The Year 1000

The Year 1000

Author: Valerie Hansen

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-04-20

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1501194119

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The World in the Year 1000 -- Go West, Young Viking -- The Pan-American Highways of 1000 -- European Slaves -- The World's Richest Man -- Central Asia Splits in Two -- Surprising Journeys -- The Most Globalized Place on Earth.


Ecological Revolutions

Ecological Revolutions

Author: Carolyn Merchant

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2010-11-08

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0807899623

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With the arrival of European explorers and settlers during the seventeenth century, Native American ways of life and the environment itself underwent radical alterations as human relationships to the land and ways of thinking about nature all changed. This colonial ecological revolution held sway until the nineteenth century, when New England's industrial production brought on a capitalist revolution that again remade the ecology, economy, and conceptions of nature in the region. In Ecological Revolutions, Carolyn Merchant analyzes these two major transformations in the New England environment between 1600 and 1860. In a preface to the second edition, Merchant introduces new ideas about narrating environmental change based on gender and the dialectics of transformation, while the revised epilogue situates New England in the context of twenty-first-century globalization and climate change. Merchant argues that past ways of relating to the land could become an inspiration for renewing resources and achieving sustainability in the future.


Explorers

Explorers

Author: DK

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2010-09-20

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0756675111

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From the first people to leave Africa to the first to leave the planet, the urge to explore the unknown has driven human progress. Explorers tells the story of humanity's explorations, taking the reader into the lives of some of the most intrepid people ever known. Throughout history, exploration has arisen from a wide range of impulses, from trade and the search for lands to colonize, to scientific curiosity and missionary zeal. This book tells the story of explorers of every type, from those chasing glory to those seeking enlightenment. In its pages, readers will meet some of history's most famous trail blazers-people whose courage opened frontiers, turned voids into maps, forged nations, connected cultures, and added to humankind's knowledge of the world by leaps and bounds. Each life is captured in context, by considering the knowledge of the world in which the explorers lived, the factors that gave rise to their expeditions, and the technology available to them at the time. Their discoveries, and the consequences, are also considered in depth, and highlighted with beautiful maps, photographs, and illustrations. The tales of the explorers' assistants and companions are woven into the overall story, along with an examination of the qualities that made the them drop everything in pursuit of discovery.


Merchant Kings

Merchant Kings

Author: Stephen R. Bown

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2010-12-07

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1429927356

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Commerce meets conquest in this swashbuckling story of the six merchant-adventurers who built the modern world It was an era when monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land, and taking on governmental and military functions. They managed their territories as business interests, treating their subjects as employees, customers, or competitors. The leaders of these trading enterprises exercised virtually unaccountable, dictatorial political power over millions of people. The merchant kings of the Age of Heroic Commerce were a rogue's gallery of larger-than-life men who, for a couple hundred years, expanded their far-flung commercial enterprises over a sizable portion of the world. They include Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the violent and autocratic pioneer of the Dutch East India Company; Peter Stuyvesant, the one-legged governor of the Dutch West India Company, whose narrow-minded approach lost Manhattan to the British; Robert Clive, who rose from company clerk to become head of the British East India Company and one of the wealthiest men in Britain; Alexandr Baranov of the Russian American Company; Cecil Rhodes, founder of De Beers and Rhodesia; and George Simpson, the "Little Emperor" of the Hudson's Bay Company, who was chauffeured about his vast fur domain in a giant canoe, exhorting his voyageurs to paddle harder so he could set speed records. Merchant Kings looks at the rise and fall of company rule in the centuries before colonialism, when nations belatedly assumed responsibility for their commercial enterprises. A blend of biography, corporate history, and colonial history, this book offers a panoramic, new perspective on the enormous cultural, political, and social legacies, good and bad, of this first period of unfettered globalization.


