Explore the vast range of titles available.

During the decades of empire (1870–1914), legendary heroes and their astonishing deeds of conquest gave imperialism a recognizable human face. Henry Morton Stanley, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, Charles Gordon, Jean-Baptiste Marchand, and Hubert Lyautey all braved almost unimaginable dangers among “savage” people for their nation’s greater good. This vastly readable book, the first comparative history of colonial heroes in Britain and France, shows via unforgettable portraits the shift from public veneration of the peaceful conqueror to unbridled passion for the vanquishing hero. Edward Berenson argues that these five men transformed the imperial steeplechase of those years into a powerful “heroic moment.” He breaks new ground by linking the era’s “new imperialism” to its “new journalism”—the penny press—which furnished the public with larger-than-life figures who then embodied each nation’s imperial hopes and anxieties.

Sir Reginald Coupland was widely regarded as an authority on David Livingstone, a Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary and an explorer in Africa, who was one of the most popular national heroes of late-19th-century in Victorian Britain. Coupland's previous works on African history include Kirk on the Zambesi (1928) and The Exploitation of East Africa, 1856-1890 (1939). Intended as a sequel to Kirk on the Zambesi, Livingstone's Last Journey was written several years prior to its first publication in 1945, but was then laid aside while Coupland undertook a full-scale study of East African history. It then became due and ready for completion in the autumn of 1939, but was further delayed by the outbreak of World War II. This postponement proved profitable however, as in the course of the war new and valuable documentary material—in particular the Kirk and Waller Papers—became available and were thus able to be included in its eventual publication. A remarkable biographical account by an exceptional historian. \"One of the soundest and best-balanced English biographies that I have had the satisfaction of reading for a very long time. It is a remarkable book.\"—Peter Grenwell in Daily Mail \"It is a noble book about a very noble man; it describes a period of British and European history in which man's struggles and problems greatly resembled our own.\"—Sir John Squire in Illustrated London News \"This is a book which Englishmen may be proud to read.\"—London Quarterly

Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.

Edmond Howes wrote in his additions to John Stowe’s Annales (1631) that there had been a playhouse “in former time at Newington Buts.” But from the time scholars began to unearth the history of the London theaters, the playhouse that once stood a mile south of the Thames has remained an enigma. Edmond Malone did not list it among the theaters in “An Historical Account of the English Stage” (1790), even though he twice cites Howes in support of claims for the existence of other theaters. And even in his hastily inserted “Additions”—after he had pored over the papers of Philip Henslowe that had been found in Dulwich College Library—Malone dismisses as irrelevant to Shakespeare scholarship Henslowe’s list of performances by the Lord Admiral’s Men and Lord Chamberlain’s Men at Newington Butts in June 1594. In the first book-length study of the Elizabethan theaters, published more than a century after Malone’s “Historical Account,” Thomas Fairman Ordish reckoned on there still being no evidence of the existence of the Newington Butts playhouse but claimed that a case could be made based upon “inference.” While much has been done in the past hundred years to add to our stock of knowledge on the existence of this theater, most noticeably by Herbert Berry and William Ingram, many puzzles remain. Two questions relating to names, for example, hang over the Newington Butts playhouse: there is no agreement over the origin of the name of the location itself—whence the “Butts” in Newington Butts—and studies of the theater invariably concede that we have no way of knowing the name of the playhouse itself. Answers to both questions are to be found in the public record: in the case of the origin of “Butts,” I will consider a Privy Council document that is readily available in the Acts but that seems to have passed unnoticed to date; regarding the name of the playhouse, I will point to where the answer has been hiding in plain sight in a lease document that has been cited by a number of scholars since Ingram brought it to light in his 1970 essay “The Playhouse at Newington Butts: A New Proposal.”

Paul Lomami Tchibamba (1914–85) is often described as the Congo’s first novelist. Previous research in French and English has depicted Tchibamba’s work as a straightforward example of ‘writing back’ to the colonial canon. However, this article advances scholarship on Tchibamba’s work by demonstrating that his later writing responds not only to Henry Morton Stanley’s account of the imperial subjugation of the Congo, but to Joseph Conrad’s questioning of colonialist narratives of ‘progress’. Drawing on recent theoretical work that examines intertextuality in postcolonial fiction, this article demonstrates that while Tchibamba is highly critical of Stanley, he enters into dialogue with Conrad’s exposure of colonial brutality. Bringing together comparative research insights from Congolese and European literatures, this article also employs literary translation. This is the first time that excerpts from two of Tchibamba’s most important responses to colonial authors have been translated into English. Also for the first time, Tchibamba’s novella Ngemena is shown to be a crucial postcolonial Congolese response to Heart of Darkness. Through close textual analysis of Tchibamba’s use of irony and imagery, this article’s key findings are that, while Tchibamba nuances Conrad’s disparaging portrait of a chief, he develops the ironic mode of Conrad’s An Outpost of Progress, and updates the journey upriver into the interior in Heart of Darkness. This article illustrates the complex and nuanced way in which Tchibamba interacts with his European intertexts, deploying close analyses of his responses to Conradian imagery

The British explorer and adventurer Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) had achieved international fame in 1871 by finding a distinguished medical missionary in Central Africa and greeting him with the understated query, \"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?\" He wanted to repeat this astonishing achievement by rescuing Emin Pasha. In \"Geography and Some Explorers\" (1924), Conrad recalled that \"the subdued thundering mutter of the Stanley Falls hung in the heavy night air of the last navigable reach of the Upper Congo.\" (Thousands of elephants were slaughtered, then and now, so their ivory could be used to make piano keys, billiard balls and carved trinkets.) Both Stanley and Conrad met Roger Casement, the impressive Irish adventurer who later exposed the atrocities committed on the enslaved rubber workers in Leopold's territory. [...]Stanley and Emin, Conrad and Kurtz, weakened by the destructive forces of the jungle and overwhelmed by their solitude, accept Blaise Pascal's troubling assertion, \"We shall die alone\" (\"On mourra seul\") (97).

one photo

one painting of Stanley's African adventure