Download or read book The Spanish Acequias of San Antonio written by I. Waynne Cox and published by Maverick Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pioneering account of San Antonio's Spanish-era acequia system
Download or read book Spanish Water Anglo Water written by Charles R. Porter and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-22 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1718, the Spanish settled San Antonio, partly because of its prolific and breathtaking springs—at that time, one of the largest natural spring systems in the known world. The abundance of fresh water, coupled with the Spanish colonial legal concept that water was to be equitably shared by all settlers, led to the building of the system of acequias (canals or ditches) within the settlement. The system is one of the earliest and perhaps most extensive municipal water systems in North America. This book offers a meticulous chronicling of the origins and often-contentious development of water rights in San Antonio from its Spanish settlement through the beginning of the twentieth century.
Download or read book The World of the American West written by Gordon Morris Bakken and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The World of the American West is an innovative collection of original essays that brings the world of the American West to life, and conveys the distinctiveness of this diverse, constantly changing region. Twenty scholars incorporate the freshest research in the field to take the history of the American West out of its timeworn "Cowboys and Indians" stereotype right up into the major issues being discussed today, from water rights to the presence of the defense industry. Other topics covered in this heavily illustrated, highly accessible volume include the effects of leisure and tourism, western women, politics and politicians, Native Americans in the twentieth century, and of course, oil. With insight both informative and unexpected, The World of the American West offers perspectives on the latest developments affecting the modern American West, providing essential reading for all scholars and students of the field so that they may better understand the vibrant history of this globally significant, ever-evolving region of North America.
Download or read book Brackenridge written by Lewis F. Fisher and published by Trinity University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brackenridge Park began its life as a heavily wooded, bucolic driving park at the turn of the twentieth century. Over the next 120 years it evolved into the sprawling, multifaceted jewel San Antonians enjoy today, home to the San Antonio Zoo, the state’s first public golf course, the Japanese Tea Garden, the Sunken Garden Theater, and the Witte Museum. The land that Brackenridge Park occupies, near the San Antonio River headwaters, has been reinvented many times over. People have gathered there since prehistoric times. Following the city’s founding in 1718, the land was used to channel river water into town via a system of acequias; its limestone cliffs were quarried for building materials; and it was the site of a Civil War tannery, headquarters for two military camps, a plant nursery, and a racetrack. The park continues to be a site of national acclaim even while major sections have fallen into disrepair. The more than 400 acres that constitute San Antonio’s flagship urban park are made up of half a dozen parcels stitched together over time to create an uncommon varied landscape. Uniquely San Antonian, Brackenridge is full of romantic wooded walks and whimsical public spaces drawing tourists, locals, wildlife, and waterfowl. Extensively researched and illustrated with some two hundred archival photographs and vintage postcards, Brackenridge: San Antonio’s Acclaimed Urban Park is the first comprehensive look at the fascinating story of this unique park and how its diverse layers evolved to create one of the city’s foremost gathering places.
Download or read book Sharing the Common Pool written by Charles R. Porter and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If all the people, municipalities, agencies, businesses, power plants, and other entities that think they have a right to the water in Texas actually tried to exercise those rights, there would not be enough water to satisfy all claims, no matter how legitimate. In Sharing the Common Pool: Water Rights in the Everyday Lives of Texans, water rights expert Charles Porter explains in the simplest possible terms who has rights to the water in Texas, who determines who has those rights, and who benefits or suffers because of it. The origins of Texas water law, which contains elements of the state’s Spanish, English, and Republic heritages, contributed to the development of a system that defines water by where it sits, flows, or falls and assigns its ownership accordingly. Over time, this seemingly logical, even workable, set of expectations has evolved into a tortuous collection of laws, permits, and governing authorities under the onslaught of population growth and competing interests—agriculture, industry, cities—all with insatiable thirsts. In sections that cover ownership, use, regulation, real estate, and policy, Porter lays out in as straightforward a fashion as possible just how we manage (and mismanage) water in this state, what legal cases have guided the debate, and where the future might take us as old rivalries, new demands, and innovative technologies—such as hydraulic fracturing of oil shale formations (“fracking”)—help redefine water policy. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.
