Cod all mighty

EQUIPPED WITH AGRICULTURE AND IRON, THE PEOPLES OF WESTERN Africa sought to build up their numbers, humanise the land, fertilise it with their dead, consolidate their societies, and send out more colonists to extend the struggle with nature. These were tasks so compelling that they gave social organisation and culture a character that still underlies African behaviour today. This chapter describes the evolution of colonising societies in the savanna and forest of West and West-Central Africa between the eleventh and mid-seventeenth centuries, before the Atlantic slave trade made its most widespread impact. But some evidence is also taken from later centuries when it illuminates long-standing social patterns. COLONISATION AND AGRICULTURE From Senegal to Angola, most western Africans of the forest and the immediately adjoining savanna spoke Niger-Congo languages. North of them, also in the savanna, were survivors of groups probably driven southwards by the desiccation of the Sahara, speaking either Nilo-Saharan languages (possibly including the Songhay people of the middle Niger) or Afroasiatic tongues (the Hausa of modern northern Nigeria). Desert peoples – Berbers, Moors, Tuareg – also spoke Afroasiatic languages. Further desiccation in the north and laborious forest clearance in the south bred a continuing southward population drift. This drift was not the only pattern of colonisation. The West African savanna had no single moving frontier like North America or Siberia. Rather, clusters of pioneer agriculturalists were scattered through the region at favoured and defensible locations like the early settlements along the middle Niger or on mounds above the floodplain south of Lake Chad. By the early second millennium ad, such areas of intensive crop production and rich culture had multiplied, often in river valleys or defensible highland outcrops where the hoe and digging-stick were the only practicable tools. During the eleventh century, for example, a people known to their successors as Tellem settled on the edge of the Bandiagara escarpment in modern Mali, cultivating the plateau margins, barely storing their grain and interring their dead in accessible caverns in the cliffs, and making some of the earliest cloth and the oldest wooden objects – hoes, statuettes, musical instruments, neck-rests for the dead – yet found in sub-Saharan Africa.

As Henry Hudson sailed up the broad river that would one day bear his name, he grew concerned that his Dutch patrons would be disappointed in his failure to find the fabled route to the Orient. What became immediately apparent, however, from the Indians clad in deer skins and good was that Hudson had discovered something just as tantalizing. The news of Hudson's 1609 voyage to America ignited a fierce competition to lay claim to this uncharted continent, teeming with untapped natural resources. The result was the creation of an American fur trade, which fostered economic rivalries and fueled wars among the European powers, and later between the United States and Great Britain, as North America became a battleground for colonization and imperial aspirations. In Fur, Fortune, and Empire, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin chronicles the rise and fall of the fur trade of old, when the rallying cry was get the furs while they last. Beavers, sea otters, and buffalos were slaughtered, used for their precious pelts that were tailored into extravagant hats, coats, and sleigh blankets. To read Fur, Fortune, and Empire then is to understand how North America was explored, exploited, and settled, while its native Indians were alternately enriched and exploited by the trade. As Dolin demonstrates, fur, both an economic elixir and an agent of destruction, became inextricably linked to many key events in American history, including the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812, as well as to the relentless pull of Manifest Destiny and the opening of the West. This work provides an international cast beyond the scope of any Hollywood epic, including Thomas Morton, the rabble-rouser who infuriated the Pilgrims by trading guns with the Indians; British explorer Captain James Cook, whose discovery in the Pacific Northwest helped launch America's China trade; Thomas Jefferson who dreamed of expanding the fur trade beyond the Mississippi; America's first multimillionaire John Jacob Astor, who built a fortune on a foundation of fur; and intrepid mountain men such as Kit Carson and Jedediah Smith, who sliced their way through an awe inspiring and unforgiving landscape, leaving behind a mythic legacy still resonates today. Concluding with the virtual extinction of the buffalo in the late 1800s, Fur, Fortune, and Empire is an epic history that brings to vivid life three hundred years of the American experience, conclusively demonstrating that the fur trade played a seminal role in creating the nation we are today.

