An Aqueous Territory


Book Description

In An Aqueous Territory Ernesto Bassi traces the configuration of a geographic space he calls the transimperial Greater Caribbean between 1760 and 1860. Focusing on the Caribbean coast of New Granada (present-day Colombia), Bassi shows that the region's residents did not live their lives bounded by geopolitical borders. Rather, the cross-border activities of sailors, traders, revolutionaries, indigenous peoples, and others reflected their perceptions of the Caribbean as a transimperial space where trade, information, and people circulated, both conforming to and in defiance of imperial regulations. Bassi demonstrates that the islands, continental coasts, and open waters of the transimperial Greater Caribbean constituted a space that was simultaneously Spanish, British, French, Dutch, Danish, Anglo-American, African, and indigenous. Exploring the "lived geographies" of the region's dwellers, Bassi challenges preconceived notions of the existence of discrete imperial spheres and the inevitable emergence of independent nation-states while providing insights into how people envision their own futures and make sense of their place in the world.




A Camera in the Garden of Eden


Book Description

In the early twentieth century, the Boston-based United Fruit Company controlled the production, distribution, and marketing of bananas, the most widely consumed fresh fruit in North America. So great was the company’s power that it challenged the sovereignty of the Latin American and Caribbean countries in which it operated, giving rise to the notion of company-dominated “banana republics.” In A Camera in the Garden of Eden, Kevin Coleman argues that the “banana republic” was an imperial constellation of images and practices that was checked and contested by ordinary Central Americans. Drawing on a trove of images from four enormous visual archives and a wealth of internal company memos, literary works, immigration records, and declassified US government telegrams, Coleman explores how banana plantation workers, women, and peasants used photography to forge new ways of being while also visually asserting their rights as citizens. He tells a dramatic story of the founding of the Honduran town of El Progreso, where the United Fruit Company had one of its main divisional offices, the rise of the company now known as Chiquita, and a sixty-nine day strike in which banana workers declared their independence from neocolonial domination. In telling this story, Coleman develops a new set of conceptual tools and methods for using images to open up fresh understandings of the past, offering a model that is applicable far beyond this pathfinding study.




No Limits to Their Sway


Book Description

Following the 1808 French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, an unprecedented political crisis threw the Spanish Monarchy into turmoil. On the Caribbean coast of modern-day Colombia, the important port town of Cartagena rejected Spanish authority, finally declaring independence in 1811. With new leadership that included free people of color, Cartagena welcomed merchants, revolutionaries, and adventurers from Venezuela, the Antilles, the United States, and Europe. Most importantly, independent Cartagena opened its doors to privateers of color from the French Caribbean. Hired mercenaries of the sea, privateers defended Cartagena's claim to sovereignty, attacking Spanish ships and seizing Spanish property, especially near Cuba, and establishing vibrant maritime connections with Haiti. Most of Cartagena's privateers were people of color and descendants of slaves who benefited from the relative freedom and flexibility of life at sea, but also faced kidnapping, enslavement, and brutality. Many came from Haiti and Guadeloupe; some had been directly involved in the Haitian Revolution. While their manpower proved crucial in the early Anti-Spanish struggles, Afro-Caribbean privateers were also perceived as a threat, suspected of holding questionable loyalties, disorderly tendencies, and too strong a commitment to political and social privileges for people of color. Based on handwritten and printed sources in Spanish, English, and French, this book tells the story of Cartagena's multinational and multicultural seafarers, revealing the Trans-Atlantic and maritime dimensions of South American independence.




Everything Under


Book Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 MAN BOOKER PRIZE An eerie, watery reimagining of the Oedipus myth set on the canals of Oxford, from the author of Fen The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries. One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found community and shelter with them, and all three were haunted by their past and stalked by an ominous creature lurking in the canal: the bonak. Everything and nothing at once, the bonak was Gretel’s name for the thing she feared most. And now that she’s searching for her mother, she’ll have to face it. In this electrifying reinterpretation of a classical myth, Daisy Johnson explores questions of fate and free will, gender fluidity, and fractured family relationships. Everything Under—a debut novel whose surreal, watery landscape will resonate with fans of Fen—is a daring, moving story that will leave you unsettled and unstrung.







