Special Collections added the following 12 titles to ASC's holdings during the second quarter of 2025. The list is a sample of purchased and donated publications and while exhaustive, is meant to highlight recent acquisitions. For a full list of Special Collections titles, please search PRIMO, the library's catalog.
All That Glitters Is Ours: The Theft of Indian Mineral Resources by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating E91 .H368 2023
ISBN: 9781632936295
Publication Date: 2023-12-01
U.S. General Pope in 1878 stated that it was absolutely imperative that Indian Nations realize the United States' premeditated and calculated determination to dispossess the "savage" and occupy his lands and that "it is certain that the larger part of the country claimed by him will, in some manner, pass into the possession of the white race." The insatiable drive for a continental empire resulted in the iron triangle of the federal government, the military and big business working in concert to steal Indian mineral lands. They knowingly and willfully unleashed the pioneer vigilantes to commandeer Indian resources. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs J.Q. Smith wrote in 1876: "Wherever an Indian reservation has on it good land, or timber, or minerals, the cupidity of the white man is excited, and a constant struggle is inaugurated to dispossess the Indian, in which the avarice and determination of the white man usually prevails." "Every art, trick, and device of the unscrupulous land pirate is resorted to," admonished Colonel Preston. Yet it was brutal warfare, massacres, disease, and starvation that decimated Indian populations, leaving them destitute, to be replaced by industrial tycoons, timber barons, mineral magnates, and capital investors profiting from the "savage's" minerals in the bowels of the Earth.
Billy the Kid: The Life Behind the Legend by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating F786.B54 M38 2025
ISBN: 9781476695266
Publication Date: 2025-02-20
This new, in-depth life of Henry McCarty, alias Billy Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, offers fresh perspectives, not only on the Lincoln County War and his boyhood in Silver City, New Mexico, but also on his Irish mother's origins and immigration to Indiana, his public-school education in Indianapolis, the McCarty family's moves to Wichita, Kansas, and Santa Fe, and his two-year outlaw adventures in Arizona. For the first time, the whole person emerges. This biography brings together a huge amount of material, much of it made available to researchers only in recent years. The result is an original, authoritative, and provocative portrait of Billy the Kid as both outlaw and frontier fighter against the infamously corrupt Santa Fe Ring.
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating PS3602.U766378 B55 2022
ISBN: 9781639883660
Publication Date: 2022-05-20
"What does a boy do when things go bad at home? Who does he tell when things grow worse? Leeland didn't tell anyone--or did he? BLIND EYE tells the story of Leeland's life on a remote ranch in New Mexico. No one paid attention to what he couldn't say. Would you have listened?" - Candace Simar, Spur Award-winning author of The Abercrombie Trail Series --- At the Bounty Canyon Ranch in Southeastern New Mexico, the bodies of Luke and Deona Pruitt are buried in a manure pit and their 14-year-old son Leeland Pruitt is missing. Deputy Sheriff Greenwood is called out to investigate the missing Pruitt family and discovers the grim scene. Leeland's brutal upbringing was an open secret overlooked by neighbors and teachers for years. The community turned a blind eye as Leeland was moved by his cruel father from one remote ranch to another. And so, Deputy Greenwood begins a twenty-four-hour hunt to find and save the boy suspected of murdering his parents. Blind Eye is both a tragedy and a dilemma of moral conscience. In this tale of cultural complicity, the community, at best, looked the other way and, at worst, enabled abuse, leaving us all to ask, 'What is too much to ask of a boy?'
The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America's Forgotten Origin Story by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating F394.E4 P37 2025
ISBN: 9780063161917
Publication Date: 2025-03-04
A radical work of history that re-centers the American story around El Paso, Texas, gateway between north and south, center of indigenous power and resistance, locus of European colonization of North America, centuries-long hub of immigration, and underappreciated modern blueprint for a changing United States. American history is almost always told from East to West. Yet a closer look at the past reveals the country's start began not in the East, but in the West--at a Texan city situated in a natural shallow crossing of the Rio Grande River: El Paso. El Paso is the crossroads of Indigenous America, the nexus of a thousand-year-old Native American migration and trade route, linking MesoAmerican and Pueblo empires and beyond. It's where the European conquest of North America began, and where the United States' Manifest Destiny was later achieved. Here, East met West, where the consequential transatlantic route, the Southern Pacific, was completed in 1881. Here the West was "won"--the Indian Wars were not fought on the Great Plains, but in the Southwest, with a scorched-earth strategy that went on for decades. It's where Immigrant America starts--more immigrants have passed through El Paso than Ellis Island--and where crucial battles for Civil Rights were fought--the city smashing through racial and ethnic discrimination before anywhere else in the nation. The Crossing is a revelatory new history of El Paso that recasts the city as the unacknowledged cradle of American history, where cultures have encountered each other for centuries and forged a thriving multi-ethnic community far ahead of the rest of the nation. As award-winning, El Paso-native journalist Richard Parker charts, the city holds not only the framework of our American story, but also a model for a more diverse and flourishing country.
