Download or read book The Plan of Chicago written by Carl Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguably the most influential document in the history of urban planning, Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, coauthored by Edward Bennett and produced in collaboration with the Commercial Club of Chicago, proposed many of the city’s most distinctive features, including its lakefront parks and roadways, the Magnificent Mile, and Navy Pier. Carl Smith’s fascinating history reveals the Plan’s central role in shaping the ways people envision the cityscape and urban life itself. Smith’s concise and accessible narrative begins with a survey of Chicago’s stunning rise from a tiny frontier settlement to the nation’s second-largest city. He then offers an illuminating exploration of the Plan’s creation and reveals how it embodies the renowned architect’s belief that cities can and must be remade for the better. The Plan defined the City Beautiful movement and was the first comprehensive attempt to reimagine a major American city. Smith points out the ways the Plan continues to influence debates, even a century after its publication, about how to create a vibrant and habitable urban environment. Richly illustrated and incisively written, his insightful book will be indispensable to our understanding of Chicago, Daniel Burnham, and the emergence of the modern city.

Download or read book Americans Against the City written by Steven Conn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-07 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a paradox of American life that we are a highly urbanized nation filled with people deeply ambivalent about urban life. An aversion to urban density and all that it contributes to urban life, and a perception that the city was the place where "big government" first took root in America fostered what historian Steven Conn terms the "anti-urban impulse." In response, anti-urbanists called for the decentralization of the city, and rejected the role of government in American life in favor of a return to the pioneer virtues of independence and self-sufficiency. In this provocative and sweeping book, Conn explores the anti-urban impulse across the 20th century, examining how the ideas born of it have shaped both the places in which Americans live and work, and the anti-government politics so strong today. Beginning in the booming industrial cities of the Progressive era at the turn of the 20th century, where debate surrounding these questions first arose, Conn examines the progression of anti-urban movements. : He describes the decentralist movement of the 1930s, the attempt to revive the American small town in the mid-century, the anti-urban basis of urban renewal in the 1950s and '60s, and the Nixon administration's program of building new towns as a response to the urban crisis, illustrating how, by the middle of the 20th century, anti-urbanism was at the center of the politics of the New Right. Concluding with an exploration of the New Urbanist experiments at the turn of the 21st century, Conn demonstrates the full breadth of the anti-urban impulse, from its inception to the present day. Engagingly written, thoroughly researched, and forcefully argued, Americans Against the City is important reading for anyone who cares not just about the history of our cities, but about their future as well.

Download or read book Wild West China written by Christian Tyler and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Closed to the world for half a century, like a black hole in the Asian landmass, the wilderness of Xinjiang in northwest China is returning to the light. The picture it presents is both fascinating and disturbing. Despite a savage landscape and climate, Xinjiang has a rich past: sand-buried cities, painted cave shrines, rare creatures, and wonderfully preserved mummies of European appearance. Their descendants, the Uighurs, still farm the tranquil oases that ring the dreaded Taklamakan, the world's second largest sand desert, and the Kazakh and Kirghiz herdsmen still roam the mountains. The region's history, however, has been punctuated by violence, usually provoked by ambitious outsiders--nomad chieftains from the north, Muslim emirs from Central Asia, Russian generals, or warlords from inner China. The Chinese regard the far west as a barbarian land. Only in the 1760s did they subdue it, and even then their rule was repeatedly broken. Compared with the Russians' conquest of Siberia, or the Americans' trek west, China's colonization of Xinjiang has been late and difficult. The Communists have done most to develop it, as a penal colony, as a buffer against invasion, and as a supplier of raw materials and living space for an overpopulated country. But what China sees as its property, the Uighurs regard as theft by an alien occupier. Tension has led to violence and savage reprisals. This portrait of Xinjiang should be essential reading for travelers and for anyone interested in today's China and the fate of minority peoples.

Download or read book Tamed written by Anne Elizabeth O'Regan and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story is about the physical and emotional landscapes encountered when a city girl walks alone for thousands of miles on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Download or read book Here Be Dragons written by Stefan Ekman and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-19 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First in-depth study of the use of landscape in fantasy literature

Download or read book Pedaling Revolution written by Jeff Mapes and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From traffic-dodging-bike messengers to tattooed teenagers on battered bikes, from riders in spandex to well-dressed executives, ordinary citizens are becoming transportation revolutionaries. Jeff Mapes traces the growth of bicycle advocacy and explores the environmental, safety, and health aspects of bicycling. He rides with bicycle advocates who are taming the streets of New York City, joins the street circus that is Critical Mass in San Francisco, and gets inspired by the everyday folk pedaling in Amsterdam, the nirvana of American bike activists. Chapters focused on big cities, college towns, and America's most successful bike city, Portland, show how cyclists, with the encouragement of local officials, are claiming a share of the valuable streetscape."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Uncommon Ground written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Manhood for Amateurs written by Michael Chabon and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-01-24 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize winning author -- “an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) -- offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as critics and readers have come to expect. A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces: MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and his vision of life in the way so many of us experience our own: as a series of reflections, regrets and re-examinations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past. What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even as -- simply because -- it goes on being written every day. As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as the father of four young Americans, Chabon’s memories of childhood, of his parents’ marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, are like a theme played -- on different instruments, with a fresh tempo and in a new key -- by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor. At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS is destined to become a classic.

