Special Collections added the following 11 titles to ASC's holdings during the first 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.
American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating F786 .P25 2025
ISBN: 9780553387377
Publication Date: 2025-01-14
An expansive and revelatory historical exploration of the multicultural, water-seeking, land-destroying settlers of the most arid corner of North America, arguing that in order to know where the United States is going in the era of mass migration and climate crisis we must understand where the Southwest has already been Albuquerque. Phoenix. Tucson. El Paso. Las Vegas. Iconic American cities surrounded by desert and rust. Teeming metropolises that seem to exist independently of the seemingly inhospitable and arid landscape that surrounds them, belying the rich insight they offer into American stories of migration, industry, bloodshed, and rebirth. Charting a geographic path through America's largest and hottest deserts, acclaimed journalist Kyle Paoletta maps the past and future of these cities, and the many other settlements from rural town to urban sprawl that make up the region that has come to be called "the American Southwest." Weaving together the stories of immigrants and indigenous populations, American Oasis pulls back the layers of settlement, sediment, habit, and effect that successive empires have left on the region, from the Athapascan, Diné, Tewa, Apache, and Comanche, to the Spanish, Mexican, and, finally, American. As Paoletta's journey into the Southwest's history becomes inextricably linked to an exploration of its dependency on water, he begins to ask: where, ultimately, will cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix find themselves once the Colorado River and its branches dry up? Richly reported and sweeping in its history, American Oasis is the story of what one iconic region's past can tell us about our shared environmental and cultural future.
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating JV305 .C67 2022
ISBN: 9781642597370
Publication Date: 2022-04-26
The remarkable true story of an Indigenous family who fought back, over multiple generations, against the world-destroying power of settler colonial violence. Just weeks before police would kill him in Gallup, New Mexico, in March of 1973, Larry Casuse wrote that "never before have we faced an enemy such as this." An Enemy Such as This, for the first time, tells the history of that colonial enemy through the simultaneously epic and intimate story of Larry Casuse and those, like him, who fought against it. From the genocidal Mexican war against the Apaches in the nineteenth century, through the collapse of European empires in the first half of the twentieth century, and culminating in the efforts of young Navajo activists and organizers in the second half of the twentieth century to confront settler colonialism in New Mexico, the book offers a resolutely Native-focused history of colonialism.
Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating PS3563.C337 Z64 2024
ISBN: 9781477330845
Publication Date: 2024-10-08
Cormac McCarthy told an interviewer for the New York Times Magazine that "books are made out of books," but he was famously unwilling to discuss how his own writing draws on the works of other writers. Yet his novels and plays masterfully appropriate and allude to an extensive range of literary works, demonstrating that McCarthy was well aware of literary tradition and deliberately situating himself in a knowing relationship to precursors. In Books Are Made Out of Books, Michael Lynn Crews thoroughly mines McCarthy's literary archive to identify over 150 writers and thinkers that McCarthy referenced in early drafts, marginalia, notes, and correspondence. Crews organizes the references into chapters devoted to McCarthy's published works, the unpublished screenplay Whales and Men, and McCarthy's correspondence. This updated edition now examines McCarthy's final publications: the novel The Passenger and its play-like coda Stella Maris. For each work, Crews identifies authors, artists, or other cultural figures that McCarthy referenced; gives the source of the reference in McCarthy's papers; provides context for the reference as it appears in the archives; and explains the significance of the reference to the novel or play that McCarthy was working on. This groundbreaking exploration of McCarthy's literary influences vastly expands our understanding of how one of America's foremost authors engaged with the ideas, images, metaphors, and language of other thinkers and made them his own.
Borderlands and the Mexican American Story by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating PZ9 E184.M5 R626 2024
ISBN: 9780593567753
Publication Date: 2024-08-20
The Mexican American story is usually carefully presented as a story of immigrants- migrants crossing borders, drawn to the promise of a better life. In reality, Mexicans were on this land long before any borders existed. Their culture and practices shaped the Southwestern part of this country, in spite of relentless attempts by white colonizers and settlers to erase them. From missions and the Alamo to muralists, revolutionaries, and teen activists, this is the true story of the Mexican American experience. The Race to the Truth series tells the true history of America from the perspective of different communities. These books correct common falsehoods and celebrate underrepresented heroes and achievements. They encourage readers to ask questions and to approach new information thoughtfully. Check out the other books in the series- Colonization and the Wampanoag Story, Slavery and the African American Story, and Exclusion and the Chinese American Story.
