Results by title

Part memoir, part reportage, and all good reading, Take Down Flag & Feed Horses is the first volume devoted to the daily work of staff members at Yellowstone National Park. Written by a retired National Park Service historian, the book is divided into two parts, the first chronicling daily life at Yellowstone and the second detailing the savage fires that hit the park during the summer of 1988 and their aftermath. Bill Everhart lived at the park during the summer of 1978, accompanying the superintendent and his staff of rangers, naturalists, and scientists on daily rounds. His lively anecdotes and observations will lure readers farther and farther into the book and perhaps into the park as well. He gives a gripping account of the unstoppable fires of 1988 and shows how fire, a presence in the Yellowstone ecosystem for thousands of years,
ensures biological diversity.
    
 One of an elite cadre of Park Service employees who served in the system for many years, Everhart would smile knowingly at a comrade's recollection of an old-timer who left often unnecessary instructions that regularly concluded with, "Take down flag & feed horses (TDF &; FH)." His book, a gentle excursion through places and among people, will be attractive to a wide range of readers.
 

Part travelogue, part memoir, and part cookbook, this addition to the Haus Armchair Traveller series offers a dynamic journey through Spain, one where the focus is on culinary delights found everywhere from Madrid’s cafes to Barcelona’s fish markets.

H. M. van den Brink paints an evocative scene of everyday life in Spain. Readers see the urban shop windows displaying famous serrano ham and Spanish sweet cakes, taste crispy pigs’ ears along with rich chickpea soup, and smell the strong coffee and steaming tortillas often enjoyed while breakfasting outdoors. An appealing blend of historical background and personal recollections, Tasting Spain shapes a lively account of the country and its culture, both in the city and out in the countryside. From exquisite restaurants to private settings, this is a book about eating—meals that Van den Brink has enjoyed solo or with friends—and about the vivid and sustaining memories such meals can create.

“I am not a cook, nor a historian, nor a critic,” writes Van den Brink. “I am just an eater.” With Tasting Spain, he opens new vistas on Spanish cuisine that will tickle the taste buds of readers and leave them hungry for more of this beautiful land.

Ted Lambert is regarded as one of the premier Alaska artists, a true pioneer. Born in 1905, and raised in the Chicago area, Lambert moved to Alaska in 1925 and went to work as a miner near McCarthy. He held several jobs, predominantly working at a copper mine and mushing dogs—first for adventure, and then as a mail carrier.

Lambert left Alaska in 1931 to study art for a year at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, then moved to Seattle, where he began a mentorship under Eustace Ziegler, with whom he traveled throughout Alaska and painted. Eventually Lambert settled down in Fairbanks, where he stayed for twenty years and solidified his reputation as a painter and an artist.

But in 1960 he disappeared from the remote cabin he was living in at Bristol Bay. No trace of his body was ever found, but among the effects rescued from his last home was a memoir of his early days in Alaska. Presented here and never before published, these memoirs reveal Lambert to be a keen and intelligent observer and relay the adventure story of a young man who would become one of Alaska’s most important artists.

Publication supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

Texas was already slipping from the grasp of Mexico when Manuel Mier y Terán made his tour of inspection in 1828. American settlers were pouring across the vaguely defined border between Mexico’s northernmost province and the United States, along with a host of Indian nations driven off their lands by American expansionism. Terán’s mission was to assess the political situation in Texas while establishing its boundary with the United States. Highly qualified for these tasks as a soldier, scientist, and intellectual, he wrote perhaps the most perceptive account of Texas’s people, politics, natural resources, and future prospects during the critical decade of the 1820s. This book contains the full text of Terán’s diary—which has never before been published—edited and annotated by Jack Jackson and translated into English by John Wheat. The introduction and epilogue place the diary in historical context, revealing the significant role that Terán played in setting Mexican policy for Texas between 1828 and 1832.

Wallace's Malay Archipelago is a classic account of the travels of a Victorian naturalist through island Southeast Asia. It has been loved by readers ever since its publication in 1869. Despite numerous modern reprints with appreciative introductions, this is the first - and long overdue - annotated edition in English.