Conn's Translational Neuroscience


Book Description

Conn’s Translational Neuroscience provides a comprehensive overview reflecting the depth and breadth of the field of translational neuroscience, with input from a distinguished panel of basic and clinical investigators. Progress has continued in understanding the brain at the molecular, anatomic, and physiological levels in the years following the 'Decade of the Brain,' with the results providing insight into the underlying basis of many neurological disease processes. This book alternates scientific and clinical chapters that explain the basic science underlying neurological processes and then relates that science to the understanding of neurological disorders and their treatment. Chapters cover disorders of the spinal cord, neuronal migration, the autonomic nervous system, the limbic system, ocular motility, and the basal ganglia, as well as demyelinating disorders, stroke, dementia and abnormalities of cognition, congenital chromosomal and genetic abnormalities, Parkinson's disease, nerve trauma, peripheral neuropathy, aphasias, sleep disorders, and myasthenia gravis. In addition to concise summaries of the most recent biochemical, physiological, anatomical, and behavioral advances, the chapters summarize current findings on neuronal gene expression and protein synthesis at the molecular level. Authoritative and comprehensive, Conn’s Translational Neuroscience provides a fully up-to-date and readily accessible guide to brain functions at the cellular and molecular level, as well as a clear demonstration of their emerging diagnostic and therapeutic importance. Provides a fully up-to-date and readily accessible guide to brain functions at the cellular and molecular level, while also clearly demonstrating their emerging diagnostic and therapeutic importance Features contributions from leading global basic and clinical investigators in the field Provides a great resource for researchers and practitioners interested in the basic science underlying neurological processes Relates and translates the current science to the understanding of neurological disorders and their treatment




Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean


Book Description

The half century of European activity in the Caribbean that followed Columbus’s first voyages brought enormous demographic, economic, and social change to the region as Europeans, Indigenous people, and Africans whom Spaniards imported to provide skilled and unskilled labor came into extended contact for the first time. In Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean, Ida Altman examines the interactions of these diverse groups and individuals and the transformation of the islands of the Greater Antilles (Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica). She addresses the impact of disease and ongoing conflict; the Spanish monarchy’s efforts to establish a functioning political system and an Iberian church; evangelization of Indians and Blacks; the islands’ economic development; the international character of the Caribbean, which attracted Portuguese, Italian, and German merchants and settlers; and the formation of a highly unequal and coercive but dynamic society. As Altman demonstrates, in the first half of the sixteenth century the Caribbean became the first full-fledged iteration of the Atlantic world in all its complexity.




Freedom's Mirror


Book Description

Studies the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba, where the violent entrenchment of slavery occurred while slaves in Haiti successfully overthrew the institution.




Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana


Book Description

Between 1717 and 1731, the French Company of the Indies (Compagnie des Indes) held a virtual monopoly over Louisiana culture and trade. Among numerous controls, its administrators oversaw the slave trade, the immigration of free and indentured whites, negotiations with Native American peoples, and the purchase and exportation of Louisiana-grown tobacco. In Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana, Erin M. Greenwald situates the colony within a French Atlantic circuit that stretched from Paris and the Brittany coast to Africa's Senegambian region to the West Indies to Louisiana and back. Focusing on the travels and travails of Marc-Antoine Caillot, a company clerk who set sail for Louisiana in 1729, Greenwald deftly examines the company's role as colonizer, developer, slaveholder, commercial entity, and deal maker. As the company's focus shifted away from agriculture with the reversion of Louisiana to the French crown in 1731, so too did the lives of the individuals whose fortunes were bound up in the company's trade, colonization, and agricultural mission in the Americas. Greenwald’s focus on Caillot provides an engaging microhistory for readers interested in the culture and society of early Louisiana and its place in the larger French Atlantic world.




Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution


Book Description

Royalist Indians and slaves in the northern Andes engaged with the ideas of the Age of Revolution (1780–1825), such as citizenship and freedom. Although generally ignored in recent revolution-centered versions of the Latin American independence processes, their story is an essential part of the history of the period. In Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution, Marcela Echeverri draws a picture of the royalist region of Popayán (modern-day Colombia) that reveals deep chronological layers and multiple social and spatial textures. She uses royalism as a lens to rethink the temporal, spatial, and conceptual boundaries that conventionally structure historical narratives about the Age of Revolution. Looking at royalism and liberal reform in the northern Andes, she suggests that profound changes took place within the royalist territories. These emerged as a result of the negotiation of the rights of local people, Indians and slaves, with the changing monarchical regime.