Download or read book Popular Culture written by Iain Chambers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-06-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iain Chambers approaches the often overlooked details and textures of popular culture through a series of histories which show how it becomes continually remade as each of us defines our own urban space.

Download or read book A Companion to the City written by Gary Bridge and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-06-09 with total page 659 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the City provides the reader with an indispensable and authoritative overview of the key debates, controversies, and questions concerning the city from a variety of theoretical vantage points with an international perspective. Indispensable companion for students of the City. Multidisciplinary approach of interest across several fields. Includes contributions from major scholars in the field.

Download or read book Forest and Stream written by and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book In the Shadow Of the Poorhouse Tenth Anniversary Edition written by Michael B Katz and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 1996-12-11 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With welfare reform a burning political issue, this special anniversary edition of the classic history of welfare in America has been revised and updated to include the latest bipartisan debates on how to “end welfare as we know it.”In the Shadow of the Poorhouse examines the origins of social welfare, both public and private, from the days of the colonial poorhouse through the current tragedy of the homeless. The book explains why such a highly criticized system persists. Katz explores the relationship between welfare and municipal reform; the role of welfare capitalism, eugenics, and social insurance in the reorganization of the labor market; the critical connection between poverty and politics in the rise of the New Deal welfare state; and how the War on Poverty of the '60s became the war on welfare of the '80s.

Download or read book Wilderness written by Corry McDonald and published by Sunstone Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The growing awareness of the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, along with the enactment of the Wilderness Act, precipitated local, regional, and national joint actions of the many outdoor recreation organizations. Wilderness enactments resulted from some of the more successful citizen attempts. The onrush of man's capability to "tame the wilderness" continues to accelerate with the population growth and the need for some restraints has become increasingly evident. This book shows what happened in a magical part of the American Southwest. "Wisconsin Bookwatch" reported: "...an informative history of the conflicting forces striving to determine the fate of New Mexico's wild lands-on one hand, the press of population growth and the desire to 'tame the wilderness'; and on the other, the efforts of environmental movements and outdoor recreation groups to preserve the wilderness and its heritage. Black-and-white photographs illustrate this thoughtful and moving account which is a welcome and much appreciated contribution to Environmental Studies reference collections and reading lists." * * * * * Corry McDonald was employed for over thirty years by Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was during this time that he developed an interest in the wilderness areas of that state. McDonald took copious notes on every back country trip he made. Those notes have become the basis for this book. In it he reluctantly tells about some of his secret places in the hope that it will reduce some of the overuse of the wildernesses that are so well known. He is also the author of "The Dilemma of Wilderness" from Sunstone Press.

Download or read book Story Line written by Ian Marshall and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weaving together stories of his hiking adventures with reflective explorations of literary works set along the Appalachian Trail, Marshall traces a literary geography of the trail that ranges from Georgia to Maine and spans three centuries.

Download or read book Wild written by Cheryl Strayed and published by . This book was released on 2023-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'One of the best books I've read in the last five or ten years... Wild is angry, brave, sad, self-knowing, redemptive, raw, compelling, and brilliantly written, and I think it's destined to be loved by a lot of people, men and women, for a very long time.' Nick Hornby

Download or read book Hayduke Lives written by Edward Abbey and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2011-08-21 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Abbey’s latter-day Luddites, introduced in his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, are back—and not a moment too soon” (The New York Times). George Washington Hayduke, ex-Green Beret, was last seen clinging to a rock face in the wilds of Utah as an armed posse hunted him down for his eco-radical crimes. Now he’s back, with a fiery need for vengeance . . . This sequel to Edward Abbey’s cult classic brings back the old gang of environmental warriors, as they battle a fundamentalist preacher intent on turning the Grand Canyon into a uranium mine—in “a fine novel, combative and comic, anarchistic and ultimately redemptive” (Albuquerque Journal). “I laughed out loud reading this book.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

Download or read book Rodeo written by Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1984-05-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rodeo people call their sport "more a way of life than a way to make a living." Rodeo is, in fact, a rite that not only expresses a way of life but perpetuates it, reaffirming in a ritual contest between man and animal the values of American ranching society. Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence uses an interpretive approach to analyze rodeo as a symbolic pageant that reenacts the "winning of the West" and as a stylized expression of frontier attitudes toward man and nature. Rodeo constestants are the modern counterparts of the rugged and individualistic cowboys, and the ethos they inherited is marked by ambivalence: they admire the wild and the free yet desire to tame and conquer. Based on extensive field work and drawing on comparative materials from other stock-tending societies, Rodeo is a major contribution to an understanding of the role of performance in society, the culturally constructed view of man's place in nature, and the structure and meaning of social relationships and their representations.