Download or read book Liberia Portrait of a People written by Claude Peafrey and published by Bookbaby. This book was released on 2021-09-22 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the lives of everyday Liberians far removed from the atrocities and effects of civil war and the resulting second order effects on the country. Chronicling the lives of Liberians. in the interior and in the city, 'Liberia, portrait of a people' is a look at the tenacity, beauty and will of the Liberian people one person, community, town and city at a time.
Download or read book Liberia written by Frank Sherman and published by New Africa Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a general introduction to Liberia. It is comprehensive in scope covering a wide range of subjects from a historical and contemporary perspective. It is intended for members of the general public. But some members of the academic community may also find this work to be useful in their fields. Subjects covered include an overview of the country and its geography including all the regions - known as counties - and the different ethnic groups who live there. The work is also a historical study of Liberia since the founding of the country by freed black American slaves. One of the subjects covered in the book is the conflicts - including wars - the new black American settlers had with the indigenous people. The freed slaves who, together with their descendants, came to be known as Americo-Liberians, dominated the country and excluded the indigenous people from the government and other areas of national life for almost 160 years until the Americo-Liberian rulers were overthrown in a military coup in 1980. It was one of the bloodiest military coups in modern African history. The soldiers who overthrew the government were members of native tribes and were hailed as liberators by the indigenous people who had been dominated and had suffered discrimination at the hands of Americo-Liberians throughout the nation's history. Some of them were even sold into slavery in Panama by the Americo-Liberian rulers in the 1930s, prompting an investigation of the labour scandal by the League of Nations. Others were forced to work on various projects within Liberia itself and became virtual slaves in their own country. Americo-Liberians saw the natives as inferior to them and treated them that way. The mistreatment of the members of native tribes by the Americo-Liberians was one of the main reasons native soldiers of the Liberian army decided to overthrow the government. The book also covers the Liberian civil war which destroyed the country in the 1990s and early 2000s, a conflict which also had historical roots. The conflict is attributed to the inequalities between Americo-Liberians and the indigenous people which existed throughout the nation's history. But its immediate cause was the brutalities Liberians suffered under the military rulers who overthrew the Americo-Liberian-dominated government. Another major subject covered in the book is the ethnic composition of Liberia. The work looks at all the ethnic groups in the country and their home regions - counties - as well as their cultures, providing a comprehensive picture of life in contemporary times in Africa's oldest republic. The national culture of Liberia in general is also another subject addressed in the book. The author has also addressed another very important subject: indigenous forms of writing invented by the members of different tribes or ethnic groups in Liberia. The indigenous scripts are a major contribution to civilisation and Liberia stands out among all the countries on the African continent as the country which has the largest number of these forms of writing. People going to Liberia for the first time, and anybody else who wants to learn about this African country, may find this work to be useful.
Download or read book Liberia written by John-Peter Pham and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Liberia written by John-Peter Pham and published by Reed Press(NY). This book was released on 2004 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this utterly depressing account of the west African nation's history and politics, scholar and diplomat Pham offers a cautionary tale regarding Western intervention in Africa. Colonized by free American blacks in the early 19th century, Liberia has long been beset by tensions, not only among its native populations but between natives and the descendants of its Western colonizers. But Pham is no knee-jerk blame-the-West critic- far from it. As he points out, Western investment, by Firestone and other rubber companies, "served as the principal catalyst for Liberia's infrastructure." The author does, however, acknowledge that the workers were paid little for the labor that enriched the rubber companies, and that tribal chiefs were given a cut for the toil of their villagers. Liberia's worst times have come in the past two decades, with rampant corruption and civil war. In Pham's eyes, nation-states have failed, in Liberia and elsewhere in Africa, for a variety of reasons: tribal and ethnic tensions and the end of the Cold War, which allowed weak states propped up by the superpowers to tumble. Pham argues that these states must take responsibility for their own reconstruction and reconstitution as democratic nations, without Western intervention, if they are ever to emerge from their current struggle"--from Publisher's Weekly, quoted on amazon.com.
Download or read book Head Body Legs written by Won-Ldy Paye and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2005-09 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A creation story originating from Liberia.
