Lloyd's List Ports of the World 2008

John Fossey
Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse in London, 1688, was a gathering place for sailors, merchants, and shipowners. Lloyd catered to them with reliable shipping news and the shiping industry met to discuss insurance deals. This was the nucleus of the Royal Exchange as The Society of Lloyd's. Between 1688 and 1807, Lloyds primary business was the insurance of ships engaged in slave trading, which changed to insuring other cargo after abolition.

A Brief History of the Caribbean
From the Arawak and Carib to the Present

Jan Rogozinski
This comprehensive volume takesus through more than five hundred years of Caribbean history, beginning with Columbus's arrival in the Bahamas in 1492. A Brief History of the Caribbean traces the people and events that have marked this constantly shifting region, encompassing everything from economic booms and busts to epidemics, wars, and revolutions, and bringing to life figures as Sir Francis Drake, Blackbeard, Toussaint Louverture, Fidel Castro, the Duvaliers, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Revised and updated, with new chapters that reflect the islands' most recent social, economic, and political developments, is a work of impeccable scholarship. Featuring maps. charts, tables, and photographs, it is the ideal guide to the region and its people.

Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Series in History & Culture)

Ports of the World : Prints from the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich c.1700-1870

Cindy McCreery
Dr. Mcreery is currently Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctural Research Fellow in the School of History at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She has published articles on eighteenth-century British prints, including political and social caricatures and maritme engravings. Ports of the World is a survey of the golden age of print production as seen through examples from the collection of the National Maritime Museum. Prints are analyzed as commercial and art objects, rather than as just historical records of matters maritime.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History: Four-volume set
$595.00

Excerpted from Booklist: Much more than the usual naval battles, warships, and nautical terms, this impressive and wide-ranging A-Z encyclopedia seeks "to be a reference work for the entire field of maritime history." Editor Hattendorf (president of the American Society for Oceanic History) heads an inspiring list of over 400 primarily international contributors in an attempt to integrate maritime history into a global economic, cultural, military, and political context. More than 900 entries are detailed and multidimensional. For example, Wars, maritime includes 11 subentries and covers 56 pages. This integrated approach would be separate and distinct in other encyclopedias.

The son of a well-to-do butcher, Defoe became a London tradesman and merchant. He was well educated and kept notebooks from an early age in which he wrote short fictions. He also daydreamed about adventurous voyages in the South Seas and was excited by the prospect of colonizing new (and utopian) lands. These ideas were to bear fruit in his great work, Robinson Crusoe .

A Journal of the Plague Year

Daniel Defoe

Defoe's account of the bubonic plague that swept London in 1665 remains as vivid as it is harrowing. Based on Defoe's own childhood memories and prodigious research, A Journal of the Plague Year walks the line between fiction, history, and reportage. In meticulous and unsentimental detail it renders the daily life of a city under siege; the often gruesome medical precautions and practices of the time; the mass panics of a frightened citizenry; and the solitary travails of Defoe's narrator, a man who decides to remain in the city through it all, chronicling the course of events with an unwavering eye. Defoe's Journal remains perhaps the greatest account of a natural disaster ever written. This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the original edition published in 1722.

From the book: "It was about the Beginning of September 1664, that I, among the Rest of my Neighbours, heard in ordinary Discourse, that the Plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Roterdam, in the Year 1663, whether they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant among some Goods, which were brought home by their Turkey Fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not, from whence it come; but all agreed, it was come into Holland again . . . "

Asia: China
Assignment: Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution (Series in Contemporary Photography)

Jack Birns
The author's photographs from 1947 Shanghai express the brutality, confusion, and tumult of a country on the verge of major change, capturing the beggars, street executions, refugees, prostitutes, and ordinary people who made this city a spectacular locale for photo-journalists during the revolution. (History)The author's photographs from 1947 Shanghai express the brutality, confusion, and tumult of a country on the verge of major change, capturing the beggars, street executions, refugees, prostitutes, and ordinary people who made this city a spectacular locale for photo-journalists during the revolution.

The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and Their Shared History, 1400-1900
Thomas Benjamin

The Atlantic World: A History, 1400 - 1888

Douglas R. Egerton, Alison Games, Kris Lane, Donald R. Wright

Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

J.H. Elliott

Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Reinterpreting History)

Jack P. Greene, Philip D. Morgan, Editors

A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820

John K. Thornton

Australia

The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

Robert Hughes
Erudite, colorful and brutal telling of the story of the development of Australia from England's infamous method of ridding herself of her "unwanted classes." Extraordinary detail of the movement of ship loads of prisoners across thousands of miles of open water to an unknown, seemingly desolate land. The author quotes hundreds of original sources, some of which are painful, other humorous. Includes tales of Australia's gold rush. Some illustrations.
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1987

The Barbary Wars:
American Independence in the Atlantic World

Frank Lambert
American independence was secured from Britain on September 3, 1783. Within a year, the American merchant ship Betsey was captured by "Sallee Rovers," state-sponsored pirates operating out of the ports of Morocco. Algerian pirates quickly seized two more American ships. The boats were confiscated, their crews held captive, and ransom demanded of the fledging American government. The history of America's conflict with the piratical states of the Mediterranean runs through the presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison; the adoption of the Constitution; and the War of 1812; the construction of a full-time professional navy; and, most important, the nation's haltering steps toward commercial independence. Frank Lambert's sees in the Barbary Wars the ideal means of capturing the new nation's shaky emergence in the complex context of the Atlantic world. Depicting a time when Britain ruled the seas and France most of Europe, The Barbary Wars proves America's earliest conflict with the Arabic world was always a struggle for economic advantage rather than any clash of cultures or religions.

