Search results for ""Author Peter C. Mancall""
University of Pennsylvania Press Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic
In the sixteenth-century Atlantic world, nature and culture swirled in people's minds to produce fantastic images. In the South of France, a cloister's painted wooden panels greeted parishioners with vivid depictions of unicorns, dragons, and centaurs, while Mayans in the Yucatan created openings to buildings that resembled a fierce animal's jaws, known to archaeologists as serpent-column portals. In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the century following the historic voyages of Christopher Columbus. Through innovative use of oral history and folklore maintained for centuries by Native Americans, as well as original use of spectacular manuscript atlases, paintings that depict on-the-spot European representations of nature, and texts that circulated imperfectly across the ocean, he reveals how the encounter between the old world and the new changed the fate of millions of individuals. This inspired work of Atlantic, European, and American history begins with medieval concepts of nature and ends in an age when the printed book became the primary avenue for the dissemination of scientific information. Throughout the sixteenth century, the borders between the natural world and the supernatural were more porous than modern readers might realize. Native Americans and Europeans alike thought about monsters, spirits, and insects in considerable depth. In Mancall's vivid narrative, the modern world emerged as a result of the myriad encounters between peoples who inhabited the Atlantic basin in this period. The centuries that followed can be comprehended only by exploring how culture in its many forms—stories, paintings, books—shaped human understanding of the natural world.
£21.99
Cornell University Press Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture along the Upper Susquehanna, 1700–1800
Valley of Opportunity recreates an age when Indians, colonists, and post-Revolutionary settlers embraced a similar dream: to create a successful economy in the rural hinterland of the middle colonies. Peter C. Mancall draws on abundant evidence from seldom-used archives in the region, as well as from libraries on both sides of the Atlantic, to reconstruct their daily economic life. The author describes the varied economic transformations that took place in the area, considering these changes from an environmental as well as an economic standpoint. He shows how different groups of people perceived the resources of the region and how their perceptions shaped settlement patterns, land use, and the formation of commercial networks. Ultimately, each of the three peoples looked beyond the mountains that set the boundaries of their physical world and tried to establish ties to the larger commercial network that linked North America to Europe. Mancall offers connections between the development of a particular region, previously overlooked by most historians, and the wide pattern of American economic change. He breaks through old ethnocentric barriers of settlement history by portraying Indian people in their full diversity and by including Indians and whites as actors of comparable significance, and he shows how attitudes that developed in the colonial period affected economic patterns well beyond the Revolution. Integrating a range of disciplines, from anthropology through ecology and geography to zoology, he seeks to answer the questions: what did different groups of people make of the natural resources of this river valley and how did they allocate the rewards? His answers provide a novel overview of the economic culture of the eighteenth century. Studded with sharp insights and attention-catching quotations that mirror everyday life of the times, Valley of Opportunity will appeal to those interested in the development of the American economy, the impact of the Revolution on urban Americans, and the relations between the peoples who together created a vibrant world along the edges of European settlement in North America.
£34.20
University of Pennsylvania Press Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic
In the sixteenth-century Atlantic world, nature and culture swirled in people's minds to produce fantastic images. In the South of France, a cloister's painted wooden panels greeted parishioners with vivid depictions of unicorns, dragons, and centaurs, while Mayans in the Yucatan created openings to buildings that resembled a fierce animal's jaws, known to archaeologists as serpent-column portals. In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the century following the historic voyages of Christopher Columbus. Through innovative use of oral history and folklore maintained for centuries by Native Americans, as well as original use of spectacular manuscript atlases, paintings that depict on-the-spot European representations of nature, and texts that circulated imperfectly across the ocean, he reveals how the encounter between the old world and the new changed the fate of millions of individuals. This inspired work of Atlantic, European, and American history begins with medieval concepts of nature and ends in an age when the printed book became the primary avenue for the dissemination of scientific information. Throughout the sixteenth century, the borders between the natural world and the supernatural were more porous than modern readers might realize. Native Americans and Europeans alike thought about monsters, spirits, and insects in considerable depth. In Mancall's vivid narrative, the modern world emerged as a result of the myriad encounters between peoples who inhabited the Atlantic basin in this period. The centuries that followed can be comprehended only by exploring how culture in its many forms—stories, paintings, books—shaped human understanding of the natural world.
£26.99
