America's Early Whalemen

America's Early Whalemen PDF Author: John A Strong
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816538816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The Indians of coastal Long Island were closely attuned to their maritime environment. They hunted sea mammals, fished in coastal waters, and harvested shellfish. To celebrate the deep-water spirits, they sacrificed the tail and fins of the most powerful and awesome denizen of their maritime world—the whale. These Native Americans were whalemen, integral to the origin and development of the first American whaling enterprise in the years 1650 to 1750. America’s Early Whalemen examines this early chapter of an iconic American historical experience. John A. Strong’s research draws on exhaustive sources, domestic and international, including little-known documents such as the whaling contracts of 340 Native American whalers, personal accounting books of whaling company owners, London customs records, estate inventories, and court records. Strong addresses labor relations, the role of alcohol and debt, the patterns of cultural accommodations by Native Americans, and the emergence of corporate capitalism in colonial America. When Strong began teaching at Long Island University in 1964, he found little mention of the local Indigenous people in history books. The Shinnecocks and the neighboring tribes of Unkechaugs and Montauketts were treated as background figures for the celebratory narrative of the “heroic” English settlers. America’s Early Whalemen highlights the important contributions of Native peoples to colonial America.

America's Early Whalemen

America's Early Whalemen PDF Author: John A Strong
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816538816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The Indians of coastal Long Island were closely attuned to their maritime environment. They hunted sea mammals, fished in coastal waters, and harvested shellfish. To celebrate the deep-water spirits, they sacrificed the tail and fins of the most powerful and awesome denizen of their maritime world—the whale. These Native Americans were whalemen, integral to the origin and development of the first American whaling enterprise in the years 1650 to 1750. America’s Early Whalemen examines this early chapter of an iconic American historical experience. John A. Strong’s research draws on exhaustive sources, domestic and international, including little-known documents such as the whaling contracts of 340 Native American whalers, personal accounting books of whaling company owners, London customs records, estate inventories, and court records. Strong addresses labor relations, the role of alcohol and debt, the patterns of cultural accommodations by Native Americans, and the emergence of corporate capitalism in colonial America. When Strong began teaching at Long Island University in 1964, he found little mention of the local Indigenous people in history books. The Shinnecocks and the neighboring tribes of Unkechaugs and Montauketts were treated as background figures for the celebratory narrative of the “heroic” English settlers. America’s Early Whalemen highlights the important contributions of Native peoples to colonial America.

Native American Whalemen and the World

Native American Whalemen and the World PDF Author: Nancy Shoemaker
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469622580
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
In the nineteenth century, nearly all Native American men living along the southern New England coast made their living traveling the world's oceans on whaleships. Many were career whalemen, spending twenty years or more at sea. Their labor invigorated economically depressed reservations with vital income and led to complex and surprising connections with other Indigenous peoples, from the islands of the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean. At home, aboard ship, or around the world, Native American seafarers found themselves in a variety of situations, each with distinct racial expectations about who was "Indian" and how "Indians" behaved. Treated by their white neighbors as degraded dependents incapable of taking care of themselves, Native New Englanders nevertheless rose to positions of command at sea. They thereby complicated myths of exploration and expansion that depicted cultural encounters as the meeting of two peoples, whites and Indians. Highlighting the shifting racial ideologies that shaped the lives of these whalemen, Nancy Shoemaker shows how the category of "Indian" was as fluid as the whalemen were mobile.

Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America

Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America PDF Author: Eric Jay Dolin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393066665
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
A Los Angeles Times Best Non-Fiction Book of 2007 A Boston Globe Best Non-Fiction Book of 2007 Amazon.com Editors pick as one of the 10 best history books of 2007 Winner of the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History, given by the North American Society for Oceanic History "The best history of American whaling to come along in a generation." —Nathaniel Philbrick The epic history of the "iron men in wooden boats" who built an industrial empire through the pursuit of whales. "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme," Herman Melville proclaimed, and this absorbing history demonstrates that few things can capture the sheer danger and desperation of men on the deep sea as dramatically as whaling. Eric Jay Dolin begins his vivid narrative with Captain John Smith's botched whaling expedition to the New World in 1614. He then chronicles the rise of a burgeoning industry—from its brutal struggles during the Revolutionary period to its golden age in the mid-1800s when a fleet of more than 700 ships hunted the seas and American whale oil lit the world, to its decline as the twentieth century dawned. This sweeping social and economic history provides rich and often fantastic accounts of the men themselves, who mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, scrimshawed, and recorded their experiences in journals and memoirs. Containing a wealth of naturalistic detail on whales, Leviathan is the most original and stirring history of American whaling in many decades.

The Poison Plot

The Poison Plot PDF Author: Elaine Forman Crane
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501721321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
An accusation of attempted murder rudely interrupted Mary Arnold’s dalliances with working men and her extensive shopping sprees. When her husband Benedict fell deathly ill and then asserted she had tried to kill him with poison, the result was a dramatic petition for divorce. The case before the Rhode Island General Assembly and its tumultuous aftermath, during which Benedict died, made Mary a cause célèbre in Newport through the winter of 1738 and 1739. Elaine Forman Crane invites readers into the salacious domestic life of Mary and Benedict Arnold and reveals the seamy side of colonial Newport. The surprise of The Poison Plot, however, is not the outrageous acts of Mary or the peculiar fact that attempted murder was not a convictable offense in Rhode Island. As Crane shows with style, Mary’s case was remarkable precisely because adultery, criminality and theft, and even spousal homicide were well known in the New England colonies. Assumptions of Puritan propriety are overturned by the facts of rough and tumble life in a port city: money was to be made, pleasure was to be had, and if marriage became an obstacle to those pursuits a woman had means to set things right. The Poison Plot is an intimate drama constructed from historical documents and informed by Crane’s deep knowledge of elite and common life in Newport. Her keen eye for telling details and her sense of story bring Mary, Benedict, and a host of other characters—including her partner in adultery, Walter Motley, and John Tweedy the apothecary who sold Mary toxic drugs—to life in the homes, streets, and shops of the port city. The result is a vivid tale that will change minds about life in supposedly prim and proper New England.

A Bold and Hardy Race of Men

A Bold and Hardy Race of Men PDF Author: Jennifer Schell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781625340207
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In his novel Miriam Coffin, or The Whale-Fishermen (1834), Joseph C. Hart proclaimed that his characters were "a bold and hardy race of men," who deserved the "expressive title of American Whale-Fishermen." Hart was not the only American author to applaud these physical laborers as the embodiment of national manhood. Heroic portraits of whalers first appeared in American literature during the 1780s, and they proliferated across time. Writers as various as Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman celebrated the talents of the seafarers who transformed the New England whale fishery into a globally dominant industry. But these images did not go unchallenged. Alternative visions?some of which undermined the iconic status of the trade and its workers?began to proliferate. Even so, these depictions did very little to dismantle the notion that whaling men were prime exemplars of a proud American work ethic. To explain why this industry had such a widespread and enduring impact on American literature, Jennifer Schell juxtaposes and analyzes a wide array of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century whaling narratives. Drawing on various studies of masculinity, labor history, and transnationalism, Schell shows how this particular type of maritime work, and the traits and values associated with it, helped to shape the American literary, cultural, and historical imagination. In the process, she reveals the diverse, flexible, and often contradictory meanings of gender, class, and nation in nineteenth-century America.

