Thoreau The Land Surveyor

Author : Patrick Chura
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2010-10-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813043500

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Thoreau the Land Surveyor by Patrick Chura Pdf

Henry David Thoreau, one of America’s most prominent environmental writers, supported himself as a land surveyor for much of his life, parceling land that would be sold off to loggers. In the only study of its kind, Patrick Chura analyzes this seeming contradiction to show how the best surveyor in Concord combined civil engineering with civil disobedience. Placing Thoreau's surveying in historical context, Thoreau the Land Surveyor explains the cultural and ideological implications of surveying work in the mid-nineteenth century. Chura explains the ways that Thoreau's environmentalist disposition and philosophical convictions asserted themselves even as he reduced the land to measurable terms and acted as an agent for bringing it under proprietary control. He also describes in detail Thoreau's 1846 survey of Walden Pond. By identifying the origins of Walden in--of all places--surveying data, Chura re-creates a previously lost supporting manuscript of this American classic.

Author : Michael Sims
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 405 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2014-07-31
Category : Nature
ISBN : 9781408838235

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The Adventures of Henry Thoreau by Michael Sims Pdf

From Mahatma Gandhi and John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King and Leo Tolstoy, the works of Henry David Thoreau – author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, surveyor, schoolteacher, engineer – have long been an inspiration to many. But who was the unsophisticated young man who in 1837 became a protégé of Ralph Waldo Emerson? The Adventures of Henry Thoreau tells the colourful story of a complex man seeking a meaningful life in a tempestuous era. In rich, evocative prose Michael Sims brings to life the insecure, youthful Henry, as he embarks on the path to becoming the literary icon Thoreau. Using the letters and diaries of Thoreau's family, friends and students, Michael Sims charts his coming of age within a family struggling to rise above poverty in 1830s America. From skating and boating with Nathaniel Hawthorne, to travels with his brother, John Thoreau, and the launching of their progressive school, Sims paints a vivid portrait of the young writer struggling to find his voice through communing with nature, whether mountain climbing in Maine or building his life-changing cabin at Walden Pond. He explores Thoreau's infatuation with the beautiful young woman who rejected his proposal of marriage, the influence of his mother and sisters – who were passionate abolitionists – and that of the powerful cultural currents of the day. With emotion and texture, The Adventures of Henry Thoreau sheds fresh light on one of the most iconic figures in American history.

Author : Laura Dassow Walls
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 670 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2018-09-28
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780226599373

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Henry David Thoreau by Laura Dassow Walls Pdf

"Walden. Yesterday I came here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854. But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau's character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, "Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided." Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls renews Henry David Thoreau for us in all his profound, inspiring complexity. Drawing on Thoreau's copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive, full of quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him. "The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one," says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time.--Dust jacket.

Author : Daegan Miller
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2018-03-22
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780226336312

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This Radical Land by Daegan Miller Pdf

“The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That’s largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today: a country expanding unstoppably, bending the continent’s natural bounty to the national will, heedless of consequence. A country of slavery and of Indian wars. There’s much truth in that vision. But if you know where to look, you can uncover a different history, one of vibrant resistance, one that’s been mostly forgotten. This Radical Land recovers that story. Daegan Miller is our guide on a beautifully written, revelatory trip across the continent during which we encounter radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress in the very landscapes around them, even as the runaway engine of capitalism sought to steamroll everything in its path. Here we meet Thoreau, the expert surveyor, drawing anticapitalist property maps. We visit a black antislavery community in the Adirondack wilderness of upstate New York. We discover how seemingly commercial photographs of the transcontinental railroad secretly sent subversive messages, and how a band of utopian anarchists among California’s sequoias imagined a greener, freer future. At every turn, everyday radicals looked to landscape for the language of their dissent—drawing crucial early links between the environment and social justice, links we’re still struggling to strengthen today. Working in a tradition that stretches from Thoreau to Rebecca Solnit, Miller offers nothing less than a new way of seeing the American past—and of understanding what it can offer us for the present . . . and the future.

Author : Robert M. Thorson
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2017-04-24
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780674977723

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The Boatman by Robert M. Thorson Pdf

Robert Thorson gives readers a Thoreau for the Anthropocene. The boatman and backyard naturalist was keenly aware of the way humans had altered the waterways and meadows of his beloved Concord River Valley. Yet he sought out for solace and pleasure those river sites most dramatically altered by human invention and intervention—for better and worse.

Author : William A. Blair
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 155 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2012-03-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780807852637

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Journal of the Civil War Era by William A. Blair Pdf

The Journal of the Civil War Era Volume 2, Number 1 March 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Forum The Future of Civil War Era Studies Stephen Berry, Michael T. Bernath, Seth Rockman, Barton A. Myers, Anne Marshall, Lisa M. Brady, Judith Giesberg, & Jim Downs Articles Jacqueline G. Campbell "The Unmeaning Twaddle about Order 28″: Ben Butler and Confederate Women in Occupied New Orleans David C. Williard Executions, Justice, and Reconciliation in North Carolina's Western Piedmont, 1865-67 Matthew C. Hulbert Constructing Guerrilla Memory: John Newman Edwards and Missouri's Irregular Lost Cause Book Reviews Books Received Professional Notes Kathi Kern & Linda Levstik Teaching the New Departure: the United States vs. Susan B. Anthony Notes on Contributors The Journal of the Civil War Era takes advantage of the flowering of research on the many issues raised by the sectional crisis, war, Reconstruction, and memory of the conflict, while bringing fresh understanding to the struggles that defined the period, and by extension, the course of American history in the nineteenth century.

