Download or read book Natural Histories written by American Museum of Natural History and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlights 40 masterworks of illustrated scientific art from the Rare Book Collection of the American Museum of Natural History.
Download or read book The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way written by Colin Davey and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the story of the building of the American Museum of Natural History and Hayden Planetarium, a story of history, politics, science, and exploration, including the roles of American presidents, New York power brokers, museum presidents, planetarium directors, polar and African explorers, and German rocket scientists. The American Museum of Natural History is one of New York City’s most beloved institutions, and one of the largest, most celebrated museums in the world. Since 1869, generations of New Yorkers and tourists of all ages have been educated and entertained here. Located across from Central Park, the sprawling structure, spanning four city blocks, is a fascinating conglomeration of many buildings of diverse architectural styles built over a period of 150 years. The first book to tell the history of the museum from the point of view of these buildings, including the planned Gilder Center, The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way contextualizes them within New York and American history and the history of science. Part II, “The Heavens in the Attic,” is the first detailed history of the Hayden Planetarium, from the museum’s earliest astronomy exhibits, to Clyde Fisher and the original planetarium, to Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and it features a photographic tour through the original Hayden Planetarium. Author Colin Davey spent much of his childhood literally and figuratively lost in the museum’s labyrinthine hallways. The museum grew in fits and starts according to the vicissitudes of backroom deals, personal agendas, two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War. Chronicling its evolution―from the selection of a desolate, rocky, hilly, swampy site, known as Manhattan Square to the present day―the book includes some of the most important and colorful characters in the city’s history, including the notoriously corrupt and powerful “Boss” Tweed, “Father of New York City” Andrew Haswell Green, and twentieth-century powerbroker and master builder Robert Moses; museum presidents Morris K. Jesup, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Ellen Futter; and American presidents, polar and African explorers, dinosaur hunters, and German rocket scientists. Richly illustrated with period photos, The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way is based on deep archival research and interviews.
Download or read book A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America written by Donald Culross Peattie and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1991 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed handbook giving clear descriptions and full historical information about the trees that grow in North America--Résumé de l'éditeur.
Download or read book A Natural History of North American Trees written by Donald Culross Peattie and published by Trinity University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A volume for a lifetime" is how The New Yorker described the first of Donald Culross Peatie's two books about American trees published in the 1950s. In this one-volume edition, modern readers are introduced to one of the best nature writers of the last century. As we read Peattie's eloquent and entertaining accounts of American trees, we catch glimpses of our country's history and past daily life that no textbook could ever illuminate so vividly. Here you'll learn about everything from how a species was discovered to the part it played in our country’s history. Pioneers often stabled an animal in the hollow heart of an old sycamore, and the whole family might live there until they could build a log cabin. The tuliptree, the tallest native hardwood, is easier to work than most softwood trees; Daniel Boone carved a sixty-foot canoe from one tree to carry his family from Kentucky into Spanish territory. In the days before the Revolution, the British and the colonists waged an undeclared war over New England's white pines, which made the best tall masts for fighting ships. It's fascinating to learn about the commercial uses of various woods -- for paper, fine furniture, fence posts, matchsticks, house framing, airplane wings, and dozens of other preplastic uses. But we cannot read this book without the occasional lump in our throats. The American elm was still alive when Peattie wrote, but as we read his account today we can see what caused its demise. Audubon's portrait of a pair of loving passenger pigeons in an American beech is considered by many to be his greatest painting. It certainly touched the poet in Donald Culross Peattie as he depicted the extinction of the passenger pigeon when the beech forest was destroyed. A Natural History of North American Trees gives us a picture of life in America from its earliest days to the middle of the last century. The information is always interesting, though often heartbreaking. While Peattie looks for the better side of man's nature, he reports sorrowfully on the greed and waste that have doomed so much of America's virgin forest.
Download or read book Beneath the United States written by Lars Schoultz and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-06-15 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sweeping history of United States policy toward Latin America, Lars Schoultz shows that the United States has always perceived Latin America as a fundamentally inferior neighbor, unable to manage its affairs and stubbornly underdeveloped. This perception of inferiority was apparent from the beginning. John Quincy Adams, who first established diplomatic relations with Latin America, believed that Hispanics were lazy, dirty, nasty...a parcel of hogs. In the early nineteenth century, ex-President John Adams declared that any effort to implant democracy in Latin America was as absurd as similar plans would be to establish democracies among the birds, beasts, and fishes. Drawing on extraordinarily rich archival sources, Schoultz, one of the country's foremost Latin America scholars, shows how these core beliefs have not changed for two centuries. We have combined self-interest with a civilizing mission--a self-abnegating effort by a superior people to help a substandard civilization overcome its defects. William Howard Taft felt the way to accomplish this task was to knock their heads together until they should maintain peace, while in 1959 CIA Director Allen Dulles warned that the new Cuban officials had to be treated more or less like children. Schoultz shows that the policies pursued reflected these deeply held convictions. While political correctness censors the expression of such sentiments today, the actions of the United States continue to assume the political and cultural inferiority of Latin America. Schoultz demonstrates that not until the United States perceives its southern neighbors as equals can it anticipate a constructive hemispheric alliance.
