Download or read book Imagining Niagara written by Patrick McGreevy and published by Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Niagara Falls was a lightning rod for nineteenth-century enthusiasms. Although travelers came to the falls to experience a place they considered outside the world of their ordinary lives, they brought with them their contemporary concerns. Many tourists were obsessed with the mysteries of death, others with scientific or religious speculation. The way they imagined Niagara Falls found expression in a torrent of writings and images that took a variety of forms. Patrick McGreevy begins with the question, What can these visions of Niagara tell us about the place itself? The landscape surrounding the falls contains not only parks and religious shrines but also circuses, horror museums, and factories. People travel to Niagara not only to experience nature but also to celebrate marriages or commit suicide. One way to make sense of these bizarre "human accumulations", as H. G. Wells called them, is to take seriously the Niagaras people have imagined. This book focuses on four interlocking themes that recur time and again in descriptions of the falls: Niagara as a thing imagined from afar, as a metaphor for death, as an embodiment of nature, and as a focus of future events. Using the skills of a cultural geographer, McGreevy discovers some surprising connections between the Niagara people have imagined and the one they made, between its natural grandeur and its industrial exploitation, between Frederick Law Olmsted's Reservation and the Love Canal.
Download or read book Inventing Niagara written by Ginger Strand and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-05-06 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strand reveals the hidden history of America's most iconic natural wonder, Niagara Falls, illuminating what it says about our history, our relationship with the environment, and ourselves.
Download or read book Covering Niagara written by Joan Nicks and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2010-05-20 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering Niagara: Studies in Local Popular Culture closely examines some of the myriad forms of popular culture in the Niagara region of Canada. Essays consider common assumptions and definitions of what popular culture is and seek to determine whether broad theories of popular culture can explain or make sense of localized instances of popular culture and the cultural experiences of people in their daily lives. Among the many topics covered are local bicycle parades and war memorials, cooking and wine culture, radio and movie-going, music stores and music scenes, tourist sites, and blackface minstrel shows. The authors approach their subjects from a variety of critical and historical perspectives and employ a range of methodologies that includes cultural studies, textual analysis, archival research, and participant interviews. Altogether, Covering Niagara provides a richly diverse mapping of the popular culture of a particular area of Canada and demonstrates the complexities of everyday culture.
Download or read book Overcoming Niagara written by Janet Dorothy Larkin and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Overcoming Niagara Janet Dorothy Larkin analyzes the canal age from the perspective of the Niagara–Great Lakes borderland between 1792 and 1837. She shows what drove the transportation revolution, not the conventional story of westward expansion and the international/metropolitan rivalry between Great Britain and the United States, but a dynamic connection, cooperation, and healthy competition in a transnational-borderland region. Larkin focuses on North America's three most vital waterways—the Erie, Oswego, and Welland Canals. Canadian and American transportation leaders and promoters mutually sought to overcome the natural and artificial barriers presented by Niagara Falls by building an integrated, interconnected canal system, thus strengthening the borderland economy and propelling westward expansion, market development, and the Niagara tourist industry. On the heels of the Erie Canal's bicentennial in 2017, Overcoming Niagara explores the transnational nature of the canal age within the Niagara–Great Lakes borderland, and its impact on the commercial and cultural landscape of this porous region.
Download or read book The Niagara Companion written by Linda L. Revie and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2010-11-22 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it about Niagara Falls that fascinates people? What draws them to it? Is it love, obsession, or fear? In The Niagara Companion, Linda Revie searches for an answer to these questions by examining the paintings and writings about the Falls from the late seventeenth century, when the first Europeans discovered Niagara, to the early twentieth century. Linda Revie’s study considers how three centuries of representations are shaped by the earliest encounters with the waterfall and notes shifts in the construction of landscape features and in human figures, both Native and European, in the long history of fine art depictions. Travel narratives, both literary and scientific, also come under her scrutiny, and reveal how these chronicles were influenced by previous pictures coming out of Niagara, particularly some of the first from the seventeenth century. In all of these portraits and texts, she notes a common pattern of response from the observers — moving from anticipation, to disappointment, to a kind of recovery. But in the end, there is fear. Even long after Niagara had become a tourist mecca, it was often drawn as a primordial wilderness — a place where civilization vies with wildness, artifice with nature, fear with control, the natural with the mastered. Throughout this history of images and narratives, as humans struggle to control nature, the notion of wildness prevails. Those who want a deeper understanding of why Niagara Falls continues to fascinate us, even today, will find Linda Revie’s book an excellent companion.
