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Back to the Land
For many, “going back to the land” brings to mind the 1960s and 1970s—hippie communes and the Summer of Love, The Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News. More recently, the movement has reemerged in a new enthusiasm for locally produced food and more sustainable energy paths. But these latest back-to-the-landers are part of a much larger story. Americans have been dreaming of returning to the land ever since they started to leave it. In Back to the Land, Dona Brown explores the history of this recurring impulse. ? Back-to-the-landers have often been viewed as nostalgic escapists or romantic nature-lovers. But their own words reveal a more complex story. In such projects as Gustav St...
The Poetics and Politics of the Desert
This study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes. Drawing on the critical concepts of American studies and on questions and problems raised in recent debates on ecocriticism, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert investigates the spatial rhetoric of America as it developed in view of arid landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Gersdorf argues that the integration of the desert into America catered to the entire spectrum of ideological and political responses to the history and culture of the US, maintaining that the Americanization of this landscape was and continues to be staged within the idiomatic parameters and in reaction to the discursive authority of four spatial metaphors: garden, wilderness, Orient, and heterotopia.
From the Family Farm to Agribusiness
From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West, 1850-1931 explores the transformative journey of California’s agricultural economy, examining the shifts from mining and livestock to wheat farming, and eventually to horticulture. The book traces how California's economy underwent rapid changes through booms and busts, from the mining gold rushes to speculative real estate and the wheat industry. Despite its rich natural resources, the state's growth was hampered by unpredictable climate, limited land availability, and competition from other regions. The development of large-scale wheat farming in the 1860s brought mechanization and significant produc...
Water, Land, and Law in the West
The series presents an interdisciplinary approach to the use and misuse of resources in the American West. This volume comprises essays written between 1982 and 1994, and previously published in journals such as Western Historical Quarterly, J. of American History, and Environmental History Review). Pisani, one of the nation's leading environmental and Western historians, highlights the central role played by land, water, and timber allocation in the American West, and shows how efforts to achieve justice and efficiency were compromised by the region's obsession with achieving rapid economic growth. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Progressivism and the World of Reform
In this major reinterpretation of the Progressive era, Peter Coleman argues that the American welfare state had its origins in what he calls the "world-wide crisis of capitalism." Here and abroad, reformers, no longer content to treat the symptoms of distress, sought to achieve social, political, and economic justice by abandoning laissez faire in favor of governmental intervention. This study thoroughly documents the external forces that shaped the American Progressive movement and shows that the reformers' agenda for change drew heavily on foreign ideas and models as well as the American reform tradition. Tracing the international cross-currents of reform ideas, Coleman demonstrates that f...
The Colorado Doctrine
DIV Making extensive use of archival and other primary sources, David Schorr demonstrates that the development of the “appropriation doctrine,” a system of private rights in water, was part of a radical attack on monopoly and corporate power in the arid West. Schorr describes how Colorado miners, irrigators, lawmakers, and judges forged a system of private property in water based on a desire to spread property and its benefits as widely as possible among independent citizens. He demonstrates that ownership was not dictated by concerns for economic efficiency, but by a regard for social justice. /div
Border Oasis
"Border Oasis tells how two very different nations developed the delta into an agricultural oasis at enormous environmental cost. Focusing on the years 1940 to 1975 - including the disastrous salinity crisis of the 1960s and 1970s - it combines Mexican, Native American, and U.S. perspectives to demonstrate that the political and diplomatic influences on the delta played as much a part in the region's transformation as did irrigation. Ward reveals how mistrust among political and economic participants has been fueled by conflict between national and local officials on both sides of the border, by Mexican nationalism, and by a mutual recognition that water is the critical ingredient for regional economic development."--University of Arizona Press website
The Great Plains
A study of the changes initiated into the systems and culture of the plain dwellers
Desert Passages
Traces the development of American attitudes toward the desert using case studies from many writers over the years.
