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Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called an impossible but inevitable city. How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis. Craig E. Colten traces engineered modifications to New Orleans's natural environment from 1800 to 2000. Before the city could swell in size and commercial importance as its nineteenth-century boosters envisioned, builders had to wrest it from its waterlogged site, protect it from floods, expel disease, and supply basic services using local resources. Colten shows how every manipulation of the environment made an impact on the city's social geography as well - often with unequal, adverse consequences for minorities - and how each still requires maintenance and improvement today. For example, while the massive levee system has controlled the unpredictable Mississippi, it also captures heavy down-pours, creating a new set of internal flood problems. Urban geographers frequently have portrayed cities as the antithesis of nat
Building Louisiana by Robert D. Leighninger Jr. Pdf
Robert D. Leighninger, Jr., believes there may be a model for municipal building projects everywhere in the ambitious and artful structures erected in Louisiana by the Public Works Administration. In the 1930s, the PWA built a tremendous amount of infrastructure in a very short time. Most of the edifices are still in use, yet few people recognize how these schools, courthouses, and other great structures came about. Building Louisiana documents the projects one New Deal agency erected in one southern state and places these in social and political context. Based on extensive research in the National Archives and substantial field work within the state, Leighninger has gathered the story of the establishment of the PWA and the feverish building activity that ensued. He also recounts early tussles with Huey Long and the scandals involving public works discovered during the late New Deal. The book includes looks at individual projects of particular interest--"Big Charity" hospital, the Carville leprosy center, the Shreveport incinerator, and the LSU sugar plant. A concluding chapter draws lessons from the PWA's history that might be applied to current political concerns. Also included is an annotated inventory of every PWA project in the state. Finally, this composite picture honors those workers and policymakers who, in a time of despair, expressed hope for the future with this enduring investment.
Author : Robert R. N. Ross,Deanne E. B. Ross Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers Page : 615 pages File Size : 51,8 Mb Release : 2008-09-22 Category : Philosophy ISBN : 9781630872120
Walking to New Orleans by Robert R. N. Ross,Deanne E. B. Ross Pdf
Two and a half years after the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, New Orleans and south Louisiana continue to struggle in an unsettled gumbo of environmental, social, and rebuilding chaos. Citizens await the fruition of four successive recovery and reconstruction planning processes and the realization of essential infrastructure repairs. Repopulation in Orleans Parish has slowed considerably; the parish remains at best two-thirds of its former size; thousands of former residents who wish to return face barriers of many kinds. Heroic efforts at rebuilding have occurred through the efforts of individual neighborhood associations and voluntary associations who have attempted to address serious losses in affordable housing and health care services. Walking to New Orleans traces how a dominant but paradoxical model of the relation between the human and natural worlds in Western culture has informed many environmental and engineering dilemmas and has contributed to the history of social inequities and injustice that anteceded the disasters of the hurricanes and subsequent flooding. It proposes a model for collaborative recovery that links principles of ethics and engineering, in which citizens become active, ongoing participants in the process of the reconstruction and redesign of their unique locus of habitation. Equally important, it gives voice to the citizens and associations who are desperately working to rebuild their homes and lives both in urban New Orleans and in the villages of coastal Louisiana.