Download or read book The Economy of Icons written by Ernest Sternberg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1999-09-30 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though many still think that we live in an information economy, Ernest Sternberg asserts that the driving force in 21st-century capitalism is not information, but image. Through studies of food processing, real estate development, tourism, movies, and labor performances, he examines how businesses endow products with evocative meaning. It has become common wisdom that we live in a postindustrial information society in which data and calculation underlie wealth. But now that information is as routinely produced as industrial or agricultural goods, businesses are discovering that they best achieve competitive advantage by producing what consumers most dearly seek—personal meaning. The 21st-century economy produces just that: not merely information, but evocative images; not just commodities, but meaning-laden icons. As Sternberg shows, foods now appeal through their sensuality and nostalgia; houses and stores draw customers through their exoticism; people sell their labor through the deliberate performance of the self for the market; and tourist destinations offer up carefully crafted thematic experiences. Whereas farms, factories, and information processors once stood at the core of the economy, now movie studios do, producing the product valued above all, meaningful content, from which downstream firms acquire the themes that animate desire. Now that meaning pervades production, Sternberg argues, modes of inquiry once reserved for the humanities make sense in the study of the economy. Drawing on art history and aesthetics, he introduces iconography as a mode of cultural analysis adapted to the study of commercial production. Through comparative studies of diverse economic sectors, ranging from food processing to tourism, Sternberg carries out an iconographic analysis of the new economy. This is a provocative study for scholars, students, and professionals dealing with marketing and consumer research, culture and media studies, socio-economics, and economic geography.
Download or read book Descriptions of Niagara written by William Barham and published by Gravesend [England] : Published by the compiler. This book was released on 1847 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Niagara Falls written by Dirk Vanderwilt and published by Channel Lake, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-10-23 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is so much more to Niagara than just the falls! In this comprehensive guide, completely revised and updated, learn about the best ways to see the falls, the best places for family fun, the best dining, shopping, resorts and more! Niagara Falls has it all, plus golfing, indoor waterparks, arcades and casinos. Whether on your first or tenth visit, this guide will help you explore the many wonders that Niagara has to offer.
Download or read book Fixing Niagara Falls written by Daniel Macfarlane and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late nineteenth century, Niagara Falls has been heavily engineered to generate energy behind a flowing façade designed to appeal to tourists. Fixing Niagara Falls reveals the technological feats and cross-border politics that facilitated the transformation of one of the most important natural sites in North America. Daniel Macfarlane shows how this natural wonder is essentially a tap: huge tunnels around the reconfigured Falls channel the waters of the Niagara River, which ebb and flow according to the tourism calendar. This book offers a unique interdisciplinary and transborder perspective on how the Niagara landscape embodies the power of technology and nature.
Download or read book The ISLE Reader written by Michael P. Branch and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume gathers nineteen of the most representative and defining essays from the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment over the course of its first ten years. Following an introduction that traces the stages of ecocriticism's development, The ISLE Reader is organized into three sections, each of which reflects one of the general goals the journal has sought to accomplish. The section titled "Re-evaluations" provides new readings of familiar environmental writers and new environmental perspectives on authors or literary traditions not usually considered from a green perspective. The writings in "Reaching Out to Other Disciplines" promote cross-pollination among various disciplines and methodologies in the environmental arts and humanities. The writings in the final section, "New Theoretical and Practical Paradigms," are especially significant for the conceptual and methodological terrain they map. The ISLE Reader documents the state of research in ecocriticism and related interdisciplinary fields, provides a survey of the field, and points to new methodologies and possibilities for the future.
