The early phase of industrialization in America devestated many lives by what the author calls 'The Fiery Furnace Effect.' Not only were the initial participants affected, but much of the effect, through them, was carried over into the subsequent generation, and beyond in some cases. This novel focuses upon the intergenerational impact for two decades in the life of young Adam Vasilyevich, born out of wedlock in 1926 in the 'Loch Jean' coal camp of 'Paine County,' West Virginia. His early personal development, in what Borges would call his 'green Garden,' is detailed, as is the subsequent series of events that strip him of his human connections and even his identity. Then he is uprooted from his native soil, like a hickory sapling, and is banished into, for Adam, the urban wilderness of Detroit. There, he is abandoned by his mother, who was his last bond to his previous existence. For six years thereafter, Adam is increasingly demoralized and estranged from his life and from his own self. At that point, he is surely on a path toward a life of crime and self destruction, but a fortunate stroke of fate provides new opportunities for a meaningful and gratifying life. However, Adam has been beaten into a feckless, alienated condition for so long that it is highly problematic whether or not he can marshall any inner resources to take advantage of the new circumstances in Melville Township.

In the nineteenth century, nearly all Native American men living along the southern New England coast made their living traveling the world's oceans on whaleships. Many were career whalemen, spending twenty years or more at sea. Their labor invigorated economically depressed reservations with vital income and led to complex and surprising connections with other Indigenous peoples, from the islands of the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean. At home, aboard ship, or around the world, Native American seafarers found themselves in a variety of situations, each with distinct racial expectations about who was "Indian" and how "Indians" behaved. Treated by their white neighbors as degraded dependents incapable of taking care of themselves, Native New Englanders nevertheless rose to positions of command at sea. They thereby complicated myths of exploration and expansion that depicted cultural encounters as the meeting of two peoples, whites and Indians. Highlighting the shifting racial ideologies that shaped the lives of these whalemen, Nancy Shoemaker shows how the category of "Indian" was as fluid as the whalemen were mobile.

Under suspicion of setting fire to some fields, a group of boys from a village in Crete are incarcerated and tortured by officials hoping to implicate the boys' parents

First US Edition -- The first comprehensive book on whaling wives at sea written for a general audience.

By extending their voyages to all oceans from the 1760s onward, whaling vessels from North America and Europe spanned a novel net of hunting grounds, maritime routes, supply posts, and transport chains across the globe. For obtaining provisions, cutting firewood, recruiting additional men, and transshipping whale products, these highly mobile hunters regularly frequented coastal places and islands along their routes, which were largely determined by the migratory movements of their prey. American-style pelagic whaling thus constituted a significant, though often overlooked factor in connecting people and places between distant world regions during the long nineteenth century. Focusing on Africa, this book investigates side-effects resulting from stopovers by whalers for littoral societies on the economic, social, political, and cultural level. For this purpose it draws on eight local case studies, four from Africa’s west coast and four from its east coast. In the overall picture, the book shows a broad range of effects and side-effects of different forms and strengths, which it figures as a "grey undercurrent" of global history.

On the Northwest is the first complete history of commercial whaling in the Pacific Northwest from its shadowy origins in the late 1700s to its demise in western Canada in 1967. Whaling in the eastern North Pacific represented a century and a half of exploration and exploitation which involved the entrepreneurs, merchants, politicians, and seamen of a dozen nations.