The Prickly Meanings of the Pineapple

If Flagler and Jefferson Browne had been wrong in predicting that “the products of the West Indies and Caribbean sea will be ferried across from Cuba and taken by the railroad for distribution to all parts of the U.S.,” and that “with the completion of the Nicaraguan Canal, Key West would be a port of call for no small part of the shipping of the w

With a tropical climate and countless animal reservoirs of disease, tropical Africa was home to many fatal and debilitating diseases both for humans and farm animals, including horses. Falciparum malaria, transmitted by the human-biting mosquito Anopheles gambiae, created a disease barrier to European conquest. African trypanosomiasis, otherwise kn

A number of those shipwreck survivors were introduced to the beauties of the atoll-like paradise in such a manner, and many of them stayed on to make a life there. The bounteous local waters supported thriving industries in fishing, shrimping, sponge diving, and even turtle raising.

The logo-map silhouette accurately captured the borders of the United States for only three years. Because in 1857, not long after the Gadsden Purchase was ratified (1854), the United States began annexing small islands throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific. By the end of the century, it would claim almost a hundred of them. The islands had no i

The Indians, then, who had the wisdom and the grace to live in this country for perhaps ten thousand years without destroying or damaging any of it, needed for their travels no more than a footpath; but their successors, who in a century and a half plundered the area of at least half its topsoil and virtually all of its forest, felt immediately tha

American imperialism and Hawaiian popular cultural practices into the same arena to deliberate on hula within a larger context of the political and economic incorporation of Hawai‘i.