Writings on American History

Writings on American History PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description

Writings on American History

Writings on American History PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description


Flying Cloud

Flying Cloud PDF Author: David W. Shaw
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061873888
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
Flying Cloud is the riveting and thoroughly researched tale of a truly unforgettable sea voyage during the days of the California gold rush. In 1851, navigator Eleanor Creesy set sail on the maiden voyage of the clipper ship Flying Cloud, traveling from New York to San Francisco in only 89 days. This swift passage set a world record that went unbroken for more than a century. Upon arrival in San Francisco, Flying Cloud became an enduring symbol of a young nation's daring frontier spirit. Illustrated with original maps and charts as well as historical photographs, Shaw's compelling narrative captures the drama of this thrilling adventure. In a position almost unheard of for a woman in the mid-19th century, Eleanor Creesy served as the ship's navigator. With only the sun, planets, and stars to guide her, she brought Flying Cloud safely around Cape Horn at the height of a winter blizzard, faced storms, dodged shoals, and found her way through calms to make the swift passage possible. Along with her husband, Josiah, the ship's captain, she sailed the mighty 3-masted clipper through 16,000 miles of the fiercest, most unpredictable oceans in the world. Shaw vividly recreates 19th-century seafaring conditions and customs, for both the crew and the passengers who entrusted their fate to an untested ship. Including excerpts from letters and diaries of passengers, Shaw recounts Flying Cloud's victory in the face of adversity—including sabotage, insubordination, and severe damage to the clipper's mainmast that might have sunk her with all hands lost. But the ship triumphed and would ultimately sail the world. Flying Cloud brings to life, for the first time, the glory of one of America's most important seafaring tales and one woman's incredible achievements.

Narrating the Landscape

Narrating the Landscape PDF Author: Matthew N. Johnston
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806154969
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The American nineteenth century saw a largely rural nation confined to the Eastern Seaboard conquer a continent and spawn increasingly dense commercial metropolises. This time of unprecedented territorial and economic growth has long been thought to find its most sweeping visual equivalent in the period’s landscape paintings. But, as Matthew N. Johnston shows, the age’s defining features were just as clearly captured in, and motivated by, visual material mass-produced through innovations in printing technology. Illustrated railroad and steamboat guidebooks, tourist literature, reports of geological surveys, ethnographic studies: all of these new print vehicles brought new meanings to the interplay of time, space, and place as American continental expansion peaked. Instrumental to that project of national and industrial growth, these commercial and scientific publications introduced readers, travelers, and citizens to a changing North American landscape made more accessible by new travel routes blazed between 1825 and 1875. More fundamentally, as Johnston shows in his nuanced analysis, by simulating new temporal frameworks through their presentation of landscape, these print materials established new models of consumption and new kinds of knowledge critical to expansion. Johnston relates these sources to traditional art historical subjects—the landscapes of the Hudson River school, luminist paintings by John Kensett and William Trost Richards, Native portraits painted by George Catlin, and photographs by Timothy O’Sullivan—to show how key discourses associated with expansion shifted away from picturesque strategies pairing imagery and narrative toward entirely new forms that gave temporal structure to viewers’ experience of an emerging modernity. Revealing the crucial role of print and visual culture in shaping the nineteenth-century United States, Narrating the Landscape offers fresh insight into the landscapes Americans beheld and imagined in this formative era.

Rush for Riches

Rush for Riches PDF Author: J. S. Holliday
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520214021
Category : California
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Traces the history of the California Gold Rush from 1849 through 1884 when a court decision forced the shut down of the hydraulic mining operations, bringing decades of careless freedom to an end.

Carleton Watkins

Carleton Watkins PDF Author: Carleton E. Watkins
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606060058
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
This is an opulently illustrated catalogue of the entire remaining mammoth photographs of Carleton Watkins (1829-1916). The work will contribute not only to a fuller understanding of this pioneering photographer but also portray the barely explored frontier in its final moments of pristine beauty.

Made in California

Made in California PDF Author: Stephanie Barron
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520227644
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Unusually inclusive, visually intriguing, and beautifully produced, Made in California will appeal to anyone who has lived in, visited, or imagined California.".

The Mythical West

The Mythical West PDF Author: Richard W. Slatta
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1576075885
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
This cultural journey down memory lane showcases how major Western figures, events, and places have been portrayed in folk legends, art, literature, and popular culture. Ever since the days of the 49ers and George Armstrong Custer, the Old West has been America's most potent source of legend. But it is sometimes hard to separate fact from fiction. Did you know, for example, that Annie Oakley was a talented marksman who shot an estimated 40,000 rounds per year while practicing and performing for Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show in the late l800s? Or that many interpreters believe that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not just a fairy tale, but also a Populist allegory? These are just two of the folk legends dissected and examined in this veritable cultural geography. The volume covers everything from billionaire Howard Hughes and composer Aaron Copeland to Aztlan (the legendary first city of the Aztecs) and Area 51, the top-secret U.S. Air Force base at Groom Lake, Nevada, that has fascinated UFO and conspiracy buffs.

Verdi at the Golden Gate

Verdi at the Golden Gate PDF Author: George Martin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520913426
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Opera is a fragile, complex art, but it flourished extravagantly in San Francisco during the Gold Rush years, a time when daily life in the city was filled with gambling, duels, murder, and suicide. In the history of the United States there has never been a rougher town than Gold Rush San Francisco, yet there has never been a greater frenzy for opera than developed there in these exciting years. How did this madness for opera take root and grow? Why did the audience's generally drunken, brawling behavior gradually improve? How and why did Verdi emerge as the city's favorite composer? These are the intriguing themes of George Martin's enlightening and wonderfully entertaining story. Among the incidents recounted are the fist fight that stopped an opera performance and ended in a fatal duel; and the brothel madam who, by sitting in the wrong row of a theater, caused a fracas that resulted in the formation of the Vigilantes of 1856. Martin weaves together meticulously gathered social, political, and musical facts to create this lively cultural history. His study contributes to a new understanding of urban culture in the Jacksonian–Manifest Destiny eras, and of the role of opera in cities during this time, especially in the American West. Over it all soars Verdi's somber, romantic music, capturing the melancholy, the feverish joy, and the idealism of his listeners.

Eugenic Nation

Eugenic Nation PDF Author: Alexandra Minna Stern
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520938666
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Many people assume that eugenics all but disappeared with the fall of Nazism, but as this sweeping history demonstrates, the idea of better breeding had a wide and surprising reach in the United States throughout the twentieth century. With an original emphasis on the American West, Eugenic Nation brings to light many little-known facts—for example, that one-third of the involuntary sterilizations in this country occurred in California between 1909 and 1979—as it explores the influence of eugenics on phenomena as varied as race-based intelligence tests, school segregation, tropical medicine, the Border Patrol, and the environmental movement. Eugenic Nation begins in the 1900s, when influential California eugenicists molded an extensive agenda of better breeding for the rest of the country. The book traces hereditarian theories of sex and gender to the culture of conformity of the 1950s and moves to the 1960s, arguing that the liberation movements of that decade emerged in part as a challenge to policies and practices informed by eugenics.

Eugenic Nation

Eugenic Nation PDF Author: Alexandra Stern
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520244436
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
The first book to show how huge a part eugenic ideas in the West influenced the entire US, a view that reveals that these ideas did not die after World War II, but --especially in the form of ideas of hereditary weakness that particularly blamed mothers--remained strong in the 1950s and in many ways led to the 1960s liberation movements.