Our National Monuments
Our National Monuments

Author: Q. T. Luong

Publisher:

Published: 2021-09-25

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9781733576079

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From the north woods of Maine to the cactus-filled deserts of Arizona, America's national monuments include vast lands rivaling the national parks in beauty, diversity, and historical heritage. These critically important landscapes, mostly under the Bureau of Land Management supervision, are often under the radar with limited visitor information available yet offer considerable opportunities for solitude and adventure compared to bustling national parks. The Antiquities Act of 1906 gave Presidents the authority to proclaim national monuments as an expedited way to protect areas of natural or cultural significance. Since then, 16 Presidents have used the Antiquities Act to preserve some of America's most treasured public lands and waters. In 2017, an unprecedented Executive Order was issued questioning these designations by calling for the review of 27 national monuments across 11 states and two oceans, opening the threat of development to vulnerable and irreplaceable natural resources. Our National Monuments introduces these spectacular and unique landscapes, in the first book of its kind. Accompanying the collection of scenic photographs is an invaluable guide including maps of each national monument with carefully selected attractions identified and described based on the author's wide-ranging explorations. Our National Monuments invites readers to experience for themselves these lands and learn about the people and cultures who came before, and to whom these lands are still sacred places. QT Luong is one of the most prolific photographers working in America's public lands and the author of Treasured Lands, the best-selling and acclaimed photography book about the national parks. Combining hundreds of his sumptuously printed photographs with essays from citizen conservation associations caring for these national treasures; including a foreword by former Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and photographs of marine national monuments from Ansel Adams award-winning photographer Ian Shive, the comprehensive portrayals of Our National Monuments help readers understand how these essential landscapes are preserving America's past and shaping its future.

The Centennial
The Centennial

Author: David Kroese

Publisher: Wheatmark, Inc.

Published: 2019-01-17

Total Pages: 765

ISBN-13: 1627876588

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Sparked by the opportunity to explore his personal passions, David Kroese turns away from a rewarding yet languishing career and begins the adventure of a lifetime. What happens next evolves into a tour of all four hundred-plus units in America's National Park System -- a perfect way to celebrate the 2016 National Park Service centennial. The Centennial: A Journey Through America's National Park System details David's compelling centennial explorations to 387 parks in 360 days. The story continues through December 2017, when he becomes one of fewer than fifty people known to have visited all 417 national parks. His personal expedition is a poignant exploration into quintessential America as told through its historical and natural wonders. Delve into diverse locations from Hawaii to the Rockies, New England to the Caribbean, Charleston to the California desert, Alaska to American Samoa. Join David and experience the inherent marvels within America's unique landscape and fascinating history, revealed in engaging context, poetic descriptions, and heartfelt appreciation. The Centennial: A Journey Through America's National Park System is an odyssey of self discovery and fulfillment through the nation's soul.

The Hour of Land
The Hour of Land

Author: Terry Tempest Williams

Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books

Published: 2016-05-31

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0374712263

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America’s national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them. From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas and more, Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that illuminate the unique grandeur of each place while delving into what it means to shape a landscape with its own evolutionary history into something of our own making. Part memoir, part natural history, and part social critique, The Hour of Land is a meditation and a manifesto on why wild lands matter to the soul of America.

Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley
Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley

Author: Thomas J. Harvey

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2013-07-29

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 0806150424

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The Colorado River Plateau is home to two of the best-known landscapes in the world: Rainbow Bridge in southern Utah and Monument Valley on the Utah-Arizona border. Twentieth-century popular culture made these places icons of the American West, and advertising continues to exploit their significance today. In Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley, Thomas J. Harvey artfully tells how Navajos and Anglo-Americans created fabrics of meaning out of this stunning desert landscape, space that western novelist Zane Grey called “the storehouse of unlived years,” where a rugged, more authentic life beckoned. Harvey explores the different ways in which the two societies imbued the landscape with deep cultural significance. Navajos long ago incorporated Rainbow Bridge into the complex origin story that embodies their religion and worldview. In the early 1900s, archaeologists crossed paths with Grey in the Rainbow Bridge area. Grey, credited with making the modern western novel popular, sought freedom from the contemporary world and reimagined the landscape for his own purposes. In the process, Harvey shows, Grey erased most of the Navajo inhabitants. This view of the landscape culminated in filmmaker John Ford’s use of Monument Valley as the setting for his epic mid-twentieth-century Westerns. Harvey extends the story into the late twentieth century when environmentalists sought to set aside Rainbow Bridge as a symbolic remnant of nature untainted by modernization. Tourists continue to flock to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, as they have for a century, but the landscapes are most familiar today because of their appearances in advertising. Monument Valley has been used to sell perfume, beer, and sport utility vehicles. Encompassing the history of the Navajo, archaeology, literature, film, environmentalism, and tourism, Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley explores how these rock formations, Navajo sacred spaces still, have become embedded in the modern identity of the American West—and of the nation itself.

Monument Culture
Monument Culture

Author: Laura A. Macaluso

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-05-30

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 153811416X

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This book brings together a collection of essays from scholars and cultural critics working on the meanings of monuments and memorials in the second decade of the twenty-first century, a time of great social and political change.

My Itchy Travel Feet: Breathtaking Adventure Vacation Ideas
My Itchy Travel Feet: Breathtaking Adventure Vacation Ideas

Author: Donna Hull

Publisher: Hyperink Inc

Published: 2012-07-23

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1614644810

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At My Itchy Travel Feet, The Baby Boomer’s Guide to Travel, writer Donna Hull and photographer Alan Hull travel the world recording their boomer travel experiences with words, photos, and videos so that you’ll know exactly what to expect. Their goal? To get boomers off the couch and out into the world. In this Blog to Book, they’ve chosen some of their favorite journeys to share with you. Take a road trip in Northern Italy, drive the California Big Sur coast, or explore Arches, Canyonlands, Glacier, and Grand Tetons National Parks. You’ll find a chapter on small ship luxury cruising and a travel tips section with advice on road trips, cruising, travel photography, and multi-generational travel. So, pull up a chair, grab a cup of coffee, and start reading about active travel for boomers. It’s guaranteed to make your travel feet itchy!

Boundaries
Boundaries

Author: Maya Lin

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-04-26

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1501146564

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Renowned artist and architect Maya Lin's visual and verbal sketchbook—a unique view into her artwork and philosophy. Walking through this parklike area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth -- a long, polished black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth. Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward, and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into the grassy site contained by the walls of this memorial, we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial's walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole.... So begins the competition entry submitted in 1981 by a Yale undergraduate for the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. -- subsequently called "as moving and awesome and popular a piece of memorial architecture as exists anywhere in the world." Its creator, Maya Lin, has been nothing less than world famous ever since. From the explicitly political to the un-ashamedly literary to the completely abstract, her simple and powerful sculpture -- the Rockefeller Foundation sculpture, the Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial, the Yale Women's Table, Wave Field -- her architecture, including The Museum for African Art and the Norton residence, and her protean design talents have defined her as one of the most gifted creative geniuses of the age. Boundaries is her first book: an eloquent visual/verbal sketchbook produced with the same inspiration and attention to detail as any of her other artworks. Like her environmental sculptures, it is a site, but one which exists at a remove so that it may comment on the personal and artistic elements that make up those works. In it, sketches, photographs, workbook entries, and original designs are held together by a deeply personal text. Boundaries is a powerful literary and visual statement by "a leading public artist" (Holland Carter). It is itself a unique work of art.