Author: Daniel Immerwahr
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374715122
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382
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Book Description
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.
Author: Joseph R. Hartman
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824889203
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
When the USS Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana's harbor on February 15, 1898, the United States joined local rebel forces to avenge the Maine and "liberate" Cuba from the Spanish empire. "Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain!" So went the popular slogan. Little did the Cubans know that the United States was not going to give them freedom--in less than a year the American flag replaced the Spanish flag over the various island colonies of Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Spurred by military successes and dreams of an island empire, the US annexed Hawai'i that same year, even establishing island colonies throughout Micronesia and the Antilles. With the new governmental orders of creating new art, architecture, monuments, and infrastructure from the United States, the island cultures of the Caribbean and Pacific were now caught in a strategic scope of a growing imperial power. These spatial and visual objects created a visible confrontation between local indigenous, African, Asian, Spanish, and US imperial expressions. These material and visual histories often go unacknowledged, but serve as uncomplicated "proof" for the visible confrontation between the US and the new island territories. The essays in this volume contribute to an important art-historical, visual cultural, architectural, and materialist critique of a growing body of scholarship on the US Empire and the War of 1898. Imperial Islands seeks to reimagine the history and cultural politics of art, architecture, and visual experience in the US insular context. The authors of this volume propose a new direction of visual culture and spatial experience through nuanced terrains for writing, envisioning, and revising US-American, Caribbean, and Pacific histories. These original essays address the role of art and architecture in expressions of state power; racialized and gendered representations of the United States and its island colonies; and forms of resistance to US cultural presence. Featuring interdisciplinary approaches, Imperial Islands offers readers a new way of learning the ongoing significance of vision and experience in the US empire today, particularly for Caribbean, Latinx, Pilipinx, and Pacific Island communities.
Author: Douglas Hamilton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019884722X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
This volume examines the various ways in which islands (and groups of islands) contributed to the establishment, extension, and maintenance of the British Empire in the age of sail.
Author: Juan José Ponce Vázquez
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108801366
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
Islanders and Empire examines the role smuggling played in the cultural, economic, and socio-political transformation of Hispaniola from the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. With a rare focus on local peoples and communities, the book analyzes how residents of Hispaniola actively negotiated and transformed the meaning and reach of imperial bureaucracies and institutions for their own benefit. By co-opting the governing and judicial powers of local and imperial institutions on the island, residents could take advantage of, and even dominate, the contraband trade that reached the island's shores. In doing so, they altered the course of the European inter-imperial struggles in the Caribbean by limiting, redirecting, or suppressing the Spanish crown's policies, thus taking control of their destinies and that of their neighbors in Hispaniola, other Spanish Caribbean territories, and the Spanish empire in the region.
Author: Paul Kléber Monod
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405134445
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 469
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Book Description
Imperial Island: A History of Britain and its Empire, 1660-1837 is a comprehensive account of Great Britain's imperial path from the Stuart Restoration of 1660 to its emergence as a dominant global superpower. Suitable for students with no prior knowledge of British history Organized to help students and instructors: comprises 21 thematic chapters set within a clear, chronological framework Includes over 30 illustrations and maps to help orient the reader Addresses the new generation of American and British students that are interested in global, environmental, and cultural history
Author: Camilla Fojas
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292756305
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
Examining a broad range of pop culture media-film, television, journalism, advertisements, travel writing, and literature-Fojas explores the United States as an empire and how it has narrated its relationship to its island territories.
Author: Tom Zoellner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674984307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award “Impeccably researched and seductively readable...tells the story of Sam Sharpe’s revolution manqué, and the subsequent abolition of slavery in Jamaica, in a way that’s acutely relevant to the racial unrest of our own time.” —Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising The final uprising of enslaved people in Jamaica started as a peaceful labor strike a few days shy of Christmas in 1831. A harsh crackdown by white militias quickly sparked a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. The rebels lost their daring bid for freedom, but their headline-grabbing defiance triggered a decisive turn against slavery. Island on Fire is a dramatic day-by-day account of these transformative events. A skillful storyteller, Tom Zoellner uses diaries, letters, and colonial records to tell the intimate story of the men and women who rose up and briefly tasted liberty. He brings to life the rebellion’s enigmatic leader, the preacher Samuel Sharpe, and shows how his fiery resistance turned the tide of opinion in London and hastened the end of slavery in the British Empire. “Zoellner’s vigorous, fast-paced account brings to life a varied gallery of participants...The revolt failed to improve conditions for the enslaved in Jamaica, but it crucially wounded the institution of slavery itself.” —Fergus M. Bordewich, Wall Street Journal “It’s high time that we had a book like the splendid one Tom Zoellner has written: a highly readable but carefully documented account of the greatest of all British slave rebellions, the miseries that led to it, and the momentous changes it wrought.” —Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains
Author: Kathleen Wilson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113620864X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Rooted in a period of vigorous exploration and colonialism, The Island Race: Englishness, empire and gender in the eighteenth century is an innovative study of the issues of nation, gender and identity. Wilson bases her analysis on a wide range of case studies drawn both from Britain and across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Creating a colourful and original colonial landscape, she considers topics such as: * sodomy * theatre * masculinity * the symbolism of Britannia * the role of women in war. Wilson shows the far-reaching implications that colonial power and expansion had upon the English people's sense of self, and argues that the vaunted singularity of English culture was in fact constituted by the bodies, practices and exchanges of peoples across the globe. Theoretically rigorous and highly readable, The Island Race will become a seminal text for understanding the pressing issues that it confronts.
Author: Antonis Hadjikyriacou
Publisher: Markus Wiener Publishers
ISBN: 9781558766372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Book Description
The Ottoman Empire stretched from the Black Sea to the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. It included the islands of Cyprus, Crete, Rhodes, and many smaller islands in the Aegean, Adriatic, and Black Seas. These islands were its frontiers, and many of the battles against Christian enemies were fought here; they were also bridges to the outside world beyond the empire. They were often fortified by magnificent castles, and sometimes served as bases for corsairs. The book highlights significant events in naval history, depicts collective punishments by invaders, and provides myriad insights into economic and cultural life on the islands.
Author: Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816648634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Through a detailed unpacking of the castaway genre’s appeal in English literature, Empire Islands forwards our understanding of the sociopsychology of British Empire. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower argues convincingly that by helping generations of readers to make sense of—and perhaps feel better about—imperial aggression, the castaway story in effect enabled the expansion and maintenance of European empire. Empire Islands asks why so many colonial authors chose islands as the setting for their stories of imperial adventure and why so many postcolonial writers “write back” to those island castaway narratives. Drawing on insightful readings of works from Thomas More’s Utopia to Caribbean novels like George Lamming’s Water with Berries, from canonical works such as Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest to the lesser-known A Narrative of the Life and Astonishing Adventures of John Daniel by Ralph Morris, Weaver-Hightower examines themes of cannibalism, piracy, monstrosity, imperial aggression, and the concept of going native. Ending with analysis of contemporary film and the role of the United States in global neoimperialism, Weaver-Hightower exposes how island narratives continue not only to describe but to justify colonialism. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower is assistant professor of English and postcolonial studies at the University of North Dakota.
