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The authoritative account of one city s dramatic rebirth."
A micro-biography of horror fiction’s most influential author and his love–hate relationship with New York City. By the end of his life and near financial ruin, pulp horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft resigned himself to the likelihood that his writing would be forgotten. Today, Lovecraft stands alongside J. R. R. Tolkien as the most influential genre writer of the twentieth century. His reputation as an unreformed racist and bigot, however, leaves readers to grapple with his legacy. Midnight Rambles explores Lovecraft’s time in New York City, a crucial yet often overlooked chapter in his life that shaped his literary career and the inextricable racism in his work. Initially, New ...
Dave Brussat has made a significant contribution to the history of Providence. For those interested in that history, Lost Providence is a real find. Providence Journal Providence has one of the nation's most intact historic downtowns and is one of America's most beautiful cities. The history of architectural change in the city is one of lost buildings, urban renewal plans and challenges to preservation. The Narragansett Hotel, a lost city icon, hosted many famous guests and was demolished in 1960. The American classical renaissance expressed itself in the Providence National Bank, tragically demolished in 2005. Urban renewal plans such as the Downtown Providence plan and the College Hill plan threatened the city in the mid-twentieth century. Providence eventually embraced its heritage through plans like the River Relocation Project that revitalized the city's waterfront and the Downcity Plan that revitalized its downtown. Author David Brussat chronicles the trials and triumphs of Providence's urban development.
This collection explores the intersections of oral history and environmental history. Oral history offers environmental historians the opportunity to understand the ways people’s perceptions, experiences and beliefs about environments change over time. In turn, the insights of environmental history challenge oral historians to think more critically about the ways an active, more-than-human world shapes experiences and people. The integration of these approaches enables us to more fully and critically understand the ways cultural and individual memory and experience shapes human interactions with the more-than-human world, just as it enables us to identify the ways human memory, identity and experience is moulded by the landscapes and environments in which people live and labour. It includes contributions from Australia, India, the UK, Canada and the USA.
The history of the American city is, in many ways, the history of the United States. Although rural traditions have also left their impact on the country, cities and urban living have been vital components of America for centuries, and an understanding of the urban experience is essential to comprehending America’s past. America’s Urban History is an engaging and accessible overview of the life of American cities, from Native American settlements before the arrival of Europeans to the present-day landscape of suburban sprawl, urban renewal, and a heavily urbanized population. The book provides readers with a rich chronological and thematic narrative, covering themes including: The role of cities in the European settlement of North America Cities and westward expansion Social reform in the industrialized cities The impact of the New Deal The growth of the suburbs The relationships between urban forms and social issues of race, class, and gender Covering the evolving story of the American city with depth and insight, America's Urban History will be the first stop for all those seeking to explore the American urban experience.
A radical rethinking of how to make distressed urban neighborhoods more livable while preserving the residents' ability to live there "With piercing insights, Joe Margulies compellingly traces the history of one neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island, a stand-in for distressed neighborhoods around the country. This utterly original book takes on many of our assumptions about race, poverty, and gentrification-- and tackles the toughest question of all: In restoring these places, do we set them up for destruction?"--Alex Kotlowitz, author of An American Summer When a distressed urban neighborhood gentrifies, all the ratios change: poor to rich; Black and Brown to white; unskilled to professi...
Designed to serve as a basic text for an introductory course in Public Administration, this innovative work provides students with an understanding of the basic management functions that are covered in all standard textbooks with two important differences. First, it is written to address the needs of both the experienced practitioner and the entry-level public servant. Case examples bridge the content-rich environment of practitioners with the basic principles of public administration sought by pre-service students. Second, the discussion of basic management practices is grounded in the political and ethical tensions inherent in the American constitutional form of governance. This reflects t...
Once the second city of empire, now descended by seemingly irreversible economic and demographic decline into European Union Objective One status, Liverpool defies historical categorization. Located at the intersection of competing cultural, economic and geo-political formations, it stands outside the main narrative frameworks of modern British history, the exception to general norms. What was it that established Liverpool as different or apart? In exploring this proverbial exceptionalism, these essays by a leading scholar of the history of Liverpool and of the Irish show how a sense of apartness has always been crucial to Liverpool’s identity. While repudiated by some as an external impos...
Thinking Northern offers new approaches to the processes of identity formation which are taking place in the diverse fields of cultural, economic and social activity in contemporary Britain. The essays collected in this volume discuss the changing physiognomy of Northern England and provide a mosaic of recent thought and new critical thinking about the textures of regional identity in Britain. Looking at the historical origin of Northern identities and at current attitudes to them, the book explores the way received mental images about the North are re-deployed and re-contained in the ever-changing socio-cultural set-up of society in Northern England. The contributors address representation of Northernness in such diverse fields as the music scene, multicultural spaces, the heritage industries, new architecture, the arts, literature and film.
A VIVID AND FASCINATING LOOK AT AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH THE PRISM OF THE COUNTRY’S MOST STORIED HIGHWAY, THE BOSTON POST ROAD During its evolution from Indian trails to modern interstates, the Boston Post Road, a system of over-land routes between New York City and Boston, has carried not just travelers and mail but the march of American history itself. Eric Jaffe captures the progress of people and culture along the road through four centuries, from its earliest days as the king of England’s “best highway” to the current era. Centuries before the telephone, radio, or Internet, the Boston Post Road was the primary conduit of America’s prosperity and growth. News, rumor, political ...