The Unending Frontier
Author: John F. Richards
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2003-05-15
Total Pages: 704
ISBN-13: 9780520230750
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Late Victorian Holocausts
Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2002-06-17
Total Pages: 476
ISBN-13: 1781680612
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis global environmental and political history “will redefine the way we think about the European colonial project” (Observer). “ . . . sets the triumph of the late 19th-century Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El Niño weather patterns at that time . . . groundbreaking, mind-stretching.” —The Independent Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants’ lives.
Mountain Rivers, Mountain Roads: Transport in Southwest China, 1700‐1850
Author: Nanny Kim
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2019-12-09
Total Pages: 647
ISBN-13: 900441617X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe commercialized economy of late imperial China depended on efficient transport, yet transport technologies, transport economics as well as its role in local societies and in interdependencies of environments and human activities are acutely under-researched. Nanny Kim analyses two transports systems into the Southwest of Qing China through the long eighteenth century and up to the mid-nineteenth century civil wars. The case studies explore shipping on the Upper Changjiang in Sichuan and through the Three Gorges into Hubei, and road transport out of the Sichuan Basin across northeastern Yunnan and northwestern Guizhou into central Yunnan. Specific and concrete investigations of a river that presented extreme dangers to navigation and carriage across the crunch zone of the Himalayan Plateau provides a basis for a systematic reconstruction of transport outside the lowland centres and their convenient networks of water transport.
China
Author: Robert B. Marks
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2011-12-16
Total Pages: 462
ISBN-13: 1442212772
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis deeply informed and beautifully written book provides a comprehensive and comprehensible history of China from prehistory to the present. Focusing on the interaction of humans and their environment, Robert B. Marks traces changes in the physical and cultural world that is home to a quarter of humankind. Through both word and image, this work illuminates the chaos and paradox inherent in China’s environmental narrative, demonstrating how historically sustainable practices can, in fact, be profoundly ecologically unsound. The author also reevaluates China’s traditional “heroic” storyline, highlighting the marginalization of nature that followed the spread of Chinese civilization while examining the development of a distinctly Chinese way of relating to and altering the environment. Unmatched in his ability to synthesize a complex subject clearly and cogently, Marks has written an accessible yet nuanced history for any reader interested in China, past or present. Indeed he argues successfully that all of humanity has a stake in China’s environmental future.
The Retreat of the Elephants
Author: Mark Elvin
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2004-03-10
Total Pages: 592
ISBN-13: 0300133537
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe eminent China scholar delivers a landmark study of Chinese culture’s relationship to the natural environment across thousands of years of history. Spanning the three millennia for which there are written records, The Retreat of the Elephants is the first comprehensive environmental history of China. It is also a treasure trove of literary, political, aesthetic, scientific, and religious sources, which allow the reader direct access to the views and feelings of Chinese people toward their environment and their landscape. China scholar and historian Mark Elvin chronicles the spread of the Chinese style of farming that eliminated elephant habitats; the destruction of most of the forests; the impacts of war on the landscape; and the re-engineering of the countryside through gigantic water-control systems. He documents the histories of three contrasting localities within China to show how ecological dynamics defined the lives of the inhabitants. And he shows that China in the eighteenth century was probably more environmentally degraded than northwestern Europe around this time. Indispensable for its new perspective on long-term Chinese history and its explanation of the roots of China’s present-day environmental crisis, this book opens a door into the Chinese past.
Phoenix
Author: D.J. Sprague
Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
Published: 2023-02-03
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13: 1639851321
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPHOENIX An ancient feathered spirit who lived in a remote desert for a long time, where it was consumed repeatedly by fires a muse would set, only to rise from the ashes of each..remade, renewed, and more evolved, and however much before the muses arrive, it may dive, tumble, fall.. or occasionally land and to something cling, but never at the expense of losing its wings THE ROSE CHAPTERS A story of a pilgrim in search of love from love unrequited, and without over endeavoring to convert such dim light to bright, there are voices, but only one character. There is truth, but no formal proof. There is art, but unlike workshop garden flowers..more like wild flowers. This streaming is for the simple pleasure of reading, to feel the sensation, feelings against gradients of thought..however much the reader upon the journey herein, may be prose'd to thought or drawn to feeling, if thought or feeling be the pleasure
A Great Undertaking
Author: Jeff Hornibrook
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2015-04-27
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 1438456891
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJeff Hornibrook provides a unique, microcosmic look at the process of industrialization in one Chinese community at the turn of the twentieth century. Industrialization came late to China, but was ultimately embraced and hastened to aid the state's strategic and military interests. In Pingxiang County in the highlands of Jiangxi Province, coalmining was seasonal work; peasants rented mines from lineage leaders to work after the harvest. These traditions changed in 1896 when the court decided that the county's mines were essential for industrialization. Foreign engineers and Chinese officials arrived to establish the new social and economic order required for mechanized mining, one that would change things for people from all levels of society. The outsiders constructed a Westernized factory town that sat uneasily within the existing community. Mistreatment of the local population, including the forced purchase of gentry-held properties and the integration of peasants into factory-style labor schemes, sparked a series of rebellions that wounded the empire and tore at the fabric of the community. Using stories found in memoirs of elite Chinese and foreign engineers, correspondence between gentry and powerful officials, travelogues of American missionaries and engineers, as well as other sources, Hornibrook offers a fascinating history of the social and political effects of industrialization in Pingxiang County.
