Download or read book Discovery and Empire written by John West-Sooby and published by University of Adelaide Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French connection with the South Seas stretches back at least as far as the voyage of Binot Paulmier de Gonneville (1503-1505), who believed he had discovered the fabled great south land after being blown off course during a storm near the Cape of Good Hope. The story of his voyage remained largely forgotten for over 150 years, but eventually resurfaced in 1664 thanks to the publication by the Abbe Jean Paulmier of a document in which he argued, on the basis of this supposed discovery, for the establishment of a Christian mission in this "third part" of the world. While historians today contest the authenticity of various aspects of the Abbe Paulmier's Memoires, there is no doubt about the impact it had in France, both on the collective imagination and, more concretely, on French plans for exploration and colonial expansion. It was not until the eighteenth century, however, that France began sending mariners to the southern oceans on a regular basis, and by that time a new maritime power had begun to emerge: Great Britain. Together, these two nations would play a decisive role in determining the configuration of these little known parts of the globe, and particularly of the Pacific, which had for so long been the almost exclusive preserve of Spain.' (From the Introduction by John West-Sooby.) DISCOVERY AND EMPIRE is a collection of essays originating out of a symposium that was held at the State Library of South Australia on 8 July 2009. The symposium formed one of the strands of the XVIIth Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association of European Historians (6-9 July 2009), the overall theme for which was 'Europe's Expansions and Contractions'.
Download or read book Empire of Light written by Sidney Perkowitz and published by Joseph Henry Press. This book was released on 1998-11-23 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Empire of Light, Sidney Perkowitz combines the expertise of a physicist with the vision of an art connoisseur and the skill of an accomplished writer to offer a unique view of the most fundamental feature of the universe: light. Empire of Light discusses the nature of light, how the eye sees, and how our understanding of these phenomena have emerged over the ages, including the role of light in the development of quantum physics. The author examines the making of electrical light and its integration into commerce, telecommunications, entertainment, medicine, warfare, and every other aspect of our daily lives. And he presents the role of light in the search for the beginning and the end of the universe, as astronomers with their instruments penetrate ever deeper into the sky. Visible light spans the spectrum between infrared and ultraviolet, but this book reaches across many other spectra as well--from the cave paintings at Lascaux to Mark Rothko's stark blocks of color in today's art museums, from Plato's speculation that the eye sends out rays to Ramon y Cajal's discovery that vision actually works in the opposite way, from Tycho Brahe's elegant antetelescope measurements of planet positions to the Hubble telescope's exquisite sensitivity to light from billions of light years away. What are the biological and neurological processes of perceiving visible light? How does a person typically scan a scene? Do you see red or blue the same way I do? What are our physiological reactions and emotional responses to light? Perkowitz explores these and many other fascinating questions, drawing together the experiences, achievements, and perspectives of a diverse cast of characters, including Galileo, Einstein, Newton, Van Gogh, and Edison. Empire of Light is written so that lay readers will readily grasp the scientific principles and science professionals will readily appreciate the human experience. It will impart new wonder to the daily experience of light in our world. Sidney Perkowitz is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Physics at Emory University. His work has appeared in national publications such as The Sciences, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, and Technology Review.
Download or read book The Discovery of Guiana and the Journal of the Second Voyage Thereto written by Sir Walter Raleigh and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pulp Empire written by Paul S. Hirsch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-06-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Popular Culture Association's Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Book in Popular or American Culture In the 1940s and ’50s, comic books were some of the most popular—and most unfiltered—entertainment in the United States. Publishers sold hundreds of millions of copies a year of violent, racist, and luridly sexual comics to Americans of all ages until a 1954 Senate investigation led to a censorship code that nearly destroyed the industry. But this was far from the first time the US government actively involved itself with comics—it was simply the most dramatic manifestation of a long, strange relationship between high-level policy makers and a medium that even artists and writers often dismissed as a creative sewer. In Pulp Empire, Paul S. Hirsch uncovers the gripping untold story of how the US government both attacked and appropriated comic books to help wage World War II and the Cold War, promote official—and clandestine—foreign policy and deflect global critiques of American racism. As Hirsch details, during World War II—and the concurrent golden age of comic books—government agencies worked directly with comic book publishers to stoke hatred for the Axis powers while simultaneously attempting to dispel racial tensions at home. Later, as the Cold War defense industry ballooned—and as comic book sales reached historic heights—the government again turned to the medium, this time trying to win hearts and minds in the decolonizing world through cartoon propaganda. Hirsch’s groundbreaking research weaves together a wealth of previously classified material, including secret wartime records, official legislative documents, and caches of personal papers. His book explores the uneasy contradiction of how comics were both vital expressions of American freedom and unsettling glimpses into the national id—scourged and repressed on the one hand and deployed as official propaganda on the other. Pulp Empire is a riveting illumination of underexplored chapters in the histories of comic books, foreign policy, and race.
Download or read book Plants and Empire written by Londa Schiebinger and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plants seldom figure in the grand narratives of war, peace, or even everyday life yet they are often at the center of high intrigue. In the eighteenth century, epic scientific voyages were sponsored by European imperial powers to explore the natural riches of the New World, and uncover the botanical secrets of its people. Bioprospectors brought back medicines, luxuries, and staples for their king and country. Risking their lives to discover exotic plants, these daredevil explorers joined with their sponsors to create a global culture of botany. But some secrets were unearthed only to be lost again. In this moving account of the abuses of indigenous Caribbean people and African slaves, Schiebinger describes how slave women brewed the "peacock flower" into an abortifacient, to ensure that they would bear no children into oppression. Yet, impeded by trade winds of prevailing opinion, knowledge of West Indian abortifacients never flowed into Europe. A rich history of discovery and loss, Plants and Empire explores the movement, triumph, and extinction of knowledge in the course of encounters between Europeans and the Caribbean populations.
