Books about Anglo west from Amazon.com

The common seaman and the pirate in the age of sail are romantic historical figures who occupy a special place in the popular culture of the modern age. And yet in many ways, these daring men remain little known to us. Like most other poor working people of the past, they left few first-hand accounts of their lives. But their lives are not beyond recovery. In this book, Marcus Rediker uses a huge array of historical sources (court records, diaries, travel accounts, and many others) to reconstruct the social cultural world of the Anglo-American seamen and pirates who sailed the seas in the first half of the eighteenth century. Rediker tours the sailor's North Atlantic, following seamen and their ships along the pulsing routes of trade and into rowdy port towns. He recreates life along the waterfront, where seafaring men from around the world crowded into the sailortown and its brothels, alehouses, street brawls, and city jail. His study explores the natural terror that inevitably shaped the existence of those who plied the forbidding oceans of the globe in small, brittle wooden vessels. It also treats the man-made terror--the harsh discipline, brutal floggings, and grisly hangings--that was a central fact of life at sea. Rediker surveys the commonplaces of the maritime world: the monotonous rounds of daily labor, the negotiations of wage contracts, and the bawdy singing, dancing, and tale telling that were a part of every voyage. He also analyzes the dramatic moments of the sailor's existence, as Jack Tar battled wind and water during a slashing storm, as he stood by his "brother tars" in a mutiny or a stike, and as he risked his neck by joining a band of outlaws beneath the Jolly Roger, the notorious pirate flag. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea focuses upon the seaman's experience in order to illuminate larger historical issues such as the rise of capitalism, the genesis the free wage labor, and the growth of an international working class. These epic themes were intimately bound up with everyday hopes and fears of the common seamen..
Price: $16.37 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Introducing a new model for the transnational history of the United States, Raœl Ramos places Mexican Americans at the center of the Texas creation story. He focuses on Mexican-Texan, or Tejano, society in a period of political transition beginning with the year of Mexican independence. From the perspective of the Tejanos of San Antonio de B©xar, Anglo-Americans were immigrants and the battle of the Alamo was a war between brothers.

Ramos explores the factors that helped shape the ethnic identity of the Tejano population, including cross-cultural contacts between Bexare–os, indigenous groups, and Anglo-Americans, as they negotiated the contingencies and pressures on the frontier of competing empires. Initial peace gave way to violence as tensions between Anglo-American immigrants and the Mexican government made cultural brokerage impossible, leading to Texas's secession from Mexico and subsequent annexation by the United States. Ramos demonstrates that Bexare–os turned to their experience on the frontier to forge a new ethnic identity within dominant American culture. The nineteenth-century story of the Tejano people, who went from political dominance in 1821 to political minority in 1861, is a story of declension, but it is also a story of resurgence in the face of changing conditions and oppressive circumstances..
Price: $28.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Eighteenth-century Jamaica, Britain's largest and most valuable slave-owning colony, relied on a brutal system of slave management to maintain its tenuous social order. Trevor Burnard provides unparalleled insight into Jamaica's vibrant but harsh African and European cultures with a comprehensive examination of the extraordinary diary of plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood.

Thistlewood's diary, kept over the course of forty years, describes in graphic detail how white rule over slaves was predicated on the infliction of terror on the bodies and minds of slaves. Thistlewood treated his slaves cruelly even while he relied on them for his livelihood. Along with careful notes on sugar production, Thistlewood maintained detailed records of a sexual life that fully expressed the society's rampant sexual exploitation of slaves. In Burnard's hands, Thistlewood's diary reveals a great deal not only about the man and his slaves but also about the structure and enforcement of power, changing understandings of human rights and freedom, and connections among social class, race, and gender, as well as sex and sexuality, in the plantation system..
Price: $17.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Amidst the immense body of Beowulf interpretations, translations, and commentary, Eileen A. Joy and Mary K. Ramsey s "The Postmodern 'Beowulf': A Critical Casebook" stands out. In "The Postmodern 'Beowulf', twenty-three critics take on the Anglo-Saxon superhero, creating a best of anthology of contemporary theoretical approaches to the epic poem that is so popular today. The essays collected here make an important scholarly contribution not only to Anglo-Saxon studies but to postmodern theory.

