Books published by University Press of Florida

One of the most understudied aspects of Jose Marti's life remains his time in the US and how it affected his attitudes toward racial politics. Anne Fountain argues that it was in the US that Marti fully engaged with the spectre of racism. Examining his entire oeuvre rather than just selected portions, Fountain demonstrates the evolution of his thinking on the topic.

Prehistoric Florida societies, particularly those of the peninsula, have been largely ignored or given only minor consideration in overviews of the Mississippian southeast (A.D. 1000-1600). This ground-breaking volume lifts the veil of uniformity frequently draped over these regions in the literature, providing the first comprehensive examination of Mississippi-period archaeology in the state.

Suitable for teachers, company directors, and advanced dancers, this book explores the importance of disciplined dancing, choreography, acting, conditioning, and performance. It also confronts serious issues dealing with the future of classical ballet and what is needed to maintain its rightful place as an important theater art.

A guide to the campgrounds for tent, van, and trailer camping in coastal Florida.

Presents the fascinating cultural, economic, and ethnographic history of rum in the Caribbean from the colonial period to the present. Frederick Smith explains why this industry arose in the islands, how attitudes toward alcohol consumption have impacted the people of the region, and how rum production evolved over 400 years.

Provides an overview of the natural and human history of one of the world's most intriguing commodities: chocolate. This title explores its ecological niche, tracing cacao's journey out of the rain forest, into pre-Columbian gardens, and then onto plantations adjacent to rain forests. It also presents a history of the use of cacao.

In this comprehensive study of a lowland South American people's astronomy, the author explains how the Bororo Indians of Brazil integrate the social, natural and cosmic dimensions of time and space into their environment.

"e;Using subadult skeletons from the Deccan Chalcolithic period of Indian prehistory, along with archaeological and paleoclimate data, this volume makes an important contribution to understanding the effects of ecological change on demography and childhood growth during the second millennium B.C. in peninsular India."e;--Michael Pietrusewsky, University of Hawai'i at ManoaIn the context of current debates about global warming, archaeology contributes important insights for understanding environmental changes in prehistory, and the consequences and responses of past populations to them. In Indian archaeology, climate change and monsoon variability are often invoked to explain major demographic transitions, cultural changes, and migrations of prehistoric populations. During the late Holocene (1400-700 B.C.), agricultural communities flourished in a semiarid region of the Indian subcontinent, until they precipitously collapsed. Gwen Robbins Schug integrates the most recent paleoclimate reconstructions with an innovative analysis of skeletal remains from one of the last abandoned villages to provide a new interpretation of the archaeological record of this period. Robbins Schug's biocultural synthesis provides us with a new way of looking at the adaptive, social, and cultural transformations that took place in this region during the first and second millennia B.C. Her work clearly and compellingly usurps the climate change paradigm, demonstrating the complexity of human-environmental transformations. This original and significant contribution to bioarchaeological research and methodology enriches our understanding of both global climate change and South Asian prehistory.

The American prose poem has a rich history marked by important contributions from major writers. Michel Delville's book is the first full-length work to provide a critical and historical survey of the American prose poem from the early years of the 20th century to the 1990s.

A compilation of interviews with Martha Graham's ""family"" of dancers, teachers, choreographers and actors, which also includes biographical material about her life and influence as the creator of classic modern dance. The book features a syllabus of Graham's work.

As its title suggests, this book is ostensibly Tristram's narration of his life story. But it is one of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything simply, that he must make explanatory diversions to add context and colour to his tale, to the extent that Tristram's own birth is not even reached until Volume III.

Henry David Thoreau, one of America's most prominent environmental writers, supported himself as a land surveyor for much of his life, parceling land that would be sold off to loggers. In the only study of its kind, Patrick Chura analyzes this seeming contradiction to show how the best surveyor in Concord combined civil engineering with civil disobedience.Placing Thoreau's surveying in historical context, Thoreau the Land Surveyor explains the cultural and ideological implications of surveying work in the mid-nineteenth century. Chura explains the ways that Thoreau's environmentalist disposition and philosophical convictions asserted themselves even as he reduced the land to measurable terms and acted as an agent for bringing it under proprietary control. He also describes in detail Thoreau's 1846 survey of Walden Pond. By identifying the origins of Walden in--of all places--surveying data, Chura re-creates a previously lost supporting manuscript of this American classic.