The racers--an Italian prince and his chauffeur, a French racing driver, a con man, and several rival journalists--battle over steep inclines, through narrow mountain passages, and across the arid Gobi Desert. Competitors endure torrential rain and choking dust. There are barely any roads, and petrol is almost impossible to find. A global audience of millions follows each twist and turn, devouring reports telegraphed from the course.

More than its many adventures, the Peking-to-Paris Motor Challenge took place on the precipice of a new world. As the twentieth century dawned, imperial regimes in China and Russia were crumbling, paving the way for the rise of communist ones. The electric telegraph was rapidly transforming modern communication, and with it, the news media, commerce, and politics. Suspended between the old and the new, the Peking-to-Paris, as best-selling historian Kassia St. Clair writes, became a critical tipping point.

A gripping, immersive narrative of the race, The Race to the Future sets the drivers' derring-do (and occasional cheating) against the backdrop of a larger geopolitical and technological race to the future. Interweaving events from the fall of the Qing dynasty to the departure of the horse economy and the rise of gendered marketing, St. Clair shows how the Peking-to-Paris provided an impetus for profound social, cultural, and industrial change, while masterfully capturing the mounting tensions between nations and empires--all building up to the cataclysmic event that changed everything: the First World War.

Consistently mind-boggling, often funny, and occasionally hair-raising (Philip Ball), The Race to the Future is the incredible true story of the quest against the odds that propelled us along the road to modernity.

A history of Wisconsin's Indigenous past, present, and future--in Native peoples' own words.

Treaties made in the 1800s between the United States and the Indigenous nations of what is now Wisconsin have had profound influence on the region's cultural and political landscape. Yet few people realize that in the early part of that century, the Menominee and Ho-Chunk Nations of Wisconsin signed land treaties with several Indigenous nations from New York State. At the onset of the removal era, these eastern nations, including the Oneida Nation and the Six Nations Confederacy, were under constant pressure from the federal government and land speculators to move to lands around Green Bay and Lake Winnebago.

In this groundbreaking book, Carol A. Cornelius has compiled a careful account of these nation-to-nation treaties, in large part in the words of those Indigenous leaders who served as the voices and representatives of their nations. Drawing on a rich collection of primary sources, Cornelius walks readers through how, why, and for whom these treaties were made and how the federal government's failure and unwillingness to acknowledge their legitimacy led to the further loss of Indigenous lands. The living documents transcribed here testify to the complexity and sovereignty of Indigenous governance then and now, making this volume a vital resource for historians and an accessible introduction to Indigenous treatymaking in Wisconsin.

Winner of the 2024 Wisconsin Historical Society's Book of Merit Award

Finalist for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Adult Nonfiction History

Erica Hobsbawm discusses the evolution of European economics, politics, arts, sciences, and cultural life from the height of the industrial revolution to the First World War. Hobsbawm combines vast erudition with a graceful prose style to re-create the epoch that laid the basis for the twentieth century.

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On December 4th, 1872, a 100-foot brigantine was discovered drifting through the North Atlantic without a soul on board. Not a sign of struggle, not a shred of damage, no ransacked cargo--and not a trace of the captain, his wife and daughter, or the crew. What happened on board the ghost ship Mary Celeste has baffled and tantalized the world for 130 years. In his stunning new book, award-winning journalist Brian Hicks plumbs the depths of this fabled nautical mystery and finally uncovers the truth.

The Mary Celeste was cursed as soon as she was launched on the Bay of Fundy in the spring of 1861. Her first captain died before completing the maiden voyage. In London she accidentally rammed and sank an English brig. Later she was abandoned after a storm drove her ashore at Cape Breton. But somehow the ship was recovered and refitted, and in the autumn of 1872 she fell to the reluctant command of a seasoned mariner named Benjamin Spooner Briggs. It was Briggs who was at the helm when the Mary Celeste sailed into history.