Author : William Cronon Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company Page : 592 pages File Size : 55,6 Mb Release : 2009-11-02 Category : History ISBN : 9780393072457
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon Pdf
A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Winner of the Bancroft Prize. "No one has written a better book about a city…Nature's Metropolis is elegant testimony to the proposition that economic, urban, environmental, and business history can be as graceful, powerful, and fascinating as a novel." —Kenneth T. Jackson, Boston Globe
Author : Martin Reuss,Stephen H. Cutcliffe Publisher : University of Virginia Press Page : 328 pages File Size : 50,8 Mb Release : 2010-09-20 Category : Science ISBN : 9780813930534
The Illusory Boundary by Martin Reuss,Stephen H. Cutcliffe Pdf
The view of nature and technology inhabiting totally different, even opposite, spheres persists across time and cultures. Most people would consider an English countryside or a Louisiana bayou to be "natural," though each is to an extent the product of technology. Pollution, widely thought to be a purely man-made phenomenon, results partly from natural processes. All around us, things from the natural world are brought into the human world. At what point do we consider them part of culture rather than nature? And does such a distinction illuminate our world or obscure its workings? This compelling new book challenges the view that a clear and unwavering boundary exists between nature and technology. Rejecting this dichotomy, the contributors show how the history of each can be united in a constantly shifting panorama where definitions of "nature" and "technology" alter and overlap. In addition to recognizing the artificial divide between these two concepts, the essays in this book demonstrate how such thinking may affect societies’ ability to survive and prosper. The answers and ideas are as numerous as the landscapes they consider, for there is no single path toward a more harmonious vision of technology and nature. Technologies that work in one place may not in another. Nature that is preserved in one community might become the raw material of technological progress somewhere else. Add to this the fact that the natural world and technology are not passive players, but are profoundly involved in cultural construction. Understanding such dynamics not only reveals a new historical complexity; it prepares us for coping with many of the most difficult and pressing social issues facing us today. Contributors Peter Coates * Craig E. Colten * Stephen H. Cutcliffe * Hugh S. Gorman * Betsy Mendelsohn * Joy Parr * Peter C. Perdue * Sara B. Pritchard * Martin Reuss * William D. Rowley * Edmund Russell * Joel A. Tarr * Ann Vileisis * James C. Williams * Thomas Zeller
Statebuilding from the Margins by Carol Nackenoff,Julie Novkov Pdf
The period between the Civil War and the New Deal was particularly rich and formative for political development. Beyond the sweeping changes and national reforms for which the era is known, Statebuilding from the Margins examines often-overlooked cases of political engagement that expanded the capacities and agendas of the developing American state. With particular attention to gendered, classed, and racialized dimensions of civic action, the chapters explore points in history where the boundaries between public and private spheres shifted, including the legal formulation of black citizenship and monogamy in the postbellum years; the racial politics of Georgia's adoption of prohibition; the rise of public waste management; the incorporation of domestic animal and wildlife management into the welfare state; the creation of public juvenile courts; and the involvement of women's groups in the creation of U.S. housing policy. In many of these cases, private citizens or organizations initiated political action by framing their concerns as problems in which the state should take direct interest to benefit and improve society. Statebuilding from the Margins depicts a republic in progress, accruing policy agendas and the institutional ability to carry them out in a nonlinear fashion, often prompted and powered by the creative techniques of policy entrepreneurs and organizations that worked alongside and outside formal boundaries to get results. These Progressive Era initiatives established models for the way states could create, intervene in, and regulate new policy areas—innovations that remain relevant for growth and change in contemporary American governance. Contributors: James Greer, Carol Nackenoff, Julie Novkov, Susan Pearson, Kimberly Smith, Marek D. Steedman, Patricia Strach, Kathleen Sullivan, Ann-Marie Szymanski.
Crisis Cities by Kevin Fox Gotham,Miriam Greenberg Pdf
"Every urban crisis is also an opportunity, and in this penetrating study of post-disaster New York and New Orleans, Kevin Gotham and Miriam Greenberg show how and why the market-model of redevelopment does so little for the people and places that need it most. Crisis Cities is insightful, sophisticated, and, alas, timely. It belongs not only in the classroom, but on every mayor's desk." --Eric Klinenberg, author of Heat Wave and Going Solo"In this wide-ranging and carefully researched book, Gotham and Greenberg explore the crisis-driven strategies of urbanization that have been pursued in two major post-disaster U.S. cities and their deeply uneven, polarizing and destructive impacts upon the social and ecological fabric. A fundamental and original analysis of early twenty-first century urban transformations in the age of disaster capitalism, this book is a superb demonstration of how the methods of critical urban studies can illuminate the powerful social, political, economic and ideological forces that are reshaping cities and regions today." --Neil Brenner, Professor of Urban Theory, Harvard Graduate School of Design "Crisis Cities is a critical revelation of the political and economic forces that direct the resources offered to cities after catastrophes. The authors clearly show how the resources are not necessarily directed to the rebuilding and recovery projects that serve all segments of the communities and would provide a successful collective future. Drawing on catastrophes in two well-known American cities the dangers of this common path are clearly presented." --Shirley Laska, Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of New Orleans.
