South America Books

An excellent job of narrating the recovery of lost material from existing documentation. The footnotes are well researched. The topic is fascinating, and the insights of the editors very useful. However, I would have liked to see an additional index with entry using English terms as well as the existing index of Taino words.

In addition, in analysis of a culture so intimately linked and so knowledgeable of nature as the Tainos, one should also take into account biological reality. For instance, it seems clear to a biologist that Mácocael, "he of the lidless eyes:' page 6 of the text may well be the great rainbow boa, Epicrates spp., Ma-ja, the great snake, since this serpent, like most boas, has lidless eyes.

An excellent job of narrating the recovery of lost material from existing documentation. The footnotes are well researched. The topic is fascinating, and the insights of the editors very useful. However, I would have liked to see an additional index with entry using English terms as well as the existing index of Taino words.

In addition, in analysis of a culture so intimately linked and so knowledgeable of nature as the Tainos, one should also take into account biological reality. For instance, it seems clear to a biologist that Mácocael, "he of the lidless eyes:' page 6 of the text may well be the great rainbow boa, Epicrates spp., Ma-ja, the great snake, since this serpent, like most boas, has lidless eyes.

A complete revision of this popular best-seller that covers Beaufort, Myrtle Beach, New Bern, Savannah, the Sea Islands, Hilton Head, Brunswick and the Golden Isles, Okefenokee Swamp, the Outer Banks, Charleston, Cape Hatteras and all the places in-between.

A complete revision of this popular best-seller that covers Beaufort, Myrtle Beach, New Bern, Savannah, the Sea Islands, Hilton Head, Brunswick and the Golden Isles, Okefenokee Swamp, the Outer Banks, Charleston, Cape Hatteras and all the places in-between.

The Adventures Of A Tropical Tramp is the travel narrative of Harry La Tourette Foster, who spent most of his life after the conclusion of World War I wandering the main roads and back roads of the world, from Mexico and South America, to Asia, the South Pacific, The Caribbean, and the Mediterranean. This particular travelogue is the story of his travels in South America following his discharge from the army. He went aboard a tramp steamer bound for Peru. Landing with no funds or resources, he took a series of odd jobs, eventually becoming a reporter for a Lima paper. He went on to join two missionaries trekking overland to the headwaters of the ..., then continued on adventure filled journeys down the ... tributaries. He ended his travels playing ragtime piano in sleazy bars until he was able to earn his passage home to New York. The Adventures Of A Tropical Tramp is fascinating reading and we can only hope for future volumes detailing his later itinerant travels to far away places and foreign climes.

A minor gem. This forgotten book is a classic travel-adventure set in 1920 Peru. Hats off to Dixon-Price Publishing for resurrecting it. Pity that the copy-editing was not done a little more skillfully, as there are a number of typo's and mis-used homonyms in the book the product of unskilled use of computer spell checker.

Still, this is a minor quibble. (A map would have been nice too). Harry Foster's casual employment in the mines, cities, and jungles of Peru are a classic of early 20th Century travel writing. Some might feel that his characterizations of Peruvian Indians, Peruvian "Anglo's, and the Irish are a bit harsh. However, he presents a well-balanced narrative of the country, and its types. This lost world (the 1920's) is a rough and tumble time, gone forever. A great loss. Foster preserves those days for posterity through his colorful writing and astute observations of people and cultures.

Many modern travel writers could learn from his unselfconscious writing style. The book never misses a beat. A combination of irony and genuine love of people, regardless of differing cultures, lifts this book out of the mundane. I highly recommend it.

Excellent book! It has pictures and a bio on todays black artists. My favorite would have to be Ben Jones, my old college professor! lol www.Gallery07002.com

Samella Lewis has updated and further developed her definitive guide on African-American Art. As a former student instructed on the subject with her first edition of this book as our class text, I can definitively say that this book provides a solid understanding of the different art movements and a variety of examples of the works. Also from the perspective of a young museum professional who has worked with African-American art collections, I highly recommend this volume as a foundation of basic knowledge on the subject.

African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom is designed to help students in a survey course gain an understanding of that struggle. It introduces the concepts, milestones, and significant figures of African American history. What is outstanding is the way it engages the reader in viewing history through the lens of many biographies and through the perspectives of people who lived those struggles.

We get the the stories of the lives of both the illustrious and the ordinary, as well as the public and the private world of the people who make up this grand saga.

These interwoven stories clearly show that, in every part of the country, at every level of society, African Americans refused to allow their condition to crush them. Instead, they were shakers and shapers of their own world insofar as this was possible. That African Americans often did not succeed in their plans or could not fully realize their hopes does not diminish their strivings.

This is an excellent introduction to African American history that many families should consider also having in their home library.

