Download or read book Nature s Metropolis Chicago and the Great West written by William Cronon and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-11-02 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Winner of the Bancroft Prize. "No one has written a better book about a city…Nature's Metropolis is elegant testimony to the proposition that economic, urban, environmental, and business history can be as graceful, powerful, and fascinating as a novel." —Kenneth T. Jackson, Boston Globe

Download or read book Changes in the Land written by William Cronon and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book that launched environmental history, William Cronon's Changes in the Land, now revised and updated. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists' sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another. With its chilling closing line, "The people of plenty were a people of waste," Cronon's enduring and thought-provoking book is ethno-ecological history at its best.

Download or read book An Analysis of William Cronon s Nature s Metropolis written by Cheryl Hudson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What caused the rise of Chicago, and how did the city's expansion fuel the westward movement of the American frontier – and influence the type of society that evolved as a result? Nature's Metropolis emerged as a result of William Cronon asking and answering those questions, and the work can usefully be seen as an extended example of the critical thinking skill of problem-solving in action. Cronon navigates a path between the followers of Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the thesis that American character was shaped by the experience of the frontier, and revisionists who sought to suggest that the rugged individualism Turner depicted as a creation of life in the West was little but a fiction. For Cronon, the most productive question to ask was not whether or not men forged in the liberty-loving furnace of the Wild West had the sort of impact on America that Turner posited, but the quite different one of how capitalism and political economy had combined to drive the westward expansion of the US. For Cronon, individualism was scarcely even possible in a capitalist machine in which humans were little more than cogs, and the needs and demands of capital, not capitalists, prevailed. Nature's Metropolis, then, is a work in which the rise of Chicago is explained by generating alternative possibilities, and one that uses a rigorous study of the evidence to decide between competing solutions to the problem. It is also a fine work of interpretation, for a large part of Cronon's argument revolves around his attempt to define exactly what is rural, and what is urban, and how the two interact to create a novel economic force.

Download or read book Chicago written by Harold M. Mayer and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of Chicago and how it grew. In a little over a century it rose from a mere frontier outpost to become one of the great cities of the world. No single book can possibly encompass the immense scope of this development or convey the endless diversity of the life of Chicago's people. But with the help of the camera it is possible to capture many dimensions of this extraordinary story. This volume, however, which comprises over 1,000 pictures and 50 maps, tries to do more than show physical developmentit attempts to suggest how the city expanded and why it looks the way it does. Because it asks different questions, this book differs markedly from other "pictorial histories" of American cities. Instead of emphasizing society and customs, this volume deals with the physical conditions of life. In place of the conventional interest in "founding fathers" and leading families, it is more concerned with street scenes and ordinary people. Without neglecting downtown, it also reaches into the residential areas and neighborhood shopping centers. Moreover, this volume is concerned with suburbs and "satellite" towns as well as the historic city.

Download or read book Irrigated Eden written by Mark Fiege and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2009-11-23 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irrigation came to the arid West in a wave of optimism about the power of water to make the desert bloom. Mark Fiege’s fascinating and innovative study of irrigation in southern Idaho’s Snake River valley describes a complex interplay of human and natural systems. Using vast quantities of labor, irrigators built dams, excavated canals, laid out farms, and brought millions of acres into cultivation. But at each step, nature rebounded and compromised the intended agricultural order. The result was a new and richly textured landscape made of layer upon layer of technology and intractable natural forces—one that engineers and farmers did not control with the precision they had anticipated. Irrigated Eden vividly portrays how human actions inadvertently helped to create a strange and sometimes baffling ecology. Winner of the Idaho Library Association Book Award, 1999 Winner of the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award, Forest History Society, 1999-2000

Download or read book Crabgrass Frontier written by Kenneth T. Jackson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1987-04-16 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first full-scale history of the development of the American suburb examines how "the good life" in America came to be equated with the a home of one's own surrounded by a grassy yard and located far from the urban workplace. Integrating social history with economic and architectural analysis, and taking into account such factors as the availability of cheap land, inexpensive building methods, and rapid transportation, Kenneth Jackson chronicles the phenomenal growth of the American suburb from the middle of the 19th century to the present day. He treats communities in every section of the U.S. and compares American residential patterns with those of Japan and Europe. In conclusion, Jackson offers a controversial prediction: that the future of residential deconcentration will be very different from its past in both the U.S. and Europe.

