Echoes from a Distant Frontier is an edited, annotated selection of the correspondence of Corinna and Ellen Brown, two single women in their twenties, who left a comfortable New England home in 1835 for the Florida frontier. Within a month of their arrival, the frontier erupted in Indian war. The Browns witnessed the terror and carnage firsthand, and their letters paint a vivid picture of the Second Seminole War (1835-1842).
FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD WINNER OF THE WHITING AWARD WINNER OF THE SAROYAN INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR WRITING WINNTER OF THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD WINNER OF THE NEW AMERICAN VOICES AWARD A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR The first novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Trust, an exquisite and blisteringly intelligent story of a young Swedish boy, separated from his brother, who becomes a legend and an outlaw A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels east in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing west. Driven back again and again, he meets criminals, naturalists, religious fanatics, swindlers, American Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre, offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.
A brilliant novel that is at once a rollicking yarn and a beautiful love story, with an amazing cast of unforgettable characters and exotic settings - a feat of imagination and storytelling.
In Miami, Florida, seeking her younger sister, 16-year-old Ashline Wilde, a Polynesian volcano goddess, joins forces with other reincarnated deities. But trickster Colt's diabolical plans threaten them all.
Sounding 4 begins with the first narrative of squatter George Russell followed by an echo on magistrate, soldier and later Crown Lands Commissioner for the Western District ‘Flogger’ Fyans. Expansion west and north-west from Geelong soon causes the Colac tribal collapse and later the government-sanctioned revenge massacre of the Gadubanud Cape Otway clans. Then follows the dispossession timeline of the Geelong / Ballarat Wathaurong people and the extensive contributions by Ian D Smith on Aboriginal geography and languages of the west, with clan organization, mechanisms of dispossession, Aboriginal responses, a geography of disruption and Aboriginal perceptions of Europeans in 19th century Victoria. For contrast is a section SANITIZED ‘FRONTIER’ PROFILES OF PROMINENT COLONIALS controlling the countryside until largely replaced by the bankers and gold-diggers. Moving further west is an echo titled WINNING & LOSING THE GRAMPIANS AND THE GLENELG RIVER before a complete reproduction of Dr Jan Critchett’s Distant Field of Murder. Ian Clark and George Russell reveal how the western plains were taken over after the ‘vanishing’ of the Djab Wurrung clans around the Hopkins River. Echoes of the KULIN SUNSET COUNTRY SETTLED and A SCOTTISH ARK GROUNDS AT ARARAT are settler versions largely from local history books of reminiscences by successful sheep and cattle pastoralists such as the Learmonth and Russell family dynasties. The sour joke that the Scots had the land, the Irish the pubs and the English the accent, does no justice to the role of guns, germs and money-making… Modern scholarship birthed echoes titled FRONTIER MAYHEM IN THE FAR WEST which include the tribal resistance of Jupiter, Cocknose, Roger, Doctor, Bumbletoe etc. defeated by the likes of Wathaurong guide Bon Jon with CCL Fyans and the mounted Wurundjeri and Bunurong members of Captain Dana’s Native Police. This is followed by Marie Fels on native police action and A. G. L. Shaw on frontier violence, with Dr Critchett’ overview on Framlingham Aboriginal Mission Station. Sounding 4 concludes with aftermath echoes titled KING DAVID, DAWSON’S INFORMANTS & THE CAMPERDOWN GEORGE OBELISK and echo 74: HINDSIGHTS ON THE CULTURE-CLASH FRONTIER. Part 1 of which is on Redmond Barry, terra nullius and the Bon Jon case and part 2 has historian Henry Reynolds challenging our national self-image.
This volume contains a variety of essays about Florida literature and history by scholars from across the state representing every kind of institution of higher learning, from community colleges to small liberal arts institutions to large universities. The essays in the first section, “Florida Studies”, focus on the rich literary, historical, and cultural traditions of the region. The contributions in “Literary and Cultural Studies” offer readings and analyses of diverse texts and critical lenses. The final section, Pedagogy, explores strategies for and challenges within institutions of higher learning in Florida.