In Brian Hicks's skilled hands, the story of the Mary Celeste becomes the quintessential tale of men lost at sea. Hicks vividly recreates the events leading up to the crew's disappearance and then unfolds the complicated and bizarre aftermath--the dark suspicions that fell on the officers of the ship that intercepted her; the farcical Admiralty Court salvage hearing in Gibraltar; the wild myths that circulated after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published a thinly disguised short story sensationalizing the mystery. Everything from a voodoo curse to an alien abduction has been hauled out to explain the fate of the Mary Celeste. But, as Brian Hicks reveals, the truth is actually grounded in the combined tragedies of human error and bad luck. The story of the Mary Celeste acquired yet another twist in 2001, when a team of divers funded by novelist Clive Cussler located the wreck in a coral reef off Haiti.

Written with the suspense of a thriller and the vivid accuracy of the best popular history, Ghost Ship tells the unforgettable true story of the most famous and most fascinating maritime mystery of all time.

The story of New England is built on an endless armature of fascinating stories of Yankee ingenuity and hardy, intrepid characters. Bootleggers, Lobstermen, and Lumberjacks will take the top fifty wildest episodes in the region's history and present them to the reader in one convenient, narrative-driven package.

It was the darkest period of modern history, particularly if you were Jewish in Europe. That is where Garmaine Pitchon was when Hitler ascended to power and unleashed a diabolical scheme to annihilate the Jewish race.

Follow along as Eli Gonzalez tells Garmaine story in a vibrant, chilling, and compelling narrative. Always a rambunctious, curious girl, Garmaine found a way to not wear the yellow Star of David and got to experience more than most before the war.

Garmaine experienced loss at an epic proportion. Her entire family was murdered, beginning with her grandmother, killed in her own grocery store by a Nazi officer who forced her to make him a sandwich as she walked over her just-murdered beloved grandmother's warm, flowing blood. Experience the horror of the 9-Day train ride to Auschwitz and become a first hand witness to when it was only Nazi's and Jews and the veil was pulled off and absolute evil abounded.

Yet, there is something about Garmaine's story, something divine that happened. What was meant to destroy her strengthened her. What was meant to stop her lineage became a force to help desperate mothers years after.

When there is a divine purpose for your life and that of your family, no one and nothing can stop it.

Traveling to Unknown Places presents a compelling, incisive analysis of how French and American writers reshaped their personal and collective identities as they traveled in foreign countries after the social upheavals of the eighteenth-century Atlantic revolutions. Delving into the experiences of renowned figures like Flora Tristan and Margaret Fuller alongside lesser-known postrevolutionary travelers, this book illuminates how cross-cultural encounters pushed writers to redefine their views of nationality, language, race, slavery, gender, religion, science, and political ideologies.

Lloyd Kramer deftly demonstrates how unsettling journeys challenged cultural preconceptions and fostered introspective writings that transcended geographical boundaries. By interweaving the perspectives of women and men whose travels led them far beyond their youthful social origins, Kramer unveils a rich tapestry of evolving selfhood, ambition, and political consciousness across the Atlantic world. Each traveler's experience was unique, but long journeys connected all these nineteenth-century writers with others who had traveled before; and trips into unknown, distant cultures also carried travelers toward previously unknown places within themselves.

A social and transnational history of black abolitionism in Brazil

Freedom's Horizon is a transnational history of black abolitionism in Brazil. In the last country to abolish slavery in the Western Hemisphere, enslaved and free Africans and their descendants crafted their visions of liberation by thinking comparatively about the uneven spread of abolition across the Atlantic world. Between the 1840s and 1860s, they acted on the idea that the end of slavery anywhere placed freedom on the horizon in Brazil. Thus, they pursued alliances with British diplomats; rose in arms at the sight of both Union and Confederate warships off Brazil's Atlantic coast; sought free soil at foreign consulates, on ships, and in maroon settlements (called quilombos); and organized uprisings for immediate abolition after learning of international emancipation struggles in the newspapers.

Isadora Moura Mota shows that through flight, marronage, rebellion, and literacy practices, enslaved and freed peoples in Brazil developed a geopolitical imagination in dialogue with the British campaign against the slave trade (banned in Brazil in 1850), French antislavery, the Haitian Revolution, the US Civil War, and the Triple Alliance War (1865-1870) in South America. Traditionally, historical research has focused on the 1870s and 1880s, when abolition emerged as Brazil's first national mass political movement, ultimately leading to the outlawing of slavery in 1888. By turning attention to earlier decades and to the role of literacy in the associational lives of afro-Brazilians, Freedom's Horizon reveals that abolitionism was more than just the cause of North Atlantic reformers, Latin American modernizing elites, or middle-class advocates. It was a grassroots movement that originated in the social and conceptual worlds of the enslaved and connected to a hemispheric black radical tradition.