Download or read book City of the Century written by Donald L. Miller and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2014-04-09 with total page 1084 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A wonderfully readable account of Chicago’s early history” and the inspiration behind PBS’s American Experience (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). Depicting its turbulent beginnings to its current status as one of the world’s most dynamic cities, City of the Century tells the story of Chicago—and the story of America, writ small. From its many natural disasters, including the Great Fire of 1871 and several cholera epidemics, to its winner-take-all politics, dynamic business empires, breathtaking architecture, its diverse cultures, and its multitude of writers, journalists, and artists, Chicago’s story is violent, inspiring, passionate, and fascinating from the first page to the last. The winner of the prestigious Great Lakes Book Award, given to the year’s most outstanding books highlighting the American heartland, City of the Century has received consistent rave reviews since its publication in 1996, and was made into a six-hour film airing on PBS’s American Experience series. Written with energetic prose and exacting detail, it brings Chicago’s history to vivid life. “With City of the Century, Miller has written what will be judged as the great Chicago history.” —John Barron, Chicago Sun-Times “Brims with life, with people, surprise, and with stories.” —David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of John Adams and Truman “An invaluable companion in my journey through Old Chicago.” —Erik Larson, New York Times–bestselling author of The Devil in the White City

Download or read book Under Western Skies written by Donald Worster and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ns explore our environmental history, uncover the role of nature and the land in the western past, and examine the West as the world's first multicultural society.

Download or read book Uncommon Ground Rethinking the Human Place in Nature written by William Cronon and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1996-10-17 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A controversial, timely reassessment of the environmentalist agenda by outstanding historians, scientists, and critics. In a lead essay that powerfully states the broad argument of the book, William Cronon writes that the environmentalist goal of wilderness preservation is conceptually and politically wrongheaded. Among the ironies and entanglements resulting from this goal are the sale of nature in our malls through the Nature Company, and the disputes between working people and environmentalists over spotted owls and other objects of species preservation. The problem is that we haven't learned to live responsibly in nature. The environmentalist aim of legislating humans out of the wilderness is no solution. People, Cronon argues, are inextricably tied to nature, whether they live in cities or countryside. Rather than attempt to exclude humans, environmental advocates should help us learn to live in some sustainable relationship with nature. It is our home.

Download or read book The New Chicago Way written by Edgar H Bachrach and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2019-01-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For all the wrong reasons, a national spotlight is shining on Chicago. The city has become known for its violence, police abuse, parent and teacher unrest, population decline, and mounting municipal and pension debt. The underlying problem, contend Ed Bachrach and Austin Berg, is that deliberative democracy is dead in the city. Chicago is home to the last strongman political system in urban America. The mayor holds all the power, and any perceived checks on mayoral control are often proven illusory. Rash decisions have resulted in poor outcomes. The outrageous consequences of unchecked power are evident in government failures in elections, schools, fiscal discipline, corruption, public support for private enterprise, policing, and more. Rather than simply lament the situation, criticize specific leaders, or justify an ideology, Bachrach and Berg compare the decisions about Chicago’s governance and finances with choices made in fourteen other large U.S. cities. The problems that seem unique to Chicago have been encountered elsewhere, and Chicagoans, the authors posit, can learn from the successful solutions other cities have embraced. Chicago government and its citizens must let go of the past to prepare for the future, argue Bachrach and Berg. A future filled with demographic, technological, and economic change requires a government capable of responding and adapting. Reforms can transform the city. The prescriptions for change provided in this book point toward a hopeful future: the New Chicago Way.

Download or read book Alongshore written by John R. Stilgoe and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cultural and historical study of the coast draws from a variety of sources to illuminate both the landscape of the shore and its place in American life. The work scrutinizes the fishing boats, lighthouses, wharfs, resorts, shipwrecks and people, to evoke the culture of the coast.

