Download or read book Smokestacks and Progressives written by David Stradling and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This clearly written, well-argued, and deeply researched book goes well beyond 'smokestacks and progressives' in helping us understand the important environmental issues embedded in the history of the American city." -- Journal of American History

Download or read book Conservation in the Progressive Era written by David Stradling and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conservation was the first nationwide political movement in American history to grapple with environmental problems like waste, pollution, resource exhaustion, and sustainability. At its height, the conservation movement was a critical aspect of the broader reforms undertaken in the Progressive Era (1890-1910), as the rapidly industrializing nation struggled to protect human health, natural beauty, and "national efficiency." This highly effective Progressive Era movement was distinct from earlier conservation efforts and later environmentalist reforms. Conservation in the Progressive Era places conservation in historical context, using the words of participants in and opponents to the movement. Together, the documents collected here reveal the various and sometimes conflicting uses of the term "conservation" and the contested nature of the reforms it described. This collection includes classic texts by such well-known figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and John Muir, as well as texts from lesser-known but equally important voices that are often overlooked in environmental studies: those of rural communities, women, and the working class. These lively selections provoke unexpected questions and ideas about many of the significant environmental issues facing us today.

Download or read book Next to Godliness written by Daniel Burnstein and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2024-02-12 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To many Progressive Era reformers, the extent of street cleanliness was an important gauge for determining whether a city was providing the conditions necessary for impoverished immigrants to attain a state of "decency"--a level of individual well-being and morality that would help ensure a healthy and orderly city. Daniel Eli Burnstein's study examines prominent street sanitation issues in Progressive Era New York City--ranging from garbage strikes to "juvenile cleaning leagues"--to explore how middle-class reformers amassed a cross-class and cross-ethnic base of support for social reform measures to a degree greater than in practically any other period of prosperity in U.S. history. The struggle for enhanced civic sanitation serves as a window for viewing Progressive Era social reformers' attitudes, particularly their emphasis on mutual obligations between the haves and have-nots, and their recognition of the role of negative social and physical conditions in influencing individual behaviors.

Download or read book Green Capitalism written by Hartmut Berghoff and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can capitalism ever truly be environmentally conscious? Green Capitalism? Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century provides a historical analysis of the relationship between business interests and environmental initiatives over the past century.

Download or read book The Progressives written by and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-11-13 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Progressives offers comprehensive coverage of the origins, evolution, and notable events that came to define the pivotal period of American history known as the Progressive Era. Offers a rich, in-depth analysis of who the progressives were and the process through which they identified and attacked social, economic, and political injustices Features an up-to-date synthesis of the literature of the field including comprehensive treatment of the role of women in the Progressive Movement Considers the movement's enduring impact – and how its vision for a better society became transfixed in the American social consciousness and helped to create the modern welfare state Part of the well-respected American History series Integrates themes of class, race, ethnicity, and gender throughout, offering a concise and engaging account of a fascinating era in U.S. history that forever changed the relationship between a democratic government and its citizens

Download or read book Chasing the Wind written by Noga Morag-Levine and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Federal Clean Air Act of 1970 is widely seen as a revolutionary legal response to the failures of the earlier common law regime, which had governed air pollution in the United States for more than a century. Noga Morag-Levine challenges this view, highlighting striking continuities between the assumptions governing current air pollution regulation in the United States and the principles that had guided the earlier nuisance regime. Most importantly, this continuity is evident in the centrality of risk-based standards within contemporary American air pollution regulatory policy. Under the European approach, by contrast, the feasibility-based technology standard is the regulatory instrument of choice. Through historical analysis of the evolution of Anglo-American air pollution law and contemporary case studies of localized pollution disputes, Chasing the Wind argues for an overhaul in U.S. air pollution policy. This reform, following the European model, would forgo the unrealizable promise of complete, perfectly tailored protection--a hallmark of both nuisance law and the Clean Air Act--in favor of incremental, across-the-board pollution reductions. The author argues that prevailing critiques of technology standards as inefficient and undemocratic instruments of "command and control" fit with a longstanding pattern of American suspicion of civil law modeled interventions. This distrust, she concludes, has impeded the development of environmental regulation that would be less adversarial in process and more equitable in outcome.