Canada

"The Dearest Birth Right of the People of England": The Jury in the History of the Common Law

Grant Macleod, John W.Cairns, Editors
While much fundamental research in the recent past has been devoted to the criminal jury in England up to 1800, there has been little work on the nineteenth century, and on the civil jury. This important study fills these obvious gaps in the literature. It also provides a re-assessment of standard issues such as jury lenity or equity, while raising questions about orthodoxies concerning the relationship of the jury to the development of laws of evidence. Moreover, re-assessment of the jury in nineteenth-century England rejects the thesis that juries were squeezed out by judges in favor of market principles. The book contributes a rounded picture of the jury as an institution, considering it in comparison to other modes of fact-finding, its development in both civil and criminal cases, and the significance, both practical and ideological, of its transplantation to North America and Scotland, while opening up new areas of investigation and research.

Havana in the 1550s was a small coastal village with a very limited population that was vulnerable to attack. By 1610, however, under Spanish rule it had become one of the best-fortified port cities in the world and an Atlantic center of shipping, commerce, and shipbuilding. Using all available local Cuban sources, Alejandro de la Fuente provides the first examination of the transformation of Havana into a vibrant Atlantic port city and the fastest-growing urban center in the Americas in the late sixteenth century. He shows how local ambitions took advantage of the imperial design and situates Havana within the slavery and economic systems of the colonial Atlantic.

The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Early American Places)

Michele Reid-Vazquez

A Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge Concise Histories)

B. W. Higman

Havana: History and Architecture of a Romantic City

Maria Luisa Lobo Montalvo, Author; Lorna S. Fox, Translator; Hugh Thomas, Contributor.
Havana, the legendary capital of Cuba, bears the traces of every stage of the island's rich history, from its indigenous traditions to the introduction of European culture in the late fifteenth century to the development of the unique amalgam of these influences that is unmistakably Cuban. Author Mar a Luisa Lobo Montalvo presents the architecture and history of Havana. Among the structures featured are the famed great forts such as Castillo del Morro and Castillo de la Punta, the city's oldest extant structures; an array of houses, from all periods of Havana's history and in all styles, simultaneously offering architectural and cultural history; and the great churches, including the Church of La Merced and the great baroque Havana Cathedral, and institutional structures, such as the magnificent Palace of the Captains General, showing the public face of Havana at its most resplendent.

Venice, A Maritime Republic

Frederic Chapin Lane
The story of Venice from the first Venetians on. Excerpt - page 20: "... were other reasons, as will be explained, why the popular maritime tradition that was strong in Venice in the thirteenth century ..."
"Frederic Lane has achieved what is the often unfulfilled dream of every historian who has devoted his entire work to the exploration of partial aspects of a single broad subject: he has given us a comprehensive, thoughtful, readable, beautifully illustrated general history of Venice from the origins to the beginning of decline."-Speculum.

The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities 1500-1730

Willem Floor

The Political Economy of the Persian Gulf (Columbia/Hurst)

Mehran Kamrava

Travels through Northern Persia: 1770-1774

Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin, Author; Willem Floor, Translator

The Mexican War 1846-1848
(Essential Histories)

Douglas V. Meed
The war with Mexico was the one of the most decisive conflicts in American history. After smashing Mexico's armies the young republic bestrode the North American continent like a colossus with one leg anchored on the Atlantic seaboard and the other on the Pacific. It was a bitter, hard fought war that raged across Mexico through the northern deserts, the fever-ridden Gulf cities and the balmy haciendas of California. This book covers the full course of the war, ending with General Winfield Scott's march from the captured port of Vera Cruz to Mexico City, fighting all the way.

The War With Mexico: The Classic History of the Mexican-American War

Justin Harvey Smith

A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico

Amy S. Greenberg
Our 1846 war with Mexico was aland grab provoked by President James Polk. While it secured the entire Southwest and California for America, it also exacerbated regional tensions over slavery, created the first significant antiwar movement in America, and helped lead the nation into civil war. A Wicked War is the definitive history of this conflict that turned America into a continental power. Amy Greenberg describes the battles between American and Mexican armies, but also delineates the political battles between Democrats and Whigs the former led by the ruthless Polk, the latter by the charismatic Henry Clay, and a young representative from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln, who initially drew national attention as a critic of the war.

South America: Brazil, Rio de Janeiro

Kirsten Schultz

Peter Chapman
In 1801 Grimsby was a tiny place with a population of just 1,524. It boomed as a port. Iron, timber, wheat, hemp and flax were imported; goal was exported. Many emigrants passed through Grimsby on their way to America. By 1801 The Haven was deepened.

During the 19th century Grimsby fishing fleet greatly expanded, some streets were paved and lit by oil lamps. After 1838 gas light was used. In 1837 the first police force in Grimsby was formed.

In 1854 a water company was formed to provide piped water (to those who could afford it). Also in the 1850s sewers were dug under Grimsby. A new Town Hall was built in 1863.