The last Italian

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Jeremy Black

"In this innovative study of the Grand Tour, Jeremy Black relies on archival sources to provide an exploration of the real tourist experience rather than, as with the majority of studies of the Grand Tour, an account that is essentially based on travel literature. While sensitive to wider cultural dimensions, the author demonstrates his interest in the experience of tourists, particularly the circumstances they encountered, and the impact of the Grand Tour on British society. Black conjures up a vivid account of the pleasures and predicaments experienced by tourists. He also asks about the impact of tourism on Britain and locates foreign travel in the tension between cosmopolitanism and xenophobia in British culture and society. The book closes with the impact of the French Revolution on tourism."--BOOK JACKET.

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Bland Simpson

Simpson mixes personl experience, travel narrative, oral history and natural history to produce an intriguing portrait of the Great Dismal Swamp and its people.

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David Thomson

"At once examining and experiencing Nevada, Thomson finds its people, its landscape, and the unexpected questions it inspires equally provocative. He shows us the historical Nevada - a classic Wild West, attracting Spanish missionaries, Mormons, uprooted Native Americans, explorers, and silver miners - and the contemporary influx of cultists, druggies, survivalists, and fortune hunters whose quests lead directly to the gaming table."--BOOK JACKET. "We see Nevada as a place of no-holds-barred experimentation, both social (gambling, prostitution, easy divorce, no taxes) and scientific (nuclear testing and storage of nuclear waste). We see suburbanites rubbing shoulders with sybarites; the natural beauty of Lake Tahoe, shadowed by the financial edifice of tourism; criminals, entertainers, and hotel impresarios sharing dreams of glory (and the memory of Bugsy Siegel and Frank Sinatra)."--BOOK JACKET. "In Nevada is a revelation of the gambler's mix of hope and anxiety, of the isolation and closeness, the beauty and banality, the fact and fancy, at the heart of the state - and the state of mind - of Nevada."--BOOK JACKET.

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Canter Brown, Jr

Peace River is a location near Lake Hancock, north of present-day Bartow. Seminole hunting towns on Peace River lay in a five or six mile wide belt of land centered on and running down the river from Lake Hancock to below present-day Fort Meade. Oponay, who also was named Ochacona Tustenatty, was sent into Florida as a representative to the Seminoles on behalf of the Creek chiefs remaining loyal to the United States during the Seminole War. Oponay occupied the land adjacent to Lake Hancock and Saddle Creek. Peter McQueen and his party occupied the area to the south of Bartow. Quite likely their settlement included the remains of Seminole lodges and other facilities located on the west bank near the great ford of the river at Fort Meade. This important strategic position would have allowed the Red Sticks (Indians) to control not only access to the hunting grounds to the south, but communication and the trade with the Cuban fishermen at Charlotte Harbor, as well as the passage of representatives of Spain and England through the harbor.