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Books > Humanities > History > Australasian & Pacific history
The convict women who built a continent..."A moving and
fascinating story." -Adam Hochschild, author of "King Leopold's
Ghost"
"The Tin Ticket" takes readers to the dawn of the nineteenth
century and into the lives of three women arrested and sent into
suffering and slavery in Australia and Tasmania-where they overcame
their fates unlike any women in the world. It also tells the tale
of Elizabeth Gurney Fry, a Quaker reformer who touched all their
lives. Ultimately, this is a story of women who, by sheer force of
will, became the heart and soul of a new nation.
Theatre in Dublin,1745-1820: A Calendar of Performances is the
first comprehensive, daily compendium of more than 18,000
performances that took place in Dublin's many professional
theatres, music halls, pleasure gardens, and circus amphitheatres
between Thomas Sheridan's becoming the manager at Smock Alley
Theatre in 1745 and the dissolution of the Crow Street Theatre in
1820. The daily performance calendar for each of the seventy-five
seasons recorded here records and organizes all surviving
documentary evidence pertinent to each evening's entertainments,
derived from all known sources, but especially from playbills and
newspaper advertisements. Each theatre's daily entry includes all
preludes, mainpieces, interludes, and afterpieces with casts and
assigned roles, followed by singing and singers, dancing and
dancers, and specialty entertainments. Financial data, program
changes, rehearsal notices, authorship and premiere information are
included in each component's entry, as is the text of contemporary
correspondence and editorial contextualization and commentary,
followed by other additional commentary, such as the many hundreds
of printed puffs, notices, and performance reviews. In the cases of
the programs of music halls, pleasure gardens, and circuses, the
playbills have generally been transcribed verbatim. The calendar
for each season is preceded by an analytical headnote that presents
several categories of information including, among other things, an
alphabetical listing of all members of each company, whether
actors, musicians, specialty artists, or house servants, who are
known to have been employed at each venue. Limited biographical
commentary is included, particularly about performers of Irish
origin, who had significant stage careers but who did not perform
in London. Each headnote presents the seasons's offerings of
entertainments of each theatrical type (prelude, mainpiece,
interlude, afterpiece) analyzed according to genre, including a
list of the number of plays in each genre and according to period
in which they were first performed. The headnote also notes the
number of different plays by Shakespeare staged during each season
and gives particular attention to entertainments of "special Irish
interest." The various kinds of benefit performance and command
performances are also noted. Finally, this Calendar of Performances
contains an appendix that furnishes a season-by-season listing of
the plays that were new to the London patent theatres, and, later,
of the important "minors." This information is provided in order
for us to understand the interrelatedness of the London and Dublin
repertories.
Domination and Resistance illuminates the twin themes of superpower
domination and indigenous resistance in the central Pacific during
the Cold War, with a compelling historical examination of the
relationship between the United States and the Republic of the
Marshall Islands. For decision makers in Washington, the Marshall
Islands represented a strategic prize seized from Japan near the
end of World War II. In the postwar period, under the auspices of a
United Nations Trusteeship Agreement, the United States reinforced
its control of the Marshall Islands and kept the Soviet Union and
other Cold War rivals out of this Pacific region. The United States
also used the opportunity to test a vast array of powerful nuclear
bombs and missiles in the Marshalls, even as it conducted research
on the effects of human exposure to radioactive fallout. Although
these military tests and human experiments reinforced the US
strategy of deterrence, they also led to the displacement of
several atoll communities, serious health implications for the
Marshallese, and widespread ecological degradation. Confronted with
these troubling conditions, the Marshall Islanders utilized a
variety of political and legal tactics-petitions, lawsuits,
demonstrations, and negotiations-to draw American and global
attention to their plight. In response to these indigenous acts of
resistance, the United States strengthened its strategic interests
in the Marshalls but made some concessions to the islanders. Under
the Compact of Free Association (COFA) and related agreements, the
Americans tightened control over the Kwajalein Missile Range while
granting the Marshallese greater political autonomy, additional
financial assistance, and a mechanism to settle nuclear claims.
Martha Smith-Norris argues that despite COFA's implementation in
1986 and Washington's pivot toward the Asia-Pacific region in the
post-Cold War era, the United States has yet to provide adequate
compensation to the Republic of the Marshall Islands for the
extensive health and environmental damages caused by the US testing
programs.
The marines on the First Fleet refused to sail without it. Convicts
risked their necks to get hold of it. Rum built a hospital and
sparked a revolution, made fortunes and ruined lives. In a society
with few luxuries, liquor was power. It played a crucial role, not
just in the lives of individuals like James Squire - the London
chicken thief who became Australia's first brewer - but in the
transformation of a starving penal outpost into a prosperous
trading port. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary sources, Grog
offers an intoxicating look at the first decades of European
settlement and explores the origins of Australia's fraught love
affair with the hard stuff.
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