Download or read book In Darkest Alaska written by Robert Campbell and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-03 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before Alaska became a mining bonanza, it was a scenic bonanza, a place larger in the American imagination than in its actual borders. Prior to the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, thousands of scenic adventurers journeyed along the Inside Passage, the nearly thousand-mile sea-lane that snakes up the Pacific coast from Puget Sound to Icy Strait. Both the famous—including wilderness advocate John Muir, landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, and photographers Eadweard Muybridge and Edward Curtis—and the long forgotten—a gay ex-sailor, a former society reporter, an African explorer, and a neurasthenic Methodist minister—returned with fascinating accounts of their Alaskan journeys, becoming advance men and women for an expanding United States. In Darkest Alaska explores the popular images conjured by these travelers' tales, as well as their influence on the broader society. Drawing on lively firsthand accounts, archival photographs, maps, and other ephemera of the day, historian Robert Campbell chronicles how Gilded Age sightseers were inspired by Alaska's bounty of evolutionary treasures, tribal artifacts, geological riches, and novel thrills to produce a wealth of highly imaginative reportage about the territory. By portraying the territory as a "Last West" ripe for American conquest, tourists helped pave the way for settlement and exploitation.
Download or read book How to Hide an Empire written by Daniel Immerwahr and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.
Download or read book Kodiak Kreol written by Gwenn A. Miller and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-21 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1780s to the 1820s, Kodiak Island, the first capital of Imperial Russia's only overseas colony, was inhabited by indigenous Alutiiq people and colonized by Russians. Together, they established an ethnically mixed "kreol" community. Against the backdrop of the fur trade, the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church, and competition among Pacific colonial powers, Gwenn A. Miller brings to light the social, political, and economic patterns of life in the settlement, making clear that Russia's modest colonial effort off the Alaskan coast fully depended on the assistance of Alutiiq people. In this context, Miller argues, the relationships that developed between Alutiiq women and Russian men were critical keys to the initial success of Russia's North Pacific venture. Although Russia's Alaskan enterprise began some two centuries after other European powers—Spain, England, Holland, and France—started to colonize North America, many aspects of the contacts between Russians and Alutiiq people mirror earlier colonial episodes: adaptation to alien environments, the "discovery" and exploitation of natural resources, complicated relations between indigenous peoples and colonizing Europeans, attempts by an imperial state to moderate those relations, and a web of Christianizing practices. Russia's Pacific colony, however, was founded on the cusp of modernity at the intersection of earlier New World forms of colonization and the bureaucratic age of high empire. Miller's attention to the coexisting intimacy and violence of human connections on Kodiak offers new insights into the nature of colonialism in a little-known American outpost of European imperial power.
Download or read book Space Time Colonialism written by Juliana Hu Pegues and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the enduring "last frontier," Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in the shift from western continental expansion to global empire. In this richly theorized work, Juliana Hu Pegues evaluates four key historical periods in U.S.-Alaskan history: the Alaskan purchase, the Gold Rush, the emergence of salmon canneries, and the World War II era. In each, Hu Pegues recognizes colonial and racial entanglements between Alaska Native peoples and Asian immigrants. In the midst of this complex interplay, the American colonial project advanced by differentially racializing and gendering Indigenous and Asian peoples, constructing Asian immigrants as "out of place" and Alaska Natives as "out of time." Counter to this space-time colonialism, Native and Asian peoples created alternate modes of meaning and belonging through their literature, photography, political organizing, and sociality. Offering an intersectional approach to U.S. empire, Indigenous dispossession, and labor exploitation, Space-Time Colonialism makes clear that Alaska is essential to understanding both U.S. imperial expansion and the machinations of settler colonialism.
Download or read book Converging Empires written by Andrea Geiger and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making a vital contribution to our understanding of North American borderlands history through its examination of the northernmost stretches of the U.S.-Canada border, Andrea Geiger highlights the role that the North Pacific borderlands played in the construction of race and citizenship on both sides of the international border from 1867, when the United States acquired Russia's interests in Alaska, through the end of World War II. Imperial, national, provincial, territorial, reserve, and municipal borders worked together to create a dynamic legal landscape that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people negotiated in myriad ways as they traversed these borderlands. Adventurers, prospectors, laborers, and settlers from Europe, Canada, the United States, Latin America, and Asia made and remade themselves as they crossed from one jurisdiction to another. Within this broader framework, Geiger pays particular attention to the ways in which Japanese migrants and the Indigenous people who had made this borderlands region their home for millennia—Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian among others—negotiated the web of intersecting boundaries that emerged over time, charting the ways in which they infused these reconfigured national, provincial, and territorial spaces with new meanings.