The society in which Jane Austen lived and set her novels was a patriarchal one. Men ran the country nationally and locally, and had professional or business careers. Women were relegated to the subservient roles of wife, mother and housekeeper. What was it like to be a man in late Georgian and Regency England? How did Jane Austen, who lived in a predominantly male household, portray her male characters? How much inspiration did she draw from real men? This book explores the lives of the men in Jane's life, her relationship with them, how typical they were of men of their time and the impact they had on her life and writing. It also shows, through an in-depth look at the male characters in the novels, how men and women related to each other in society and how men maintained their dominant position.

Ces M moires sont ceux de Boisrond-Tonnerre. Tir s un tr s-petit nombre d'exemplaires, ils sont devenus excessivement rares, et pour moi, ce n'a t qu'apr s beaucoup de recherches et de peine que je suis arriv m'en procurer deux vermoulus et mutil s, mais heureusement se compl tant l'un l'autre, ce qui m'a permis d'en donner une dition compl te, laquelle j'ai joint les manifestes de ce m me homme politique.

Les M moires de Boisrond-Tonnerre, dans d'autres temps et dans d'autres lieux, ne se recommanderaient pas par leur valeur litt raira; mais ils doivent en avoir une pour Ha ti. Boisrond-Tonnerre est le premier qui ait song enregistrer les actes de la lutte que nous avons soutenue contre l'ambition du vainqueur de l'Europe. C'est l son titre une r impression; c'est l aussi un de ses honorables titres la renomm e; malheureusement ce genre de titres est rare pour lui. J'eusse de beaucoup pr f r me taire sur un homme qui a t plus funeste qu'utile, mais l'int r t de la v rit ne le permet pas. Et en enregistrant de nouveau, comme des monuments pr cieux, ceux de ses travaux que j'ai pu me procurer, je dois faire conna tre l'homme, afin de mettre en garde contre quelques-uns de ses jugements ou opinions.

Like Winchester's Krakatoa, The Year Without Summer reveals a year of dramatic global change long forgotten by history

In the tradition of Krakatoa, The World Without Us, and Guns, Germs and Steel comes a sweeping history of the year that became known as 18-hundred-and-froze-to-death. 1816 was a remarkable year--mostly for the fact that there was no summer. As a result of a volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora in Indonesia, weather patterns were disrupted worldwide for months, allowing for excessive rain, frost, and snowfall through much of the Northeastern U.S. and Europe in the summer of 1816.

In the U.S., the extraordinary weather produced food shortages, religious revivals, and extensive migration from New England to the Midwest. In Europe, the cold and wet summer led to famine, food riots, the transformation of stable communities into wandering beggars, and one of the worst typhus epidemics in history. 1816 was the year Frankenstein was written. It was also the year Turner painted his fiery sunsets. All of these things are linked to global climate change--something we are quite aware of now, but that was utterly mysterious to people in the nineteenth century, who concocted all sorts of reasons for such an ungenial season.

Making use of a wealth of source material and employing a compelling narrative approach featuring peasants and royalty, politicians, writers, and scientists, The Year Without Summer by William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman examines not only the climate change engendered by the volcano, but also its effects on politics, the economy, the arts, and social structures.

