Download or read book The Rise of West Lake written by Xiaolin Duan and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "West Lake, near scenic Hangzhou on China's east coast, has been a major tourist site since the twelfth century and a model for idealized nature. Visitors boat to its islands, stroll through its gardens, worship in its temples, and celebrate it in poetry and painting. Xiaolin Duan examines the interplay between cultural norms and the natural environment around West Lake during the Song dynasty (960-1279). After the Song lost north China to the Jurchens and the imperial court fled south, a new capital was established at Hangzhou in 1127, making the area the national political and cultural center. Duan shows how leisure activities in, on, and around West Lake influenced visitors' conceptualization of nature and sparked the emergence of the lake as a tourist destination, and how the natural landscape played an active role in shaping social pursuits and cultural constructs. Incorporating evidence from miscellanies, local and temple gazetteers, paintings, maps, poems, and anecdotes, she explores the complexity of the lake as an interactive site where ecological and economic concerns contended and where spiritual pursuits overlapped with aesthetic ones. The book will appeal to readers interested in urban and environmental history, cultural geography, and the sociology of tourism"--

Download or read book The Rise of West Lake written by Xiaolin Duan and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lovely West Lake, near scenic Hangzhou on China’s east coast, has been celebrated as a major tourist site since the twelfth century. Now as then, visitors boat to its islands, stroll through its gardens, worship in its temples, and immortalize it in poetry and painting. Hangzhou and West Lake have long served as icons of Chinese landscape appreciation, literary and artistic expression, and tourism. In the first in-depth English-language study of this picturesque locale, Xiaolin Duan examines the interplay between human enterprise and the natural environment during the Song dynasty (960–1279). After the Song lost north China to the Jurchens and the imperial court fled south, a new capital was established at Hangzhou, making the area the national political and cultural center. West Lake became a model for idealized nature, fashioned by the diverse activities of its visitors. Duan shows how engagements in, on, and around West Lake influenced visitors’ conceptualization of nature and sparked the emergence of the lake as a tourist destination, highlighting how the natural landscape played a role in shaping social and cultural constructs. Incorporating evidence from miscellanies, local and temple gazetteers, paintings, maps, poems, and anecdotes, The Rise of West Lake explores the complexity of the lake as an interactive site where ecological and economic concerns contended and where spiritual pursuits overlapped with aesthetic ones.

Download or read book The People s West Lake written by Qiliang He and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The People's West Lake examines the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) efforts to reconfigure Hangzhou's urban space, alter the natural environment in West Lake (Xihu), and refashion the city's culture in post-1949 China. It pieces together five initiatives between the 1950s and the 1970s: the dredging of the lake, the construction of the public park of Watching Fish at the Flower Harbor (Huagang guanyu), the afforestation movement, the development of collectivized pig farming around West Lake, and the two campaigns to remove lakeside tombs. These projects were intended to generate visible and tangible results--a lake with a good depth, a scenic public garden, greener hills surrounding the lake, a growing swine population and rising productivity of fertilizer, and a tourist site cleansed of burial grounds--while also being readily subject to the Party's propaganda. These initiatives were designed both to achieve economic, cultural, and ecological utilities and to forge and popularize a sense of socialist nationhood. The CCP's endeavor to fundamentally transform the West Lake area also opened up possibilities for both human and nonhuman actors to variously benefit from, get along with, and undermine the political authorities' planning. This book thus emphatically foregrounds and unifies the agency of both humans and nonhuman entities that are not necessarily tied to intentionality, bringing into question the legitimacy of the human/nonhuman binary. Author Qiliang He explores the agency of both humans and nonhumans (including water, microbes, aquatic plants, the park, pigs, trees, pests, and tombs) to affect, deflect, and undercut the CCP's sociopolitical programs, thereby diminishing the efficacy of state propaganda. Highlighting the nonpurposive agency of both actors problematizes the long-held resistance-accommodation paradigm, which presumes the resisters' a priori subjectivities independent of the socialist system, in studying the state-society relationship in the People's Republic of China. Using a project-based approach, The People's West Lake gives the nature-human relationship in Mao's China (best known as Mao's "war against nature") historical and cultural specificities to reexamine the PRC regime's central planning and the issues related to it.

Download or read book The Rise of the West written by William H. McNeill and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-07-30 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rise of the West, winner of the National Book Award for history in 1964, is famous for its ambitious scope and intellectual rigor. In it, McNeill challenges the Spengler-Toynbee view that a number of separate civilizations pursued essentially independent careers, and argues instead that human cultures interacted at every stage of their history. The author suggests that from the Neolithic beginnings of grain agriculture to the present major social changes in all parts of the world were triggered by new or newly important foreign stimuli, and he presents a persuasive narrative of world history to support this claim. In a retrospective essay titled "The Rise of the West after Twenty-five Years," McNeill shows how his book was shaped by the time and place in which it was written (1954-63). He discusses how historiography subsequently developed and suggests how his portrait of the world's past in The Rise of the West should be revised to reflect these changes. "This is not only the most learned and the most intelligent, it is also the most stimulating and fascinating book that has ever set out to recount and explain the whole history of mankind. . . . To read it is a great experience. It leaves echoes to reverberate, and seeds to germinate in the mind."—H. R. Trevor-Roper, New York Times Book Review

