Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
Title | Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? PDF eBook |
Author | Thomas Geoghegan |
Publisher | The New Press |
Pages | 354 |
Release | 2011 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 1595587063 |
politics & government.
Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War
Title | Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War PDF eBook |
Author | Howard W. French |
Publisher | Liveright Publishing |
Pages | 444 |
Release | 2021-10-12 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1631495836 |
Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history. Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity? In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa. Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history. While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day. “Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.
Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
Title | Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? PDF eBook |
Author | Thomas Geoghegan |
Publisher | The New Press |
Pages | 354 |
Release | 2011-10-04 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 1595587896 |
Try to imagine your life in a full-blown European social democracy, especially the German version. Free public goods, a bit of worker control, and whopping trade surpluses? Social democracy doesn't sound too bad. Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? reveals where you might have been happier—or at least had time off to be unhappy properly. It explains why Americans should pay attention to Germany, where ordinary people can work three hundred to four hundred hours a year less than we do and still have one of the most competitive economies in the world.
China's Second Continent
Title | China's Second Continent PDF eBook |
Author | Howard W. French |
Publisher | Vintage |
Pages | 306 |
Release | 2015-02-03 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0307946657 |
A New York Times Notable Book Chinese immigrants of the recent past and unfolding twenty-first century are in search of the African dream. So explains indefatigable traveler Howard W. French, prize-winning investigative journalist and former New York Times bureau chief in Africa and China, in the definitive account of this seismic geopolitical development. China’s burgeoning presence in Africa is already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people. From Liberia to Senegal to Mozambique, in creaky trucks and by back roads, French introduces us to the characters who make up China’s dogged emigrant population: entrepreneurs singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, and less-lucky migrants barely scraping by but still convinced of Africa’s opportunities. French’s acute observations offer illuminating insight into the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: Why China is making these cultural and economic incursions into the continent; what Africa’s role is in this equation; and what the ramifications for both parties and their people—and the watching world—will be in the foreseeable future. One of the Best Books of the Year at • The Economist • The Guardian • Foreign Affairs
Africa
Title | Africa PDF eBook |
Author | John Reader |
Publisher | Penguin UK |
Pages | 816 |
Release | 1998-11-05 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0141926937 |
Drawing on many years of African experience, John Reader has written a book of startling grandeur and scope that recreates the great panorama of African history, from the primeval cataclysms that formed the continent to the political upheavals facing much of the continent today. Reader tells the extraordinary story of humankind's adaptation to the ferocious obstacles of forest, river and desert, and to the threat of debilitating parasites, bacteria and viruses unmatched elsewhere in the world. He also shows how the world's richest assortment of animals and plants has helped - or hindered - human progress in Africa.
The 1619 Project: Born on the Water
Title | The 1619 Project: Born on the Water PDF eBook |
Author | Nikole Hannah-Jones |
Publisher | Penguin |
Pages | 49 |
Release | 2021-11-16 |
Genre | Juvenile Nonfiction |
ISBN | 0593307356 |
The 1619 Project’s lyrical picture book in verse chronicles the consequences of slavery and the history of Black resistance in the United States, thoughtfully rendered by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and Newbery honor-winning author Renée Watson. A young student receives a family tree assignment in school, but she can only trace back three generations. Grandma gathers the whole family, and the student learns that 400 years ago, in 1619, their ancestors were stolen and brought to America by white slave traders. But before that, they had a home, a land, a language. She learns how the people said to be born on the water survived. And the people planted dreams and hope, willed themselves to keep living, living. And the people learned new words for love for friend for family for joy for grow for home. With powerful verse and striking illustrations by Nikkolas Smith, Born on the Water provides a pathway for readers of all ages to reflect on the origins of American identity.
The Lost Continent
Title | The Lost Continent PDF eBook |
Author | Bill Bryson |
Publisher | VNR AG |
Pages | 326 |
Release | 1989 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 9780060161583 |
"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.