African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom, Single Volume Edition by Clayborne Carson (Longman) Alternate editions [Volume One Chapters One through Eleven; Volume Two Chapters Eleven Through Twenty-One] Excerpt: Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it maybe a physical one, or it maybe both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will. -Frederick Douglass
African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom is designed to help students in the survey course gain an understanding of that struggle. It introduces the concepts, milestones, and significant figures of African American history. Inasmuch as that history is grounded in struggle-in the consistent and insistent call to the United States to make good on constitutional promises made to all its citizens-this book is also an American history text. Hence, the milestones of mainstream American history, economy, politics, arts and letters are interwoven in its pages.
But African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom seeks to do something more. It engages the reader in viewing history through the lens of many biographies and through the perspectives of people who lived those struggles to ensure, in the words of Langston Hughes' famous poem, that "America Will Be." This unique biographical approach to African American history positions African American lives at the center of the narrative and as the basis of analysis.
BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH
African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom tells the stories of the lives of both the illustrious (abolitionist Martin Delany) and the ordinary (planter Isaiah Montgomery), the public and the private perspectives of those who shaped the African American story. Some individuals are famous for their specific contributions; other individuals are representative of a larger idea, a concept of a people who have inhabited the American continent for more than half a millennium.
Throughout the book we examine the struggles of African Americans to define their own identities, the development of nationalist ideas and rhetoric, Americans' struggle with the concept of race, and the growth of the politics of race from the Republican Party to the Rainbow Coalition. Wherever possible, we enliven and give authenticity to the story through the words of contemporary participants. With all that, we keep the story concise, fast-paced, and compelling.
Within these pages, we try to capture the essence of the African American experience. The book presents African American voices; it sees history through African American eyes. The events and the themes around which these lives were organized are defined so as to impose order on the often disorderly past and to interpret that past as modern historical research has revealed it. The biographical approach both guides the story and animates the history In each chapter, individual African Americans are the pivot points that provide a window on the historical changes of their generation. Life stories capture the rush of events that envelop individuals and illuminate the momentous decisions that, collectively, frame the American past and present.
While humanizing history, the biographical approach has another important advantage: It is an antidote to the poisonous notion of historical inevitability. Too often, expressions such as the sweep of history, the transit of civilization, manifest destiny, and the march of progress plant the idea that history is inexorable, unalterable, and foreordained-beyond the capacity of men and women to change. That idea has been used to justify a winner's history-an approach that diminishes the full humanness of those who were captured and traded as slaves. Books with a winner's history approach also work to absolve those who traded in slaves and profited from their labor. To promote the understanding that no individual is forever trapped within iron circumstances beyond his or her ability to alter, we ground every chapter in the experience of people rather than forces.
The interwoven human stories in this textbook demonstrate that in every age, in every part of the country, at every level of society, African Americans refused to allow history to crush them. Instead, they were shakers and shapers of their own world insofar as this was possible. Whether in the small space of plantation quarters or Harlem walkups, or criss-crossing a nation, or calling for the unity of Africans dispossessed and dispersed around the globe, African Americans have shaped their world even as they contested and transformed their subordinate roles in American society. That often they did not succeed in their plans or could not fully realize their hopes does not diminish their strivings. It does not alter the fact that for many, nothing was passively accepted; everything was contested or negotiated. The struggle for dignity and respect is part of the human condition. It has been no different for a dispossessed African American minority determined to transcend the contempt of their fellow Americans.
Just as African American lives are inarguably part of the long process by which Americans have strived to achieve the promise of the national motto E pluribus unum-from the many, one-so too African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom is not a story set in stone. It is the product of our constantly changing understandings of the past, new insights about historical possibilities, and new historical research. In that ongoing effort, African American history has achieved breadth and depth in recent decades, indeed has become one of the most vibrant components of American history, reshaping the way we understand everything from the American economy to innovations in science, politics, and the arts. Drawing on the last half-century of recast historical narrative, African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom crafts a new synthesis that not only enriches our understanding of the black experience in America but alters our conception of American history in the whole.
COVERAGE AND ORGANIZATION
