Download or read book American Travel and Empire written by Susan P. Castillo and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection, leading scholars in the field examine the interfaces between narratives of travel and of empire. The term 'American', used here in the hemispheric sense, and 'American travel writing' include both writing about America by visitors and writings by Americans abroad. The contributors are recognized specialists in different periods of American literature and travel writing.
Download or read book American Travel and Empire written by Susan P. Castillo and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, leading scholars examine the interfaces between narratives of travel and empire. Including both writing about America by visitors and the travel writing of Americans abroad, this collection explores the ways in which descriptions of the landscapes and peoples of colonized areas shaped our perceptions, as well as other issues related to the American empire, such as the transmission of images and metaphor between colony and metropolis, the portrayal of cultures as primitive or wild, the cultural and economic hegemony underlying American and European travel writing, and the deployment of cultural encounters to reinforce sovereign cultural practices.
Download or read book Negotiating Paradise written by Dennis Merrill and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accounts of U.S. empire building in Latin America typically portray politically and economically powerful North Americans descending on their southerly neighbors to engage in lopsided negotiations. Dennis Merrill's comparative history of U.S. tourism in L
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 Global West American Frontier written by David M. Wrobel and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thoughtful examination of a century of travel writing about the American West overturns a variety of popular and academic stereotypes. Looking at both European and American travelers’ accounts of the West, from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, David Wrobel offers a counter narrative to the nation’s romantic entanglement with its western past and suggests the importance of some long-overlooked authors, lively and perceptive witnesses to our history who deserve new attention. Prior to the professionalization of academic disciplines, the reading public gained much of its knowledge about the world from travel writing. Travel writers found a wide and respectful audience for their reports on history, geography, and the natural world, in addition to reporting on aboriginal cultures before the advent of anthropology as a discipline. Although in recent decades western historians have paid little attention to travel writing, Wrobel demonstrates that this genre in fact offers an important and rich understanding of the American West—one that extends and complicates a simple reading of the West that promotes the notions of Manifest Destiny or American exceptionalism. Wrobel finds counterpoints to the mythic West of the nineteenth century in such varied accounts as George Catlin’s Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians in England, France, and Belgium (1852), Richard Francis Burton’s The City of the Saints (1861), and Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (1897), reminders of the messy and contradictory world that people navigated in the past much as they do in the present. His book is a testament to the instructive ways in which the best travel writers have represented the West.
Download or read book Placing Empire written by Kate McDonald and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Placing Empire examines the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism through a study of Japanese travel and tourism to Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan between the late nineteenth century and the early 1950s. In a departure from standard histories of Japan, this book shows how debates over the role of colonized lands reshaped the social and spatial imaginary of the modern Japanese nation and how, in turn, this sociospatial imaginary affected the ways in which colonial difference was conceptualized and enacted. The book thus illuminates how ideas of place became central to the production of new forms of colonial hierarchy as empires around the globe transitioned from an era of territorial acquisition to one of territorial maintenance.
Download or read book Americans in the Treasure House written by Jason Ruiz and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-01-06 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book examines travel to Mexico during the Porfiriato (the long dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz 1876-1911), focusing especially on the role of travelers in shaping ideas of Mexico as a logical place for Americans to extend their economic and cultural influence in the hemisphere. Overland travel between the United States and Mexico became instantly faster, smoother, and cheaper when workers connected the two countries' rail lines in 1884, creating intense curiosity in the United States about Mexico, its people, and its opportunities for business and pleasure. As a result, so many Americans began to travel south of the border during the Porfiriato that observers from both sides of the border began to quip that the visiting hordes of tourists and business speculators constituted a "foreign invasion," a phrase laced with irony given that it appeared at the height of public debate in the United States about the nation's imperial future. These travelers created a rich and varied record of their journeys, constructing Mexico as a nation at the cusp of modernity but requiring foreign intervention to reach its full potential"--
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 Empire in the Air written by Chandra D. Bhimull and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-12-12 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention, 2019 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, given by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology Honorable Mention, 2019 Sharon Stephens Prize, given by the American Ethnological Society Examines the role that race played in the inception of the airline industry Empire in the Air is at once a history of aviation, and an examination of how air travel changed lives along the transatlantic corridor of the African diaspora. Focusing on Britain and its Caribbean colonies, Chandra Bhimull reveals how the black West Indies shaped the development of British Airways. Bhimull offers a unique analysis of early airline travel, illuminating the links among empire, aviation and diaspora, and in doing so provides insights into how racially oppressed people experienced air travel. The emergence of artificial flight revolutionized the movement of people and power, and Bhimull makes the connection between airplanes and the other vessels that have helped make and maintain the African diaspora: the slave ships of the Middle Passage, the tracks of the Underground Railroad, and Marcus Garvey’s black-owned ocean liner. As a new technology, airline travel retained the racialist ideas and practices that were embedded in British imperialism, and these ideas shaped every aspect of how commercial aviation developed, from how airline routes were set, to who could travel easily and who could not. The author concludes with a look at airline travel today, suggesting that racism is still enmeshed in the banalities of contemporary flight.
