"Is it possible to identify a starting point in history from which everything else unfolds--a single moment that can explain the present and reveal the essence of our identities? According to Massimo Montanari, this is just a myth: by themselves, origins explain very little and historical phenomena can only be understood dynamically--by looking at how events and identities develop and change as a result of encounters and combinations that are often...

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African...

"...An imagined life, with Faulkner's tragic sensibility and Beckett's relentless grief."- Ricardo Baixeras, El Periodico From one of Mexico's leading writers-a memoir about three men who are driven to escape the confines of their traditional lives and roles. In 1958, Carlos Monge McKey sneaks out of his home in the middle of the night to fake his own death. He does not return for four years. A decade later, his son, Carlos Monge Sánchez, deserts...

With this volume, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America. Transcending the usual Anglocentric version of our colonial past, he recovers the importance of Native American tribes, African slaves, and the rival empires of France, Spain, the Netherlands, and even Russia in the colonization of North America. Moving beyond the Atlantic seaboard to examine the entire continent,...