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Designs on Empire: America's Rise to Power in the Age of European Imperialism by
In the eyes of both contemporaries and historians, the United States became an empire in 1898. By taking possession of Cuba and the Philippines, the nation seemed to have reached a watershed moment in its rise to power--spurring arguments over whether it should be a colonial power at all. However, the questions that emerged in the wake of 1898 built on long-standing and far-reaching debates over America's place in the world. Andrew Priest offers a new understanding of the roots of American empire that foregrounds the longer history of perceptions of European powers. He traces the development of American thinking about European imperialism in the years after the Civil War, before the United States embarked on its own overseas colonial projects. Designs on Empire examines responses to Napoleon III's intervention in Mexico, Spain and the Ten Years' War in Cuba, Britain's occupation of Egypt, and the carving up of Africa at the Berlin Conference. Priest shows how observing and interacting with other empires shaped American understandings of the international environment and their own burgeoning power. He highlights ambivalence among American elites regarding empire as well as the prevalence of notions of racial hierarchy. While many deplored the way powerful nations dominated others, others saw imperial projects as the advance of civilization, and even critics often felt a closer affinity with European imperialists than colonized peoples. A wide-ranging book that blends intellectual, political, and diplomatic history, Designs on Empire sheds new light on the foundations of American power.
Publication Date: 2021-08-31
The Slave's Cause by
"Traces the history of abolition from the 1600s to the 1860s . . . a valuable addition to our understanding of the role of race and racism in America."--Florida Courier Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave's cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe. "A full history of the men and women who truly made us free."--Ira Berlin, The New York Times Book Review "A stunning new history of abolitionism . . . [Sinha] plugs abolitionism back into the history of anticapitalist protest."--The Atlantic "Will deservedly take its place alongside the equally magisterial works of Ira Berlin on slavery and Eric Foner on the Reconstruction Era."--The Wall Street Journal "A powerfully unfamiliar look at the struggle to end slavery in the United States . . . as multifaceted as the movement it chronicles."--The Boston Globe
ISBN: 9780300182088Publication Date: 2016-02-23
Japan and Imperialism, 1853-1945 by
The end of the Pleistocene era brought dramatic environmental changes to small bands of humans living in North America: changes that affected subsistence, mobility, demography, technology, and social relations. The transition they made from Paleoindian (Pleistocene) to Archaic (Early Holocene) societies represents the first major cultural shift that took place solely in the Americas. This event--which manifested in ways and at times much more varied than often supposed--set the stage for the unique developments of behavioral complexity that distinguish later Native American prehistoric societies. Using localized studies and broad regional syntheses, the contributors to this volume demonstrate the diversity of adaptations to the dynamic and changing environmental and cultural landscapes that occurred between the Pleistocene and early portion of the Holocene. The authors' research areas range from Northern Mexico to Alaska and across the continent to the American Northeast, synthesizing the copious available evidence from well-known and recent excavations.With its methodologically and geographically diverse approach, "From the Pleistocene to the Holocene: Human Organization and Cultural Transformations in Prehistoric North America" provides an overview of the present state of knowledge regarding this crucial transformative period in Native North America. It offers a large-scale synthesis of human adaptation, reflects the range of ideas and concepts in current archaeological theoretical approaches, and acts as a springboard for future explanations and models of prehistoric change.
ISBN: 9781952636066Publication Date: 2020-08-10
The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War by
Focusing on ordinary Mexicans and Americans, Peter Guardino offers a clearer picture than we have ever had of the brief, bloody war that redrew the map of North America. He shows how dramatically U.S. forces underestimated Mexicans' patriotism, fierce resistance, and bitter resentment of American claims to national and racial superiority.
ISBN: 0674981839Publication Date: 2017-08-28
Recurrent Genocidal Nightmares : The Hidden Side of Euro-African Encounters, 1450-1950 by Publication Date: 2019
Proximity and Distance: Space, Time and World War I by
The global magnitude of World War I has meant that proximity and distance were highly influential in the ways the conflict was conducted, and how it was experienced at tactical, political and emotional levels. This book explores how participants and observers in World War I negotiated the temporal and spatial challenges of the conflict. International in scope, it investigates how technology, mass media, elite diplomacy and imperial networks interacted in conjunction with proximity and distance. The authors canvass a range of approaches to the conflict, from cultural history to social, political and military history. Proximity and distance were contingencies that participants had to continually adapt to. This book documents the ways in which these adaptations were approached.
ISBN: 9780522876529Publication Date: 2020-04-28
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Columbus and His First Voyage by
What happened on Columbus's first voyage across the Atlantic? Who was responsible for the success of that voyage? How do we know? These questions were debated in the courts of Spain for decades after 1492. Some of those who sailed with Columbus left very different accounts, as recorded in those trial records. Their competing voices have long been silenced by the deafening crescendo of Columbus's own narrative-a narrative riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies that beg to be explained. This documentary history allows the reader to encounter the founding documents of the Columbus story as well as the voices that dared to challenge it-even in his own day. What these documents reveal forces us to re-imagine Columbus and his voyage in surprising ways. Columbus and His First Voyage brings together for the first time the two contemporary versions of what happened on the first voyage - the Columbian narrative and the Pinzón narrative - and embeds them in a thorough introduction to Columbus, his first voyage, and the myths that surround this pivotal event in the history of the modern world.