Originally conceived to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 was one of the largest (633 acres) and most influential aggregations of human talent, energy, and industry ever assembled. More than 27 million visitors entered the grounds (now Jackson Park) to marvel at the exhibits and displays housed in some 200 buildings, including those of 79 foreign governments and 38 states. Although the Fair had its share of firsts (original Ferris wheel, first midway, Edison's kinetoscope, etc.), its chief marvel was its architecture. It is that aspect which is emphasized in this striking photographic record.
Beginning with an overview of the fair's planning and conceptual stages, Stanley Appelbaum's well-researched text then proceeds to a fascinating discussion of the personalities, regional rivalries, and intense controversy surrounding the Beaux-Arts architecture (the White City style) of the fair, including its enormous impact on subsequent American architecture. The contributions of such outstanding architects and firms as R. M. Hunt; McKim, Mead and White; Frederick Law Olmsted; and Peabody and Stearns are described.
The book then becomes a building-by-building walking tour of the fair -- imaginatively reconstructed with the help of 128 sharply reproduced rare contemporary photographs, printed on fine coated stock, and a concise, fact-filled text. The placid basins, ponds, and Lagoon that graced the fairgrounds lend a serene aura to these priceless views of the great buildings and sights of the fair: the Beaux-Arts glories of the Administration and Agriculture Buildings; Daniel Chester French's statue of the Republic; the Columbian Fountain by Frederick MacMonnies; the Golden Door of Louis Sullivan's Transportation Building; the Peristyle; Mary Cassatt's mural in the Woman's Building; the pure classicism of the Palace of Fine Arts (now the Museum of Science and Industry); numerous state and foreign pavilions, and of course, the Midway -- the first separate amusement area at a World's Fair, and the reputed location of Little Egypt's celebrated danse du ventre.
In the concluding section, the author touches on other memorable aspects of the fair and its times: the Panic of 1893; the Pullman Strike; famous visitors (Archduke Ferdinand, the Spanish Infanta, etc.); cultural and social congresses, and finally, the disastrous fires that ultimately destroyed many of the buildings. For social and cultural historians, Chicagoans, and anyone interested in the special magic of a world's fair, this book is a loving and nostalgic look back -- to a time bathed in the golden light of the fin-de-siècle years, when a colossal spectacle of human achievement in art, science, and industry captured the world's attention for one magic and unforgettable moment.

A bold new account of European imperialism told through the history of water

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world's most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today.

Spanning the major European empires of the period, Corey Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities--but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfolk, and farmers to exploit water, and highlights its crucial role in the making and unmaking of the colonial order.

Revealing how the legacies of empire have persisted long after colonialism ebbed away, Liquid Empire provides needed historical perspective on the crises engulfing the world's waters, particularly in the Global South, where billions of people are faced with mounting water shortages, rising flood risks, and the relentless depletion of sea life.

Why some of the most vulnerable communities in Europe, from independent cities to new monarchies, welcomed refugees during the Age of Revolutions and prospered

Janet Polasky unearths an unappreciated history of the experience of asylum in Europe and the United States since the Age of the Democratic Revolutions. Facing squarely the destruction of asylum in our own time, she ends with a stunningly optimistic vision of a path toward its reconstruction.--Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies

Driven from their homelands, refugees from ancient times to the present have sought asylum in worlds turned upside down. Theirs is an age-old story. So too are the solutions to their plight.

In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, thousands of men and women took to the roads and waterways on both sides of the Atlantic--refugees in search of their inalienable rights. Although larger nations fortified their borders and circumscribed citizenship, two port cities, German Hamburg and Danish Altona, opened their doors, as did the federated Swiss cantons and the newly independent Belgian monarchy. The refugees thrived and the societies that harbored them prospered. The United States followed, not only welcoming waves of immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century but offering them citizenship as well.

In this remarkable story of the first modern refugee crisis, historian Janet Polasky shows how open doors can be a viable alternative to the building of border walls.

This unique and rich collection of narratives, written or dictated by formerly enslaved Africans between 1820 and 1876, offers a rare snapshot of African voices in the history of slavery. Including narratives from the Atlantic and Indian Ocean trades, as well as testimonies from enslaved people who never left the African continent, it expands the chronological and geographical scope of known accounts of enslavement, highlights the few but important women's narratives and provides thoughtful analysis and context about internal enslavement, the slave trade and the process of liberation.

Made up of 32 narratives, each carefully contextualised and introduced, this volume comprises some of the most substantial and previously unpublished accounts of the slave trade in the archives of the Church Missionary and Methodist Missionary Societies. Bringing new testimonies to light and enriching our understanding of enslaved voices, African Narratives of Slavery and Abolition is an important and much-needed contribution to the 'biographical turn' and study of the slave trade.

