Download or read book Imaginary Cities of Gold written by Peter O. Koch and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2009-04-22 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanish conquistadors attempted to conquer the New World nearly a century before the English colonists established a permanent settlement at Jamestown. This book examines the unsuccessful elements of Spain's attempt at expanding its empire in the Americas, focusing particularly on the misadventures of three conquistadors. Part One tells the story of Cabeza de Vaca who, along with three other survivors of the ill-fated Panfilo de Narvaez expedition to Florida, spent nearly eight years among the various tribes that wandered across Texas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico before finding his way back to civilization. Their tales of lands rich with earthly delights served as inspiration for two epic but failed expeditions that make up the second and third parts of the book: Francisco de Coronado's quest to find the golden cities of Cibola and Hernando de Soto's efforts to find the rich kingdoms of Florida.
Download or read book Imaginary Cities written by Darran Anderson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”
Download or read book Imaginary Cities written by Darran Anderson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For as long as humans have gathered in cities, those cities have had their shining—or shadowy—counterparts. Imaginary cities, potential cities, future cities, perfect cities. It is as if the city itself, its inescapable gritty reality and elbow-to-elbow nature, demands we call into being some alternative, yearned-for better place. This book is about those cities. It’s neither a history of grand plans nor a literary exploration of the utopian impulse, but rather something different, hybrid, idiosyncratic. It’s a magpie’s book, full of characters and incidents and ideas drawn from cities real and imagined around the globe and throughout history. Thomas More’s allegorical island shares space with Soviet mega-planning; Marco Polo links up with James Joyce’s meticulously imagined Dublin; the medieval land of Cockaigne meets the hopeful future of Star Trek. With Darran Anderson as our guide, we find common themes and recurring dreams, tied to the seemingly ineluctable problems of our actual cities, of poverty and exclusion and waste and destruction. And that’s where Imaginary Cities becomes more than a mere—if ecstatically entertaining—intellectual exercise: for, as Anderson says, “If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined.” Every architect, philosopher, artist, writer, planner, or citizen who dreams up an imaginary city offers lessons for our real ones; harnessing those flights of hopeful fancy can help us improve the streets where we live. Though it shares DNA with books as disparate as Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, there’s no other book quite like Imaginary Cities. After reading it, you’ll walk the streets of your city—real or imagined—with fresh eyes.
Download or read book The City of Gold and Lead written by John Christopher and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will and his friends return to the City of the Tripods—and risk their lives—in this second book of a classic alien trilogy ideal for fans of Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave and Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Shadow Children series. When Will and his friends arrived at the White Mountains, they thought everything would be okay. They’d found a safe haven where the mechanical monsters called Tripods could not find them. But once there, they wonder about the world around them and how they are faring against the machines. In order to save everyone else, Will and his friends want to take down the Tripods once and for all. That means journeying to the Tripod capital: the City of Gold and Lead. Although the journey will be difficult, the real danger comes once Will is inside the city, where Tripods roam freely and humans are even more enslaved than they are on the outside. Without anyone to help him, Will must learn the secrets of the Tripods—and how to take them down—before they figure out that he’s a spy…and he can only pretend to be brainwashed for so long.
Download or read book Jelly s Gold written by David Housewright and published by Minotaur Books. This book was released on 2009-05-12 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rushmore McKenzie, a retired St. Paul policeman and unexpected millionaire, often works as an unlicensed P.I., doing favors as it suits him. When graduate students Ivy Flynn and Josh Berglund show up with a story about $8 million in missing stolen gold from the ‘30s, McKenzie is intrigued. In the early 20th century, St. Paul, Minnesota was an open city —a place where gangsters could come and stay unmolested by the local authorities. Frank "Jelly" Nash was suspected of masterminding a daring robbery of gold bars in 1933, but, before he could unload it, he was killed in the Kansas City Massacre. His gold, they believe, is still somewhere in St. Paul. But they aren't the only ones looking. So are a couple of two-bit thugs, a woman named Heavenly, a local big-wig, and others. When Berglund is shot dead outside of Ivy's apartment, the treasure hunt turns unexpectedly deadly. In this hard-boiled mystery from David Housewright, Mac McKenzie is looking for more than a legendary stash from seventy-five years ago---he's looking for a killer and the long hidden truth behind Jelly's gold.