This edition explains, updates and corrects the original text with an historical introduction and hundreds of explanatory notes. Wallace left hundreds of people, places, publications and species unidentified. He referred to most species only with the scientific name current at the time. Whenever available, the common names for species have been provided, and scientific names updated. The content of the book has never been thoroughly analysed and compared against other contemporary sources. It turns out that the book contains many errors. This includes not just incorrect dates and place names but some of the most remarkable anecdotes; for example, the dramatic claim that tigers "kill on an average a Chinaman every day" in Singapore or that a Dutch Governor General committed suicide by leaping from a waterfall on Celebes.


By correcting the text of the Malay Archipelago against Wallace's letters and notebooks and other contemporary sources and by enriching it with modern identifications this edition reveals Wallace's work as never before.

In the late 1890s, John Synge, in his middle twenties and unsure of his vocation, made his way to Paris to study French literature and become a literary critic. There he met William Butler Yeats. The eminent poet advised Synge to drop his involvement with fin de siècle French authors, return to Ireland, and describe a society with which he had a natural connection.

Synge first traveled to the primitive, little-known Aran Islands in 1898. His trip proved to be a wonderfully fruitful and decisive experience. He then went back for part of each summer until 1902. The Aran Islands, his memoir of those experiences, was published in 1907, and the future playwright called it his "first serious piece of work."

Mexico is more than a country; it is a concept that is the product of a complex network of discourses as disparate as the rhetoric of Chicano nationalism, English-language literature about Mexico, and Mexican tourist propaganda. The idea of "Mexicanness," says Daniel Cooper Alarcón, "has arisen through a process of erasure and superimposition as these discourses have produced contentious and sometimes contradictory descriptions of their subject." By considering Mexicanness as a palimpsest of these competing yet interwoven narratives, Cooper offers a paradigm through which the construction and representation of cultural identity can be studied.

He shows how the Chicano myth of Aztlan was constructed upon earlier Mesoamerican myths, discusses representations of Mexico in texts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, and analyzes the content of tourist literature, thereby revealing the economic, social, and political interests that drive the production of Mexicanness today. This original linking of seemingly incongruous discourses corrects the misconception that Mexicanness is produced only by hegemonic groups. Cooper shows how Mexico has been defined and represented, by both Mexicans and non-Mexicans, as more than a political or geographic entity, and he particularly reveals how Mexicanness has been exploited by Mexicans themselves through the promotion of tourism as a form of neocolonialism.

Cooper's work is valuable both for identifying attempts to revise and control Mexican myth, history, and culture and for defining the intricate relationship between history, historiography, and cultural nationalism. The Aztec Palimpsest extends existing analyses of Mexicanness into new theoretical realms and provides a fresh perspective on the relationship between the United States and Mexico at a time when these two nations are becoming more intimately linked.

The Bark River valley in southeastern Wisconsin is a microcosm of the state's - indeed, of the Great Lakes region's - natural and human history. "The Bark River Chronicles" reports one couple's journey by canoe from the river's headwaters to its confluence with the Rock River and several miles farther downstream to Lake Koshkonong. Along the way, it tells the stories of Ice Age glaciation, the effigy mound builders, the Black Hawk War, early settlement and the development of waterpower sites, and recent efforts to remove old dams and mitigate the damage done by water pollution and invasive species.
Along with these big stories, the book recounts dozens of little stories associated with sites along the river. The winter ice harvest, grain milling technology, a key supreme court decision regarding toxic waste disposal, a small-town circus, a scheme to link the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River by canal, the murder of a Chicago mobster, controversies over race and social class in Waukesha County's lake country, community efforts to clean up the river and restore a marsh, visits to places associated with the work of important Wisconsin writers - these and many other stories belong to the Bark River chronicles.

For the two voyageurs who paddle the length of the Bark, it is a journey of rediscovery and exploration. As they glide through marshes, woods, farmland, and cities, they acquire not only historical and environmental knowledge but also a renewed sense of the place in which they live. Maps and historical photographs help the reader share their experience.

