Author: Marcy Norton Publisher: ISBN: 9780801476327 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
Traces European encounters and use of tobacco and cacao and its eventual commodification into a major business from the earliest period through the seventeenth century.
Author: Marcy Norton Publisher: ISBN: Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 362
Book Description
Focusing on the Spanish Empire, Marcy Norton investigates how tobacco and chocolate became material and symbolic links to the pre-Hispanic past for colonized Indians and colonizing Europeans alike. Botanical ambassadors of the American continent, they also profoundly affected Europe. Tobacco, once condemned as proof of Indian diabolism, became the constant companion of clergymen and the single largest source of state revenue in Spain. Before coffee or tea became popular in Europe, chocolate was the drink that energized the fatigued and uplifted the depressed. However, no one could quite forget the pagan past of tobacco and chocolate, despite their apparent Europeanization: physicians relied on Mesoamerican medical systems for their understanding of tobacco; theologians looked to Aztec precedent to decide whether chocolate drinking violated Lenten fasts.
Author: John K. Thornton Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139536192 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1088
Book Description
A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 explores the idea that strong links exist in the histories of Africa, Europe and North and South America. John K. Thornton provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the Atlantic Basin before 1830 by describing political, social and cultural interactions between the continents' inhabitants. He traces the backgrounds of the populations on these three continental landmasses brought into contact by European navigation. Thornton then examines the political and social implications of the encounters, tracing the origins of a variety of Atlantic societies and showing how new ways of eating, drinking, speaking and worshipping developed in the newly created Atlantic World. This book uses close readings of original sources to produce new interpretations of its subject.
Author: Lawrence R. Samuel Publisher: University of Texas Press ISBN: 029277477X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
The history of our attitudes toward the possibilities of tomorrow:“A fascinating trek through American future visions from the 1920s to the present.” —Lori C. Walters, Ph.D., University of Central Florida The future is not a fixed idea but a highly variable one that reflects the values of those who are imagining it. By studying the ways that visionaries imagined the future—particularly that of America—in the past century, much can be learned about the cultural dynamics of the times. In this social history, Lawrence R. Samuel examines the future visions of intellectuals, artists, scientists, businesspeople, and others to tell a chronological story about the history of the future in the past century. He defines six separate eras of future narratives from 1920 to the present day, and argues that the milestones reached during these years—especially related to air and space travel, atomic and nuclear weapons, the women’s and civil rights movements, and the advent of biological and genetic engineering—sparked the possibilities of tomorrow in the public’s imagination, and helped make the twentieth century the first century to be significantly more about the future than the past. The idea of the future grew both in volume and importance as it rode the technological wave into the new millennium, and the author tracks the process by which most people, to some degree, have now become futurists as the need to anticipate tomorrow accelerates.
Author: Richard Manning Publisher: North Point Press ISBN: 1466823429 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
In this provocative, wide-ranging book, Against the Grain, Richard Manning offers a dramatically revisionist view of recent human evolution, beginning with the vast increase in brain size that set us apart from our primate relatives and brought an accompanying increase in our need for nourishment. For 290,000 years, we managed to meet that need as hunter-gatherers, a state in which Manning believes we were at our most human: at our smartest, strongest, most sensually alive. But our reliance on food made a secure supply deeply attractive, and eventually we embarked upon the agricultural experiment that has been the history of our past 10,000 years. The evolutionary road is littered with failed experiments, however, and Manning suggests that agriculture as we have practiced it runs against both our grain and nature's. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, and philosophers, along with his own travels, he argues that not only our ecological ills-overpopulation, erosion, pollution-but our social and emotional malaise are rooted in the devil's bargain we made in our not-so-distant past. And he offers personal, achievable ways we might re-contour the path we have taken to resurrect what is most sustainable and sustaining in our own nature and the planet's.
Author: John Mason Hart Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520246713 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 722
Book Description
"This is an extraordinarily important history of both U.S.-Mexico relations and of the political, economic, social, and cultural activities of Americans in Mexico."—Friedrich Katz, author of The Life and Times of Pancho Villa "Empire and Revolution is empowering as well as informative, providing a detailed record and judicious interpretation of the protean relations between the United States and Mexico. As John Mason Hart convincingly narrates, the association is of dynamic importance for people of both countries. While there have been studies on discrete parts and periods of the U.S.-Mexico relation, this book charts and anchors the relation globally. Hart allows the reader intellectual as well as imaginative insight into the multifaceted social, cultural, and political reality of the sharing of North America—then, now, and in the future."—Juan Gomez-Quinones, author of Mexican-American Labor, 1790-1990
Author: Timothy Brook Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 159691727X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
In this critical darling Vermeer's captivating and enigmatic paintings become windows that reveal how daily life and thought-from Delft to Beijing--were transformed in the 17th century, when the world first became global. A Vermeer painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another canvas, fruit spills from a blue-and-white porcelain bowl. Familiar images that captivate us with their beauty--but as Timothy Brook shows us, these intimate pictures actually give us a remarkable view of an expanding world. The officer's dashing hat is made of beaver fur from North America, and it was beaver pelts from America that financed the voyages of explorers seeking routes to China-prized for the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time, including Vermeer's. In this dazzling history, Timothy Brook uses Vermeer's works, and other contemporary images from Europe, Asia, and the Americas to trace the rapidly growing web of global trade, and the explosive, transforming, and sometimes destructive changes it wrought in the age when globalization really began.
Author: Jennifer L. Anderson Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674067266 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 421
Book Description
Colonial Americans were enamored with the rich colors and silky surface of mahogany. As this exotic wood became fashionable, demand for it set in motion a dark, hidden story of human and environmental exploitation. Anderson traces the path from source to sale, revealing how prosperity and desire shaped not just people’s lives but the natural world.
Author: Daniel J. Flynn Publisher: Open Road Media ISBN: 1497620821 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 217
Book Description
Stupid is the new smart—but it wasn’t always so Popular culture has divorced itself from the life of the mind. Who has time for great books or deep thought when there is Jersey Shore to watch, a txt 2 respond 2, and World of Warcraft to play? At the same time, those who pursue the life of the mind have insulated themselves from popular culture. Speaking in insider jargon and writing unread books, intellectuals have locked themselves away in a ghetto of their own creation. It wasn’t always so. Blue Collar Intellectuals vividly captures a time in the twentieth century when the everyman aspired to high culture and when intellectuals descended from the ivory tower to speak to the everyman. Author Daniel J. Flynn profiles thinkers from working-class backgrounds who played a prominent role in American life by addressing their intellectual work to a mass audience. Blue Collar Intellectuals shows us how much everyone—intellectual and everyman alike—has suffered from mass culture’s crowding out of higher things and the elite’s failure to engage the masses.
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Author: Marcy Norton
Author: Marcy Norton
Author: John K. Thornton
Author: Lawrence R. Samuel
Author: Hyunhee Park
Author: Richard Manning
Author: John Mason Hart
Author: Timothy Brook
Author: Jennifer L. Anderson
Author: Daniel J. Flynn