Download or read book The Landscape of History written by John Lewis Gaddis and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is history and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book. The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft, as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today. Gaddis points out that while the historical method is more sophisticated than most historians realize, it doesn't require unintelligible prose to explain. Like cartographers mapping landscapes, historians represent what they can never replicate. In doing so, they combine the techniques of artists, geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists. Their approaches parallel, in intriguing ways, the new sciences of chaos, complexity, and criticality. They don't much resemble what happens in the social sciences, where the pursuit of independent variables functioning with static systems seems increasingly divorced from the world as we know it. So who's really being scientific and who isn't? This question too is one Gaddis explores, in ways that are certain to spark interdisciplinary controversy. Written in the tradition of Marc Bloch and E.H. Carr, The Landscape of History is at once an engaging introduction to the historical method for beginners, a powerful reaffirmation of it for practitioners, a startling challenge to social scientists, and an effective skewering of post-modernist claims that we can't know anything at all about the past. It will be essential reading for anyone who reads, writes, teaches, or cares about history.
Download or read book Illustrated History of Landscape Design written by Elizabeth Boults and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-02-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A visual journey through the history of landscape design For thousands of years, people have altered the meaning of space by reshaping nature. As an art form, these architectural landscape creations are stamped with societal imprints unique to their environment and place in time. Illustrated History of Landscape Design takes an optical sweep of the iconic landscapes constructed throughout the ages. Organized by century and geographic region, this highly visual reference uses hundreds of masterful pen-and-ink drawings to show how historical context and cultural connections can illuminate today's design possibilities. This guide includes: Storyboards, case studies, and visual narratives to portray spaces Plan, section, and elevation drawings of key spaces Summaries of design concepts, principles, and vocabularies Historic and contemporary works of art that illuminate a specific era Descriptions of how the landscape has been shaped over time in response to human need Directing both students and practitioners along a visually stimulating timeline, Illustrated History of Landscape Design is a valuable educational tool as well as an endless source ofinspiration.
Download or read book Trace written by Lauret Savoy and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a New Preface by the Author Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land. Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life–defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost. A provocative and powerful mosaic that ranges across a continent and across time, from twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.–Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories—natural, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. "Every landscape is an accumulation," reads one epigraph. "Life must be lived amidst that which was made before." Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful book: she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory—and to be one.
Download or read book Discovering the Unknown Landscape written by Ann Vileisis and published by Island Press. This book was released on 1999-09-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rapidly disappearing wetlands that once spread so abundantly across the American continent serve an essential and irreplaceable ecological function. Yet for centuries, Americans have viewed them with disdain. Beginning with the first European settlers, we have thought of them as sinkholes of disease and death, as landscapes that were worse than useless unless they could be drained, filled, paved or otherwise "improved." As neither dry land, which can be owned and controlled by individuals, nor bodies of water, which are considered a public resource, wetlands have in recent years been at the center of controversy over issues of environmental protection and property rights. The confusion and contention that surround wetland issues today are the products of a long and convoluted history. In Discovering the Unknown Landscape, Anne Vileisis presents a fascinating look at that history, exploring how Americans have thought about and used wetlands from Colonial times through the present day. She discusses the many factors that influence patterns of land use -- ideology, economics, law, perception, art -- and examines the complicated interactions among those factors that have resulted in our contemporary landscape. As well as chronicling the march of destruction, she considers our seemingly contradictory tradition of appreciating wetlands: artistic and literary representations, conservation during the Progressive Era, and recent legislation aimed at slowing or stopping losses. Discovering the Unknown Landscape is an intriguing synthesis of social and environmental history, and a valuable examination of how cultural attitudes shape the physical world that surrounds us. It provides important context to current debates, and clearly illustrates the stark contrast between centuries of beliefs and policies and recent attempts to turn those longstanding beliefs and policies around. Vileisis's clear and engaging prose provides a new and compelling understanding of modern-day environmental conflicts.
