Founded in 1965, the University Press of Colorado is a nonprofit cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, University of Wyoming, Utah State University, and Western Colorado University.
In 2012, University Press of Colorado merged with Utah State University Press, which was established in 1972. USU Press titles are managed as an active imprint of University Press of Colorado, and they maintain offices in both Louisville, Colorado, and Logan, Utah.
The University Press of Colorado, including the Utah State University Press imprint, publishes forty to forty-five new titles each year, with the goal of facilitating communication among scholars and providing the peoples of the state and region with a fair assessment of their histories, cultures, and resources.
Latino Colorado
The Struggle for Equality in the Centennial State
Mexican Americans and other Latinos make up more than 22 percent of Colorado’s population, play a vital role in its major economic sectors, and are becoming a political force to be reckoned with. Yet most official histories of the state mention them only in passing. Latino Colorado fills this gap in the literature by examining the multifaceted experience of Latinos in Colorado from the nineteenth century to the present, from the old Hispano families of southern Colorado to the new arrivals, and from metro Denver to the state’s rural areas of the Western Slope and Eastern Plains.
- Copyright year: 2025
Exploring the Mesoamerican Subterranean Realm
- Copyright year: 2025
I Woke a Lake
I Woke a Lake faces the anxieties of climate change, extinctions, and political chaos. Susan McCabe weaves together the fragile fabric of worlds imagined and lost, both palpable and present.
- Copyright year: 2025
Bats of the Rocky Mountain West
Natural History, Ecology, and Conservation
- Copyright year: 2025
Temporalities in Mesoamerican Ritual Practices
Temporalities in Mesoamerican Ritual Practices examines the time-based dimensions of ritual activities in past and present Mesoamerican societies, including the prehispanic, colonial, and modern periods.
Landscapes of Warfare
Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East
Landscapes of Warfare offers a detailed examination of the Urartian empire. Situated in the highlands of Turkey, Armenia, and Iran and less known than its rival, the Neo-Assyrian empire, Urartu presents a unique case of an empire whose power was not centralized in cities but was instead distributed among mountain fortresses.
- Copyright year: 2024
Human Dispersal, Human Evolution, and the Sea
The Palaeolithic Seafaring Debate
Human Dispersal, Human Evolution, and the Sea is the first book-length treatment of what has become known as the global Palaeolithic seafaring debate.
- Copyright year: 2024
Beyond Cortés and Montezuma
The Conquest of Mexico Revisited
Beyond Cortés and Montezuma examines both European and Nahuatl texts and images that shed light on the complex narrative of contact and the ensuing conflict, negotiation, and cooperation that continued well after the colonial period.
- Copyright year: 2024
The Duplex Nature of Indigeneity
Navigating Identity in the Ahuehuepan Diaspora
The Duplex Nature of Indigeneity is a detailed ethnography centered on Ahuehuepan, a Mexican town in the Alto Balsas region of the state of Guerrero, where an exodus of more than half the population to the United States and other parts of Mexico has altered both livelihoods and social identities.
- Copyright year: 2025
Maya Blue
Unlocking the Mysteries of an Ancient Pigment
One of the great technological achievements of the ancient Maya, Maya Blue is one the world’s most unusual ancient pigments. In Maya Blue, Dean E. Arnold offers a comprehensive history of its study for almost a century, filled with personal anecdotes drawn from his decades of work uncovering the Maya knowledge of its constituents, its ancient sources, and how it was made—including previously unknown methods.
- Copyright year: 2024
The Other Altar
- Copyright year: 2024
The General History of Peru
Book 1
Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa’s General History of Peru (Historia General del Piru, 1616) is one of the most significant Spanish chronicles of Inca history and Peru’s early colonial period yet to be published in English. Written over several decades and approved by King Philip III for publication, Murúa’s magnificent manuscript disappeared from public view for nearly 350 years until its publication in 1964. Here, translators Brian S. Bauer, Eliana Gamarra Carrillo, and Andrea Gonzales Lombardi present the first English translation of Book 1 of Murúa’s comprehensive three-part work.
