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In this provocative and timely collection of essays--five published for the first time--one of the most important ethnohistorians writing today, James Axtell, explores the key role of imagination both in our perception of strangers and in the writing of history. Coinciding with the 500th anniversary of Columbus's "discovery" of America, this collection covers a wide range of topics dealing with American history. Three essays view the invasion of North America from the perspective of the Indians, whose land it was. The very first meetings, he finds, were nearly always peaceful. Other essays describe native encounters with colonial traders--creating "the first consumer revolution"--and Jesuit ...
Written by one of the leading authorities on trade and finance in the early modern Atlantic world, these fourteen essays, revised and integrated for this volume, share as their common theme the development of the Atlantic economy, especially British America and the Caribbean. Topics treated range from early attempts in medieval England to measure the carrying capacity of ships, through the advent in Renaissance Italy and England of business newspapers that reported on the traffic of ships, cargoes and market prices, to the state of the economy of France over the two hundred years before the French Revolution and of the British West Indies between 1760 and 1790. Included is the story of Thomas Irving who challenged and thwarted the likes of John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
In an era of intense religious conflict in Europe and ongoing exploration of the lands beyond Europe, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723-37) set a new agenda for thinking about faith and provided a lasting visual template for representing the world's religions. In the work's seven massive volumes, Jean Frederic Bernard and the renowned engraver Bernard Picart invited readers to view religions and their institutions as cultural practices. Bernard Picart and The First Global Vision of Religion approaches this much-cited but little-studied work from a variety of angles. Its fifteen scholarly essays examine Bernard and Picart's authorial and artistic strategies, the handling of religious difference in Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses, and the cultural context that fostered the creation of one of the most influential works of comparative religion ever published.
When the Handbook for Research in American History was first published, reviewers called it "an excellent tool for historians of all interests and levels of experience . . . simple to use, and concisely worded" (Western Historical Quarterly) and "an excellent work that fulfills its title in being portable yet well-filled" (Reference Reviews). The Journal of American History added, "It is not easy to produce a reference work that is utilitarian and enriching and does not duplicate existing works. Professor Prucha has done the job very well." This second, revised edition takes account of the revolution that is occurring in bibliographic science as printed reference works extend to electronic d...
Over the past decade, literary scholars have become increasingly engaged with colonial studies and have fashioned various points of focus in their investigations of imperialist narratives, including the figure of woman, cannibalism, the romance of the first encounter, and the tropicopolitan. This book builds on existing work by offering a new focal point: the evolution of the British imperial hero in America from Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of... Guiana (1596) to James Grainger's The Sugar Cane (1764), with concentration on narratives produced between the year of Cromwell's Western Design (1655) and the British raid on Cartegena (1741). Each individual chapter isolates a distinct type of colonial hero, furnishing examples from a wide variety of narratives, including some nonfiction essays and tracts, but chiefly novels, plays, and poems.
In response to the global turn in scholarship on colonial and early modern history, the eighteen essays in this volume provide a fresh and much-needed perspective on the wider context of the encounter between the inhabitants of precolonial Virginia and the English. This collection offers an interdisciplinary consideration of developments in Native America, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Chesapeake, highlighting the mosaic of regions and influences that formed the context and impetus for the English settlement at Jamestown in 1607. The volume reflects an understanding of Jamestown not as the birthplace of democracy in America but as the creation of a European outpost in a neighborhood...
In the early modern world, botany was big science and big business, critical to Europe's national and trade ambitions. Tracing the dynamic relationships among plants, peoples, states, and economies over the course of three centuries, this collection of essays offers a lively challenge to a historiography that has emphasized the rise of modern botany as a story of taxonomies and "pure" systems of classification. Charting a new map of botany along colonial coordinates, reaching from Europe to the New World, India, Asia, and other points on the globe, Colonial Botany explores how the study, naming, cultivation, and marketing of rare and beautiful plants resulted from and shaped European voyages...
Written as a reference to be used within University, Departmental, Public, Institutional, Herbaria, and Arboreta libraries, this book provides the first starting point for better access to data on medicinal and poisonous plants. Following on the success of the author's CRC World Dictionary of Plant Names and the CRC World Dictionary of Grasses, the author provides the names of thousands of genera and species of economically important plants. It serves as an indispensable time-saving guide for all those involved with plants in medicine, food, and cultural practices as it draws on a tremendous range of primary and secondary sources. This authoritative lexicon is much more than a dictionary. It includes historical and linguistic information on botany and medicine throughout each volume.