A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Carmel Finley reveals that the fallibility of MSY lies at its very inception—as a tool of government rather than science. The foundational doctrine of MSY emerged at a time when the US government was using science to promote and transfer Western knowledge and technology, and to ensure that American ships and planes would have free passage through the world’s seas and skies. Finley charts the history of US fisheries science using MSY as her focus, and in particular its application to halibut, tuna, and salmon fisheries. Fish populations the world over are threatened, and All the Fish in the Sea helps to sound warnings of the effect of any management policies divested from science itself.
A new collection of essays grappling with identity and memory, from a master of the form.
The author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Gates of the Alamo, the sweeping Texas history Big Wonderful Thing, and decades of incisive journalism, Stephen Harrigan is an adept writer skilled in crafting memorable characters. From this singular voice now comes a collection of essays tackling the most personal, and yet most expansive, themes of all: identity, memory, and time itself.
An Anchor in the Sea of Time unfolds individual stories but also a larger narrative about the development and distortions of history. In one essay, a painting on his grandparents’ wall is seared in Harrigan’s young mind. In another, a group trip to Vietnam stirs up a sobering confrontation with class privilege among Americans who fought there and others, like Harrigan, who did their best not to. The award-winning essay “Off Course” reflects on the father Harrigan never met. And Harrigan’s reporting about the Karankawas, an Indigenous group from the Texas coast once thought to be extinct, takes readers deep into the recesses of collective forgetting and offers glimpses of the possibility of recovery. A vivid encounter with lost selves, vanished worlds, and futures yet unrealized, An Anchor in the Sea of Time is perhaps the most personal book yet from this beloved writer.
Notion, also known as Colophon-by-the-Sea, was an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia. A comprehensive archaeological survey carried out by the University of Michigan and Brown University (2014–21) yielded rich ceramic evidence for the chronology and commercial connections of the settlement, clarified essential aspects of the city plan, provided opportunities for detailed study of major buildings and public works, and shed new light on both the local geology and the modification of the landscape through terracing and stone extraction. These investigations documented a major program of urban development featuring new fortifications and a new city plan in the early to mid-third century BCE, three centuries of prosperous habitation, and the substantial abandonment of the city in the early first century CE. The archaeology of Notion provides vivid evidence for the turbulent history of Ionia in Hellenistic times, and for the different responses of local communities to Roman rule.
A high-spirited idealist who craved excitement when he enlisted in the Eighth Illinois Volunteers for three months and reenlisted for three years, Charles W. Wills of Canton, Illinois, wrote frequently to his sister Mary Emily Wills and kept a diary of General William T. Sherman’s campaigns during the last year of the war. In the beginning of his service, Wills could boast that his company refused to enlist "roughs." He reported that he and his comrades "drink no liquors and keep ourselves as cleanly as possible.... Almost all are reading or writing, and I defy anyone to find 75 men without any restraint, paying more attention to the Sabbath. . . . Health generally excellent in our company, because we are all careful."
A student and store clerk before enlisting, Wills found that army life "beats clerking." He enlisted as a private at the age of twenty-one and by twenty-four was a major. He had thought he might receive an infantry commission eventually, but when the opportunity arose for promotion to first lieutenant in the Seventh Illinois Cavalry, "cupidity and ambition" caused him to abandon the Eighth, enabling him to hold rank "without so much walking." For a while, though, he seriously rued his lack of action. "Haven’t I a brilliant record," he wrote. "Thirty-three months in service and not a battle." As Simon points out, however, "in the year ahead, Wills would have more than his fill of battles." Battle starved once, his enthusiasm for carnage waned as he marched with Sherman to the sea. Yet Major Wills was impressed by his troops’ "endurance, spirit and recklessness."
Wills matured in the army. He joined solely to preserve the Union, and his early comments on slaves "lacked sympathy, even decency," according to Simon. Later he came to the point where he would arm blacks—in part, with an eye toward gaining rank by leading the new regiments. Yet he was not blind to the anomalies of a slave society.
Wills died in 1883. To preserve his memory, his sister (now Mary Kellogg) printed his diary in 1904. Two years later, Kellogg combined the diary with the letters Wills had written to her earlier in the war. Simon renders this assessment: "Wills had a sparkling, witty style that contrasted sharply with that of both his contemporaries in the field and the seven regimental veterans who compiled their diaries. In assembling this book, Mary E. Kellogg wisely allowed her brother to speak for himself; rarely intruding a comment of her own, excising from his letters home inevitable expressions of concern for his sister and her welfare but leaving intact the sparkling flow of camp gossip and military speculation."
Between Sahara and Sea: Africa in the Roman Empire challenges orthodox views of the story of Africa under Roman domination. It presents a new framework for understanding this and other territories incorporated in the Roman Empire. Based on decades of research in North Africa, David Mattingly’s book is a cleverly constructed and innovative account of the history and archaeology of ancient North Africa (roughly equivalent to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya) from the first century BCE to the third century CE. He charts a new path toward a bottom-up understanding of North African archaeology, exploring in turn the differing material cultures and experiences of the Roman communities of the military and the urban and rural areas. Regional and societal differences emerge as significant and of long duration in the fascinating story of one of the most important sectors of the Roman Empire.
This important book is the most comprehensive in English on Roman North Africa. It is remarkably rich, with up-to-date references and a host of new ideas and perspectives. Well written and illustrated, with a plethora of maps, it will be required reading for anyone interested in the subject. Rather than emphasizing the role of external actors, as studies of “Roman Africa” have traditionally done, Between Sahara and Sea focuses on local contributions to the making of Africa in the Roman Empire. The author demonstrates that the multiple populations encountered by Rome were not an indistinct bloc, but had different identities and cultures.
