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For nearly two centuries, the creation myth for the United States imagined European settlers arriving on the shores of a vast, uncharted wilderness. Over the last two decades, however, a contrary vision has emerged, one which sees the country's roots not in a state of "pristine" nature but rather in a "human-modified landscape" over which native peoples exerted vast control. Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape seeks a middle ground between those conflicting paradigms, offering a critical, research-based assessment of the role of Native Americans in modifying the landscapes of pre-European America. Contributors focus on the western United States and look at the question of fire re...
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Rolling green hills dotted with Holstein cows, red barns, and blue silos. The Great Lakes ports at Superior, Ashland, and Kenosha. A Polish wedding dance or a German biergarten in Milwaukee. The dappled quiet of the Chequamagon forest. A weatherbeaten but tidy town hall at the intersection of two county trunk highways. Ojibwa families gathering wild rice into canoes. The boat ride through the Dells. The upland ridges of the Driftless Area, falling away into hidden valleys. . . . These are images of Wisconsin's land and life, images that evoke a strong sense of place. This book, Wisconsin Land and Life, is an exploration of place, a series of original essays by Wisconsin geographers that offe...
Most people equate Los Angeles with smog, sprawl, forty suburbs in search of a city-the great "what-not-to-do" of twentieth-century city building. But there's much more to LA's story than this shallow stereotype. History shows that Los Angeles was intensely, ubiquitously planned. The consequences of that planning-the environmental history of urbanism—is one place to turn for the more complex lessons LA has to offer. Working forward from ancient times and ancient ecologies to the very recent past, Land of Sunshine is a fascinating exploration of the environmental history of greater Los Angeles. Rather than rehearsing a litany of errors or insults against nature, rather than decrying the los...
Working with the premise that there are much meaning and value in the "repelling beauty" of mining landscapes, Richard Francaviglia identifies the visual clues that indicate an area has been mined and tells us how to read them, showing the interconnections among all of America's major mining districts. With a style as bold as the landscape he reads and with photographs to match, he interprets the major forces that have shaped the architecture, design, and topography of mining areas. Covering many different types of mining and mining locations, he concludes that mining landscapes have come to symbolize the turmoil between what our society elects to view as two opposing forces: culture and nature.
Leader of the first tourist expedition into Yosemite in 1855, James Mason Hutchings became a tireless promoter of the valley-and of himself. Seeking to create an alternative to California's Gold Rush social chaos, Hutchings whetted the public enthusiasm for this unspoiled land by mass producing a lithograph of Yosemite Falls, while his Hutchings' California Magazine beat the drum for tourism. But because of his later legal imbroglios over the park, Hutchings was effectively written out of its history, and today he is largely viewed as an opportunist who made a career out of exploiting Yosemite. Now Jen Huntley removes the tarnish from Hutchings's image. She portrays him instead as a "connect...
Postcards from the Baja California Border uses popular historical imagery--the vintage postcard--to tell a compelling, visually enriched geographical story about the border towns of Baja California.
By studying the many ways diverse peoples have changed, shaped, and conserved the natural world over time, environmental historians provide insight into humanity's unique relationship with nature and, more importantly, are better able to understand the origins of our current environmental crisis. Beginning with the precolonial land-use practice of Native Americans and concluding with our twenty-first century concerns over our global ecological crisis, American Environmental History addresses contentious issues such as the preservation of the wilderness, the expulsion of native peoples from national parks, and population growth, and considers the formative forces of gender, race, and class. E...
"The connection between geography and progress is fundamental," writes Robert Sack in the introduction to the present volume. Touching on both moral and material progress, six of the world's leading geographers and environmental historians explore differing aspects of this connection. Thomas Vale discusses whether progress is discernible in the natural realm; Kenneth Olwig examines fundamental changes that occurred to the notion of progress with the rise of modernity, while David Lowenthal and Yi-Fu Tuan discuss recent geographical changes that have resulted in an increasing societal disenchantment and anxiety. Nicholas Entrikin looks at progress as "moral perfectibility, and its connection ...
Environmental patriotism, the belief that the national environment defines a country’s greatness, is a significant strand in twentieth century American environmentalism. This book is the first to explore the history of environmental patriotism in America through the intriguing stories of environmental patriots and the rhetoric of their speeches and propaganda, The See America First movement began in 1906 with the aim of protecting and promoting the landscapes of the American West. In 1908, Gifford Pinchot and President Theodore Roosevelt hosted the White House Conservation Conference to promote the wise use of natural resources for generations of Americans. In 1912, Pittsburgh’s smoke in...