In 1930s rural Argentina, a determined fifteen-year-old left an isolated, poverty-stricken life to find her fortune in the "Paris of South America"--Buenos Aires. There, with few connections, little education, but plenty of persistence, Maria Eva Duarte gained a toehold in the city's artistic scene. Eva--Evita--rode the radio revolution to fortune, providing for her mother and siblings. She caught the eye of rising political star Colonel Juan Perón, and with him, she rode the pro-labor wave all the way to the presidential palace. The story of Eva Duarte Perón highlights not just her own extraordinary life but the opportunities seized by women of all classes and background in a post-independence, modernizing Latin America. This work offers an alternate method for understanding post-independence Latin America and its history. The ten figures treated are ethnically mixed, of African, indigenous, European, and mestizo heritage. They include figures from all social classes, geographic settings, occupations seen in colonial Latin America, and they acted over the entirety of the more three centuries of the colonial period. Through their stories, the reader comes away with an enriched understanding of this rich, diverse region.

In 1930s rural Argentina, a determined fifteen-year-old left an isolated, poverty-stricken life to find her fortune in the "Paris of South America"--Buenos Aires. There, with few connections, little education, but plenty of persistence, Maria Eva Duarte gained a toehold in the city's artistic scene. Eva--Evita--rode the radio revolution to fortune, providing for her mother and siblings. She caught the eye of rising political star Colonel Juan Perón, and with him, she rode the pro-labor wave all the way to the presidential palace. The story of Eva Duarte Perón highlights not just her own extraordinary life but the opportunities seized by women of all classes and background in a post-independence, modernizing Latin America. This work offers an alternate method for understanding post-independence Latin America and its history. The ten figures treated are ethnically mixed, of African, indigenous, European, and mestizo heritage. They include figures from all social classes, geographic settings, occupations seen in colonial Latin America, and they acted over the entirety of the more three centuries of the colonial period. Through their stories, the reader comes away with an enriched understanding of this rich, diverse region.

In the seventeenth century, Catalina de Erauso, at age sixteen a renegade Basque nun, escaped from her convent and traveled to the New World, eventually reaching Peru. She became an outlaw and a crossdresser with a price on her head. Yet she ended her days absolved by both the King of Spain and the Pope, the latter of whom granted her permission to dress as a man for the remainder of her life. The Nun Ensign passed her final years guarding silver shipments on the Mexico City-Veracruz highway. The life of the Nun Ensign highlights not just her extraordinary life but also the opportunities seized by women in colonial Latin America. This book profiles the Nun Ensign and nine other women of colonial Latin America, offering an alternate method for understanding the region and its history. The ten figures span different ethnic, geographic, occupational, and class backgrounds. Through their stories, the reader comes away with an enriched understanding of colonial Latin American history.

In the seventeenth century, Catalina de Erauso, at age sixteen a renegade Basque nun, escaped from her convent and traveled to the New World, eventually reaching Peru. She became an outlaw and a crossdresser with a price on her head. Yet she ended her days absolved by both the King of Spain and the Pope, the latter of whom granted her permission to dress as a man for the remainder of her life. The Nun Ensign passed her final years guarding silver shipments on the Mexico City-Veracruz highway. The life of the Nun Ensign highlights not just her extraordinary life but also the opportunities seized by women in colonial Latin America. This book profiles the Nun Ensign and nine other women of colonial Latin America, offering an alternate method for understanding the region and its history. The ten figures span different ethnic, geographic, occupational, and class backgrounds. Through their stories, the reader comes away with an enriched understanding of colonial Latin American history.

Porcelain production in the Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad) region of western Bohemia is featured here. American importers of the New York firm Larzarus Straus & Sons financed the creation of the Marx & Gutherz factory in 1884. It later became known as the Oscar & Edgar Gutherz Royal Austria factory. Over 1000 color photographs and illustrations demonstrate the rich variety of porcelain items produced by the factory between 1889 and 1918.\nThe Gutherz factory exported factory-decorated ware and large amounts of undecorated porcelain, known as "whitewall" to satisfy interest in amateur porcelain painting in America. The methods used to decorate and market Royal Austria porcelain are explained and American hand-decorated pieces are presented, making the book an invaluable reference for those who purchase, sell, or have inherited this fine tableware. \nThe plate blanks are identified, categorized, and illustrated in over 100 patterns. Many shapes of dinnerware, cups and saucers, and hollowware handles are shown for the first time. A list of the numbered molds used to create hundreds of shapes is unique.

