Its history, location, people and industry--all serve as an example of small riverside settlements that grew into industrial cities over the course of a century early in our country's history. From schools, to factories, to founding families, to all the minutiae that create a town--it provides a clear picture of the many facets of Lewiston during its transformation.
This book, written by the author of the celebrated volume Six Guns and Society, explains why the myth of the Wild West is popular around the world. It shows how the cultural icon of the Wild West speaks to deep desires of individualism and liberty and offers a vision of social contract theory in which a free and equal individual (the cowboy) emerges from the state of nature (the wilderness) to build a civil society (the frontier community). The metaphor of the Wild West retained a commitment to some limited government (law and order) but rejected the notion of the fully codified state as too oppressive (the corrupt sheriff). Compelling and magnificently suggestive, the book unpacks one of the core icons of our time.
From Harriet Beecher Stowe's image of the Mississippi's "bosom" to Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod as "the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts," the American environment has been represented in terms of the human body. Exploring such instances of embodiment, Cecelia Tichi exposes the historically varied and often contrary geomorphic expression of a national paradigm.
First published in 1997, this volume from the Bruton Center for Development Studies examines urban productivity and the Korean urban system. The Center recognizes the growing significance of information and technology in local, national and global development. Research conducted within the Center includes both theoretical and empirical investigations of regional housing markets; mobility and location choices of households and businesses; interaction of land use and transportation; relationships between spatial patterns of development and the dynamics of regional economies, and on the interaction of market forces and public policies in shaping development.
This volume explores the relationship between cities and railways over three centuries. Despite their nearly 200-year existence, The City and the Railway in the World shows that urban railways are still politically and historically important to the modern world. Since its inception, cities have played a significant role in the railway system; cities were among the main reasons for building such efficient but lavish and costly modes of transport for persons, goods, and information. They also influenced the technological appearance of railways as these have had to meet particular demands for transport in urban areas. In 25 essays, this volume demonstrates that the relationship between the city and the railway is one of the most publicly debated themes in the context of daily lives in growing urban settings, as well as in the second urbanisation of the global South with migration from rural to urban landscapes. The volume’s broad geographical range includes discussions of railway networks, railway stations, and urban rails in countries such as India, Japan, England, Belgium, Romania, Nigeria, the USA, and Mexico. The City and the Railway in the World will be a useful tool for scholars interested in the history of transport, travel, and urban change.
How did American cities change throughout the 20th and early 21st century? This timely publication integrates research from American Literary and Cultural Studies, Urban Studies and History. The essays range from negotiations of the »ethnic city« in US literature and media, to studies of recent urban phenomena and their representations: gentrification, re-appropriation and conversion of urban spaces in the USA. These interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives on American cities provide unique points of access for studying the complex narratives of urban transformation.
Few spaces remain as central to American consciousness as the western frontier. The vast territory, which for generations fueled the desires and conquests of artists, philosophers, and politicians alike, now offers new discoveries in Richard Lehan's Quest West. Through an intellectual and cultural history of the frontier experience, Lehan details the transformations of ideas and literary forms that occurred as the country expanded to the west and demonstrates how the wilderness, and then by turn the urban frontier, represent an ideological summary of the nation itself. His study involves the foundations of belief and the realms of evolving interpretations, from mythic destiny to the more regional address of historicism. In both instances, the desire is to find meaning in the lost past. By tracing the evolution of Frederick Jackson Turner's famous thesis -- that the unchartered frontier ended in 1890 and was replaced with an equally precarious urban landscape -- Lehan argues that the two spaces became the basis for a division still evident in America today. Historically, the wilderness accommodated conservative thinking, while urban environments proved more conducive to liberal values. Ideologies stemming from the two regions, as Lehan shows, found literary equivalents in fictional narratives ranging from subgenres like the Western and naturalism to modern forms like neorealism and noir, extending even into the postmodern. Lehan offers a view of the West as a cultural phenomenon borne of ideological changes, encompassing historical and literary movements -- from Puritan perspectives to the revisionist claims of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, from homesteading to imperial ambition. Quest West traces these competing ideas as they appear in the works of major American writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Nathanael West, and John Steinbeck. An important work of literary and historical scholarship, Quest West presents compelling evidence that the meaning of America remains inseparable from the march of seminal ideas westward.
'The Complex City: Social and Built Approaches and Methods' explores different ways of understanding the city. The social city approach proceeds from the ground-up, it focuses on human interactions shaped by economic and environmental processes. The built city method looks through a top-down lens, examining policy and planning for buildings and infrastructure, including utilities and energy networks. This volume is different from other city anthologies in that it explores them through their differences, by presenting each chapter in one of the two categories. While there is invariably an overlap between the two areas, they are distinct positions. In doing so the book identifies how, despite their often adversarial approaches, they both belong to the same city. As essential components of the city they should not necessarily be resolved, as it is in this friction where creativity and innovation happens. 'The Complex City: Social and Built Approaches and Methods' is concerned about the ideas and solutions that they both offer. The book’s originality stems from this duality, and from its recognition that cities are living, organic, protean places of opportunity, crisis, conflict and challenge. The chapters demonstrate the complexity of cities as a set of ideas concerning what they engender, how they function and why they continue to act as a catalyst for different kinds of human activity. They explore issues of socio-political import and questions of the city as a physically constructed space. The themes are diverse and include the inception of the city as a place of competition to centres of regeneration and urban withdrawal. They cover a range of city and urban regions from Athens to Wellington from site specific singular perspectives to comparative assessments. The questions they raise include how do we inhabit urban areas, how do we make plans for them, and how do we, at times, ignore them entirely.
Much city marketing and branding activity is future-oriented; aimed at achieving a forward-looking vision for places. The aim of this activity is to attract visitors, residents and/or inward investment, and focus on communicating attractive place attributes to create a differentiated spatial ‘product’ that will appeal to particular target audiences. In seeking to achieve this, place marketing campaigns have been criticized for emphasizing generic attributes, such as accessibility, infrastructure and a skilled workforce—which can serve to homogenize places which in reality are very different. However, a city’s distinctive character is a consequence of its history and development over time, and this book analyses the role of these temporal dimensions in place marketing and branding. The book analyses how the past—both material (i.e. the historic built environment) and intangible (i.e. routines, practices and the ‘character’ of the populace)—is appropriated, in order to ‘sell’ the city into the future. It acknowledges the inherent selectivity involved and discusses the factors influencing what is remembered from the past—and equally importantly, what is forgotten. Adopting a range of theoretical approaches to understanding temporality in this context, the book will appeal to advanced students, academic researchers and reflexive place branding practitioners by introducing a ‘temporal paradox’ incorporating both fixity (the material and immaterial elements of the city’s past) and fluidity (relating to the creation of the place product as a dynamic assemblage of individual elements and attributes aimed at particular target audiences).