Download or read book Rhetorics Literacies and Narratives of Sustainability written by Peter N. Goggin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-02-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Touching on topics including conservation efforts in specific locales; social and political constructions of rhetorical place and space; town planning and zoning issues; and rhetorics of environmental remediation and sustainability, this collection provides rhetoricians and environmentalists a window into the discourse on sustainability.
Download or read book Water for the People written by Enrique R. Lamadrid and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Water for the People: The Acequia Heritage of New Mexico in a Global Context is a new anthology of essays by world-renowned acequia scholars and community members that situates New Mexico's acequia heritage and its inherent sustainable design within a global framework. Initially inspired by two special issues of the Green Fire Times (GFT) that centered on New Mexico's rich acequia traditions, Water for the People features twenty-five essays (including the Epilogue) highlighting acequia culture, use, and history in New Mexico and northern Mexico complemented by accompanying articles that focus on acequias in Chile and Peru, Spain, the Middle East, Nepal, and the Philippines. A hybrid Iberian model of irrigation melded with irrigated agricultural practices already existing in the Americas in places like Peru, Mesoamerica, and the high-altitude deserts of northern New Spain inhabited by Puebloan peoples that is now the American Southwest. In the case of the upper Rio Grande, the lush landscapes created by acequias in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries and later continue to feed their communities today despite threats of economic modernity, urbanization, private water markets, and conditions of extreme water scarcity due to cycles of prolonged drought and the emerging impacts of climate change. Water for the People demonstrates through a series of connected essays how the acequia in New Mexico is part of an agricultural web of creative irrigation works that stretches from Valencia, Spain, to the Middle East, Mexico, the Philippines, Argentina, and elsewhere. This volume celebrates acequia practices and traditions worldwide and shows how these ancient irrigation systems continue to provide arid regions a model for water governance, sustainable food systems, and in the case of New Mexico, community traditions that year after year reaffirms a deep cultural and spiritual relationship with the land. Ditch-irrigation systems have stood as the backbone of New Mexican landscape and garden construction for over four centuries. Acequias offer a proven and elegant answer to these everlasting questions: How do you provide consistent water so that a garden, field, or pasture will thrive? And how do you do so in a place that is known for its droughts, heat, thin soils, remarkably small streams and springs, and other scarce agricultural resources? Existing literature on acequias include technical and historical studies, ethnographies, and even memoir, but none has the global scope of this anthology"--
Download or read book The Spanish Element in Texas Water Law written by Betty Eakle Dobkins and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spanish element in Texas water law is a matter of utmost importance to many landholders whose livelihood is dependent on securing water for irrigation and to many communities particularly concerned about water supply. Titles to some 280,000 acres of Texas land originated in grants made by the Crown of Spain or by the Republic of Mexico. For these lands, the prevailing law, even today, is the Hispanic American civil law. Thus the question of determining just what water rights were granted by the Spanish Crown in disposing of lands in Texas is more than a matter of historical interest. It is a subject of great practical importance. Spanish law enters directly into the question of these lands, but its influence is by no means confined to them. Texas water law in general traces its roots primarily to the Spanish law, not to the English common law doctrine of riparian rights or to the Western doctrine of prior appropriation (both of which were, however, eventually incorporated in Texas law). A clear understanding of this background might have saved the state much of the current confusion and chaos regarding its water law. Dobkins’s book offers an intensive and unusually readable study of the subject. The author has traced water law from its origin in the ancient world to the mid-twentieth century, interpreting the effect of water on the counties concerned, setting forth in detail the development of water law in Spain, and explaining its subsequent adoption in Texas. Copious notes and a complete bibliography make the work especially valuable. The idea for this book came in the midst of the great seven-year drought in Texas, from 1950 to 1957. The author gave two reasons for her study: “One was my belief that the water problems, crucial to all Texas, can be solved only when Texans become conscious of their imperative needs and only if they become informed and aroused enough to act. “The second reason came from a realization that water—common, universal, and ordinary as it is—had been overlooked by the historian. It is high time that this oversight be corrected. In American history the significance of land, especially in terms of the frontier, has been spelled out in large letters. The importance of water has been recognized by few.”
