Download or read book A Temperate Empire written by Anya Zilberstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Controversy over the role of human activity in causing climate change is pervasive in contemporary society. But, as Anya Zilberstein shows in this work, debates about the politics and science of climate are nothing new. Indeed, they began as early as the settlement of English colonists in North America, well before the age of industrialization. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many early Americans believed that human activity and population growth were essential to moderating the harsh extremes of cold and heat in the New World. In the preindustrial British settler colonies in particular, it was believed that the right kinds of people were agents of climate warming and that this was a positive and deliberate goal of industrious activity, rather than an unintended and lamentable side effect of development. A Temperate Empire explores the ways that colonists studied and tried to remake local climates in New England and Nova Scotia according to their plans for settlement and economic growth. For colonial officials, landowners, naturalists, and other elites, the frigid, long winters and short, muggy summers were persistent sources of anxiety. These early Americans became intensely interested in reimagining and reducing their vulnerability to the climate. Linking climate to race, they assured would-be migrants that hardy Europeans were already habituated to the severe northern weather and Caribbean migrants' temperaments would be improved by it. Even more, they drew on a widespread understanding of a reciprocal relationship between a mild climate and the prosperity of empire, promoting the notion that land cultivation and the expansion of colonial farms would increasingly moderate the climate. One eighteenth-century naturalist observed that European settlement and industry had already brought about a "more temperate, uniform, and equal" climate worldwide-a forecast of a permanent, global warming that was wholeheartedly welcomed. Illuminating scientific arguments that once celebrated the impact of economic activities on environmental change, A Temperate Empire showcases an imperial, colonial, and early American history of climate change.
Download or read book A Temperate Empire written by Anya Zilberstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Controversy over the role of human activity in causing climate change is pervasive in contemporary society. But, as Anya Zilberstein shows in this work, debates about the politics and science of climate are nothing new. Indeed, they began as early as the settlement of English colonists in North America, well before the age of industrialization. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many early Americans believed that human activity and population growth were essential to moderating the harsh extremes of cold and heat in the New World. In the preindustrial British settler colonies in particular, it was believed that the right kinds of people were agents of climate warming and that this was a positive and deliberate goal of industrious activity, rather than an unintended and lamentable side effect of development. A Temperate Empire explores the ways that colonists studied and tried to remake local climates in New England and Nova Scotia according to their plans for settlement and economic growth. For colonial officials, landowners, naturalists, and other elites, the frigid, long winters and short, muggy summers were persistent sources of anxiety. These early Americans became intensely interested in reimagining and reducing their vulnerability to the climate. Linking climate to race, they assured would-be migrants that hardy Europeans were already habituated to the severe northern weather and Caribbean migrants' temperaments would be improved by it. Even more, they drew on a widespread understanding of a reciprocal relationship between a mild climate and the prosperity of empire, promoting the notion that land cultivation and the expansion of colonial farms would increasingly moderate the climate. One eighteenth-century naturalist observed that European settlement and industry had already brought about a "more temperate, uniform, and equal" climate worldwide-a forecast of a permanent, global warming that was wholeheartedly welcomed. Illuminating scientific arguments that once celebrated the impact of economic activities on environmental change, A Temperate Empire showcases an imperial, colonial, and early American history of climate change.
Download or read book Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire written by Felix Driver and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contrast between the temperate and the tropical is one of the most enduring themes in the history of the Western geographical imagination. Caught between the demands of experience and representation, documentation and fantasy, travelers in the tropics have often treated tropical nature as a foil to the temperate, to all that is civilized, modest, and enlightened. Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire explores images of the tropical world—maps, paintings, botanical drawings, photographs, diagrams, and texts—produced by European and American travelers over the past three centuries. Bringing together a group of distinguished contributors from disciplines across the arts and humanities, this volume contains eleven beautifully illustrated essays—arranged in three sections devoted to voyages, mappings, and sites—that consider the ways that tropical places were encountered, experienced, and represented in visual form. Covering a wide range of tropical sites in the Pacific, South Asia, West Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, the book will appeal to a broad readership: scholars of postcolonial studies, art history, literature, imperial history, history of science, geography, and anthropology.
Download or read book Visible Empire written by Daniela Bleichmar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-10-08 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked—until now. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a window into the worlds of Enlightenment science, visual culture, and empire. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.
Download or read book Pineapple Culture written by Gary Y Okihiro and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pineapple Culture is a dazzling history of the world's tropical and temperate zones told through the pineapple's illustrative career. --from publisher description
Download or read book Ornamentalism written by David Cannadine and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ornamentalism is a vividly evocative account of a vanished era, a major reassessment of Britain and its imperial past, and a trenchant and disturbing analysis of what it means to be a post-imperial nation today.
