Arriving as the country commemorates the expedition's bicentennial, Across the Continent is an examination of the explorers' world and the complicated ways in which it relates to our own. The essays collected here look at the global geopolitics that provided the context for the expedition. Finally, the discussion considers the various legacies of the expedition, in particular its impact on Native Americans, and the current struggle over who will control the narrative of the expansion of the American Empire. --from publisher description.
An account of the resourcefulness and courage of Lewis and Clark on their journey through the wilderness from St. Louis to the Pacific. Written from original records and diaries of the expedition.
A triumph of historical detective work, Crossing the Continent is the remarkable, never-before-told story of the first black explorer and adventurer in America, Esteban Dorantes. An African slave, Dorantes led an eight-year journey from Florida to California in the early sixteenth century—three hundred years before Lewis and Clark ventured west. An extraordinary true-life saga of courage, trials, and discovery that the Philadelphia Inquirer calls, “an adventure story more thrilling than Defoe or Melville could have imagined,” Crossing the Continent breaks new ground as it challenges the traditional view of American history.
Arguing that the climate crisis confronting the world today is rooted mainly in the wealthy economies’ abuse of fossil fuels, indigenous forests, and global commercial agriculture, this important book investigates how Africa has been exploited and how Africans should respond for the good of all. As it examines the oil industry in Africa and probes the causes of global warming, this record warns of its insidious impacts and explores false solutions. Demonstrating that the issues around natural resource exploitation, corporate profiteering, and climate change must be considered together if the planet is to be saved, the book suggests how Africa can overcome the crises of environment and global warming.
Charles H. Brown became Edward Creighton's assistant in 1861, working on the transcontinental telegraph line. His diary begins on June 18, 1861, the first entry describing Brown's departure from Fort Kearny, Nebraska. The final entry is dated August 9, 1861--
In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.
