The Mountains That Remade America

Author : Craig H. Jones
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 358 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2017-09-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520289642

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The Mountains That Remade America by Craig H. Jones Pdf

From ski towns to national parks, fresh fruit to environmental lawsuits, the Sierra Nevada has changed the way Americans live. Where there was gold to be mined (and where there was not) redefined land, mineral, and water laws. Where rain falls (and where it doesn’t) determines whose fruit grows on trees and whose appears on slot machines. All this emerges from the geology of the range and how it changed history, and in so doing, changed the country. The Mountains That Remade America combines geology with history to show how the particular forces and conditions that created the Sierra Nevada have effected broad outcomes and influenced daily life in the United States in the past and continue to do so today. Drawing connections between events in historical geology and contemporary society, Craig H. Jones makes geological science accessible and shows the vast impact this mountain range has had on the American West.

Author : Michael P. Cohen
Publisher : University of Nevada Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2019-05-08
Category : Nature
ISBN : 9781948908177

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Granite and Grace by Michael P. Cohen Pdf

In Granite and Grace Michael Cohen reflects on a lifetime of climbing, walking, and pondering the granite in Yosemite National Park at Tuolumne Meadows. This high-country region of Yosemite is dominated by a young, beautifully glaciated geological formation known as the Tuolumne Intrusive Suite. It does not include familiar Yosemite icons like Half Dome, yet geologists describe this granitic realm at over 8,000 feet as “an iconic American landscape.” Drawing together the humanistic and scientific significance of the wild landscapes he traverses, Michael uncovers relationships between people and places and meaning and substance, rendering this text part memoir—but also considerably more. On-the-rock encounters by hand and foot open up a dialogue between the heart of a philosopher and the mind of a geologist. Michael adds a literary softness to this hard landscape, blending excursions with exposition and literature with science. It is through his graceful representations that the geological becomes metaphorical, while the science turns mythological. This high country, where in 1889 John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson planned what would become Yosemite National Park, is significant for cultural as well as natural reasons. Discoursing on everything from Camus’s “Myths of Sisyphus” to the poems of Gary Snyder, Michael adds depth to an already splendorous landscape. Premier early geologists, such as François Matthes, shaped the language of Yosemite’s landscape. Even though Yosemite has changed over half a century, the rock has not. As Michael explores the beauty and grace of his familiar towering vistas, he demonstrates why, of the many aspects of the world to which one might get attached, the most secure is granite.

Author : Richard B. Rice,William A. Bullough,Richard J. Orsi,Mary Ann Irwin,Michael F. Magliari,Cecilia M. Tsu
Publisher : Waveland Press
Page : 555 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2019-09-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9781478639916

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The Elusive Eden by Richard B. Rice,William A. Bullough,Richard J. Orsi,Mary Ann Irwin,Michael F. Magliari,Cecilia M. Tsu Pdf

California is a region of rich geographic and human diversity. The Elusive Eden charts the historical development of California, beginning with landscape and climate and the development of Native cultures, and continues through the election of Governor Gavin Newsom. It portrays a land of remarkable richness and complexity, settled by waves of people with diverse cultures from around the world. Now in its fifth edition, this up-to-date text provides an authoritative, original, and balanced survey of California history incorporating the latest scholarship. Coverage includes new material on political upheavals, the global banking crisis, changes in education and the economy, and California's shifting demographic profile. This edition of The Elusive Eden features expanded coverage of gender, class, race, and ethnicity, giving voice to the diverse individuals and groups who have shaped California. With its continued emphasis on geography and environment, the text also gives attention to regional issues, moving from the metropolitan areas to the state's rural and desert areas. Lively and readable, The Elusive Eden is organized in ten parts. Each chronological section begins with an in-depth narrative chapter that spotlights an individual or group at a critical moment of historical change, bringing California history to life.