Download or read book The History of Landscape Design in 100 Gardens written by Linda A. Chisholm and published by Timber Press. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Rich with photographs and descriptions of how landscape design has shaped and reflected culture over time.” —The American Gardener The History of Landscape Design in 100 Gardens explores the defining moments in garden design. Through profiles of 100 of the most influential gardens, Linda Chisholm explores how social, political, and economic influences shaped garden design principles. The book is organized chronologically and by theme, starting with the medieval garden Alhambra and ending with the modern naturalism of the Lurie Garden. Sumptuously illustrated, The History of Landscape Design in 100 Gardens is a comprehensive resource for garden designers and landscape architects, design students, and garden history enthusiasts.
Download or read book A Landscape History of New England written by Blake A. Harrison and published by Mit Press. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a view of New England's landscapes that goes beyond picture postcard-ready vistas of white-steepled churches, open pastures, and tree-covered mountains. Its chapters describe, for example, the Native American presence in the Maine Woods; offer a history of agriculture told through stone walls, woodlands, and farm buildings; report on the fragile ecology of tourist-friendly Cape Cod beaches; and reveal the ethnic stereotypes informing Colonial Revivalism. Taken together, they offer a wide-ranging history of New England's diverse landscapes, stretching across two centuries. The book shows that all New England landscapes are the products of human agency as well as nature. The authors trace the roles that work, recreation, historic preservation, conservation, and environmentalism have played in shaping the region, and they highlight the diversity of historical actors who have transformed both its meaning and its physical form. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, including history, geography, environmental studies, literature, art history, and historic preservation, the book provides fresh perspectives on New England's many landscapes: forests, mountains, farms, coasts, industrial areas, villages, towns, and cities. Illustrated, and with many archival photographs, it offers readers a solid historical foundation for understanding the great variety of places that make up New England.
Download or read book Landscape of Industry written by Worcester Historical Museum and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2009 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illustrated history of the cradle of American industrialization
Download or read book Landscape Design written by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From ancient Egyptian royal cemeteries to great 18th-century English estates and the earth works of today, this volume spans the history of landscape design, revealing a great deal about the development of societies, and how cities, parks and gardens embody cultural values.
Download or read book Restoring Women s History Through Historic Preservation written by Gail Lee Dubrow and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-01-28 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay collection draws upon work presented at three national conferences on women and historic preservation held at Bryn Mawr College in 1994, Arizona State University in 1997, and at Mount Vernon College in 2000.
Download or read book Gardens and the Picturesque written by John Dixon Hunt and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of Hunt's essays, many previously unpublished, dealing with the ways in which men and women have given meaning to gardens and landscapes, especially with the ways in which gardens have represented the world of nature "picturesquely".
Download or read book Fresh Pond written by Jill Sinclair and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-02-13 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Fresh Pond Reservation—onetime summer retreat for wealthy Bostonians, center of the nineteenth-century ice industry, and stomping grounds for Harvard students—told through photographs, maps and plans, and stories. Fresh Pond Reservation, at the northwest edge of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been described as a “landscape loved to death.” Certainly it is a landscape that has been changed by its various uses over the years and one to which Cantabridgeans and Bostonians have felt an intense attachment. Henry James returned to it in his sixties, looking for “some echo of the dreams of youth,” feeling keenly “the pleasure of memory”; a Harvard student of the 1850s fondly remembered skating parties and the chance of “flirtation with some fair-ankled beauty of breezy Boston”; modern residents argue fiercely over dogs being allowed to run free at the reservation and whether soccer or nature is a more valuable experience for Cambridge schoolchildren. In Fresh Pond, Jill Sinclair tells the story of the pond and its surrounding land through photographs, drawings, maps, plans, and an engaging narrative of the pond's geological, historical, and political ecology. Fresh Pond has been a Native American hunting and fishing ground; the site of an eighteenth-century hotel offering bowling, food and wine, and impromptu performances by Harvard men; a summer retreat for wealthy Bostonians; a training ground for trench warfare; a location for picnics and festivals for workers and sporting activities for all. The parkland features an Olmsted design, albeit an imperfectly realized one. The pond itself—a natural lake carved out by the retreating Ice Age about 15,000 years ago—was a center of the nineteenth-century ice industry (disparaged by Thoreau, writing about another pond), and still supplies the city of Cambridge with fresh drinking water. Sinclair's celebration of a local landscape also alerts us to broader issues—shifts in public attitudes toward nature (is it brutal wilderness or in need of protection?) and water (precious commodity or limitless flow?)—that resonate as we remake our relationship to the landscape.
