I grew up hearing stories about Mexico City from my grandmother, who spent her childhood in the 1930s there after emigrating from the Soviet Union. I fell in love with the city’s neighborhoods during my first visit in 2006, and I am still mesmerized by its scale and its extremes. I am especially interested in the city’s public spaces and the ways people have used them for work and pleasure over the centuries. Those activities often take place in the gray areas of the law, a dynamic I explored in the research for my Ph.D. in History and in my book, Black Market Capital.
This book by Barbara Mundy, an art historian, challenges the idea that the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was instantly transformed into Spanish Mexico City following the conquest in 1521. Using indigenous and Spanish maps, Nahua codices, and archaeological evidence, Mundy shows that many aspects of urban life remained in indigenous hands for nearly a century after the Spanish and their indigenous allies toppled Montezuma and his empire. The book is beautifully illustrated, and Mundy’s writing brings the spaces and rhythms of the sixteenth-century city to life.
Winner, Book Prize in Latin American Studies, Colonial Section of Latin American Studies Association (LASA), 2016 ALAA Book Award, Association for Latin American Art/Arvey Foundation, 2016
The capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan, was, in its era, one of the largest cities in the world. Built on an island in the middle of a shallow lake, its population numbered perhaps 150,000, with another 350,000 people in the urban network clustered around the lake shores. In 1521, at the height of Tenochtitlan's power, which extended over much of Central Mexico, Hernando Cortes and his followers conquered the city. Cortes boasted to…
I’ve always been drawn to social history, so the chance to learn what people used for toilet paper in the middle ages or how deodorant was invented and popularized in the early 20th century was perfect for me. The three years I spent researching The Dirt on Clean included trips to see the bathing facilities in Pompeii and actually bathing in ancient mineral baths and spas in Hungary, Switzerland, and Germany, and what’s not to like about that?
Europeans had feared water since the Black Death of 1347 when the doctors of the Sorbonne pronounced that people who took warm baths were more susceptible to the plague. There followed what the French historian Jules Michelet called (with some hyperbole) “five hundred years without a bath.” Goubert’s scholarly but always readable book describes the gradual and tentative death of this longstanding myth. Beginning in the 18th century, the emergence of the idea of water as a benefit and not a danger to public health was complicated and touched many areas of life. Goubert is adept at moving from social to cultural to administrative sectors, with just the right balance of theory and anecdotes.
"The preoccupation with water is, according to Jean-Pierre Goubert, one of the subdivisions of the religion of progress. . . . Goubert's research is entirely interdisciplinary, and his procedure is highly original. The first in his field, the author has at all points built up a study which never departs from its faithfulness to texts, documents and facts."--From the introduction
This book is the first major study of the social and cultural conquest of water during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jean-Pierre Goubert discloses the changing meanings of everyday reality as he explores the transition from water-scarce cultures, in which…
Andreas Bieler’s main research focus has been on the possibilities of labour movements, broadly defined, to represent the interests of their members and wider societies in struggles against capitalist exploitation in times of neo-liberal globalisation. His research on water struggles in Europe was motivated by the fact that this has been one of the few areas, in which resistance has actually been successful. Understanding the reasons behind this success may help us understand what is necessary for success in other areas of resistance.
In Whose Water Is It Anyway, Maude Barlow, one of the world’s foremost activists in the struggle against water grabbing, provides an account of the rich history of resistance against profit-making with water.
Importantly, the book is not just about the history of resistance. By introducing the Blue Communities project it provides people with an opportunity of engaging in concrete grassroots action, accomplishing something in the here and now.
To become a Blue Community, a municipality must recognize water as a human right, run water and sanitation services as a public company and ban or phase out bottled water in municipal events.