Download or read book Portraits of a People written by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently, a number of cutting edge African American artists have investigated issues of race and American identity in their work, relying on the use of historical source material and the subversion of archaic media. This scrutiny of little known, yet uncannily familiar, racialized imagery by contemporary artists has created a renewed interest in the politics of nineteenth-century American art and the role of race in the visual discourse. Portraits of a People looks critically at images made of and by African Americans, extending back to the late 1700s when a portrait of African-born poet Phillis Wheatley was drawn by her friend, the slave Scipio Moorhead. From the American Revolution until the Civil War and on into the Gilded Age, American artists created dynamic images of black sitters. In their effort to create enduring symbols of self-possessed identity, many of these portraits provide a window into cultural stereotypes and practices. For example, while some of these pictures were undoubtedly of distinct, named individuals, many are now known by titles that reference only generalized types, such as Joshua Johnston's painting Portrait of a Man, c. 1805–10, or the silhouette inscribed "Mr. Shaw's blackman," cut around 1802 by the manumitted slave Moses Williams. By the middle of the nineteenth century, photography began to offer black sitters an affordable and accessible way to fashion an individual identity and sometimes obtain financial support, as in the case of the numerous cartes-de-visites produced during the 1860s and '70s that bear the image of the feminist activist Sojourner Truth above the text, "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance." Portraits of a People features colour reproductions of over 100 important portraits in various media, ranging from paintings, photographs, and silhouettes to book frontispieces and popular prints. Essays by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw consider silhouettes and African American identity in the early republic, photography and the black presence in the public sphere after the Civil War, and portrait painting and social fluidity among middle-class African American artists and sitters. This landmark publication will change the way that we view the images of blacks in the nineteenth century.
Download or read book This Our Dark Country written by Catherine Reef and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the history of the colony, later the independent nation of Liberia, which was established on the west coast of Africa in 1822 as a haven for free African-Americans.
Download or read book Liberian Politics written by Hanes Walton and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberian Politics tells the fascinating story of Liberia's early nation-building efforts, its attempts to establish democracy, and the pivotal role played by African Americans in exporting the American democratic experiment to Liberia. The story of the rise of Africa's oldest democracy is told through the writings of J. Milton Turner, an African American diplomat who served in Liberia from 1871 to 1878. Turner's official diplomatic correspondence--superbly organized and edited by Walton, Rosser, and Stevenson--document Liberia's struggle to define its political institutions and processes. They chart Liberia's struggle to establish its relationship with the wider world and offer an intimate portrait of Turner's role as the agent of U.S. foreign policy in Liberia. A comparative study in the best tradition of Tocqueville and Myrdal, this pathbreaking work reveals the global dimensions of nineteenth-century African American politics and offers rich insight into the direction of early U.S. diplomacy in Africa.
Download or read book Liberia Art and Culture written by Emmanuel Alvin and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-11-07 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberia Art and Culture, who is Liberian and what is the tradition and origin, this book details about the entire Liberian profile and the environment, related to Culture, Art, History and the Environment, Liberia rejoices in a cultural heritage whose divertsity and dynamism enriches the nation�s life in all its aspects. After an inevitable period in which the vitality of the nation�s own cultural traditions was weakened by Western influence, the nation�s arts and crafts are thriving as Liberians increasingly come to valie their own indigenous cultural expressions while at the same time drawing on the best of Western culture to produce a healthy and exciting eclecticism.Liberia�s National Culture Troupe, for instance, offers plays and dances based on traditional Liberian themes both at home and abroad, under the encouragement of President Tolbert, initiator of the annual National Art and Culture Festival. On Liberian television and radio, African drama and music have an honored place, while Liberian writers, encouraged by the country�s rapidly rising level of literacy, are increasingly finding a voice..
Download or read book The Land and People of Liberia written by Mary Louise Clifford and published by . This book was released on 1971-01-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the history, geography, economy, culture, and people of the African nation founded in 1822 as a home for freed Negro slaves.