The definitive history of Katrina: an epic of citymaking, revealing how engineers and oil executives, politicians and musicians, and neighbors black and white built New Orleans, then watched it sink under the weight of their competing ambitions. Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster extend across the twentieth century. After the city weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could safely build housing away from the high ground near the Mississippi. And so New Orleans grew in lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system surrounding the city and its suburbs failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated. The homes that flooded belonged to Louisianans black and white, rich and poor. Katrina’s flood washed over the twentieth-century city. The flood line tells one important story about Katrina, but it is not the only story that matters. Andy Horowitz investigates the response to the flood, when policymakers reapportioned the challenges the water posed, making it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than it was for African Americans. And he explores how the profits and liabilities created by Louisiana’s oil industry have been distributed unevenly among the state’s citizens for a century, prompting both dreams of abundance—and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today. Laying bare the relationship between structural inequality and physical infrastructure—a relationship that has shaped all American cities—Katrina offers a chilling glimpse of the future disasters we are already creating.
Technology and the Environment in History by Sara B. Pritchard,Carl A. Zimring Pdf
New perspectives on how envirotech can help us engage with the surrounding world in ways that are more sustainable for humanity—and the planet. Today's scientists, policymakers, and citizens are all confronted by numerous dilemmas at the nexus of technology and the environment. Every day seems to bring new worries about the dangers posed by carcinogens, "superbugs," energy crises, invasive species, genetically modified organisms, groundwater contamination, failing infrastructure, and other troubling issues. In Technology and the Environment in History, Sara B. Pritchard and Carl A. Zimring adopt an analytical approach to explore current research at the intersection of environmental history and the history of technology—an emerging field known as envirotech. Technology and the Environment in History They discuss the important topics, historical processes, and scholarly concerns that have emerged from recent work in thinking about envirotech. Each chapter focuses on a different urgent topic: • Food and Food Systems: How humans have manipulated organisms and ecosystems to produce nutrients for societies throughout history. • Industrialization: How environmental processes have constrained industrialization and required shifts in the relationships between human and nonhuman nature. • Discards: What we can learn from the multifaceted forms, complex histories, and unexpected possibilities of waste. • Disasters: How disaster, which the authors argue is common in the industrialized world, exposes the fallacy of tidy divisions among nature, technology, and society. • Body: How bodies reveal the porous boundaries among technology, the environment, and the human. • Sensescapes: How environmental and technological change have reshaped humans' (and potentially nonhumans') sensory experiences over time. Using five concepts to understand the historical relationships between technology and the environment—porosity, systems, hybridity, biopolitics, and environmental justice—Pritchard and Zimring propose a chronology of key processes, moments, and periodization in the history of technology and the environment. Ultimately, they assert, envirotechnical perspectives help us engage with the surrounding world in ways that are, we hope, more sustainable and just for both humanity and the planet. Aimed at students and scholars new to environmental history, the history of technology, and their nexus, this impressive synthesis looks outward and forward—identifying promising areas in more formative stages of intellectual development and current synergies with related areas that have emerged in the past few years, including environmental anthropology, discard studies, and posthumanism.
Public Religion and the Urban Environment by Richard Bohannon Pdf
'Nature' and the 'city' have most often functioned as opposites within Western culture, a dichotomy that has been reinforced (and sometimes challenged) by religious images. Bohannon argues here that cities and natural environments, however, are both connected and continually affected by one another. He shows how such connections become overt during natural disasters, which disrupt the narratives people use to make sense of the world,including especially religious narratives, and make them more visible. This book offers both a theoretical exploration of the intersection of the city, nature, and religion, as well as a sociological analysis of the 1997 flood in Grand Forks, ND, USA. This case study shows how religious factors have influenced how the relationship between nature and the city is perceived, and in particular have helped to justify the urban control of nature. The narratives found in Grand Forks also reveal a broader understanding of the nature of Western cities, highlighting the potent and ethically-rich intersections between religion, cities and nature.
