You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book describes and explains the changes in location, occupation, and wealth of immigrants arriving in the first great wave of 19th century migration to the United States.
In Pursuit of Leviathan traces the American whaling industry from its rise in the 1840s to its precipitous fall at the end of the nineteenth century. Using detailed and comprehensive data that describe more than four thousand whaling voyages from New Bedford, Massachusetts, the leading nineteenth-century whaling port, the authors explore the market for whale products, crew quality and labor contracts, and whale biology and distribution, and assess the productivity of the American fleet. They then examine new whaling techniques developed at the end of the nineteenth century, such as modified clippers and harpoons, and the introduction of darting guns. Despite the common belief that the whaling industry declined due to a fall in whale stocks, the authors argue that the industry's collapse was related to changes in technology and market conditions. Providing a wealth of historical information, In Pursuit of Leviathan is a classic industry study that will provide intriguing reading for anyone interested in the history of whaling.
Examines the social, political, economic, and military history of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the nineteenth century, with a focus on the Civil War homefront, 1861-1865, and on the city's black community, soldiers, and veterans.
A highly original exploration of the history of architecture in relation to fish, shedding light on the connection between marine environments and terrestrial landscapes. Architecture Follows Fish is set in the North Atlantic, and its protagonist is fish. In this book author and architect André Tavares explores the notion of fishing architecture, a concept coined to describe architectural practices that are spawned by fisheries. To encompass the scope of fishing architecture, and to establish the connections between marine ecology and architectural practice, the book oscillates between different continents, centuries, and species. Fisheries are unique, and this book sheds light on that uniq...
It’s almost impossible to imagine spending eight months at sea “without once putting foot on land.” But that’s exactly what whalers experienced when playing the dangerous “game of chance,” hunting down leviathans for oil and bone—all for a “lay,” or share, of the vessel’s spoils. A Game of Chance is the first comprehensive, in-depth study of British North American South Seas whaling. Author Andrea Kirkpatrick takes readers on a series of fascinating and sometimes fantastical journeys as she chronicles in great detail the story of a largely forgotten industry that operated out of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick ports from the 1760s to 1850. Kirkpatrick plumbed the depths of ...
The creation of new frontiers of slave commodity production and the expansion and intensification of slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the southern United States were an integral part of the expansion of the world economy during the nineteenth century. Beginning from this vantage point, The Politics of the Second Slavery brings together a group of international scholars to reinterpret pro- and antislavery politics both globally and nationally as part of the forces that were restructuring Atlantic slavery. Individual chapters shed new light on the decolonization and nationalization of slavery in the Americas, the politics of proslavery elites both within particular countries and across the Atlantic region, the abolition of the international slave trade, and slave resistance.
We take for granted today that the assessments, measurements, and forecasts of economists are crucial to the decision-making of governments and businesses alike. But less than a century ago that wasn’t the case—economists simply didn’t have the necessary information or statistical tools to understand the ever more complicated modern economy. With Political Arithmetic, Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Fogel and his collaborators tell the story of economist Simon Kuznets, the founding of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the creation of the concept of GNP, which for the first time enabled us to measure the performance of entire economies. The book weaves together the ma...
The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick offers the first book-length study of how physical disability shapes one of the world's most iconic novels. Rather than see Ahab's lost limb as a deficiency, however, it explores the way that his prosthesis becomes both a means to power and a key figure for understanding the role that Islamic cultures play in the novel's plot and form.