This study offers a “social interpretation of environmental process” for the coastal lowlands of southeastern Ghana. The Anlo-Ewe, sometimes hailed as the quintessential sea fishermen of the West African coast, are a previously non-maritime people who developed a maritime tradition. As a fishing community the Anlo have a strong attachment to their land. In the twentieth century coastal erosion has brought about a collapse of the balance between nature and culture. The Anlo have sought spiritual explanations but at the same time have responded politically by developing broader ties with Ewe-speaking peoples along the coast.
Contributors. Stacy Alaimo, Amy Braun, Irus Braverman, Holly Jean Buck, Jennifer L. Gaynor, Stefan Helmreich, Elizabeth R. Johnson, Stephanie Jones, Zsofia Korosy, Berit Kristoffersen, Jessica Lehman, Astrida Neimanis, Susan Reid, Alison Rieser, Katherine G. Sammler, Astrid Schrader, Kristen L. Shake, Phil Steinberg
The essays in Chop Suey and Sushi from Sea to Shining Sea fill gaps in the existing food studies by revealing and contextualizing the hidden, local histories of Chinese and Japanese restaurants in the United States.
The writer of these essays show how the taste and presentation of Chinese and Japanese dishes have evolved in sweat and hardship over generations of immigrants who became restaurant owners, chefs, and laborers in the small towns and large cities of America. These vivid, detailed, and sometimes emotional portrayals reveal the survival strategies deployed in Asian restaurant kitchens over the past 150 years and the impact these restaurants have had on the culture, politics, and foodways of the United States.
Some of these authors are family members of restaurant owners or chefs, writing with a passion and richness that can only come from personal investment, while others are academic writers who have painstakingly mined decades of archival data to reconstruct the past. Still others offer a fresh look at the amazing continuity and domination of the “evil Chinaman” stereotype in the “foreign” world of American Chinatown restaurants. The essays include insights from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, economics, phenomenology, journalism, food studies, and film and literary criticism.
Chop Suey and Sushi from Sea to Shining Sea not only complements the existing scholarship and exposes the work that still needs to be done in this field, but also underscores the unique and innovative approaches that can be taken in the field of American food studies.
These are fishing stories, told as such stories are meant to be: simple, often coarse, and tinged with the elemental beauty of the sea. They reflect rugged lives lived on the edge of the ocean’s borders, where grief and grace ride the same waves. Rosemary McGuire, a fisherman herself, captures the essential humanity at the heart of each tale. No one comes through unscathed, but all retain a sense of hope and belief in earthly miracles, however humble.
A dazzling debut, The Creatures at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea will leave readers with a sense of the fragility and beauty inherent in eroded lives spent in proximity to danger.
The stories in Dare the Sea explore Iran’s landscape, culture, and the undercurrent of change affecting its people—both in Iran and the United States. The stories in the first half of the collection are set in Iran in the time before and just after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Each tale discloses the obstacles rural Iranians lived with on a daily basis and the exigencies of survival: petty theft, corruption, drug trafficking, religion, and love. Stories in the second half take place in exile, where characters are seemingly dropped into American locales like the Midwest or Hawaii, taking in their situation with only the survival skills they’ve learned in their own land and enduring the hardships of being strangers in a new country.
Loosely interconnected by reappearing characters, the stories in Dare the Sea are strongly linked by the country of Iran, its landscape, its history, and its hold on its people.
Derek Jarman was the most important independent filmmaker in England during the 1980s. Using emblems and symbols in associative contexts, rather than conventional, cause-and-effect narrative, he created films noteworthy for their lyricism and poetic feeling and for their exploration of the gay experience. His style of filmmaking also links Jarman with other prominent directors of lyric film, including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet.
This pathfinding book places Derek Jarman in the tradition of lyric film and offers incisive readings of all eleven of his feature-length films, from Sebastiane to Blue. Steven Dillon looks at Jarman and other directors working in a similar vein to establish how lyric films are composed through the use of visual imagery and actual poetry. He then traces Jarman's use of imagery (notably mirrors and the sea) in his films and discusses in detail the relationship between cinematic representations and sexual identity. This insightful reading of Jarman's work helps us better understand how films such as The Last of England and The Garden can be said to cohere and mean without being reduced to clear messages. Above all, Dillon's book reveals how truly beautiful and brilliant Jarman's movies are.
So what if we stopped hedging? What if we grounded our efforts to solve environmental problems in hope instead, and let nature make our case for us? That’s what George Monbiot does in Feral, a lyrical, unabashedly romantic vision of how, by inviting nature back into our lives, we can simultaneously cure our “ecological boredom” and begin repairing centuries of environmental damage. Monbiot takes readers on an enchanting journey around the world to explore ecosystems that have been “rewilded”: freed from human intervention and allowed—in some cases for the first time in millennia—to resume their natural ecological processes. We share his awe, and wonder, as he kayaks among dolphins and seabirds off the coast of Wales and wanders the forests of Eastern Europe, where lynx and wolf packs are reclaiming their ancient hunting grounds. Through his eyes, we see environmental success—and begin to envision a future world where humans and nature are no longer separate and antagonistic, but are together part of a single, healing world.
Monbiot’s commitment is fierce, his passion infectious, his writing compelling. Readers willing to leave the confines of civilization and join him on his bewitching journey will emerge changed—and ready to change our world for the better.
