Ruby Sisson Library

Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of...

A collection of stories about young Latino's immigrant experiences in the United States.

Presents the plight of young, male Sudanese refugees, known as "lost boys," being displaced to foreign countries due to civil war in their homeland. The film tells the story of three of the lost boys who struggled to come to the United States for a better life, while still attempting to assist the family and friends they have left behind.

"In To the End of the Earth, Hordes explores the remarkable story of crypto-Jews and the tenuous preservation of Jewish rituals and traditions in Mexico and New Mexico over the past five hundred years. He follows the crypto-Jews from their Jewish origins in medieval Spain and Portugal to their efforts to escape inquisitorial persecution by migrating to the New World and settling in the far reaches of the northern Mexican frontier.". "Drawing on individual...

Joan Wallach Scott is the Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her books include Parite!: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism and Gender and the Politics of History. In 2004, the French government instituted a ban on the wearing of "conspicuous signs" of religious affiliation in public schools. Though the ban applies to everyone, it is aimed at Muslim girls wearing headscarves....

"Sondra Jones traces the metamorphosis of the Ute people from a society of small, interrelated bands of mobile hunter-gatherers to sovereign, dependent nations, modern tribes who run extensive business enterprises and government services. Weaving together the history of all Ute groups in Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. the narrative describes their traditional culture, including all the facets that have continued to define them as a people. Jones...

"Young Latinos across the United States are redefining their identities, pushing boundaries, and awakening politically in powerful and surprising ways. Many of them--Afrolatino, indigenous, Muslim, queer and undocumented, living in large cities and small towns--are voices who have been chronically overlooked in how the diverse population of almost sixty million Latinos in the U.S. has been represented. No longer. In this empowering cross-country travelogue,...

"On New Years Day 1870, ten year old Adolph Korn was kidnapped by Plains Indians. For three years, he thrived on their rough, nomadic existence, becoming a fierce warrior. Never readjusting to white society, he spent his last years in a cave, all but forgotten by his family. That is, until Scott Zesch stumbled over his great-great-great uncle's grave. Determined to understand how a timid farm boy could have become so Indianized, Zesch traveled across...

"From the suburbs of Seattle to the villas of Jordan and the refugee camps of the West Bank, on an emotional journey exploring what it means to be a family, Warah tells the story of the Mansours, a sprawling Arab-American family, and the women who married into it"--

In their efforts to impose colonial rule on Nueva Vizcaya from the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, Spaniards established missions among the principal Indian groups of present-day eastern Sinaloa, northern Durango, and southern Chihuahua, Mexico-the Xiximes, Acaxees, Conchos, Tepehuanes, and Tarahumaras. Yet, when the colonial era ended two centuries later, only the Tepehuanes and Tarahumaras remained as distinct peoples, the other...