Vanishing Landscapes
Vanishing Landscapes

Author: William L. Preston

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0520311256

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Now no longer well known or clearly recognizable as a region, the Tulare Lake Basin also once supported the densest non-agricultural population in North America. This population, of Yokut Indians, caused little change to the wild oasis environment. Today, however, the Basin bears the rigid imprint of the past two centuries of technological progress, culminating in the complete domination of the land and landscape by large-scale, corporate farming. Natural landmarks and boundaries are subordinate to cultural creations, and the identity of the region has waned with its assimilation into the uniform landscape of international agribusiness and with the gradual demise of the lake itself. After describing the geological processes that created the lake and basin, William Preston considers the values, attitudes to the environment, and aims and technologies that have characterized successive stages of human habitation, leaving their mark upon the land. Using innovative research techniques, and with insight derived from extensive personal knowledge of Tulare and its environs, he reconstructs the physical and cultural realities of each technological period: the Yokut subsistence culture and its disruption by Spanish, Mexican, and American settlers; early sheepherding, cattle ranching, and agricultural experimentation; the arrival of the railroad and of bonanza wheat farming in the late nineteenth century; the small farms stil lin existence during his own youth in Tulare; and, finally, the corporate, "world" farms of today. Integrating ecological and historical perspectives, Preston describes the concrete effects of cultural change upon the land and the land's reciprocal impact upon culture. Rather than just the story of this region, we are given the case history of its physical transformation by forces that have shaped all the Central Valley and California's large urban centers as well. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

Report
Report

Author: Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Home Missions

Publisher:

Published: 1914

Total Pages: 1010

ISBN-13:

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Country Schoolwomen
Country Schoolwomen

Author: Kathleen Weiler

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780804730044

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Focusing on the lives and work of women teachers in two rural California counties from 1850 to 1950, Country Schoolwomen explores the social context of teaching, seeking to understand what teaching meant to women teachers, what it provided them, and how it shaped their categories of experience. The women we meet in this study taught in isolated one- and two-room schoolhouses and in the migrant schools of the Depression years; many of them witnessed the profound upheavals brought about by the two world wars. Through the lens of their lives, the author examines the growth of state control over schools, the irrevocable impact of powerful economic and political changes on small-town life, and the patterns of racism that have divided California from the time of the earliest European settlement. This study challenges a number of assumptions about the lives and work of women teachers. It is often assumed, for example, that the work of women in schools has always been controlled by men--that education has, with rare exceptions, remained a patriarchal space in which women care for children in classrooms while men hold positions of authority, define issues, and set policy. Country Schoolwomen introduces us to a network of women educators who occupied positions of power at the state level, who supported one another, and who defined an alternative, far more positive image of the woman teacher. The work of these women put forth a vision of classroom teaching as a serious and stimulating profession. And for many of the women in this study, teaching clearly did provide material resources and intellectual satisfaction. The historical record thus suggests that rather than signaling their subjugation, teaching has afforded women a potential source of power; it has offered them respect, autonomy, and financial independence. But women have had to struggle--not always successfully--to claim this potential, which male educators have often sought to deny or disregard. In addition, both university experts and local communities have persisted in viewing classroom teaching as "women's work" and have consequently been slow to acknowledge competing perspectives on the profession. This study ultimately reveals, then, not a homogeneous tradition but a dense ideological landscape, one in which representations of "the woman teacher" were often caught among contradictory and contested visions.