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Author: Eric Jay Dolin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871404338
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
Traces the history of the relationship between America and China back to its earliest days, when the United States traded with China for furs, opium, and rare sea cucumbers, but left an ecological and human rights disaster that still reverberates today.
Author: Eric Jay Dolin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871404338
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 433
Get Book Here
Book Description
Traces the history of the relationship between America and China back to its earliest days, when the United States traded with China for furs, opium, and rare sea cucumbers, but left an ecological and human rights disaster that still reverberates today.
Author: Eric Jay Dolin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 087140348X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 508
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Book Description
Ancient China collides with newfangled America in this epic tale of opium smugglers, sea pirates, and dueling clipper ships. Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. It is a prescient fable for our time, one that surprisingly continues to shed light on our modern relationship with China. Indeed, the furious trade in furs, opium, and bêche-de-mer—a rare sea cucumber delicacy—might have catalyzed America’s emerging economy, but it also sparked an ecological and human rights catastrophe of such epic proportions that the reverberations can still be felt today. Peopled with fascinating characters—from the “Financier of the Revolution” Robert Morris to the Chinese emperor Qianlong, who considered foreigners inferior beings—this page-turning saga of pirates and politicians, coolies and concubines becomes a must-read for any fan of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower or Mark Kurlansky’s Cod.
Author: Peter Andreas
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197629997
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
In Killer High, Peter Andreas tells the story of war from antiquity to the modern age through the lens of six psychoactive drugs: alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, opium, amphetamines, and cocaine. Armed conflict has become progressively more "drugged" with the global spread of these mind-altering substances. From ancient brews and battles to meth and modern warfare, drugs and war have grown up together and become addicted to each other. By looking back not just years and decades but centuries, Andreas reveals that the drugs-conflict nexus is actually an old story, and that powerful states have been its biggest beneficiaries.
Author: Andrew R. Black
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807174092
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
The Hoosac railroad tunnel in the mountains of northwestern Massachusetts was a nineteenth-century engineering and construction marvel, on par with the Brooklyn Bridge, Transcontinental Railroad, and Erie Canal. The longest tunnel in the Western Hemisphere at the time (4.75 miles), it took nearly twenty-five years (1851‒1875), almost two hundred casualties, and tens of millions of dollars to build. Yet it failed to deliver on its grandiose promise of economic renewal for the commonwealth, and thus is little known today. Andrew R. Black’s Buried Dreams refreshes public memory of the project, explaining how a plan of such magnitude and cost came to be in the first place, what forces sustained its completion, and the factors that inhibited its success. Black digs into the special case of Massachusetts, a state disadvantaged by nature and forced repeatedly to reinvent itself to succeed economically. The Hoosac Tunnel was just one of the state’s efforts in this cycle of decline and rejuvenation, though certainly the strangest. Black also explores the intense rivalry among Eastern Seaboard states for the spoils of western expansion in the post‒Erie Canal period. His study interweaves the lure of the West, the competition between Massachusetts and archrival New York, the railroad boom and collapse, and the shifting ground of state and national politics. The psychic makeup of Americans before and after the Civil War heavily influenced public perceptions of the tunnel; by the time it was finished, Black contends, the indomitable triumphalism that had given birth to the Hoosac had faded to skepticism and cynicism. Anticipated economic benefits never arrived, and Massachusetts eventually sold the tunnel for only a fraction of its cost to a private railroad company. Buried Dreams tells a story of America’s reckoning with the perils of impractical idealism, the limits of technology to bend nature to its will, and grand endeavors untempered by humility.
Author: Julia Skinner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442271027
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Afternoon Tea: A History explores the development of the afternoon tea meal, diving deeper than the popular tale of the Duchess of Bedford’s afternoon gatherings to find the meals that inspired those early afternoon teas. Julia Skinner carefully separates the fact and lore around the meal and sets the story of afternoon tea within its historic contexts. Recognizing that a meal’s birth and life never happen in a vacuum, the book sets aside the already well-documented conversations surrounding tea etiquette, instead exploring the social contexts that made the meal possible and popular, moving it from one small subset of the population to a widespread and beloved phenomenon, one that nearly died out at the end of the 20th century before experiencing a resurgence in the 21st. Afternoon tea is a meal that came of age during the British Empire’s most aggressive expansion, and as such became a meal that was transported to new continents with colonial forces. The book explores how this movement took place and uncovers the different ways tea and colonialism intersect in both the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It also looks at afternoon tea in America, a country that broke from the Empire before the meal was established as a set ritual, but which still has its own complex relationship with the beverage and a continuing fascination with the meal. The book concludes by looking at afternoon tea today, including a handful of interviews that show the range of perspectives about the meal and its place in society, as well as its resurging popularity in the last decade.
Author: Michael A. Verney
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226818373
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
A Great and Rising Nation illuminates the unexplored early decades of the United States’ imperialist naval aspirations. Conventional wisdom holds that, until the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States was a feeble player on the world stage, with an international presence rooted in commerce rather than military might. Michael A. Verney’s A Great and Rising Nation flips this notion on its head, arguing that early US naval expeditions, often characterized as merely scientific, were in fact deeply imperialist. Circling the globe from the Mediterranean to South America and the Arctic, these voyages reflected the diverse imperial aspirations of the new republic, including commercial dominance in the Pacific World, religious empire in the Holy Land, proslavery expansion in South America, and diplomatic prestige in Europe. As Verney makes clear, the United States had global imperial aspirations far earlier than is commonly thought.