Author : Gordon Fraser
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2021-06-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812252927

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Star Territory by Gordon Fraser Pdf

In Star Territory Gordon Fraser charts how the project of rationalizing the cosmos enabled the nineteenth-century expansion of U.S. territory and explores the alternative and resistant cosmologies of free and enslaved Blacks and indigenous peoples.

Author : John Pastor
Publisher : Island Press
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2023-01-05
Category : Nature
ISBN : 9781642831412

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White Pine by John Pastor Pdf

America was built on white pine. From the 1600s through the Civil War and beyond, it was used to build the nation’s ships and houses, barns, and bridges. It became a symbol of independence, adorning the Americans’ flag at Bunker Hill, and an economic engine, generating three times more wealth than the California gold rush. Yet this popularity came at a cost: by the end of the 19th century, clear cutting had decimated much of America’s white pine forests. In White Pine: The Natural and Human History of a Foundational American Tree, ecologist and writer John Pastor takes readers on walk through history, connecting the white pine forests that remain today to a legacy of destruction and renewal. Since the clear-cutting era, naturalists, foresters, and scientists have taken up the quest to restore the great white pine forests. White Pine follows this centuries-long endeavor, illuminating how the efforts shaped Americans’ understanding of key scientific ideas, from forest succession to the importance of fire. With his keen naturalist’s eye, Pastor shows us why restoring the vitality of these forests has not been simple: a host of other creatures depend on white pine and white pine depends on them. In weaving together cultural and natural history, White Pine celebrates the way humans are connected to the forest—and to the larger natural world. Today, white pine forests have begun to recover, but face the growing threat of climate change. White Pine shows us that hope for healthy forests lies in understanding the lessons of history, so that iconic species survive as a touchstone for future generations.

Author : Henry David Thoreau
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 1882
Category : Electronic
ISBN : UOM:39015031909610

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Walden by Henry David Thoreau Pdf

Author : Laura Dassow Walls
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 668 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2017-07-07
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780226344690

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Henry David Thoreau by Laura Dassow Walls Pdf

"[The author] traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and 'America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.' By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation. What did that portend for the contemplative individual and abundant, wild nature that Thoreau celebrated? Drawing on Thoreau’s copious writings, published and unpublished, [the author] presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him."--

Author : Michael Dear,Jim Ketchum,Sarah Luria,Doug Richardson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2011-04-14
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781136883484

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GeoHumanities by Michael Dear,Jim Ketchum,Sarah Luria,Doug Richardson Pdf

In the past decade, there has been a convergence of transdisciplinary thought characterized by geography’s engagement with the humanities, and the humanities’ integration of place and the tools of geography into its studies. GeoHumanities maps this emerging intellectual terrain with thirty cutting edge contributions from internationally renowned scholars, architects, artists, activists, and scientists. This book explores the humanities’ rapidly expanding engagement with geography, and the multi-methodological inquiries that analyze the meanings of place, and then reconstructs those meanings to provoke new knowledge as well as the possibility of altered political practices. It is no coincidence that the geohumanities are forcefully emerging at a time of immense intellectual and social change. This book focuses on a range of topics to address urgent contemporary imperatives, such as the link between creativity and place; altered practices of spatial literacy; the increasing complexity of visual representation in art, culture, and science and the ubiquitous presence of geospatial technologies in the Information Age. GeoHumanties is essential reading for students wishing to understand the intellectual trends and forces driving scholarship and research at the intersections of geography and the humanities disciplines. These trends hold far-reaching implications for future work in these disciplines, and for understanding the changes gripping our societies and our globalizing world.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 1976
Category : Cartography
ISBN : UCAL:B3552875

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Surveying and Mapping by Anonim Pdf

Author : Maurice S. Lee
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2013-06-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780199985814

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Uncertain Chances by Maurice S. Lee Pdf

Maurice Lee's study illustrates how writers such as Poe, Melville, Douglass, Thoreau, Dickinson, and others participated in a broad intellectual and cultural shift in which Americans increasingly learned to live with the threatening and wonderful possibilities of chance.

Author : Mark W. Sullivan
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2015-01-14
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780739189078

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Picturing Thoreau by Mark W. Sullivan Pdf

As we approach the bicentennial, in 2017, of the birth of Henry David Thoreau, there is considerable debate and confusion as to what he may, or may not have, contributed to American life and culture. Almost every American has heard of Thoreau, but only a few are aware that he was deeply engaged with most of the important issues of his day, from slavery to “Manifest Destiny” and the rights of the individual in a democratic society. Many of these issues are still affecting us today, as we move toward the second quarter of the twenty-first century. By studying how various American artists have chosen to portray Thoreauover the years since the publication of Walden in 1854, we can gain a clear understanding of how he has been interpreted (or misinterpreted) throughout the years since his death in 1862. But along the way, we might also find something useful, for our times, in the insights that Thoreau gained as he wrestled with the most urgent problems being experienced by American society in his day.

Author : Henry David Thoreau
Publisher : Pan Macmillan
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2016-10-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781509831548

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Walden by Henry David Thoreau Pdf

Henry David Thoreau is considered one of the leading figures in early American literature, and Walden is without doubt his most influential book. Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. It recounts the author's experiences living in a small house in the woods around Walden Pond near Concord in Massachusetts. Thoreau constructed the house himself, with the help of a few friends, to see if he could live 'deliberately' - independently and apart from society. The result is an intriguing work which blends natural history with philosophical insights, and includes many illuminating quotations from other authors. Thoreau's wooden shack has won a place for itself in the collective American psyche, a remarkable achievement for a book with such modest and rustic beginnings.