This beautifully illustrated children’s book based on a true story recounts a dramatic rescue on Lake Michigan and introduces young readers to Lester Smith and his family, who founded Port Washington’s long-running and beloved Smith Bros. Fish Shanty. Educational materials including definitions, an illustrated map of Lake Michigan, and short biographies of the story’s featured characters supplement this engaging story for elementary-age readers.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, despite its inland location, Xalapa became an important Atlantic community as it came to represent both a haven and a place of fortification for residents of Veracruz. Yellow fever, foreign invasion, and domestic discord drove thousands of residents of Veracruz, as well as foreign travelers, to seek refuge in Xalapa. At the same time, these adverse circumstances prompted the Mexican government to use Xalapa as a bulwark against threats originating in the Atlantic.
The influence of the Atlantic world thus stretched far into central Mexico, thanks to both the instability of the coastal region and the desire of government officials to “protect” central Mexico from volatile Atlantic imports. The boundaries established at Xalapa, however, encouraged goods, information, and people to collect in the city and thereby immerse the population in the developments of the Atlantic sphere. Thus, in seeking to protect the center of the country, government authorities more firmly situated Xalapa in the Atlantic world. This connection would be trumped by national affiliation only when native residents of Xalapa became more comfortable with their participation in the Mexican public sphere later in the nineteenth century.
The interdisciplinary and comparative nature of this study will make it appeal to those studying Atlantic history, including historians of Britain, the United States, Latin America, and Africa, as well as those studying communication, print culture, and postal history more broadly.
Shaped by New Hampshire's unique conservation focus on both resource use and preservation that developed during the first years of the twentieth century, as well as on the tradition of home rule in the state, the outcome of each campaign relied on the insight into, appreciation for, and dedication to protecting the historic and aesthetic values of these three places.
In 1961, the U.S. economy and military remained unassailable in the eyes of the world. Within twenty years, America faced defeat in Vietnam and its economy had been shaken. Japan was now considered the great economic superpower, while the U.S. and Japan reversed roles as surplus and debtor nations. Hands across the Sea? examines this reversal of roles, determining how and why America and Japan became the post-World War II era’s most argumentative allies.
Through extensive research in a number of presidential libraries and author interviews with both American and Japanese policy-makers, Professor Maga finds a U.S.-Japan relationship forever troubled by cultural misunderstanding, America’s Cold War obsession, Japanese pride, and strangely conflicting goals in both trade and defense. Given the intensity of the arguments over some of these issues, it is remarkable that Washington and Tokyo continued a working dialogue during this critical time.
Hands across the Sea? represents the first in-depth study of the modern U.S.-Japan relationship. It especially discovers how serious the U.S.-Japan disagreements over trade, defense, the direction of the Cold War, nuclear policy, and the environment had become.
Whereas American observers of U.S.-Japan relations are quick to point out their fellow countrymen’s ignorance of other cultures and Japan’s brilliance in analyzing American policy and life, the evidence suggests otherwise. Steering far away from anyone’s political correctness, this book’s bottom line involves hard-hitting investigation and analysis.
Belloc captures the essence of each place he visits--whether on the gloomy English fens, or the sunny Provence and Languedoc regions of France, or navigating the North Sea in a leaky boat. Praised for his blend of wit and philosophy, Belloc also weaves together fantasy and fact, producing portraits that take on mythic proportions.
Exploring the data in detail, the authors here show how a complex series of interrelated problems has tended to be treated in reductionist or overly simplistic terms. Cherry and Leppard elucidate this complexity by bringing to bear perspectives from archaeology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. They demonstrate not only that a series of unique circumstances—evolutionary, behavioral, environmental, and economic—conspired to drive mass, ubiquitous global colonization over the last ten millennia; but also that earlier, sparser data provide real insight into key social and behavioral thresholds, even if there is little evidence to support the “oceans as highways” model for species other than our own.
A major intervention in this important debate, Human Dispersal, Human Evolution, and the Sea explains the deep significance of the problem and the profound implications for history, archaeology, and biological anthropology.
A landmark survey of African American literature about Black experiences of the maritime environment.
The ocean is foundational to the story of Africans in America, beginning with the searing Middle Passage. Initially evoking terror, pain, and death, the ocean also became associated with escape, empowerment, freedom, and home, as over time, African Americans in seaport towns found work, built communities, and gained knowledge from travelers. David R. Anderson shows in this groundbreaking collection of memoir, fiction, poetry, and more that African American maritime literature summons many of the traditional themes—survival in the face of overwhelming natural force, sublimity, demonstration of skill and merit, and self-discovery—but often with an eye on legacies of imperialism, slavery, discrimination, and cultural erasure.
Divided thematically across ten sections that address peril, labor, recreation, and more, the book gathers work by influential writers and intellectuals from the eighteenth century to the present, including: Lucille Clifton, Edwidge Danticat, Frederick Douglass, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, W. E. B. DuBois, Camille T. Dungy, Marcus Garvey, Robert Hayden, Zora Neale Hurston, Major Jackson, Harriet Jacobs, John S. Jacobs, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, Natasha Trethewey, Phillis Wheatley, Colson Whitehead, and Kevin Young.
In American Waters is the catalog of an exhibition co-organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
The exhibition and this associated catalog invite visitors to discover the sea as an expansive way to reflect on American culture and environment, learn how coastal and maritime symbols moved inland across the United States, and question what it means to be “in American waters.” Work by Georgia O’Keeffe, Amy Sherald, Kay WalkingStick, Norman Rockwell, Hale Woodruff, Paul Cadmus, Thomas Hart Benton, Jacob Lawrence, Valerie Hegarty, Stuart Davis, and many others is included, along with essays from scholars, critics, and the curators.
