Explore the vast range of titles available.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Setting Paul within the First Century Counter‐imperial Messages in the Letters? Conclusion References

[Bernard DeVoto]'s project is to show how the geography of the North American continent supported the concept of empire that eventually brought the United States and her specific borders into being. But what interests me far more than this notion is the book's narrative detail, the wonderful prose, and vivid imagery in which all is conveyed. Here are portraits of Indians, conquerors, explorers, and surveyors; wry descriptions of wrong-footed schemes and of a desire for riches so great that it created geography a priori. Of the 16th- century Spanish, DeVoto writes with characteristic brio: \"Romantic, histrionic, cruel, and trance-bound, they marched in rusty medieval armor toward the nonexistent.\" Later he traces the years of frenzied trapping and trade and trailblazing, and of continuing deluded presumption, of fantasies acted upon that would be funny were their results not so tragic. In conclusion, DeVoto lauds the expedition of Lewis and Clark, an achievement whose importance \"went rippling out through the history of the West and of the United States.\" Both [John Noble Wilford]'s and DeVoto's books have made me much more alert to topography than ever I was. Thus, I got the most intense pleasure out of Stephen Ambrose's \"Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869.\" \"Next to winning the Civil War and abolishing slavery,\" he writes, \"building the first transcontinental railroad, from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, was the greatest achievement of the American people in the nineteenth century.\" Throughout the book Ambrose strikes this triumphal note, which I began to find rather wearing. Still, it was a small irritation to put up with in order to revel in the astonishing dimension of the transcontinental project, an adventure that turned into a race with the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific rushing toward each other from east and west. Without power tools and the internal combustion engine, the railroads were built spanning rivers and crossing three mountain ranges. The terrain, the political battle over the course of the roads, the character of those who surveyed the country and charted the course of the roadbeds, the ingenuity and dedication of the engineers, the itinerant culture of the men who hewed out the wilderness and laid the rails, are all compellingly portrayed.

This article discusses an undergraduate module which introduces students to the study of the history of education through the lens of our own institutions – UCL (University College London, UK), founded in 1826, and the IOE (Institute of Education, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society), founded in 1902. The module critically examines the close, but often hidden, connections between British education and empire, asking what impact these imperial legacies have today. After outlining the module’s origins and relationship with the history of UCL and the IOE, the article sets its creation in the wider context of initiatives that seek to critique and reimagine institutional histories within higher education for a variety of purposes. The article also explores the developing role of the IOE Archives team in teaching, and explores how academics and archivists work together to teach institutional histories, and how this work can prompt change.

In the second part of our article we continue presentation of individual fates of Polish mathematicians (in a broad sense) and the formation of modern Polish mathematical community against the background of the events of World War I. In particular we focus on the situations of Polish mathematicians in the Russian Empire (including those affiliatedwith the University of Warsaw, reactivated by Germans, and the Warsaw Polytechnics, founded already by Russians) and other countries.W drugiej części artykułu kontynuujemy przedstawianie indywidualnych losów matematyków polskich (w szerokim sensie) oraz kształtowanie się nowoczesnego polskiego środowiska matematycznego na tle wydarzeń pierwszej wojny światowej. W szczególności skupiamy się na sytuacji matematyków polskich w Cesarstwie Rosyjskim (także tych związanych z reaktywowanym przez Niemców Uniwersytetem Warszawskim i utworzoną jeszcze przez Rosjan Politechniką Warszawską) i innych krajach.

When, in California, Fremont's role changed from explorer to regular military officer, he soon ran into trouble and in 1848 was court-martialed for insubordination over the question of who had the authority to appoint him California's governor. Years later, after he had grown rich on California gold, served briefly as a U.S. senator and run unsuccessfully in 1856 for president as the first candidate of a new national party, the Republicans, Fremont got President Lincoln to appoint him a major general in the Civil War. Lincoln, who had almost run as Fremont's vice president in 1856, had campaigned for him vigorously. But within a few months of becoming military commander of the Department of the West, Fremont had so infuriated the president that Lincoln relieved him of his command. Less than six months later, the president offered him another command, but that, too, was short-lived. Fremont was a controversial figure in his own lifetime, and as our shame over what western expansion meant to the people already living in the West has grown, the notions of pathfinder, empire builder and Indian fighter have lost a lot of their luster. [Tom Chaffin], the author of this well-researched but sprawling new narrative biography of Fremont, elaborates his subject's many flaws but also tries to stand back from them and see him as a creature of his times. One large theme in this vein shows how Fremont was a cat's-paw for Sen. Benton's grandiose theories of an American empire based on trade with Asia. Many of the explorer's missions had less to do with Manifest Destiny than with finding an accessible trade route from Mississippi to the Pacific to fulfill Benton's dreams.

