Colony World

The New World of the 18th century was dotted with failed colonies, and New South Wales nearly joined them. The motley crew of unruly marines and bedraggled convicts who arrived at Botany Bay in 1788 in leaky boats nearly starved to death. They could easily have been murdered by hostile locals, been overwhelmed by an attack from French or Spanish expeditions or been brought undone by the Castle Hill uprising of 1804. Yet through fortunate decisions, a few remarkably good leaders and, most of all, good luck, Sydney survived and thrived.

In 1609, two years after its English founding, colonists struggled to stay alive in a tiny fort at Jamestown. John Smith fought to keep order. When he left, desperate colonists ate lizards, rats, and human flesh. Meanwhile, the Virginia-bound Sea Venture was shipwrecked on Bermuda, the dreaded, uninhabited “Isle of Devils”. Bermuda became England’s second New World colony in 1612. A Tale of Two Colonies examines the existing sources on the colonies, sets them in a transatlantic context, and weighs them against circumstantial evidence.

When saving a life in 1946 Alabama, Amish giant Konrad took one in return and must run before the electric chair claims him. In New York, Nazi propaganda fools him into jumping on a ship to Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich. In 1965, at Gothengau, an SS-run colony in Ukraine, a terrorist rocket attack on Berlin compels soldier-farmer Konrad to focus on his duty: commanding an SS convict battalion. He must flex his muscle for the armed forces or the Holocaust's perpetrators--his superiors, colleagues, and neighbors in Ukraine.

German South West Africa: The History and Legacy of Germany’s Biggest African Colony chronicles the politics and conflicts that marked Germany’s efforts to colonize German South West Africa. You will learn about German South West Africa like never before.

Cameroon, 1929. As colonial powers fight for influence in Africa, French military surgeon Eugène Jamot is dispatched to Cameroon to lead the fight against sleeping sickness there. But despite his humanitarian intentions, the worst comes to pass: seven hundred local villagers are left blind as a result of medical malpractice by a doctor under Jamot’s watch.

A Recommended Summer Read from The Verge and io9 A Recommended June Read from Hello Giggles and Tor.com When the world ends, where will you go? In a breathtakingly vivid and emotionally gripping debut novel, one woman must confront the emptiness in the universe—and in her own heart—when a...

Gordon Wood's wondrous accomplishment here is to bring these men and their times down to earth and within our reach, showing us just who they were and what drove them. In so doing, he shows us that although a lot has changed in two hundred years, to an amazing degree the virtues these founders defined for themselves are the virtues we aspire to still.

The settlement of North America was the beginning of a new era in human history. The oppressive laws, habits, and customs of the Old World no longer held such power over those who had made the treacherous journey across the Atlantic. No reigning monarch or dictatorial power ever stepped onto the ground of North America. Yet, despite this, the men and women of the 13 colonies of North America were still not free until they threw off the shackles of England's government and asserted their own rights.

NPR Best Book of 2015 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER The author of the celebrated Victory tells the fascinating story of the intertwined lives of Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first and second women to serve as Supreme Court justices. The relationship...

A groundbreaking global exploration of the ideas that drove the American Revolution, showing how widespread revolutionary impulses were in the eighteenth century, shining a light on the defiance of marginalized peoples all over the world While the American Revolution is often celebrated as the...

In We Could Perceive No Sign of Them: Failed Colonies in North America, 1526-1689, historians David MacDonald and Raine Waters tell the fascinating stories of the many attempts to establish a European foothold in the New World, from the first Spanish colony in 1526 on the coast of Georgia to the final disastrous French endeavors near the arctic.

*National Bestseller* A sweeping account of America's oldest unsolved mystery, the people racing to unearth its answer, and the sobering truths--about race, gender, and immigration--exposed by the Lost Colony of Roanoke In 1587, 115 men, women, and children arrived at Roanoke Island on the coast...

Franz Kafka nació en Praga el 3 de Julio de 1883, en el seno de una acomodada familia de comerciantes judíos de lengua alemana. A los 23 años se doctoró en derecho. Al año siguiente padeció los primeros síntomas de tuberculosis. A pesar de la enfermedad, de la hostilidad de su familia hacia su vocación literaria, de sus cinco tentativas matrimoniales frustradas y de su empleo de burócrata en una compañía de seguros, Franz Kafka se dedicó intensamente a la literatura.

French Senegal: The History of the French Colony and Senegal’s Transition to Independence examines how France established the colony, and how that colony affected events in the 20th century before Senegal became a modern nation.

The modern history of Africa was, until very recently, written on behalf of the indigenous races by the white man, who had forcefully entered the continent during a particularly hubristic and dynamic phase of European history. In 1884, Prince Otto von Bismark, the German chancellor, brought the plenipotentiaries of all major powers of Europe together to deal with Africa's colonization in such a manner as to avoid provocation of war. This event - known as the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 - galvanized a phenomenon that came to be known as the Scramble for Africa.

King Leopold II of Belgium emerges from the pages of history as a curious character. He was a member of a privileged clique of European monarchs, bereft of power but rich, indulgent, and indolent. Leopold certainly availed himself of all the pleasures of court life, but he was also shrewd, astonishingly competent, and avaricious to an almost unimaginable degree.

Don't think that because it is such a small country with only about 17 million people, it should be neglected. The Netherlands has a long history, with a high influence on our cultures, trading routes, the stock market, business, and art. The Dutch were all over the world. They "owned" and colonized a big portion of what was then the known world. They were among the first settlers, had the biggest haven, and biggest fleet for some time. The Dutch East-Indian Trading Company, or VOC, is probably the biggest or at least one of the biggest companies that has ever existed.