Sacred Gifts Profane Pleasures

Download or read book Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures written by Marcy Norton and published by . This book was released on 2010-01 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces European encounters and use of tobacco and cacao and its eventual commodification into a major business from the earliest period through the seventeenth century.

Download or read book Sacred Gifts, Profane, Pleasures written by Marcy Norton and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the Spanish Empire, Marcy Norton investigates how tobacco and chocolate became material and symbolic links to the pre-Hispanic past for colonized Indians and colonizing Europeans alike. Botanical ambassadors of the American continent, they also profoundly affected Europe. Tobacco, once condemned as proof of Indian diabolism, became the constant companion of clergymen and the single largest source of state revenue in Spain. Before coffee or tea became popular in Europe, chocolate was the drink that energized the fatigued and uplifted the depressed. However, no one could quite forget the pagan past of tobacco and chocolate, despite their apparent Europeanization: physicians relied on Mesoamerican medical systems for their understanding of tobacco; theologians looked to Aztec precedent to decide whether chocolate drinking violated Lenten fasts.

Download or read book Mahogany written by Jennifer L. Anderson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-17 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colonial Americans were enamored with the rich colors and silky surface of mahogany. As this exotic wood became fashionable, demand for it set in motion a dark, hidden story of human and environmental exploitation. Anderson traces the path from source to sale, revealing how prosperity and desire shaped not just people’s lives but the natural world.

Download or read book Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 written by Patricia Seed and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-10-27 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 1996 comparative history exploring the significance of ceremonies performed by the western imperial powers to mark their territorial possession of the New World.

Download or read book A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 written by John K. Thornton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 1088 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 explores the idea that strong links exist in the histories of Africa, Europe and North and South America. John K. Thornton provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the Atlantic Basin before 1830 by describing political, social and cultural interactions between the continents' inhabitants. He traces the backgrounds of the populations on these three continental landmasses brought into contact by European navigation. Thornton then examines the political and social implications of the encounters, tracing the origins of a variety of Atlantic societies and showing how new ways of eating, drinking, speaking and worshipping developed in the newly created Atlantic World. This book uses close readings of original sources to produce new interpretations of its subject.

Download or read book Heredity and Hope written by Ruth Schwartz COWAN and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neither minimizing the difficulty of the choices that modern genetics has created for us nor fearing them, Cowan argues that we can improve the quality of our own lives and the lives of our children by using the modern science and technology of genetic screening responsibly.

Download or read book The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America written by Jennifer Van Horn and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture, architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn reconstructs the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Moving beyond emulation and the desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption, Van Horn shows that Anglo-Americans' material choices were intimately bound up with their efforts to distance themselves from Native Americans and African Americans. She also traces women's contested place in forging provincial culture. As encountered through a woman's application of makeup at her dressing table or an amputee's donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War, material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or political identification. They made Anglo-American society.