Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin are known to all; men like Morgan, Greene, and Wayne are less familiar. Yet the dreams of the politicians and theorists only became real because fighting men were willing to take on the grim, risky, brutal work of war. The soldiers of the American Revolution were a diverse lot: merchants and mechanics, farmers and fishermen, paragons and drunkards. Most were ardent amateurs.
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11526.37 | Fiction literature | 18 November 2011
2
In An Antique Land
In the 1980s Amitav Ghosh moved into a converted chicken coop. It was on the roof of a house in Lataifa, a tiny village in Egypt. During the day he poured over medieval letters sent to India from Cairo by Arab merchants. In the evenings he shut out the bellowing of his fat landlord by turning up the volume of his transistor radio and wrote stories based on what he had seen in the village.
Students will discover the ancient markets of Africa by exploring Zanzibar, the ancient Swahili commercial hub off the coast of Tanzania that helped feed the West’s demand for ivory and spices, and investigating the bustling port town of Lamu, an island off the Kenyan coast. Then it’s off to Djenne in the heart of Mali, where, in this historic center of business, politics and art, merchants and their customers continue to exchange goods and opinions.