With essays by Eileen A. Joy, Mary K. Ramsey, Edward Said, Claire Sponsler, Nicholas Howe, Allen J. Frantzen, John D. Niles, John Moreland, Alfred K. Siewers, James W. Earl, Janet Thormann, John M. Hill, Jeffrey J. Cohen, Carol J. Clover, Clare A. Lees, Mary Dockray-Miller, Shari Horner, Michel Foucault, Carol Braun Pasternack, Gillian Overing, Seth Lerer, Susan Kim, and Michelle R. Warren..
Price: $42.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Presents the development of the basic institutions of the Anglo-American common-law system. Explores the sources of law from cases, legislation, and codification, to doctrinal writings. The text also discusses the development of legal concepts such as property in land, contracts, liability for injury, negotiability of commercial paper, and the business corporation. .
Price: $20.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

With this sweeping reinterpretation of early cultural encounters between the English and American natives, Joyce E. Chaplin thoroughly alters our historical view of the origins of English presumptions of racial superiority, and of the role science and technology played in shaping these notions. By placing the history of science and medicine at the very center of the story of early English colonization, Chaplin shows how contemporary European theories of nature and science dramatically influenced relations between the English and Indians within the formation of the British Empire.

In Chaplin's account of the earliest contacts, we find the English--impressed by the Indians' way with food, tools, and iron--inclined to consider Indians as partners in the conquest and control of nature. Only when it came to the Indians' bodies, so susceptible to disease, were the English confident in their superiority. Chaplin traces the way in which this tentative notion of racial inferiority hardened and expanded to include the Indians' once admirable mental and technical capacities. Here we see how the English, beginning from a sense of bodily superiority, moved little by little toward the idea of their mastery over nature, America, and the Indians--and how this progression is inextricably linked to the impetus and rationale for empire.

(20011201).
Price: $27.61 [Notify me when price goes down.]

To those of us who look at Los Angeles and see no sense at all, Landscapes of Desire offers a vivid and rewarding account of the particular visions that drove the period of Anglo dominance in the Los Angeles region, from about 1850 to about 1985. William McClung's fascinating essay, supported at every point by wonderful illustrations, shows that Anglo settlers and developers wanted nothing more than to make sense of their surroundings, but that their two dominant paradigms were at war with each other. Anglophone Los Angeles, McClung says, has tried strenuously to reconcile two competing mythologies of place and space: one of an acquired Arcadia--a found natural paradise--and the other of an invented Utopia--an empty space inviting development. The collision between these two underlying ideals is still present in the ambivalence at the heart of the city's and region's understanding of themselves.
The Arcadian dream of nurturing inherited beauty entailed idealizing the region's Hispanic past. Yet that past was simultaneously belittled by the utopian vision of arid landscapes watered into Anglo plantations and ranchos reshaped into cities.
From Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel Ramona to the work of artists David Hockney, Edward Ruscha, and Terry Schoonhoven in the 1960s and after, Los Angeles has been an arena of competing and often incompatible constructions of ideal place and space. Looking at architecture, landscaping, literature, historiography, painting, conceptual art, and such ancillary activities and crafts as booster pamphlets, real estate promotions, and citrus box labels, McClung presents a new and refreshingly revisionist view of the city's growth. Examining designed spaces, including buildings, parks, freeways, and whole neighborhoods and communities, he gives readers a strong sense of the contradictions, failures, and triumphs that continue to govern L.A.'s image of itself.
Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of 2000.
Price: $1.72 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A reprint of Walter Wills' colonial reference book, containing the details of nearly 2,000 prominent men and women of Edwardian Africa. This astonishing work includes biographies of settlers, warriors, explorers, invaders, politicians and traditional leaders from every corner of the continent. Invaluable for genealogists, historians, military researchers and medal enthusiasts, it offers fascinating biographical sketches of colonial African celebrities - many of whom were known personally to the editor..
Price: $32.76 [Notify me when price goes down.]