NEH Fellowship Program

FAIN: RA-20214-00

Huntington Library (San Marino, CA 91108-1218)
Robert C. Ritchie (Project Director: September 1999 to December 2004)

Three NEH fellowships for each of three years.

Associated Products

The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Book)
Title: The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush
Author: David Igler
Abstract: The Pacific of the early eighteenth century was not a single ocean but a vast and varied waterscape, a place of baffling complexity, with 25,000 islands and seemingly endless continental shorelines. But with the voyages of Captain James Cook, global attention turned to the Pacific, and European and American dreams of scientific exploration, trade, and empire grew dramatically. By the time of the California gold rush, the Pacific's many shores were fully integrated into world markets-and world consciousness. The Great Ocean draws on hundreds of documented voyages--some painstakingly recorded by participants, some only known by archeological remains or indigenous memory--as a window into the commercial, cultural, and ecological upheavals following Cook's exploits, focusing in particular on the eastern Pacific in the decades between the 1770s and the 1840s. Beginning with the expansion of trade as seen via the travels of William Shaler, captain of the American Brig Lelia Byrd, historian David Igler uncovers a world where voyagers, traders, hunters, and native peoples met one another in episodes often marked by violence and tragedy. Igler describes how indigenous communities struggled against introduced diseases that cut through the heart of their communities; how the ordeal of Russian Timofei Tarakanov typified the common practice of taking hostages and prisoners; how Mary Brewster witnessed first-hand the bloody "great hunt" that decimated otters, seals, and whales; how Adelbert von Chamisso scoured the region, carefully compiling his notes on natural history; and how James Dwight Dana rivaled Charles Darwin in his pursuit of knowledge on a global scale. These stories--and the historical themes that tie them together--offer a fresh perspective on the oceanic worlds of the eastern Pacific. Ambitious and broadly conceived, The Great Ocean is the first book to weave together American, oceanic, and world history in a path-breaking portrait of the Pacific world.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/great-ocean-pacific-worlds-from-captain-cook-to-the-gold-rush/oclc/811599695&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Secondary URL: http://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-great-ocean-9780199914951?q=igler&lang=en&cc=us
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780199914951
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire (Book)
Title: The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire
Author: Karl Jacoby
Abstract: To his contemporaries in Gilded Age Manhattan, Guillermo Eliseo was a fantastically wealthy Mexican, the proud owner of a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, a busy Wall Street office, and scores of mines and haciendas in Mexico. But for all his obvious riches and his elegant appearance, Eliseo was also the possessor of a devastating secret: he was not, in fact, from Mexico at all. Rather, he had begun life as a slave named William Ellis, born on a cotton plantation in southern Texas during the waning years of King Cotton. After emancipation, Ellis, capitalizing on the Spanish he learned during his childhood along the Mexican border and his ambivalent appearance, engaged in a virtuoso act of reinvention. He crafted an alter ego, the Mexican Guillermo Eliseo, who was able to access many of the privileges denied to African Americans at the time: traveling in first-class train berths, staying in upscale hotels, and eating in the finest restaurants. Eliseo’s success in crossing the color line, however, brought heightened scrutiny in its wake as he became the intimate of political and business leaders on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Ellis, unlike many passers, maintained a connection to his family and to black politics that also raised awkward questions about his racial status. Yet such was Ellis’s skill in manipulating his era’s racial codes, most of the whites he encountered continued to insist that he must be Hispanic even as Ellis became embroiled in scandals that hinted the man known as Guillermo Eliseo was not quite who he claimed to be.
Year: 2016
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-393-3541
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Prizes

Ray Allen Billington Prize
Date: 4/1/2017
Organization: Organization of American Historians
Abstract: Awarded for "the best book on the history of native and/or settler peoples in frontier, border, and borderland zones of intercultural contact in any century to the present and to include works that address the legacies of those zones."

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