Download or read book Empire in Black and Gold written by Adrian Tchaikovsky and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-06-28 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The city states of the Lowlands have lived in peace for decades, bastions of civilization, prosperity and sophistication, protected by treaties, trade and a belief in the reasonable nature of their neighbors. But meanwhile, in far-off corners, the Wasp Empire has been devouring city after city with its highly trained armies, its machines, it killing Art . . . And now its hunger for conquest and war has become insatiable. Only the aging Stenwold Maker, spymaster, artificer and statesman, can see that the long days of peace are over. It falls upon his shoulders to open the eyes of his people, before a black-and-gold tide sweeps down over the Lowlands and burns away everything in its path. But first he must stop himself from becoming the Empire's latest victim.
Download or read book Invisible Cities written by Italo Calvino and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
Download or read book Revolvers and Pistolas Vaqueros and Caballeros written by D. H. Figueredo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This riveting exposé reveals how a distorted belief in Anglo superiority necessitated the rewriting of American western history, replacing heroic images of Mexican and Spanish cowboys with negative stereotypes. Early Anglo settlers in the Old West crafted negative images of Latinos in part to help justify the takeover of land occupied by Mexicans and Spaniards at the time. Unfortunately, these depictions were perpetuated throughout the 20th century in art, popular culture, and media ... eventually reshaping the narrative of the American West to the exclusion of the non-Anglo people. This book contrasts dominant lore with historical reality to provide a broad overview of the history and contributions of Latinos in the Old West. Author D. H. Figueredo sets out to debunk the myths and falsehoods of the American West by chronicling the cultural perceptions that led to such historical inaccuracies. Through spellbinding accounts, chapters address such topics as the legends behind the caballeros, Mexican culture in the Old West, and the search for cities of gold in the Southwest. Arranged chronologically and thematically, the book examines how popular culture diminished the role of the Mexican vaqueros and illustrates how the image of the Anglo cowboy became the iconic symbol of the Old West.
Download or read book Perverse Feelings written by Suzanne Ashworth and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-09-23 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perverse Feelings: Poe and American Masculinity examines white masculinity in Poe's fiction and the culture it represents. Poe's men are tormented by chronic illness, deviant attachments, and ugly emotions. As it analyzes these afflictions, this book illuminates the pathologies of American masculinity that emerged in a terrible history of imperialism, capitalism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. One of its central contentions is that we can better understand a past and present American masculinity through a reckoning with its "perverse feelings." More pointedly, this book asks: What does masculinity feel? What does white American masculinity feel in the first decades of nation formation? What does it feel in the crucible of its revolution, its slave system, its democracy, its nascent capitalism, and its pursuit of happiness? What feelings besiege and beleaguer Poe's men? And what can they teach us about the antagonisms of contemporary white American masculinity?
Download or read book Walt Disney s Uncle Scrooge written by Carl Barks and published by Complete Carl Barks Disney Lib. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carl Barks's greatest creation: The miserly, excessively wealthy Scrooge McDuck, whose giant money bin, lucky dime, and constant wrangles with his nemeses the Beagle Boys are well-known to and beloved by young and old. This volume starts off with "Only a Poor Old Man," the defining Scrooge yarn (in fact his first big starring story) in which Scrooge's plan to hide his money in a lake goes terribly wrong. Two other long-form classics in this volume include "Tralla La La" (also known as "The Bottlecap Story," in which Scrooge's intrusion has terrible consequences for a money-less Eden) and "Back to the Klondike" (Barks disciple Don Rosa's favorite story, a crucial addition to Scrooge's early history, and famous for a censored bar brawl that was restored in later editions). Also in this volume are the full-length "The Secret of Atlantis," and over two dozen more shorter stories and one-page gags.
Download or read book The King s Fifth written by Scott O'Dell and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006-09-04 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newbery Honor Book: A “stunning” historical novel of a teenager’s journey from Spain to the New World in search of gold (Kirkus Reviews). Mapmaker Esteban de Sandoval is only seventeen years old, but he has experienced much adventure, traveling to the New World to hunt for gold with the Conquistadors. Whatever treasure they find, they were expected to give one-fifth of it to the king. But Esteban is accused of withholding the king’s fifth—and of murder. As he waits for his trial to begin, he recalls the experience of his journey: the men he sailed with, the young Native American girl who guided him—and the ways that it changed him—in this remarkable novel about Spanish colonialism by the author of such classics as Island of the Blue Dolphins.