Download or read book The Rise of Western Power written by Jonathan Daly and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-14 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this second edition of The Rise of Western Power, Jonathan Daly retains the broad sweep of his introduction to the history of Western civilization as well as introducing new material into every chapter, enhancing the book's global coverage and engaging with the latest historical debates. The West's history is one of extraordinary success: no other region, empire, culture, or civilization has left so powerful a mark upon the world. Daly charts the West's achievements-representative government, the free enterprise system, modern science, and the rule of law-as well as its misdeeds: two World Wars, the Holocaust, imperialistic domination, and the Atlantic slave trade. Taking us through a series of revolutions, he explores the contributions of other cultures and civilizations to the West's emergence, weaving in historical, geographical, and cultural factors. The new edition also contains more material on themes such as the environment and gender, and additional coverage of India, China and the Islamic world. Daly's engaging narrative is accompanied by timelines, maps and further reading suggestions, along with a companion website featuring study questions, over 100 primary sources and 60 historical maps to enable further study.

Download or read book Why the West Rules For Now written by Ian Morris and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2011-01-14 with total page 767 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does the West rule? In this magnum opus, eminent Stanford polymath Ian Morris answers this provocative question, drawing on 50,000 years of history, archeology, and the methods of social science, to make sense of when, how, and why the paths of development differed in the East and West — and what this portends for the 21st century. There are two broad schools of thought on why the West rules. Proponents of "Long-Term Lock-In" theories such as Jared Diamond suggest that from time immemorial, some critical factor — geography, climate, or culture perhaps — made East and West unalterably different, and determined that the industrial revolution would happen in the West and push it further ahead of the East. But the East led the West between 500 and 1600, so this development can't have been inevitable; and so proponents of "Short-Term Accident" theories argue that Western rule was a temporary aberration that is now coming to an end, with Japan, China, and India resuming their rightful places on the world stage. However, as the West led for 9,000 of the previous 10,000 years, it wasn't just a temporary aberration. So, if we want to know why the West rules, we need a whole new theory. Ian Morris, boldly entering the turf of Jared Diamond and Niall Ferguson, provides the broader approach that is necessary, combining the textual historian's focus on context, the anthropological archaeologist's awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist's comparative methods to make sense of the past, present, and future — in a way no one has ever done before.

Download or read book Gallatin National Forest N F West Lake Timber Sale and Road Decommissioning Project written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Great Idea at the Time written by Alex Beam and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-09 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today the classics of the western canon, written by the proverbial ''dead white men,'' are cannon fodder in the culture wars. But in the 1950s and 1960s, they were a pop culture phenomenon. The Great Books of Western Civilization, fifty-four volumes chosen by intellectuals at the University of Chicago, began as an educational movement, and evolved into a successful marketing idea. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? And how and why did the great books fall out of fashion? In A Great Idea at the Time Alex Beam explores the Great Books mania, in an entertaining and strangely poignant portrait of American popular culture on the threshold of the television age. Populated with memorable characters, A Great Idea at the Time will leave readers asking themselves: Have I read Lucretius's De Rerum Natura lately? If not, why not?

Download or read book THE CHINESE DREAM The Rise of the World s Largest Middle Class and What It Means to You written by Helen H. Wang and published by Bestseller Press. This book was released on with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (2nd Edition: July 6, 2012) In The Chinese Dream, a groundbreaking book about the rising middle class in China, Forbes columnist and China expert Helen Wang challenges us to recognize that some of our fears about China are grossly misplaced. As a result of China's new capitalist paradigm, a burgeoning middle class-calculated to reach 800 million within the next fifteen years-is jumping aboard the consumerism train and riding it for all it's worth-a reality that may provide the answer to America's economic woes. And with China's increasing urbanization and top-down governmental approach, it now faces increasing energy, environmental, and health problems-problems that the U.S. can help solve. Through timely interviews, personal stories, and a historical perspective, China-born Wang takes us into the world of the Chinese entrepreneurial middle class to show how a growing global mindset and the realization of unity in diversity may ultimately provide the way to creating a saner, safer world for all.

Download or read book Rosewood written by Annah Lake Zhu and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s nouveau riche are purchasing billions of dollars of furniture built from endangered African rosewood. Responding to Western powers’ attempts to stop the trade, Annah Zhu uncovers Chinese initiatives to plant rosewood responsibly and shows how these efforts offer a new path forward for environmentalism in a world no longer ruled by the West.

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 The West without Water written by B. Lynn Ingram and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The West without Water documents the tumultuous climate of the American West over twenty millennia, with tales of past droughts and deluges and predictions about the impacts of future climate change on water resources. Looking at the region’s current water crisis from the perspective of its climate history, the authors ask the central question of what is "normal" climate for the West, and whether the relatively benign climate of the past century will continue into the future. The West without Water merges climate and paleoclimate research from a wide variety of sources as it introduces readers to key discoveries in cracking the secrets of the region’s climatic past. It demonstrates that extended droughts and catastrophic floods have plagued the West with regularity over the past two millennia and recounts the most disastrous flood in the history of California and the West, which occurred in 1861–62. The authors show that, while the West may have temporarily buffered itself from such harsh climatic swings by creating artificial environments and human landscapes, our modern civilization may be ill-prepared for the future climate changes that are predicted to beset the region. They warn that it is time to face the realities of the past and prepare for a future in which fresh water may be less reliable.

