Download or read book Land and Light in the American West written by and published by . This book was released on 2007-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major collection of master photographer John Ward's gorgeously detailed black-and-white images of the American West
Download or read book This Land written by Christopher Ketcham and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before. Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the reader on a journey across these last wild places, to see how capitalism is killing our great commons. Ketcham begins in Utah, revealing the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, and exposing rampant malfeasance in the federal land management agencies, who have been compromised by the profit-driven livestock and energy interests they are supposed to regulate. He then turns to the broad effects of those corrupt politics on wildlife. He tracks the Department of Interior's failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act--including its stark betrayal of protections for the grizzly bear and the sage grouse--and investigates the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry. Along the way, Ketcham talks with ecologists, biologists, botanists, former government employees, whistleblowers, grassroots environmentalists and other citizens who are fighting to protect the public domain for future generations. This Land is a colorful muckraking journey--part Edward Abbey, part Upton Sinclair--exposing the rot in American politics that is rapidly leading to the sell-out of our national heritage"--
Download or read book How to Read the American West written by William Wyckoff and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2014-06-05 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From deserts to ghost towns, from national forests to California bungalows, many of the features of the western American landscape are well known to residents and travelers alike. But in How to Read the American West, William Wyckoff introduces readers anew to these familiar landscapes. A geographer and an accomplished photographer, Wyckoff offers a fresh perspective on the natural and human history of the American West and encourages readers to discover that history has shaped the places where people live, work, and visit. This innovative field guide includes stories, photographs, maps, and diagrams on a hundred landscape features across the American West. Features are grouped according to type, such as natural landscapes, farms and ranches, places of special cultural identity, and cities and suburbs. Unlike the geographic organization of a traditional guidebook, Wyckoff's field guide draws attention to the connections and the differences between and among places. Emphasizing features that recur from one part of the region to another, the guide takes readers on an exploration of the eleven western states with trips into their natural and cultural character. How to Read the American West is an ideal traveling companion on the main roads and byways in the West, providing unexpected insights into the landscapes you see out your car window. It is also a wonderful source for armchair travelers and people who live in the West who want to learn more about the modern West, how it came to be, and how it may change in the years to come. Showcasing the everyday alongside the exceptional, Wyckoff demonstrates how asking new questions about the landscapes of the West can let us see our surroundings more clearly, helping us make informed and thoughtful decisions about their stewardship in the twenty-first century. Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYSmp5gZ4-I
Download or read book Promised Lands written by David M. Wrobel and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2002-10-31 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether seen as a land of opportunity or as paradise lost, the American West took shape in the nation's imagination with the help of those who wrote about it; but two groups who did much to shape that perception are often overlooked today. Promoters trying to lure settlers and investors to the West insisted that the frontier had already been tamed-that the only frontiers remaining were those of opportunity. Through posters, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and other printed pieces, these boosters literally imagined places into existence by depicting backwater areas as settled, culturally developed regions where newcomers would find none of the hardships associated with frontier life. Quick on their heels, some of the West's original settlers had begun publishing their reminiscences in books and periodicals and banding together in pioneer societies to sustain their conception of frontier heritage. Their selective memory focused on the savage wilderness they had tamed, exaggerating the past every bit as much as promoters exaggerated the present. Although they are generally seen today as unscrupulous charlatans and tellers of tall tales, David Wrobel reveals that these promoters and reminiscers were more significant than their detractors have suggested. By exploring the vast literature produced by these individuals from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s, he clarifies the pivotal impact of their works on our vision of both the historic and mythic West. In examining their role in forging both sense of place within the West and the nation's sense of the West as a place, Wrobel shows that these works were vital to the process of identity formation among westerners themselves and to the construction of a "West" in the national imagination. Wrobel also sheds light on the often elitist, sometimes racist legacies of both groups through their characterizations of Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans. In the era Wrobel examines, promoters painted the future of each western place as if it were already present, while the old-timers preserved the past as if it were still present. But, as he also demonstrates, that West has not really changed much: promoters still tout its promise, while old-timers still try to preserve their selective memories. Even relatively recent western residents still tap into the region's mythic pioneer heritage as they form their attachments to place. Promised Lands shows us that the West may well move into the twenty-first century, but our images of it are forever rooted in the nineteenth.