Jack London’s fiction has been studied previously for its thematic connections to the ocean, but Jack London and the Sea marks the first time that his life as a writer has been considered extensively in relationship to his own sailing history and interests. In this new study, Anita Duneer claims a central place for London in the maritime literary tradition, arguing that for him romance and nostalgia for the Age of Sail work with and against the portrayal of a gritty social realism associated with American naturalism in urban or rural settings. The sea provides a dynamic setting for London’s navigation of romance, naturalism, and realism to interrogate key social and philosophical dilemmas of modernity: race, class, and gender. Furthermore, the maritime tradition spills over into texts that are not set at sea.
Jack London and the Sea does not address all of London’s sea stories, but rather identifies key maritime motifs that influenced his creative process. Duneer’s critical methodology employs techniques of literary and cultural analysis, drawing on extensive archival research from a wealth of previously unpublished biographical materials and other sources. Duneer explores London’s immersion in the lore and literature of the sea, revealing the extent to which his writing is informed by travel narratives, sensational sea yarns, and the history of exploration, as well as firsthand experiences as a sailor in the San Francisco Bay and Pacific Ocean.
Organized thematically, chapters address topics that interested London: labor abuses on “Hell-ships” and copra plantations, predatory and survival cannibalism, strong seafaring women, and environmental issues and property rights from San Francisco oyster beds to pearl diving in the Paumotos. Through its examination of the intersections of race, class, and gender in London’s writing, Jack London and the Sea plumbs the often-troubled waters of his representations of the racial Other and positions of capitalist and colonial privilege. We can see the manifestation of these socioeconomic hierarchies in London’s depiction of imperialist exploitation of labor and the environment, inequities that continue to reverberate in our current age of global capitalism.
Land and Sea was first published in 1978. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Although Philip Freneau is best known as the poet of the American Revolution, half his poems had nothing to do with the war, Professor Vitzthum points out, and this, the first systematic, in-depth study of Freneau's lyric poetry, provides a fresh perspective on the poet's non-political work. Demonstrating that there is a heretofore unrecognized pattern of land-sea imagery and symbolism in Freneau's best work. Professor Vitzthum traces changes reflected in this imagery to developments in the poet's thought, which in turn related to major intellectual and literary trends in revolutionary and early republican America. An introductory chapter assesses twentieth century biographical and critical estimates of Freneau, outlines the key themes in his work, and links his thirty-year career as sailor and ship captain to his creation of a covert, symbolistic poetic method. The following five chapters chronologically discuss Freneau's non-political poems from 1772 through 1815. Professor Vitzthum concludes that Freneau was not the derivative and unsuccessful artist he is currently thought to have been but, rather, one of America's genuinely important poets.
Drawing equally from Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, John Berryman, and Robert Frost, Samuel Amadon’s award-winning Like a Sea is a collection of poems where personality is foregrounded and speech is both bizarre and familiar. Central to this weirdly talky work is “Each H,” a sequence of eleven monologues and dialogues wherein an unknown number of speakers examine their collective and singular identities while simultaneously distorting them. From a sequence of pared-down sonnets to a more traditional lyric to a procedural collage inspired by J. D. Salinger, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Walter Benjamin, Jane Kenyon, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Primo Levi, Eugenio Montale, and Edwin Arlington Robinson, Like a Sea is a book of significant variation and originality.
Amadon’s electric collection begins with the line “I could not sound like anyone but me,” and through a wide range of forms and styles and voices he tests the true limits of that statement. The image of a half-abandoned Hartford, Connecticut, remains in the background of these poems, casting a tone of brokenness and haplessness. Ultimately Amadon’s poems present the confusion and fear of the current moment, of Stevens’s “river that flows nowhere, like a sea,” equally alongside its joyful ridiculousness and possibility. Rather than create worlds, they point out what a strange world already exists.
Our attempts to understand the world are always more than simply rational. Our bodies learn through lived experience, our natural environments challenge what we think we know, and we take lessons from our nonhuman kin. Even scientists, often considered paragons of rationality, frequently describe their findings in the language of beauty. For rhetorician Megan Poole, beauty is integral to how scientific research works.
Drawing on interviews with leading biologists, Poole explores what happens when scientists set aside objectivity and listen for beauty around them. The wonder we feel at the plumage of birds, the melodies of whales, or the caretaking of elephants may not help us (on its own) to isolate a given fact, but such encounters may teach us to open ourselves to a different way of knowing entirely. Through stories about researchers’ encounters with wonder, Listening to Beauty reveals how scientific discovery happens sometimes unsystematically, sometimes incoherently, often beautifully.
Living by the Rules of the Sea is a primer for people living along the nation's coastlines, those considering moving to the coast, or those who want a greater understanding of the risks and dangers posed by living at the seacoast. Published as part of Duke University Press's Living with the Shore series, but without a direct focus on the coastline of one particular state, this book is intended as an overall guide to coastal physical processes, risk assessment of potential property damage from coastal natural hazards, and property damage mitigation.
Over the past twenty years, the authors have mapped and studied most of the barrier islands in the United States and have experienced coastal processes such as storms and shoreline retreat at close range. They represent a coastal geology/oceanographic perspective that is decidedly in favor of preserving the natural protective capabilities of the native coastal environment. While strongly anti-engineering in outlook, Living by the Rules of the Sea does provide a review of coastal engineering techniques. It also examines methods of repairing damage to the natural environment that lessen the prospect of further property damage. Finally, it employs a more inclusive "coastal zone" approach rather than simply concentrating on a more narrowly defined shoreline. Barrier islands are viewed as part of a larger system in which changes in one part of the system—for example, the mining of sand dunes or dredging offshore for beach replenishment sand—can have profound effects on another part of the system, predictable effects even though they may not be visible for years or decades.
A comprehensive handbook with references to recent storms including hurricanes Andrew, Gilbert, Hugo, Emily, and Opal, Living by the Rules of the Sea is designed to help people make better and more informed choices about where or if to live at the coast.