Download or read book Empire Maker written by Kenneth N. Owens and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A native of northern Russia, Alexander Baranov was a middle-aged merchant trader with no prior experience in the fur trade when, in 1790, he arrived in North America to assume command over Russia’s highly profitable sea otter business. With the title of chief manager, he strengthened his leadership role after the formation of the Russian American Company in 1799. An adventuresome, dynamic, and charismatic leader, he proved to be something of a commercial genius in Alaska, making huge profits for company partners and shareholders in Irkutsk and St. Petersburg while receiving scandalously little support from the homeland. Baranov receives long overdue attention in Kenneth Owens’s Empire Maker, the first scholarly biography of Russian America’s virtual imperial viceroy. His eventful life included shipwrecks, battles with Native forces, clashes with rival traders and Russian Orthodox missionaries, and an enduring marriage to a Kodiak Alutiiq woman with whom he had two children. In the process, the book reveals maritime Alaska and northern California during the Baranov era as fascinating cultural borderlands, where Russian, English, Spanish, and New England Yankee traders and indigenous peoples formed complex commercial, political, and domestic relationships that continue to influence these regions today.
Download or read book Beau Monde on Empire s Edge written by Mayhill C. Fowler and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge, Mayhill C. Fowler tells the story of the rise and fall of a group of men who created culture both Soviet and Ukrainian. This collective biography showcases new aspects of the politics of cultural production in the Soviet Union by focusing on theater and on the multi-ethnic borderlands. Unlike their contemporaries in Moscow or Leningrad, these artists from the regions have been all but forgotten despite the quality of their art. Beau Monde restores the periphery to the center of Soviet culture. Sources in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Yiddish highlight the important multi-ethnic context and the challenges inherent in constructing Ukrainian culture in a place of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Jews. Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge traces the growing overlap between the arts and the state in the early Soviet years, and explains the intertwining of politics and culture in the region today.
Download or read book Alaska written by Walter R. Borneman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2004-01-20 with total page 635 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Alaska is filled with stories of new land and new riches -- and ever present are new people with competing views over how the valuable resources should be used: Russians exploiting a fur empire; explorers checking rival advances; prospectors stampeding to the clarion call of "Gold!"; soldiers battling out a decisive chapter in world war; oil wildcatters looking for a different kind of mineral wealth; and always at the core of these disputes is the question of how the land is to be used and by whom. While some want Alaska to remain static, others are in the vanguard of change. Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land shows that there are no easy answers on either side and that Alaska will always be crossing the next frontier.
Download or read book Bye Bye Miss American Empire written by Bill Kauffman and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2010-07-10 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book "traces the historical roots of the secessionist spirit, and introduces us to the often radical, sometimes quixotic, and highly charged movements that want to decentralize and re-localize power"--P. [4] of cover.
Download or read book An oshi Lingit Aan K written by Nora Dauenhauer and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation Winner of the 2009 Alaska Library Association's Alaskana of the Year Award The Battles of Sitka were seminal events in the history of the Tlingit people, in the multicultural history of Alaska, and, ultimately, in the history of America. The Tlingits saw themselves as victors even as they formally ceded to the Russians the site of their village and fort, now knows as Sitka. This book covers the period from the first arrival of European and American fur traders in Tlingit territory to the establishment of a permanent Russian presence in the Pacific Northwest. It presents transcriptions and English translations of Tlingit oral traditions recorded almost fifty years ago and translations of newly available Russian historical documents. Although independent in origin and transmission, these accounts support one another to a remarkable degree on the main historical point. The Tlingit-Russian conflict is usually presented as a confrontation between "whites" with superior arms, and brave but outnumbered and poorly armed Natives. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Tlingits saw themselves as victors even as they formally ceded to the Russians the site of their village and fort, now known as Sitka. Setting aside ancient rules of story ownership, a new generation of Tlingit clan leaders has decided to publish the stories told by their ancestors so that the Tlingit point of view would be known and succeeding generations would not forget their people's history. Including Russian historical documents, travelers' accounts of information interactions between the formerly warring parties after the battles, and Dr. W. Schuhmacher's work on the role played by British and American skippers, this book inquires into and provides some answers to the fundamental question, Who owns history? Photographs of objects now in Russian and American museums - from the favorite battle hammer of Tlingit war chief Katlian to the metal ceremonial hat Baranov commissioned for the peace ceremony - enrich the book, along with portraits of key historical figures and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century charts of Tlingit territory. Also included is the journal of Dmitrii Tarkhanov, a gazetteer, a glossary, Tlingit and Russian name lists, and an index.
Download or read book Kivalina written by Christine Shearer and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For the people of Kivalina, Alaska, the price of further climate change denial could be the complete devasation of their lives and culture. Their village must be relocated to survive, but neither the fossil fuel giants nor the U.S. government are willing to take full responsibility."--P. [4] of cover.
Download or read book Glorious Misadventures written by Owen Matthews and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian Empire once extended deep into America: in 1818 Russia's furthest outposts were in California and Hawaii. The dreamer behind this great Imperial vision was Nikolai Rezanov ? diplomat, adventurer, courtier, millionaire and gambler. His quest to plant Russian colonies from Siberia to California led him to San Francisco, where he was captivated by Conchita, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Spanish Governor, who embodied his dreams of both love and empire. From the glittering court of Catherine the Great to the wilds of the New World, Matthews conjures a brilliantly original portrait of one of Russia's most eccentric Empire-builders.
