61 books match the query 'Expeditions & Discoveries' and 2 start with a

cover of A Governor and His Image in Baroque Brazil: The Funereal Eulogy of Afonso Furtado de Castro do Rio de Mendonca

A Governor and His Image in Baroque Brazil

The Funereal Eulogy of Afonso Furtado de Castro do Rio de Mendonca

Juan Sierra

University of Minnesota Press, 1979

A Governor and His Image in Baroque Brazil was first published in 1979. 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.This seventeenth-century manuscript describes the life and death of Afonso Furtado, governor of Brazil from 1671 to 1675. The obscure author, Juan Lopes Sierra, was an eyewitness to many of the governor’s activities and was clearly a great admirer of Furtado, whom he calls in his text “Our Hero.” The manuscript is a useful cultural and historical document focusing on the governor’s administration and, especially, on his direction of military campaigns into the heart of Brazil to subdue hostile Indians and search for mineral wealth. The author’s descriptions of religious life in the capital city of Salvador and of the elaborate funeral arrangements for the governor reveal the attitudes and aspirations of the Brazilian colonial elite. Most important, perhaps, the document covers on of the least studied periods in Brazilian history, the years between the great century of sugar and the half-century of gold. Lopes Sierra wrote in Spanish, though his subject was Portuguese Brazil, and his manuscript is peppered with Portuguese/Spanish coinages and classical allusions. Ruth Jones has mastered the difficult task of translation and Stuart Schwartz provides a historical context and notes to the translation. The book is a publication from the James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota.
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cover of Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas

Ancient Ocean Crossings

Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas

Stephen C. Jett

University of Alabama Press, 2017

Paints a compelling picture of impressive pre-Columbian cultures and Old World civilizations that, contrary to many prevailing notions, were not isolated from one another
 
In Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas, Stephen Jett encourages readers to reevaluate the common belief that there was no significant interchange between the chiefdoms and civilizations of Eurasia and Africa and peoples who occupied the alleged terra incognita beyond the great oceans.
 
More than a hundred centuries separate the time that Ice Age hunters are conventionally thought to have crossed a land bridge from Asia into North America and the arrival of Columbus in the Bahamas in 1492. Traditional belief has long held that earth’s two hemispheres were essentially cut off from one another as a result of the post-Pleistocene meltwater-fed rising oceans that covered that bridge. The oceans, along with arctic climates and daunting terrestrial distances, formed impermeable barriers to interhemispheric communication. This viewpoint implies that the cultures of the Old World and those of the Americas developed independently.
 
Drawing on abundant and concrete evidence to support his theory for significant pre-Columbian contacts, Jett suggests that many ancient peoples had both the seafaring capabilities and the motives to cross the oceans and, in fact, did so repeatedly and with great impact. His deep and broad work synthesizes information and ideas from archaeology, geography, linguistics, climatology, oceanography, ethnobotany, genetics, medicine, and the history of navigation and seafaring, making an innovative and persuasive multidisciplinary case for a new understanding of human societies and their diffuse but interconnected development.
 
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