This wilderness travelogue about the exploration of Canaan Valley, West Virginia was originally published in 1853. With appeal far beyond its time and region, first editions of this chronicle reached New York, London, and even Germany. This often humorous and always fascinating story reveals Kennedy's journey into an unexplored territory.

The Blind African Slave recounts the life of Jeffrey Brace (né Boyrereau Brinch), who was born in West Africa around 1742. Captured by slave traders at the age of sixteen, Brace was transported to Barbados, where he experienced the shock and trauma of slave-breaking and was sold to a New England ship captain. After fighting as an enslaved sailor for two years in the Seven Years War, Brace was taken to New Haven, Connecticut, and sold into slavery. After several years in New England, Brace enlisted in the Continental Army in hopes of winning his manumission. After five years of military service, he was honorably discharged and was freed from slavery. As a free man, he chose in 1784 to move to Vermont, the first state to make slavery illegal. There, he met and married an African woman, bought a farm, and raised a family. Although literate, he was blind when he decided to publish his life story, which he narrated to a white antislavery lawyer, Benjamin Prentiss, who published it in 1810. Upon his death in 1827, Brace was a well-respected abolitionist. In this first new edition since 1810, Kari J. Winter provides a historical introduction, annotations, and original documents that verify and supplement our knowledge of Brace's life and times.

The Buffalo River in northwest Arkansas is one of the longest free-flowing, undammed rivers west of the Mississippi—and one of the most beautiful waterways on earth. Almost lost to development, it proved to be the perfect testing ground for a young boy almost lost to mediocrity.

Middle-schooler Ben is struggling with learning challenges that have left him resentful and underachieving. His father, middle-ager Todd, wants to help his son gain self-confidence but is searching for his own identity. For twelve adventure-filled days on the river—all 125 miles of her navigable course, from Ponca to the White River—father and son discover the formative, curative, and redemptive powers of nature.

Leaving video games and cell phones behind isn’t easy for kids these days, but in the great outdoors parents and youngsters can connect in unimaginable ways. The Buffalo, Ben, and Me shares such a connection in an adventure story set on a wild river. It is a captivating tale featuring a host of colorful characters and enlivened by photos that reflect the essence of the wilderness.

But deeper than that, it is the story of crossing a threshold from dream to possibility—of one man’s search for meaning in his life and his efforts to motivate his son, blending love of family with love of nature in a tale of transformation. It tells how a rebellious teen and a bored banker conspired to buck a system keyed to predictability, and how a wild river inspired both to a better use of their lives. “This trip hit me as hard as it did Ben,” writes Parnell, “as a wake-up call to life, to what is important, to what is not.”

The trip down the Buffalo was one that even Ben admits changed his life in more ways than one, as he later went on to earn a master of science degree specializing in stream ecology. For any reader who loves the outdoors—and especially those seeking to connect with their children—The Buffalo, Ben, and Me is essential reading that reminds us of possibilities to be had in facing life head-on as it raises awareness of the need to protect the Ozarks’ water resources and heritage.

For 12,000 years, people have left a rich record of their experiences in Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park. In The Capitol Reef Reader, award-winning author and photographer Stephen Trimble collects the best of this writing—160 years worth of words that capture the spirit of the park and its surrounding landscape in personal narratives, philosophical riffs, and historic and scientific records.

The volume features nearly fifty writers who have anchored their attention and imagination in Utah’s least-known national park. The bedrock elders of Colorado Plateau literature are here (Clarence Dutton, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey), as are generations of writers who love this land (including Ellen Meloy, Craig Childs, Charles Bowden, Renny Russell, Ann Zwinger, Gary Ferguson, and Rose Houk). Their pieces are a pleasure to read and each reveals a facet of Capitol Reef’s story, creating a gem of a volume. Editor Stephen Trimble guides and orients with commentary and context.

A visual survey of the park in almost 100 photographs adds another layer to our understanding of this place. Historic photos, pictures from Trimble’s forty-five years of hiking the park, as well as images from master visual artists who have worked in Capitol Reef are included. No other book captures the essence of Capitol Reef like this one. 