Download or read book Esteban written by Dennis F. Herrick and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work Herrick dispels the myths and outright lies about Esteban. His biography emphasizes Esteban rather than the Spaniards whose exploits are often exaggerated and jingoistic in the sixteenth-century chronicles.
Download or read book World Food written by Mary Ellen Snodgrass and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-09-15 with total page 1882 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multicultural and interdisciplinary reference brings a fresh social and cultural perspective to the global history of food, foodstuffs, and cultural exchange from the age of discovery to contemporary times. Comprehensive in scope, this two-volume encyclopedia covers agriculture and industry, food preparation and regional cuisines, science and technology, nutrition and health, and trade and commerce, as well as key contemporary issues such as famine relief, farm subsidies, food safety, and the organic movement. Articles also include specific foodstuffs such as chocolate, potatoes, and tomatoes; topics such as Mediterranean diet and the Spice Route; and pivotal figures such as Marco Polo, Columbus, and Catherine de' Medici. Special features include: dozens of recipes representing different historic periods and cuisines of the world; listing of herbal foods and uses; and a chronology of key events/people in food history.
Download or read book William Hickling Prescott written by Peter O. Koch and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-04-27 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859) was one of those rare historians who effectively melded history and literature in an elegant, compelling writing style that appealed to the casual reader, while still meeting the strict criteria of the scholar. Prescott was the first American historian to achieve international recognition with his critically acclaimed History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Plagued by poor vision and chronic health issues, he was determined to make his mark as a historian. His follow-up work, The History of the Conquest of Mexico, is considered his masterpiece. Prescott went on to write A History of the Conquest of Peru, History of the Reign of Philip II and a 200-page addendum to William Robertson's History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V. Drawing on correspondence and journal entries, this book traces the life of one of America's most celebrated historians.
Download or read book John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood written by Peter O. Koch and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-01-16 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daring exploits and astounding achievements were common for two 19th century adventurers--John Lloyd Stephens, a New York lawyer and best-selling author, and Frederick Catherwood, a London architect and renowned topographical artist. Separately, these explorers covered much of the same ground, touring Italy, Greece, Egypt, Arabia, and the Holy Land in search of ancient sites that were of historical significance. Jointly, these adventurers endured many life-threatening obstacles in a determined effort that led to the discovery of nearly fifty forgotten Mayan cities buried deep in the jungles of Central America and Mexico. The vivid accounts penned by Stephens coupled with the magnificent drawings of ruins by Catherwood brought back to life a vanished civilization that both considered equal to the greatness of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The story concludes with the premature and tragic deaths of the two.
Download or read book Eldorado and the Quest for Fortune and Glory in South America written by Peter O. Koch and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-06-21 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the origin of the legend of El Dorado and the various expeditions that set out to locate that mysterious land of untold wealth in South America. Motivated by both fanciful rumors of a golden city ruled by a man who coated himself daily with gold dust, and the more practical allure of a region abundant in cinnamon trees (a spice that was worth its weight in gold to Europeans), many conquistadors convinced themselves that another native empire awaited their conquest. These quests for fortune and glory would lead to an encounter with fierce female warriors who were believed to be the Amazons of ancient Greek lore, and the discovery of the mighty river later named for the legendary Amazon tribe. The first half of this book details the lesser-known accounts of German interest in locating the wealth of a golden kingdom called Xerira and an elusive passage at Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo which supposedly led to the Pacific Ocean. The second section focuses on the various Spanish efforts to discover El Dorado, each of which was eventually doomed to despair, disappointment, and death.
Download or read book Border Witness written by Michael Dear and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Border Witness offers a surprising catalogue of films dealing with the US-Mexico border and released during the past 100 years. It compares these screen visions with what was happening on the ground at the time in both countries. From revolution through to the present global crisis, the films are left to speak for themselves, but their stories are measured alongside the author's experience following decades of research, writing, and activism along the line. Taken together, this book outlines a unique Border Film genre just now entering its Golden Age. This book also comes with a message to both nations that they should learn more from borderlanders about how to conduct cross-border lives"--
