The Environmental Imagination

The Environmental Imagination

Author: Lawrence Buell

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 604

ISBN-13: 9780674258624

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With Thoreau’s Walden as a touchstone, Buell offers an account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of Western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more “ecocentric” way of being. In doing so, he provides a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.


Back to Nature

Back to Nature

Author: Peter J. Schmitt

Publisher:

Published: 1990-02

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13:

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Peter J. Schmitt describes the many ways in which America's urban middle class became involved with nature from the turn of the century to shortly after World War I, and he assess the influence of the "Arcadian myth" on American culture. With sympathy and gentle irony, he surveys the manifestations of the American love affair with the country: summer camps, the beginnings of wildlie protection and the conservation crusade, landscaped cemeteris, "Christian ornithology," and wilderness novels. The Arcadian drive reflected urban values, as the city-dweller sought virtue in nature. Landscape gardening, country clubs, national parks, and scenic turnoffs imposed the industrial ethic of order, neatness, and regularity on natural landscaps. Nature study and anthropomorphic animal stories taught moral values to children.


The Making of Urban America

The Making of Urban America

Author: Raymond A. Mohl

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-10-03

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 1493083627

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The revised and updated third edition of The Making of Urban America includes seven new articles and a richly detailed historiographical essay that discusses the vast urban history literature added to the canon since the publication of the second edition. The authors’ extensively revised introductions and the fifteen reprinted articles trace urban development from the preindustrial city to the twentieth-century city. With emphasis on the social, economic, political, commercial, and cultural aspects of urban history, these essays illustrate the growth and change that created modern-day urban life. Dynamic topics such as technology, immigration and ethnicity, suburbanization, sunbelt cities, urban political history, and planning and housing are examined. The Making of Urban America is the only reader available that covers all of U.S. urban history and that also includes the most recent interpretive scholarship on the subject.


The Gateway Arch

The Gateway Arch

Author: W. Arthur Mehrhoff

Publisher: Popular Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 9780879725686

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Muses on the many dimensions of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in downtown St. Louis. Five essays, some of them published previously, consider the relation of the edifice to classical arches, to the westward expansion it celebrates, to the city it occupies, and to the present and future conception of the US. No index. Paper edition (unseen), $20.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


The Country in the City

The Country in the City

Author: Richard A. Walker

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2009-11-23

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 0295989734

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Winner of the Western History Association's 2009 Hal K. Rothman Award Finalist in the Western Writers of America Spur Award for the Western Nonfiction Contemporary category (2008). The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the world's most beautiful cities. Despite a population of 7 million people, it is more greensward than asphalt jungle, more open space than hardscape. A vast quilt of countryside is tucked into the folds of the metropolis, stitched from fields, farms and woodlands, mines, creeks, and wetlands. In The Country in the City, Richard Walker tells the story of how the jigsaw geography of this greenbelt has been set into place. The Bay Area’s civic landscape has been fought over acre by acre, an arduous process requiring popular mobilization, political will, and hard work. Its most cherished environments--Mount Tamalpais, Napa Valley, San Francisco Bay, Point Reyes, Mount Diablo, the Pacific coast--have engendered some of the fiercest environmental battles in the country and have made the region a leader in green ideas and organizations. This book tells how the Bay Area got its green grove: from the stirrings of conservation in the time of John Muir to origins of the recreational parks and coastal preserves in the early twentieth century, from the fight to stop bay fill and control suburban growth after the Second World War to securing conservation easements and stopping toxic pollution in our times. Here, modern environmentalism first became a mass political movement in the 1960s, with the sudden blooming of the Sierra Club and Save the Bay, and it remains a global center of environmentalism to this day. Green values have been a pillar of Bay Area life and politics for more than a century. It is an environmentalism grounded in local places and personal concerns, close to the heart of the city. Yet this vision of what a city should be has always been informed by liberal, even utopian, ideas of nature, planning, government, and democracy. In the end, green is one of the primary colors in the flag of the Left Coast, where green enthusiasms, like open space, are built into the fabric of urban life. Written in a lively and accessible style, The Country in the City will be of interest to general readers and environmental activists. At the same time, it speaks to fundamental debates in environmental history, urban planning, and geography.