Great species richness in eastern Asia is the effect of a long history with low extinction and speciati0n rates,while great richness in northwestern North America is due to recent rapid speciati0n . Data fai1 t0 support the theoretical dominacy of ecological determinism in favor of region— specific geophysica1 history as a basis for explaining regional species diversity . A species pool is proposed as the product of evolution . mmlgration, and extinction and thus postulates extant species richness to be and historica1 artifact rather than an ecologicaly determinate reality . UVer the past 1 00 years, scientists have accumulated much data on species diversity . Howeve ra omprehensive,rigorous,and general theory of species diversity is lacking(Solbrig 1991) . Ricklefs (1 987)thus claimed that species diversity is“the major , unexplained pattern in natura1 history一, one that“mocks our ignorance . here are three basic assumptions about the origin of species diversity . (1)Life controls environments·The Gaia hypothesis , which was restated by Loveloc k and Margulis two decades ago

The fur trade of North America was part of a broader movement of European expansion into the northern forests of Asia and America. Its two branches started with similar timing near the beginning of the seventeenth century and continued until they changed form drastically in the early nineteenth. Both were driven by European economic demand for fur garments, and both were carried out within the institutional forms of a trading-post empire. This chapter will be concerned principally with the North Amerian fur trade, but with the Siberian fur trade in the background to help maintain the perspective of world history. The two branches of the movement were similar in many ways, but different in others. The North American setting: epidemiology and culture The most striking difference was epidemiological, arising from the long separation of the Americas from the disease environments of the Afro- Eurasian landmass. The Americas were originally populated from Asia, but regular contact was then broken for tens of thousands of years before it was reestablished by Columbus and his successors after 1492. In the interval, people in the Americas developed their own food crops, their own domestic animals, and their own patterns of culture. These American cultures lacked some of the technology that was crucial to Old World civilization. They lacked large animals capable of pulling carts; hence they had no need for applications of rotary motion like the wheel. More important, they lacked the patterns of disease that had become generalized through the Afro-Eurasian intercommunicating zone. A few diseases were peculiar to the Americas, but the serious problem was the lack of acquired immunities to the common diseases of Europe, Africa, and Asia.

The collection embraces a wide range of fields related to Medieval Latin, including poetry, hymnology, music, theology and philosophy, historiography, and inscriptions, in addition to Latin linguistics and metrics. Contributions are drawn from leading scholars from many European countries as well as from North America and Australia. The volume should prove invaluable to all students of this period. Latin Culture in the Eleventh Century is a collection of approximately sixty papers presented at the Third International Conference on Medieval Latin Studies held at the University of Cambridge in September 1998. The collection embraces a wide range of fields related to Medieval Latin, including poetry, hymnology, music, theology and philosophy, historiography, and inscriptions, in addition to Latin linguistics and metrics. Contributions are drawn from leading scholars from many European countries as well as from North America and Australia. The volume should prove invaluable to all students of this period

A Pictorial History of the Canoe The Canoe: A Living Tradition. Ed. John Jennings. Toronto: Firefly, 2002. What a beautiful book! I open it at random at pages 42-43, and there on the left is a picture of a North canoe, on the ground at the Hudson's Bay Company Bear Island post on Lake Temagami. It contains seven men and a dog. The caption points out that this picture must have been very carefully set up, because normally canoemen got out of a birchbark before reaching shore. On the right-hand page another birchbark fur-trade canoe, this time loaded with eight men and gear. Below it, a woodcut of a York boat on Lake Winnipeg by Walter Phillips, showing the artist's great debt to Japanese printmakers in his handling of waves, space and colour. It doesn't matter where you open this book; each page is a feast for the eyes. There are pictures from Canada's earliest times, through the first photographs of birchbark canoes, paintings from past to present times, photo essays on many types of craft including West Coast dugouts, birchbark canoes and the large Umiaks the Inuit built. The pictures form a pretty complete essay on the canoe, its history and use. Combined with these pictures is a series of essays on the history of the and other craft used by North America's Aboriginal peoples - it is after all a bit of a stretch to call a kayak, which is propelled with a double-bladed paddle, or Umiaks (the large skin-covered boats of the Inuit) canoes, any more than were York boats. But all have their place in the history of water craft in North America, either in their use by Aboriginal people or as crafts that rivaled the in some uses. It does not do to be a purist, and the broader interpretation of canoe does allow for a better overview of paddle-propelled craft on the rivers, lakes, and sea waters of North America. The first section is on Native craft, and the first essay, by John Jennings, introduces the Aboriginal birchbark canoe, the main protagonist of the book, in a thoroughly scholarly way. So does the second, on the frontier and by Jennings as well, which discusses the use of the birchbark by the early explorers, missionaries, and traders as North America was discovered, opened up and settled by Europeans. The history related in these two chapters needs to be told and retold. The exploits of the early travellers by canoe, especially the French coureurs de bois, stand among the great adventure stories of all time. They, and the evolution of the fur trade through the use of the canoe, explain why Canada is logically an east-west nation, at a time when so many of the commercial and cultural exchanges have become north-south at the expense of internal Canadian cohesion and identity. The fur trade, and the French in the North American West, get well-deserved attention in this chapter. The photographs and other illustrations in these two chapters nicely complement the text. The evolution from the comparatively small canoes of the pre-contact Aboriginal people, which rarely exceeded 25 feet, to the huge Montreal canoes of the fur trade, which reached 40 feet, is not only well covered, but also forms its own fascinating story of the cultural and economic exchanges between Europeans and Aboriginal peoples, and the evolution of an Aboriginal technology under commercial pressures. The next chapter, by Rick Nash, discusses the building of birchbark canoes by Aboriginal people, and the types of craft constructed by the various Aboriginal groups. This chapter as well is lavishly illustrated with appropriate photographs and drawings from a wide range of sources. Following it is a five-page, 28-photograph essay on the building of a birchbark canoe. Next comes a companion piece by David Finch and Don Gardner that describes the craft of the Aboriginal people of the inland Northwest. Much of this is devoted to the birchbark canoes of the Dogrib Indians, which in many ways are constructed and look like a cross between the birchbark canoes of the more southerly Indians and the kayaks of the Inuit. …