The Making of Urban America by Raymond A. Mohl,Roger Biles Pdf
The revised and updated third edition of The Making of Urban America includes seven new articles and a richly detailed historiographical essay that discusses the vast urban history literature added to the canon since the publication of the second edition. The authors’ extensively revised introductions and the fifteen reprinted articles trace urban development from the preindustrial city to the twentieth-century city. With emphasis on the social, economic, political, commercial, and cultural aspects of urban history, these essays illustrate the growth and change that created modern-day urban life. Dynamic topics such as technology, immigration and ethnicity, suburbanization, sunbelt cities, urban political history, and planning and housing are examined. The Making of Urban America is the only reader available that covers all of U.S. urban history and that also includes the most recent interpretive scholarship on the subject.
Interdisciplinary perspectives on landscape, from the philosophical to the geographical, with an emphasis on the overarching concept of place. This volume explores the conceptual "topography" of landscape: It examines the character of landscape as itself a mode of place as well as the modes of place that appear in relation to landscape. Leading scholars from a range of disciplines explore the concept of landscape, including its supposed relation to the spectatorial, its character as time-space, its relation to indigenous notions of "country," and its liminality. They examine landscape as it appears within a variety of contexts, from geography through photography and garden history to theology; and more specific studies look at the forms of landscape in medieval landscape painting, film and television, and in relation to national identity. The essays demonstrate that the study of landscape cannot be restricted to any one genre, cannot be taken as the exclusive province of any one discipline, and cannot be exhausted by any single form of analysis. What the place of landscape now evokes is itself a wide-ranging terrain encompassing issues concerning the nature of place, of human being in place, and of the structures that shape such being and are shaped by it.
Fascinating insights on what Japanese manga and anime mean to artists, audiences, and fans in the United States and elsewhere, covering topics that range from fantasy to sex to politics. Within the last decade, anime and manga have become extremely popular in the United States. Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World provides a sophisticated anthology of varied commentary from authors well versed in both formats. These essays provide insights unavailable on the Internet, giving the interested general reader in-depth information well beyond the basic, "Japanese Comics 101" level, and providing those who teach and write about manga and anime valuable knowledge to further expand their expertise. The topics addressed range widely across various artists and art styles, media methodology and theory, reception of manga and anime in different cultural markets, and fan behavior. Specific subjects covered include sexually explicit manga drawn and read by women; the roots of manga in Japanese and world film; the complexity of fan activities, including "cosplay," fan-drawn manga, and fans' highly specific predilections; right-wing manga; and manga about Hiroshima and despair following World War II. The book closes with an examination of the international appeal of manga and anime.
In Pure and Modern Milk, the author tells the history of a nearly universal consumer product, and sheds light on America's food industry. Today, she notes, milk reaches supermarkets in an entirely different state than it had at its creation. Cows march into milking parlors, where tubes are attached to their teats, and the product of their lactation is mechanically pumped into tanks. Enormous, expensive machines pasteurize it, fortify it with vitamins, remove fat, and store it at government-regulated temperatures. It reaches consumers in a host of forms: as fluid milk, butter, ice cream, and in apparently non-dairy foods such as whey solids or milk proteins. Smith-Howard examines the cultural, political, and social context, discussing the attempts to reform the production and distribution of this once-perilous product in the Progressive Era, the history of butter between the world wars, dairy waste at mid-century, and the postwar landscape of mass production. She asks how milk could be conceptualized as a "natural" product, even as it has been incorporated into Cheez Whiz and wood glue. And she shows how consumer's changing expectations have had repercussions back down the chain, affecting farmers, cows, and rural landscapes.