The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson

The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson PDF Author: Ólafur Egilsson
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press + ORM
ISBN: 0813228700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book

Book Description
A seventeenth-century minister tells his story of abduction by pirates, and a solo journey from Algiers to Copenhagen, in this remarkable historical text. In summer 1627, Barbary corsairs raided Iceland, killing dozens and abducting almost four hundred people to sell into slavery in Algiers. Among those taken was Lutheran minister Olafur Egilsson. Reverend Olafur—born in the same year as William Shakespeare and Galileo Galilei—wrote The Travels to chronicle his experiences both as a captive and as a traveler across Europe as he journeyed alone from Algiers to Copenhagen in an attempt to raise funds to ransom the Icelandic captives that remained behind. He was a keen observer, and the narrative is filled with a wealth of detail―social, political, economic, religious―about both the Maghreb and Europe. It is also a moving story on the human level: We witness a man enduring great personal tragedy and struggling to reconcile such calamity with his understanding of God. The Travels is the first-ever English translation of the Icelandic text. Until now, the corsair raid on Iceland has remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. To give a clearer sense of the extraordinary events connected with that raid, this edition of The Travels includes not only Reverend Olafur’s first-person narrative but also a collection of contemporary letters describing both the events of the raid itself and the conditions under which the enslaved Icelanders lived. Also included are appendices containing background information on the cities of Algiers and Salé in the seventeenth century, on Iceland in the seventeenth century, on the manuscripts accessed for the translation, and on the book’s early modern European context.

Northern Captives

Northern Captives PDF Author: Karl Smári Hreinsson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789935922328
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book

Book Description


The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson

The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson PDF Author: Ólafur Egilsson
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press + ORM
ISBN: 0813228700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book

Book Description
A seventeenth-century minister tells his story of abduction by pirates, and a solo journey from Algiers to Copenhagen, in this remarkable historical text. In summer 1627, Barbary corsairs raided Iceland, killing dozens and abducting almost four hundred people to sell into slavery in Algiers. Among those taken was Lutheran minister Olafur Egilsson. Reverend Olafur—born in the same year as William Shakespeare and Galileo Galilei—wrote The Travels to chronicle his experiences both as a captive and as a traveler across Europe as he journeyed alone from Algiers to Copenhagen in an attempt to raise funds to ransom the Icelandic captives that remained behind. He was a keen observer, and the narrative is filled with a wealth of detail―social, political, economic, religious―about both the Maghreb and Europe. It is also a moving story on the human level: We witness a man enduring great personal tragedy and struggling to reconcile such calamity with his understanding of God. The Travels is the first-ever English translation of the Icelandic text. Until now, the corsair raid on Iceland has remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. To give a clearer sense of the extraordinary events connected with that raid, this edition of The Travels includes not only Reverend Olafur’s first-person narrative but also a collection of contemporary letters describing both the events of the raid itself and the conditions under which the enslaved Icelanders lived. Also included are appendices containing background information on the cities of Algiers and Salé in the seventeenth century, on Iceland in the seventeenth century, on the manuscripts accessed for the translation, and on the book’s early modern European context.

Barbary Captives

Barbary Captives PDF Author: Mario Klarer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 611

Get Book

Book Description
In the early modern period, hundreds of thousands of Europeans, both male and female, were abducted by pirates, sold on the slave market, and enslaved in North Africa. Between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, pirates from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco not only attacked sailors and merchants in the Mediterranean but also roved as far as Iceland. A substantial number of the European captives who later returned home from the Barbary Coast, as maritime North Africa was then called, wrote and published accounts of their experiences. These popular narratives greatly influenced the development of the modern novel and autobiography, and they also shaped European perceptions of slavery as well as of the Muslim world. Barbary Captives brings together a selection of early modern slave narratives in English translation for the first time. It features accounts written by men and women across three centuries and in nine different languages that recount the experience of capture and servitude in North Africa. These texts tell the stories of Christian pirates, Christian rowers on Muslim galleys, house slaves in the palaces of rulers, domestic servants, agricultural slaves, renegades, and social climbers in captivity. They also depict liberation through ransom, escape, or religious conversion. This book sheds new light on the social history of Mediterranean slavery and piracy, early modern concepts of unfree labor, and the evolution of the Barbary captivity narrative as a literary and historical genre.

Captives and Cousins

Captives and Cousins PDF Author: James F. Brooks
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807899887
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book

Book Description
This sweeping, richly evocative study examines the origins and legacies of a flourishing captive exchange economy within and among native American and Euramerican communities throughout the Southwest Borderlands from the Spanish colonial era to the end of the nineteenth century. Indigenous and colonial traditions of capture, servitude, and kinship met and meshed in the borderlands, forming a "slave system" in which victims symbolized social wealth, performed services for their masters, and produced material goods under the threat of violence. Slave and livestock raiding and trading among Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, Utes, and Spaniards provided labor resources, redistributed wealth, and fostered kin connections that integrated disparate and antagonistic groups even as these practices renewed cycles of violence and warfare. Always attentive to the corrosive effects of the "slave trade" on Indian and colonial societies, the book also explores slavery's centrality in intercultural trade, alliances, and "communities of interest" among groups often antagonistic to Spanish, Mexican, and American modernizing strategies. The extension of the moral and military campaigns of the American Civil War to the Southwest in a regional "war against slavery" brought differing forms of social stability but cost local communities much of their economic vitality and cultural flexibility.