Download or read book The Contemporary History of Latin America written by Tulio Halperín Donghi and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether you stitch up a pair of cute baby shoes, knit a clever cardigan, or upcycle adult sweaters into children's sweaters, Sweet & Simple Handmade Melissa Wastney has something for all the little ones in your life. This how-to book features 25 adorable--and very practical--projects designed for babies and young children up to age 10. Inside you'll find reusable patterns, detailed instructions, and endless inspiration for garments, bags, quilts, and much more!
Download or read book This Radical Land written by Daegan Miller and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-22 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That’s largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today: a country expanding unstoppably, bending the continent’s natural bounty to the national will, heedless of consequence. A country of slavery and of Indian wars. There’s much truth in that vision. But if you know where to look, you can uncover a different history, one of vibrant resistance, one that’s been mostly forgotten. This Radical Land recovers that story. Daegan Miller is our guide on a beautifully written, revelatory trip across the continent during which we encounter radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress in the very landscapes around them, even as the runaway engine of capitalism sought to steamroll everything in its path. Here we meet Thoreau, the expert surveyor, drawing anticapitalist property maps. We visit a black antislavery community in the Adirondack wilderness of upstate New York. We discover how seemingly commercial photographs of the transcontinental railroad secretly sent subversive messages, and how a band of utopian anarchists among California’s sequoias imagined a greener, freer future. At every turn, everyday radicals looked to landscape for the language of their dissent—drawing crucial early links between the environment and social justice, links we’re still struggling to strengthen today. Working in a tradition that stretches from Thoreau to Rebecca Solnit, Miller offers nothing less than a new way of seeing the American past—and of understanding what it can offer us for the present . . . and the future.
Download or read book Sarraceniaceae of South America written by Stewart McPherson and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sarraceniaceae of South America" is one part of a two-part monograph providing the first complete study of the full diversity, ecology and taxonomy of all recognised species of the three genera of Sarraceniaceae, a family of pitcher plants, namely Darlingtonia, Heliamphora and Sarracenia. This volume examines all species of Heliamphora from the Guiana Highlands of Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana. All known species are illustrated in full detail for the very first time, including many that have been discovered only very recently. Notably, the description of one spectacular new species of Heliamphora is included in the Appendix of this work and is documented in detail. Complete with up-to-date conservation assessments, distribution maps and accounts of the wild ecology and habitats of each species of Sarraceniaceae, this work is a major and definitive taxonomic revision for all three genera of true pitcher plants of the New World. Visually beautiful and comprehensive, these books will appeal to both general readers and specialists who are interested in the natural history, diversity, ecology and relationships of Darlingtonia, Heliamphora and Sarracenia.
Download or read book Mark Catesby s Natural History of America written by Henrietta McBurney and published by Merrell. This book was released on 1997 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Natural History , the life work of the English naturalist and artist Markatesby (1682-1749), the most important precursor of Audubon, was the firstomprehensive study of the flora and fauna of the eastern seaboard of Northmerica. Published here for the first time are the original watercolor
Download or read book Tinkering with Eden written by Kim Todd and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2002 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bewitching look at nonnative species in American ecosystems, by the heir apparent to McKibben and Quammen.
Download or read book An Environmental History of Latin America written by Shawn William Miller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-27 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A narration of the mutually mortal historical contest between humans and nature in Latin America. Covering a period that begins with Amerindian civilizations and concludes in the region's present urban agglomerations, the work offers an original synthesis of the current scholarship on Latin America's environmental history and argues that tropical nature played a central role in shaping the region's historical development. Human attitudes, populations, and appetites, from Aztec cannibalism to more contemporary forms of conspicuous consumption, figure prominently in the story. However, characters such as hookworms, whales, hurricanes, bananas, dirt, butterflies, guano, and fungi make more than cameo appearances. Recent scholarship has overturned many of our egocentric assumptions about humanity's role in history. Seeing Latin America's environmental past from the perspective of many centuries illustrates that human civilizations, ancient and modern, have been simultaneously more powerful and more vulnerable than previously thought.