Download or read book Sustainable Communities written by Woodrow W. Clark II and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-01-12 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book would not have been possible without the dedication and commitment of each of the chapter authors. For some authors, writing a chapter was beyond their “9–5” job, and this book re?ects their commitment to sustainability at the local level for their communities. To every chapter author and their staff, friends, and families, thank you. This dynamic and paradigm-changing volume on the topic of sustainable development is focused on communities such as cities, schools, and colleges where the future of our families and children are most at risk. We must act today as each of the chapters represents in their presentations. This book marks a new era: the Third Industrial Revolution. The new age of the Third Industrial Revolution has been labeled by some as the “green era” or “green economy,” but it had already started around the world, especially in Europe and Japan, for over a decade – since the end of the 20th c- tury. More signi?cantly, the book highlights people and communities who have a shared concern and vision along with the will and determination to enact programs and polices that make sustainable development real – not just political rhetoric or “branding” or even the current “buzz word” for obtaining funds and grants. The book presents “The Sequel to an Inconvenient Truth” – actual examples of how c- munities can and have changed in order to mitigate climate change. Again, thanks to everyone and their colleagues.

Download or read book City of Lake and Prairie written by Kathleen A. Brosnan and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known as the Windy City and the Hog Butcher to the World, Chicago has earned a more apt sobriquet—City of Lake and Prairie—with this compelling, innovative, and deeply researched environmental history. Sitting at the southwestern tip of Lake Michigan, one of the largest freshwater bodies in the world, and on the eastern edge of the tallgrass prairies that fill much of the North American interior, early residents in the land that Chicago now occupies enjoyed natural advantages, economic opportunities, and global connections over centuries, from the Native Americans who first inhabited the region to the urban dwellers who built a metropolis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As one millennium ended and a new one began, these same features sparked a distinctive Midwestern environmentalism aimed at preserving local ecosystems. Drawing on its contributors’ interdisciplinary talents, this volume reveals a rich but often troubled landscape shaped by communities of color, workers, and activists as well as complex human relations with industry, waterways, animals, and disease.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of the Progressive Era written by Catherine Cocks and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2009-03-13 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Progressive Era, the period in the United States between 1898 and 1917, was a time of great social, political, and industrial change. Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, an event that signaled the emergence of the United States as a great power, the country soon was involved in its first overseas guerrilla war, in the Philippines. Vast changes in communications and transportation, immigration and migration patterns, social mores, gender roles, family structure, class structure, work patterns, business methods, education, intellectual life, religion, the professions, technology, science, medicine, and much else were transforming the scope and feel of people's lives and relationships. In many ways what happened in this era set the agenda for the rest of the 20th century. The Historical Dictionary of the Progressive Era is the most comprehensive and coherent reference work on the Progressive Era. Through its chronology, introductory essay, bibliography, appendixes, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the key events, people, organizations, and ideas of the period, this resource is a lively, complete, and accessible overview of this significant era.

Download or read book The A to Z of the Progressive Era written by Peter C. Holloran and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2009-09-24 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Progressive Era, the period in the United States between 1898 and 1917, was a time of great social, political, and industrial change. Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, an event that signaled the emergence of the United States as a great power, the country soon was involved in its first overseas guerrilla war, in the Philippines. Vast changes in communications and transportation, immigration and migration patterns, social mores, gender roles, family structure, class structure, work patterns, business methods, education, intellectual life, religion, the professions, technology, science, medicine, and much else were transforming the scope and feel of people's lives and relationships. In many ways what happened in this era set the agenda for the rest of the 20th century. The A to Z of the Progressive Era is the most comprehensive and coherent reference work on the Progressive Era. Through its chronology, introductory essay, bibliography, appendixes, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the key events, people, organizations, and ideas of the period, this resource is a lively, complete, and accessible overview of this significant era.

