David Hill relates the extraordinary people and staggering events of Australia's great gold-rush years. From the mid- to late-1800s, people from all corners of the globe and all walks of life, including two future prime ministers of Great Britain and Australia, threw off their previous pursuits and made the often perilous journey to the goldfields, from where they would return either fabulously wealthy or demoralised and broken - if they returned at all.
Nothing set the world in motion like gold. Between the discovery of California placer gold in 1848 and the rush to Alaska fifty years later, the search for the precious yellow metal accelerated worldwide circulations of people, goods, capital, and technologies. A Global History of Gold Rushes brings together historians of the United States, Africa, Australasia, and the Pacific World to tell the rich story of these nineteenth century gold rushes from a global perspective. Gold was central to the growth of capitalism: it whetted the appetites of empire builders, mobilized the integration of global markets and economies, profoundly affected the environment, and transformed large-scale migration patterns. Together these essays tell the story of fifty years that changed the world.
When young Jim Richards left the army to make to chase a dream, he had no language skills, no money and no idea, just the kind of gold lust that has driven fortune hunters throughout history. And when he struck gold and diamonds in the remote rivers of Guyana, his problems and his success grew in equal measure. Jim Richards has done it all: dived for diamonds in the piranha-infested rivers of South America; discovered a fabulously rich goldmine in the Australian outback; got caught up in the world's biggest mining scam in Indonesia; and even started a gold rush in the war-torn jungles of Laos. Jim Richards has gone on to found a string of successful mining businesses. Today he is one of the industry's most respected executives – although his many enemies would disagree.
Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.
"The brave independence of the 'roaring days', the camaraderie of the gold fields, jolly diggers on a spree - these are the images that have come down to us of the gold era of the 1850s in Australia and California. But these images were largely shaped decades later, by writers such as Henry Lawson and Bret Harte - they speak of later nostalgia rather than the experience of the time." "In this study of the contemporary response to the discoveries of gold in Victoria and California, David Goodman argues that people at the time were apprehensive about gold rushing, and the kind of society it seemed to prefigure. In the chaos of the gold rushes, individual self-interest seemed to be all that could motivate people to any exertion. And it was only the economic rationalists of the day - those who believed in political economy and its promise, that out of the confusion of individual self-interest would come some sort of social order - who could wholeheartedly endorse the gold rushes as events." "This is a history of the ways people talked about gold. As the first full-length cultural history of the gold rushes on two continents, it examines the meanings of gold at the time, and the narratives which were told about social disruption. It locates the deeper underlying themes in the response to gold. It also looks at the ways in which the dominant later memories of gold were shaped. And it is about national differences, about the construction of distinctive national cultures out of materials common to the British world. This book should be read not only by Australian and American historians but by anyone with an interest in the cultural history of modernity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Introduces readers to the behavior and proper care of pet rabbits. Vivid photographs and easy-to-read text aid comprehension for early readers. Features include a table of contents, an infographic, fun facts, Making Connections questions, a glossary, and an index. QR Codes in the book give readers access to book-specific resources to further their learning. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Cody Koala is an imprint of Pop!, a division of ABDO.