The same press that produced The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied, 1832–1834 in three massive volumes between 2008 and 2012 has released a user-friendly one volume condensed version of this important eyewitness source. The Joslyn Art Museum curator/historian Marsha Gallagher, who co-edited the complete version with Stephen S. Witte, chose the selections, representing around 200,000 words, or approximately one-third of the complete version. In her own words, she provides the reader “a good overview and understanding of where Maximilian went in North America, what he saw, and what he thought was significant about both” (p. xiii). The text is supplemented with thirty-two color and sixteen black-and-white illustrations from Maximilian’s own hand, as well as from that of the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer. As in her previous work, Gallagher provides the reader with short biographies of the most frequently mentioned Cast of Characters who appear in Maximilian’s journals. These include a few of the principal Indian leaders met on the journey, as well as many non-Indian hosts and acquaintances representing men of science in Boston and Philadelphia as well as fur traders and clerks from St. Louis to Fort McKenzie, below present-day Great Falls, Montana.

This article examines the relationship between the erudite hermit Peter Damian (c.1007–1072) and the abbey of Montecassino through a study of the manuscripts of his works housed in the abbey's scriptorium. Damian was a prolific writer and reformer whose ideas on spiritual perfection helped to shape the ideals of the ‘Gregorian Reform’ movement in the eleventh century. Through nurturing important relationships with monasteries such as Montecassino, Damian was able to articulate his ideas on monastic behaviour and how they translated into practice. Damian's correspondence with Montecassino revealed his thoughts on the connection between the eremitic and coenobitic vocations and how monks might ascend the spiritual hierarchy. A study of the manuscripts of Damian's letters reveals how the monks at Montecassino read and responded to those texts which were not only addressed to their community but also to other institutions. Whilst recent studies have informed historians about the nature of the spiritual life at Montecassino in the Middle Ages, and also of certain aspects of Damian's connection with the institution, to date there has been no study of the Damian manuscripts for what they can reveal of this complex spiritual relationship. This article therefore aims to contribute to recent scholarship on this issue whilst also seeking to shed light on the manuscript culture of eleventh-century monastic reform institutions.

I summarize the current state of economists’ contributions to the economic history of Indigenous Peoples in North America. After briefly providing some context, I describe the current state of the literature, which is dominated by studies focusing on the period post-1800, over 300 years after contact. With a few exceptions, the literature largely paints a story of dispossession and decline after a golden era of economic interdependence in the fur trade. While valuable, I suggest this story is just a glimpse of something substantively more significant and fundamental to the economic history of North America. Understanding the centrality of Indigenous Peoples in North American economic history broadly and of Indigenous Peoples’ continued existence as economic actors offers yet unseen opportunities to revise our understanding of North American economic development. Beyond this, studying Indigenous North American history offers new opportunities to understand and reimagine how nations and economic systems rise, fall, interact with changing ecological systems, and persist in the face of dramatic change.