Polpop

Polpop

Author: James E. Combs

Publisher: Popular Press

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780879722760

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This book discusses various components of popular culture and the effects they have on politics. Some of the areas of mass culture which are discussed are: popular dramas, folk heritage, the Western myth, sports, religion, media, propaganda, and show business.


The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History

The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History

Author: Carolyn Merchant

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2005-09-14

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 0231505841

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How and why have Americans living at particular times and places used and transformed their environment? How have political systems dealt with conflicts over resources and conservation? This is the only major reference work to explore all the major themes and debates of the burgeoning field of environmental history. Humanity ́s relationship with the natural world is one of the oldest and newest topics in human history. The issue emerged as a distinct field of scholarship in the early 1970s and has been growing steadily ever since. The discipline ́s territory and sources are rich and varied and include climactic and geological data, court records, archaeological digs, and the writings of naturalists, as well as federal and state economic and resource development and conservation policy. Environmental historians investigate how and why natural and human-created surroundings affect a society ́s development. Merchant provides a context-setting overview of American environmental history from the beginning of the millennium; an encyclopedia of important concepts, people, agencies, and laws; a chronology of major events; and an extensive bibliography including films, videos, CD-Roms, and websites. This concise "first stop" reference for students and general readers contains an accessible overview of environmental history; a mini-encyclopedia of ideas, people, legislation, and agencies; a chronology of events and their significance; and a bibliography of books, magazines, and journals as well as films, videos, CD-ROMs, and online resources. In addition to providing a wealth of factual information, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History explores contentious issues in this much-debated field, from the idea of wilderness to global warming. How and why have Americans living at particular times and places used and transformed their environment? How have political systems dealt with conflicts over resources and conservation? This is the only major reference work to explore all the major themes and debates in the burgeoning field of environmental history. Humanity's relationship with the natural world is one of the oldest and newest topics in human history. The issue emerged as a distinct field of scholarship in the early 1970s and has been growing steadily ever since. The discipline's territory and sources are rich and varied and include climatic and geological data, court records, archaeological digs, and the writings of naturalists, as well as federal and state economic and resource development and conservation policy. Environmental historians investigate how and why natural and human-created surroundings affect a society's development. Merchant provides a context-setting overview of American environmental history from the precolonial land-use practice of Native Americans and concluding with twenty-first concerns over global warming. The book also includes a glossary of important concepts, people, agencies, and legislation; a chronology of major events; and an extensive bibliography including films, videos, CD-ROMs, and websites. This concise reference for students and general readers contains an accessible overview of American environmental history; a mini-encyclopedia of ideas, people, legislation, and agencies; a chronology of events and their significance; and a bibliography of books, magazines, and journals as well as films, videos, CD-ROMs, and online resources. In addition to providing a wealth of factual information, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History explores contentious issues in this much-debated field, from the idea of wilderness to global warming.


The United States and Latin America

The United States and Latin America

Author: Fredrick B. Pike

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-07-05

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0292787898

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The lazy greaser asleep under a sombrero and the avaricious gringo with money-stuffed pockets are only two of the negative stereotypes that North Americans and Latin Americans have cherished during several centuries of mutual misunderstanding. This unique study probes the origins of these stereotypes and myths and explores how they have shaped North American impressions of Latin America from the time of the Pilgrims up to the end of the twentieth century. Fredrick Pike's central thesis is that North Americans have identified themselves with "civilization" in all its manifestations, while viewing Latin Americans as hopelessly trapped in primitivism, the victims of nature rather than its masters. He shows how this civilization-nature duality arose from the first European settlers' perception that nature—and everything identified with it, including American Indians, African slaves, all women, and all children—was something to be conquered and dominated. This myth eventually came to color the North American establishment view of both immigrants to the United States and all our neighbors to the south.


Playing Indian

Playing Indian

Author: Philip Joseph Deloria

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780300080674

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Looks at the ways Native Americans and their culture have become essential to the identity of the United States.