“Maude Barlow is one of our planet’s greatest water defenders.” ― Naomi Klein, bestselling author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine
“This book is a blueprint for communities around the world to take back that responsibility and maintain water as a human right.” ― David Suzuki
“This is a must-read.” ― Jane Fonda
A call to action from former Senior Advisor on Water to the U.N., honorary chairperson of the Council of Canadians, chair of Washing-based Food and Water Watch, and councillor with the Hamburg-based World Future Council
The Blue Communities Project is dedicated to three primary things:…
Andreas Bieler’s main research focus has been on the possibilities of labour movements, broadly defined, to represent the interests of their members and wider societies in struggles against capitalist exploitation in times of neo-liberal globalisation. His research on water struggles in Europe was motivated by the fact that this has been one of the few areas, in which resistance has actually been successful. Understanding the reasons behind this success may help us understand what is necessary for success in other areas of resistance.
By comparing the struggles against water charges in Ireland with struggles over the extraction of unconventional gas in Australia, Madelaine Moore provides a fascinating account of common roots of resistance underpinning different forms of water grabbing.
Drawing on feminist Social Reproduction Theory she clearly demonstrates how these moments of contestation not only contest profit-making with water, but capitalist reproduction as a whole.
This book provides an important intervention into social reproduction theory and the politics of water. Presenting an incorporated comparison, it analyses the conjuncture following the 2007 financial crisis through the lens of water expropriation and resistance. This brings into view the way that transnational capital has made use of and been facilitated by the strategic selectivities of both the Irish and the Australian state, as well as the particular class formations that emerged in resistance to such water grabs. What is revealed is a crisis-ridden system that is marked by increasing reproductive unrest - class understood through the lens of…
I spent long days at the beach as a kid, and sharp bits of horseshoe crab shells in my sandcastles were a frequent annoyance. As an adult, I discovered a horseshoe crab lurching its way back to the water and wondered: What's the deal with this weird animal? To find out, I read books, talked with scientists, and assisted with horseshoe crab and shorebird research. What I discovered—about horseshoe crabs, other animals, and the water they live in—was too amazing to keep to myself. I hope my book encourages kids to go out and explore wild places, too!
As a young reader, I would have slipped into this book and lost myself for hours. While it’s not a picture book by most definitions, these gorgeously illustrated pages overflow with facts, stories, and cheerful art. Like its subject matter, Water: A Deep Dive of Discovery covers a lot of territory—from the many ways water affects the lives of all living creatures, to maps and diagrams, to simple experiments you can try at home. A lovely book that will hold up to repeated readings by curious minds.
Immerse yourself in fascinating facts about water! This comprehensive yet accessible exploration of water will help young readers understand many aspects of one of our planet's most precious resources - and how they can protect it. A friendly water droplet character guides children through topics ranging from melting and freezing to the ways in which water literally shapes the Earth. Tales by storytellers from around the world are sprinkled through the book, highlighting the variety of ways in which global cultures value water. The engaging format includes gatefolds and booklets with hands-on activity ideas for learning about and protecting water.…
History is my passion as well as my profession. I love a good story! When I was teaching courses in environmental history and women’s history, I kept noticing the intriguing intersections, which inspired me to write Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers. Most of my work focuses on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (1877-1920) and includes two award-winning biographies, Fighting Bob La Follette and Belle La Follette Progressive Era Reformer. I’m also the co-editor of A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and have written dozens of op-eds and give public talks (some of which can be found in the C-SPAN online library and on YouTube).
This is a classic by a leader in the field. It’s a hefty tome combining philosophy, economics, and history, but is well worth the time and energy required. Worster emphasizes that lack of water resources is a massive problem for the modern American West, necessitating increasingly complex and far-reaching irrigation systems that come at high social and economic costs. The result is an “empire” whose power is based on who controls the water vital to the urban, suburban, and rural life of the hydraulic west.
Donald Worster examines the development history of the American West, identifying the elite of technology and wealth who have controlled its most essential resource: water.
Andreas Bieler’s main research focus has been on the possibilities of labour movements, broadly defined, to represent the interests of their members and wider societies in struggles against capitalist exploitation in times of neo-liberal globalisation. His research on water struggles in Europe was motivated by the fact that this has been one of the few areas, in which resistance has actually been successful. Understanding the reasons behind this success may help us understand what is necessary for success in other areas of resistance.