Author: Gordon H. Chang
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674050398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
Americans look to China with fascination and fear, unsure whether the rising Asian power is friend or foe but certain it will play a crucial role in America’s future. This is nothing new, Gordon Chang says. For centuries, Americans have been convinced of China’s importance to their own national destiny. Fateful Ties draws on literature, art, biography, popular culture, and politics to trace America’s long and varied preoccupation with China. China has held a special place in the American imagination from colonial times, when Jamestown settlers pursued a passage to the Pacific and Asia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans plied a profitable trade in Chinese wares, sought Chinese laborers to build the West, and prized China’s art and decor. China was revered for its ancient culture but also drew Christian missionaries intent on saving souls in a heathen land. Its vast markets beckoned expansionists, even as its migrants were seen as a “yellow peril” that prompted the earliest immigration restrictions. A staunch ally during World War II, China was a dangerous adversary in the Cold War that followed. In the post-Mao era, Americans again embraced China as a land of inexhaustible opportunity, playing a central role in its economic rise. Through portraits of entrepreneurs, missionaries, academics, artists, diplomats, and activists, Chang demonstrates how ideas about China have long been embedded in America’s conception of itself and its own fate. Fateful Ties provides valuable perspective on this complex international and intercultural relationship as America navigates an uncertain new era.
![Drugs in American Society [3 volumes] PDF](https://books.google.com/books/content/images/frontcover/sxjOEAAAQBAJ?fife=w80-h100)
Author: Nancy E. Marion
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1610695968
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1295
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Book Description
Containing more than 450 entries, this easy-to-read encyclopedia provides concise information about the history of and recent trends in drug use and drug abuse in the United States—a societal problem with an estimated cost of $559 billion a year. Despite decades of effort and billions of dollars spent to combat the problem, illicit drug use in the United States is still rampant and shows no sign of abating. Covering illegal drugs ranging from marijuana and LSD to cocaine and crystal meth, this authoritative reference work examines patterns of drug use in American history, as well as drug control and interdiction efforts from the nineteenth century to the present. This encyclopedia provides a multidisciplinary perspective on the various aspects of the American drug problem, including the drugs themselves, the actions taken in attempts to curb or stop the drug trade, the efforts at intervention and treatment of those individuals affected by drug use, and the cultural and economic effects of drug use in the United States. More than 450 entries descriptively analyze and summarize key terms, trends, concepts, and people that are vital to the study of drugs and drug abuse, providing readers of all ages and backgrounds with invaluable information on domestic and international drug trafficking and use. The set provides special coverage of shifting societal and legislative perspectives on marijuana, as evidenced by Colorado and Washington legalizing marijuana with the 2012 elections.
![Imperialism and Expansionism in American History [4 volumes] PDF](https://books.google.com/books/content/images/frontcover/g6fOEAAAQBAJ?fife=w80-h100)
Author: Chris J. Magoc
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1610694309
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1665
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Book Description
This four-volume encyclopedia chronicles the historical roots of the United States' current military dominance, documenting its growth from continental expansionism to hemispheric hegemony to global empire. This groundbreaking four-volume encyclopedia offers sweeping coverage of a subject central to American history and of urgent importance today as the nation wrestles with a global imperial posture and the long-term viability of the largest military establishment in human history. The work features more than 650 entries encompassing the full scope of American expansionism and imperialism from the colonial era through the 21st-century "War on Terror." Readers will learn about U.S.-Native American conflicts; 19th-century land laws; early forays overseas, for example, the opening of Japan; and America's imperial conflicts in Cuba and the Philippines. U.S. interests in Latin America are explored, as are the often-forgotten ambitions that lay behind the nation's involvement in the World Wars. The work also offers extensive coverage of the Cold War and today's ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, and the Middle East as they relate to U.S. national interests. Notable individuals, including American statesmen, military commanders, influential public figures, and anti-imperialists are covered as well. The inclusion of cultural elements of American expansionism and imperialism—for example, Hollywood films and protest music—helps distinguish this set from other more limited works.
Author: Eric Jay Dolin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1631491539
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 644
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Book Description
"What Moby-Dick is to whales, Brilliant Beacons is to lighthouses—a transformative account of a familiar yet mystical subject." —Laurence Bergreen, author of Columbus: The Four Voyages In this "magnificent compendium" (New Republic), best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin presents the definitive history of American lighthouses, and in so doing "illuminate[s] the history of America itself" (Entertainment Weekly). Treating readers to a memorable cast of characters and "fascinating anecdotes" (New York Review of Books), Dolin shows how the story of the nation, from a regional backwater colony to global industrial power, can be illustrated through its lighthouses—from New England to the Gulf of Mexico, the Great Lakes, the Pacific Coast, and all the way to Alaska and Hawaii. A Captain and Classic Boat Best Nautical Book of 2016
