The title of this book implies that it is about things—gadgets and necessities within the twentieth-century home. In a way it is, but we hope that it is a little more than that. It is about people and their ideas, about their relationships with things and the value they placed upon them. It is also about people as the...

A myth is a narrative projection of a given cultural group's sense of its sacred past and its significant relationship with the deeper powers of the surrounding world and universe. A myth is a projection of an aspect of a culture's soul. In its complex but revealing symbolism, a myth is to a culture what a dream is to an...

• Traditional Entries, or basic encyclopedic summaries of the knowledge in a typical area or field of study;
• Feature Entries, which include...

Clashes between European powers and the indigenous peoples of the Americas began almost immediately upon the arrival of the first Europeans on the shores of the New World. Such conflict seems inevitable in retrospect, and perhaps it should have been expected at the outset as well. The great disparity between the two cultures,...

Any folklorist who saw the 1998 Columbia Pictures film Urban Legend will probably remember the library scene for its depiction of one aspect of folklore research. In this scene the beautiful student Natalie (played by Alicia Witt) suspects that recent campus mayhem was inspired by urban legends, the same kind of stories...

At first glance, it would seem that Mexico and the United States should have been good neighbors in the nineteenth century—they were both relatively young countries that had rebelled against a mother nation to establish republics. As they grew, they both had to deal with states with populations that believed that their...