Author : John Clayton
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2019-08-06
Category : Nature
ISBN : 9781643131818

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Natural Rivals by John Clayton Pdf

John Muir and Gifford Pinchot have often been seen as the embodiment of conflicting environmental philosophies. Muir, the preservationist and co-founder of the Sierra Club. Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service advocating sustainability in timber harvests, instituted conservation. The idealistic Muir saw nature as something special and separate; the pragmatic Pinchot accepted that people used the products of nature. The environmental movement’s original sin, and the root of many of it's difficulties, was its inability to reconcile these two viewpoints—and these two men.So how was it that Muir and Pinchot went camping together—and delighted in each other's company? Does this mean that the seemingly irreparable divide in environmental ethos is not as unbridgeable as it might seem? The perceived rivalry between these two men has obscured a fascinating and hopeful story. Muir and Pinchot actually spent years in an alliance that lead to the original movement for public lands. Their shared commitment to the glories of natural landscapes united their disparate talents and viewpoints to create a fledgling and uniquely American vision of land ownership and management.

Author : Lawrence J. Haas
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2021-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781640124479

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The Kennedys in the World by Lawrence J. Haas Pdf

The Kennedys in the World tells a new, rich, fascinating, and consequential story about Jack, Bobby, and Ted Kennedy. From an early age the brothers developed a deep understanding of the different peoples, cultures, and ideologies around the world; a keen appreciation for the challenges that such differences created for the United States; and a strong desire to reshape America’s response to them. From their childhoods in the first half of the twentieth century, the brothers were prodded by their ruthless, demanding, win-at-all-costs father, Joe Kennedy, and their cold and distant mother, Rose, to learn and care about the world—and told they could shape America’s role in it. For more than six decades after World War II, the brothers shaped broad issues of war and peace as well as the U.S. response to almost every major global challenge of their times: the Soviet Union and China, the Cold War and Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador, Korea and Vietnam, South Africa and Northern Ireland, and Iraq (twice). In their time, America was what it remains today—the world’s greatest power, with roles and responsibilities that stretch across the planet. Consequently, as the brothers remade America’s empire, they invariably changed the world.

Author : Gilbert H. Muller
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2014-07-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813150130

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New Strangers in Paradise by Gilbert H. Muller Pdf

New Strangers in Paradise offers the first in-depth account of the ways in which contemporary American fiction has been shaped by the successive generations of immigrants to reach U.S. shores. Gilbert Muller reveals how the intersections of peoples, regions, and competing cultural histories have remade the American cultural landscape in the aftermath of World War II. Muller focuses on the literature of Holocaust survivors, Chicanos, Latinos, African Caribbeans, and Asian Americans. In the quest for a new identity, each of these groups seeks the American dream and rewrites the story of what it means to be an American. New Strangers in Paradise explores the psychology of uprooted peoples and the relations of culture and power, addressing issues of race and ethnicity, multiculturalism and pluralism, and national and international conflicts. Examining the groups of immigrants in the cultural and historical context both of America and of the lands from which they originated, Muller argues that this "fourth wave" of immigration has led to a creative flowering in modern fiction. The book offers a fresh perspective on the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, Sual Bellow, William Styron, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Oscar Hijuelos, Jamaica Kincaid, Bharati Mukherjee, Rudolfo Anaya, and many others.

Author : J. Christian Spielvogel
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
Page : 205 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2013-01-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780817317751

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Interpreting Sacred Ground by J. Christian Spielvogel Pdf