Finding the First Greeks of Santa Fe, New Mexico 1914-1955: A Walking Tour of Downtown Santa Fe by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating F805.G7 P66 2024
ISBN: 9781632936752
Publication Date: 2024-08-01
From 1914 to 1955 there were at least forty-eight Greek immigrant-owned businesses located in and around downtown Santa Fe. These businesses were mainly restaurants and cafés, but they also included candy shops, pool halls, grocery stores, cigar stores, bars, and a bakery. This book takes you on a walking tour in and around downtown Santa Fe, pointing out the historic locations of these Greek immigrant-owned businesses. This book also provides historical background on the Santa Fe Plaza and on the Greek immigrants and their families, making an important contribution to the history of Santa Fe and to Greek-American studies.
Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating E99.N3 H67 2024
ISBN: 9780890136836
Publication Date: 2024-07-06
"My earliest memory of art is of my mom. Looking back at it now, I didn't consider her an artist then because she was always home with us. Now that I'm older, I think about these things differently and know that she is an artist--she is a weaver. She was always spinning yarn, creating sash belts, and sewing baby blankets in a way that was special to me. . . . I can still hear her spindle dancing on the floor; the squeak of wood on linoleum; the pounding when she was weaving her belts. Those were the sounds we went to sleep to."--Kevin Aspaas (Diné) "Diné weaving is an artistic practice grounded in Diné cosmology and Diné creation stories. Diné weavings have multidimensional and intersecting connections to sacred places, plants, animals, and spiritual beings. Distinctive protocols to care for these material, immaterial, visible, and/or cosmic spectrums, which are unique to weavings, are necessary to sustain them. In Diné creation stories, Spider Woman, an important deity, helped create the loom and gave Diné the gift of weaving. In gifting Diné with weaving, she also helped them construct the loom and its tools and attributed specific properties to each element that aligned with nature and the universe."--Larissa Nez (Diné) "Our journey to tell the stories of the weavers of these textiles has been inspiring. These weavers faced the violence of settler colonialism, which included executive orders for extermination, forced relocations, livestock reduction, conversion to Christianity, government boarding schools, and trading post directives that could have stifled individual artistic creativity. These weavers created incredible works of art during these times. I voice my gratitude that the prayers and songs of my matriarchs have allowed me to gather strength every day to live my life in balance. I now carry their resiliency, their warrior spirits, and the power of our Diné language to weave with creative freedom."--Lynda Teller Pete (Diné) Shaped by the voices of contemporary weavers and practitioners and through a constellation of poetry, essays, interviews, photographs, and multimedia artworks, Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles establishes connections between weaving and photography as ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to place. Drawing primarily from the collections of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture--and considered in conversation with selected contemporary works--these historic textiles are reinterpreted by leading Diné weavers, scholars, and visual artists to reveal previously overlooked innovations and artistic expressions.
In the Face of Flying Glass: Susie Parks, Border Town Hero of the Pancho Villa Raid by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating F804.C65 P37 2023
ISBN: 9781632935557
Publication Date: 2023-11-01
On March 9, 1916, Susie Parks, age twenty, found herself in the center of battle the night Pancho Villa's rebel army invaded the border town of Columbus, New Mexico. At the telephone switchboard with her baby in her arms, she made the call that alerted the outside world of the attack. She was celebrated as an American hero but her broader story reveals a tenacity and grit that surpasses the events of that day. We first meet Susie at eleven growing up in the Northwest when a family tragedy prompts the family to move to Columbus, New Mexico. There she grows up unencumbered, free to hunt and roam the desert. At eighteen, she meets Garnet Parks, an intellectual cavalry soldier with dreams of owning a newspaper. They fall in love and together traverse the Great War, the flu pandemic, and a devastating fire. All the while babies come, businesses falter, and illness strikes. Susie must run the paper, care for her family and nurse her dying husband. Against all odds, a chance discovery saves his life but leaves him with an addiction and both of them vulnerable to the treacherous influence of his troublemaking brother. Susie must navigate the challenge of her life for herself and for the sake of her children.
The Jemez Mountains: A Cultural and Natural History by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating F802.S3 S94 2025
ISBN: 9780826367754
Publication Date: 2025-04-01
The Jemez Mountains are a quintessential New Mexico landscape. For centuries, Pueblo, Spanish, and Anglo cultures have mixed and melded here. Many ancient villages are scattered across the mesas and in the canyons below the Valles Caldera, the crater of a giant, slumbering volcano. The rocks and trees of this landscape tell tales of eruptions, lava flows, droughts, floods, forest fires, and hot springs damming a river. Stories abound of battles for land and water between conquistadores, pueblos, and priests, and of farming and sheep herding disrupted by raiders and rustlers. In the modern era, forest rangers, scientists, and hippies have played an important role in shaping the area. In forty brief chapters, this book recounts some of these fascinating stories, accompanied by more than a hundred photographs, maps, and drawings. Matched photographs of the same views taken up to 150 years apart attest to striking change and apparent stasis. Major alterations have occurred in some places over the past two centuries due to human activity, and increasing climate change threatens further transformation. For those new to the Jemez Mountains, these stories and images will provide an introduction to the cultural and natural history of the area. Residents and long-time aficionados of the Jemez will find both familiar and surprising stories and will gain a renewed sense of this magnificent place.
