Fordlandia

Author: Greg Grandin
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 9781429938013
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
The stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

Fordlandia

Author: Greg Grandin
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805082360
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
The stunning, never-before-told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon, "Fordlandia" depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch.

Fordlandia

Author: Greg Grandin
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 9780312429621
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Greg Grandin comes the stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

The Empire of Necessity

Author: Greg Grandin
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1429943173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Book Description
From the acclaimed author of Fordlandia, the story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates America's struggle with slavery and freedom during the Age of Revolution and beyond One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren't. Having earlier seized control of the vessel and slaughtered most of the crew, they were staging an elaborate ruse, acting as if they were humble servants. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception, he responded with explosive violence. Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity explores the multiple forces that culminated in this extraordinary event—an event that already inspired Herman Melville's masterpiece Benito Cereno. Now historian Greg Grandin, with the gripping storytelling that was praised in Fordlandia, uses the dramatic happenings of that day to map a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas, capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.

Fordlandia

Author: Eduardo Sguiglia
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 9780312283995
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Fordlandia is a haunting, evocative novel at whose core lies a nugget of fact: In 1929, Henry Ford, presiding in divine authority over his automobile empire, grew tired of the British monopoly on Brazilian rubber. So, with signature hubris, Ford decided he would produce his own rubber and set about colonizing the Amazon, ultimately investing millions and founding an entire city around his rubber plantation. The name of the city was Fordlandia. Surrounding this historical curiosity is a rich, captivating tales that explores the fundamental struggle between man and the natural world. Eduardo Sguiglia's exquisitely imagined Fordlandia is a town of characters by turns engaging and enigmatic, who draw the reader into their various worlds so effortlessly and ingenuously that their dreams, discoveries, and downfalls begin to seem as immediate and piercing as one's won.

SUMMARY - Fordlandia: The Rise And Fall Of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City By Greg Grandin

Author: Shortcut Edition
Publisher: Shortcut Edition
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 22

Book Description
* Our summary is short, simple and pragmatic. It allows you to have the essential ideas of a big book in less than 30 minutes. By reading this summary, you will discover how Henry Ford wanted to recreate a small North America in the middle of the Amazon jungle of Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s. You will also discover that : Henry Ford hated cow's milk; He was a great fan of folk dances; The people of Fordlandia were encouraged to eat wholegrain bread and wholegrain rice; Fordlandia was twice the size of the state of Delaware; At first, crime was all-powerful in Fordlandia; Henry Ford enforced Prohibition in Fordlandia. The forgotten city of the jungle, so one could call Fordlandia, the American colony created from scratch by Henry Ford in the heart of the Amazon jungle. The author, Greg Grandin, tells like a novel a true story, with protagonists who have the stature of the men who make the story. Henry Ford is unquestionably of this calibre. This plunge into the Brazilian primary forest is also a plunge into the consciousness of Puritan America and its fundamental anguish. *Buy now the summary of this book for the modest price of a cup of coffee!

Summary of Greg Grandin's Fordlandia

Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 63

Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 In the 1920s, America’s thirst for rubber helped strengthen European colonialism, as revenue from rubber was used to pay off England and France’s war debt. #2 The rubber industry was already dependent on oil, and by 1924, Ford had considered growing his own rubber in the muck lands of the Florida Everglades. Rumors of his interest in Florida prompted speculators to organize the Florida and Cape Cod Realty Company to buy up and subdivide large tracts of land in Labelle. #3 Ford did not like collective action. When Firestone tried to organize the rubber industry, Ford refused to participate. He decided that the best place to grow rubber was in the Amazon, where it originated. #4 The southern half of the Amazon basin, which is home to the Hevea brasiliensis tree, was the site of the world’s rubber boom in the second half of the nineteenth century. With their Beaux Arts palaces, neoclassical municipal buildings, electric trams, and wide Parisian boulevards, the cities of Manaus and Belém competed for the title of tropical Paris.

A Century of Revolution

Author: Gilbert M. Joseph
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392852
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Book Description
Latin America experienced an epochal cycle of revolutionary upheavals and insurgencies during the twentieth century, from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 through the mobilizations and terror in Central America, the Southern Cone, and the Andes during the 1970s and 1980s. In his introduction to A Century of Revolution, Greg Grandin argues that the dynamics of political violence and terror in Latin America are so recognizable in their enforcement of domination, their generation and maintenance of social exclusion, and their propulsion of historical change, that historians have tended to take them for granted, leaving unexamined important questions regarding their form and meaning. The essays in this groundbreaking collection take up these questions, providing a sociologically and historically nuanced view of the ideological hardening and accelerated polarization that marked Latin America’s twentieth century. Attentive to the interplay among overlapping local, regional, national, and international fields of power, the contributors focus on the dialectical relations between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary processes and their unfolding in the context of U.S. hemispheric and global hegemony. Through their fine-grained analyses of events in Chile, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru, they suggest a framework for interpreting the experiential nature of political violence while also analyzing its historical causes and consequences. In so doing, they set a new agenda for the study of revolutionary change and political violence in twentieth-century Latin America. Contributors Michelle Chase Jeffrey L. Gould Greg Grandin Lillian Guerra Forrest Hylton Gilbert M. Joseph Friedrich Katz Thomas Miller Klubock Neil Larsen Arno J. Mayer Carlota McAllister Jocelyn Olcott Gerardo Rénique Corey Robin Peter Winn

Marsupilami - Volume 6 - Fordlandia

Author: Franquin
Publisher: Cinebook
ISBN: 1800449402
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : fr
Pages : 50

Book Description
In Palombia, the president is throwing a lavish completion ceremony for a colossal project: a dam across the mighty river Huaytoonarro. An event that couldn’t leave the Marsupilami more indifferent, for he has other piranhas to fry: Mrs Marsupilami has disappeared. Our friend’s nose tells him that it was the doing of Bring M. Backalive, the famous hunter, and he rushes after the kidnapper, soon followed by Sarah and Bip ... and then the situation becomes even more complicated!

The End of the Myth

Author: Greg Grandin
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1250179815
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE A new and eye-opening interpretation of the meaning of the frontier, from early westward expansion to Trump’s border wall. Ever since this nation’s inception, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity. Symbolizing a future of endless promise, it was the foundation of the United States’ belief in itself as an exceptional nation – democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Today, though, America hasa new symbol: the border wall. In The End of the Myth, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of U.S. history – from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016. For centuries, he shows, America’s constant expansion – fighting wars and opening markets – served as a “gate of escape,” helping to deflect domestic political and economic conflicts outward. But this deflection meant that the country’s problems, from racism to inequality, were never confronted directly. And now, the combined catastrophe of the 2008 financial meltdown and our unwinnable wars in the Middle East have slammed this gate shut, bringing political passions that had long been directed elsewhere back home. It is this new reality, Grandin says, that explains the rise of reactionary populism and racist nationalism, the extreme anger and polarization that catapulted Trump to the presidency. The border wall may or may not be built, but it will survive as a rallying point, an allegorical tombstone marking the end of American exceptionalism.