Interpreting Sacred Ground is a rhetorical analysis of Civil War battlefields and parks, and the ways various commemorative traditions—and their ideologies of race, reconciliation, emancipation, and masculinity—compete for dominance. The National Park Service (NPS) is known for its role in the preservation of public sites deemed to have historic, cultural, and natural significance. In Interpreting Sacred Ground, J. Christian Spielvogel studies the NPS’s secondary role as an interpreter or creator of meaning at such sites, specifically Gettysburg National Military Park, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, and Cold Harbor Visitor Center. Spielvogel studies in detail the museums, films, publications, tours, signage, and other media at these sites, and he studies and analyzes how they shape the meanings that visitors are invited to construct. Though the NPS began developing interpretive exhibits in the 1990s that highlighted slavery and emancipation as central facets to understanding the war, Spielvogel argues that the NPS in some instances preserves outmoded narratives of white reconciliation and heroic masculinity, obscuring the race-related causes and consequences of the war as well as the war’s savagery. The challenges the NPS faces in addressing these issues are many, from avoiding unbalanced criticism of either the Union or the Confederacy, to foregrounding race and violence as central issues, preserving clear and accurate renderingsof battlefield movements and strategies, and contending with the various public constituencies with their own interpretive stakes in the battle for public memory. Spielvogel concludes by arguing for the National Park Service’s crucial role as a critical voice in shaping twentieth-first-century Civil War public memory and highlights the issues the agency faces as it strives to maintain historical integrity while contending with antiquated renderings of the past.

Author : John Pomfret
Publisher : Henry Holt and Company
Page : 705 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2016-11-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781429944120

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The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom by John Pomfret Pdf

A remarkable history of the two-centuries-old relationship between the United States and China, from the Revolutionary War to the present day From the clipper ships that ventured to Canton hauling cargos of American ginseng to swap Chinese tea, to the US warships facing off against China's growing navy in the South China Sea, from the Yankee missionaries who brought Christianity and education to China, to the Chinese who built the American West, the United States and China have always been dramatically intertwined. For more than two centuries, American and Chinese statesmen, merchants, missionaries, and adventurers, men and women, have profoundly influenced the fate of these nations. While we tend to think of America's ties with China as starting in 1972 with the visit of President Richard Nixon to China, the patterns—rapturous enchantment followed by angry disillusionment—were set in motion hundreds of years earlier. Drawing on personal letters, diaries, memoirs, government documents, and contemporary news reports, John Pomfret reconstructs the surprising, tragic, and marvelous ways Americans and Chinese have engaged with one another through the centuries. A fascinating and thrilling account, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom is also an indispensable book for understanding the most important—and often the most perplexing—relationship between any two countries in the world.

Author : Mary Hill
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 467 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2006-05-15
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780520936942

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Geology of the Sierra Nevada by Mary Hill Pdf

Writing with verve and clarity, Mary Hill tells the story of the magnificent Sierra Nevada—the longest, highest, and most spectacular mountain range in the contiguous United States. Hill takes us from the time before the land which would be California even existed, through the days of roaring volcanoes, violent earthquakes, and chilling ice sheets, to the more recent history of the Sierra's early explorers and the generations of adventuresome souls who followed. The author introduces the rocks of the Sierra Nevada, which tell the mountains' tale, and explains how nature's forces, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, faulting, erosion, and glaciation formed the range's world-renowned scenery and mineral wealth, including gold. For thirty years, the first edition of Geology of the Sierra Nevada has been the definitive guide to the Sierra Nevada's geological history for nature lovers, travelers, hikers, campers, and armchair explorers. This new edition offers new chapters and sidebars and incorporates the concept of plate tectonics throughout the text. * Written in easy-to-understand language for a wide audience. * Gives detailed information on where to view outstanding Sierra Nevada geology in some of the world's most beloved natural treasures and national parks, including Yosemite. * Provides specific information on places to see glaciers and glacial deposits, caves, and exhibits of gold mines and mining equipment, many from Gold Rush times. * Superbly illustrated with 117 new color illustrations, 16 halftones, 39 line illustrations, and 12 maps, and also features an easy-to-use, interactive key for identifying rocks and a glossary of geological terms.

Author : Franklin Russell
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 1975
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:731280008

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The Mountains of America by Franklin Russell Pdf

Mounain heights have always given men a sense of freedom and exhilaration. This book really celebrates the glory of America's great ranges. Sill of the photographs is wonderful!