Download or read book Land in the American West written by William G. Robbins and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the history of the United States, the concepts of “land” and “the West” have fired the American imagination and fueled controversy. The essays in Land in the American West deal with complex, troublesome, and interrelated questions regarding land: Who owns it? Who has access to it? What happens when private rights infringe upon the public good, or when one ethnic group is pitted against another, or when there is a conflict between economic and environmental values? Many of these questions have deep historical roots. They all have special significance in the modern American West, where natural resources are still abundant and large areas of land are federally owned.
Download or read book Light in the Trees written by Gail Louise Folkins and published by Voice in the American West. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""A memoir about growing up in a mountain foothill in Washington state, chronically a coming of age for author and region. Includes further views of the Northwest through the eyes of Southwest terrain and climate."--Provided by publisher"--
Download or read book Three Frontiers written by Dean L. May and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-08-26 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the values and aspirations of settlers in the Far West. It compares rural people who settled in the Willamette Valley in the 1840s, the Utah Valley in the 1850s, and the Boise Valley in the 1860s. The Oregon and Utah settlers tried with differing degrees of success to resist the modernizing trends represented by Idaho, but ultimately adopted the individualistic, commercial, and acquisitive values that prevailed in the New West. How did Americans move away from a culture centering on family and kin and from attitudes that valued and protected the land, not for its commercial worth, but as the base of support for future generations? What led to our present tendency to pursue individual pleasure and material well-being at the expense of communal and broader societal well-being? These are questions central to this comparative study of three peoples who pioneered the American frontiers.
Download or read book The Best Land Under Heaven The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny written by Michael Wallis and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence Finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award A Publishers Weekly Holiday Guide History Pick “A book so gripping it can scarcely be put down.... Superb.” —New York Times Book Review "WESTWARD HO! FOR OREGON AND CALIFORNIA!" In the eerily warm spring of 1846, George Donner placed this advertisement in a local newspaper as he and a restless caravan prepared for what they hoped would be the most rewarding journey of a lifetime. But in eagerly pursuing what would a century later become known as the "American dream," this optimistic-yet-motley crew of emigrants was met with a chilling nightmare; in the following months, their jingoistic excitement would be replaced by desperate cries for help that would fall silent in the deadly snow-covered mountains of the Sierra Nevada. We know these early pioneers as the Donner Party, a name that has elicited horror since the late 1840s. With The Best Land Under Heaven, Wallis has penned what critics agree is “destined to become the standard account” (Washington Post) of the notorious saga. Cutting through 160 years of myth-making, the “expert storyteller” (True West) compellingly recounts how the unlikely band of early pioneers met their fate. Interweaving information from hundreds of newly uncovered documents, Wallis illuminates how a combination of greed and recklessness led to one of America’s most calamitous and sensationalized catastrophes. The result is a “fascinating, horrifying, and inspiring” (Oklahoman) examination of the darkest side of Manifest Destiny.
Download or read book Haunted by Waters written by Robert T. Hayashi and published by . This book was released on 2007-08-15 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even though race influenced how Americans envisioned, represented, and shaped the American West, discussions of its history devalue the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities. In this lyrical history of marginalized peoples in Idaho, Robert T. Hayashi views the West from a different perspective by detailing the ways in which they shaped the western landscape and its meaning. As an easterner, researcher, angler, and third-generation Japanese American traveling across the contemporary Idaho landscape—where his grandfather died during internment during World War II—Hayashi reconstructs a landscape that lured emigrants of all races at the same time its ruling forces were developing cultured processes that excluded nonwhites. Throughout each convincing and compelling chapter, he searches for the stories of dispossessed minorities as patiently as he searches for trout. Using a wide range of materials that include memoirs, oral interviews, poetry, legal cases, letters, government documents, and even road signs, Hayashi illustrates how Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian, all-white, and democratic West affected the Gem State’s Nez Perce, Chinese, Shoshone, Mormon, and particularly Japanese residents. Starting at the site of the Corps of Discovery’s journey into Idaho, he details the ideological, aesthetic, and material manifestations of these intertwined notions of race and place. As he ?y-?shes Idaho’s fabled rivers and visits its historical sites and museums, Hayashi reads the contemporary landscape in light of this evolution.