History Of The American Whale Fishery From Its Earliest Inception To The Year 1876

History Of The American Whale Fishery From Its Earliest Inception To The Year 1876 PDF Author: Alexander Starbuck
Publisher: Alpha Edition
ISBN: 9789354414626
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 784

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Book Description
This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

A Most Glorious Ride

A Most Glorious Ride PDF Author: Edward P. Kohn
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438455135
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Encompasses key years and important events in Theodore Roosevelt’s early life and career. A Most Glorious Ride presents the complete diaries of Theodore Roosevelt from 1877 to 1886. Covering the formative years of his life, Roosevelt’s entries show the transformation of a sickly and solitary Harvard freshman into a confident and increasingly robust young adult. He writes about his grief over the premature death of his father, his courtship and marriage to his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, and later the death of Alice and his mother on the same day. The diaries chronicle his burgeoning political career in New York City and his election to the New York State Assembly. With his descriptions of balls, dinner parties, and nights at the opera, they offer a glimpse into life among the Gilded Age elite in Boston and New York. They also recount Roosevelt’s first birding and hunting trips to the Adirondacks, the Maine woods, and the American West. Ending with Roosevelt’s secret engagement to his second wife, Edith Kermit Carow, A Most Glorious Ride provides an intimate look into the life of the man who would become America’s twenty-sixth president. Brought together for the first time in a single volume, the diaries have been meticulously transcribed, annotated, and introduced by Edward P. Kohn. Twenty-four black-and-white photographs are also included. “Edward P. Kohn has done scholars a great public service by editing the diaries of Theodore Roosevelt, 1877–1886. This volume is essential reading for anybody interested in the rise of the great Rough Rider. Highly recommended.” — Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America “I thought there was nothing new under the sun to be done on Theodore Roosevelt, given the thousands of books already published, but Edward P. Kohn has discovered, and admirably filled, a major gap in books on the life and times of TR. By bringing these diaries together in one place for the first time and providing expert annotation and footnotes, Kohn makes an extremely valuable contribution to understanding Roosevelt.” — Paul Grondahl, author of I Rose Like a Rocket: The Political Education of Theodore Roosevelt “A Most Glorious Ride is an outstanding addition not only to the scholarship on Roosevelt but also to the study of the Gilded Age, capturing the social norms of the times and offering insights into a long-gone era of family life.” — Michael Patrick Cullinane, author of Liberty and American Anti-Imperialism: 1898–1909

The Whalemen

The Whalemen PDF Author: Edouard A. Stackpole
Publisher: New Word City
ISBN: 1612309445
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
No other enterprise in America's history ever approached whaling for adventure. Here, award-winning historian Edouard A. Stackpole describes the early Colonial days when boat crews attacked whales near shore through the development of deep-sea whaling by the hardy Quaker whalemen of Nantucket and on into the adventure-packed century when Yankee whalemen made the world their domain.

Forgotten Patriots

Forgotten Patriots PDF Author: Edwin G. Burrows
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786727047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Between 1775 and 1783, some 200,000 Americans took up arms against the British Crown. Just over 6,800 of those men died in battle. About 25,000 became prisoners of war, most of them confined in New York City under conditions so atrocious that they perished by the thousands. Evidence suggests that at least 17,500 Americans may have died in these prisons -- more than twice the number to die on the battlefield. It was in New York, not Boston or Philadelphia, where most Americans gave their lives for the cause of independence. New York City became the jailhouse of the American Revolution because it was the principal base of the Crown's military operations. Beginning with the bumper crop of American captives taken during the 1776 invasion of New York, captured Americans were stuffed into a hastily assembled collection of public buildings, sugar houses, and prison ships. The prisoners were shockingly overcrowded and chronically underfed -- those who escaped alive told of comrades so hungry they ate their own clothes and shoes. Despite the extraordinary number of lives lost, Forgotten Patriots is the first-ever account of what took place in these hell-holes. The result is a unique perspective on the Revolutionary War as well as a sobering commentary on how Americans have remembered our struggle for independence -- and how much we have forgotten.

The Story of Yankee Whaling

The Story of Yankee Whaling PDF Author: Irwin Shapiro
Publisher: New York : American Heritage Publishing Company; book trade distribution by Golden Press
ISBN:
Category : Adventure
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Gives a history of whaling in New England.