Empires Crossroads

Download or read book Empire's Crossroads written by Carrie Gibson and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “wide-ranging, vivid” narrative history of one of the most coveted and complex regions of the world: the Caribbean (The Observer). Ever since Christopher Columbus stepped off the Santa Maria and announced that he had arrived in the Orient, the Caribbean has been a stage for projected fantasies and competition between world powers. In Empire’s Crossroads, British American historian Carrie Gibson offers a panoramic view of the region from the northern rim of South America up to Cuba and its rich, important history. After that fateful landing in 1492, the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, and even the Swedes, Scots, and Germans sought their fortunes in the islands for the next two centuries. These fraught years gave way to a booming age of sugar, horrendous slavery, and extravagant wealth, as well as the Haitian Revolution and the long struggles for independence that ushered in the modern era. Gibson tells not only of imperial expansion—European and American—but also of life as it is lived in the islands, from before Columbus through the tumultuous twentieth century. Told “in fluid, colorful prose peppered with telling anecdotes,” Empire’s Crossroads provides an essential account of five centuries of history (Foreign Affairs). “Judicious, readable and extremely well-informed . . . Too many people know the Caribbean only as a tourist destination; [Gibson] takes us, instead, into its fascinating, complex and often tragic past. No vacation there will ever feel quite the same again.” —Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars and King Leopold’s Ghost

Download or read book Crossroads of Empire written by Ned C. Landsman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines colonial New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania as central to both warfare and the emerging British-Atlantic world of culture and trade. In this probing history, Ned C. Landsman demonstrates how the Middle Colonies came to function as a distinct region. He argues that while each territory possessed varying social, religious, and political cultures, the collective lands of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were unified in their particular history and place in the imperial and Atlantic worlds. Landsman shows that the societal cohesiveness of the three colonies originated in the commercial and military rivalries among Native nations and developed further with the competing involvement of the European powers. They eventually emerged as the focal point in the contest for dominion over North America. In relating this progression, Landsman discusses various factors in the region’s development, including the Enlightenment, evangelical religion, factional politics, religious and ethnic diversity, and distinct systems of Protestant pluralism. Ultimately, he argues, it was within the Middle Colonies that the question was first posed, What is the American?

Download or read book At the Crossroads written by Jane T. Merritt and published by Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents

Download or read book Frontier Cities written by Jay Gitlin and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Macau, New Orleans, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. All of these metropolitan centers were once frontier cities, urban areas irrevocably shaped by cross-cultural borderland beginnings. Spanning a wide range of periods and locations, and including stories of eighteenth-century Detroit, nineteenth-century Seattle, and twentieth-century Los Angeles, Frontier Cities recovers the history of these urban places and shows how, from the start, natives and newcomers alike shared streets, buildings, and interwoven lives. Not only do frontier cities embody the earliest matrix of the American urban experience; they also testify to the intersections of colonial, urban, western, and global history. The twelve essays in this collection paint compelling portraits of frontier cities and their inhabitants: the French traders who bypassed imperial regulations by throwing casks of brandy over the wall to Indian customers in eighteenth-century Montreal; Isaac Friedlander, San Francisco's "Grain King"; and Adrien de Pauger, who designed the Vieux Carré in New Orleans. Exploring the economic and political networks, imperial ambitions, and personal intimacies of frontier city development, this collection demonstrates that these cities followed no mythic line of settlement, nor did they move lockstep through a certain pace or pattern of evolution. An introduction puts the collection in historical context, and the epilogue ponders the future of frontier cities in the midst of contemporary globalization. With innovative concepts and a rich selection of maps and images, Frontier Cities imparts a crucial untold chapter in the construction of urban history and place.

Download or read book Guantanamo written by Jana K. Lipman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-12-02 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guantánamo has become a symbol of what has gone wrong in the War on Terror. Yet Guantánamo is more than a U.S. naval base and prison in Cuba, it is a town, and our military occupation there has required more than soldiers and sailors—it has required workers. This revealing history of the women and men who worked on the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay tells the story of U.S.-Cuban relations from a new perspective, and at the same time, shows how neocolonialism, empire, and revolution transformed the lives of everyday people. Drawing from rich oral histories and little-explored Cuban archives, Jana K. Lipman analyzes how the Cold War and the Cuban revolution made the naval base a place devoid of law and accountability. The result is a narrative filled with danger, intrigue, and exploitation throughout the twentieth century. Opening a new window onto the history of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean and labor history in the region, her book tells how events in Guantánamo and the base created an ominous precedent likely to inform the functioning of U.S. military bases around the world.

Download or read book At the Crossroads of Empires written by Nara Dillon and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Republican Shanghai was a heterogeneous city with no central institutions. Yet somehow it functioned coherently. What held the city together? The authors argue that networks of middlemen with boundless connections provided the glue.

Download or read book Summary of Carrie Gibson's Empire's Crossroads written by Everest Media, and published by Everest Media LLC. This book was released on 2022-06-22T22:59:00Z with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The story of the modern Caribbean begins in a small port town in northern North Africa, almost within sight of the Iberian peninsula. On 25 July 1415, the feast day of St. James, Prince Henry of Portugal led a fleet of around 200 ships down the Tagus River to Atlantic Ocean. #2 The Portuguese were struggling to get wheat and gold from Ceuta. The small kingdom was dependent on imports, and could not produce enough to meet its needs. It was trying to access a steady, dependable source of grain and gold. #3 The legend of Prester John, a Christian king who had traveled to a faraway land, was used to encourage the search for him and his treasure. The story compelled people to search for him and his gold. #4 Henry the Navigator contributed to the rise of Portugal’s maritime dominance in the fifteenth century, which resulted in part from his triumph in Ceuta. He was a leading ship owner, and he pushed Castile to invade Granada in 1419 and 1434, but that battle would not be fought for decades yet.