Part of the National Park Reader series, edited by Lance Newman and David Stanley

A camera makes enemies; a sketchbook, friends. Firm in this belief, Irwin Allan Sealy carried to China just his pen and a book of blank pages. When the literary conference that took him there ended and his fellow writers returned to India, Sealy stayed on to travel the railroads of the north in search of a town reminiscent of his Himalayan hometown and a man who might resemble himself. Sign language, good will, and plain luck see him through, but in a northern mining town known for its ancient Buddhist cave sculptures, Sealy finally comes to the conclusion that his other was unreachable, his hometown was one of a kind, and his only hope was a pen, allowing him to record his memories, sketches, and adventures along the way.

Sealy is known for both his fiction and his travelogue From Yukon to Yukatan: A Western Journey. This facsimile edition of The China Sketchbook, however, adds a special dimension to a travel narrative—the sketches and scribbles give readers a more immediate and unrestrained insight into the mind of a very fine writer and chart an unusual and quirky travel diary.

Inspired by August Derleth’s seminal book The Wisconsin, Richard D. Cornell traveled the Chippewa River from its two sources south of Ashland to where it joins the Mississippi. Over several decades he returned time and again in his red canoe to immerse himself in the stories of the Chippewa River and document its valley, from the Ojibwe and early fur traders and lumbermen to the varied and hopeful communities of today. Cornell shares tales of such historical figures as legendary Ojibwe leader Chief Buffalo, world famous wrestler Charlie Fisher, and supercomputer innovator Seymour Cray, along with the lesser-known stories of local luminaries such as Dr. John "Little Bird" Anderson. Cornell gathered firsthand stories from diners and dives, local museums and landmarks, quaint small-town newspaper offices, and the homes of old-timers and local historians. Through his conversations with ordinary people, he gets at the heart of the Chippewa and shares a history of the river that is both one of a kind and deeply personal.

In the mid-1970s, Nancy L. Abrams, a young photojournalist from the Midwest, plunges into life as a small-town reporter in West Virginia. She befriends the hippies on the commune one mountaintop over, rents a cabin in beautiful Salt Lick Valley, and falls in love with a local boy, wrestling to balance the demands of a job and a personal life. She learns how to survive in Appalachia—how to heat with coal and wood, how to chop kindling, plant a garden, and preserve produce.

The Climb from Salt Lick is the remarkable memoir of an outsider coming into adulthood. It is the story of a unique place and its people from the perspective of a woman who documents its burdens and its beauty, using words and pictures to tell the rich stories of those around her.

"This brilliantly written reconstruction of Sir Walter Raleigh's 1595 South American journey combines painstaking scholarship, vivid travelogue, and an intuitive sensitivity for the many meanings of the El Dorado myth. . . . Nicholl brings this six-week expedition to life. . . . A rare treat for both intellect and imagination."—Kirkus Reviews

"Walter Raleigh . . . was one of those Elizabethan all-rounders who still seem staggeringly larger than life. . . . Mr. Nicholl's cogent reconstruction of the journey uses Raleigh's own account, 'The Discoverie of Guiana'—part truth, part advertising, part rhapsody—and much well-found ancillary material."—Anthony Bailey, New York Times

"Like The Reckoning, his brilliant account of the murder of Christopher Marlowe, Nicholl's new book might be called an exercise in historical conjuring. The Creature in the Map is an effort not only to analyse but also to call into presence the lived experience of the voyage Raleigh undertook in 1595 to the Orinoco Delta in what is now Venezuela."—Stephen Greenblatt, Times Literary Supplement

"Charles Nicholl belongs to an elite company, that of historians who know how to make research into arcane matters and distant times as engrossing as In Cold Blood or All the President's Men."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

In 1935, during the wind-swept years of the Dust Bowl, three people went missing on separate occasions in the rugged canyon country of southeastern Utah, a place “wild, desolate, mysterious.” A thirteen-year old girl, Lucy Garrett, was tricked into heading west with the man who had murdered her father under the pretense of reuniting with him. At the same time, a search was underway for Dan Thrapp, a young scientist on leave from the American Museum of Natural History. Others were scouring the same region for an artist, Everett Ruess, who had disappeared into “the perfect labyrinth.” 

