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An award-winning environmental historian explores American history through wrenching, tragic, and sometimes humorous stories of getting lost The human species has a propensity for getting lost. The American people, inhabiting a mental landscape shaped by their attempts to plant roots and to break free, are no exception. In this engaging book, environmental historian Jon Coleman bypasses the trailblazers so often described in American history to follow instead the strays and drifters who went missing. From Hernando de Soto's failed quest for riches in the American southeast to the recent trend of getting lost as a therapeutic escape from modernity, this book details a unique history of location and movement as well as the confrontations that occur when our physical and mental conceptions of space become disjointed. Whether we get lost in the woods, the plains, or the digital grid, Coleman argues that getting lost allows us to see wilderness anew and connect with generations across five centuries to discover a surprising and edgy American identity.
Over a continent and three centuries, American livestock owners destroyed wolves to protect the beasts that supplied them with food, clothing, mobility, and wealth. The brutality of the campaign soon exceeded wolves’ misdeeds. Wolves menaced property, not people, but storytellers often depicted the animals as ravenous threats to human safety. Subjects of nightmares and legends, wolves fell prey not only to Americans’ thirst for land and resources but also to their deeper anxieties about the untamed frontier. Now Americans study and protect wolves and jail hunters who shoot them without authorization. Wolves have become the poster beasts of the great American wilderness, and the federal g...
In the summer of 1823, a grizzly bear mauled Hugh Glass. The animal ripped the trapper up, carving huge hunks from his body. Glass's fellows rushed to his aid and slew the bear, but Glass's injuries mocked their first aid. The expedition leader arranged for his funeral: two men would stay behind to bury the corpse when it finally stopped gurgling; the rest would move on. Alone in Indian country, the caretakers quickly lost their nerve. They fled, taking Glass's gun, knife, and ammunition with them. But Glass wouldn't die. He began crawling toward Fort Kiowa, hundreds of miles to the east, and as his speed picked up, so did his ire. The bastards who took his gear and left him to rot were goin...
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Best known for catching wolves alive with his bare hands, John R. Abernathy (1876?1941) was born to Scottish ancestors in Texas. Raised in the burgeoning railroad town of Sweetwater, Abernathy considered himself a true son of the Wild West. In his amazing life he worked as a U.S. marshal, sheriff, Secret Service agent, and wildcat oil driller. But it was the accidental discovery of a bold means of catching wolves alive that made Abernathy famous and drew the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. By forcing his hand deep enough into a wolf's mouth, he could stun the creature long enough to capture it, a service for which he was paid fifty dollars by eager ranchers. ø This Bison Books edition brings Abernathy's vivid account of his life into print for the first time since its original publication in 1936.
The Teacher and the Teenage Brain is essential reading for all teachers and students of education. This book offers a fascinating introduction to teenage brain development and shows how this knowledge has changed the way we understand young people. It provides a critical insight into strategies for improving relationships in the classroom and helping both adults and teenagers cope better with this stage of life. Dr John Coleman shows how teachers and students can contribute to healthy brain development. The book includes information about memory and learning, as well as guidance on motivation and the management of stress. Underpinned by his extensive work with schools, Dr Coleman offers advi...
It has been commented on many times during the course of history that the average person in most countries has little or no time to spare to think beyond making a living, raising a family and holding down a job to make these objectives possible. This leaves little or no time to attend to politics or matters of economics or other vital issues, such as war and peace that affect their lives and the life of the nation. Governments know this. So it seems, do highly organized groups operating behind many different front organizations which always have the edge over the citizenry. What the average individual does not know-and will probably never know-is that all great historical events are planned ...
The conventional history of animals could be more accurately described as the history of human ideas about animals. Only in the last few decades have scholars from a wide variety of disciplines attempted to document the lives of historical animals in ways that recognize their agency as sentient beings with complex intelligence. This collection advances the field further, inviting us to examine our recorded history through an animal-centric lens to discover how animals have altered the course of our collective past. The seventeen scholars gathered here present case studies from the Pacific Ocean, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, involving species ranging from gorillas and horses to salamande...
The partisan divide in the United States has widened to a chasm. Legislators vote along party lines and rarely cross the aisle. Political polarization is personal, too—and it is making us miserable. Surveys show that Americans have become more fearful and hateful of supporters of the opposing political party and imagine that they hold much more extreme views than they actually do. We have cordoned ourselves off: we prefer to date and marry those with similar opinions and are less willing to spend time with people on the other side. How can we loosen the grip of this toxic polarization and start working on our most pressing problems? The Way Out offers an escape from this morass. The social...
"Wild by Nature answers the question: how did indigenous animals shape the course of colonization in English America? The book argues that animals acted as obstacles to colonization because their wildness was at odds with Anglo-American legal assertions of possession. Animals and their pursuers transgressed the legal lines officials drew to demarcate colonizers' sovereignty and control over the landscape. Consequently, wild creatures became legal actors in the colonizing process--the subjects of statutes, the issues in court cases, and the parties to treaties--as authorities struggled to both contain and preserve the wildness that made those animals so valuable to English settler societies i...