IN THE WINTER OF 1983, the largest El Niño event on record-a chain of "superstorms" that swept in from the Pacific Ocean-battered the entire West. That spring, a massive snowmelt sent runoff racing down the Colorado River toward the Glen Canyon Dam, a 710-foot-high wall of concrete that sat at the head of the most iconic landscape feature in America, the Grand Canyon. As the water clawed toward the parapet of the dam, worried federal officials desperately...

Early in the twentieth century, amid the myths of progress and modernity that underpinned Mexico's ruling party, some three hundred Chinese immigrants-close to half of the Cantonese residents of the newly founded city of Torreón-were massacred over the course of three days. It is considered the largest slaughter of Chinese people in the history of the Americas, but more than a century later, the facts continue to be elusive, mistaken, and repressed....

"In 1576 a catastrophic epidemic devastated Indigenous Mexican communities and left the colonial church in ruins. With its horrific final symptom of hemorrhage from the nose, the unfamiliar disease, which the Nahua named cocoliztli, took almost two million lives. In the crisis and its immediate aftermath, Spanish missionaries and surviving pueblos de indios held radically different visions for the future of church in the Americas"--