Download or read book Killing for Coal written by Thomas G. Andrews and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a spring morning in 1914, in the stark foothills of southern Colorado, members of the United Mine Workers of America clashed with guards employed by the Rockefeller family, and a state militia beholden to Colorado’s industrial barons. When the dust settled, nineteen men, women, and children among the miners’ families lay dead. The strikers had killed at least thirty men, destroyed six mines, and laid waste to two company towns. Killing for Coal offers a bold and original perspective on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the “Great Coalfield War.” In a sweeping story of transformation that begins in the coal beds and culminates with the deadliest strike in American history, Thomas Andrews illuminates the causes and consequences of the militancy that erupted in colliers’ strikes over the course of nearly half a century. He reveals a complex world shaped by the connected forces of land, labor, corporate industrialization, and workers’ resistance. Brilliantly conceived and written, this book takes the organic world as its starting point. The resulting elucidation of the coalfield wars goes far beyond traditional labor history. Considering issues of social and environmental justice in the context of an economy dependent on fossil fuel, Andrews makes a powerful case for rethinking the relationships that unite and divide workers, consumers, capitalists, and the natural world.

Download or read book Down the Asphalt Path written by Clay McShane and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: McShane examines the uniquely American relation between auto-mobility and urbanization. Deftly combining urban and technological history, McShane focuses on how new transportation systems -- most important, the private automobile -- and new concepts of the city redefined each other in modern America.

Download or read book The Fruits of Natural Advantage written by Steven Stoll and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-11-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The once arid valleys and isolated coastal plains of California are today the center of fruit production in the United States. Steven Stoll explains how a class of capitalist farmers made California the nation's leading producer of fruit and created the first industrial countryside in America. This brilliant portrayal of California from 1880 to 1930 traces the origins, evolution, and implications of the fruit industry while providing a window through which to view the entire history of California. Stoll shows how California growers assembled chemicals, corporations, and political influence to bring the most perishable products from the most distant state to the great urban markets of North America. But what began as a compromise between a beneficent environment and intensive cultivation ultimately became threatening to the soil and exploitative of the people who worked it. Invoking history, economics, sociology, agriculture, and environmental studies, Stoll traces the often tragic repercussions of fruit farming and shows how central this story is to the development of the industrial countryside in the twentieth century.

Download or read book Under an Open Sky written by William Cronon and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1993 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If you prefer history served in a dozen fresh ways, get this book." --Chicago Tribune

Download or read book Nature s Metropolis written by Cheryl Hudson and published by Macat Library. This book was released on 2017-07-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the publication of Nature's Metropolis in 1991, historians generally treated urban and rural areas as distinct from one another, eact following separate lines of development and maturity. Using Chicago and its surrounding areas as a model, Cronon shows that the city-country story should be treated as a unified narrative, with each part inseparable from, and dependent on, the other. Cronon builds on Frederick Jackson Turner's nineteenth century "frontier thesis, "which stressed the effect that taming the wilderness had on the American character. He argues that nature has shaped human creativity and that capitalist market forces played the major role in changing urban and rural areas together. Book jacket.

Download or read book The Gary Anthology written by Samuel A. Love and published by Belt City Anthologies. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Instant City," "Magic City of Steel," "Sin City," "Chocolate City," "Plywood City," "Murder Capital." Once the second-largest city in Indiana, and home to the world's largest steel mill, Gary has suffered and shrunk greatly in the postindustrial global economy. Population numbers now approach pre-Great Depression lows. Large swathes of its land are urban prairie, and a recent survey found a quarter of the Gary's built environment is in a dilapidated or dangerous condition. But Gary is also a center of Black culture and political power. It is home to the Indiana Dunes National Park and globally rare ecosystems. Union, community organizing, and environmental justice struggles based in Gary have profoundly shaped social and political life in the United States. It is the setting for everyday joys and tragedies, and very much alive. The Gary Anthology's contributors include not only the essayist, poet, and journalist but also the graffiti writer, the minister, the activist, the singer, the organizer, and of course, the steel worker. Their work complicates standard narratives about steel, violence, and urban decay, and offers readers the chance to hear from those who are reshaping the city from the bottom up. Taken as a whole, the collection is a vibrant rebuke to the notion that Gary is "dead."