Download or read book Middle Imperial China 900 1350 written by Linda Walton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly readable and engaging work, Linda Walton presents a dynamic survey of China's history from the tenth through the mid-fourteenth centuries from the founding of the Song dynasty through the Mongol conquest when Song China became part of the Mongol Empire and Marco Polo made his famous journey to the court of the Great Khan. Adopting a thematic approach, she highlights the political, social, economic, intellectual, and cultural changes and continuities of the period often conceptualized as 'Middle Imperial China'. Particular emphasis is given to themes that inform scholarship on world history: religion, the state, the dynamics of empire, the transmission of knowledge, the formation of political elites, gender, and the family. Consistent coverage of peoples beyond the borders – Khitan, Tangut, Jurchen, and Mongol, among others – provides a broader East Asian context and introduces a more nuanced, integrated representation of China's past.

Download or read book Rise and Float written by Brian Tierney and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working—remarkably, miraculously—to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page. With the “corpse of Frost” under his heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition. The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father’s death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide—all of these compound to “month after / month” and “dream / after dream” of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry’s cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling like “wrist skin when a grater slips,” a “laugh as good as a scream,” pears as hard as a tumor. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release. The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem gently confesses to “trying, these days, to believe again / in people,” another concedes that “defeat / sometimes is defeat / without purpose.” Look: the chair is just a chair.” But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between a boy “torn open” by dogs and a suicide, “two beautiful teenagers are kissing.” Between screams, something intimate—hope, however difficult it may be.

Download or read book Westlake written by Deborah S. Rossman and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2008-04-21 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The city of Westlake was originally settled as part of Dover Township. In the period between 1811 and 1840, the pioneers cleared the forest to make way for agriculture. The land shaped the boundaries of the township, a 15.9-square-mile area rich in farms, dairies, orchards, and vineyards. The town’s businesses grew and prospered, and Dover became the second-largest shipping point for grapes in the United States. Over time the farms have disappeared from the landscape, but the city’s proud heritage continues today. Westlake is an opportunity to experience not only the past events in the city of Westlake but also the lives of the people who call Westlake home.

Download or read book Born of Lakes and Plains Mixed Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West written by Anne F. Hyde and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2023 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize "Immersive and humane." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times A fresh history of the West grounded in the lives of mixed-descent Native families who first bridged and then collided with racial boundaries. Often overlooked, there is mixed blood at the heart of America. And at the heart of Native life for centuries there were complex households using intermarriage to link disparate communities and create protective circles of kin. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Native peoples—Ojibwes, Otoes, Cheyennes, Chinooks, and others—formed new families with young French, English, Canadian, and American fur traders who spent months in smoky winter lodges or at boisterous summer rendezvous. These families built cosmopolitan trade centers from Michilimackinac on the Great Lakes to Bellevue on the Missouri River, Bent’s Fort in the southern Plains, and Fort Vancouver in the Pacific Northwest. Their family names are often imprinted on the landscape, but their voices have long been muted in our histories. Anne F. Hyde’s pathbreaking history restores them in full. Vividly combining the panoramic and the particular, Born of Lakes and Plains follows five mixed-descent families whose lives intertwined major events: imperial battles over the fur trade; the first extensions of American authority west of the Appalachians; the ravages of imported disease; the violence of Indian removal; encroaching American settlement; and, following the Civil War, the disasters of Indian war, reservations policy, and allotment. During the pivotal nineteenth century, mixed-descent people who had once occupied a middle ground became a racial problem drawing hostility from all sides. Their identities were challenged by the pseudo-science of blood quantum—the instrument of allotment policy—and their traditions by the Indian schools established to erase Native ways. As Anne F. Hyde shows, they navigated the hard choices they faced as they had for centuries: by relying on the rich resources of family and kin. Here is an indelible western history with a new human face.

Download or read book Trail of Tears written by John Ehle and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-06-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sixth-generation North Carolinian, highly-acclaimed author John Ehle grew up on former Cherokee hunting grounds. His experience as an accomplished novelist, combined with his extensive, meticulous research, culminates in this moving tragedy rich with historical detail. The Cherokee are a proud, ancient civilization. For hundreds of years they believed themselves to be the "Principle People" residing at the center of the earth. But by the 18th century, some of their leaders believed it was necessary to adapt to European ways in order to survive. Those chiefs sealed the fate of their tribes in 1875 when they signed a treaty relinquishing their land east of the Mississippi in return for promises of wealth and better land. The U.S. government used the treaty to justify the eviction of the Cherokee nation in an exodus that the Cherokee will forever remember as the “trail where they cried.” The heroism and nobility of the Cherokee shine through this intricate story of American politics, ambition, and greed. B & W photographs