Download or read book When They Hid the Fire written by Daniel French and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2017-04-17 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When They Hid the Fire examines the American social perceptions of electricity as an energy technology that were adopted between the mid-nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries. Arguing that both technical and cultural factors played a role, Daniel French shows how electricity became an invisible and abstract form of energy in American society. As technological advancements allowed for an increasing physical distance between power generation and power consumption, the commodity of electricity became consciously detached from the environmentally destructive fire and coal that produced it. This development, along with cultural forces, led the public to define electricity as mysterious, utopian, and an alternative to nearby fire-based energy sources. With its adoption occurring simultaneously with Progressivism and consumerism, electricity use was encouraged and seen as an integral part of improvement and modernity, leading Americans to culturally construct electricity as unlimited and environmentally inconsequential—a newfound "basic right" of life in the United States.

Download or read book Poisonous Skies written by Rachel Emma Rothschild and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The climate change reckoning looms. As scientists try to discern what the Earth’s changing weather patterns mean for our future, Rachel Rothschild seeks to understand the current scientific and political debates surrounding the environment through the history of another global environmental threat: acid rain. The identification of acid rain in the 1960s changed scientific and popular understanding of fossil fuel pollution’s potential to cause regional—and even global—environmental harms. It showed scientists that the problem of fossil fuel pollution was one that crossed borders—it could travel across vast stretches of the earth’s atmosphere to impact ecosystems around the world. This unprecedented transnational reach prompted governments, for the first time, to confront the need to cooperate on pollution policies, transforming environmental science and diplomacy. Studies of acid rain and other pollutants brought about a reimagining of how to investigate the natural world as a complete entity, and the responses of policy makers, scientists, and the public set the stage for how societies have approached other prominent environmental dangers on a global scale, most notably climate change. Grounded in archival research spanning eight countries and five languages, as well as interviews with leading scientists from both government and industry, Poisonous Skies is the first book to examine the history of acid rain in an international context. By delving deep into our environmental past, Rothschild hopes to inform its future, showing us how much is at stake for the natural world as well as what we risk—and have already risked—by not acting.

Download or read book Tainted Earth written by Marianne Sullivan and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-23 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smelting is an industrial process involving the extraction of metal from ore. During this process, impurities in ore—including arsenic, lead, and cadmium—may be released from smoke stacks, contaminating air, water, and soil with toxic-heavy metals. The problem of public health harm from smelter emissions received little official attention for much for the twentieth century. Though people living near smelters periodically complained that their health was impaired by both sulfur dioxide and heavy metals, for much of the century there was strong deference to industry claims that smelter operations were a nuisance and not a serious threat to health. It was only when the majority of children living near the El Paso, Texas, smelter were discovered to be lead-exposed in the early 1970s that systematic, independent investigation of exposure to heavy metals in smelting communities began. Following El Paso, an even more serious led poisoning epidemic was discovered around the Bunker Hill smelter in northern Idaho. In Tacoma, Washington, a copper smelter exposed children to arsenic—a carcinogenic threat. Thoroughly grounded in extensive archival research, Tainted Earth traces the rise of public health concerns about nonferrous smelting in the western United States, focusing on three major facilities: Tacoma, Washington; El Paso, Texas; and Bunker Hill, Idaho. Marianne Sullivan documents the response from community residents, public health scientists, the industry, and the government to pollution from smelters as well as the long road to protecting public health and the environment. Placing the environmental and public health aspects of smelting in historical context, the book connects local incidents to national stories on the regulation of airborne toxic metals. The nonferrous smelting industry has left a toxic legacy in the United States and around the world. Unless these toxic metals are cleaned up, they will persist in the environment and may sicken people—children in particular—for generations to come. The twentieth-century struggle to control smelter pollution shares many similarities with public health battles with such industries as tobacco and asbestos where industry supported science created doubt about harm, and reluctant government regulators did not take decisive action to protect the public’s health.