Download or read book Our Continent written by National Geographic Society (U.S.) and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The plant and animal life on this continent are described over a 4-billion-year time span.
Download or read book Early Latin America written by James Lockhart and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1983-09-30 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brief general history of Latin America in the period between the European conquest and the independence of the Spanish American countries and Brazil serves as an introduction to this quickly changing field of study.
Download or read book A Brief History of South American Metatherians written by Francisco Goin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book summarizes major aspects of the evolution of South American metatherians, including their epistemologic, phylogenetic, biogeographic, faunal, tectonic, paleoclimatic, and metabolic contexts. A brief overview of the evolution of each major South American lineage ("Ameridelphia", Sparassodonta, Didelphimorphia, Paucituberculata, Microbiotheria, and Polydolopimorphia) is provided. It is argued that due to physiological constraints, metatherian evolution closely followed the conditions imposed by global temperatures. In general terms, during the Paleocene and the early Eocene multiple radiations of metatherian lineages occurred, with many adaptive types exploiting insectivorous, frugivorous, and omnivorous adaptive zones. In turn, a mixture of generalized and specialized types, the latter mainly exploiting carnivorous and granivorous-folivorous adaptive zones, characterized the second half of the Cenozoic. In both periods, climate was the critical driver of their radiation and turnovers.
Download or read book A History of Indigenous Latin America written by René Harder Horst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-25 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Indigenous Latin America is a comprehensive introduction to the people who first settled in Latin America, from before the arrival of the Europeans to the present. Indigenous history provides a singular perspective to political, social and economic changes that followed European settlement and the African slave trade in Latin America. Set broadly within a postcolonial theoretical framework and enhanced by anthropology, economics, sociology, and religion, this textbook includes military conflicts and nonviolent resistance, transculturation, labor, political organization, gender, and broad selective accommodation. Uniquely organized into periods of 50 years to facilitate classroom use, it allows students to ground important indigenous historical events and cultural changes within the timeframe of a typical university semester. Supported by images, textboxes, and linked documents in each chapter that aid learning and provide a new perspective that broadly enhances Latin American history and studies, it is the perfect introductory textbook for students.
Download or read book A Guide to the Carnivores of Central America written by Carlos L. de la Rosa and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-06-28 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carnivores such as pumas, jaguars, and ocelots have roamed the neotropical forests of Central America for millennia. Enshrined in the myths of the ancient Maya, they still inspire awe in the region's current inhabitants, as well as in the ecotourists and researchers who come to experience Central America's diverse and increasingly endangered natural environment. This book is one of the first field guides dedicated to the carnivores of Central America. It describes the four indigenous families—wild cats, raccoons and their relatives, skunks and their relatives, and wild canids—and their individual species that live in the region. The authors introduce each species by recounting a first-person encounter with it, followed by concise explanations of its taxonomy, scientific name, English and Spanish common names, habitat, natural history, and conservation status. Range maps show the animal's past and current distribution, while Claudia Nocke's black-and-white drawings portray it visually. The concluding chapter looks to the carnivores' future, including threats posed by habitat destruction and other human activities, and describes some current conservation programs. Designed for citizens of and visitors to Central America, as well as specialists, this book offers an excellent introduction to a group of fascinating, threatened, and still imperfectly understood animals.
Download or read book Visual Voyages written by Daniela Bleichmar and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented visual exploration of the intertwined histories of art and science, of the old world and the new From the voyages of Christopher Columbus to those of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, the depiction of the natural world played a central role in shaping how people on both sides of the Atlantic understood and imaged the region we now know as Latin America. Nature provided incentives for exploration, commodities for trade, specimens for scientific investigation, and manifestations of divine forces. It also yielded a rich trove of representations, created both by natives to the region and visitors, which are the subject of this lushly illustrated book. Author Daniela Bleichmar shows that these images were not only works of art but also instruments for the production of knowledge, with scientific, social, and political repercussions. Early depictions of Latin American nature introduced European audiences to native medicines and religious practices. By the 17th century, revelatory accounts of tobacco, chocolate, and cochineal reshaped science, trade, and empire around the globe. In the 18th and 19th centuries, collections and scientific expeditions produced both patriotic and imperial visions of Latin America. Through an interdisciplinary examination of more than 150 maps, illustrated manuscripts, still lifes, and landscape paintings spanning four hundred years, Visual Voyages establishes Latin America as a critical site for scientific and artistic exploration, affirming that region's transformation and the transformation of Europe as vitally connected histories.
