Beyond the Pampas is an exploration of the lives of the descendents of nineteenth century Welsh settlers in Argentina. Herrad discovers a fascinating melding of Welsh and Spanish language cultures through which she explores the nature of heritage and identity. Her expectations are further challenged by the plight of Patagonia's indigenous peoples - the Tehuelche and Mapuche - with the land-related cultures and oppression by European settlers. This is an additional prism through which to view history, as is the difference Herrad discovers between metropolitan Buenos Aires and the rural hinterland. And the whole is underpinned by Herrad's personal journey of self-discovery, from an abusive childhood in Germany to acceptance in the communities of Wales and Patagonia. Herrad's openness to new experience and her wonder at the natural world result in a rich and evocative depiction of the exotic places in which she finds herself, from camping under the stars in the Andes to whale-watching on the Atlantic coast, and from the Welsh-speaking tea rooms of Chubut to the museums of lost Indian peoples.

Two-time Academy Award winner Sir David Lean (1908–1991) was one of the most prominent directors of the twentieth century, responsible for the classics The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965). British-born Lean asserted himself in Hollywood as a major filmmaker with his epic storytelling and panoramic visions of history, but he started out as a talented film editor and director in Great Britain. As a result, he brought an art-house mentality to blockbuster films. Combining elements of biography and film criticism, Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean uses screenplays and production histories to assess Lean’s body of work. Author Gene D. Phillips interviews actors who worked with Lean and directors who knew him, and their comments reveal new details about the director’s life and career. Phillips also explores Lean’s lesser-studied films, such as The Passionate Friends (1949), Hobson’s Choice (1954), and Summertime (1955). The result is an in-depth examination of the director in cultural, historical, and cinematic contexts. Lean’s approach to filmmaking was far different than that of many of his contemporaries. He chose his films carefully and, as a result, directed only sixteen films in a period of more than forty years. Those films, however, have become some of the landmarks of motion-picture history. Lean is best known for his epics, but Phillips also focuses on Lean’s successful adaptations of famous works of literature, including retellings of plays such as Brief Encounter (1945) and novels such as Great Expectations (1946), Oliver Twist (1948), and A Passage to India (1984). From expansive studies of war and strife to some of literature’s greatest high comedies and domestic dramas, Lean imbued all of his films with his unique creative vision. Few directors can match Lean’s ability to combine narrative sweep and psychological detail, and Phillips goes beyond Lean’s epics to reveal this unifying characteristic in the director’s body of work. Beyond the Epic is a vital assessment of a great director’s artistic process and his place in the film industry.

On the Argentine pampas, between the years 1860 and 1910, a dramatic social and agricultural revolution took place. The haunts of wild cattle, native peoples, and gauchos were transformed into cultivated fields and rich pastures. A land that had produced only scrawny sheep and cattle became one of the world’s leading exporters of wheat, corn, beef, mutton, and wool. A country that had had only a sparse and scattered Spanish and mestizo population now boasted a metropolis of one and a half million, and a national population of eight million people, nearly a third of whom were born in Europe. These were significant changes, and wheat growing played a major role in all of them. This study traces the development of the Argentine wheat zone, focusing on the part wheat played in forming the Argentina of today. James R. Scobie begins his account with the first settlers who colonized Santa Fe in the 1850s and shows how they and thousands of other European immigrants converted this vast grassland into a world breadbasket. He explains why these small farmer-owners soon gave way to tenant farmers, and how crop farming developed primarily as servant to the predominant sheep and cattle interests. He expands on several factors responsible for this evolvement: the elimination of indigenous threat, the coming of the railroad, the agricultural policy—or lack of policy—of the Argentine government, and the urban orientation of the Argentine people. The railroads, by suppressing the building of other roads through the pampas, had the effect of isolating the wheatgrowers. By making the products of the pampas available to world markets, the railroads opened up new trade, which helped the growth of cities tremendously; but this very prosperity pushed the cost of land far beyond the wheatgrower’s ability to buy it. The result was a pampas without settlers, a frontier filled with migrant sharecroppers and tenant farmers, a land exploited but not possessed. Transiency as well as isolation became the common denominators of these families, who were forced to move every few years to make way for more valued tenants—sheep and cattle. They left behind them no schools, no churches, no roads, no villages. Immigrants came to labor but not to sink their roots in the pampas. Without sentimentality but with understanding and compassion, Scobie explores every facet of the lives of these laborers who created Argentina’s agricultural greatness. His examination of Argentina’s broad policies toward land, immigration, and tariffs shows that the national government had little lasting or effective interest in the country’s agricultural development. In a social sense, the thousands of immigrants who toiled the pampas were looked upon as the wild cattle or fertile soil—blessings which neither needed nor warranted official attention. Scobie’s conclusion is that Argentina got better than it deserved.

In this book, Gustavo G. Politis and Luis A. Borrero explore the archaeology and ethnography of the indigenous people who inhabited Argentina's Pampas and the Patagonia region from the end of the Pleistocene until the 20th century. Offering a history of the nomadic foragers living in the harsh habitats of the South America's Southern Cone, they provide detailed account of human adaptations to a range of environmental and social conditions. The authors show how the region's earliest inhabitants interacted with now-extinct animals as they explored and settled the vast open prairies and steppes of the region until they occupied most of its available habitats. They also trace technological advances, including the development of pottery, the use of bows and arrows, and horticulture. Making new research and data available for the first time, Politis and Borrero's volume demonstrates how geographical variation in the Southern Cone generated diverse adaptation strategies.

This book explores the archaeology and ethnography of the indigenous people who inhabited Argentina's pampas and the Patagonia region.

A feminist pioneer, writer, and patron of the arts and literature in Buenos Aires, Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979) was a larger-than-life personality of legendary vitality. A key protagonist in Argentina’s rise to world-class status in the arts and sciences, Ocampo leveraged her wealth and social status to found Sur (1931–92), the internationally influential journal of literature, culture, and ideas. Ocampo personally invited many intellectual and artistic celebrities to visit Buenos Aires. Most were men. Some, endowed with egos as outsized as their reputations, tripped and fell into sentimental imbroglios with the strong-willed and beautiful Ocampo. In Free Women in the Pampas the ups and downs of her passionate friendships, debates, and misunderstandings with poet Rabindranath Tagore, philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, and the writers Pierre Drieu de la Rochelle, Hermann von Keyserling, and Waldo Frank are witnessed by the fictional Carmen Brey, a Galician-Spanish immigrant whose story is skilfully interwoven with that of Ocampo. Carmen’s sympathetic but incisive gaze puts her friend Victoria into perspective against a larger vision of Argentina. Carmen’s adventures lead her to social-justice writer María Rosa Oliver, the wilder side of the 1920s literary avant-garde (and the now-canonical authors Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, and Leopoldo Marechal), the Mapuche people of the pampa, and a ten-year-old Evita Ibarguren, later famous as Eva Perón. Against this broad, inclusive backdrop, the novel vividly depicts Victoria Ocampo’s struggle with the strictures of class and gender to find her own voice and vocation as a public intellectual.

Amaral focuses on the estancia, livestock firms, that led the economic growth of Buenos Aires in the early 1800s.