Download or read book A Temperate Forest Food Chain written by Rebecca Hogue Wojahn and published by Lerner Publications. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Profiles a variety of North American forest consumers, producers, and decomposers, explaining how each one fits into the region.
Download or read book The Fate of Rome written by Kyle Harper and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How devastating viruses, pandemics, and other natural catastrophes swept through the far-flung Roman Empire and helped to bring down one of the mightiest civilizations of the ancient world Here is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the Roman Empire. The Fate of Rome is the first book to examine the catastrophic role that climate change and infectious diseases played in the collapse of Rome’s power—a story of nature’s triumph over human ambition. Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. He takes readers from Rome’s pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unraveling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted. Harper describes how the Romans were resilient in the face of enormous environmental stress, until the besieged empire could no longer withstand the combined challenges of a “little ice age” and recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague. A poignant reflection on humanity’s intimate relationship with the environment, The Fate of Rome provides a sweeping account of how one of history’s greatest civilizations encountered and endured, yet ultimately succumbed to the cumulative burden of nature’s violence. The example of Rome is a timely reminder that climate change and germ evolution have shaped the world we inhabit—in ways that are surprising and profound.
Download or read book Difference and Disease written by Suman Seth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-07 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suman Seth reveals how histories of medicine, empire, race and slavery intertwined in the eighteenth-century British Empire.
Download or read book Empire written by Niall Ferguson and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2012-10-25 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Niall Ferguson's acclaimed bestseller on the highs and lows of Britain's empire Once vast swathes of the globe were coloured imperial red and Britannia ruled not just the waves, but the prairies of America, the plains of Asia, the jungles of Africa and the deserts of Arabia. Just how did a small, rainy island in the North Atlantic achieve all this? And why did the empire on which the sun literally never set finally decline and fall? Niall Ferguson's acclaimed Empire brilliantly unfolds the imperial story in all its splendours and its miseries, showing how a gang of buccaneers and gold-diggers planted the seed of the biggest empire in all history - and set the world on the road to modernity. 'The most brilliant British historian of his generation ... Ferguson examines the roles of "pirates, planters, missionaries, mandarins, bankers and bankrupts" in the creation of history's largest empire ... he writes with splendid panache ... and a seemingly effortless, debonair wit' Andrew Roberts 'Dazzling ... wonderfully readable' New York Review of Books 'A remarkably readable précis of the whole British imperial story - triumphs, deceits, decencies, kindnesses, cruelties and all' Jan Morris 'Empire is a pleasure to read and brims with insights and intelligence' Sunday Times
Download or read book Imperial Ecology written by Peder Anker and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aelian's Historical Miscellany is a pleasurable example of light reading for Romans of the early third century. Offering engaging anecdotes about historical figures, retellings of legendary events, and descriptive pieces - in sum: amusement, information, and variety - Aelian's collection of nuggets and narratives could be enjoyed by a wide reading public. A rather similar book had been published in Latin in the previous century by Aulus Gellius; Aelian is a late, perhaps the last, representative of what had been a very popular genre. Here then are anecdotes about the famous Greek philosophers, poets, historians, and playwrights; myths instructively retold; moralizing tales about heroes and rulers, athletes and wise men; reports about styles in dress, foods and drink, lovers, gift-giving practices, entertainments, religious beliefs and death customs; and comments on Greek painting. Some of the information is not preserved in any other source. Underlying it all are Aelian's Stoic ideals as well as this Roman's great admiration for the culture of the Greeks (whose language he borrowed for his writings).
Download or read book Making Climate Change History written by Joshua P. Howe and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection pulls together key documents from the scientific and political history of climate change, including congressional testimony, scientific papers, newspaper editorials, court cases, and international declarations. Far more than just a compendium of source materials, the book uses these documents as a way to think about history, while at the same time using history as a way to approach the politics of climate change from a new perspective. Making Climate Change History provides the necessary background to give readers the opportunity to pose critical questions and create plausible answers to help them understand climate change in its historical context; it also illustrates the relevance of history to building effective strategies for dealing with the climatic challenges of the future.