Grit, Not Glamour: Female Farmers, Ranchers, Ropers, and Herders of the American West by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating HD6077.2.U6 M855 2023
ISBN: 9781493060498
Publication Date: 2023-03-01
Grit, Not Glamour celebrates the contributions of our foremothers who devoted their lives to farming and ranching related pursuits. Some embraced their roles; others detested the life; often their contributions were minimized or overlooked. Readers will meet a community of spunky, brazen, plucky, (and in a couple of cases dishonest), hardworking gals who donned trousers, tucked long hair under a straw hat, nurtured plants and baby livestock, studied the markets, fretted over the weather, disseminated vital information, scraped animal dung from their boots, enjoyed a few hours of deep sleep afforded by hours in the fresh country air, only to rise early the next day and start all over again. Anyone who has lived and worked on a family farm or ranch may relate to the experiences of the women who are profiled. Town dwellers and urbanites generations removed from the farm or their rural communities, who grew up hearing grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ stories, will appreciate these women who may or may not resemble in any way their foremothers.
Legible Walls: Poems for Santa Fe Murals by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating PS3623.E4678 L44 2023
ISBN: 9781736912881
Publication Date: 2023-06-01
Challenging and opening our perceptions of the city, this collection of poems, essayistic prose fragments, and images rounds out Darryl Lorenzo Wellington’s tenure as Santa Fe Poet Laureate 2021-2023. “I see mirages—my books, that is, generally speaking begin with collections of riddles, tiny insidious lights, mysterious UFOs and mirages that beckon me. After I became the Santa Fe Poet Laureate 2021-2023, I crisscrossed the city bringing my lessons to public and private schools and schoolchildren. Then I retraced my routes bringing the poems they had written back home. I visited sections of the city I had never visited before, and along the way—whether to success, failure, or poetry and play—painted walls beckoned me…” – Darryl Lorenzo Wellington
My Side of the River: A Memoir by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating E184.M5 G864 2024
ISBN: 9781250277954
Publication Date: 2024-02-13
New York Times bestselling author of Good Night, Irene Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez reveals her experience as the U.S. born daughter of immigrants and what happened when, at fifteen, her parents were forced back to Mexico in this captivating and tender memoir. Born to Mexican immigrants south of the Rillito River in Tucson, Arizona, Elizabeth had the world at her fingertips. She was preparing to enter her freshman year of high school as the number one student when suddenly, her own country took away the most important right a child has: the right to have a family. When her parents' visas expired and they were forced to return to Mexico, Elizabeth was left responsible for her younger brother, as well as her education. Determined to break the cycle of being a "statistic," she knew that even though her parents couldn't stay, there was no way she could let go of the opportunities the U.S. could provide. Armed with only her passport and sheer teenage determination, Elizabeth became what her school would eventually describe as an unaccompanied homeless youth, one of thousands of underage victims affected by family separation due to broken immigration laws. For fans of Educated by Tara Westover and The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande, My Side of the River explores separation, generational trauma, and the toll of the American dream. It's also, at its core, a love story between a brother and a sister who, no matter the cost, is determined to make the pursuit of her brother's dreams easier than it was for her.
Navajo Traditional Stories and the Science of Geology by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating E99.N3 N3855 2023
ISBN: 9798765791288
Publication Date: 2023-06-14
The three authors of this book vary greatly in backgrounds and experience but share in the love of the land and a desire to impart their knowledge of it. Comparisons are made of the rock record of geologic events known to geologists, to the legends in stories known to traditional Navajos. Ages and environments of deposition of stratigraphic units' progress from the two-billion-year-old rocks that are exposed in the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon to succeeding rock units known to exist on and under the lands of Dine 'Bikeyah across the Colorado Plateau that were formed a few million years ago or less. Geologists use observed fossil records and other geologic events to establish a Universal Geologic Time Scale that consists of four Eras of geologic time: the Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozioc, and Cenozioc eras. Navajo medicine men tell stories of their vision of the First Dark World, the Second Blue World, the Yellow Third World, and the Fourth White World. The stories show a major cycle of life beginning and extinction of variety of different species in the four worlds as does the geologic history in the four geologic eras.
