Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Against the Tide
Women in the Second Anglo-Boer War demonstrated great heroism. Theirs is a remarkable history derived from diaries and letters written during their incarceration in concentration camps. Against the Tide illustrates the fortitude of the brave Dutch women and children in their struggle against impossible circumstances in the attempt to save their country from the stronger forces of the British usurper. Not many today are aware that the British government established concentration camps to imprison innocent civilians nearly forty years before Germany did so. Their intention was to cause a quick surrender by such intimidation. However, the imprisoned Dutch women watching their children dying in ...
Wine, Women and Good Hope
While setting up a refreshment station in the Cape of Good Hope, Jan van Riebeeck tried his hand at making wine and brewing beer. This introduction, partnered with its trusty bedfellow, sex, set the tone for what would become a hedonistic metropolis. Wine, Women and Good Hope is a romp through this more salacious history of the Cape, looking at the antics of certain missionaries from the London Missionary Society, whose wandering eyes and love of the flesh took precedence over their moral duty to the church, and Cecil John Rhodes, whose excessive indulgence in alcohol contributed to his own demise and no doubt influenced the disgraceful behaviour of some of his contemporaries. Using her knowledge as a genealogist, June McKinnon traces the lineages of many well-known family trees to overturn the notion that those who lived in the past were nobler or had more sense than their modern descendants. Encompassing tales that are both humorous and tragic in their revelations of past misdeeds, this book will give you access to the little-known history of the Cape of Good Hope, and leave you asking the question, ‘What were my ancestors really up to?’
Colonial Literature and the Native Author
This book is the first study of writers who are both Victorian and indigenous, who have been educated in and write in terms of Victorian literary conventions, but whose indigenous affiliation is part of their literary personae and subject matter. What happens when the colonised, indigenous, or ‘native’ subject learns to write in the literary language of empire? If the romanticised subject of colonial literature becomes the author, is a new kind of writing produced, or does the native author conform to the models of the coloniser? By investigating the ways that nineteenth-century concerns are adopted, accommodated, rewritten, challenged, re-inscribed, confronted, or assimilated in the work of these authors, this study presents a novel examination of the nature of colonial literary production and indigenous authorship, as well as suggesting to the discipline of colonial and postcolonial studies a perhaps unsettling perspective with which to look at the larger patterns of Victorian cultural and literary formation.
A Drink of Dry Land
Two journalists – passionate about travel and the ‘vast, dry cathedral called Namibia’ – set out to meander through this land and to relish the pure space and the joy of road travel. The journey shaped up as something special. Along the way, thirty years of memories returned. Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit encountered a landscape like no other, a seemingly barren place of unexpected and unrivalled beauty: from the enchantment of the Kalahari to the misty shipwreck world of the Skeleton Coast and up to the frontiers of the Caprivi Strip. Somewhere between Otjiwarongo and the silver pans of Etosha, they fell under the spell of cheetahs. With insight, sensitivity and great humour, Ch...
Scottish Presbyterianism and Settler Colonial Politics
This book offers a new interpretation of political reform in the settler colonies of Britain’s empire in the early nineteenth century. It examines the influence of Scottish Presbyterian dissenting churches and their political values. It re-evaluates five notorious Scottish reformers and unpacks the Presbyterian foundation to their political ideas: Thomas Pringle (1789-1834), a poet in Cape Town; Thomas McCulloch (1776-1843), an educator in Pictou; John Dunmore Lang (1799-1878), a church minister in Sydney; William Lyon Mackenzie (1795-1861), a rebel in Toronto; and Samuel McDonald Martin (1805?-1848), a journalist in Auckland. The book weaves the five migrants’ stories together for the first time and demonstrates how the campaigns they led came to be intertwined. The book will appeal to historians of Scotland, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the British Empire and the Scottish diaspora.
Improvisations of Empire
Improvisations of Empire offers a historical, biographical and literary study of the life and writings of Thomas Pringle (1789–1834), the son of a Lowland tenant farmer in Scotland. It examines his Scottish journalistic and literary career, his emigration to the Cape Colony as the head of a party of Scottish settlers and his subsequent relocation to London where he gained prominence as the secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society and the editor of a popular annual, Friendship’s Offering. The central concern of the book is with Pringle’s poetry and his affiliated prose, and how these writings reflect the negotiation of his deeply conflicted colonial experience from the perspectives of his Scottish background, his shifting colonial locations and his subsequent period of residence in London.
Legends
We have a lot to be positive about in South Africa. With all our problems, it’s easy to feel bleak. But hold those thoughts, because Legends might be just the tonic you need to drive off the gloom. This book tells the stories of a dozen remarkable people – some well known, others largely forgotten – who changed Mzansi for the better. Most South Africans are proud of Nelson Mandela – and rightly so. His life was truly astounding, but he’s by no means the only person who should inspire us. There’s King Moshoeshoe, whose humanity and diplomatic strategies put him head and shoulders above his contemporaries, both European and African. And John Fairbairn, who brought non-racial democr...
Knowledge and Colonialism
The establishment of a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth century and an expansion of the sphere of colonial influence in the eighteenth century made South Africa the only part of sub-Saharan Africa where Europeans could travel with relative ease deep into the interior. As a result individuals with scientific interests in Africa came to the Cape. This book examines writings and drawings of scientifically educated travellers, particularly in the field of ethnography, against the background of commercial and administrative discourses on the Cape. It is argued that the scientific travellers benefited more from their relationship with the colonial order than the other way around.
Letters of a Lifetime
First published in 1985, this volume of letters follows Susanna Moodie from her Suffolk girlhood and her experience as an aspiring young writer in London, through her emigration to Upper Canada and five decades of Canadian life. The letters provide a sense of Moodie's literary accomplishments before her emigration, the long, uncertain struggle to develop her career as a writer in the colony, and the brief but intense period of literary activity during which her books were published in Britain and the U.S.
The Rise of Conservation in South Africa
A major contribution to the environmental history of settler societies, William Beinart's innovative study analyses the development of conservationalist ideas over the long term in South Africa, examining them as a response to the rapid transformation of natural pastures brought about as the Cape became a major exporter of wool.