The Unnatural History of the Sea

The Unnatural History of the Sea

Author: Callum Roberts

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2009-01-05

Total Pages: 649

ISBN-13: 1597265772

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Humanity can make short work of the oceans’ creatures. In 1741, hungry explorers discovered herds of Steller’s sea cow in the Bering Strait, and in less than thirty years, the amiable beast had been harpooned into extinction. It’s a classic story, but a key fact is often omitted. Bering Island was the last redoubt of a species that had been decimated by hunting and habitat loss years before the explorers set sail. As Callum M. Roberts reveals in The Unnatural History of the Sea, the oceans’ bounty didn’t disappear overnight. While today’s fishing industry is ruthlessly efficient, intense exploitation began not in the modern era, or even with the dawn of industrialization, but in the eleventh century in medieval Europe. Roberts explores this long and colorful history of commercial fishing, taking readers around the world and through the centuries to witness the transformation of the seas. Drawing on firsthand accounts of early explorers, pirates, merchants, fishers, and travelers, the book recreates the oceans of the past: waters teeming with whales, sea lions, sea otters, turtles, and giant fish. The abundance of marine life described by fifteenth century seafarers is almost unimaginable today, but Roberts both brings it alive and artfully traces its depletion. Collapsing fisheries, he shows, are simply the latest chapter in a long history of unfettered commercialization of the seas. The story does not end with an empty ocean. Instead, Roberts describes how we might restore the splendor and prosperity of the seas through smarter management of our resources and some simple restraint. From the coasts of Florida to New Zealand, marine reserves have fostered spectacular recovery of plants and animals to levels not seen in a century. They prove that history need not repeat itself: we can leave the oceans richer than we found them.


Merchants and Explorers

Merchants and Explorers

Author: Heather Dalton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0199672059

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In the early sixteenth century, a young English sugar trader spent a night at what is now the port of Agadir in Morocco, watching from the tenuous safety of the Portuguese fort as the local tribesmen attacked the "Moors." Having recently departed the familiar environs of London and the Essex marshes, this was to be the first of several encounters Roger Barlow was to have with unfamiliar worlds. Barlow's family was linked to networks where the exchange of goods and ideas merged, and his contacts in Seville brought him into contact with the navigator, Sebastian Cabot. Merchants and Explorers follows Barlow and Cabot across the Atlantic to South America and back to Spain and Reformation England. Heather Dalton uses their lives as an effective narrative thread to explore the entangled Atlantic world during the first half of the sixteenth century. In doing so, she makes a critical contribution to the fields of both Atlantic and global history. Although it is generally accepted that the English were not significantly attracted to the Americas until the second half of the sixteenth century, Dalton demonstrates that Barlow, Cabot, and their cohorts had a knowledge of the world and its opportunities that was extraordinary for this period. She reveals how shared knowledge as well as the accumulation of capital in international trading networks prior to 1560 influenced emerging ideas of trade, "discovery," settlement, and race in Britain. In doing so, Dalton not only provides a substantial new body of facts about trade and exploration, she explores the changing character of English commerce and society in the first half of the sixteenth century.


U.S. History

U.S. History

Author: P. Scott Corbett

Publisher:

Published: 2024-09-10

Total Pages: 1886

ISBN-13:

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U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.


When Asia Was the World

When Asia Was the World

Author: Stewart Gordon

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0306815567

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Describes the important influence of Asia's great civilization on the West, as traveling merchants, scholars, philosophers, and religious figures brought the wisdom of China and the Middle East to medieval Europe during the Dark Ages.


Starving Sailors

Starving Sailors

Author: National Maritime Museum (Great Britain)

Publisher: Accelerated Learning Systems, Limited

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

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Sixteen papers, including some on polar aspects.


Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

Author: Peter Hopkirk

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780192802118

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The Silk Road, which linked imperial Rome and distant China, was once the greatest thoroughfare on earth. Along it travelled precious cargoes of silk, gold, and ivory, as well as revolutionary new ideas. Its oasis towns blossomed into thriving centres of Buddhist art and learning. In time it began to decline. The traffic slowed, the merchants left, and finally its towns vanished beneath the desert sands to be forgotten for a thousand years. But legends grew up of lost cities filled with treasurees and guarded by demons. In the early years of the 20th century, foreign explorers began to investigate these legends, and very soon an international race began for the art treasures of the Silk Road. Huge wall paintings, sculptures, and priceless manuscripts were carried away, literally by the ton, and are today scattered through the museums of a dozen countries. Peter Hopkirk tells the story of the intrepid men who, at great personal risk, led these long-range archaeological raids, incurring the undying wrath of the Chinese.