Academic literature on the topic 'Business correspondence (Spanish) 1857'

Abstract Unfortunately, Buchanan’s White House entourage and official advisers included no diarists to record, day by day, his domestic life, personal relationships, and shifting moods, or to discuss and interpret the formal business transacted at Cabinet meetings, his conferences with individual department heads, and the complex manner in which policies evolved during his presidential years. The voluminous correspondence of the President and some of those close to him, notably Black and Cobb, the facts and rumors served up by friendly and unfriendly reporters, and the recollections, more or less reliable, of his associates tell us much about life behind the White House doors.

Abstract Elizabeth Barrett lived most of her life as an invalid in the home of a tyrannical father until she began a correspondence with Robert Browning (1812-89), who was a relatively obscure poet during her lifetime. He fell in love with her through her poetry. The two secretly married and eloped to Italy, where they lived happily until her death in 1861. Barrett Browning de­ scribes her love for her husband in her enduring Sonnets from the Portuguese. The title seems to suggest that the sequence is a translation from the Portuguese language, but it is really a private reference to her poem “Catarina to Camoens,” about the love of a Portuguese woman for the Spanish poet. Her verse novel Aurora Leigh (1857) is a substantial literary achievement.

This chapter turns to pearl consumption practices in the seventeenth century and considers what they reveal about the overlap between personal and imperial approaches to the custodianship of value. Drawing on personal correspondence of high-ranking diplomats, smugglers, widows, and children in Spain, as well as Inquisition records from Lima and Cartagena, the inventories of London goldsmiths, and Amsterdam-based Sephardic jewelers’ ledgers, it shows that the use and exchange of pearls among families, friends, and business associates reflected highly contextual assessments of value and worth. The personal political economies that pearls illuminated were often, if not always, at odds with official assessments of the jewel, which tried to remove them from their context and assign them arbitrary financial valuations. In art, pearls could be used to explore the supposed nature of different types of subjects, but in reality they figured in the socially embedded wealth husbandry practices of people of diverse backgrounds and means. The sixteen thousand smuggled pearls discovered in a small lead box that sank in 1622 with the Spanish galleon Santa Margarita illustrate the tremendous variety of the jewel, their subjective appeal, and their accessibility.

Following the arrival of the plague, and the dramatic fall in population, pressure on food supplies within the Mediterranean diminished. This did not mean that the old Mediterranean grain trade withered. In fact, it flourished: as inferior lands were abandoned and turned over to pasture, and as other areas became dedicated to products such as sugar and dyestuffs, the economic life of the lands bordering the Great Sea became more varied. As specialization increased, trade in all manner of goods was stimulated. The Mediterranean economy began to take on a new shape. Local contacts came to the fore: products such as timber were ferried down the coasts of Catalonia; wool was sent across the Adriatic from Apulia to the burgeoning towns of Dalmatia, and from Minorca (famous for its sheep) to Tuscany, where around 1400 the ‘Merchant of Prato’, Francesco di Marco Datini, obsessively ensured that every bale was recorded and every piece of correspondence was preserved – about 150,000 letters – to the great advantage of historians. One of his agents in Ibiza complained: ‘this land is unhealthy, the bread is bad, the wine is bad – God forgive me, nothing is good! I fear I shall leave my skin here.’ But the demands of business came before personal comfort. The Merchant of Prato also had Tuscan agents based in San Mateu on the Spanish coast, where they could collect the best Aragonese wools, while deep within the Spanish interior sheep were conquering the Meseta, as millions of animals grazed the high ground in summer and the plateau in winter. Datini’s reach extended to the Maghrib and eastwards to the Balkans and the Black Sea. In the 1390s, he was involved in the slave trade, at a time when Circassians from the Black Sea and Berbers from North Africa were being sold in the slave markets of Majorca and Sicily. From oriental lands beyond the Mediterranean he obtained indigo, brazilwood, pepper, aloes, zedoary and galingale, as well as cotton, mastic and refined sugar from within the Great Sea. From Spain and Morocco, he imported, besides vast amounts of raw wool, ostrich feathers, elephant ivory, rice, almonds and dates.

Estella said yes. After such news, Aldo could hardly concentrate. He wrote home, “Somehow, this time, I don’t seem to be able to write.” On December 2, he wrote in his work journal, “In at least 6 lines of work today and nothing particularly accomplished in any one.” Aldo celebrated the holidays and his engagement at the Bergeres’ with his father beside him, warmly regaled with guitar music, Spanish and Italian carols, pasta, luminarias, and piñatas. Then came the promenade of New Year’s fiestas and parties honoring New Mexico’s statehood. Work looked pretty dull in comparison. On his return to Tres Piedras, Leopold found his desk buried under requests for grazing permits. Altogether, Carson headquarters had received applications for 220,000 sheep. The new plan allowed only 198,000, and it was Leopold’s job to reject the extra applications and to make the decisions stick. He and his rangers patrolled the forests, their six-shooters at their sides. Even so, they relied mostly on forceful words as a means of persuasion. When he met ranchers or sheepers to talk, Leopold carefully left his pistols in his saddle. By March, the business of permits was well under way. Hall had accomplished the job he came for, and he moved on. Ringland promoted Leopold to acting supervisor of Carson National Forest. Aldo boasted to his fiancée: “Of all the men in our class from Forest School there are only two of us Acting Supervisors, and none are Supervisors yet.” By fall, he was Carson’s full supervisor. Leopold hired more rangers to hold the grazing situation steady. He closely inspected the rangers’ stations, work journals, and reports. When a forester’s idea or accomplishment impressed him, he dashed off “Bully!” in the margin. That summer, Aldo built a house for his bride- to- be, assisted by Estella’s brother and his own brother Frederic, who was working at headquarters for the summer. Aldo’s correspondence to his beloved never faltered.