Conquest or Long Pursuit

Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others

Author: David Day

In this bold, sweeping book, David Day surveys the ways in which one nation or society has supplanted another, and then sought to justify its occupation - for example, the English in Australia and North America, the Normans in England, the Spanish in Mexico, the Japanese in Korea, the Chinese in Tibet. Human history has been marked by territorial aggression and expanion, an endless cycle of ownership claims by dominant cultures over territory occupied by peoples unable to resist their advance. Day outlines the strategies, violent and subtle, such dominant cultures have used to stake and bolster their claims - by redrawing maps, rewriting history, recourse to legal argument, creative renaming, use of foundation stories, tilling of the soil, colonization and of course outright subjugation and even genocide. In the end the claims they make reveal their own sense of identity and self-justifying place in the world. This will be an important book, an accessible and captivating macro-narrative about empire, expansion, and dispossession.

Publishers Weekly

Historian Day (Claiming a Continent) surveys the justifications that nations have offered for conquering other peoples, and lays out the process of claiming a territory by a symbolic act like planting a flag, then by mapping the land and naming it. Many of his examples are familiar-the Spanish in Central and South America, the Germans in Eastern Europe. But he includes less familiar instances, such as Japan's 18th-century takeover of the Ainu culture on the island of Hokkaido and the contest between the Dutch, French and English to claim Australia. As interesting as Day's stories are, he comes up short on interpretation and analysis. Much more could have been made, for example, of the impact of population pressures. And the book lacks almost any examples of conquests in the ancient world, a striking omission when one considers that modern nations have looked to Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome for models in their own empire building. Nevertheless, history buffs' curiosity will be piqued by Day's accounts of lesser known conquests. Maps. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents:

List of Plates

List of Maps

Introduction 1

1 Staking a Legal Claim 11

2 The Power of Maps 28

3 Claiming by Naming 49

4 Supplanting the Savages 69

5 By Right of Conquest 92

6 Defending the Conquered Territory 112

7 Foundation Stories 132

8 Tilling the Soil 159

9 The Genocidal Imperative 176

10 Peopling the Land 198

11 The Never-Ending Journey 223

Endnotes 239

Select Bibliography 265

Index 277

See also: Jarhead or The Pirate Queen

Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln's Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America

Author: Roy Morris Jr

In this compelling narrative, renowned historian Roy Morris, Jr., expertly offers a new angle on two of America's most towering politicians and the intense personal rivalry that transformed both them and the nation they sought to lead in the dark days leading up to the Civil War.

For the better part of two decades, Stephen Douglas was the most famous and controversial politician in the United States, a veritable "steam engine in britches." Abraham Lincoln was merely Douglas's most persistent rival within their adopted home state of Illinois, known mainly for his droll sense of humor, bad jokes, and slightly nutty wife.

But from the time they first set foot in the Prairie State in the early 1830s, Lincoln and Douglas were fated to be political competitors. The Long Pursuit tells the dramatic story of how these two radically different individuals rose to the top rung of American politics, and how their personal rivalry shaped and altered the future of the nation during its most convulsive era. Indeed, had it not been for Douglas, who served as Lincoln's personal goad, pace horse, and measuring stick, there would have been no Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, no Lincoln presidency in 1860, and perhaps no Civil War six months later. For both men—and for the nation itself—the stakes were that high.

Not merely a detailed political study, The Long Pursuit is also a compelling look at the personal side of politics on the rough-and-tumble western frontier. It shows us a more human Lincoln, a bare-knuckles politician who was not above trading on his wildly inaccurate image as a humble "rail-splitter," when he was, in fact, one of thenation's most successful railroad attorneys. And as the first extensive biographical study of Stephen Douglas in more than three decades, the book presents a long-overdue reassessment of one of the nineteenth century's more compelling and ultimately tragic figures, the one-time "Little Giant" of American politics.

Randall M. Miller - Library Journal

Morris (editor, Military Heritage magazine; The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War) argues that in Illinois Lincoln and Douglas grew up, legally and politically, pitted one against the other. The Democrat Douglas often got the better of the Whig Lincoln at the ballot box, though Lincoln won often in court-and in courting Mary Todd. Morris sees westward expansion and race as coming to define their contests. Douglas advocated majority rule, Lincoln individual rights as the bedrock of a free people. Lincoln proved a formidable foe on the legal circuit because of his skills and friendships and his recognition of the moral dimension of the slavery question. This dual biography helps us understand that the Lincoln-Douglas debates had both personal and political dimensions. Morris gives Douglas his due, but ultimately his book does not move beyond Allen Guelzo's Lincoln and Douglas, which argues that the debates obliged both men to reckon the meanings of democracy, liberty, and America. Morris does not much change established thinking. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.