Download or read book Another America The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It written by James Ciment and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2014-08-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first popular history of the former American slaves who founded, ruled, and lost Africa's first republic In 1820, a group of about eighty African Americans reversed the course of history and sailed back to Africa, to a place they would name after liberty itself. They went under the banner of the American Colonization Society, a white philanthropic organization with a dual agenda: to rid America of its blacks, and to convert Africans to Christianity. The settlers staked out a beachhead; their numbers grew as more boats arrived; and after breaking free from their white overseers, they founded Liberia—Africa's first black republic—in 1847. James Ciment's Another America is the first full account of this dramatic experiment. With empathy and a sharp eye for human foibles, Ciment reveals that the Americo-Liberians struggled to live up to their high ideals. They wrote a stirring Declaration of Independence but re-created the social order of antebellum Dixie, with themselves as the master caste. Building plantations, holding elegant soirees, and exploiting and even helping enslave the native Liberians, the persecuted became the persecutors—until a lowly native sergeant murdered their president in 1980, ending 133 years of Americo rule. The rich cast of characters in Another America rivals that of any novel. We encounter Marcus Garvey, who coaxed his followers toward Liberia in the 1920s, and the rubber king Harvey Firestone, who built his empire on the backs of native Liberians. Among the Americoes themselves, we meet the brilliant intellectual Edward Blyden, one of the first black nationalists; the Baltimore-born explorer Benjamin Anderson, seeking a legendary city of gold in the Liberian hinterland; and President William Tubman, a descendant of Georgia slaves, whose economic policies brought Cadillacs to the streets of Monrovia, the Liberian capital. And then there are the natives, men like Joseph Samson, who was adopted by a prominent Americo family and later presided over the execution of his foster father during the 1980 coup. In making Liberia, the Americoes transplanted the virtues and vices of their country of birth. The inspiring and troubled history they created is, to a remarkable degree, the mirror image of our own.
Download or read book Zubaryea Akoi Tellewoyan of Liberia the Man and His Work written by S. Henry Cordor and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Testament written by Chris Hondros and published by powerHouse Books. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Testament is a collection of photographs and writing by late photojournalist Chris Hondros spanning over a decade of coverage from most of the world's conflicts since the late 1990s, including Kosovo, Afghanistan, the West Bank, Iraq, Liberia, Egypt, and Libya. Through Hondros' images, we witness a jubilant Liberian rebel fighter exalt during a firefight, a U.S. Marine remove Saddam Hussein's portrait from an Iraqi classroom, American troops ride confidently in a thin-skinned unarmored Humvee during the first months of the Iraq war, "the probing eyes of an Afghan village boy," and "rambunctious Iraqi schoolgirls enjoying their precious few years of relative freedom before aging into more restricted adulthoods." Hondros was not just a front-line war photographer, but also a committed observer and witness, and his work humanizes complex world events and brings to light shared human experiences. Evident in his writings, interspersed throughout, Hondros was determined to broaden our understanding of war and its consequences. This unyielding determination led Hondros to take dozens of trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, even as the news turned elsewhere. During these "routine" trips, Hondros examined and observed daily life in these war-torn societies. His inventive Humvee picture series frames the ever-changing landscapes of these countries, offering a glimpse into the daily lives of those most affected by conflict. "One of the ongoing themes in my work, I hope, and one of the things I believe in, is a sense of human nature, a sense of shared humanity above the cultural layers we place on ourselves [which don't] mean that much compared to the human experience." —Chris Hondros As a photographer working in the world's most difficult and dangerous places, Chris Hondros had the distinctive ability to connect his viewers with people embroiled in far-flung and sometimes obscure conflicts. He recognized the shared humanity among those affected by war, regardless of culture or beliefs, and he was determined to share their challenges to the wider world in the hope of provoking thought, raising awareness, and fostering understanding. In the introduction to the book, Getty Images Co-founder and CEO Jonathan Klein writes, "Chris believed that his work could and would make a difference. He dedicated and ultimately lost his life in pursuit of that belief. I have no doubt that Chris was correct. Images can and do influence public opinion, galvanize people and societies, and force governments to change. They bring much-needed focus and attention to the suffering of people who are otherwise unable to communicate their plight." Inspired by his life, work, and vision—The Chris Hondros Fund endeavors to bring light to shared human experiences by supporting and protecting photojournalists. Through their generous support, Getty Images' proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to the Fund. For more information please visit www.chrishondrosfund.org.
