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Books > History > History of other lands
Already renowned as a statesman, Thomas Jefferson in his retirement
from government turned his attention to the founding of an
institution of higher learning. Never merely a patron, the former
president oversaw every aspect of the creation of what would become
the University of Virginia. Along with the Declaration of
Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, he
regarded it as one of the three greatest achievements in his life.
Nonetheless, historians often treat this period as an epilogue to
Jefferson's career. In The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind,
Andrew O'Shaughnessy offers a twin biography of Jefferson in
retirement and of the University of Virginia in its earliest years.
He reveals how Jefferson's vision anticipated the modern university
and profoundly influenced the development of American higher
education. The University of Virginia was the most visible apex of
what was a much broader educational vision that distinguishes
Jefferson as one of the earliest advocates of a public education
system. Just as Jefferson's proclamation that "all men are created
equal" was tainted by the ongoing institution of slavery, however,
so was his university. O'Shaughnessy addresses this tragic conflict
in Jefferson's conception of the university and society, showing
how Jefferson's loftier aspirations for the university were not
fully realized. Nevertheless, his remarkable vision in founding the
university remains vital to any consideration of the role of
education in the success of the democratic experiment.
The first full account of the journey and discoveries of an
archaeological expedition into the rugged American Southwest. In
1931 a group from Harvard University's Peabody Museum accomplished
something that had never been attempted in the history of American
archaeology-a six-week, four-hundred-mile horseback survey of
prehistoric sites through some of the West's most rugged terrain.
The expedition was successful, but a report on the findings was
never completed. What should have been one of the great
archaeological stories in American history was relegated to boxes
and files in the basement of the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Now,
based on over a thousand pages of documents and over four hundred
photographs, this book recounts the remarkable day-to-day
adventures of this crew of one professor, five students, and three
Utah guides who braved heat, fatigue, and the dangerous canyon
wilderness to reveal vestiges of the Fremont culture in the
Tavaputs Plateau and Uinta Basin areas. To better tell this story,
authors Spangler and Aton undertook extensive fieldwork to confirm
the sites; their recent photographs and those of the original
expedition are shared on these pages.
To this day, Japan's modern ascendancy challenges many assumptions
about world history, particularly theories regarding the rise of
the west and why the modern world looks the way it does. In this
engaging new history, Brett L. Walker tackles key themes regarding
Japan's relationships with its minorities, state and economic
development, and the uses of science and medicine. The book begins
by tracing the country's early history through archaeological
remains, before proceeding to explore life in the imperial court,
the rise of the samurai, civil conflict, encounters with Europe,
and the advent of modernity and empire. Integrating the pageantry
of a unique nation's history with today's environmental concerns,
Walker's vibrant and accessible new narrative then follows Japan's
ascension from the ashes of World War II into the thriving nation
of today. It is a history for our times, posing important questions
regarding how we should situate a nation's history in an age of
environmental and climatological uncertainties.
From a Christian, Greek- and Armenian-speaking land to a
predominantly Muslim and Turkish speaking one, the Islamisation of
medieval Anatolia would lay the groundwork for the emergence of the
Ottoman Empire as a world power and ultimately the modern Republic
of Turkey. Bringing together previously unpublished sources in
Arabic, Persian and Turkish, Peacock offers a new understanding of
the crucial but neglected period in Anatolian history, that of
Mongol domination, between c. 1240 and 1380. This represents a
decisive phase in the process of Islamisation, with the
popularisation of Sufism and the development of new forms of
literature to spread Islam. This book integrates the study of
Anatolia with that of the broader Islamic world, shedding new light
on this crucial turning point in the history of the Middle East.