In African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom, the distinctive people and events of American history are all here: the Europeans' first encounter with new people and a new environment, the American Revolution and its shaping of humanitarian ideals, the War of 1812, the Missouri Compromise, sectional conflicts, wars from the Civil War
through this century's war against terrorism, cultural trends from the resistance poetry of revolutionary-era Phillis Wheatley through modern-day hip hop.
African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom corn-prises twenty-one chapters. Chapters 1-7 explore the period up to 1830, when most Africans in North America were enslaved. The book begins, as all human history begins, in Africa with ancient history and the rise of empires in West and Central Africa during the period American and western historians think of as the Middle Ages. European contact and the growth of the slave trade are followed by an analysis of the new conditions of slavery in the Americas. To understand how Africans were not all enslaved in the same ways and in the same conditions, the chapters treat the formation of notions about race and how they figured in the descent into slavery in different zones of European settlement-French, Dutch, and Spanish as well as English-in the Americas. The galvanizing effect of the American Revolution and the decades thereafter during which free black people in the North and in the South built families, founded churches, forged friendships and communities, and struggled for autonomy and dignity are central themes.
Chapters 8-14 examine pivotal junctures in African American history that parallel the American focus on reform and nationality. The 1830s marked the first years when the majority of black Americans were not forced immigrants but rather born on American soil. Echoing the religious reawakening that undergirded both abolitionism and a vigorous defense of slavery, slave and free African Americans alike claimed their voice in an international antebellum debate about the future of American democracy. Then, through a long and merciless Civil War, the end of slavery, and the South's attempt to recreate the essence of slavery, black Americans persisted in holding forth, before white Americans and the world, the guarantees of equality and citizenship built into the new constitutional amendments. The post-Civil War dispersal of newly freed African Americans to every corner of North America shows how, in the face of a still-hostile white America that abandoned Reconstruction, black people built families, communities, and viable economic lives; established churches, mutual aid and literary societies, and businesses; and launched schools and publishing ventures as they sought to transform themselves from slaves to soldiers and citizens and to wrest equality and justice from white America.
Chapters 15-21 address African American life in mod-ern America. We devote attention to the increasing diversity of African Americans and how-during world wars, the Great Depression, and other momentous national and inter-national transformations-they struggled for full participation in a society still marred by racist attitudes and practices. Throughout twentieth-century scientific, technological, and
sources, visual material, historical essays, and personal interpretations.
Visual History: Each chapter includes a complement of graphic materials and illustrations-maps, charts, photographs, lithographs, and paintings-that provide a visual window on the past. These visual materials are intended to unfold an additional dimension of the narrative, reinforcing the student's sense of seeing history as participants saw it. To sharpen complex or subtle concepts, tables efficiently convey a sequence of events or milestones-for example, judicial decisions, legislative acts, and protest movement flashpoints.
economic changes, one theme permeates African American strategies for securing justice and equal opportunity: the ongoing struggle for a positive sense of identity amidst racism and destructive racial stereotypes. Whether in fighting the nation's wars; helping build the modern economy; adding to the explosion of cultural creativity through innovations in music, art, film, dance, and literature; or emerging on the political stage at the local, state, and national level, African Americans in the last century are portrayed as the principal innovators of the nation's most important liberation movement.
SPECIAL FEATURES AND PEDAGOGY
Complementing the multitude of stories connecting African American lives and American history, this book has several features we consider essential elements of a braided analytic narrative.
First Persons: Each chapter contains several primary documents called "First Person" that bring authentic firsthand accounts from the past to the page. These written and spoken words help us comprehend, as no modern paraphraser can do, how African Americans such as Olaudah Equiano, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Pauli Murray understood their world and sought to transform it. A headnote puts each primary document in context. Many documents end with a reference to the book's companion website (www.ablongman.com/ carson/documents), encouraging students to view a longer version of the document online.
Timelines: Timelines help students fix the most significant developments in African American history as they are framed in the larger, more familiar American story. These are positioned at the beginning of each chapter directly following an opening vignette.
Chapter-opening Vignettes: Focusing on personal stories such as the rebelliousness of Venture Smith or the wartime experience of First Lieutenant Thomas Edward Jones, these vignettes draw students into the chapter period and herald the chapter's events and themes.
Conclusions: A summary of the main ideas and events of each chapter, and a look ahead to the next, can be found in the Conclusion.
Further Reading: At the end of each chapter are suggestions for further reading. Here we provide a sampling, rather than an exhaustive list, of fresh histories as well as classics, engaging autobiographies and historical novels students can explore for primary