Download or read book Long Story Bit by Bit written by Tim Hetherington and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intrepid journalist considers power's corrosion, evades execution, and walks on the wild side of war-torn Africa.
Download or read book Empire of Rubber written by Gregg Mitman and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious and shocking exposé of America’s hidden empire in Liberia, run by the storied Firestone corporation, and its long shadow In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic. Empire of Rubber tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America’s rubber empire. Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman scoured remote archives to unearth a history of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land. Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America—on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war. A riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, Empire of Rubber uncovers the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present.
Download or read book Liberia Will Rise Again written by Arthur Kulah and published by Abingdon Press. This book was released on 1999-04-01 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For seven years, Liberia was involved in a civil war that cost the lives of more than 200,000 people. That war ended on January 31, 1997. Liberia Will Rise Again outlines the causes of the war, interprets the present situation, and offers suggestions for the future. KEY BENEFITS: * Provides a better understanding of the civil war in Liberia * Shows how the Liberians may have contributed to the problem * Helps readers learn about the treatment of refugees * Discusses issues related to the civil war and suggests lessons to be learned from the bitter experience
Download or read book Liberia written by Gabriel I. H. Williams and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On December 24, 1989, a group of Libyan-trained armed dissidents, which styled itself the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), attacked Liberian territory from neighboring Ivory Coast. The band of outlaws was led by Charles Taylor, an ex-Liberia government official who escaped from prison in the United States while facing extradition to Liberia for allegedly embezzling nearly one million dollars of public funds. After he fled the U.S. Taylor returned to West Africa, from where he connected with Libya. Sustained by Libyan support, Taylor went to Liberia to spearhead his murderous brand of civil war. Liberia's dictatorial leader Samuel Doe responded to the NPFL invasion by deploying troops in the conflict area, whose senior ranks were dominated by the military strongman's own ethnic group. The government forces carried out collective punishment against local villagers, killing, looting, and raping, while singling out people from certain ethnic groups whom they regarded as supporters of the invasion by reason of their ethnic identity. The NPFL also targeted members of Doe's ethnic group and other ethnic groups that were seen to be supportive of the government, as well as its officials and sympathizers. As the war spread from the interior toward the Liberian capital of Monrovia amid widespread death and destruction, the United States responded to the deteriorating situation by dispatching four warships with 2,300 marines to evacuate Americans and other foreigners who were in the country. The U.S. decided not to intervene to contain the unfolding catastrophe. Officials of the George Bush administration maintained that Liberia, which was then America's closest traditional ally in Africa, was no longer of strategic importance to the U.S. Coincidentally, the Liberian civil war started at the time the Cold War was ending. Located on the West Coast of Africa, Liberia was founded in 1822 by freed black American slaves who were returned to the continent. Their passage was paid by the American Colonization Society, a philanthropic organization, whose members included Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe. The Liberian capital Monrovia is named after Monroe, who was president of the United States at the time Liberia was founded. The country's national flag of red, white and blue stripes with a star, bears close resemblance to the American flag. The systems of government and education, architecture and other aspects of Liberian life reflect American taste. Names of places in the country include Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, Louisiana and Buchanan. More than anywhere in Africa, spoken English in Liberia echoes the rhythms of Black American speech. Liberia served as the regional headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and hosted a Voice of America relay station that beamed American propaganda, as well as other major U.S. security installations during the Cold War. The Americans also operated the Omega Navigation Tower, which was intended to track the movement of ships and planes in the region and beyond. Once one of Africa's most stable and prosperous countries, Liberia was regarded as a haven for international trade and commerce because of the use of the American dollar as a legal tender. Major U.S. investments in the country included the Firestone Rubber Plantation, the world's largest plantation, which produce rubber for Firestone tires, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Citibank. Pan American Airlines (PAN AM) once operated Liberia's Roberts International Airport, where U.S. fighter jets have landing rights. During part of the 1970s, Liberia's per capita income was equivalent to that of Japan. Independent since 1847 as Africa's first republic, Liberia's plunge into anarchy began after a bloody military coup that ended the rule of descendants of the freed slaves, who monopolized political and economic power for over a century. During the 1980 coup, President William Tolbert, who tried to institute some meaningful po