Download or read book Fixing Landscape written by Corey Byrnes and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1994, workers broke ground on China’s Three Gorges Dam. By its completion in 2012, the dam had transformed the ecology of the Yangzi River, displaced over a million people, and forever altered a landscape immortalized in centuries of literature and art. The controversial history of the dam is well known; what this book uncovers are its unexpected connections to the cultural traditions it seems to sever. By reconsidering the dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Three Gorges region over more than two millennia, Fixing Landscape offers radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in contemporary China. Corey Byrnes argues that this monumental feat of engineering can only be understood by confronting its status as a techno-poetic act, a form of landscaping indebted to both the technical knowledge of engineers and to the poetic legacies of the Gorges as cultural site. Synthesizing methods drawn from premodern, modern, and contemporary Chinese studies, as well as from critical geography, art history, and the environmental humanities, Byrnes offers innovative readings of eighth-century poetry, paintings from the twelfth through twenty-first centuries, contemporary film, nineteenth-century British travelogues, and Chinese and Western maps, among other sources. Fixing Landscape shows that premodern poetry and visual art have something urgent to tell us about a contemporary experiment in spatial production. Poems and paintings may not build dams, but Byrnes argues that the Three Gorges Dam would not exist as we know it without them.
Download or read book Landscape with Figures written by Malcolm Goldstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-11-30 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the United States become not only the leading contemporary art scene in the world, but also the leading market for art? The answer has to do not only with the talents of American artists or even the size of the American economy, but also--and especially--the skills and entrepreneurship of American art dealers. Their story has not been told...until now. Landscape with Figures is the first history of art dealing in the United States, following the profession from eighteenth-century portrait and picture salesmen in the colonies to the high-profile, jet-set gallery owners of today. Providing anecdotal and carefully researched biographies of the prominent dealers from more than two centuries of trade, author Malcolm Goldstein shows how magnanimous personalities and social networking helped to shape the way Americans have bought and valued art. These dealers range from Michael Paff, whose enthusiasm often overshadowed his expertise but nonetheless helped him sell faux Old Master paintings to major collectors in the early nineteenth century; to the imperious Joseph Duveen, dealer to magnates like Henry Clay Frick; to visionary Leo Castelli, who helped to usher in a revolution in modern art during the 1960s by showing such avant-garde artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. Goldstein also shows that the American art trade, while male-dominated, has been galvanized by female dealers, including the inimitable Edith Gregor Halpert, Peggy Guggenheim, and Mary Boone. Their fascinating stories unfold in the context of world art history, the rise of major art institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, and the growing zeal of art collectors who would eventually pay millions for individual works of art. Unprecedented and critical to understanding today's art world, Landscape with Figures is a must for artists, art history students, and art lovers.
Download or read book Political Landscape written by Martin Warnke and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all know what "the political landscape" is, and politicians and journalists never tire of referring to it. But in this ingenious and original book, Martin Warnke takes that well-worn metaphor literally and uses it to reveal just how politicized the real landscape of continental Europe has been for centuries. The author finds his evidence of humanity's intervention in nature in the form of monuments and milestones, gardens, roads and border crossings, in landscape paintings and maps – even, in fact, in the anthropomorphic interpretations once given to formations of hills and rocks. The Political Landscape is underpinned with a fascinating array of examples and illustrations, many of which will be new even to experts in the art of landscape and related disciplines.
Download or read book Landscape and Western Art written by Malcolm Andrews and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores many issues raised by the range of ideas and images of the natural world in Western art since the Renaissance. The whole concept of landscape is examined as a representation of the relationship between the human and natural worlds. Featured artists include Claude, Freidrich, Turner, Cole and Ruisdael, and many different forms of landscape art are addressed, such as land art, painting, photography, garden design, panorama and cartography.
Download or read book The Spirit of the Garden written by Martha Brookes Brown Hutcheson and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Landscapes of Exclusion written by William E O'Brien and published by . This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1930s, the state park movement and the National Park Service expanded public access to scenic American places, especially during the era of the New Deal. However, under severe Jim Crow restrictions in the South, African Americans were routinely and officially denied entrance to these supposedly shared sites. Landscapes of Exclusion presents the first-ever study of segregation in southern state parks, underscoring the profound disparity that persisted for decades in the Jim Crow South.