Download or read book An Empire Wilderness written by Robert D. Kaplan and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-11-12 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having reported on some of the world's most violent, least understood regions in his bestsellers Balkan Ghosts and The Ends of the Earth, Robert Kaplan now returns to his native land, the United States of America. Traveling, like Tocqueville and John Gunther before him, through a political and cultural landscape in transition, Kaplan reveals a nation shedding a familiar identity as it assumes a radically new one. An Empire Wilderness opens in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where the first white settlers moved into Indian country and where Manifest Destiny was born. In a world whose future conflicts can barely be imagined, it is also the place where the army trains its men to fight the next war. "A nostalgic view of the United States is deliberately cultivated here," Kaplan writes, "as if to bind the uncertain future to a reliable past." From Fort Leavenworth, Kaplan travels west to the great cities of the heartland--to St. Louis, once a glorious shipping center expected to outshine imperial Rome and now touted, with its desolate inner city and miles of suburban gated communities, as "the most average American city." Kaplan continues west to Omaha; down through California; north from Mexico, across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas; up to Montana and Canada, and back through Oregon. He visits Mexican border settlements and dust-blown county sheriffs' offices, Indian reservations and nuclear bomb plants, cattle ranches in the Oklahoma Panhandle, glacier-mantled forests in the Pacific Northwest, swanky postsuburban sprawls and grim bus terminals, and comes, at last, to the great battlefield at Vicksburg, Mississippi, where an earlier generation of Americans gave their lives for their vision of an American future. But what, if anything, he asks, will today's Americans fight and die for? At Vicksburg Kaplan contemplates the new America through which he has just traveled--an America of sharply polarized communities that draws its population from pools of talent far beyond its borders; an America where the distance between winners and losers grows exponentially as corporations assume gov-ernment functions and the wealthy find themselves more closely linked to their business associates in India and China than to their poorer neighbors a few miles away; an America where old loyalties and allegiances are vanishing and new ones are only beginning to emerge. The new America he found is in the pages of this book. Kaplan gives a precise and chilling vision of how the most successful nation the world has ever known is entering the final, and highly uncertain, phase of its history.
Download or read book Snowshoe Country written by Thomas M. Wickman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An environmental and cultural history of winter in the colonial Northeast, examining indigenous and settler knowledge of life in the cold.
Download or read book Race for Empire written by Takashi Fujitani and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race for Empire offers a profound and challenging reinterpretation of nationalism, racism, and wartime mobilization during the Asia-Pacific war. In parallel case studies—of Japanese Americans mobilized to serve in the United States Army and of Koreans recruited or drafted into the Japanese military—T. Fujitani examines the U.S. and Japanese empires as they struggled to manage racialized populations while waging total war. Fujitani probes governmental policies and analyzes representations of these soldiers—on film, in literature, and in archival documents—to reveal how characteristics of racism, nationalism, capitalism, gender politics, and the family changed on both sides. He demonstrates that the United States and Japan became increasingly alike over the course of the war, perhaps most tellingly in their common attempts to disavow racism even as they reproduced it in new ways and forms.
Download or read book Orientalism and Empire written by Austin Jersild and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2002 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orientalism and Empire sheds new light on the little-studied Russian empire in the Caucasus by exploring the tension between national and imperial identities on the Russian frontier. Austin Jersild contributes to the growing literature on Russian "orientalism" and the Russian encounter with Islam, and reminds us of the imperial background and its contribution to the formation of the twentieth-century ethno-territorial Soviet state. Orientalism and Empire describes the efforts of imperial integration and incorporation that emerged in the wake of the long war. Jersild discusses religion, ethnicity, archaeology, transcription of languages, customary law, and the fate of Shamil to illustrate the work of empire-builders and the emerging imperial imagination. Drawing on both Russian and Georgian materials from Tbilisi, he shows how shared cultural concerns between Russians and Georgians were especially important to the formation of the empire in the region.
Download or read book A Not So New World written by Christopher M. Parsons and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-09-21 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Samuel de Champlain founded the colony of Quebec in 1608, he established elaborate gardens where he sowed French seeds he had brought with him and experimented with indigenous plants that he found in nearby fields and forests. Following Champlain's example, fellow colonists nurtured similar gardens through the Saint Lawrence Valley and Great Lakes region. In A Not-So-New World, Christopher Parsons observes how it was that French colonists began to learn about Native environments and claimed a mandate to cultivate vegetation that did not differ all that much from that which they had left behind. As Parsons relates, colonists soon discovered that there were limits to what they could accomplish in their gardens. The strangeness of New France became woefully apparent, for example, when colonists found that they could not make French wine out of American grapes. They attributed the differences they discovered to Native American neglect and believed that the French colonial project would rehabilitate and restore the plant life in the region. However, the more colonists experimented with indigenous species and communicated their findings to the wider French Atlantic world, the more foreign New France appeared to French naturalists and even to the colonists themselves. Parsons demonstrates how the French experience of attempting to improve American environments supported not only the acquisition and incorporation of Native American knowledge but also the development of an emerging botanical science that focused on naming new species. Exploring the moment in which settlers, missionaries, merchants, and administrators believed in their ability to shape the environment to better resemble the country they left behind, A Not-So-New World reveals that French colonial ambitions were fueled by a vision of an ecologically sustainable empire.