Miracle Of The Desert
Author: Thomas H. Williams
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 704
ISBN-13: 1462873693
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Thomas Ward is like a small stream in the mountains, that emerges from a tiny spring and trickles on down the hillside to join the creek on its way to the river. No attempt has been made to get all the information, about all the people who live, or have lived, within its boundaries. Neither is the material collected, considered to be the most important or free from errors. This book is just "a cup of water" dipped from the little stream, as it journeys on its way, no attempt is made to dip up all the water or stop its flow. It is hoped, that like the cup of cool water from the tiny stream, this book will refresh the reader, and the stream of time flows on. To those pioneers, both young and old who had the courage to combine all the natural resources which the creator so wisely stored in these mountains, rivers and valleys along with the brawn and brain that He gave man. The Miracle of the Desert came to be.
The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison
Author: Elizabeth Atwood
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Published: 2020-09-01
Total Pages: 284
ISBN-13: 1682475301
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn September 1918, World War I was nearing its end when Marguerite E. Harrison, a thirty-nine-year-old Baltimore socialite, wrote to the head of the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) asking for a job. The director asked for clarification. Did she mean a clerical position? No, she told him. She wanted to be a spy. Harrison, a member of a prominent Baltimore family, usually got her way. She had founded a school for sick children and wangled her way onto the staff of the Baltimore Sun. Fluent in four languages and knowledgeable of Europe, she was confident she could gather information for the U.S. government. The MID director agreed to hire her, and Marguerite Harrison became America’s first female foreign intelligence officer. For the next seven years, she traveled to the world’s most dangerous places—Berlin, Moscow, Siberia, and the Middle East—posing as a writer and filmmaker in order to spy for the U.S. Army and U.S. Department of State. With linguistic skills and knack for subterfuge, Harrison infiltrated Communist networks, foiled a German coup, located American prisoners in Russia, and probably helped American oil companies seeking entry into the Middle East. Along the way, she saved the life of King Kong creator Merian C. Cooper, twice survived imprisonment in Russia, and launched a women’s explorer society whose members included Amelia Earhart and Margaret Mead. As incredible as her life was, Harrison has never been the subject of a published book-length biography. Past articles and chapters about her life relied heavily on her autobiography published in 1935, which omitted and distorted key aspects of her espionage career. Elizabeth Atwood draws on newly discovered documents in the U.S. National Archives, as well as Harrison’s prison files in the archives of the Russian Federal Security Bureau in Moscow, Russia. Although Harrison portrayed herself as a writer who temporarily worked as a spy, this book documents that Harrison’s espionage career was much more extensive and important than she revealed. She was one of America’s most trusted agents in Germany, Russia and the Middle East after World War I when the United States sought to become a world power.
Every Nook & Cranny: a World Travel Guide
Author: Faye Day
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Published: 2016-05-24
Total Pages: 1268
ISBN-13: 151444464X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEvery Nook and Cranny is a first in a series of autobiographical travel guides touching on every continent, most countries and hundreds of islands. Travel with the author through steamy jungles and bird-filled tropical rainforest to scorching deserts and the wilderness of Arctic regions; from Stone Age tribes to the sophistication of the worlds most modern cities. Explore the ancient civilisations and participate in amazing wildlife encounters. The authors personal experiences are related together with some historical fact, many interesting stories, adventurous episodes and several amusing anecdotes. In depth descriptive passages are illustrated with hundreds of photographs which will enable readers to visualise and fully appreciate the text. The best of every destination is revealed, along with suggestions on how to approach them.