Whether humans crossed the seas between the Old World and the New in the times before Columbus is a tantalizing question that has long excited scholarly interest and tempted imaginations the world over. From the myths of Atlantis and Mu to the more credible, perhaps, but hardly less romantic tales of Viking ships and Buddhist missionaries, people have speculated upon what is, after all, not simply a question of contact, but of the nature and growth of civilization itself.
To the specialist, it is an important question indeed. If people in the Western Hemisphere and in the Eastern Hemisphere developed their cultures more or less independently from the end of the last Ice Age until the voyages of Columbus, the remarkable similarities between New World and Old World cultures reveal something important about the evolution of culture. If, on the other hand, there were widespread or sustained contacts between the hemispheres in pre-Columbian times, these contacts represent events of vast significance to the prehistory and history of humanity.
Originally delivered at a symposium held in May 1968, during the national meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, the papers presented here, by scholars eminent in the field, offer differing points of view and considerable evidence on the pros and cons of pre-Columbian contact between the Old World and the New. Various kinds of data—archaeological, botanical, geographical, and historical—are brought to bear on the problem, with provocative and original results. Introductory and concluding remarks by the editors pull together and evaluate the evidence and suggest ground rules for future studies of this sort.
Man across the Sea provides no final answers as to whether people from Asia, Africa, or Europe visited the American Indian before Columbus. It does, however, present new evidence, suggested lines of approach, and a fresh attempt to delineate the problems involved and to establish acceptable canons of evidence for the future.
New details about the founding of China’s Navy reveals critical historical context and insight into future strategy
From 1949 to 1950, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) made crucial decisions to establish a navy and secure China’s periphery. The civil war had been fought with a peasant army, yet in order to capture key offshore islands from the Nationalist rival, Mao Zedong needed to develop maritime capabilities. Mao’s Army Goes to Sea is a ground-breaking history of the founding of the Chinese navy and Communist China’s earliest island-seizing campaigns.
In this definitive account of a little-known yet critical moment in China’s naval history, Toshi Yoshihara shows that Chinese leaders refashioned the stratagems and tactics honed over decades of revolutionary struggle on land for nautical purposes. Despite significant challenges, the PLA ultimately scored important victories over its Nationalist foes as it captured offshore islands to secure its position.
Drawing extensively from newly available Chinese-language sources, this book reveals how the navy-building process, sea battles, and contested offshore landings had a lasting influence on the PLA. Even today, the institution’s identity, strategy, doctrine, and structure are conditioned by these early experiences and myths. Mao’s Army Goes to Sea will help US policymakers and scholars place China’s recent maritime achievements in proper historical context—and provide insight into how its navy may act in the future.
In 1956 in a cafe in León, a group of literati gather, dedicated, among other things, to the rigorous reconstruction of the legend surrounding Darío—but also to conspire. There will be an attempt against dictator Somoza's life, and that little girl with the fan a half-century before will not be a disinterested party.
In Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea, Sergio Ramírez encompasses, in a complete metaphor of reality and legend, the entire history of his country. The narrative moves along paths fifty years apart, which inevitably converge. The story becomes a fascinating exercise on the power of memory, on the influence of the past, fictitious or not, in the finality of reality.
Staring in the 1980s, Chiloé was thrust into the global economy when major companies moved into the region to extract wild stocks of fish and to grow salmon and shellfish for export. The archipelago’s economy shifted abruptly from one of subsistence farming and fishing to wage labor in export industries. Local knowledge, traditions, memories, and identities similarly shifted, with young islanders expressing a more critical view of the rural past than their elders.
This book highlights the region’s unique past, emphasizing the generational tensions, disconnects, and continuities of the last half century. Drawing on interviews, field observations, and historical documents, Anton Daughters brings to life one of South America’s most culturally distinct regions.
No Communication with the Sea is a journey through this urbanizing Great Basin landscape. Here, the land fosters illusions of limitless space and resources, but its space and resources are severely limited; its people live clustered in cities but are often reluctant to embrace urbanity. These tensions led journalist and urban planner Tim Sullivan to explore the developing centers and edges of the Great Basin cities and the ways some are trying to build livable and sustainable urban environments.
In this highly readable book of creative nonfiction, Sullivan employs a variety of methods—including interviews, research, travelogues, and narrative—to survey the harsh landscape for clues to the ways cities can adapt to their geography, topography, ecology, hydrography, history, and culture. No Communication with the Sea embarks on a quest for a livable future for the heart of the interior West. In the process, it both unearths the past and ponders the present and future Great Basin cities.
Atlantic coral is rapidly disappearing in the wild. To save the species, they will have to be reproduced quickly in captivity, and so for the last decade conservationists have been at work trying to preserve their lingering numbers and figure out how to rebuild once-thriving coral reefs from a few survivors. Captive environments, built in dedicated aquariums, offer some hope for these corals. This book examines these specialized tanks, charting the development of tank craft throughout the twentieth century to better understand how aquarium modeling has enhanced our knowledge of the marine environment.
Aquariums are essential to the way we understand the ocean. Used to investigate an array of scientific questions, from animal behavior to cancer research and climate change, they are a crucial factor in the fight to mitigate the climate disaster already threatening our seas. To understand the historical development of this scientific tool and the groups that have contributed to our knowledge about the ocean, Samantha Muka takes up specialty systems—including photographic aquariums, kriesel tanks (for jellyfish), and hatching systems—to examine the creation of ocean simulations and their effect on our interactions with underwater life. Lively and engaging, Oceans under Glass offers a fresh history about how the aquarium has been used in modern marine biology and how integral it is to knowing the marine world.
