offers convincing evidence that for the Aztecs time was predominantly linear, that it was manipulated by the state as a means...

This book presents a disturbing thesis: education - often through history textbooks - promotes civic illiteracy and turns civic responsibility into patriotic conformity. Youth are taught to support a dominant-elite view of international conflicts which undermines the critical abilities that are essential for citizens in a democracy. Expanding upon the social and educational insights of dissident theorists, the author challenges the view of civic literacy...

Bestselling social critic Jeremy Rifkin shows that the disconnection between our vision for the world and our ability to realize that vision lies in the current state of human consciousness.

The world reflected in post-modernist fiction is one of chance and randomness, devoid of historical intelligibility. Stacey Olster challenges this view by distinguishing American post-modernism--with respect to the views of historical processes that its practitioners share. Arguing that their experience of communism proved instrumental in shaping the historical perspective of novelists who began writing after World War II, Olster examines their change...