This book offers an original and persuasive interpretation of the changing circumstances in New England's plant and animal communities that occurred with the shift from Indian to European dominance.
An American frontier study, focusing on the fastest growing city of 19th-century America - Chicago. It shows the land as it was when inhabited by Indians and a few white settlers, and the frenzy of development of the meat-packing industry, the grain emporiums and the lumber markets which followed.
Argues that attempting to exclude humans from their place in nature is no solution to our environmental problems. Instead, environmental advocates should help us live in a sustainable relationship with nature. This is a reassessment of the environmental agenda by historians, scientists and critics.
In a lifetime of exploration, writing, and passionate political activism, John Muir made himself America's most eloquent spokesman for the mystery and majesty of the wilderness. A crucial figure in the creation of our national parks system and a visionary prophet of environmental awareness, he was also a master of natural description who evoked ...
The history of the American West is alive with new ideas, new questions, new scholarship. Long defined by popular images of the lone cowboy and the savage Indian, and by Frederick Jackson Turner's concept of the frontier as a source of democracy and social renewal, the field of western history now admits a rich array of subjects, including the ...
Irrigation came to the arid West in a wave of optimism about the power of water to make the desert bloom. Mark Fiege's fascinating and innovative study of irrigation in southern Idaho's Snake River valley describes a complex interplay of human and natural systems. Using vast quantities of labor, irrigators built dams, excavated canals, laid out ...
First published in 1984, Robert Utley's 'The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890', is considered a classic for both students and scholars. For this revision, Utley includes scholarship and research that has become available in recent years.
In 1896, a small group of prospectors discovered a stunningly rich pocket of gold at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, and in the following two years thousands of individuals traveled to the area, hoping to find wealth in a rugged and challenging setting. Ever since that time, the Klondike Gold Rush - especially as portrayed in ...
"Stephen Pyne's "Vestal Fire" is an astounding tour de force, even by this writer's demandingly high standards: nothing less than a total history of the western conception, practice and response to fire through (at least) three millennia. " -Simon Schama, author of "Landscape and Memory". "This is environmental history at its best - a subtle but ...
Modern conceptions of nature tend to be flawed because too often they fail to take account of the influence of people. The essays in this text examine the problems that flow from a viewpoint that severs human beings and human activities from their place in nature.
Conservation became the first nationwide political movement in American history to grapple with environmental problems like waste, pollution, resource exhaustion, and sustainability. At its height, the conservation movement was a critical aspect of the broader reforms undertaken in the Progressive Era (1890-1910), as the rapidly industrializing ...
Despite a population of 7 million people, the San Francisco Bay Area is more greensward than asphalt jungle, more open space than hardscape. The "Country in the City" tells the story of how the jigsaw geography of this greenbelt has been set into place. Richard A. Walker is professor of geography and chair of the California Studies Center at the ...
The human impulse to religion - the drive to explain the world, humans, and humans' place in the universe - can be seen to encompass environmentalism as an offshoot of the secular, material faith in human reason and power that dominates modern society. "Faith in Nature" traces the history of environmentalism - and its moral thrust - from its roots ...
Drawing boundaries around wilderness areas often serves a double purpose: protection of the land within the boundary and release of the land outside the boundary to resource extraction and other development. In Drawing Lines in the Forest, Kevin R. Marsh discusses the roles played by various groupsthe Forest Service, the timber industry, ...
Many Japanese once revered the wolf as Oguchi no Magami, or Large-Mouthed Pure God, but as Japan began its modern transformation wolves lost their otherworldly status and became noxious animals that needed to be killed. By 1905 they had disappeared from the country. In this spirited and absorbing narrative, Brett Walker takes a deep look at the ...
In "Plowed Under", Andrew P. Duffin traces the transformation of the Palouse region of Washington and Idaho from land thought unusable and unproductive to a wealth-generating agricultural paradise, weighing the consequences of what this progress has wrought. During the twentieth century, the Palouse became synonymous with wheat, and the landscape ...
Cities rather than individual pioneers have been the driving force in the settlement and economic development of the western half of North America. Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, western urban centers served as starting points for conquest and settlement. As these frontier cities matured into metropolitan centers ...
The River Rhine is Europe's most important commercial waterway, channeling the flow of trade among Switzerland, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. In this innovative study, Mark Cioc focuses on the river from the moment when the Congress of Vienna established a multinational commission charged with making the river more efficient for purposes ...
In "On the Road Again", William Wyckoff explores Montana's changing physical and cultural landscape by pairing photographs taken by state highway engineers in the 1920s and 1930s with photographs taken at the same sites today. The older photographs, preserved in the archives of the Montana Historical Society, were intended to document the ...
Post-World War II Oregon was a place of optimism and growth, a spectacular natural region from ocean to high desert that seemingly provided opportunity in abundance. With the passing of time, however, Oregon's citizens - rural and urban - would find themselves entangled in issues that they had little experience in resolving. The same trees that ...
This exploration of the experiences of Native people in Seattle from the city's founding and the present focuses on three kinds of Native American history: that of the local indigenous communities on whose land Seattle grew; accounts of Native migrants to the city and the development of a multi-tribal urban Indian community, and the role Indians - ...
In his engaging book, "Windshield Wilderness", David Louter explores the relationship between automobiles and national parks, and how together they have shaped our ideas of wilderness. National parks, he argues, did not develop as places set aside from the modern world, but rather came to be known and appreciated through technological progress in ...
Monterey, California is home to the hugely successful Monterey Bay Aquarium and provided the setting for John Steinbeck's classic novel "Cannery Row", yet the city's coastline was also the stage for a great shift in the junction of industry and tourism. From the late-nineteenth-century, immigrant fisheries and the sardine boom of the interwar ...
In "The Fishermen's Frontier", David Arnold examines the economic, social, cultural, and political context in which salmon have been harvested in southeast Alaska over the past 250 years. The book is about Native and Euro-American fishermen, local fishing communities, industrialists, and resource managers and the ways in which these various groups ...
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