This collection of prose vignettes and free verse draws upon her experiences as a child in Chile, an expatriate abroad, and a minority Jew—even in the land she calls home—to create a striking portrait of a life of exile. The tone of the book varies as it lyrically explores the geography of Chile and weaves into it the themes of exile and oppression. At times the words become hymns to the physical beauty of her country, evoking the grandeur of this land extending to the southernmost tip of the world. At times they are intimate and melancholy, exploring personal and familial history through miniature portraits that reveal the pain of being different. Finally the tone becomes angry as she denounces the injustices committed against her friends and against the families of the disappeared during the seventeen-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Combining themes of memory, childhood, minority issues, Judaism, and political oppression, this collection contains some of Agosín’s strongest work. Of Earth and Sea is a poetic autobiography that explores the world of Chile with eyes that see both despair and hope.
During the vast stretches of early geologic time, the islands of the Caribbean archipelago separated from continental land masses, rose and sank many times, merged with and broke from other land masses, and then by the mid-Cenozoic period settled into the current pattern known today. By the time Native Americans arrived, the islands had developed complex, stable ecosystems. The actions these first colonists took on the landscape—timber clearing, cultivation, animal hunting and domestication, fishing and exploitation of reef species—affected fragile land and sea biotic communities in both beneficial and harmful ways.
On Land and Sea examines the condition of biosystems on Caribbean islands at the time of colonization, human interactions with those systems through time, and the current state of biological resources in the West Indies. Drawing on a massive data set collected from long-term archaeological research, the study reconstructs past lifeways on these small tropical islands. The work presents a wide range of information, including types of fuel and construction timber used by inhabitants, cooking techniques for various shellfish, availability and use of medicinal and ritual plants, the effects on native plants and animals of cultivation and domestication, and diet and nutrition of native populations.
The islands of the Caribbean basin continue to be actively excavated and studied in the quest to understand the earliest human inhabitants of the New World. This comprehensive work will ground current and future studies and will be valuable to archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, ecologists, Caribbeanists, Latin American historians, and anyone studying similar island environments.
In Outlaws of the Sea, Robert J. Antony provides a comprehensive account of the history of maritime piracy in coastal south China from the 1630s to the 1940s. He neither romanticizes nor maligns pirates, but rather analyzes them in the context of their times and the broader world in which they lived. The author demonstrates that Chinese piracy was a pervasive force shaping maritime society as it ebbed and flowed between sporadic, small-scale ventures and professional, large-scale enterprises in the modern era. This book offers important new insights into the underside of modern China’s history and the interactions between pirates, foreign traders, local communities, and the state.
Contributors highlight how Indigenous Plains groups participated in large-scale social networks in which ideas, symbols, artifacts, and people moved across North America over the last 2,000 years. They also discuss cultural transformation, focusing on key demographic, economic, social, and ceremonial factors associated with change, including colonization and integration into the social and political economies of transatlantic societies. Cultural traditions covered include Woodland-era Kansas City Hopewell, late prehistoric Central Plains tradition, and ancestral and early historic Wichita, Pawnee and Arikara, Kanza, Plains Apache, and Puebloan migrants. As the first review of Plains archaeology in more than a decade, this book brings studies of early Indigenous
peoples of the central and southern Plains into a new era.
"To read and gaze through this elegantly illustrated book is to be exposed, as if through a work of science fiction, to an astonishing and unknown cultural world."—North Dakota Quarterly
After his father-in-law passed away, Stephen Murphy found, among the voluminous papers left behind, an ancestral memoir. Murphy quickly became fascinated with the recollections of George W. Quimby (1842–1926), a Union soldier and scout for General William Tecumseh Sherman.
Before Quimby became a part of Sherman’s March, he was held captive by Nathan Bedford Forrest’s troops in western Tennessee. He joined Sherman’s Army in Vicksburg, destroying railroads and bridges across Mississippi and Alabama on the way to Georgia. As the notorious march began, Quimby became a scout and no longer experienced war as his fellow soldiers did. Scouts moved ahead of the troops to anticipate opportunities and dangers. The rank and file were instructed to be seen and feared, while scouts were required to be invisible and stealthy. This memoir offers the rare perspective of a Union soldier who ventured into Confederate territory and sent intelligence to Sherman.
Written around 1901 in the wake of the Spanish American War, Quimby’s memoir shows no desire to settle old scores. He’s a natural storyteller, keeping his audience’s attention with tales of drunken frolics and narrow escapes, providing a memoir that reads more like an adventure novel. He gives a new twist to the familiar stories of Sherman’s March, reminding readers that while the Union soldiers faced few full-scale battles, the campaign was still quite dangerous.
More than a chronicle of day-to-day battles and marches, The Perfect Scout is more episodic and includes such additional elements as the story of how he met his wife and close encounters with the enemy. Offering a full picture of the war, Quimby writes not only about his adventures as one of Sherman’s scouts, but also about the suffering of the civilians caught in the war. He provides personal insight into some of the war’s historic events and paints a vivid picture of the devastation wreaked upon the South that includes destroyed crops and homes and a shattered economy. He also tells of the many acts of kindness he received from Southerners, including women and African Americans, who helped him and his fellow scouts by providing food, shelter, or information.
These include philosophical texts drawn from a constellation of historical topoi at the critical moments of their encounter with the maritime: Plato and Euripedes’s work from fifth-century Athens; Augustus and Plautus’s writings from republican and early imperial Rome; Shakespeare’s creations from Elizabethan England; Kant and Rousseau’s texts from enlightenment continental Europe; and the thinking of Husserl and Heidegger from interwar Germany of the twentieth century. For each historical topos, Yi juxtaposes different representations of and responses to the maritime through the reading of a philosophical text vis-à-vis the reading of a literary text. In so doing, she lays bare the deep political and moral ambiguity attributed to the ocean in Western philosophical and literary imaginaries.