"Apalachicola Valley Archaeology is a major holistic synthesis of the archaeological record and what is known or speculated about the ancient Apalachicola and lower Chattahoochee Valley region of northwest Florida, southeast Alabama, and southwest Georgia. Volume 1 coverage spans from the time of the first human settlement, around 14,000 years ago, to the Middle Woodland period, ending about AD 700. Author Nancy Marie White had devoted her career to this archaeologically neglected region, and she notes that it is environmentally and culturally different from better-known regions nearby. Early chapters relate the individual ecosystems and the types of typical and unusual material culture, including stone, ceramic, bone, shell, soils, and plants. Other chapters are devoted to the archaeological Paleoindian, Archaic, Woodland periods. Topics include migration/settlement, sites, artifacts and material culture, subsistence and lifeways, culture and society, economics, warfare, and rituals. White's prodigious work reveals that Paleoindian habitation was more extensive than once assumed. Archaic sites were widespread, and those societies persisted through the first global warming when the Ice Age ended. Besides new stone technologies, pottery appeared in the Late Archaic period. Extensive inland and coastal settlement is documented. Development of elaborate religious or ritual systems is suggested by Early Woodland times when the first burial mounds appear. Succeeding Middle Woodland societies expanded this mortuary ceremony in about forty mounds. In the Middle Woodland, the complex pottery of the concurrent Swift Creek and the early Weeden Island ceramic series as well as the imported exotic objects show an increased fascination with the ornate and unusual. Native American lifeways continued with gathering-fishing-hunting subsistence systems similar to those of their ancestors. The usefulness of the information to modern society to understand human impacts on environments and vice versa caps the volume"--
Uses the collective testimony from more than two hundred Patriot War claims, previously believed to have been destroyed, to offer insight into the lesser-known Patriot War of 1812 and to constitute an intellectual history of everyday people caught in the path of an expanding American empire In the late seventeenth century a group of about a dozen escaped African slaves from the English colony of Carolina reached the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine. In a diplomatic bid for sanctuary, to avoid extradition and punishment, they requested the sacrament of Catholic baptism from the Spanish Catholic Church. Their negotiations brought about their baptism and with it their liberation. The Cana Sanctuary focuses on what author Frank Marotti terms “folk diplomacy”—political actions conducted by marginalized, non-state sectors of society—in this instance by formerly enslaved African Americans in antebellum East Florida. The book explores the unexpected transformations that occurred in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century St. Augustine as more and more ex-slaves arrived to find their previously disregarded civil rights upheld under sacred codes by an international, nongovernmental, authoritative organization. With the Catholic Church acting as an equalizing, empowering force for escaped African slaves, the Spanish religious sanctuary policy became part of popular historical consciousness in East Florida. As such, it allowed for continual confrontations between the law of the Church and the law of the South. Tensions like these survived, ultimately lending themselves to an “Afro-Catholicism” sentiment that offered support for antislavery arguments.
The international adventures of a southern widow turned patron of historical discovery Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe's Tales from the Grand Tour, 1890-1910 is a travelogue of captivating episodes in exotic lands as experienced by an intrepid American aristocrat and her son at the dawn of the twentieth century. A member of the prominent Sinkler family of Charleston and Philadelphia, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Sinkler married into Philadelphia's wealthy Coxe family in 1870. Widowed just three years later, she dedicated herself to a lifelong pursuit of philanthropy, intellectual endeavor, and extensive travel. Heeding the call of their dauntless adventuresome spirits, Lizzie and her son, Eckley, set sail in 1890 on a series of odysseys that took them from the United States to Cairo, Luxor, Khartoum, Algiers, Istanbul, Naples, Vichy, and Athens. The Coxes not only visited the sites and monuments of ancient civilizations but also participated in digs, funded entire expeditions, and ultimately subsidized the creation of the Coxe Wing of Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. A prolific correspondent, Lizzie conscientiously recorded her adventures abroad in lively prose that captures the surreal exhilarations and harsh realities of traversing the known and barely known worlds of Africa and the Middle East. She journeyed through foreign lands with various nieces in tow to expose them to the educational and social benefits of the Grand Tour. Her letters and recollections are complemented by numerous photographs and several original watercolor paintings.