The essential reference about a surprisingly well-organized medical
department Despite the many obstacles it had to overcome-including
a naval blockade, lack of a strong industrial base, and personnel
unaccustomed to military life-the Richmond-based Confederate Army
Medical Department developed into a robust organization that nimbly
adapted to changing circumstances. In the first book to address the
topic, Guy R. Hasegawa describes the organization and management of
the Confederate army's medical department. At its head was Surgeon
General Samuel Preston Moore, a talented multitasker with the
organizational know-how to put in place qualified medical personnel
to care for sick and wounded Confederate soldiers. Hasegawa
investigates how political considerations, personalities, and, as
the war progressed, the diminishing availability of human and
material resources influenced decision-making in the medical
department. Amazingly, the surgeon general's office managed not
only to provide care but also to offer educational opportunities to
its personnel and collect medical and surgical data for future use,
regardless of constant and growing difficulties. During and after
the war, the medical department of the Confederate army was
consistently praised as being admirably organized and efficient.
Although the department was unable to match its Union counterpart
in manpower and supplies, Moore's intelligent management enabled it
to help maintain the fighting strength of the Confederate army.
The nationally recognized credit-by-exam DSST (R) program helps
students earn college credits for learning acquired outside the
traditional classroom such as; learning from on-the-job training,
reading, or independent study. DSST (R) tests offer students a
cost-effective, time-saving way to use the knowledge they've
acquired outside of the classroom to accomplish their education
goals. Peterson's (R) Master the (TM) DSST (R) History of the
Soviet Union Exam provides a general overview of the subjects
students will encounter on the exam such as Russia under the old
regime, the revolutionary period, new economic policy, pre-war
Stalinism, World War II, post-war Stalinism, the Khrushchev years,
the Brezhnev era, and reform and collapse. This valuable resource
includes: Diagnostic pre-test with detailed answer explanations
Assessment Grid designed to help identify areas that need focus
Subject Matter Review proving a general overview of the subjects,
followed by a review of the relevant topics and terminology covered
on the exam Post-test offering 60 questions all with detailed
answer explanations Key information about the DSST (R) such as,
what to expect on test day and how to register and prepare for the
DSST (R)
This detailed examination of Israeli foreign policy towards the
Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) between the 1967 war and
the 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip focuses on the impact and
process of globalisation on the Israeli state's politics, economy,
society and culture. In order to determine how interfacing
developed between foreign policy and globalisation a theoretical
framework is presented that brings together two established
approaches that hitherto have advanced in parallel: foreign policy
analysis and globalisation theory. This is the first attempt within
the discipline of International Relations to theorise the
relationships between foreign policy and globalisation. Causal
relationships underpinning Israeli foreign policy -- involving
government, the state, the economy, social stratification, and the
media -- are linked to globalisation by specific example.
Conventional accounts of this relationship strip military and
political factors of any significance in terms of the
conceptualisation of globalisation and its causes, in favour of
spatio-temporal and economic dimensions. The state is viewed as
being compelled to transform in response to the pressures of
globalisation. But in the case of Israel the state acted
proactively by using foreign policy towards the PLO as a key site
of action to capture the opportunities and cope with the challenges
presented by globalisation. To date there have been only partial
historical accounts of Israeli foreign policy towards the PLO in
the context of globalisation. It is generally understood that
foreign policy towards the PLO became entangled with globalisation
due to the socio-economic and cultural globalisation of Israel in
the mid-1980s, but this study shows that the increasing impact of
military and political globalisation during the Cold War on the
Arab-Israeli conflict resulted in Israeli foreign policy towards
the PLO, and globalisation effects in Israel, becoming entwined
from the early 1970s.
This is the story behind the greatest oil discovery success of last
century and the building of the Trans Alaska pipeline. This book
details and celebrates a colossal oil exploration feat and a
world-class engineering and construction project.
The teaching of history in South African and Japanese schools has
attracted sustained criticism for the alleged attempts to conceal
the controversial aspects of their countries' past and to inculcate
ideologies favourable to the ruling regimes. This book is the first
attempt to systematically compare the ways in which education
bureaucracy in both nations dealt with opposition and critics in
the period from ca. 1945 to 1995, when both countries were
dominated by single-party governments for most of the fifty years.