- Copyright year: 2024
The Geysers of Yellowstone
Sixth Edition
This new edition of The Geysers of Yellowstone is the most up-to-date and comprehensive reference to the geysers of Yellowstone National Park, describing in detail each of the more than five hundred geysers in the park.
The Carey Act and Conservation in Colorado
The Carey Act and Conservation in Colorado is an environmental history of the endless missteps and unforeseen consequences that characterized Colorado’s participation in the Carey Act—an 1894 federal law that granted one million acres of desert-classified public land to each western state for private irrigation development and settlement.
- Copyright year: 2024
Pueblos, Plains, and Province
New Mexico in the Seventeenth Century
In Pueblos, Plains, and Province Joseph P. Sánchez offers an in-depth examination of sociopolitical conflict in seventeenth-century New Mexico, detailing the effects of Spanish colonial policies on settlers’, missionaries’, and Indigenous peoples’ struggle for economic and cultural control of the region.
- Copyright year: 2020
Growing the Taraco Peninsula
Indigenous Agricultural Landscapes
Growing the Taraco Peninsula is an examination of long-term human-environmental interactions through agriculture among Indigenous communities of the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia, located on the shores of Lake Titicaca in the Andes.
- Copyright year: 2024
In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark
Early Commemorations and the Origins of the National Historic Trail
Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua
- Copyright year: 2014
Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities
Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities is the first focused book-length discussion of migration in central Mexico, west Mexico and the Maya region, presenting case studies on population movement in and among Classic, Epiclassic, and Postclassic Mesoamerican societies and polities within the framework of urbanization and de-urbanization.
- Copyright year: 2020
A Face Out of Clay
- Copyright year: 2024
The Sheep Industry of Territorial New Mexico
Livestock, Land, and Dollars
The Sheep Industry of Territorial New Mexico offers a detailed account of the New Mexico sheep industry during the territorial period (1846–1912) when it flourished.
- Copyright year: 2023
The Nahua
Language and Culture from the 16th Century to the Present
Revealing the resiliency of Nahua culture and language while highlighting the adaptations and changes they have undergone over the centuries, The Nahua demonstrates that Nahuatl remained a vibrant and central language well after European contact and into the twenty-first century, and its characteristic features can provide insight into nuanced aspects of Nahua culture and history.
- Copyright year: 2024
The Colorado Trail in Crisis
A Naturalist’s Field Report on Climate Change in Mountain Ecosystems
The Colorado Trail in Crisis addresses the sweeping transformation of western forests and wilderness ecosystems affected by climate change.
- Copyright year: 2024
The Colorado Trail in Crisis
A Naturalist's Field Report on Climate Change in Mountain Ecosystems
The Colorado Trail in Crisis addresses the sweeping transformation of western forests and wilderness ecosystems affected by climate change.
- Copyright year: 2024
Power, Prayers, and Protection
A Cultural History of the Utah San Juan River Navajo
- Copyright year: 2022
Violence and Inequality
An Archaeological History
Violence and Inequality explores the deep-time archaeological relationship between violence and inequality, focusing on prehistoric archaeology’s contribution to the understanding of the human dynamics among coercive force, aggression, and the state.
- Copyright year: 2023
Brooke at the Bar
Inside Our Legal System
- Copyright year: 2023
Stories from the Land
A Navajo Reader about Monument Valley
- Copyright year: 2022
Francisco López de Gómara's General History of the Indies
This work is the first English translation of the entire text of part one of sixteenth-century Spanish historian Francisco López de Gómara’s General History of the Indies.
- Copyright year: 2023
The Friar and the Maya
Diego de Landa and the Account of the Things of Yucatan
The Friar and the Maya offers a full study and new translation of the Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán (Account of the Things of Yucatan) by a unique set of eminent scholars, created by them over more than a decade from the original manuscript held by the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid.
- Copyright year: 2023