Jürgen Becker’s The Sea in the Radio is a collection of “journal sentences” divided into three sections called notebooks. In this great concert of a novel, language has been pared down to a minimum: fragments, phrases, and short sentences combine and make up a life both banal and profound. It is a life in which many of the details remain unstated or, as in miniatures, float just beyond the edges of the frame. Though at first the narrative may seem to move in a relatively harmless manner, soon enough we begin to realize that the story to be told may indeed be more unsettling than we had suspected.
The Sea in the Radio is a novel that bears witness not only to one’s final years but also to one’s place within history in general and Germany’s cataclysmic twentieth-century past in particular.
In a masterful blending of lyric and narrative, Sea of Faith ranges widely across interior states and external worlds. From the Sierra Nevadas to New York City subways, from an imagined friendship with Lao Tzu to a rueful meditation on Coney Island, from a comic and poignant classroom discussion of "Dover Beach" to a sexual fantasy spawned by a tedious poetry reading, John Brehm’s poems explore the human predicament with tenderness, compassion, and unforgettable humor.
Readings by South Pacific islanders
This book offers readings of the Bible by native biblical critics from the South Pacific (Pasifika). An essay from editor Jione Havea introduces the volume by locating these essays within islander criticism and by explaining the flow of the book. Essays are presented in three sections. “Island Twists” offers readings that twist, like a whirlpool, biblical texts around insights of Pasifika novelists, composers, poets, and sages. “Island Turns” contains contextual readings that turn biblical texts toward Pasifika. “Across the Sea” contains responses by biblical critics from across the sea.
Features
- Contributions to islander criticism
- A showcase of texts by native writers, poets, and composers
- Crosscultural and postcolonial readings
A contributing photographer to National Geographic, Peschak is best known for his unusual photographs of sharks—his iconic image of a great white shark following a researcher in a small yellow kayak is one of the most recognizable shark photographs in the world. The other images gathered here are no less riveting, bringing us as close as possible to sharks in the wild. Alongside the photographs, Sharks and People tells the compelling story of the natural history of sharks. Sharks have roamed the oceans for more than four hundred million years, and in this time they have never stopped adapting to the ever-changing world—their unique cartilage skeletons and array of super-senses mark them as one of the most evolved groups of animals. Scientists have recently discovered that sharks play an important role in balancing the ocean, including maintaining the health of coral reefs. Yet, tens of millions of sharks are killed every year just to fill the demand for shark fin soup alone. Today more than sixty species of sharks, including hammerhead, mako, and oceanic white-tip sharks, are listed as vulnerable or in danger of extinction.
The need to understand the significant part sharks play in the oceanic ecosystem has never been so urgent, and Peschak’s photographs bear witness to the thrilling strength and unique attraction of sharks. They are certain to enthrall and inspire.
Patricia Clark's poems explore not only refuge but also wonder and appreciation, as well as astonishment.
A number of the 56 poems collected here show her grappling with loss, especially the loss of her mother, though she isn't one to indulge in misery. Instead, she goes walking. It is the harp tree in "The Poplar Adrift" that Clark imagines giving voice to sorrow, thus sparing those who stroll by—"all the grief that passes" becoming, in the tree’s very fibers, sound on the air, a wind through branches and leaves.
Clark also finds opportunities for learning, for meditation, and for contemplation. Octavio Paz has written, "Nature speaks as though it were a lover." In many of the poems collected here, Clark listens to nature speaking and revels in this lover, aiming to capture some of the qualities of Michigan's trees, birds, and landscapes in lyric poems.
It is Clark's particular gift to give us "tasted" as she draws her readers into the world, inhabiting the worlds of nature, head, and heart.
The Silent Deep tells the story of the exploration and discovery of the deep sea, the ecology of its diverse environments, and the impact of humans, highlighting the importance of global stewardship in keeping this delicate ecosystem alive and well. Written by world renowned deep-sea ecologist Tony Koslow, this book is a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the state of the deep sea today, accessible to anyone interested in ocean science, the story of scientific discovery, and conservation of the earth’s most threatened ecosystems.
“Koslow deals a decisive blow to the notion that the deep sea can ever be immune from unregulated human activities. . . . The historical review of deep-sea biology is the most comprehensive I have ever read.”—Adrian Glover, Times Literary Supplement
“Deeply informed by history and rendered in straightforward, careful prose.”—Anthony Doerr, Boston Globe
“This beautifully produced book tells an urgent story with clarity and grace.”—Choice
“Stands apart from other books about life in the abyss due to Tony Koslow’s thoughtful accounts. . . . [He] succeeds in painting a picture of the deep sea as an environment with inherent and threatened value.”—Science
“Textbook depth on all aspects of deep-sea science and conservation. . . . [An] exhaustively researched and referenced volume with a historical review stretching back to Socrates.”—Mark Schrope, Nature
“An important textbook and viewpoint that is highly recommended for anyone with a professional or personal interest in deep-sea ecosystems.”—Quarterly Review of Biology
Compelling stories of shipwreck, adventure, and death on the high seas, now back in print.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a time of great colonial expansion, marked by a mercantile frenzy of ships carrying merchants, aristocrats, missionaries, sailors, Inquisitors, botanists, and statesmen pursuing the spoils of empire. Among the narratives that chronicled these voyages, those of the Portuguese are unequaled. C. R. Boxer’s fascinating translations of famous Portuguese shipwreck stories detail the disasters and terrors plaguing the perilous sea trading route between Portugal and India.