Download or read book The New Niagara Tourism Technology and the Landscape of Niagara Falls 1776 1917 written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Imaging Hoover Dam written by Anthony F. Arrigo and published by University of Nevada Press. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mighty Hoover Dam, starting as a dream of land developers and farmers, became the most ambitious civil engineering project of the Great Depression. This landmark in the middle of the Mojave Desert, holding back the largest man-made lake in America, also became, like Mount Rushmore or the Empire State Building, a visual and cultural icon. The power and meanings of this icon came not through a single image but via myriad visual representations, in government propaganda, advertising, journalism, and art. Even before it was built, these images were used to shape the public’s perception of the project and frame the dam as the linchpin to an expanding American economic empire in the desert Southwest. Anthony F. Arrigo has researched a wide array of primary sources and archival materials to trace the project from its earliest representations in illustrations to the documentary photography of its construction and later depictions of the structure in commercial promotions, fine art photography, and paintings. Analyzing Hoover Dam through the trajectory of imagery across several decades, rather than the narrative of its construction, illuminates the underlying cultural and ecological imperatives in the drive to build it, including the influence of religious doctrine and the American agrarian movement. Arrigo also discusses various portrayals of laborers, women, minority groups, nature, and technology in this imagery. In time, the visual icon of power and domination was commercialized to sell cars, vacations, and more. Imaging Hoover Dam is an important work in both visual rhetoric and cultural studies. It will also intrigue readers interested in such varied topics as the history of the American Southwest, the Great Depression and the New Deal, social and environmental issues, and American popular culture.
Download or read book Niagara Falls All Over Again written by Elizabeth McCracken and published by Delta. This book was released on 2002-11-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By turns graceful and knowing, funny and moving, Niagara Falls All Over Again is the latest masterwork by National Book Award finalist and author of The Giant’s House, Elizabeth McCracken. Spanning the waning years of vaudeville and the golden age of Hollywood, Niagara Falls All Over Again chronicles a flawed, passionate friendship over thirty years, weaving a powerful story of family and love, grief and loss. In it, McCracken introduces her most singular and affecting hero: Mose Sharp — son, brother, husband, father, friend ... and straight man to the fat guy in baggy pants who utterly transforms his life. To the paying public, Mose Sharp was the arch, colorless half of the comedy team Carter and Sharp. To his partner, he was charmed and charming, a confirmed bachelor who never failed at love and romance. To his father and sisters, Mose was a prodigal son. And in his own heart and soul, he would always be a boy who once had a chance to save a girl’s life — a girl who would be his first, and greatest, loss. Born into a Jewish family in small-town Iowa, the only boy among six sisters, Mose Sharp couldn’t leave home soon enough. By sixteen Mose had already joined the vaudeville circuit. But he knew one thing from the start: “I needed a partner,” he recalls. “I had always needed a partner.” Then, an ebullient, self-destructive comedian named Rocky Carter came crashing into his life — and a thirty-year partnership was born. But as the comedy team of Carter and Sharp thrived from the vaudeville backwaters to Broadway to Hollywood, a funny thing happened amid the laughter: It was Mose who had all the best lines offstage. Rocky would go through money, women, and wives in his restless search for love; Mose would settle down to a family life marked by fragile joy and wrenching tragedy. And soon, cracks were appearing in their complex relationship ... until one unforgivable act leads to another and a partnership begins to unravel. In a novel as daring as it is compassionate, Elizabeth McCracken introduces an indelibly drawn cast of characters — from Mose’s Iowa family to the vagabond friends, lovers, and competitors who share his dizzying journey — as she deftly explores the fragile structures that underlie love affairs and friendships, partnerships and families. An elegiac and uniquely American novel, Niagara Falls All Over Again is storytelling at its finest — and powerful proof that Elizabeth McCracken is one of the most dynamic and wholly original voices of her generation.
