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Seasons of Misery
The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment.Seasons of Miseryoffers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable early days, placing crisis-both experiential and existential-at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed. Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid the upheavals of the New World. This constant state of crisis also produced the first distinctively colonial literature as settlers attempted to process events that they could neither fully absorb nor understand. Bringing a critical eye to settlers' first-person accounts, Donegan applies a unique combination of narrative history and literary analysis to trace how settlers used a language of catastrophe to describe unprecedented circumstances, witness unrecognizable selves, and report unaccountable events.Seasons of Miseryaddresses both the stories that colonists told about themselves and the stories that we have constructed in hindsight about them. In doing so, it offers a new account of the meaning of settlement history and the creation of colonial identity.
eBook
The American West : a new interpretive history
The newly revised second edition of this concise, engaging, and unorthodox history of America's West has been updated to incorporate new research, including recent scholarship on Native American lives and cultures. An ideal text for course work, it presents the West as both frontier and region, examining the clashing of different cultures and ethnic groups that occurred in the western territories from the first Columbian contacts between Native Americans and Europeans up to the end of the twentieth century.
Book
The Nature of Gold
In 1896, a small group of prospectors discovered a stunningly rich pocket of gold at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, and in the following two years thousands of individuals traveled to the area, hoping to find wealth in a rugged and challenging setting. Ever since that time, the Klondike Gold Rush - especially as portrayed in photographs of long lines of gold seekers marching up Chilkoot Pass - has had a hold on the popular imagination.
In this first environmental history of the gold rush, Kathryn Morse describes how the miners got to the Klondike, the mining technologies they employed, and the complex networks by which they obtained food, clothing, and tools. She looks at the political and economic debates surrounding the valuation of gold and the emerging industrial economy that exploited its extraction in Alaska, and explores the ways in which a web of connections among America s transportation, supply, and marketing industries linked miners to other industrial and agricultural laborers across the country. The profound economic and cultural transformations that supported the Alaska-Yukon gold rush ultimately reverberate to modern times.
The story Morse tells is often narrated through the diaries and letters of the miners themselves. The daunting challenges of traveling, working, and surviving in the raw wilderness are illustrated not only by the miners compelling accounts but by newspaper reports and advertisements. Seattle played a key role as gateway to the Klondike. A public relations campaign lured potential miners to the West and local businesses seized the opportunity to make large profits while thousands of gold seekers streamed through Seattle.
The drama of the miners journeys north, their trials along the gold creeks, and their encounters with an extreme climate will appeal not only to scholars of the western environment and of late-19th-century industrialism, but to readers interested in reliving the vivid adventure of the West s last great gold rush.
eBook
Journey : a western
\"Set in the early eighteen hundreds in the wild desert wilderness of New Mexico Territory, Journey follows the lives of three distinctly different characters whose destinies are one: Journey, a fiercely independent, sixteen-year-old of mysterious origins; Reuben Moon, the stoic half Mexican, half Apache hunter who raises her; and Esau Burdock, a brutal, pragmatic, and wealthy slave trader. The story opens on a November night in 1833, the sky on fire with meteors, each character alone, experiencing the storm. The narrative then delves into their individual histories. But Journey, Reuben, and Esau's stories soon collide in the summer of 1834 when Esau holds a rendezvous of horse racing and trading. Despite being only sixteen, and a girl at that, Journey joins the race. She doesn't win, but she's caught the attention of Esau. A year later, a mountain lion is terrorizing the area and Esau comes across Journey and Reuben in the desert as he hunts for it. Journey has tamed a wild colt. The lion had killed its mother then attacked the colt, but Journey rescues it and nurses it back to health. Esau claims the colt is his by the law of the land. Journey refuses to give him up and so Esau threatens to hang her on the spot. Instead, they make a deal: Journey can work at Esau's stables for six months to earn the horse. And so she does. All the while the mountain lion continues to kill and Esau broods. He is a successful man, but he is a lonely one too, haunted by the death of his first slave and lover, Livy, and by their daughter Lilly Rose, both of whom betrayed him and are now dead. The story comes to a fever pitch when Esau spots a necklace Journey has worn her whole life, given to her by her mother, a necklace once worn by Esau's dead daughter, Lily Rose. From there, the story races to an end, as Esau, Journey, and Reuben are tested in ways they never dreamed imaginable. Brimming with action and panoramic in scope, in Journey Foreman provides a breathtaking narrative with a heroine you'll never forget\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The campus as entrepreneurial ecosystem: the University of Chicago
This paper employs Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis of American democracy to construct a framework for understanding the U.S. university campus as an entrepreneurial ecosystem. One question that immediately comes to mind when studying ecosystem performance is what the proper unit of analysis is: the country, the state, the city, the region, or something smaller, like an incubator or accelerator? This paper suggests that the open, innovative American frontier that closed at the end of the twentieth century has reemerged in the entrepreneurial economy on the U.S. campus. The contemporary campus entrepreneurial ecosystem offers the characteristics of Turner's frontier available assets, liberty, and diversity while creating opportunity, and fostering entrepreneurship and innovation. A case study of the University of Chicago explores governance of the campus as an entrepreneurial ecosystem and the output produced by that campus ecosystem.
Journal Article