In the tradition of Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Defoe, and Poe, these dramatic stories of shipwreck—and those who lived to tell about it—represent existence and survival pushed to the limits. They describe disastrous turns of fate and miraculous rescues, heroism and cowardice, and offer the exhilaration and sheer emotive appeal of a tale of adventure well told. Often circulated in pamphlet form, these stories recounting the dangers and terrors of storm-tossed ocean voyages and the fate of castaways in distant lands were a popular genre, rife with compelling and often gory details. This first ever paperback edition includes a new translation of the tragic tale of Captain Manuel de Sousa Sepúlveda, shipwrecked with his family on the sands of Africa in 1552, the previous English versions of which have long been unavailable. Vividly descriptive and engrossing, these tales of selfishness, cruelty, despair, pirates, mayhem, and harrowing storms will captivate readers.
With a mix of research methodologies applied by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, Turbulence Across the Sea offers a comprehensive analysis of relations among European and North American actors in the context of strategic competition among the United States, Europe, Russia, and China. In doing so, it demonstrates that a reaffirmation of transatlantic cooperation is necessary to maintain security in the face of aggressive moves by both Russia and China. By analyzing attitudes from the perspective of both the various actors (Britain, France, Germany, and the European Union) and various sectors (intelligence cooperation, foreign direct investments, technology, and the defense industry), this book provides readers with a comprehensive perspective on the challenges and opportunities in the shifting landscape of security in the twenty-first century.
The United States and the Treaty Law of the Sea was first published in 1959. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The entire period of the Republic is covered in this account of United States participation in treaties which seek to regulate peacetime use of the sea, its resources, and the air space over it. Noting a revival of maritime interest in America, Professor Reiff describes current uses and abuses of the sea with respect to transportation, communications, exploitation of products and energy, waste disposal, and recreation. He relates developments in economies, technology, social science, and the natural sciences to the expanding web of treaty law, and reports some of the discussion and actions which took place at the United Nations Conference on Sea Law in the spring of 1958.
In this book, Kevin M. Bailey resurrects this forgotten witness to the changing tides of Pacific fisheries. He draws on the Steinbeck archives, interviews with family members of crew, and more than three decades of working in Pacific Northwest fisheries to trace the depletion of marine life through the voyages of a single ship. After Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts—a pioneer in the study of the West Coast’s diverse sea life and the inspiration behind “Doc” in Cannery Row—chartered the boat for their now-famous 1940 expedition, the Western Flyer returned to its life as a sardine seiner in California. But when the sardine fishery in Monterey collapsed, the boat moved on: fishing for Pacific ocean perch off Washington, king crab in the Bering Sea off Alaska, and finally wild Pacific salmon—all industries that would also face collapse.
As the Western Flyer herself faces an uncertain future—a businessman has bought her, intending to bring the boat to Salinas, California, and turn it into a restaurant feature just blocks from Steinbeck’s grave—debates about the status of the California sardine, and of West Coast fisheries generally, have resurfaced. A compelling and timely tale of a boat and the people it carried, of fisheries exploited, and of fortunes won and lost, The Western Flyer is environmental history at its best: a journey through time and across the sea, charting the ebb and flow of the cobalt waters of the Pacific coast.
Where fresh water appears to be abundant and generally accessible, chronic pollution may be relatively ignored as a public issue. Yet there are those whose lives, livelihoods, and traditions are touched directly by the destructive albeit essential relationship between humans and water.
In her passionate and persuasively argued Where Rivers Meet the Sea, Stephanie Kane compares two cities and nations—Salvador, Brazil and Buenos Aires, Argentina—as she tells the stories of those who organize in the streets, petition the courts, and challenge their governments to implement and enforce existing laws designed to protect springs, lakes, harbors, and rivers.
Illuminating the complex and distinctive cultural forces in the South Atlantic that shape conflicts and collaborations pertaining to particular waterfront settings, Kane shows the dilemmas, inventiveness, and persistence that provide the foundation for environmental and social justice movements writ large.
A favorite destination of visitors to the Texas coast, Corpus Christi is a midsize city that manages to be both cosmopolitan and provincial, networked and local. It is an indispensable provider of urban services to South Texas, as well as a port of international significance. Its industries and military bases and, increasingly, its coastal research institutes give it a range of connections throughout North America. Despite these advantages, however, Corpus Christi has never made it into the first rank of Texas cities, and a keen self-consciousness about the city’s subordinate position has driven debates over Corpus’s identity and prospects for decades.
In this masterful urban history—a study that will reshape the way that Texans look at all their cities—Alan Lessoff analyzes Corpus Christi’s place within Texas, the American Southwest, the western Gulf of Mexico, and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands from the city’s founding in 1839 to the present. He portrays Corpus as a place where westward Anglo expansion overwhelmed the Hispanic settlement process from the south, leaving a legacy of conflicting historical narratives that colors the city’s character even now. Lessoff also explores how competing visions of the city’s identity and possibilities have played out in arenas ranging from artwork in public places to schemes to embellish, redevelop, or preserve the downtown waterfront and North Padre Island. With a deep understanding of the geographic, historical, economic, and political factors that have formed the city, Lessoff demonstrates that Corpus Christi exemplifies the tensions between regional and cosmopolitan influences that have shaped cities across the Southwest.
From the Stazione Zoologica in Naples to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, the Amoy Station in China, or the Misaki Station in Japan, students and researchers at seaside research stations have long visited the ocean to investigate life at all stages of development and to convene discussions of biological discoveries. Exploring the history and current reasons for study by the sea, this book examines key people, institutions, research projects, organisms selected for study, and competing theories and interpretations of discoveries, and it considers different ways of understanding research, such as through research repertoires. A celebration of coastal marine research, Why Study Biology by the Sea? reveals why scientists have moved from the beach to the lab bench and back.
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