50 Barn Cupolas explains how old New England dairy barns came to have cupolas and presents fifty beautiful color images of unusual cupolas. Take a trip back to the nineteenth century when dairy farmers turned a ventilation problem into an opportunity to express their individuality.

Each cupola is different, and each one expresses the pride that its original owner took in his barn. Some have been lovingly restored - others are on their last legs.

This enjoyable book also documents the way fifty nineteenth-century carpenters creatively executed the same assignment.

The fascinating true story of how a group of visionary attorneys helped make American business synonymous with Big Business, and Wall Street the center of the financial world

Entertaining.--The Wall Street Journal - Fast-paced history.--Library Journal - Insightful and revealing.--Kirkus - Captivating.--BookPage

The legal profession once operated on a smaller scale--folksy lawyers arguing for fairness and justice before a judge and jury. But by the year 1900, a new type of lawyer was born, one who understood business as well as the law. Working hand in glove with their clients, over the next two decades these New York City white shoe lawyers devised and implemented legal strategies that would drive the business world throughout the twentieth century. These lawyers were architects of the monopolistic new corporations so despised by many, and acted as guardians who helped the kings of industry fend off government overreaching. Yet they also quietly steered their robber baron clients away from a public be damned attitude toward more enlightened corporate behavior during a period of progressive, turbulent change in America.

Author John Oller, himself a former Wall Street lawyer, gives us a richly-written glimpse of turn-of-the-century New York, from the grandeur of private mansions and elegant hotels and the city's early skyscrapers and transportation systems, to the depths of its deplorable tenement housing conditions. Some of the biggest names of the era are featured, including business titans J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, lawyer-statesmen Elihu Root and Charles Evans Hughes, and presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson.

Among the colorful, high-powered lawyers vividly portrayed, White Shoe focuses on three: Paul Cravath, who guided his client George Westinghouse in his war against Thomas Edison and launched a new model of law firm management--the Cravath system; Frank Stetson, the attorney general for financier J. P. Morgan who fiercely defended against government lawsuits to break up Morgan's business empires; and William Nelson Cromwell, the lawyer who taught the robber barons how to rob, and was best known for his instrumental role in creating the Panama Canal.

In White Shoe, the story of this small but influential band of Wall Street lawyers who created Big Business is fully told for the first time.

In roughly five decades, between 1848 and 1899, more gold was removed from the earth than had been mined in the 3,000 preceding years, bringing untold wealth to individuals and nations. But friction between Chinese and white settlers on the goldfields of California, Australia, and South Africa catalyzed a global battle over the Chinese Question would the United States and the British Empire outlaw Chinese immigration?

This distinguished history of the Chinese diaspora and global capitalism chronicles how a feverish alchemy of race and money brought Chinese people to the West and reshaped the nineteenth-century world. Drawing on ten years of research across five continents, prize-winning historian Mae Ngai narrates the story of the thousands of Chinese who left their homeland in pursuit of gold, and how they formed communities and organizations to help navigate their perilous new world. Out of their encounters with whites, and the emigrants' assertion of autonomy and humanity, arose the pernicious western myth of the coolie laborer, a racist stereotype used to drive anti-Chinese sentiment.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the United States and the British Empire had answered the Chinese Question with laws that excluded Chinese people from immigration and citizenship. Ngai explains how this happened and argues that Chinese exclusion was not extraneous to the emergent global economy but an integral part of it. The Chinese Question masterfully links important themes in world history and economics, from Europe's subjugation of China to the rise of the international gold standard and the invention of racist, anti-Chinese stereotypes that persist to this day.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE FOR GLOBAL CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING 2023

The late nineteenth century witnessed a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the first mass-produced cameras became available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and project an image of supremacy across the world.

Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers' personal albums to the collections of press agencies and government archives, The violence of colonial photography offers a new account of how conflict photography developed in the decades before the First World War. It explores the ways the camera was used to impose order on subject populations in Africa and Asia and to generate propaganda for the public in Europe, where a visual economy of violence was rapidly taking shape.

At the same time, the book reveals how photographs could escape the intentions of their creators, offering a means for colonial subjects to push back against oppression.