The Southern Land, Known

The Southern Land, Known
Author: Gabriel de Foigny
Publisher:
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1993
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN:

Foigny's La Terre Australe connue, published in 1676, is a fantastically engaging and playful example of the "imaginary voyage" genre. It is also a seventeenth-century work with some curiously modern resonances. Written in the tradition of More's Utopia, and serving itself as a forerunner to Swift's Gulliver's Travels, The Southern Land, Known offered its readers a radical criticism of then prevailing ideologies in the guise of a lively and provocative novel. Knowledge of the vast continent of Australia was, in Foigny's day, still mingled with legends, hearsay, and travelers' tales. It is in this context that the "unknown Southern Land" becomes known to the hero of this short, action-packed, and highly structured story. The narrator braves a long sea journey, raging storms, shipwrecks, giant whales, and high-flying creatures that try to eat him - all to reach the mysterious Austral utopia. Peopled by hermaphrodites, Foigny's Australia is a society in which distinctions of both class and gender have been abolished. It includes, among other things, an indictment of "the great empire that the male usurped over the female" as "rather a form of tyranny than a just cause".

Taming the Great South Land

Taming the Great South Land
Author: William J Lines
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 1991-01-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780520078307

Taming the Great South Land is the first full-length landscape history of an entire continent occupied by one nation. It is also, in William Lines's telling, a brutal and controversial story. Examining the ways European society rapidly, radically transformed Australia's physical and human landscapes, the author writes candidly of repeated environmental devastation--from the early slaughter of seals and whales to the destructive spread of sheep, through gold rushes and land settlement to British nuclear tests and the modern mining and timber industries. Lines shows how Enlightenment ideas of progress, economic growth, and development were reconstructed on Australian soil, and how the promise of the conquest of nature became a mockery in fact, resulting in the mass dislocation and destruction of indigenous populations. This shocking narrative, thoroughly researched and accessibly written, combines environmental, social, and political history to hard-hitting effect. Taming the Great South Land is the first full-length landscape history of an entire continent occupied by one nation. It is also, in William Lines's telling, a brutal and controversial story. Examining the ways European society rapidly, radically transformed Australia's physical and human landscapes, the author writes candidly of repeated environmental devastation--from the early slaughter of seals and whales to the destructive spread of sheep, through gold rushes and land settlement to British nuclear tests and the modern mining and timber industries. Lines shows how Enlightenment ideas of progress, economic growth, and development were reconstructed on Australian soil, and how the promise of the conquest of nature became a mockery in fact, resulting in the mass dislocation and destruction of indigenous populations. This shocking narrative, thoroughly researched and accessibly written, combines environmental, social, and political history to hard-hitting effect.

Voyages of Discovery ...

Voyages of Discovery ...
Author: James Cook
Publisher:
Total Pages: 502
Release: 1906
Genre: Antarctica
ISBN:

A narrative of Cook's three voyages to the Pacific and Australasia : the first voyage (in "Endeavour") and the second (in "Resolution" and "Adventure") are largely retold in the third person, with some quotations from Cook's own writings (p. 1-228); the third voyage (in "Resolution" and "Discovery") consists of copious sections of Cook's own account plus accounts by Captains King and Clerke, in addition to the third-person narrative (p. 229-479).

Northern Money, Southern Land

Northern Money, Southern Land
Author: Chlotilde R Martin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2020-03-18
Genre:
ISBN: 9781643361024

In the early 1930s Chlotilde R. Martin of Beaufort, South Carolina, wrote a series of articles for the Charleston News and Courier documenting the social and economic transformation of the lowcountry coast as an influx of wealthy northerners began buying scores of old local plantations. Her articles combined the name-dropping chatter of the lowcountry social register with reflections on the tension between past and present in the old rice and cotton kingdoms of South Carolina. Edited by Robert B. Cuthbert and Stephen G. Hoffius, Northern Money, Southern Land collects Martin's articles and augments them with photographs and historical annotations to carry their stories forward to the present day. As Martin recounted, the new owners of these coastal properties ranked among the most successful businessmen in the country and included members of the Doubleday, Du Pont, Hutton, Kress, Whitney, Guggenheim, and Vanderbilt families. Among the later owners are media magnate Ted Turner and boxer Joe Frazier. The plantation houses they bought and the homes they built are some of the most important architectural structures in the Palmetto State--although many are rarely seen by the public. In some fifty articles drawn from interviews with property owners and visits to their newly acquired lands, Martin described almost eighty estates covering some three hundred thousand acres of Beaufort, Jasper, Hampton, Colleton, and Berkeley counties. Martin's lively sketches included stories of wealthy young playboys who brought Broadway showgirls down for decadent parties, tales of the first nudist colony in America, and exchanges with African American farmhands who wanted to travel to New York to see their employers' primary homes, which they had been assured were piled high with gold and silver. In the process, Martin painted a fascinating landscape of a southern coastline changing hands and on the verge of dramatic redevelopment. Her tales, here updated by Cuthbert and Hoffius, will bring modern readers onto many little-known plantations in the southern part of South Carolina and provide a wealth of knowledge about the history of vexing tensions between development and conservation that remain a defining aspect of lowcountry life.

Remains of Ritual

Remains of Ritual
Author: Steven M. Friedson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2010-07-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226265064

Remains of Ritual, Steven M. Friedson’s second book on musical experience in African ritual, focuses on the Brekete/Gorovodu religion of the Ewe people. Friedson presents a multifaceted understanding of religious practice through a historical and ethnographic study of one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast of Ghana: a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the northern region of the country. Each chapter of this fascinating book considers a different aspect of ritual life, demonstrating throughout that none of them can be conceived of separately from their musicality—in the Brekete world, music functions as ritual and ritual as music. Dance and possession, chanted calls to prayer, animal sacrifice, the sounds and movements of wake keeping, the play of the drums all come under Friedson’s careful scrutiny, as does his own position and experience within this ritual-dominated society.

