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Author: James P. Ronda Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 9780803289420 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 418
Book Description
In late December 1788 a worried Spanish official in Mexico City set down his fears about a new and aggressive northern neighbor. Viceroy Manuel Antonio Florez offered a gloomy prediction about the future of Spanish-United States relations in the West. He already knew about the steady march of frontiersmen toward St. Louis and now came troubling word of Robert Gray's ship Columbia on the Northwest coast. All this seemed to fit a pattern, a design for Yankee expansion. "We ought not to be surprised," warned the viceroy, "that the English colonies of America, now being an independent Republic, should carry out the design of finding a safe port on the Pacific and of attempting to sustain it by crossing the immense country of the continent above our possessions of Texas, New Mexico, and California." Canadian fur merchants and Russian bureaucrats also viewed the young republic as a potential rival in the struggle for western dominion. The viceroy's vision of the future proved startlingly accurate. Within the next two decades an American president would authorize a federally funded expedition to find just the sort of transcontinental route Florez imagined. Equally important, a New York entrepreneur would propose and put into motion an ambitious plan to make the Northwest an American political and commercial empire. John Astor's Pacific Fur Company, with Astoria as its central post on the Columbia River, was Florez's nightmare come true. Astoria had long represented either a daring overland adventure or simply a failed trading venture. The Astorians surely had their share of adventure. And the Pacific Fur Company never brought its founder the profits he expected. But all those involved in the extensive enterprise knew it meant more. Thomas Jefferson once described Astoria as the "germ of a great, free and independent empire," believing that the entire American claim to the lands west of the Rockies rested on "Astor's settlement at the mouth of the Columbia." And John Quincy Adams, the expansionist-minded secretary of state, labeled then entire Northwest as "the empire of Astoria." This book seeks to explore Astoria as part of a large and complex struggle for national sovereignty in the Northwest. The Astorians and their rivals were always engaged in more than trading and trapping. They were advance agents of empire. -- from Preface
Author: James P. Ronda Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 9780803289420 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 418
Book Description
In late December 1788 a worried Spanish official in Mexico City set down his fears about a new and aggressive northern neighbor. Viceroy Manuel Antonio Florez offered a gloomy prediction about the future of Spanish-United States relations in the West. He already knew about the steady march of frontiersmen toward St. Louis and now came troubling word of Robert Gray's ship Columbia on the Northwest coast. All this seemed to fit a pattern, a design for Yankee expansion. "We ought not to be surprised," warned the viceroy, "that the English colonies of America, now being an independent Republic, should carry out the design of finding a safe port on the Pacific and of attempting to sustain it by crossing the immense country of the continent above our possessions of Texas, New Mexico, and California." Canadian fur merchants and Russian bureaucrats also viewed the young republic as a potential rival in the struggle for western dominion. The viceroy's vision of the future proved startlingly accurate. Within the next two decades an American president would authorize a federally funded expedition to find just the sort of transcontinental route Florez imagined. Equally important, a New York entrepreneur would propose and put into motion an ambitious plan to make the Northwest an American political and commercial empire. John Astor's Pacific Fur Company, with Astoria as its central post on the Columbia River, was Florez's nightmare come true. Astoria had long represented either a daring overland adventure or simply a failed trading venture. The Astorians surely had their share of adventure. And the Pacific Fur Company never brought its founder the profits he expected. But all those involved in the extensive enterprise knew it meant more. Thomas Jefferson once described Astoria as the "germ of a great, free and independent empire," believing that the entire American claim to the lands west of the Rockies rested on "Astor's settlement at the mouth of the Columbia." And John Quincy Adams, the expansionist-minded secretary of state, labeled then entire Northwest as "the empire of Astoria." This book seeks to explore Astoria as part of a large and complex struggle for national sovereignty in the Northwest. The Astorians and their rivals were always engaged in more than trading and trapping. They were advance agents of empire. -- from Preface
Author: Peter Stark Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 006221831X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 333
Book Description
In the tradition of The Lost City of Z and Skeletons in the Zahara, Astoria is the thrilling, true-adventure tale of the 1810 Astor Expedition, an epic, now forgotten, three-year journey to forge an American empire on the Pacific Coast. Peter Stark offers a harrowing saga in which a band of explorers battled nature, starvation, and madness to establish the first American settlement in the Pacific Northwest and opened up what would become the Oregon trail, permanently altering the nation's landscape and its global standing. Six years after Lewis and Clark's began their journey to the Pacific Northwest, two of the Eastern establishment's leading figures, John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson, turned their sights to founding a colony akin to Jamestown on the West Coast and transforming the nation into a Pacific trading power. Author and correspondent for Outside magazine Peter Stark recreates this pivotal moment in American history for the first time for modern readers, drawing on original source material to tell the amazing true story of the Astor Expedition. Unfolding over the course of three years, from 1810 to 1813, Astoria is a tale of high adventure and incredible hardship in the wilderness and at sea. Of the more than one hundred-forty members of the two advance parties that reached the West Coast—one crossing the Rockies, the other rounding Cape Horn—nearly half perished by violence. Others went mad. Within one year, the expedition successfully established Fort Astoria, a trading post on the Columbia River. Though the colony would be short-lived, it opened provincial American eyes to the potential of the Western coast and its founders helped blaze the Oregon Trail.