Intrigued by this unusual string of coincidental disappearances, Scott Thybony set out to learn what happened. His investigations took him from Island in the Sky to Skeleton Mesa, from Texas to Tucson, and from the Green River to the Red. He traced the journey of Lucy Garrett from the murder of her father to her dramatic courtroom testimony. Using the pages of an old journal he followed the route of Dan Thrapp as he crossed an expanse of wildly rugged country with a pair of outlaws. Thrapp’s story of survival in an unforgiving land is a poignant counterpoint to the fate of the artist Everett Ruess, which the New York Times has called “one of the most enduring mysteries of the modern West.” Thybony draws on extensive research and a lifetime of exploration to create a riveting story of these three lives.

Ancient glaciers passed by the Driftless Area and waterways vein its interior, forming an enchanting, enigmatic landscape of sharp ridgetops and deep valleys. Across time, this rugged topography has been home to an astonishing variety of people: Sauk, Dakota, and Ho-Chunk villagers, Norwegian farmers and Mexican mercado owners, Dominican nuns and Buddhist monks, river raftsmen and Shakespearean actors, Cornish miners and African American barn builders, organic entrepreneurs and Hmong truck gardeners.

The Driftless Reader gathers writings that highlight the unique natural and cultural history, landscape, and literature of this region that encompasses southwestern Wisconsin and adjacent Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. The more than eighty selected texts include writings by Black Hawk, Mark Twain, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aldo Leopold, David Rhodes, and many other Native people, explorers, scientists, historians, farmers, songwriters, journalists, and poets. Paintings, photographs, maps, and other images complement the texts, providing a deeper appreciation of this region's layered natural and human history.

Highlights include excerpts and art from:

Carol Ryrie Brink

William Cronon

John T. Curtis

August Derleth

Richard Eberhart

Fabu

Hamlin Garland

Pedro Guerrero

Hoowaneka (Little Elk)

Juliet Kinzie

Patty Loew

Ben Logan

Truman Lowe

Jacques Marquette

Ken McCullough

Edna Meudt

Mountain Wolf Woman

Zebulon Pike

Henry Schoolcraft

Clifford D. Simak

Wallace Stegner

Pearl Swiggum

Frank Utpatel

Mark Wunderlich

“How to speak of the imaginative reach of a land habitually seen as a seedbed of faiths and heresies, confluences and ruptures . . . trouble spot and findspot, ruin and renewal, fault line and ragged clime, with a medley of people and languages once known with mingled affection and wariness as Levantine?” So begins poet Gabriel Levin in his journeys in the Levant, the exotic land that stands at the crossroads of western Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, and northeast Africa. Part travelogue, part field guide, and part literary appreciation, The Dune’s Twisted Edge assembles six interlinked essays that explore the eastern seaboard of the Levant and its deserts, bringing to life this small but enigmatic part of the world.

 

A companion to The Western San Juan Mountains (originally published in 1996), The Eastern San Juan Mountains details the physical environment, biological communities, human history, and points of interest in this rich and diverse mountain system.

A natural division between the eastern and western slopes of the San Juans is the north-south line that runs approximately through Lake City, south of the crossing of the Piedra River by US Highway 160. In this super guidebook, twenty-seven contributors--all experts in their fields--artfully bring the geology, hydrology, animal and plant life, human histories, and travel routes of these eastern slopes to life. Designed to inform researchers, educators, and students about the region's complex systems, The Eastern San Juan Mountains also serves as an informative guidebook to accompany visitors along their travels on the Silver Thread National Scenic Byway, which stretches between South Fork and Lake City.

The Eastern San Juan Mountains deserves a place next to The Western San Juan Mountains on the bookshelf of every naturalist, researcher, resident, educator, student, and tourist seeking a greater understanding of this marvelous place and its history.