Download or read book Tin Can Country written by Anjuli Grantham and published by . This book was released on 2019-05 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Canneries are the sites of Alaska history, contends this multifaceted exploration of the salmon industry in Southeast Alaska. This thematic view includes histories of specific canneries, biographies of individuals who are nearly as colorful as the brightly hued labels that advertised Alaska salmon to the world, and essays that ground the history of canneries in the context of the era. This lushly illustrated volume contains historic photographs, custom made maps, and an unparalleled collection of rare salmon can labels and advertising materials."--Back cover.
Download or read book Colonial Crucible written by Alfred W. McCoy and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the nineteenth century the United States swiftly occupied a string of small islands dotting the Caribbean and Western Pacific, from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Hawaii and the Philippines. Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State reveals how this experiment in direct territorial rule subtly but profoundly shaped U.S. policy and practice—both abroad and, crucially, at home. Edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, the essays in this volume show how the challenge of ruling such far-flung territories strained the U.S. state to its limits, creating both the need and the opportunity for bold social experiments not yet possible within the United States itself. Plunging Washington’s rudimentary bureaucracy into the white heat of nationalist revolution and imperial rivalry, colonialism was a crucible of change in American statecraft. From an expansion of the federal government to the creation of agile public-private networks for more effective global governance, U.S. empire produced far-reaching innovations. Moving well beyond theory, this volume takes the next step, adding a fine-grained, empirical texture to the study of U.S. imperialism by analyzing its specific consequences. Across a broad range of institutions—policing and prisons, education, race relations, public health, law, the military, and environmental management—this formative experience left a lasting institutional imprint. With each essay distilling years, sometimes decades, of scholarship into a concise argument, Colonial Crucible reveals the roots of a legacy evident, most recently, in Washington’s misadventures in the Middle East.
Download or read book Russians in Tlingit America written by Nora Dauenhauer and published by Ewha Womans University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Battles of Sitka (1802 and 1804) were seminal events in the history of the Tlingit people, in the multicultural history of Alaska, and, ultimately, in the history of America. Anooshi Lingit Aani Ka / Russians in Tlingit America covers the period from the frist arrival of European and American fur traders in Tlingit territory to the establishment of a permanent Russian presence in the Pacific Northwest, presenting transcriptions and English translations of Tlingit oral traditions recorded almost fifty years ago and translations of newly available Russian historical documents. Although independent in origin and transmission, these accounts support one another to a remarkable degree on the main historical points. The Tlingit-Russian conflict is usually presented as a confrontation between "whites," with superior arms, and brave but outnumbered and poorly armed Natives. Northing could be further from the truth. The Tlingits saw themselves as victors even as they formally ceded to the Russian the site of their village and fort, now known as Sitka. Setting aside ancient rules of story ownership, a new generation of Tlingit clan leaders has decided to publish the stories told by their ancestors so that the Tlingit point of view would be known and succeeding generations would not forget their people's history. Including Russian historical documents, travelers' accounts of informal interactions between the formerly warring parties after the battles, and Dr. W. Schuhmacher's work on the role played by British and American skippers, Anooshi Lingit Aani Ka inquires into and provides some answers to the fundamental question, Who owns history? Photographs of objects now in Russian and American museums - from the favorite battle hammer of Tlingit war chief Katlian to the metal ceremonial hat Baranov commissioned for the peace ceremony - enrich the book, along with portraits of key historical figures and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century charts of Tlingit territory. Also included is the journal of Dmitrii Tarkhanov, a gazetteer, a glossary, and Tlingit and Russian name lists.
Download or read book The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U S Culture written by Amy Kaplan and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2005-03-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States has always imagined that its identity as a nation is insulated from violent interventions abroad, as if a line between domestic and foreign affairs could be neatly drawn. Yet this book argues that such a distinction, so obviously impracticable in our own global era, has been illusory at least since the war with Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century and the later wars against Spain, Cuba, and the Philippines. In this book, Amy Kaplan shows how U.S. imperialism--from "Manifest Destiny" to the "American Century"--has profoundly shaped key elements of American culture at home, and how the struggle for power over foreign peoples and places has disrupted the quest for domestic order. The neatly ordered kitchen in Catherine Beecher's household manual may seem remote from the battlefields of Mexico in 1846, just as Mark Twain's Mississippi may seem distant from Honolulu in 1866, or W. E. B. Du Bois's reports of the East St. Louis Race Riot from the colonization of Africa in 1917. But, as this book reveals, such apparently disparate locations are cast into jarring proximity by imperial expansion. In literature, journalism, film, political speeches, and legal documents, Kaplan traces the undeniable connections between American efforts to quell anarchy abroad and the eruption of such anarchy at the heart of the empire.
Download or read book Death at the Edges of Empire written by Shannon Bontrager and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-02 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2020 BookAuthority selection for best new American Civil War books Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead. In Death at the Edges of Empire Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memories of war expressed through American cultural traditions emerging within broader transatlantic and transpacific networks. Examining the pragmatic collaborations between middle-class Americans and government officials negotiating the contradictory terrain of empire and nation, Death at the Edges of Empire shows how Americans imposed modern order on the inevitability of death as well as how they used the war dead to reimagine political identities and opportunities into imperial ambitions.