Nothing before or since trumped the collaboration among publisher William Randolph Hearst -- a kind of multimedia Medici, really -- the architect Julia Morgan and the young engineer and builder George Loorz. Their work together on the so-called castle at San Simeon, at Wintoon (the Hearst family compound in Northern California), along the Grand Canyon and in Mexico is illuminated as never before in a remarkable new book, \"Building for Hearst and Morgan: Voices from the George Loorz Papers\" by the independent scholar and archivist Taylor Coffman. This is particularly true, Coffman said, in the letters she wrote to Loorz's children and in the correspondence Hearst, Morgan and their construction supervisor exchanged concerning the beauty of their Central Coast and Northern California sites. Morgan, in particular, wrote frequently to Hearst about San Simeon, saying, \"This is a gorgeous place and we have to do right by it.\" Opinions differ on whether or not they did. San Simeon -- or Hearst's Castle, as it is more frequently known -- is part pastiche, part historical collage, part act of recovery, part a work of extravagant imagination. Among its prime movers, Morgan was certainly the most enigmatic: She was, by turn, the only woman in her Berkeley class of 1894 to graduate with a degree in engineering, protegee to the great San Francisco architect Bernard Maybeck, the first woman ever to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the first woman licensed to practice architecture in California, and the designer of more than 800 buildings, who gave years of her life to the collaborations with Hearst.

On his 1842 expedition, Fremont led a sturdy group of explorers, including Kit Carson, on a quest to find a pass through the Rockies leading to Oregon. Hired by the federal government to map out this territory, Fremont and his party reached the Continental Divide and jotted down numerous reports on the trip. Not completely satisfied with this task, he set off to ascend what he believed to be the highest peak in the Rockies ---Fremont's Peak. In spite of the dangers that his party encountered and his own high-altitude illnesses, Fremont's desire for glory and success overshadowed any other thought. [Tom Chaffin]'s biography has a workman-like character, but his use of Fremont's writings and his knack for telling a tale well brings to life an American explorer who has been largely forgotten. Photo An illustration from John Bigelow's 1856 John C. Fremont biography depicts Fremont trying out an experimental rubber raft along the Sweetwater River's confluence with the Platte. / From the collection of Tom Chaffin

Fremont, [Tom Chaffin] writes, began to see himself with greater vanity, attaching his name to monuments and assuming wide latitude to act without explicit cables from Washington. In praising his top deputies, Fremont mused that they would have served Napoleon well. \"One has little trouble ascertaining whom Fremont imagined as Napoleon,\" Chaffin wryly notes. The wider consequences of Fremont's work would become more than he could bear. His troubles would boil over when he became ensnared in the settler revolt in Mexican-controlled California, where Fremont suddenly found himself leading a well-armed party on the precipice of war. Unprepared to be a central figure in one of America's defining historical movements, Chaffin writes, Fremont - though a deft explorer and scientist - was ill-equipped to handle the imprecise theaters of war and politics. One of the most interesting aspects of Fremont, which Chaffin highlights, is his nuanced views on Indian policies and on slavery, his opposition to which impressed abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Chaffin argues persuasively that Fremont's proclamation freeing the first slaves in Missouri paved the way for Lincoln's sweeping Emancipation Proclamation less than a year later.

As unimpressive as all this may sound, [Tom Chaffin] is right in casting him in imperial terms. It is his exact role that is in question. During Fremont's career, American armies dispossessed Indians and seized one-third of Mexico. American diplomats outmaneuvered the British and Russians to gain the Oregon Country and Alaska. Chaffin's argument is that Fremont turned his father-in- law's version of empire -- an empire of commerce focusing on a \"road to India\" -- into the continental empire that his contemporaries achieved. But Fremont was more an agent of imperialism than a theorist, and Chaffin makes him carry an ideological and intellectual burden that he cannot bear. But reduced from architect to agent, Fremont is still a nice symbol of American Empire. \"Our road,\" Collis P. Huntington of the Southern Pacific Railroad told him, \"goes over your buried campfires and climbs many a grade you jogged over on a mule; I think we rather owe you this.\" Fremont supposedly made empire possible. What Huntington didn't mention, nor does Chaffin, is that while governor of Arizona (his last public failure), Fremont had taken money from the Southern Pacific and worked for its interests. Fremont may be a model for our imperial future as well as for our past. After a typical Fremont accident in which a boat overturned on the Kansas River in 1842, losing much of the expedition's supplies, Fremont wrote that only a traveler in a \"strange and inhospitable country\" could imagine his dilemma. The next day, however, Kansas Indians appeared and provisioned him with a cow, a calf, butter, pumpkins, beans, onions, lettuce and 30 pounds of coffee. This wasn't exactly Webvan, but neither was Fremont in most of his travels far from succor and supply. Fremont was a fairly competent cartographer and, with his wife's help, a skilled writer whose reports publicized him as much as the country they covered. Sometimes, even given the limited tools and skills he possessed, he was a shrewd observer. He was the first, according to Tom Chaffin, to recognize that the Great Basin did not have an outlet to the sea. But his ethnography rarely rose above dismissive judgments about Indians, despite the dependence of virtually all of his expeditions on members of the Delaware tribe and other Indian hunters.