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 Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery written by Peter C. Mancall and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a primary source collection of narratives about the travel and discovery in North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe in the 16th century.
Download or read book Close Encounters of Empire written by Gilbert Michael Joseph and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays that suggest new ways of understanding the role that US actors and agencies have played in Latin America." - publisher.
Download or read book Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Secret of the Hittites written by C. W. Ceram and published by Phoenix. This book was released on 2001 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the acclaimed Gods, Graves, and Scholars tells the dramatic tale of the Hittites, an Indo-European people who became a dominant power in the Middle East. Their struggle in Egypt with Ramses II for control of Syria led to one of the greatest battles of the ancient world. The fall of the Hittite empire was sudden, and historical records were scarce--until the discovery of cuneiform tablets yielded a rich store of information on which this work is based. "...a saga richly charged with dramatic twists and with enthralling accounts of scholarly detective work."--The Atlantic.
Download or read book Sea of Glory written by Nathaniel Philbrick and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2004-10-26 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A treasure of a book."—David McCullough The harrowing story of a pathbreaking naval expedition that set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean, dwarfing Lewis and Clark with its discoveries, from the New York Times bestselling author of Valiant Ambition and In the Hurricane's Eye. A New York Times Notable Book America's first frontier was not the West; it was the sea, and no one writes more eloquently about that watery wilderness than Nathaniel Philbrick. In his bestselling In the Heart of the Sea Philbrick probed the nightmarish dangers of the vast Pacific. Now, in an epic sea adventure, he writes about one of the most ambitious voyages of discovery the Western world has ever seen—the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842. On a scale that dwarfed the journey of Lewis and Clark, six magnificent sailing vessels and a crew of hundreds set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean and ended up naming the newly discovered continent of Antarctica, collecting what would become the basis of the Smithsonian Institution. Combining spellbinding human drama and meticulous research, Philbrick reconstructs the dark saga of the voyage to show why, instead of being celebrated and revered as that of Lewis and Clark, it has—until now—been relegated to a footnote in the national memory. Winner of the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize
Download or read book Livology written by Colleen Mariotti and published by . This book was released on 2015-08-14 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Africa s Discovery of Europe written by David Northrup and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines the full range of African-European encounters from an unfamiliar African perspective rather than from the customary European one"--Publisher description.
Download or read book Discoveries Explorations and the Imperial Survey written by Pramod K. Nayar and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India and the subcontinent stimulated the curiosity of the British who came to India as traders. Each aspect of life in India - its people, customs, geography, climate, fauna and flora - was documented by British travelers, traders, administrators, soldiers to make sense to the European mind. As they 'discovered' India and occupied it, they also attempted to 'civilise' the natives. The present volumes focus on select aspects of the imperial archives: the accounts of “discovery” and exploration – fauna and flora, geography, climate – the people of the subcontinent, English domesticity and social life in the subcontinent, the wars and skirmishes – including the “Mutiny” of 1857-58 – and the “civilisational mission”. Volume 1 'Discoveries', Explorations and the Imperial Survey consists of documents that deal with England's discovery of India, its exploration and mapping of the subcontinent. The texts collected here are accounts of how the British 'discovered' the subcontinent. The narrative of discovery, with the freshness of the 'new', was couched very often in the rhetoric of wonder. But this sense of wonder, even astonishment in some cases at the variety, magnitude and sheer difference of the land and its people, was tempered over time with a narrative of exploration. If the 'discovery' moment had a surprise, awe and a sense of uncertainty at facing something totally new-which, in many ways, the subcontinent was-in the early writings of the seventeenth century, the tone, emphasis and attitude shifts later on.
Download or read book Reproducing Empire written by Laura Briggs and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-01-20 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it sheds light on the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization. Puerto Rico is a perfect lens through which to examine colonialism and globalization because for the past century it has been where the United States has expressed and fine-tuned its attitudes toward its own expansionism. Puerto Rico's history holds no simple lessons for present-day debate over globalization but does unearth some of its history. Reproducing Empire suggests that interventionist discourses of rescue, family, and sexuality fueled U.S. imperial projects and organized American colonialism. Through the politics, biology, and medicine of eugenics, prostitution, and birth control, the United States has justified its presence in the territory's politics and society. Briggs makes an innovative contribution to Puerto Rican and U.S. history, effectively arguing that gender has been crucial to the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and more broadly, to U.S. expansion elsewhere.
Download or read book Hunting for Empire written by Greg Gillespie and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hunting for Empire offers a fresh cultural history of sport and imperialism. Greg Gillespie integrates critical perspectives from cultural studies, literary criticism, and cultural geography to analyze the themes of authorship, sport, science, and nature. In doing so he produces a unique theoretical lens through which to study nineteenth-century British big-game hunting and exploration narratives from the western interior of Rupert's Land. Sharply written and evocatively illustrated, Hunting for Empire will appeal to students and scholars of culture, sport, geography, and history, and to general readers interested in stories of hunting, empire, and the Canadian wilderness.