New Mexico's Magnificent Sandia Mountain: The Complete Geological Story by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating QE28.2 .V36 2023
ISBN: 9781632936509
Publication Date: 2023-10-04
The magnificent Sandia Mountain forms an enormous rampart towering over the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Regionally, the feature's distinctive "whale back" profile utterly dominates the horizon within a huge area of central New Mexico. This book provides the complete geologic story of the mountain's origin-a story given within the context of the greater American Southwest. The text is richly illustrated, producing a reader-friendly narrative understandable to the non-geologist. The mountain and its surroundings are the end-products of a long sequence of geologic events spanning a vast period of 1.7 billion years, but the uplift we call today's Sandia Mountain was formed quite recently. In this way it differs in origin from the Rocky Mountains, which are located nearby but are much older. Paradoxically, then, what we see today is a relatively new mountain made from very old rocks.
Of Corn and Catholicism: A History of Religion and Power in Pueblo Indian Patron Saint Feast Days by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating E99.P575 M336 2025
ISBN: 9781496200556
Publication Date: 2025-02-01
In Of Corn and Catholicism Andrea Maria McComb Sanchez examines the development of the patron saint feast days among Eastern Pueblo Indians of New Mexico from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the ways Pueblo religion intertwined with Spanish Catholicism, McComb Sanchez explores feast days as sites of religious resistance, accommodation, and appropriation. McComb Sanchez introduces the term "bounded incorporation" to conceptualize how Eastern Pueblo people kept boundaries flexible: as they incorporated aspects of Catholicism, they changed Catholicism as well, making it part of their traditional religious lifeway. McComb Sanchez uses archival and published primary sources, anthropological records, and her qualitative fieldwork to discuss how Pueblo religion was kept secret and safe during the violence of seventeenth-century Spanish colonialism in New Mexico; how Eastern Pueblos developed strategies of resistance and accommodation, in addition to secrecy, to deal with missionaries and Catholicism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; how patron saint feast days emerged as a way of incorporating a foreign religion on the Pueblos' own terms; and how, by the later nineteenth century, these feast days played a significant role in both Pueblo and Hispano communities through the Pueblos' own initiative.
Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating F790.M5 V35 2024
ISBN: 9781469675619
Publication Date: 2024-04-30
This book analyzes the ways collective memories of the US-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans' civil rights struggles over several generations. As the first Latinx people incorporated into the nation, Mexican Americans were offered US citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war. Because the 1790 Naturalization Act declared whites solely eligible for citizenship, the treaty pronounced Mexican Americans to be legally white. While their incorporation as citizens appeared as progress towards racial justice and the electorate's diversification, their second-class citizenship demonstrated a retrenchment in racial progress. Over several generations, civil rights activists summoned conquest memories to link Mexican Americans' poverty, electoral disenfranchisement, low educational attainment, and health disparities to structural and institutional inequalities resulting from racial retrenchments. Activists also recalled the treaty's citizenship guarantees to push for property rights, protection from vigilante attacks, and educational reform. Omar Valerio-Jiménez addresses the politics of memory by exploring how succeeding generations reinforced or modified earlier memories of conquest according to their contemporary social and political contexts. The book also examines collective memories in the US and Mexico to illustrate transnational influences on Mexican Americans and to demonstrate how community and national memories can be used strategically to advance political agendas.
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating PS3601.R678 W45 2023
ISBN: 9798218207922
Publication Date: 2023-05-08
Was the death the result of murder, suicide, or did someone seize the opportunity to shift the blame onto the Lees? Jesús' memoir explores these, and other questions that arise as he recovers from comatic amnesia. While struggling to rediscover his past, he finds solace in the structure and strict values of the immigrant Texan ranching community. But when his visions and dreams connect to real-life experiences, Jesús must confront his identity conflicts while being true to the Tularosa family that saved him. Against the backdrop of the New Mexico Territory's statehood tug-o-war and a ranching society clinging to its wild west ways, Mary Armstrong weaves a coming-of-age story that delves into the collision of cultures and the struggle for lawfulness and individualism. The White Sands takes you to the mystical duneland of the late 1880s, where legends of the lost and murdered rivaled the beauty of the glistening waves of sand. Murder, mayhem, court battles, and election and legislative clashes come to a head in this gripping tale of life on the wild frontier.