Eastward Of Good Hope

How did news from the East—carried in ship logs and mariners' reports, journals, and correspondence—shape early Americans' understanding of the world as a map of dangerous and incoherent sites? Winner of the John Lyman Book Award by the North American Society for Oceanic History Freed from restrictions of British mercantilism in the years following the War of Independence, Yankee merchants embarked on numerous voyages of commerce and discovery into distant seas. Through the news from the East, carried in mariners' reports, ship logs, journals, and correspondence, Americans at home imagined the world as a map of dangerous and deranged places. This was a world that was profoundly disordered, hobbled by tyranny and oppression or steeped in chaos and anarchy, often deadly, always uncertain, unpredictable, and unstable, yet amenable to American influence. Focusing on four representative arenas—the Ottoman Empire, China, India, and the Great South Sea (collectively, the East Indies, Oceana, and the American continent's Northwest coast)—Eastward of Good Hope recasts the relationship between America and the world by examining the early years of the republic, when its national character was particularly pliable and its foundational posture in the world was forming. Drawing on recent scholarship in global ethnohistory, Dane A. Morrison recounts how reports of cannibal encounters, shipboard massacres, shipwrecks, tropical fever, and other tragedies in distant seas led Americans to imagine each region as a distinct set of threats to their republic. He also demonstrates how the concept of justification through self-doubt allowed for aggressive expansionism and for the foundations of imperialism to develop. Morrison reconsiders American ideas about the world through three questions: How did British Americans imagine the world before independence allowed them to travel "Eastward of Good Hope"? What were the signal encounters that filled the public sphere in their early years of global encounter? And finally, how did Americans' contacts with other peoples inflect their ideas about the world and their place in it? Written in a lively, engaging style, Eastward of Good Hope will appeal to scholars and the general public alike.

Morrison reconsiders American ideas about the world through three questions: How did British Americans imagine the world before independence allowed them to travel "Eastward of Good Hope"? What were the signal encounters that filled the public sphere in their early years of global encounter? And finally, how did Americans' contacts with other peoples inflect their ideas about the world and their place in it? Written in a lively, engaging style, Eastward of Good Hope will appeal to scholars and the general public alike.

In 'Good Hope', Carla Liesching constructs a fragmented visual and textual assemblage that orbits around the gardens and grounds at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa ? a historic location at the height of Empire, now an epicenter for anti-colonial resistance movements, and also the place of the artist?s birth. Named by the Portuguese in their ?Age of Discovery?, the Cape?s position at the mid-point along the ?Spice Route? was viewed with great optimism for its potential to open up a valuable maritime passageway. The ?refreshment station? later established there set into motion flows of capital from ?east? to ?west?. Good Hope brings together cumulative layers of documentary prose, personal essay, and found photographic material, along with sources ranging from apartheid-era trade journals, tourist pamphlets, and National Geographic and Life magazines, to contemporary newspapers and family albums. It offers both an intimate and critical examination of White supremacist settler-colonialism in the present, and a questioning of the ethics and politics involved in the very acts of looking, discovering, collecting, codifying, preserving, naming, knowing, and putting to language

In January 1991, when civil war came to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, two-thirds of the city’s population fled. Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi. His mother murdered by a militia, his father somewhere in hiding, he was swept alone into the great wartime migration that scattered the Somali people throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the world. This extraordinary book tells Asad’s story. Serially betrayed by the people who promised to care for him, Asad lived his childhood at a skeptical remove from the adult world, his relation to others wary and tactical. He lived in a bewildering number of places, from the cosmopolitan streets of inner-city Nairobi to the desert towns deep in the Ethiopian hinterland. By the time he reached the cusp of adulthood, Asad had honed an array of wily talents. At the age of seventeen, in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, he made good as a street hustler, brokering relationships between hard-nosed businessmen and bewildered Somali refugees. He also courted the famously beautiful Foosiya, and, to the astonishment of his peers, seduced and married her. Buoyed by success in work and in love, Asad put twelve hundred dollars in his pocket and made his way down the length of the African continent to Johannesburg, South Africa, whose streets he believed to be lined with gold. And so began a shocking adventure in a country richer and more violent than he could possibly have imagined. A Man of Good Hope is the story of a person shorn of the things we have come to believe make us human—personal possessions, parents, siblings. And yet Asad’s is an intensely human life, one suffused with dreams and desires and a need to leave something permanent on this earth.

Crossing the remote, southern tip of Africa has fired the imagination of European travellers from the time Bartholomew Dias opened up the passage to the East by rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. Dutch, British, French, Danes, and Swedes formed an endless stream of seafarers who made the long journey southwards in pursuit of wealth, adventure, science, and missionary, as well as outright national, interest. Beginning by considering the early hunter-gatherer inhabitants of the Cape and their culture, Malcolm Jack focuses in his account on the encounter that the European visitors had with the Khoisan peoples, sometimes sympathetic but often exploitative from the time of the Portuguese to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. This commercial and colonial background is key to understanding the development of the vibrant city that is modern Cape Town, as well as the rich diversity of the Cape hinterland. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

History of Swiss emigration to South Africa, together with genealogies of immigrant descendants.

"Combining a reporter's eye for detail, the breathless narrative rush of an action movie and the generous heart of a hometown boy desperately trying to make sense of a place gone terribly wrong, Downs examines the social and economic disintegration of Hartford, Conn., in the 1990s through the coming-of-age of five African-American teenage boys. These young men-track stars, football players, scholars-try to make the right decisions while local and state politicians squabble over money, drug gangs roam the streets and the middle class-both white and black-flees to the suburbs. Harvey, Derrick, Eric, Hiram and Joshua make a pledge that no matter their future path, they will return to Hartford to rebuild their shattered city. The first half of the book flows with the power and grace of a finely tuned magazine article. Then Downs loses his focus and gets bogged down in a lengthy recounting of the boys' track coach's trial. The narrative shifts from the boys-now young men with growing families and burgeoning careers-to Downs's own struggle with his identity and the declining health of his grandfather. If the narrative splinters, perhaps it is an apt metaphor for the boys' pledge. Just one-Joshua-returned to Hartford. (Apr.)"--Publishers Weekly.