Andersonvilles of the North

Andersonvilles of the North PDF Author: James Massie Gillispie
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574412558
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book

Book Description
This study argues that the image of Union prison officials as negligent and cruel to Confederate prisoners is severely flawed. It explains how Confederate prisoners' suffering and death were due to a number of factors, but it would seem that Yankee apathy and malice were rarely among them.

Setting All the Captives Free

Setting All the Captives Free PDF Author: Ian K. Steele
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773589902
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 552

Get Book

Book Description
Among the many upheavals in North America caused by the French and Indian War was a commonplace practice that affected the lives of thousands of men, women, and children: being taken captive by rival forces. Most previous studies of captivity in early America are content to generalize from a small selection of sources, often centuries apart. In Setting All the Captives Free, Ian Steele presents, from a mountain of data, the differences rather than generalities as well as how these differences show the variety of circumstances that affected captives’ experiences. The product of a herculean effort to identify and analyze the captives taken on the Allegheny frontier during the era of the French and Indian War, Setting All the Captives Free is the most complete study of this topic. Steele explores genuine, doctored, and fictitious accounts in an innovative challenge to many prevailing assumptions and arguments, revealing that Indians demonstrated humanity and compassion by continuing to take numerous captives when their opponents took none, by adopting and converting captives into kin during the war, and by returning captives even though doing so was a humiliating act that betrayed their societies' values. A fascinating and comprehensive work by an acclaimed scholar, Setting All the Captives Free takes the study of the French and Indian War in America to an exciting new level.

White Women Captives in North Africa

White Women Captives in North Africa PDF Author: K. Bekkaoui
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230294499
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book

Book Description
A fascinating anthology of narratives from the period 1735-1830, by European women who recount their enslavement in North Africa. The first such collection, it includes an extensive introduction which links the discourse on contemporary Western women captives in Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq with that of former white captives in North Africa.

Captives

Captives PDF Author: Catherine M. Cameron
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803295766
Category : SOCIAL SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
"In Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World archaeologist Catherine M. Cameron provides an eye-opening comparative study of the profound impact that captives of warfare and raiding have had on small-scale societies through time. Cameron provides a new point of orientation for archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars by illuminating the impact that captive-taking and enslavement have had on cultural change, with important implications for understanding the past. Focusing primarily on indigenous societies in the Americas while extending the comparative reach to include Europe, Africa, and Island Southeast Asia, Cameron draws on ethnographic, ethnohistoric, historic, and archaeological data to examine the roles that captives played in small-scale societies. In such societies, captives represented an almost universal social category consisting predominantly of women and children and constituting 10 to 50 percent of the population in a given society. Cameron demonstrates how captives brought with them new technologies, design styles, foodways, religious practices, and more, all of which changed the captor culture. This book provides a framework that will enable archaeologists to understand the scale and nature of cultural transmission by captivesand it will also interest anthropologists, historians, and other scholars who study captive-taking and slavery. Cameron's exploration of the peculiar amnesia that surrounds memories of captive-taking and enslavement around the world also establishes a connection with unmistakable contemporary relevance"--

British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760

British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760 PDF Author: Nabil Matar
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004264507
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book

Book Description
British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760 provides the first study of British captives in the North African Atlantic and Mediterranean, from the reign of Elizabeth I to George II. Based on extensive archival research in the United Kingdom, Nabil Matar furnishes the names of all captives while examining the problems that historians face in determining the numbers of early modern Britons in captivity. Matar also describes the roles which the monarchy, parliament, trading companies, and churches played (or did not play) in ransoming captives. He questions the emphasis on religious polarization in piracy and shows how much financial constraints, royal indifference, and corruption delayed the return of captives. As rivarly between Britain and France from 1688 on dominated the western Mediterranean and Atlantic, Matar concludes by showing how captives became the casus belli that justified European expansion.

Captives

Captives PDF Author: Linda Colley
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307425169
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Get Book

Book Description
In this path-breaking book Linda Colley reappraises the rise of the biggest empire in global history. Excavating the lives of some of the multitudes of Britons held captive in the lands their own rulers sought to conquer, Colley also offers an intimate understanding of the peoples and cultures of the Mediterranean, North America, India, and Afghanistan. Here are harrowing, sometimes poignant stories by soldiers and sailors and their womenfolk, by traders and con men and by white as well as black slaves. By exploring these forgotten captives – and their captors – Colley reveals how Britain’s emerging empire was often tentative and subject to profound insecurities and limitations. She evokes how British empire was experienced by the mass of poor whites who created it. She shows how imperial racism coexisted with cross-cultural collaborations, and how the gulf between Protestantism and Islam, which some have viewed as central to this empire, was often smaller than expected. Brilliantly written and richly illustrated, Captives is an invitation to think again about a piece of history too often viewed in the same old way. It is also a powerful contribution to current debates about the meanings, persistence, and drawbacks of empire.