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Sylvanus G Morley (1883-1948) is widely known as an influential Mayan archaeologist. This intriguing book shows that he was arguably the greatest American spy of World War I. Morley came to the attention of the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1916, when reports that German agents were establishing a Central American base for submarine warfare first surfaced. Morley's field research provided the ideal cover for reconnoitring throughout the region. He made several extended research/intelligence-gathering trips along the Caribbean coast of Central America starting in 1917 and forwarded detailed reports and maps to ONI. While he found no noteworthy German activity, his activities permit the authors of this book to reconstruct the way ONI identified, recruited, placed, and debriefed field agents, nearly 150 of whom, many with academic ties, were funnelling data to ONI by the close of World War I. In a final chapter, Sadler and Harris extend the story of academic participation in intelligence work through the 1930s into the founding of 'Wild Bill' Donovan's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) at the beginning of World War II.
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In a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of modern and postmodern literature, film, art, and visual culture, Monika Kaup examines the twentieth century's recovery of the baroque within a hemispheric framework embracing North America, Latin America, and U.S. Latino/a culture. As "neobaroque" comes to the forefront of New World studies, attention to transcultural dynamics is overturning the traditional scholarship that confined the baroque to a specific period, class, and ideology in the seventeenth century. Reflecting on the rich, nonlinear genealogy of baroque expression, Neobaroque in the Americas envisions the baroque as an anti-proprietary expression that brings together seemingly disparate writers and artists and contributes to the new studies in global modernity.
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Making a vital contribution to the understanding of Latin American modernism, Esther Gabara rethinks the role of photography in the Brazilian and Mexican avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s. During these decades, intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil were deeply engaged with photography. Authors who are now canonical figures in the two countries’ literary traditions looked at modern life through the camera in a variety of ways. Mário de Andrade, known as the “pope” of Brazilian modernism, took and collected hundreds of photographs. Salvador Novo, a major Mexican writer, meditated on the medium’s aesthetic potential as “the prodigal daughter of the fine arts.” Intellectuals...
It rises suddenly out of the Sonoran Desert landscape, towering over the tallest tree or cactus, a commanding building with a sensuous dome, elliptical vaults, and sturdy bell towers. There is nothing else like it around, nor does it seem there should be. This incongruity of setting is what strikes first-time visitors to Mission San Xavier del Bac. This great church is of another place and another time, while its beauty is universal and timeless. Mission San Xavier del Bac is a two-century-old Spanish church in southern Arizona located just a few miles from downtown Tucson, a metropolis of more than half a million people in the American Southwest. A National Historic Landmark since 1963, the...
The first study of Christian murals created by indigenous artists in sixteenth and seventeenth century Yucatán. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Maya artists painted murals in churches and conventos of Yucatán using traditional techniques to depict iconography brought from Europe by Franciscan friars. The fragmentary visual remains and their placement within religious structures embed Maya conceptions of sacredness beyond the didactic imagery. Mobilizing both cutting-edge technology and tried-and-true analytical methods, art historians Amara Solari and Linda K. Williams reexamine the Maya Christian murals, centering the agency of the people who created them. The first volume to ...
Arranged alphabetically from Eduardo Abela to Francisco Zuniga, this volume provides biographical and career information, as well as critical essays, on prominent Hispanic artists.