The Land Of Gold

In the village of Funar, located in the central highlands of Timor-Leste, the disturbing events of the twenty-four-year-long Indonesian occupation are rarely articulated in narratives of suffering. Instead, the highlanders emphasize the significance of their return to the sacred land of the ancestors, a place where "gold" is abundant and life is thought to originate. On one hand, this collective amnesia is due to villagers' exclusion from contemporary nation-building processes, which bestow recognition only on those who actively participated in the resistance struggle against Indonesia. On the other hand, the cultural revival and the privileging of the ancestral landscape and traditions over narratives of suffering derive from a particular understanding of how human subjects are constituted. Before life and after death, humans and the land are composed of the same substance; only during life are they separated. To recover from the forced dislocation the highlanders experienced under the Indonesian occupation, they thus seek to reestablish a mythical, primordial unity with the land by reinvigorating ancestral practices. Never leaving out of sight the intense political and emotional dilemmas imposed by the past on people’s daily lives, The Land of Gold seeks to go beyond prevailing theories of postconflict reconstruction that prioritize human relationships. Instead, it explores the significance of people’s affective and ritual engagement with the environment and with their ancestors as survivors come to terms with the disruptive events of the past.

At the heart of Silence in the Land of Gold is an intrigue over a fortune lost in an air crash involving the Burmese military and the Kachin Independence Army. George Wilford is a foreign lawyer who must solve the mystery of the crash to save his own life and that of the woman with whom he falls in love.

Share the triumph and fear of a woman -- alone, injured, and pregnant -- stranded on a remote Alaska island in winter. Her husband fails to return from a trip, leaving her to survive a winter and give birth at their cabin, alone. This true story is hard to put down.

Hinton Rowan Helper (1829-1909) of North Carolina became one of the South's most controversial figures in the 1850s for his criticisms of slavery in The land of gold and his better known book, The impending crisis. Indeed, he found it prudent to move to New York before the Civil War, and he received diplomatic appointments in Latin America from the Lincoln administration. The land of gold (1855) draws on Helper's three years residence in California and leads him to the conclusion, "California is the poorest State in the Union." Aside from gold, he can see nothing to recommend the state economically, and his book damns the state's populace in terms of morals and intelligence. He spends three chapters dismissing San Francisco (although he later has good words for the Vigilance Committee), is disgusted by the Digger Indians at Bodega, finds fault with Sacramento, and reflects on prospecting on Yuba River and at Columbia. Some good words are reserved for Stockton, but on the whole, Helper writes to discourage emigrants from retracing his course round the Horn.

Perry A. Burgess, son of Abram Burgess and Emma Semantha Cheney, was born in 1843 in Nauvoo, Illinois. He married Annie Mapes in 1870. They had three children. He died in 1900 in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

Lying at the edge of the Rift Valley in Saudi Arabia is perhaps one of the most stunning places uncovered in history. Rediscovered in May of 2007, the Gold Fields of Ophir had once disappeared from man, hiding a veritable treasure trove of ancient history. The Muslim Empire gives us a closer look at the history and geography of this ancient Biblical culture.