Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice

Elizabeth Horodowich
Cambridge University Press

While historians typically describe the state as emerging through a wide variety of processes and structures such as armies, bureaucracies and administrative organizations, this book demonstrates that a crucial but unrecognized component of state building in Renaissance Venice was the management of public speech – controlling foul language. Ideas about language were deeply embedded in Venetian political culture. Instead of studying the history of language through literary, printed texts, Horodowich examines the speech of everyday people on the streets of Renaissance Venice by looking at their actual words as recorded in archival documents. Horodowich shows that the Venetian state constructed a normative language to protect and reinforce its civic identity.

What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak

Robert Boswell and David Schweidel
Cinco Puntos Press

In 1937, Doc Noss – part adventurer, part conman – and his wife, Babe, discovered fabulous treasure inside the caverns of New Mexico’s Victorio Peak. They dynamited the tunnel to hide the treasure from other treasure hunters. At least that’s what they said happened. Babe’s grandson Terry Delonas grew up listening to his grandmother’s magical stories about her dead husband and Victorio Peak. Her stories were his legacy. In the 1980s, Terry, a gay man, tested positive for HIV. He decided that searching for Victorio’s lost treasure was the only dream that would give his life meaning. With his grandmother’s grit and her gift for talking her way through tough places, he found money and support to follow his dream and overcome many obstacles. But Victorio Peak, that inscrutable and mysterious mountain, would not give up its treasure.

The Human Tradition in Modern China

Kenneth J. Hammond and Kristin Stapleton
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Through compelling biographies of a wide range of historical figures, this engaging text presents a panorama of modern Chinese history that illustrates the great social and political changes that have occurred during the past 500 years. Through the lives of both the famous and the obscure, the contributors explore such enduring themes as the flexibility of the definition of Chinese in an era of imperialism and revolution, the tremendous transformations in gender relations and the wide gap between the lives of urban and rural Chinese. Richly researched, these biographies are written in an accessible and appealing style.

Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream

Connie Voisine
The University of Chicago Press

This is a book haunted by the afterlife of medieval theology and literature yet grounded in distinctly modern quandaries of desire. Connie Voisine’s female speakers reverberate with notes of Marie de France’s tragic heroines, but whereas Marie’s poems are places where women’s longings quickly bloom and die in captivity – in towers and dungeons – Voisine uses narrative to suspend the movement of storytelling. For Voisine, poems are occasions for philosophical wanderings. With fluency, intelligence and deeply felt emotional acuity, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream navigates the heady intersection of obsessive love and searing loss.

Cricket in the Web: The 1949 Unsolved Murder that Unraveled Politics in New Mexico

Paula Moore ’85
University of New Mexico Press

Ovida “Cricket” Coogler was last seen entering a mysterious car driven by an unknown man in downtown Las Cruces around 3 a.m. on the morning of March 31, 1949. Seventeen days later, her body was found in a hastily dug grave near Mesquite, N.M. The discovery of the 18-year-old waitress’s body launched a series of court inquiries and trials that would reshape the direction of New Mexico politics, expose political corruption, and spawn generations of rumors that have polarized opinions of what happened to Coogler that windy March morning.

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Panorama welcomes information on books published by NMSU faculty members and alumni. Information may be sent to panorama@nmsu.edu or mailed to University Communications and Marketing Services, MSC 3K, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003-8001.