Coming from an anthropological, ethnographic approach, Andrea Muehlebach provides an illuminating account of the motives, hopes, and disappointments driving activists in their struggle against the financialization of water.
Through a close engagement with water struggles on the ground Muehlebach paints a rich picture of the large variety of forms of resistance in the very struggle over life itself.
In A Vital Frontier Andrea Muehlebach examines the work of activists across Europe as they organize to preserve water as a commons and public good in the face of privatization. Traversing social, political, legal, and hydrological terrains, Muehlebach situates water as a political fault line at the frontiers of financialization, showing how the seemingly relentless expansion of capital into public utilities is being challenged by an equally relentless and often successful insurgence of political organizing. Drawing on ethnographic research, Muehlebach presents water protests as a vital politics that comprises popular referenda, barricades in the streets, huge demonstrations, the burning of…
I heard Lucas speak on a panel discussion my university had about the Ogallala Aquifer. That put his book—and his tremendously poignant examination of climate change, environmental loss, and human/land interactions in my corner of the world—on my radar.
He included several well-referenced facts I’ve subsequently worked into conversations about environmental damage in our region, as well as a deeply personal accounting of his own family’s contributions to aquifer depletion and our collective complicity in the destruction that will echo in our ecosystem forever.
I am grateful to Bessire for his courage candor, and compassion, for taking an honest look at what has been done to the Plains and what that means for people in this place, and for inviting his readers to journey from willful ignorance to thoughtful reflection to principled action… together.
Finalist for the National Book Award An intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America's heartland
The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force.
Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family…
Visiting journalists regularly misinterpret California. Outside politicians twist it into bizarre caricatures. I know because I have worked as a journalist in all parts of the state. I covered crime for the LA Herald Examiner, spent 27 years at the LA Times, was a columnist and editorial page editor at the Sacramento Bee and, finally, was senior editor of the nonprofit news organization, CalMatters. I’ve covered governors, wildfires, a major earthquake, politics, mass incarceration, mass shootings, an execution, and all manner of policy. There are many great nonfiction books about California, including Jim Newton’s biographies of Earl Warren and Jerry Brown, Randy Shilts’s The Mayor of Castro Street, and Gladwin Hill’s Dancing Bear.
Mark Arax is a lovely writer who tells a riveting story about the place he knows best, California’s Central Valley. He describes the flawed giants who carved up California’s water for their benefit and the workers who toiled to make their dreams happen. Mark makes his hometown of Fresno and the rest of the Valley a compelling character in the drama. His book as essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand California.
A vivid, searching journey into California's capture of water and soil—the epic story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought
Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Land, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, that is straining to keep up with California's relentless growth.
I try to use my platform to help people consider how to live a more meaningful life. I've made mistakes, learned from them, and want to pass on those lessons. There are many definitions of success and fulfillment and many paths to achieve it. I hope by telling my story others can avoid some of the mistakes I made.
In this memoir Scott Harrison, founder of Charity: Water, tells of his transformation from a party-seeking youth to a man of grace and influence. Through his charity, he has brought water and hope to millions.
I am deeply inspired by his journey and how he overcame past mistakes to find a new purpose. I knew Scott during my early days in New York City. I support his cause not only because I respect him personally but also because of his approach to philanthropy. Charity: Water applies innovation to a noble cause.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An inspiring personal story of redemption, second chances, and the transformative power within us all, from the founder and CEO of the nonprofit charity: water.
At 28 years old, Scott Harrison had it all. A top nightclub promoter in New York City, his life was an endless cycle of drugs, booze, models—repeat. But 10 years in, desperately unhappy and morally bankrupt, he asked himself, "What would the exact opposite of my life look like?" Walking away from everything, Harrison spent the next 16 months on a hospital ship in West Africa and discovered his true…
