Invented Edens
Invented Edens

Author: Robert H. Kargon

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2008-07-11

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0262293935

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Tracing the design of “techno-cities” that blend the technological and the pastoral. Industrialization created cities of Dickensian squalor that were crowded, smoky, dirty, and disease-ridden. By the beginning of the twentieth century, urban visionaries were looking for ways to improve both living and working conditions in industrial cities. In Invented Edens, Robert Kargon and Arthur Molella trace the arc of one form of urban design, which they term the techno-city: a planned city developed in conjunction with large industrial or technological enterprises, blending the technological and the pastoral, the mill town and the garden city. Techno-cities of the twentieth century range from factory towns in Mussolini's Italy to the Disney creation of Celebration, Florida. Kargon and Molella show that the techno-city represents an experiment in integrating modern technology into the world of ideal life. Techno-cities mirror society's understanding of current technologies, and at the same time seek to regain the lost virtues of the edenic pre-industrial village. The idea of the techno-city transcended ideologies, crossed national borders, and spanned the entire twentieth century. Kargon and Molella map the concept through a series of exemplars. These include Norris, Tennessee, home to the Tennessee Valley Authority; Torviscosa, Italy, built by Italy's Fascist government to accommodate synthetic textile manufacturing (and featured in an early short by Michelangelo Antonioni); Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela, planned by a team from MIT and Harvard; and, finally, Disney's Celebration—perhaps the ultimate techno-city, a fantasy city reflecting an era in which virtual experiences are rapidly replacing actual ones.

Paradise Lust
Paradise Lust

Author: Brook Wilensky-Lanford

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2011-08-02

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0802195636

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A “certainly weird . . . strangely wonderful . . . [and] often irresistible” search to find the real Garden of Eden (The New York Times Book Review). Where, precisely, was God’s Paradise? St. Augustine had a theory. So did medieval monks, John Calvin and Christopher Columbus. But when Darwin’s theory of evolution changed our understanding of human origins, shouldn’t the desire to put a literal Eden on the map have faded away? Not so fast. This “gloriously researched, pluckily written historical and anecdotal assay of humankind’s age-old quixotic quest for the exact location of the Biblical garden” (Elle) explores an obsession that has consumed scientists and theologians alike for centuries. To this day, the search continues, taken up by amateur explorers, clergymen, scholars, engineers and educators—romantic seekers all who started with the same simple-sounding Bible verses, only to end up at a different spot on the globe: Sri Lanka, the Seychelles, the North Pole, Mesopotamia, China, Iraq—and Ohio. Inspired by an Eden seeker in her own family, “Wilensky-Lanford approaches her subjects with respect, enthusiasm and conscientious research” (San Francisco Chronicle) as she traverses a century-spanning history provoking surprising insights into where we came from, what we did wrong, and where we go from here. And it all makes for “a lively journey” (Kirkus Reviews).

A History of Wine in America, Volume 1
A History of Wine in America, Volume 1

Author: Thomas Pinney

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2007-09-17

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 052093458X

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The Vikings called North America "Vinland," the land of wine. Giovanni de Verrazzano, the Italian explorer who first described the grapes of the New World, was sure that "they would yield excellent wines." And when the English settlers found grapes growing so thickly that they covered the ground down to the very seashore, they concluded that "in all the world the like abundance is not to be found." Thus, from the very beginning the promise of America was, in part, the alluring promise of wine. How that promise was repeatedly baffled, how its realization was gradually begun, and how at last it has been triumphantly fulfilled is the story told in this book. It is a story that touches on nearly every section of the United States and includes the whole range of American society from the founders to the latest immigrants. Germans in Pennsylvania, Swiss in Georgia, Minorcans in Florida, Italians in Arkansas, French in Kansas, Chinese in California—all contributed to the domestication of Bacchus in the New World. So too did innumerable individuals, institutions, and organizations. Prominent politicians, obscure farmers, eager amateurs, sober scientists: these and all the other kinds and conditions of American men and women figure in the story. The history of wine in America is, in many ways, the history of American origins and of American enterprise in microcosm. While much of that history has been lost to sight, especially after Prohibition, the recovery of the record has been the goal of many investigators over the years, and the results are here brought together for the first time. In print in its entirety for the first time, A History of Wine in America is the most comprehensive account of winemaking in the United States, from the Norse discovery of native grapes in 1001 A.D., through Prohibition, and up to the present expansion of winemaking in every state.

American Winescapes
American Winescapes

Author: Gary L Peters

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-02-12

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0429970889

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Winescapes are unique agricultural landscapes that are shaped by the presence of vineyards, winemaking activities, and the wineries where wines are produced and stored. Where viticulture is successful it transforms the local landscape into a combination of agriculture, industry, and tourism. This book demystifies viticulture in a way that helps the reader understand the environmental and economic conditions necessary in the art and practice of wine making. Distinctive characteristics of the book include a detailed discussion of more than thirty grape cultivars, an overview of wine regions around the country, and a survey of wine publications and festivals. Peters discusses the major environmental conditions affecting viticulture, especially weather and climate, and outlines the special problems the industry faces from lack of capital, competition, and changing public tastes.

Garden of the World
Garden of the World

Author: Cecilia M. Tsu

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-06-01

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0199910626

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Nearly a century before it became known as Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara Valley was world-renowned for something else: the succulent fruits and vegetables grown in its fertile soil. In Garden of the World, Cecilia Tsu tells the overlooked, intertwined histories of the Santa Clara Valley's agricultural past and the Asian immigrants who cultivated the land during the region's peak decades of horticultural production. Weaving together the story of three overlapping waves of Asian migration from China, Japan, and the Philippines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Tsu offers a comparative history that sheds light on the ways in which Asian farmers and laborers fundamentally altered the agricultural economy and landscape of the Santa Clara Valley, as well as white residents' ideas about race, gender, and what it meant to be an American family farmer. At the heart of American racial and national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the family farm ideal: the celebration of white European-American families operating independent, self-sufficient farms that would contribute to the stability of the nation. In California by the 1880s, boosters promoted orchard fruit growing as one of the most idyllic incarnations of the family farm ideal and the lush Santa Clara Valley the finest location to live out this agrarian dream. But in practice, many white growers relied extensively on hired help, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was largely Asian. Detailing how white farmers made racial and gendered claims to defend their dependence on nonwhite labor, how those claims shifted with the settlement of each Asian immigrant group, and how Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos sought to create their own version of the American dream in farming, Tsu excavates the social and economic history of agriculture in this famed rural community to reveal the intricate nature of race relations there.

Early Cupertino
Early Cupertino

Author: Mary Lou Lyon

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2006-10-16

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 143961461X

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A priest with Juan Batista de Anza's expedition in 1776 named a wild creek where the group camped after St. Joseph of Cupertino, Italy. A village known as Westside adopted the name in 1904 as it grew up by that stream, now Stevens Creek, near the road that is now De Anza Boulevard. Like its Italian namesake, Cupertino once had wineries, and vineyards striped its foothills and flatlands. Later vast orchards created an annual blizzard of spring blossoms, earning it the name Valley of Heart's Delight. The railroad came to carry those crops to market, and the electric trolley extended to connect Cupertino's first housing tract, Monte Vista. When the postwar building boom came, Cupertino preserved its independence through incorporation, but that bold move would not stop the wave of modernization that would soon roll over the valley.