War Upon the Land

War Upon the Land
Author: Lisa M. Brady
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2012-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820343838

In this first book-length environmental history of the American Civil War, Lisa M. Brady argues that ideas about nature and the environment were central to the development and success of Union military strategy. From the start of the war, both sides had to contend with forces of nature, even as they battled one another. Northern soldiers encountered unfamiliar landscapes in the South that suggested, to them, an uncivilized society's failure to control nature. Under the leadership of Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip Sheridan, the Union army increasingly targeted southern environments as the war dragged on. Whether digging canals, shooting livestock, or dramatically attempting to divert the Mississippi River, the Union aimed to assert mastery over nature by attacking the most potent aspect of southern identity and power--agriculture. Brady focuses on the siege of Vicksburg, the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign, marches through Georgia and the Carolinas, and events along the Mississippi River to examine this strategy and its devastating physical and psychological impact. Before the war, many Americans believed in the idea that nature must be conquered and subdued. Brady shows how this perception changed during the war, leading to a wider acceptance of wilderness. Connecting environmental trauma with the onset of American preservation, Brady pays particular attention to how these new ideas of wilderness can be seen in the creation of national battlefield memorial parks as unaltered spaces. Deftly combining environmental and military history with cultural studies, War upon the Land elucidates an intriguing, largely unexplored side of the nation's greatest conflict.

Great Southern Land

Great Southern Land
Author: Ivan O'Mahoney
Publisher:
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2013
Genre: Australia
ISBN: 9780733332111

GREAT SOUTHERN LAND is the beautiful illustrated hardback book accompanying ABC 1's landmark television series. Drawing an audience of more than 3.5 million when it went to air in late 2012, GREAT SOUTHERN LAND was compared to David Attenborough's productions and described variously as 'a revelation', 'must see', 'breathtaking' and 'will make you proud to be an Australian'. GREAt SOUtHERN LAND is an epic journey across Australia, from the top of the Snowy Mountains to the tropical wilds of the Gulf of Carpentaria; the irrigated farms of the Murray Darling Basin to the ancient forests of tasmania. It is the pictorial record of our remarkable story - revealing otherwise hidden patterns, networks and systems that keep our population of 23 million people moving, fed, alive and thriving in a huge, remote, dry continent. Written by series producers and writers Ivan O'Mahoney and Steve Bibb, with an introduction by presenter Professor Steve Simpson, and including the photography of Richard Woldendorp, GREAt SOUtHERN LAND features more than 300 incredible photographs of Australia from above.

Drowned Town

Drowned Town
Author: Jayne Moore Waldrop
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2021-10-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1950564177

"They had been told their sacrifice was for the public good. They were never told how much they would miss it, or for how long." Drowned Town explores the multigenerational impact caused by the loss of home and illuminates the joys and sorrows of a group of people bound together by western Kentucky's Land Between the Lakes and the lakes that lie on either side of it. The linked stories are rooted in a landscape forever altered by the mid-twentieth-century impoundment of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers and the seizing of property under the power of eminent domain to create a national recreation area on the narrow strip of land between the lakes. The massive federal land and water projects completed in quick succession were designed to serve the public interest by providing hydroelectric power, flood control, and economic progress for the region—at great sacrifice for those who gave up their homes, livelihoods, towns, and history. The narrative follows two women whose lives are shaped by their friendship and connection to the place, and their stories go back and forth in time to show how the creation of the lakes both healed and hurt the people connected to them. In the process, the stories emphasize the importance of sisterhood and family, both blood and created, and how we cannot separate ourselves from our places in the world.

The Land Was Ours

The Land Was Ours
Author: Andrew W. Kahrl
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2016-06-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469628732

The coasts of today's American South feature luxury condominiums, resorts, and gated communities, yet just a century ago, a surprising amount of beachfront property in the Chesapeake, along the Carolina shores, and around the Gulf of Mexico was owned and populated by African Americans. Blending social and environmental history, Andrew W. Kahrl tells the story of African American–owned beaches in the twentieth century. By reconstructing African American life along the coast, Kahrl demonstrates just how important these properties were for African American communities and leisure, as well as for economic empowerment, especially during the era of the Jim Crow South. However, in the wake of the civil rights movement and amid the growing prosperity of the Sunbelt, many African Americans fell victim to effective campaigns to dispossess black landowners of their properties and beaches. Kahrl makes a signal contribution to our understanding of African American landowners and real-estate developers, as well as the development of coastal capitalism along the southern seaboard, tying the creation of overdeveloped, unsustainable coastlines to the unmaking of black communities and cultures along the shore. The result is a skillful appraisal of the ambiguous legacy of racial progress in the Sunbelt.

Australia

Australia
Author: Frank Welsh
Publisher:
Total Pages: 792
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN:

"Australia: A New History of the Great Southern Land is a major new account that places Australia's history fully within a global context, drawing on sources from the United States, Britain, South Africa, and Canada, as well as within Australia itself." "In a compelling narrative, acclaimed historian Frank Welsh traces the history of the land from scattered convict settlements to the formation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 and on to today's thriving independent nation, exposing many national myths in the process. This book also explores the dark side of Australia's history: the long-continued "White Australia" policy, which bedeviled foreign policy for more than a century; the still-tortured official relationship with the Aboriginal peoples; the subordination of women; and the flaws in the constitution. Also examined is Australia's uneasy relationship with its Asian neighbors, and its isolation from Britain and the United States, its traditional allies."--BOOK JACKET.