Download or read book Power on the Hudson written by Robert D. Lifset and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beauty of the Hudson River Valley was a legendary subject for artists during the nineteenth century. They portrayed its bucolic settings and humans in harmony with nature as the physical manifestation of God's work on earth. More than a hundred years later, those sentiments would be tested as never before.In the fall of 1962, Consolidated Edison of New York, the nation's largest utility company, announced plans for the construction of a pumped-storage hydroelectric power plant at Storm King Mountain on the Hudson River, forty miles north of New York City. Over the next eighteen years, their struggle against environmentalists would culminate in the abandonment of the project. Robert D. Lifset offers an original case history of this monumental event in environmental history, when a small group of concerned local residents initiated a landmark case of ecology versus energy production. He follows the progress of this struggle, as Con Ed won approvals and permits early on, but later lost ground to environmentalists who were able to raise questions about the potential damage to the habitat of Hudson River striped bass. Lifset uses the struggle over Storm King to examine how environmentalism changed during the 1960s and 1970s. He also views the financial challenges and increasingly frequent blackouts faced by Con Ed, along with the pressure to produce ever-larger quantities of energy. As Lifset demonstrates, the environmental cause was greatly empowered by the fact that through this struggle, for the first time, environmentalists were able to gain access to the federal courts. The environmental cause was also greatly advanced by adopting scientific evidence of ecological change, combined with mounting public awareness of the environmental consequences of energy production and consumption. These became major factors supporting the case against Con Ed, spawning a range of new local, regional, and national environmental organizations and bequeathing to the Hudson River Valley a vigilant and intense environmental awareness. A new balance of power emerged, and energy companies would now be held to higher standards that protected the environment.

Download or read book Making Mountains written by David Stradling and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2009-11-23 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over two hundred years, the Catskill Mountains have been repeatedly and dramatically transformed by New York City. In Making Mountains, David Stradling shows the transformation of the Catskills landscape as a collaborative process, one in which local and urban hands, capital, and ideas have come together to reshape the mountains and the communities therein. This collaboration has had environmental, economic, and cultural consequences. Early on, the Catskills were an important source of natural resources. Later, when New York City needed to expand its water supply, engineers helped direct the city toward the Catskills, claiming that the mountains offered the purest and most cost-effective waters. By the 1960s, New York had created the great reservoir and aqueduct system in the mountains that now supplies the city with 90 percent of its water. The Catskills also served as a critical space in which the nation's ideas about nature evolved. Stradling describes the great influence writers and artists had upon urban residents - especially the painters of the Hudson River School, whose ideal landscapes created expectations about how rural America should appear. By the mid-1800s, urban residents had turned the Catskills into an important vacation ground, and by the late 1800s, the Catskills had become one of the premiere resort regions in the nation. In the mid-twentieth century, the older Catskill resort region was in steep decline, but the Jewish "Borscht Belt" in the southern Catskills was thriving. The automobile revitalized mountain tourism and residence, and increased the threat of suburbanization of the historic landscape. Throughout each of these significant incarnations, urban and rural residents worked in a rough collaboration, though not without conflict, to reshape the mountains and American ideas about rural landscapes and nature.

Download or read book Home Fires written by Sean P. Adams and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This perspective allows a unique view of the development of an industrial society not just from the ground up but from the hearth up.

Download or read book A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era written by Christopher McKnight Nichols and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era presents a collection of new historiographic essays covering the years between 1877 and 1920, a period which saw the U.S. emerge from the ashes of Reconstruction to become a world power. The single, definitive resource for the latest state of knowledge relating to the history and historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Features contributions by leading scholars in a wide range of relevant specialties Coverage of the period includes geographic, social, cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, global, and ecological themes and approaches In today’s era, often referred to as a “second Gilded Age,” this book offers relevant historical analysis of the factors that helped create contemporary society Fills an important chronological gap in period-based American history collections