Download or read book The American West written by Dee Brown and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-12-25 with total page 815 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the railroads opened up the American West to settlers in the last half of the 19th Century, the Plains Indians made their final stand and cattle ranches spread from Texas to Montana. Eminent Western author Dee Brown here illuminates the struggle between these three groups as they fought for a place in this new landscape. The result is both a spirited national saga and an authoritative historical account of the drive for order in an uncharted wilderness, illustrated throughout with maps, photographs and ephemera from the period.
Download or read book Butcher s Crossing written by John Williams and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-03-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Gabe Polsky. In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America. It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.
Download or read book Up in Arms written by John Temple and published by BenBella Books. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "IT'S TIME! They have my cattle and now they have one of my boys. Range War begins tomorrow at Bundy Ranch." These words, pounded out on a laptop at Cliven Bundy's besieged Nevada ranch on April 6, 2014, ignited a new American revolution. Across the country, a certain type of citizen snapped to attention: This was the flashpoint they'd been waiting for, a chance to help a fellow American stand up to a tyrannical and corrupt federal government. Up in Arms chronicles how an isolated clan of desert-dwelling Mormons became the guiding light—and then the outright leaders—of America's Patriot movement. The nation was riveted in 2014 when hundreds of Bundy supporters, many of them armed, forced federal agents to abandon a court-ordered cattle roundup. Then in 2016, Ammon Bundy, one of Cliven's 13 children, led a 41-day armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Those events and the subsequent shootings, arrests, and trials captured headlines, but they're just part of a story that has never been fully told. John Temple, award-winning journalist and author of American Pain, gives readers an unprecedented and objective look at the real people and families at the heart of these highly publicized standoffs. Up in Arms offers a propulsive narrative populated by rifle-toting cowboys, apocalyptic militiamen, undercover infiltrators, and the devout and charismatic Bundys themselves. Neither mainstream nor conservative media outlets have contextualized the religious, political, environmental, and economic factors that set the stage for these events. Up in Arms provides a framework for understanding this diverse collection of American rebels who believe government overreach justifies the taking up of arms.
Download or read book Home Land written by Laura Pritchett and published by Big Earth Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: essays on new approaches to ranching and preserving western lands
Download or read book That Day written by John Rohrbach and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Rather than the proverbial melting pot, Wilson asks us to recognize a West that is at least a place where, against a backdrop of aridity and expansive space, diverse lives can and do coexist." --John Rohrbach Renowned photographer Laura Wilson has captured the majesty, as well as the tragedy, of her home region of Texas and the wider West for more than three decades. A former assistant to Richard Avedon, she has published her work to wide acclaim over the past twenty-five years. As seen in this extraordinary book, Wilson's subjects range from legendary West Texas cattle ranches to impoverished Plains Indian reservations to lavish border-town cotillions. Also featured are compelling portraits of artists who are associated with the region, including Donald Judd, Ed Ruscha, and Sam Shepard. The unforgettable images in That Day, most of which are previously unpublished, tell sharply drawn stories of the people and places that have shaped, and continue to shape, the nation's most dynamic and unyielding land. Text from Wilson's journals accompanies the photographs, recalling her personal experiences behind the camera at the moment when a particular image was captured. With her incisive eye, Wilson casts a fresh light on the West--a topic of enduring fascination.
Download or read book The Red and the White A Family Saga of the American West written by Andrew R. Graybill and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award. One of the American West’s bloodiest—and least-known—massacres is searingly re-created in this generation-spanning history of native-white intermarriage. At dawn on January 23, 1870, four hundred men of the Second U.S. Cavalry attacked and butchered a Piegan camp near the Marias River in Montana in one of the worst slaughters of Indians by American military forces in U.S. history. Coming to avenge the murder of their father—a former fur-trader named Malcolm Clarke who had been killed four months earlier by their Piegan mother’s cousin—Clarke ’s own two sons joined the cavalry in a slaughter of many of their own relatives. In this groundbreaking work of American history, Andrew R. Graybill places the Marias Massacre within a larger, three-generation saga of the Clarke family, particularly illuminating the complex history of native-white intermarriage in the American Northwest.
Download or read book Violence over the Land written by Ned BLACKHAWK and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ambitious book that ranges across the Great Basin, Blackhawk places Native peoples at the center of a dynamic story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that shaped the American West. This book is a passionate reminder of the high costs that the making of American history occasioned for many indigenous peoples.
Download or read book Some Dry Space written by Michael Light and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains 18 aerial photographs of California and Nevada, including Joshua Tree National Park and Twentynine Palms.