Author : Theodore Steinberg
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 1995-03-21
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520918467

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Slide Mountain by Theodore Steinberg Pdf

The drive to own the natural world in twentieth-century America seems virtually limitless. Signs of this national penchant for possessing nature are everywhere—from suburban picket fences to elaborate schemes to own underground water, clouds, even the ocean floor. Yet, as Theodore Steinberg demonstrates in this compelling, witty look at Americans' attempts to master the environment, nature continually turns these efforts into folly. In a rich, narrative style recalling the work of John McPhee, Steinberg tours America to explore some of the more unusual dilemmas that have arisen in our struggle to possess nature. Beginning along the Missouri River, Steinberg recounts the battle for three thousand acres of land the river carved from a Nebraska Indian reservation and deposited in Iowa. Then he travels to Louisiana, where an army of lawyers butted heads over whether Six Mile Lake was actually a lake or a stream. He continues to Arizona to investigate who owned the underground, then to Pennsylvania's Blue Ridge Mountains to see who claimed the clouds. He ends in crowded New York City with Donald Trump's struggle for air rights. Americans' obsession with owning nature was immortalized by Mark Twain in the tale of Slide Mountain, where a landslide-prone Nevada peak turned the American dream of real estate into dust. In relating these modern-day "Slide Mountain" stories, Steinberg illuminates what it means to live in a culture of property where everything must have an owner.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 974 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 1878
Category : Canadian periodicals (English)
ISBN : HARVARD:HN433R

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New Dominion Monthly by Anonim Pdf

Author : Pete Millwood
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 393 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2022-12-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9781108936163

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Improbable Diplomats by Pete Millwood Pdf

In 1971, Americans made two historic visits to China that would transform relations between the two countries. One was by US official Henry Kissinger; the other, earlier, visit was by the US table tennis team. Historians have mulled over the transcripts of Kissinger's negotiations with Chinese leaders. However, they have overlooked how, alongside these diplomatic talks, a rich program of travel and exchange had begun with ping-pong diplomacy. Improbable Diplomats reveals how a diverse cast of Chinese and Americans – athletes and physicists, performing artists and seismologists – played a critical, but to date overlooked, role in remaking US-China relations. Based on new sources from more than a dozen archives in China and the United States, Pete Millwood argues that the significance of cultural and scientific exchanges went beyond reacquainting the Chinese and American people after two decades of minimal contact; exchanges also powerfully influenced Sino-American diplomatic relations and helped transform post-Mao China.

Author : Drew A. Swanson
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2018-11-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780820353975

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Beyond the Mountains by Drew A. Swanson Pdf

Beyond the Mountains explores the ways in which Appalachia often served as a laboratory for the exploration and practice of American conceptions of nature. The region operated alternately as frontier, wilderness, rural hinterland, region of subsistence agriculture, bastion of yeoman farmers, and place to experiment with modernization. In these various takes on the southern mountains, scattered across time and space, both mountain residents and outsiders consistently believed that the region’s environment made Appalachia distinctive, for better or worse. With chapters dedicated to microhistories focused on particular commodities, Drew A. Swanson builds upon recent Appalachian studies scholarship, emphasizing the diversity of a region so long considered a homogenous backwater. While Appalachia has a recognizable and real coherence rooted in folkways, agriculture, and politics (among other things), it is also a region of varied environments, people, and histories. These discrete stories are, however, linked through the power of conceptualizing nature and work together to reveal the ways in which ideas and uses of nature often created a sense of identity in Appalachia. Delving into the environmental history of the region reveals that Appalachian environments, rather than separating the mountains from the broader world, often served to connect the region to outside places.

Author : Garry Wills
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2012-12-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9781439126455

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Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills Pdf

The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead, he gave the whole nation "a new birth of freedom" in the space of a mere 272 words. His entire life and previous training, and his deep political experience went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece. By examining both the address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew, and reveals much about a president so mythologized but often misunderstood. Wills shows how Lincoln came to change the world and to effect an intellectual revolution, how his words had to and did complete the work of the guns, and how Lincoln wove a spell that has not yet been broken.