The second Powell Colorado River exploration, consisting of eleven men and three boats at the time of launch, departed from Green River Station, Wyoming, on May 22, 1871. Most members kept journals, and this volume contains the writings of three men, Stephen Vandiver Jones, John F. Steward, and Walter Clement Powell, as well as excerpts from the journals of John Wesley Powell. Taken together, they provide diverse points of views about the second expedition, both in terms of its human components and in its scientific labors.

Originally published from 1948 to 1949 as volumes sixteen and seventeen of the Utah Historical Quarterly, this volume looks to the larger significance and fruits of the second of Powell’s explorations, a more carefully constituted and better equipped scientific operation, yet one strangely neglected in historical records. Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society.

Winner of the AAG’s John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize
Winner of the Great Lakes American Studies Association/Ohio University Press Book Award

Throughout the nineteenth century, the southern shores of Lake Superior held great promise for developers imagining the next great metropolis. These new territories were seen as expanses to be filled, first with romantic visions, then with scientific images, and later with vistas designed to entice settlement and economic development. The Future City on the Inland Sea describes the attempts of explorers under government, commercial, or scientific sponsorship to project their imaginative visions on a region where the future did not happen as planned.

Author Eric D. Olmanson takes a fresh look at the settlements in the vicinity of Chequamegon Bay and the Apostle Islands by analyzing the texts and images left by the missionaries, geologists, ordinance surveyors, newspaper editors, and boosters. The Future City on the Inland Sea shows how new visions of the place absorbed and replaced the old ones, eventually producing what might be called for the first time “a region.”

More than a regional geography, The Future City on the Inland Sea is an appraisal of these early efforts to meld geographies of physical nature with those of human ideals, a demonstration of how thoroughly and paradoxically those two realms are entangled.

The history of Cyprus offers a reflection of larger world history. Coveted by a succession of foreign powers, it has been repeatedly occupied: the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, crusaders, Venetians, Genoese, Ottomans, and British have all left their mark on this Mediterranean island. Alongside the Roman and early Byzantine ruins of Salamis, other impressive monuments date from the Frankish and Venetian times, including the Abbey of Bellapais; the fortified harbor of Kyrenia; the magnificent cathedrals of Nicosia; and Famagusta, the setting for Shakespeare’s Othello.

In The Geckos of Bellapais, Joachim Sartorius shares the cultures and legends, colors and lights of the Levant. He explores the island’s history—including its division after the Turkish invasion of 1974 and the difficulties that followed. A revealing exploration of Cyprus after the Turkish partition and an evocative account of one poet’s life on one of the most beautiful islands in the Mediterranean, this book belongs among the world’s best travel writing.

Stretching for 170 miles across northern Arizona and southern Utah, Lake Powell is both a vacationer's paradise and the second-largest reservoir in the Western Hemisphere. Yet few visitors to the lake today are aware of the lost world that lies beneath its crystal waters. Once an enchanted landscape of sandstone cliffs and secret crevices, Glen Canyon has been but a memory since the damming of the Colorado River near Page, Arizona, in 1963. Often called "the place no one knew," Glen Canyon was in fact explored by thousands of visitors—including dozens of writers—before the dam's completion. River runner Mathew Gross has combed the literature of Glen Canyon to assemble this wide-ranging look at the history of this now-submerged natural treasure, the first book to bring together these voices of remembrance. Beginning with the first known written report of Glen Canyon in an eighteenth-century missionary journal, Gross has selected accounts of the canyon from both before and after the dam. Included are some of the West's best-known writers—Zane Grey and Katie Lee, Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy—as well as Pulitzer Prize winners John McPhee and Wallace Stegner. Other authors range from David Brower, director of the Sierra Club when the dam was built, to Floyd Dominy, the federal bureaucrat responsible for the dam. The Glen Canyon Reader is a book that may be read straight through as entertaining and informative history. But as Gross suggests, "Perhaps more pleasurable is to flip through these pages, to poke around and explore, as one would have done in Glen Canyon . . . to visit and revisit the places contained in this book, these cool glens and embracing alcoves and hidden grottos, these canyons and dreams and ghosts that will always, always be with us."

