The whale and his captors

The whale and his captors
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 362
Release :
ISBN-10 : RUTGERS:39030006378626
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (26 Downloads)

Synopsis The whale and his captors by : Henry Theodore Cheever

The Whale and His Captors; Or, The Whaleman's Adventures

The Whale and His Captors; Or, The Whaleman's Adventures
Author :
Publisher : Brandeis University Press
Total Pages : 280
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781512602654
ISBN-13 : 1512602655
Rating : 4/5 (54 Downloads)

Synopsis The Whale and His Captors; Or, The Whaleman's Adventures by : Henry T. Cheever

An authoritative new edition of a lost source of Melville's Moby-Dick

The Whale and His Captors

The Whale and His Captors
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 232
Release :
ISBN-10 : OCLC:877275308
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (08 Downloads)

Synopsis The Whale and His Captors by : Henry Theodore Cheever

Trying Leviathan

Trying Leviathan
Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Total Pages : 299
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780691146157
ISBN-13 : 0691146152
Rating : 4/5 (57 Downloads)

Synopsis Trying Leviathan by : D. Graham Burnett

D. Graham Burnett recovers the strange story of Maurice v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular--and biblically sanctioned--view that the whale was a fish. The immediate dispute was mundane: whether whale oil was fish oil and therefore subject to state inspection. But the trial fueled a sensational public debate in which nothing less than the order of nature--and how we know it--was at stake. Burnett vividly re-creates the trial, during which a parade of experts--pea-coated whalemen, pompous philosophers, Jacobin lawyers--took the witness stand, brandishing books, drawings, and anatomical reports, and telling tall tales from whaling voyages. Falling in the middle of the century between Linnaeus and Darwin, the trial dramatized a revolutionary period that saw radical transformations in the understanding of the natural world. Out went comfortable biblical categories, and in came new sorting methods based on the minutiae of interior anatomy--and louche details about the sexual behaviors of God's creatures. - Publisher.

The Essex and the Whale

The Essex and the Whale
Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages : 391
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9798216040484
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (84 Downloads)

Synopsis The Essex and the Whale by : R. D. Madison

This fascinating anthology introduces readers to the literary side of Herman Melville's whaling world with an unprecedented collection of the original whaling texts from which Melville drew to create his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. The notorious 1820 sinking of the whaleship Essex inspired Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, as recounted in Nathaniel Philbrick's bestselling book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex—now a major motion picture. But how exactly did Melville transmute the historic tragedy of the Essex into what is arguably the "Great American Novel"? Here, for the first time, R.D. Madison collects together Melville's personal "library" of whaling and whale-lore into a single volume and presents these primary sources in a way that readers can readily see how a horrific whaling tragedy became a literary masterpiece. But where did Moby-Dick begin? Prompted by sailor-author Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Melville supplemented his own firsthand experience as a whaleman in the South Pacific with "libraries" of books that he "swum through" to create his whaling masterpiece. Scholars and lay readers alike have long wondered how he did it, and over the past 60 years, a very tight theory of inspiration and creation has emerged. It is very likely wrong. This volume gathers together for the first time all of the main texts that Melville encountered, including the accounts of the unique sinking of the Essex by a sperm whale that provided the climax for Moby-Dick. Melville scholar R. D. Madison examines what critics have said about Melville's response to the sinking and offers the challenging thesis that Melville did not even begin the book at all until spurred on by Dana in the spring of 1850.

Gettysburg's Unknown Soldier

Gettysburg's Unknown Soldier
Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages : 288
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780313003806
ISBN-13 : 0313003807
Rating : 4/5 (06 Downloads)

Synopsis Gettysburg's Unknown Soldier by : Mark H. Dunkelman

He was found dead on the battlefield at Gettysburg, an unknown soldier with nothing to identify him but an ambrotype of his three children, clutched in his fingers. With the photograph as the single, sad clue to his identity, a publicity campaign to locate his family swept the North. Within a month, the bereaved widow and children were located in Portville, New York, and the devoted father was revealed to be Sergeant Amos Humiston of the 154th New York Volunteers. Using many previously untapped sources, this book tells the tale of 19th-century war, sentiment, and popular culture in greater detail than ever before. The Humiston story touched deep emotions in Civil War America, and inspired a flood of heartfelt prose, poetry, and song. Amid a vast outpouring of public sympathy, a charitable drive evolved to assist the bereft family. At the end of the war, the crusade was expanded to establish a home at Gettysburg for orphans of deceased soldiers. The first residents of the institution were Amos Humiston's widow Philinda and her three children: Franklin, Alice, and Frederick. In this extensive account, a full portrait emerges of Amos Humiston, the loving husband and father destined to be remembered for his death tableau, and his family, the widow and orphans who struggled for the rest of their lives with celebrity born of tragedy.