Those who are captivated by the great beauty of decorated porcelain will recognize, at once, the quality of the Bohemian Porcelain. Factories in the Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad) region of Western Bavaria produced numerous types of tableware and objects. This new book is the first in English dedicated to describing and illustrating the vast array of decorative objects, household wares, and tableware. It includes both the goods produced and decorated in Bohemia and those exported to America for decoration in the form of whiteware during the late 1800s to early 1900s. Detailed descriptions of the production, exportation, and decoration methods utilized by the Karlovy Vary factories to produce this collectible porcelain make this book an invaluable reference for those who collect, deal, or have inherited pieces of this china. Over 400 color photographs, as well as illustrated examples of the distinguishing factory marks, information on the factories' owners, and an up-to-date value guide make this book unique. With the wide exportation of Bohemian porcelain to the United States and throughout the West, this book will be a welcome addition to the libraries of dealers, collectors, and everyone interested in the development of the art of fine porcelain.

Colombia's Narcotics Nightmare is a history of that Andean nation's illegal drug trade and of the extreme violence that it generated. The book first describes how during the late 1960s narcotics traffickers from the United States convinced Colombians, who had no previous involvement in illegal-drug export, to grow marijuana for them. Early in the 1970s the foreign, mostly American, traffickers began requesting cocaine. The book's focus is the criminality and violence that the illegal drug trade brought to Colombia and how that social upset was ended in the early 2000s. At the work's center are three chapters detailing the Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels' war against the Colombian state, the revolutionary guerrillas' war against the Colombian state, and the war that paramilitary groups conducted against the guerrillas. The book's concluding, sixth, chapter describes how Colombia's government brought the drug-money-financed violence to an end between 2002 and 2008. The work's Conclusion assesses the progress and prospects of Colombia since the end of the violence and civil war that claimed the lives of some 300,000 Colombian nationals between 1975 and 2008.

"The research involved in putting this manuscript together is truly awesome and involves a major synthesis of Colombian political, economic, urban, and social history which has not been achieved to date either in Spanish or in English."-- Maurice P. Brungardt, Loyola University of New Orleans

"Henderson's life-and-times study of Laureano Gomez provides a cogent analysis of a rapidly modernizing Colombia as well as a vivid portrait of one of the most powerful 20th-century Latin American conservative thinkers and politicians."-- Jane M. Rausch, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The life of Laureano Gomez (1889-1965), Colombia's combative Conservative politician and reviled public figure, serves as the backdrop for this modern history of one of the hemisphere's least understood nations. Tracing the complex process of development in Colombia, James Henderson explores the civil violence that defined the Gomez era even as the country experienced economic growth unparalleled in the rest of the Americas.

Gomez was a consummate debater, a spellbinding orator, and an influential newspaper editor. Early in his career he was a thorn in the side of Liberals and Conservatives alike, while in later years he led the Conservative opposition in Congress. He made and unmade presidents, served as president himself, and all the while figured prominently in Colombia's transition to modernity.

Henderson gives us the best and worst of Gomez and his adversaries during this era, a time of alternating political peace and progress, punctuated by spells of extremist invective and bloody violence. Thus he shows that much of recent Colombian history is rooted in developments from the Gomez years.

Few Colombians can speak calmly of Gomez, and many blame him for the violence that plagued the country from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. Henderson's objective and thorough discussion exposes the myths and assumptions surrounding Gomez and offers especially effective analysis of his writings, speeches, congressional debates, and editorials (as well as his rejoinders, one-liners, and put-downs, classics in the lexicon of Colombian history). Henderson also chronicles the titanic political rivalry between Gomez and Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo, an arch-Liberal, showing how the two men who began their careers as friends became bitter enemies and ultimately led Colombia into the fratricidal civil war known as La Violencia.
This important history of Colombia's political, economic, urban, and social life will become the definitive study of the nation during its critical period of modernization.

James D. Henderson, professor of international studies at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina, is general editor of "A Reference Guide to Latin American History." He has written two other books on 20th-century Colombia, both best-sellers in their Colombian Spanish-language editions.