Download or read book Saving San Antonio written by Lewis F. Fisher and published by Trinity University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few American cities enjoy the likes of San Antonio's visual links with its dramatic past. The Alamo and four other Spanish missions, recently marked as a UNESCO World Heritage site, are the most obvious but there are a host of landmarks and folkways that have survived over the course of nearly three centuries that still lend San Antonio an "odd and antiquated foreignness." Adding to the charm of the nation's seventh largest city is the San Antonio River, saved to become a winding linear park through the heart of downtown and beyond and a world model for sensitive urban development. San Antonio's heritage has not been preserved by accident. The wrecking balls and headlong development that accompanied progress in nineteenth-century San Antonio roused an indigenous historic preservation movement—the first west of the Mississippi River to become effective. Its thrust has increased since the mid-1920s with the pioneering work of the San Antonio Conservation Society. In Saving San Antonio, Texas historian Lewis Fisher peels back the myths surrounding more than a century of preservation triumphs and failures to reveal a lively mosaic that portrays the saving of San Antonio's cultural and architectural soul. The process, entertaining in the telling, has reverberated throughout the United States and provided significant lessons for the built environments and economies of cities everywhere.
Download or read book American Venice written by Lewis Fisher and published by Trinity University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-23 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In American Venice: The Epic Story of San Antonio’s River, Lewis F. Fisher uncovers the evolution of San Antonio’s beloved River Walk. He shares how San Antonians refused to give up on the vital water source that provided for them from before the city’s beginnings. In 1941 neglect, civic uprisings, and bursts of creativity culminated in the completion of a Works Projects Administration project designed by Robert H. H. Hugman. The resulting River Walk languished for years but enjoyed renewed interest during the 1968 World’s Fair, held in San Antonio, and has since become the center of the city’s cultural and historical narrative. “The real story [of the River Walk] is a bit less Hollywood but far more interesting . . . With a growing number of cities facing issues of water supply, urban runoff, flooding, and ways of rebuilding better after a disaster, the San Antonio River Walk remains a great example of getting it right,” writes Irby Hightower, co-chair of the San Antonio River Oversight Committee. In this updated and expanded edition of River Walk: The Epic Story of San Antonio’s River, Fisher offers more fascinating stories about the River Walk’s evolution, bringing to light new facts and sharing historical images that he has since discovered. The update includes information about the Museum and Mission Reaches, two expansions of the River Walk that are vital to San Antonio’s continued growth as the seventh largest city in the country. Fisher starts his story with the first written records of the river, in the 1690s, and continues through the 1800s and the flood of 1921, to debates over transforming the river and its eventual role as the crown jewel of Texas, and finally to its recent expansion. More than a community attraction, the River Walk’s banks are also a giant botanical garden full of plants and trees. Indeed, the American Society for Horticulture has named the River Walk a Horticultural Landmark. As Fisher says, the River Walk “remains a work in progress, one forever precarious and unfinished yet standing before the world as a triumph of enterprise and human imagination.”
Download or read book Texas Water Atlas written by Lawrence Ernest Estaville and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rainfall, hurricanes, rivers, reservoirs, springs, lakes, aquifers, wetlands, floodplains, water parks, irrigation, wellsthe list of water-related topics in Texas is long and critical to the state s economic and political future. Texas Water Atlas provides the first comprehensive reference for water-related topics in Texas. Geographers Lawrence E. Estaville and Richard A. Earl have compiled a host of data to visually convey vital information on Texas climate, surface and groundwater, water uses and hazards, water quantity and quality, recreation, future supply projections, and the environmental management of its water resources. In addition to more than 150 color maps, the book includes brief introductions to each chapter and a Texas water timeline that traces the state s water events since European settlement. An excellent resource for teachers, students, and policy makers, the atlas promises also to be an invaluable tool for conservation professionals and the general public."
Download or read book San Antonio Uncovered written by Mark Louis Rybczyk and published by Trinity University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-18 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: San Antonio is in the national spotlight as one of the fastest growing and most dynamic emerging major cities in America. Yet local lore has it that every Texan has two hometowns—his own and San Antonio. The Alamo City's charm, colorful surroundings, and diverse cultures combine to make it one of the most interesting places in Texas and the nation. In San Antonio Uncovered, Mark Rybczyk examines some of the city's internationally known legends and lore (including ghost stories) and takes a nostalgic look at landmarks that have disappeared. He also introduces some of the city’s characters and unusual features, debunks local myths, and corrects common misconceptions. Rybczyk embraces San Antonio's peculiarities by chronicling the cross-country journey of the World’s Largest Boots to their home in front of North Star Mall; the origins of the Frito corn chip and chewing gum; the annual Cornyation of King Anchovy; and Dwight Eisenhower's stint as the football coach at St Mary’s University. This completely updated, new edition of San Antonio Uncovered highlights San Antonio as a modern, thriving city with the feel of a small town that sees beauty in the old and fights to save it, even something as seemingly insignificant as an old Humble Oil Station; and its diverse inhabitants as those who appreciate the blending of the old and the new at the Tobin Center and fight to save what’s left of the Hot Wells Hotel.
Download or read book San Antonio de B xar written by Ione William Tanner Wright ("Mrs. S. J. Wright") and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book San Antonio Architecture written by AIA San Antonio and published by Trinity University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-20 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a history more than 290 years old, San Antonio boasts a diverse, eclectic, and important architectural inventory. From the Spanish Missions of the 17th century to invigorating adaptation and restoration of historic buildings alongside landmark new construction, there is a wide array of culturally significant assets reflecting Anglo and Hispanic traditions, alongside regional variations of southern and southwestern American styles. San Antonio Architecture is the comprehensive catalog of the architecture inventory of the city. Complete with color illustrations, keyed maps, and informative essays, it is a must-have book for every armchair and on foot architectural, art, and community historian. Edited by Julius M. Gribou, AIA; Robert G. Hanley, AIA; and Thomas E. Robey, AIA; with architectural text written by Lewis F. Fisher and Maria Watson Pfeiffer.
Download or read book Enduring Acequias written by Juan Estevan Arellano and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For generations the Río Embudo watershed in northern New Mexico has been the home of Juan Estevan Arellano and his ancestors. From this unique perspective Arellano explores the ways people use water in dry places around the world. Touching on the Middle East, Europe, Mexico, and South America before circling back to New Mexico, Arellano makes a case for preserving the acequia irrigation system and calls for a future that respects the ecological limitations of the land.
Download or read book Faces of B xar written by Jesús F. De la Teja and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2019 Summerfield G. Robert Award, sponsored by The Sons of the Republic of Texas Faces of Béxar showcases the finest work of Jesús F. de la Teja, a foremost authority on Spanish colonial Mexico and Texas through the Republic. These essays trace the arc of the author’s career over a quarter of a century. A new bibliographic essay on early San Antonio and Texas history rounds out the collection, showing where Tejano history has been, is now, and where it might go in the future. For de la Teja, the Tejano experience in San Antonio is a case study of a community in transition, one moved by forces within and without. From its beginnings as an imperial outpost to becoming the center of another, newer empire—itself in transition—the social, political, and military history of San Antonio was central to Texas history, to say nothing of the larger contexts of Mexican and American history. Faces of Béxar explores this and more, including San Antonio's origins as a military settlement, the community's economic ties to Saltillo, its role in the fight for Mexican independence, and the motivations of Tejanos for joining Anglo Texans in the struggle for independence. Taken together, Faces of Béxar stands to be a milestone in the growing literature on Tejano history.
Download or read book Public Water Policies written by Charles R. Porter, Jr. and published by Bernan Press. This book was released on 2018-08-31 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although water is nature's most important molecule; its regulation and management are the most challenging public policy issues. This book provides an interdisciplinary view of water policies worldwide and critically analyzes the consequences of water policies around the world, many that are not only overlooked, but that have never been considered.