Download or read book The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures written by Ralph Bauer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ralph Bauer presents a comparative investigation of colonial prose narratives in Spanish and British America from 1542 to 1800. He discusses narratives of shipwreck, captivity, and travel, as well as imperial and natural histories of the New World in the context of transformative early modern scientific ideologies. Bauer positions the narrative models promoted by the 'New Sciences' during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within the context of the geopolitical question of how knowledge can be centrally controlled in outwardly expanding empires.
Download or read book Travel Writing Form and Empire written by Julia Kuehn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-11-19 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays is an important contribution to travel writing studies -- looking beyond the explicitly political questions of postcolonial and gender discourses, it considers the form, poetics, institutions and reception of travel writing in the history of empire and its aftermath. Starting from the premise that travel writing studies has received much of its impetus and theoretical input from the sometimes overgeneralized precepts of postcolonial studies and gender studies, this collection aims to explore more widely and more locally the expression of imperialist discourse in travel writing, and also to locate within contemporary travel writing attempts to evade or re-engage with the power politics of such discourse. There is a double focus then to explore further postcolonial theory in European travel writing (Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanic), and to trace the emergence of postcolonial forms of travel writing. The thread that draws the two halves of the collection together is an interest in form and relations between form and travel.
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 372 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 Travel Writing and Empire written by Steven H. Clark and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Travel writing has become central to postcolonial studies. This book provides an introduction to the genre, particularly to its dynamics of power and representation, and the degree to which it has promoted ideologies of empire.The book combines detailed evaluations of major contemporary models of analysis - new historicism, travelling theory, and post-colonial studies - with a series of specific studies detailing the complicity of the genre with a history of violent incursion from Columbus' reports from the New World through to the nomadism of postmodern travelogue.Among its particular areas of concern are* 'Othering' discourses - of cannibalism and infanticide* the production of colonial knowledge - geographic,medicinal, zoological* the role of sexual anxiety in the constructionof the gendered, travelling body* the interplay between imperial and domestic spheres* reappropration of alien discourse by indigenous cultures.Post-colonial studies has concentrated on travellers as conduits of erasure and appropriation. This book resists the temptation to think in terms of a simple monolithic Eurocentrism and offers a more complex reading of texts produced before, during and after periods of imperial ascendency. In doing so, it provides a more nuanced account of the hegemonic functions of travel-writing. As such it is necessary reading for students and academics of cultural studies, literary theory, anthropology and history.
Download or read book Travels Explorations and Empires 1770 1835 Part I Vol 4 written by Tim Fulford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-24 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of work that attempts to reflect the diversity of travel literature from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This literature often reveals something of the cultural and gender difference of the travellers, as well as ideas on colonialism, anthropology and slavery.
Download or read book Empire of the Air written by Jenifer Van Vleck and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jenifer Van Vleck's fascinating history reveals the central role commercial aviation played in the United States' ascent to global preeminence in the twentieth century. As U.S. military and economic influence grew, the federal government partnered with the aviation industry to deliver American power across the globe and to sell the idea of the "American Century" to the public at home and abroad. The airplane promised to extend the frontiers of the United States "to infinity," as Pan American World Airways president Juan Trippe said. As it accelerated the global circulation of U.S. capital, consumer goods, technologies, weapons, popular culture, and expertise, few places remained distant from Wall Street and Washington. Aviation promised to secure a new type of empire--an empire of the air instead of the land, which emphasized access to markets rather than the conquest of territory and made the entire world America's sphere of influence. By the late 1960s, however, foreign airlines and governments were challenging America's control of global airways, and the domestic aviation industry hit turbulent times. Just as the history of commercial aviation helps to explain the ascendance of American power, its subsequent challenges reflect the limits and contradictions of the American Century.
Download or read book Americans in the Treasure House written by Jason Ruiz and published by Univ of TX + ORM. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of American travel to Mexico from 1884 to 1911 examines how the influx of tourists and speculators altered perceptions of US influence. When railroads connected the United States and Mexico in 1884, travel between the two countries became easier and cheaper. Americans developed an intense curiosity about Mexico, its people, and its opportunities for business and pleasure. Indeed, so many Americans visited Mexico during the Porfiriato—the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz—that observers on both sides of the border called it a “foreign invasion.” This, as Jason Ruiz demonstrates, was an especially apt phrase. In Americans in the Treasure House, Ruiz argues that this influx of travelers helped shape American perceptions of Mexico as a logical place to exert its cultural and economic influence. Analyzing a wealth of evidence ranging from travelogues and literary representations to picture postcards and snapshots, Ruiz shows how American travelers constructed an image of Mexico as a nation requiring foreign intervention to reach its full potential. Most importantly, he relates the rapid rise in travel and travel discourse to complex questions about national identity, state power, and economic relations across the US–Mexico border.
Download or read book American Empire written by A. G. Hopkins and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 1002 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Compelling, provocative, and learned. This book is a stunning and sophisticated reevaluation of the American empire. Hopkins tells an old story in a truly new way--American history will never be the same again."--Jeremi Suri, author of The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office.Office.