ISBN: 9781474276825Publication Date: 2016-10-06
Leonardo Da Vinci by
This incisive and illuminating biography follows the three themes that shaped the life of Leonardo da Vinci and, through him, forever changed Western art and imagination: nature, art, and self-fashioning. Nature and art helped form Leonardo. He spent his first twelve years in the Tuscan countryside before entering the most reputed artistic workshop of Florence. There he blossomed as one of the most promising painters of his time and promptly applied his skills to explore and question the world through science and invention. Leonardo was also self-fashioned: he received only a basic education and grew up around peasants and artisans. But from the 1480s onwards, he transformed himself into a court artist and became a familiar of kings and rulers. Following the chronology of Leonardo's extraordinary life, this book examines Leonardo as artist, courtier, and thinker, and explores how these aspects found expression in his paintings, as well as in his work in sculpture, architecture, theater design, urban planning, engineering, anatomy, geology, and cartography. François Quiviger concludes with observations on Leonardo's relevance today as a model of the multidisciplinary artist who combines imagination, art, and science--the original, and ultimate, Renaissance Man.
ISBN: 9781789141078Publication Date: 2019-06-10
Galileo Unbound by
Galileo Unbound traces the journey that brought us from Galileo's law of free fall to today's geneticists measuring evolutionary drift, entangled quantum particles moving among many worlds, and our lives as trajectories traversing a health space with thousands of dimensions. Remarkably, common themes persist that predict the evolution of species as readily as the orbits of planets or the collapse of stars into black holes. This book tells the history of spaces of expanding dimension and increasing abstraction and how they continue today to give new insight into the physics of complex systems. Galileo published the first modern law of motion, the Law of Fall, that was ideal and simple, laying the foundation upon which Newton built the first theory of dynamics. Early in the twentieth century, geometry became the cause of motion rather than the result when Einstein envisioned the fabric of space-time warped by mass and energy, forcing light rays to bend past the Sun. Possibly more radical was Feynman's dilemma of quantum particles taking all paths at once -- setting the stage for the modern fields of quantum field theory and quantum computing. Yet as concepts of motion have evolved, one thing has remained constant, the need to track ever more complex changes and to capture their essence, to find patterns in the chaos as we try to predict and control our world.
ISBN: 9780198805847Publication Date: 2018-09-26
The Castle : A History by
A vibrant history of the castle in England, from the early Middle Ages to the present day
ISBN: 9780300265224Publication Date: 2022
200 Years and Beyond Britain and America since the Industrial Revolution by
This book examines the changing social political and economics landscapes that continue to shape and define the Britain and America that we know today. The industrial Revolution was defined by technology in cotton spinning, in the building of canals, railways and telegraphy. The intensity of economic change meant changes in social and political expectations from the Chartists seeking to widen the franchise in Britain to Civil War and slavery in America. Social progress ebbs and flows; nothing in history is linear. Strikes were won and lost. Coxey's army marched to show the plight of unemployment as many others would do during the Depression of the 1930s. America had the New Deal and Britain provided social forms of protection to deal with unemployment. The 1950s to 1970s are described as the years of calm waters of fully employment continuing prosperity people buying their first cars their first homes and domestic appliances. Stagflation became the problem for the 1980s of dealing with inflation and revisiting unemployment to new prosperity of the 1990s and the financial meltdown of 2008. People in 2020 have different lived experiences to those of 1820. Yet life in 2020 brings new but different challenges to 1820. The books is aimed at students of history of economics of social change and politics. It is however also aimed at a wider readership as it tries to tell 200 years of history as a journey that continues to shape both countries.
Publication Date: 2020-11-23
Cold War: The Essential Reference Guide by
The impact of the Cold War is still being felt around the world today. This insightful single-volume reference captures the events and personalities of the era, while also inspiring critical thinking about this still-controversial period.Cold War: The Essential Reference Guide is intended to introduce students to the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States that dominated international affairs in the second half of the 20th century. A comprehensive overview essay, plus separate essays on the causes and consequences of the conflict, will provide readers with the necessary context to understand the many facets of this complex era.The guide's expert contributors cover all of the influential people and pivotal events of the period, encompassing the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, Southeast Asia, China, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa from political, military, and cultural perspectives. Reference entries offer valuable insight into the leaders and conflicts that defined the Cold War, while other essays promote critical thinking about controversial and significant Cold War topics, including whether Ronald Reagan was responsible for ending the Cold War, the impact of Sputnik on the Cold War, and the significance of the Prague Spring.
ISBN: 9781610690041Publication Date: 2012-01-16