Author: David Freeland Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 0813594405 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 212
Book Description
Completed in 1931, New York’s Waldorf-Astoria towers over Park Avenue as an international landmark and a masterpiece of Art Deco architecture. A symbol of elegance and luxury, the hotel has hosted countless movie stars, business tycoons, and world leaders over the past ninety years. American Hotel takes us behind the glittering image to reveal the full extent of the Waldorf’s contribution toward shaping twentieth-century life and culture. Historian David Freeland examines the Waldorf from the opening of its first location in 1893 through its rise to a place of influence on the local, national, and international stage. Along the way, he explores how the hotel’s mission to provide hospitality to a diverse range of guests was put to the test by events such as Prohibition, the anticommunist Red Scare, and civil rights struggles. Alongside famous guests like Frank Sinatra, Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon, and Eleanor Roosevelt, readers will meet the lesser-known men and women who made the Waldorf a leader in the hotel industry and a key setting for international events. American Hotel chronicles how institutions such as the Waldorf-Astoria played an essential role in New York’s growth as a world capital.
Author: Robert Viscusi Publisher: Guernica Editions ISBN: 9781550711004 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
A metaphysical novel on "meaning in history." It is prompted by a visit to Paris of its ethnic narrator. In dream-like sequences he analyzes his Italian-American double identity. A first novel.
Author: Justin Kaplan Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101218819 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
In this marvelous anecdotal history, Justin Kaplan––Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Mark Twain––vividly brings to life a glittering, bygone age. Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, cousins John Jacob Astor IV and William Waldorf Astor vied for primacy in New York society, producing the grandest hotels ever seen in a marriage of ostentation and efficiency that transformed American social behavior. Kaplan exposes it all in exquisite detail, taking readers from the 1890s to the Roaring Twenties in a combination of biography, history, architectural appreciation, and pure reading pleasure
Author: William G. Robbins Publisher: ISBN: Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
"A forceful analysis of the role of capitalism in the history of the American West. This is an important contribution to the new western history that should be read by both historians and residents of the American West". -- Journal of American History. "This exciting book should take its place on the shelf next to Patricia Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest". -- Forest & Conservation History.
Author: Robert Stuart Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 9780803292345 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 558
Book Description
Robert Stuart saw the American West a few years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and, like them, kept a journal of his epic experience. A partner in John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company, the Scotsman shipped for Oregon aboard the Tonquin in 1810 and helped found the ill-fated settlement of Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River. In 1812, facing disaster, Stuart and six others slipped away from Astoria and headed east. His journal, edited and annotated by Philip Ashton Rollins, describes their hazardous 3,700-mile journey to St. Louis. Crossing the Rockies in winter, they faced death by cold, starvation, and hostile Indians. But they made history by discovering what came to be called the Oregon Trail, including South Pass, over which thousands of emigrants would travel west in mid-century. Besides Stuart’s narrative, this volume contains important material about Astoria and the fate of the Tonquin, as well as the harrowing account of Wilson Price Hunt, who headed a party of overlanders traveling east to join the Astorians.
Author: Ronald A. Reis Publisher: Infobase Publishing ISBN: 1438119372 Category : Electronic books Languages : en Pages : 145
Book Description
It was to be a structure like no other: the largest and tallest skyscraper in the world. Initial plans for the Empire State Building called for an Art Deco masterwork to rise 1,000 feet, with 80 stories of rental space. The high-rise was to completely fill the 84,000-square-foot site of the former Waldorf-Astoria, then New Yorks most opulent hotel. Hopes were high that the Empire State Building would accelerate Midtown Manhattans stride toward commercial prominence, pulling more business uptown. Built in the early years of the Great Depression, during which one out of four New Yorkers was out of work, the Empire State Buildings construction was thought by many to be a foolish undertaking. Yet, it was completed under budget and ahead of schedule, and the commercial colossus has stood through good times and bad as a symbol of daring, beauty, and American invention.
Author: James P. Ronda
Author: James P. Ronda
Author: Peter Stark
Author: Washington Irving
Author: James P. Ronda
Author: David Freeland
Author: Robert Viscusi
Author: Justin Kaplan
Author: William G. Robbins
Author: Robert Stuart
Author: Ronald A. Reis