A pictorial survey of the past history of more than one hundred former mining towns in Arizona

Each fun and intriguing volume offers more than 250 illustrated pages of places where tourists usually don't venture, including oddball curiosities, local legends, crazy characters, and peculiar roadside attractions.

Featuring 170 striking photographs, Abandoned Cold War Places is a fascinating visual history of the relics left behind by both sides from the late 1940s to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

For every woman who has ever been called outdoorsy comes a collection of stories that inspires unforgettable adventure. Beautiful, empowering, and exhilarating, She Explores is a spirited celebration of female bravery and courage, and an inspirational companion for any woman who wants to travel the world on her own terms. Combining breathtaking travel photography with compelling personal narratives, She Explores shares the stories of 40 diverse women on unforgettable journeys in nature: women who live out of vans, trucks, and vintage trailers, hiking the wild, cooking meals over campfires, and sleeping under the stars. Women biking through the countryside, embarking on an unknown road trip, or backpacking through the outdoors with their young children in tow. Complementing the narratives are practical tips and advice for women planning their own trips, including: • Preparing for a solo hike • Must-haves for a road-trip kitchen • Planning ahead for unknown territory • Telling your own story A visually stunning and emotionally satisfying collection for any woman craving new landscapes and adventure.

In the mid-1560s Spanish explorers marched northward through Mexico to the farthest northern reaches of the Spanish empire in Latin America. They beheld an impressive site known as Casas Grandes in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Row upon row of walls featured houses and plazas of what was once a large population center, now deserted. Called Casas Grandes (Spanish for “large houses”) but also known as Paquimé, the prehistoric archaeological site may have been one of the first that Spanish explorers encountered. The Ibarra expedition, occurring perhaps no more than a hundred years after the site was abandoned, contained a chronicler named Baltasar de Obregón, who gave to posterity the first description of Paquimé: ". . . many houses of great size, strength, and height . . . six and seven stories, with towers and walls like fortresses for protection and defense against the enemies who undoubtedly used to make war on its inhabitants . . . large and magnificent patios paved with enormous and beautiful stones resembling jasper . . ." Casas Grandes, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is under the purview of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, which oversees a world-class museum near the ruins. Paquimé visitors can learn about the site’s history and its excavations, which were conducted under the pioneering research of Charles Di Peso and Eduardo Contreras Sánchez and their colleagues from INAH and the Amerind Foundation. Based on a half century of modern research since the Joint Casas Grandes Project, this book explores the recent discoveries about important site and its neighbors. Drawing the expertise of fourteen scholars from the United States, Mexico, and Canada, who have long worked in the region, the chapters revel new insights about Paquimé and its influence, bringing this fascinating place and its story to light.

Discusses what archaeology can reveal about how Pueblo architecture was built and used, and describes the Hopi buildings at Oraibi, Arizona

In "Abandoned America: Dismantling the Dream", internationally acclaimed photographer Matthew Christopher continues his examination of the ruins dotting American cities as quiet catastrophes that have affected not only the nation's past but also its present and future.--Matthew Christopher

From the actions of Europeans in the seventeenth century to the real estate deals of the modern era, people making a living off the land in southern Arizona have been repeatedly robbed of their way of life. History has recorded more than three centuries of speculative failures that never amounted to much but left dispossessed people in their wake. This book seeks to excavate those failures, to examine the new social spaces the schemers struggled to create and the existing social spaces they destroyed. Landscapes of Fraud explores how the penetration of the evolving capitalist world-system created and destroyed communities in the Upper Santa Cruz Valley of Arizona from the late 1600s to the 1970s. Thomas Sheridan has melded history, anthropology, and critical geography to create a penetrating view of greed and power and their lasting effect on those left powerless. Sheridan first examines how OÕodham culture was fragmented by the arrival of the Spanish, telling how autonomous communities moving across landscapes in seasonal rounds were reduced to a mission world of subordination. Sheridan then considers the fate of the Tumac‡cori grant and Baca Float No. 3, another land grant. He tells the unbroken story of land fraud from Manuel Mar’a G‡ndaraÕs purchase of the ÒabandonedÓ Tumac‡cori grant at public auction in 1844 through the bankruptcy of the shady real estate developers who had fraudulently promoted housing projects at Rio Rico during the 1960s and Õ70s. As the Upper Santa Cruz Valley underwent a wrenching transition from a landscape of community to a landscape of fraud, the betrayal of the OÕodham became complete when land, that most elemental form of human space, was transformed from a communal resource into a commodity bought and sold for its future value. Today, Mission Tumac‡cori stands as a romantic icon of the past while the landscapes that supported it lay buried under speculative schemes that continue to haunt our history.