The author argues that both South African and Japanese education
bureaucracy did not overtly express its intentions in the
curriculum documents or in the textbooks, but found ways to enhance
its authority through a range of often subtle measures. A total of
eight themes in 60 officially approved Standard 6 South African and
Japanese middle-school history textbooks have been selected to
demonstrate the changes and continuity. This work contributes to
the existing literature of comparative history by drawing lessons
that would probably not have emerged from the study of either
country by itself.
Comprehensive yet concise, this account informs readers about the
challenges faced and advances made by the city's dedicated
department members since its inception in 1886.
The life of Seager Wheeler is one of the most significant--albeit
nearly forgotten--Canadian success stories. He was North America's
most celebrated wheat developer, whose varieties in the 1920s made
up 40 percent of the world's wheat exports, and contributed wealth
to most facets of the Canadian economy. His most publicized
accomplishment was being crowned World Wheat King an unsurpassed
five times, from 1911 to 1918.
In this third volume of In Those Days, Harper shares stories of the
rise and fall of the whaling industry in the Eastern Canadian
Arctic. At the turn of the nineteenth century, whale baleen and
blubber were extremely valuable commodities, and so sailors braved
the treacherous Arctic waters, risking starvation, scurvy, and
death, to bring home the bounty of the North. The presence of these
whalemen in the North would irrevocably alter the lives of Inuit.
Along with first-hand accounts from journals and dozens of rare,
historical photographs, this collection includes the myth of the
Octaviusaa ship that drifted for twelve years with a frozen
crewaencounters between sailors and Inuit, tales of the harrowing
hazing rituals suffered by first-time crewmembers, and much more.
At the heart of Memphis lies Overton Park, a 342-acre public space
that contains the world-class Memphis Zoo, an old-growth forest,
the Memphis College of Art, an amphitheater, and the Memphis Brooks
Museum of Art, among other beloved amenities. Founded in 1901, the
park has been at the center of both celebration and controversy.
Performers like Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash have dazzled
audiences there, while local children have long enjoyed its
playgrounds and runners its jogging trails. During the civil rights
era, desegregating the park became a major goal of local activists,
and the park's Greensward was the scene of protests against the
Vietnam War. Late in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, when the
proposed route of Interstate 40 threatened the park, concerned
citizens banded together to fight the plan-a struggle that reached
the Supreme Court and eventually saved the park for future
generations. This delightfully informative book, filled with
historic photos, offers a history of the park from the perspective
of those who lived it. Brooks Lamb interviewed nearly a score of
Memphians-from civil rights activist Johnnie Turner to U.S.
Congressman Steve Cohen, from artist Martha Kelly to retired
zookeepers Kathy Fay and Richard Meek-to learn what the park has
meant to them and to discover the transformations they have
witnessed. The stories they tell reveal a dynamic place that
remains, despite changes and challenges, a people's park and, in
the words of one resident, "the heartbeat of Memphis."
Between 1955 and 1987, the United States Coast Guard Cutter Glacier
was the largest and most powerful icebreaker in the free world.
Consequently, it was often given the most difficult and dangerous
Antarctic missions. This is the dramatic first-person account of
its most legendary voyage. In 1970, the author was the Chief
Medical Officer on the Glacier when it became trapped deep in the
Weddell Sea, pressured by 100 miles of wind-blown icepack. Glacier
was beset within seventy miles of where Sir Ernest Shackleton's
ship, the Endurance, was imprisoned in 1915. His stout wooden ship
succumbed to the crushing pressure of the infamous Weddell Sea pack
ice and sank, leading to an unbelievable two-year saga of hardship,
heroism and survival. The sailors aboard the Glacier feared they
would suffer Shackleton's fate, or one even worse. Freakishly good
luck eventually saved the Glacier from destruction, but the story
is told as the author, who was not part of the chain of command,
experienced it. More imminent threats later occurred involving a
three-hour inferno, as well as eight-story waves that drove the
ship to the brink of disaster. Wind, Fire, and Ice is the story
about a physician fresh-out-of-internship who naively assumes he is
going to have an easy assignment and see numerous exotic ports.
