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As this book intriguingly explores, for those who would make Rome
great again and their victims, ideas of Roman decline and renewal
have had a long and violent history. The decline of Rome has been a
constant source of discussion for more than 2200 years. Everyone
from American journalists in the twenty-first century AD to Roman
politicians at the turn of the third century BC have used it as a
tool to illustrate the negative consequences of changes in their
world. Because Roman history is so long, it provides a buffet of
ready-made stories of decline that can help develop the context
around any snapshot. And Rome did, in fact, decline and,
eventually, fall. An empire that once controlled all or part of
more than 40 modern European, Asian, and African countries no
longer exists. Roman prophets of decline were, ultimately, proven
correct-a fact that makes their modern invocations all the more
powerful. If it happened then, it could happen now. The Eternal
Decline and Fall of Rome tells the stories of the people who built
their political and literary careers around promises of Roman
renewal as well as those of the victims they blamed for causing
Rome's decline. Each chapter offers the historical context
necessary to understand a moment or a series of moments in which
Romans, aspiring Romans, and non—Romans used ideas of Roman
decline and restoration to seize power and remake the world around
them. The story begins during the Roman Republic just after 200 BC.
It proceeds through the empire of Augustus and his successors,
traces the Roman loss of much of western Europe in the fifth
century AD, and then follows Roman history as it runs through the
Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) until its fall in 1453. The final
two chapters look at ideas of Roman decline and renewal from the
fifteenth century until today. If Rome illustrates the profound
danger of the rhetoric of decline, it also demonstrates the
rehabilitative potential of a rhetoric that focuses on
collaborative restoration, a lesson of great relevance to our world
today.
Mapping Region in Early American Writing is a collection of essays
that study how early American writers thought about the spaces
around them. The contributors reconsider the various roles
regions-imagined politically, economically, racially, and
figuratively-played in the formation of American communities, both
real and imagined. These texts vary widely: some are canonical,
others archival; some literary, others scientific; some polemical,
others simply documentary. As a whole, they recreate important
mental mappings and cartographies, and they reveal how diverse
populations imagined themselves, their communities, and their
nation as occupying the American landscape. Focusing on
place-specific, local writing published before 1860, Mapping Region
in Early American Writing examines a period often overlooked in
studies of regional literature in America. More than simply
offering a prehistory of regionalist writing, these essays offer
new ways of theorizing and studying regional spaces in the United
States as it grew from a union of disparate colonies along the
eastern seaboard into an industrialized nation on the verge of
overseas empire building. They also seek to amplify lost voices of
diverse narratives from minority, frontier, and outsider groups
alongside their more well-known counterparts in a time when
America's landscapes and communities were constantly evolving.
After the Revolution, Americans realized they lacked the common,
deep, or meaningful history that might bind together their loose
confederation of former colonies into a genuine nation. They had
been conquerors yet colonials, now politically independent yet
culturally subordinate to European history and traditions. To
resolve these paradoxes, some early republic "historians" went so
far as to reconstruct pre-Columbian, transatlantic adventures by
white people that might be employed to assert their rights and
ennoble their identities as Americans.In Colonizing the Past,
Edward Watts labels this impulse "primordialism" and reveals its
consistent presence over the span of nineteenth-century American
print culture in writers ranging from Washington Irving to Mark
Twain. In dozens of texts, Watts tracks episodes in which varying
accounts of pre-Columbian whites attracted widespread attention:
the Welsh Indians, the Lost Tribes of Israel, the white Mound
Builders, and the Vikings, as well as two ancient Irish
interventions. In each instance, public interest was ignited when
representations of the group in question became enmeshed in
concurrent conversations about the nation's evolving identity and
policies. Yet at every turn, counternarratives and public
resistance challenged both the plausibility of the pre-Columbian
whites and the colonialist symbolism that had been evoked to create
a sense of American identity. By challenging the rhetoric of
primordialism and empire building, dissenting writers exposed the
crimes of conquest and white Americans' marginality as
ex-colonials.
Ship Registration Law and Practice is fully updated and now
entering its third edition. Part of Lloyd's Shipping Law Library,
it is the most authoritative guide to the theory and practice of
ship registration in the most popular jurisdictions. It contains
the reference material needed to submit a vessel for registration
at the leading ship registries world-wide, as well as extracts from
key international conventions in this area, a new statistical
analysis of the world merchant fleet and Port State control
rankings.
After the Revolution, Americans realized they lacked the common,
deep, or meaningful history that might bind together their loose
confederation of former colonies into a genuine nation. They had
been conquerors yet colonials, now politically independent yet
culturally subordinate to European history and traditions. To
resolve these paradoxes, some early republic "historians" went so
far as to reconstruct pre-Columbian, transatlantic adventures by
white people that might be employed to assert their rights and
ennoble their identities as Americans.In Colonizing the Past,
Edward Watts labels this impulse "primordialism" and reveals its
consistent presence over the span of nineteenth-century American
print culture in writers ranging from Washington Irving to Mark
Twain. In dozens of texts, Watts tracks episodes in which varying
accounts of pre-Columbian whites attracted widespread attention:
the Welsh Indians, the Lost Tribes of Israel, the white Mound
Builders, and the Vikings, as well as two ancient Irish
interventions. In each instance, public interest was ignited when
representations of the group in question became enmeshed in
concurrent conversations about the nation's evolving identity and
policies. Yet at every turn, counternarratives and public
resistance challenged both the plausibility of the pre-Columbian
whites and the colonialist symbolism that had been evoked to create
a sense of American identity. By challenging the rhetoric of
primordialism and empire building, dissenting writers exposed the
crimes of conquest and white Americans' marginality as
ex-colonials.
A newly discovered nineteenth-century novel about West Virginia
breaking away from Virginia, set amid the cannel coal boom and
featuring an interracial abolitionist movement. Based mostly on his
own experiences, Theophile Maher's local color novel Cannel Coal
Oil Days challenges many popular ideas about antebellum Appalachia,
bringing it more fully into the broader story of the United States.
Written in 1887, discovered in 2018, and published here for the
first time, it offers a narrative of life between 1859 and 1861 in
what was then western Virginia as it became West Virginia. Cannel
coal (a soft form of coal whose oil, when distilled, was
competitive in the lighting oil business after overfishing reduced
the whale oil supply) was at the center of one of Appalachia's
first extractive industries. Using the development of coal oil
manufacturing in the Kanawha valley as its launching point, Maher's
semiautobiographical novel tells of a series of interrelated
changes, each reflecting larger transformations in the United
States as a whole. It shows how coal oil manufacturing was
transformed from an amateurish endeavor to a more professional
industry, with implications for Appalachian environment and labor.
Then, Maher foreshadows the coming Progressive Era by insisting on
moral and environmental reforms based in democratic and Christian
principles. Finally, he tells the story of the coming of the Civil
War to the region, as the novel's protagonist, a mining engineer,
works closely with a Black family to organize the local
abolitionist mountain folk into a Union militia to aid in the
secession of West Virginia from Virginia.
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