Honorable Mention, American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies's Eleanor Tufts Book Award, hailed by the award committee as a "transformative scholarly contribution."
Winner, 2016 Admiral Teixeira da Mota Prize from the Academia de Marinha (Naval Academy), Lisbon

Recently identified by the editors as the Rua Nova dos Mercadores, the principal commercial and financial street in Renaissance Lisbon, two sixteenth-century paintings, acquired by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1866, form the starting point for this portrait of a global city in the early modern period. Focusing on unpublished objects, and incorporating newly discovered documents and inventories that allow novel interpretations of the Rua Nova and the goods for sale on it, these essays offer a compelling and original study of a metropolis whose reach once spanned four continents. The Rua Nova views painted by an anonymous Flemish artist portray an everyday scene on a recognizable street, with a diverse global population. This thoroughfare was the meeting point of all kinds of people, from rich to poor, slave to knight, indigenous Portuguese to Jews and diasporic black Africans.

The volume highlights the unique status of Lisbon as an entrepôt for curiosities, luxury goods and wild animals. As the Portuguese trading empire of the fifteenth and sixteenth century expanded sea-routes and networks from West Africa to India and the Far East, non-European cargoes were brought back to Renaissance Lisbon. Many rarities were earmarked for the Portuguese court, but simultaneously exclusive items were readily available for sale on the Rua Nova, the Lisbon equivalent of Bond Street or Fifth Avenue. Specialized shops offered West African and Ceylonese ivories, raffia and Asian textiles, rock crystals, Ming porcelain, Chinese and Ryukyuan lacquerware, jewelry, precious stones, naturalia and exotic animal byproducts. Lisbon was also a hub of distribution for overseas goods to other courts and cities in Europe. The cross-cultural and artistic influences between Lisbon and Portuguese Africa and Asia at this date are reassessed. Lisbon was imagined as the head of empire or caput mundi, while the River Tagus became the aquatic gateway to a globally connected world. Lisbon evolved into a dynamic Atlantic port city, excelling in shipbuilding, cartography and the manufacture of naval instruments. The historian Damião de Góis bragged of the "Tagus reigning over the world." Lisbon's fame depended on its river, an aquatic avenue that competed with the Rua Nova, providing a means of interaction, trade and communication along Lisbon’s coastline. Even for the cosmopolitan Góis, who traveled extensively for the Portuguese crown, Lisbon’s chaotic docks were worth describing. Of all the European cities he experienced, only Lisbon and her rival Seville could be "rightfully called Ladies and Queens of the Sea." Góis contended that they had opened up the early modern world through circumnavigation. Lisbon was destroyed in a devastating earthquake and tsunami in November 1755. These paintings are the only large-scale vistas of Rua Nova dos Mercadores to have survived, and together with the new objects and archival sources offer a fresh and original insight into Renaissance Lisbon and its material culture.

"This is a book about Chicago. It is also, and for that very reason, a book about every other American city which has lived long enough and grown large enough to experience the transformation of neighborhoods and the contact of cultures and the tension between different types of individual and community behavior. . . . Here is a type of sociological investigation which is equally marked by human interest and scientific method."—Christian Century

One of the most persistent legends in the annals of New World exploration is that of the Land of Gold. This mythical site was located over vast areas of South America (and later, North America); the search for it drove some men mad with greed and, as often as not, to their untimely deaths.

In this history of quest and adventure, Robert Silverberg traces the fate of Old World explorers lured westward by the myth of El Dorado. From the German conquistadores licensed by the Spanish king to operate out of Venezuela, to the journeys of Gonzalo Pizarro in the Amazon basin, and to the nearly miraculous voyage of Francisco Orellana to the mouth of the Amazon River, encountering the warlike women who gave the river its name, violence and bloodshed accompanied the determined adventurers. Sir Walter Raleigh and a host of other explorers spent small fortunes and many lives trying to locate Manoa, a city that was rumored to be El Dorado—City of Gold. Celebrated science fiction author Robert Silverberg recreates these legendary quests in The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado.