The Austro-Hungarian aristocrat of Transylvanian origin, Baron Franz Nopcsa (1877-1933), was one of the most adventuresome travelers and scholars of Southeast Europe in the early decades of the ...twentieth century. He was also a paleontologist of renown and a noted geologist of the Balkan Peninsula : many of his assumptions have been confirmed by science. The Memoirs of this fascinating figure deal mainly with his travels in the Balkans, and specifically in the remote and wild mountains of northern Albania, in the years from 1903 to 1914. They thus cover the period of Ottoman Rule, the Balkan Wars and the outbreak of the First World War. Nopcsa was a keen adventurer who hiked through regions of northern Albania. With time, he became a leading expert in Albanian studies. He was also deeply involved in the politics of the period. In 1913, Nopcsa even offered himself as a candidate for the vacant Albanian throne. The Introduction also tells of Nopcsa’s tragic death: he shot his Albanian secretary and partner before killing himself. The memoirs themselves reveal some references to his homosexuality for those who can read between the lines.
By the late Meiji period Japanese were venturing abroad in great numbers, and some of those who traveled kept diaries and wrote formal travelogues. These travelogues reflected a changing view of the ...West and changing artistic sensibilities in the long-standing Japanese literary tradition of travel writing (kikoōbungaku). This book shows that overseas Meiji-period travel writers struck out to create a dynamic new type of travel literature, one that had a solid foundation in traditional Japanese kikōbungaku yet also displayed influence from the West. Musashino in Tuscany specifically examines the poetic imagery and allusion in these travelogues and reveals that when Japanese traveled to the West in the mid-nineteenth century, the images they wrote about tended to be associated not with places initially discovered by the Japanese traveler but with places that already existed in Western fame and lore. And unlike imagery from Japanese traveling in Japan, which was predominantly nature based, Japanese overseas travel imagery was often associated with the manmade world.
Placing Empire examines the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism through a study of Japanese travel and tourism to Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan between the late nineteenth century and the early ...1950s. In a departure from standard histories of Japan, this book shows how debates over the place of colonized lands reshaped the social and spatial imaginary of the modern Japanese nation. In turn, this sociospatial imaginary affected the ways in which colonial difference was conceptualized and enacted. The book thus illuminates how ideas of place became central to the production of new forms of colonial hierarchy as empires around the globe transitioned from an era of territorial acquisition to one of territorial maintenance.
The American tours of five visiting virtuoso pianists — Leopold de Meyer (1845-7), Henri Herz (1846-50), Sigismund Thalberg (1856-8), Anton Rubinstein (1872-3), and Hans von Bülow (1875-6) — are ...examined in this book in regard to their management, itinerary, repertoire, performance style, and reception. The transformation of audiences from boisterous to reverent, the gradual acceptance of the piano recital, the establishment of a canon of masterworks for the piano, and the evolution of concert-giving into a highly organized commercial enterprise are documented. Appendices include the itineraries of these five pianists, totaling almost one thousand concerts in more than one hundred cities, and the repertoire of Rubinstein and Bülow.
Along with basic practical reasons, our practices concerning food and drink are driven by context and environment, belief and convention, aspiration and desire to display - in short, by culture. ...Similarly, culture guides how tourism is used and operates. This book examines food and drink tourism, as it is now and is likely to develop, through a cultural 'lens'. It asks: what is food and drink tourism, and why have food and drink provisions and information points become tourist destinations in their own right, rather than remaining among a number of tourism features and components? While it offers a range of international examples, the main focus is on food and drink tourism in the UK. What with the current diversification of tourism in rural areas, the increased popularity of this type of tourism in the UK, the series of BSE, vCJD and foot and mouth crises in British food production, and the cultural and ethnic fusion in British towns and cities, it makes a particularly rich place in which to explore this subject. The author concludes that the future of food and drink tourism lies in diversity and distinctiveness. In an era of globalisation, there is a particular desire to enjoy varied, rather than mono-cultural ambiance and experience. She also notes that there is an immediacy of gratification in food and drink consumption which has become a general requirement of contemporary society.
Contents: Food and drink, from past to present; Food and drink become a leisure destination; Food for thought and visit; Ripe time for providers; Initiative and opinion; Production and display centres and venues; Outlets and markets; Accommodation; Feeding and drinking; Special events and devices, and resources for education; The wine dimension; From among the Cornucopia; The crop now, and for sowing in future; Bibliography; Index.
During the course of his short but extraordinary life, John Ledyard (1751-1789) came in contact with some of the most remarkable figures of his era: the British explorer Captain James Cook, American ...financier Robert Morris, Revolutionary naval commander John Paul Jones, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and others. Ledyard lived and traveled in remarkable places as well, journeying from the New England backcountry to Tahiti, Hawaii, the American Northwest coast, Alaska, and the Russian Far East. In this engaging biography, the historian Edward Gray offers not only a full account of Ledyard's eventful life but also an illuminating view of the late eighteenth-century world in which he lived.Ledyard was both a product of empire and an agent in its creation, Gray shows, and through this adventurer's life it is possible to discern the many ways empire shaped the lives of nations, peoples, and individuals in the era of the American Revolution, the world's first modern revolt against empire.
The paper road Mueggler, Erik
2011., 20111003, 2011, 2011-11-02
eBook
This exhilarating book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth-century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens ...from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Erik Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 until his death in 1932. We also meet American Joseph Francis Charles Rock, who, in 1924, undertook a dangerous expedition to Gansu and Tibet with the sons and nephews of Forrest's workers. Mueggler describes how the Naxi workers and their Western employers rendered the earth into specimens, notes, maps, diaries, letters, books, photographs, and ritual manuscripts. Drawing on an ancient metaphor of the earth as a book, Mueggler provides a sustained meditation on what can be copied, translated, and revised and what can be folded back into the earth.
Richard Hakluyt the younger, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, advocated the creation of English colonies in the New World at a time when the advantages of this idea were far from self-evident. ...This book describes in detail the life and times of Hakluyt, a trained minister who became an editor of travel accounts.Hakluyt's Promisedemonstrates his prominent role in the establishment of English America as well as his interests in English opportunities in the East Indies. The volume presents nearly 50 illustrations-many unpublished since the sixteenth century-and offers a fresh view of Hakluyt's milieu and the central concerns of the Elizabethan age.
Though he never traveled farther than Paris, young Hakluyt spent much of the 1580s recording information about the western hemisphere and became an international authority on overseas exploration. The book traces his rise to prominence as a source of information and inspiration for England's policy makers, including the queen, and his advocacy for colonies in Roanoke and Jamestown. Hakluyt's thought was shaped by debates that stretched across Europe, and his interests ranged just as widely, encompassing such topics as peaceful coexistence with Native Americans, the New World as a Protestant Holy Land, and in, his later life, trade with the Spice Islands.
PDF