Instead, he experiences adventures and adversities beyond his
imagination, as well as jarring conflicts with an obsessed captain.
Before there could be a revolution, there was a rebellion; before
patriots, there were insurgents. Challenging and displacing decades
of received wisdom, T. H. Breen's strikingly original book explains
how ordinary Americans--most of them members of farm families
living in small communities--were drawn into a successful
insurgency against imperial authority. A few celebrated figures in
the Continental Congress do not make for a revolution. It requires
tens of thousands of ordinary men and women willing to sacrifice,
kill, and be killed. Breen not only gives the history of these
ordinary Americans but, drawing upon a wealth of rarely seen
documents, restores their primacy to American independence.
Mobilizing two years before the Declaration of Independence,
American insurgents in all thirteen colonies concluded that
resistance to British oppression required organized violence
against the state. They channeled popular rage through elected
committees of safety and observation, which before 1776 were the
heart of American resistance. "American Insurgents, American
Patriots "is the stunning account of the insurgency that led to the
nation's founding.
During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the
nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin
Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for
and against social change were starting to form. For a white
southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News
and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to
culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay
somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret
Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. On May 5, 1937, he set out to find
it, driving thousands of miles in his trusty Plymouth and
ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself. In Discovering the
South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels's
unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings
and a wealth of archival evidence to put this one man's journey
through a South in transition into a larger context. Daniels's well
chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of
political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s,
from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee
Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to
planters' and industrialists' reactionary worldview and repressive
violence. The result is a lively narrative of black and white
southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at
the start of the nation's long civil rights era.
Mass shootings have been on the rise in the United States since the
early 2000s, but until the heartbreak of the 1 October 2017 Route
91 Harvest Music Festival, the citizens of Las Vegas had never
experienced the violence and tragedy of this now all-too-frequent
occurrence. That day, fifty-eight people were shot to death on
site, while another two victims later died of their injuries. The 1
October incident physically wounded nearly 900 concert-goers, but
psychologically impacted countless untold victims. As individual
and institutional response to urgent requests for help came in both
during and after the 1 October catastrophe, those who call Las
Vegas home struggled to cope with pain and grief. Now, editor
Roberta Sabbath draws together a collection of personal essays,
oral histories, interviews, scholarly writings, and commentaries to
remember those whose lives were lost, and to honor survivors and
their loved ones. Written five years after the tragedy, each
contribution offers a unique story of healing, demonstrating the
wide-ranging experiences and repercussions of the event. The essays
in this collection represent a broad diversity of voices from
political leaders, health professionals, first responders,
community members, and incident survivors. This work is dedicated
to those who lost their lives on 1 October 2017, to survivors and
their loved ones, and to the caregivers-both individual and
institutional-all of whom continue to keep Vegas Strong.
The International Joint Commission oversees and protects the shared
waters of Canada and the United States. Created by the Boundary
Waters Treaty of 1909, it is one of the world's oldest
international environmental bodies. A pioneering piece of
transborder water governance, the IJC has been integral to the
modern Canada-United States relationship. This is the definitive
history of the International Joint Commission. Separating myth from
reality and uncovering the historical evolution of the IJC from its
inception to its present, this collection features an impressive
interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners. Examining
the many aspects of border waters from east to west The First
Century of the International Joint Commission traces the three
major periods of the IJC, detailing its early focus on water flow,
its middle period of growth and increasing politicization, and its
modern emphasis on ecosystems. Informative, detailed, and
fascinating, The First Century of the International Joint
Commission is essential reading for academics, contemporary policy
makers, governments, and all those interested in sustainability,
climate change, pollution, and resiliency along the Canada-US
Border.
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