Unbuttoned: Gay Life in the Santa Fe Arts Scene: A Memoir by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating HQ76.3.U62 S26 2016
ISBN: 9781517496074
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Where gays live, creativity thrives! For over 100 years, the Santa Fe/Taos region of Northern New Mexico has nurtured a rich gay culture, yet most people have no idea what an enormous impact lesbians and gay men play, and have played, in shaping the art and cultural mecca of the American Southwest. Cooper's unbridled memoir takes you behind adobe walls and plunges you into the queer world that was Santa Fe artistic life in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. It's packed with LGBT history, camp humor, fascinating anecdotes, 80 photographs, and the author's personal encounters with such cultural icons as Georgia O'Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Norman Rockwell, Buckminster Fuller, Tennessee Williams, Shirley MacLaine, and Elizabeth Taylor. But the heart of Cooper's story spotlights the regional painters, potters, writers, poets, photographers, designers, tastemakers, and opera people he's known and loved for 40 years. Cooper gives voice to a dynamic LGBT community that helps make "the City Different" truly different. And who better to write an inside look at an untold story than a closeted copywriter who left a 10-year career in New York and Tokyo with advertising giant J. Walter Thompson, then bid adios to the ad biz, packed up his dreams, headed West, kicked open the closet door, and became a full-time painter and printmaker. Cooper's artwork has been exhibited in major galleries and private and corporate collections. His work in graphic design includes book and record album covers, opera posters, wool rugs, greeting cards, and postage stamps. As the overheated 1970s gave way to the sobering '80s, Cooper's candid memoir traces his journey from those high-flying years in New York and Fire Island to his new life as a painter in high-desert New Mexico during a time of great transition, when Santa Fe itself was experiencing a tectonic shift from a quaint art colony to a cultural boom town. Written with wit and insight, Cooper describes his intimate journey of self-discovery, both as a gay man and a struggling painter. While striving to establish his own identity as a painter, he tells what it's like to risk everything to be an artist." Perhaps only Walter Cooper could unfurl this marvelous, queer cavalcade that was Santa Fe in its halcyon, gay heydays, before Stonewall, before AIDS, before 'gay pride'. Clearly, a great deal has been lost (dare we say 'innocence'?) while much more has been gained." --Jan Adlmann, art historian, author of "Contemporary Art in New Mexico."
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating PS3603.A533 V36 2023
ISBN: 9780593436721
Publication Date: 2023-08-15
As the daughter of a rancher in 1840s Mexico, Nena knows a thing or two about monsters - her home has long been threatened by tensions with Anglo settlers from the north. But something more sinister lurks near the ranch at night, something that drains men of their blood and leaves them for dead. Something that once attacked Nena nine years ago. Believing Nena dead, Nestor has been on the run from his grief ever since, moving from ranch to ranch working as a vaquero. But no amount of drink can dispel the night terrors of sharp teeth; no woman can erase his childhood sweetheart from his mind. When the United States attacks Mexico in 1846, the two are brought abruptly together on the road to war: Nena as a curandera, a healer striving to prove her worth to her father so that he does not marry her off to a stranger, and Nestor as a member of the auxiliary cavalry of ranchers and vaqueros. But the shock of their reunion - and Nena's rage at Nestor for seemingly abandoning her long ago - is quickly overshadowed by the appearance of a nightmare made flesh. And unless Nena and Nestor work through their past and face the future together, neither will survive to see the dawn.
Wild, Weird, West: Essays on Arid America by
Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating PN56.D477 R44 2024
ISBN: 9781682832288
Publication Date: 2024-10-01
Ever since the Long Expedition labeled the plains west of the Mississippi the “Great American Desert,” Americans have grappled with the radical differences between the humid East and the arid West. Wild, Weird, West: Essays on Arid America collects a diverse array of essays that weave together an image of this indelible region. Author Gary Reger's aim is to examine human interaction with desert spaces of the American Southwest through specific case studies that range from treatment of literary texts, sacred spaces, travelers? narratives, colonial topography, UFO encounters, and even the desert of Mars. Trained in Greek and Roman history, Reger brings a unique approach to theorizing desert spaces, which sifts together the sands of ecocriticism, materialism, and historical approaches. He argues that the southwestern desert imaginary orbits a series of tropes that echo across subject and across theoretical approach. In sum, Wild, Weird, West provides a transdisciplinary vision of desert literature, tracing the agency of the landscape itself and the human beings who have encountered it.