The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping on Modern America
Laurence Culver
Oxford University Press, 2010
Southern California has long been promoted as the playground of the world, the home of resort-style living, backyard swimming pools, and year-round suntans. Tracing the history of Southern California from the late 19th century through the late 20th century, The Frontier of Leisure reveals how this region did much more than just create lavish resorts like Santa Catalina Island and Palm Springs–it literally remade American attitudes towards leisure.
The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763
Paul W. Mapp
University of North Carolina Press, 2011
In the early to mid-18th century, imperial officials in Europe knew very little about western North America. Yet competition to gain access to the Pacific Ocean and control trade to the Far East enhanced the importance of western American territories. Mapp reconstructs French, Spanish, and British ideas about these then-unknown regions, especially the elusive Northwest Passage, and shows that a Pacific focus in crucial to understanding the causes, course, and consequences of the Seven Years’ War.
Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman
Wiley, 2011
NPR science correspondent Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman, multimedia editor for NPR’s “Talk of the Nation: Science Friday,” take readers on a scientific quest through psychology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and other disciplines to uncover the truth about being annoyed. What is the recipe for annoyance? For starters, it should be temporary, unpleasant, and unpredictable, like a boring meeting or mosquito bites. Palca was the science writer in residence at The Huntington in 2009.
Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border
Rachel St. John
Princeton University Press, 2011
St. John explores how the U.S.-Mexico boundary changed from a mere line on a map to a clearly marked and heavily regulated divide between the two countries. Focusing on the desert border to the west of the Rio Grande, the book explains the origins of the modern border and places the line at the center of a transnational history of expanding capitalism and state power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order
Robert S. Westman
University of California Press, 2011
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus publicly defended his hypothesis that the earth is a planet and the sun a body resting near the center of a finite universe. The Copernican Question reframes this pivotal moment in the history of science, centering the story on a conflict over the credibility of astrology that erupted in Italy just as Copernicus arrived in 1496. Westman shows that efforts to answer the astrological skeptics becomes a crucial unifying theme of the early modern scientific movement.