This book maintains that the primary purpose of the FBI, from its inception and at least through to the late 1980s when Agents of Repression was first published, was to repress political groups and individuals who posed a threat to the status quo. The text is accompanied by heavy documentation and I was often reminded of the writing style of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. The focus here, however, is on the domestic crimes of the government. Churchell and Vander Wall show that the FBI was willing to use massive illegal force (including assasination) to repress political enemies and serve the interests of those in power. This is an excellent eye-opener to the true nature of the Bureau and the harsh crimes visited upon the American Indian Movement, the Black Panther Party and others such as the Puerto Rican Independence Movement. One is left wondering what activities the FBI has engaged in since the '80s and especially since 9/11. The best book I've read in some time.

The reissue of Agents of Repression is not only based on the historical significance of the book, but also the concerns expressed by co-author Ward Churchill in his lectures and writings about the direction of this nation with the advent of the Department of Homeland Security and legislative measures that have trampled over the Bill of Rights.

The book was published in 1988 based on the then ongoing litigation by some government officials against an author and publisher who had a work published concerning the illegal repression of AIM.

Agents of Repression is basically split into four sections; a history of the FBI, the government's war against the Black Panther Party, a lengthy exploration of AIM and the steps taken by a variety of government departments to destroy the grass-roots movement and how nothing has changed in the 1980s.

For readers who have explored these issues through other forums, it is an outstanding history. Readers who may be researching this era for the first time, I highly recommend the book since it takes larger topics and breaks them down into succinct chapters.

Churchill became the punching bag for the lightweight talking-heads on cable "news" shows more than a year ago due to comments he made in an academic setting concerning 9/11.

I urge a potential book-buyer to disregard that rhetoric and disinformation campaign waged against the co-author Churchill and consider that perhaps the payback for truly believing in civil rights means the attempt to silence him.

This is a really good piece of work. I'm a maritime history buff and I enjoyed it a lot. If you're at all interested in the early history of the New England states or especially interested in Nantucket and the way people there made their fortunes, I'd give this book a try. It's a good history that reads like a good novel in places. Highly recommended.

Mawer's splendid "Ahab's Trade" tells the incredible story of South Seas (i.e. Pacific) whaling during the 19th and 20th centuries. The principal character in this book does not have a particular name; the names themselves shift from voyage to voyage - but the constant heroic icon that keeps appearing is the longboat's crewman; the sailor who ventures out onto the high seas in little but a glorified rowboat, harpoon in hand, ready to do battle with a beast that could easily smash the boat to bits. Whatever you think of whaling, you can't deny the bravery of these men.

Mawer does not stop with a strict rendition of whaling, however: he takes the opportunity to share with the reader many a story about the Pacific in general during this fateful period, from the discovery of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn island, to the "ExEx" expedition of the 1830s (recently given its own entire history), to the exploits of Confederate raiders during the 1860s. The narrative ends with the (comparatively recent) international ban on whaling - a ban that Mawer does not entirely embrace. Immaculately researched and superbly written.

If you're a fan of taking the backroad instead of the interstate, this is a great companion through a great state. I've lived in Alabama all of my life, and this book helped me discover things I didn't even know were around.

We don't leave home on a road trip without it.

As someone who has lived in Alabama for over 20 years now, this is old hat for me. However, if you want to get a taste of modern culture with a mixture of the old southern traditions and beautiful countryside, then this book is for you. Come by and see us sometime!

This book contains a great list of places to stay and eat with prices. Some of my favorite sections of book include the following: Listing of Best Unspoiled Small Towns, which include Kodiak, Petersburg, and Cordova; Listing of Strange Comunity Events which include Cordova's Ice Worm Festival, Fairbanks' Midnight Sun Baseball Game nad Nomes Polar Bear Swim/Bathtub Race. If you are going to Alaska's number 1 destination, Denali National Park, make sure you pick up a copy of Discovering Denali.

I was planning a cruise to Alaska. I chose "Fodor's 2001 Alaska" as a guidebook and was so impressed, I purchased two more of them for my cruise travelmates. This book went with me wherever I traveled in the "land of the midnight sun". Not only did Fodor's guidebook describe the cruise ships to the inth, but all of the activities, etc. Every bit of the text was accurate to my experiences. This was my first cruise, and my first trip to Alaska. I found this book to be indispensible! The data on Alaska, the facts, the figures, the special places to see, things to do, walks, hikes, eats, animals, and people...all here in crisp detail for you to enjoy. Upon my return to the "lower 48", I even narrated my Alaska photo albums with information I retrieved from this book. History, indiginous peoples, it's all here. Do get this book if you are thinking of going to Alaska, or returning to Alaska. All text is up to date, with maps, etc. Excellent resource! From the Inside Passage to Denali National Park I traveled, and I learned much more about this great land we call Alaska because of Fodor's book. I am now planning on going back to this beautiful place in great part due to reading this guidebook.

Over the decades, this has been the respected source. This is considered trusted by top blue bloods, including the sovereign Queens and Kings. It is presided by the King of Spain, H.M. Juan Carlos. Simple format that lists the orders each person belongs to, their occupations and other things. There are two sources of information on who is noble: The Gotha and the Handbuch des Adels. Stay to these books and you'll be ok.

_This is the ultimate power register of the ruling classes. Simply, this book charts the ruling Royal and Princely houses of Europe. Traditionally considered the last word in matters of succession, protocol, and marriage. Known for it's accuracy and the publisher's inability to be bribed or pressured in matters of inclusion or exclusion. The rock against which pretenders are wrecked.

_Not for the nouveau riche.