Download or read book Religion and American Cultures 4 volumes written by Gary Laderman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-12-17 with total page 1712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This four-volume work provides a detailed, multicultural survey of established as well as "new" American religions and investigates the fascinating interactions between religion and ethnicity, gender, politics, regionalism, ethics, and popular culture. This revised and expanded edition of Religion and American Cultures: Tradition, Diversity, and Popular Expression presents more than 140 essays that address contemporary spiritual practice and culture with a historical perspective. The entries cover virtually every religion in modern-day America as well as the role of religion in various aspects of U.S. culture. Readers will discover that Americans aren't largely Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish anymore, and that the number of popular religious identities is far greater than many would imagine. And although most Americans believe in a higher power, the fastest growing identity in the United States is the "nones"—those Americans who elect "none" when asked about their religious identity—thereby demonstrating how many individuals see their spirituality as something not easily defined or categorized. The first volume explores America's multicultural communities and their religious practices, covering the range of different religions among Anglo-Americans and Euro-Americans as well as spirituality among Latino, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities. The second volume focuses on cultural aspects of religions, addressing topics such as film, Generation X, public sacred spaces, sexuality, and new religious expressions. The new third volume expands the range of topics covered with in-depth essays on additional topics such as interfaith families, religion in prisons, belief in the paranormal, and religion after September 11, 2001. The fourth volume is devoted to complementary primary source documents.
Download or read book Progress written by Robert David Sack and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2002-06-06 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The connection between geography and progress is fundamental," writes Robert Sack in the introduction to the present volume. Touching on both moral and material progress, six of the world's leading geographers and environmental historians explore differing aspects of this connection. Thomas Vale discusses whether progress is discernible in the natural realm; Kenneth Olwig examines fundamental changes that occurred to the notion of progress with the rise of modernity, while David Lowenthal and Yi-Fu Tuan discuss recent geographical changes that have resulted in an increasing societal disenchantment and anxiety. Nicholas Entrikin looks at progress as "moral perfectibility, and its connection to democratic places," a theme which Robert Sack further explores by prescribing ways in which geographers and citizens can evaluate and create places that increase our awareness of reality in its variety and complexity. Contributors: J. Nicholas Entrikin, University of California-Los Angeles; David Lowenthal, University College, London; Kenneth Olwig, University in Trondheim, Norway; Robert David Sack, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Yi-Fu Tuan, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Thomas R. Vale, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Download or read book Follies in America written by Kerry Dean Carso and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-15 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Follies in America examines historicized garden buildings, known as "follies," from the nation's founding through the American centennial celebration in 1876. In a period of increasing nationalism, follies—such as temples, summerhouses, towers, and ruins—brought a range of European architectural styles to the United States. By imprinting the land with symbols of European culture, landscape gardeners brought their idea of civilization to the American wilderness. Kerry Dean Carso's interdisciplinary approach in Follies in America examines both buildings and their counterparts in literature and art, demonstrating that follies provide a window into major themes in nineteenth-century American culture, including tensions between Jeffersonian agrarianism and urban life, the ascendancy of middle-class tourism, and gentility and social class aspirations.
Download or read book Tourism in the USA written by Dimitri Ioannides and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-01-25 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States continues to provide opportunities for travel and tourism to domestic and international travellers. This is the first book to offer students a comprehensive overview of both tourism and travel in this region, paying specific attention to the disciplines of Geography, Tourism Studies and, more generally, Social Science. Tourism in the USA explains the evolution of tourism paying attention to the forces that shaped the product that exists today. The focus of the book includes the manner in which tourism has played out in various contexts; the role of federal, state, and local policy is also examined in terms of the effects it has had on the US travel industry and on destinations. The various elements of tourism demand and supply are discussed and the influence that transportation (especially Americans’ high personal mobility rates and love affair with the auto) has had on the sector highlighted. The economics of tourism are fleshed out before focusing more narrowly on both the urban and rural settings where tourism occurs. A look into the manner in which the spatial structure of cities is transformed through tourism is also offered. Additionally, a brief examination of future issues in American tourism is presented along with explanations concerning the ascendancy of tourism as an economic development tool in various areas. The book combines theory and practice as well as integrating a range of useful student orientated resources to aid understanding and spur further debate, which can be used for independent study or in class exercises. These include: ‘Closer Look’ case studies with reflective questions to help show theory in practice and encourage critical thinking about tourism developments in this region ‘Discussion Questions’ at the end of each chapter encourage stimulating debates ‘Further Reading’ sections direct the readers to related book and web resources so that they can learn more about the topics covered in each chapter. Written in an engaging style and supported with visual aids, this book will provide students globally with an in-depth and essential understanding of the complexities of tourism and travel in the USA.