During the four years of the second Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) government in Bulgaria from 1997 until 2001 the Bulgarian Orthodox Church continued to be split by an apparently insoluble schis...

Latin Culture in the Eleventh Century is a collection of approximately sixty papers presented at the Third International Conference on Medieval Latin Studies held at the University of Cambridge in September 1998. The collection embraces a wide range of fields related to Medieval Latin, including poetry, hymnology, music, theology and philosophy, historiography, and inscriptions, in addition to Latin linguistics and metrics. Contributions are drawn from leading scholars from many European countries as well as from North America and Australia. The volume should prove invaluable to all students of this period.

This concise and balanced history traces the 300-year saga of the pirates and warlords who poured out of Scandinavia between the eighth and eleventh centuries, terrorizing, conquering, and ultimately settling vast tracts of land throughout Europe. Undaunted by the might of the Arab caliphates and the Byzantine Empire, they founded Russia, originated the bloodline that came to rule France, and created a North Sea empire that included England. They also established settlements across the North Atlantic, notably in Iceland and Greenland, and their adventurous spirit and extraordinary seafaring skills led them to explore and briefly build colonies in North America. These were the Vikings, initially ferocious pagan warriors seeking land and booty under the banners of their gods, but eventually belligerent Christian kings commanding vast armies. Martin Arnold provides a lively and accessible account of the early medieval period that became known as the Viking Age. Drawing on rich literary and archaeological source material, the first half of the book focuses especially on Viking culture, religious beliefs, and battle tactics and weaponry. The second half ranges over the four main theaters of Viking activity—the British Isles, Western Europe, the Slavic regions, and the North Atlantic settlements. Arnold vividly illustrates the two faces of the Vikings: on the one hand, savage, greedy, and implacable; on the other, adventurous, innovative, and artistic.

Latin Culture in the Eleventh Century is a collection of approximately sixty papers presented at the Third International Conference on Medieval Latin Studies held at the University of Cambridge in September 1998. The collection embraces a wide range of fields related to Medieval Latin, including poetry, hymnology, music, theology and philosophy, historiography, and inscriptions, in addition to Latin linguistics and metrics. Contributions are drawn from leading scholars from many European countries as well as from North America and Australia. The volume should prove invaluable to all students of this period.

From the eleventh century onward, a number of city states arose in Italybased on communes, free of feudalism, and controlled by the city’s merchants and financiers. The city states went into a rapid decline with the rise of nation states in northern Europe. Following the logic of capitalist accumulation, the new nation states acquired colonies from the beginning. England already had its oldest colony in Ireland, conquered by Henry II in the late twelfth century. From the seventeenth century, it acquired colonies in North America and the Caribbean, and in the eighteenth century it conquered most of India, which became its most valuable prize. After defeating France in 1815, it became the sole superpower until it was challenged by imperial Germany in World War I. After the interregnum of the interwar years, the United Statesemerged as the most powerful nation economically and militarily, its paramountcy being challenged by the Soviet Union until it went into terminal decline from the late seventies. By 2020its superpower status is wasbeing challenged by China and Russia. In the meantime most other European countries had acquired colonies. Most of these colonies became formally independent after World War II, some not until the late seventies.

In this year of the tercentenary of the incorporation of the Hudson's Bay Company it is appropriate to examine the founding membership of what may still be called “The Great Company.” It is surprising that the literature which chronicles the early adventures of the Company in the northern reaches of Canada has largely neglected a close scrutiny of the founders. The purpose of this article is to examine the early partnership, note the walks of life and social groups from which the adventurers came, and identfy those who formed the nucleus of leadership in planning and executing the endeavors for which the Hudson's Bay Company became renowned.In general, the men who established the Hudson's Bay Company were representative of the era of extensive oversea expansion that characterized Restoration England. They were essentially promoters and imperialists. Yet they were not the first of their kind, for in the thirteenth century merchants had formed regulated organizations for prosecuting the cloth trade. Nor did they ever possess the financial power or parliamentary lobby of the East India Company. Nonetheless, their interest in the fur trade, in a Northwest passage and in general scientific inquiry prompted these men to lay the basis of a firm that by the height of its influence in the early 1840 was engaged in business throughout most of British North America as well as on the Pacific slope south to San Francisco Bay, in the Pacific islands, and in Canton. Today this organization remains the oldest merchant trading company in the world and the oldest business firm on the North American continent.