Across the Great Border Fault

Across the Great Border Fault PDF Author: Kevin T. Dann
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813527901
Category : Natural history
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
He argues that these were expressions of the early, "back-to-nature" movement whose underlying biological materialism, or "Naturalism," was integral to American popular culture of the time.".

Across the Great Border Fault

Across the Great Border Fault PDF Author: Kevin T. Dann
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813527901
Category : Natural history
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
He argues that these were expressions of the early, "back-to-nature" movement whose underlying biological materialism, or "Naturalism," was integral to American popular culture of the time.".

Life on Display

Life on Display PDF Author: Karen A. Rader
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022607966X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Life on Display traces the history of biological exhibits in American museums to demonstrate how science museums have shaped and been shaped by understandings of science and public education in twentieth-century society. Karen Rader and Victoria Cain document how public natural history and science museums’ ongoing efforts to create popular educational displays led these institutions to develop new identities, ones that changed their positions in both twentieth-century science and American culture. They describe how, pre-1945, biological exhibitions changed dramatically--from rows upon rows of specimen collections to large-scale dioramas with push-button displays--as museums attempted to negotiate the changing, and often conflicting, interests of scientists, educators, and the public. The authors then reveal how, from the 1950s through the 1980s, museum staffs experimented with wildly different definitions of life science and life science education, and how, in the process, natural history and science museums and science centers faced significant public and scientific scrutiny. The book concludes with a discussion of the ways corporate sponsorship and contemporary blockbuster economics influenced the content and display of science and natural history museums in the century’s last decades. As a dynamic historical account of how museums negotiated their multiple roles in science and society, Life on Display will attract a diverse audience of cultural historians, sociologists, and ethnographers of science, as well as museum practitioners.

Enchanted New York

Enchanted New York PDF Author: Kevin Dann
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479860220
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
A fantastical field guide to the hidden history of New York's magical past Manhattan has a pervasive quality of glamour—a heightened sense of personality generated by a place whose cinematic, literary, and commercial celebrity lends an aura of the fantastic to even its most commonplace locales. Enchanted New York chronicles an alternate history of this magical isle. It offers a tour along Broadway, focusing on times and places that illuminate a forgotten and sometimes hidden history of New York through site-specific stories of wizards, illuminati, fortune tellers, magicians, and more. Progressing up New York’s central thoroughfare, this guidebook to magical Manhattan offers a history you won’t find in your Lonely Planet or Fodor’s guide, tracing the arc of American technological alchemies—from Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton to the Manhattan Project—to Mesmeric physicians, to wonder–working Madame Blavatsky, and seers Helena Roerich and Alice Bailey. Harry Houdini appears and disappears, as the world’s premier stage magician’s feats of prestidigitation fade away to reveal a much more mysterious—and meaningful—marquee of magic. Unlike old-world cities, New York has no ancient monuments to mark its magical adolescence. There is no local memory embedded in the landscape of celebrated witches, warlocks, gods, or goddesses—no myths of magical metamorphoses. As we follow Kevin Dann in geographical and chronological progression up Broadway from Battery Park to Inwood, each chapter provides a surprising picture of a city whose ever-changing fortunes have always been founded on magical activity.

Great Day Trips to Discover the Geology of Connecticut

Great Day Trips to Discover the Geology of Connecticut PDF Author: Greg McHone
Publisher: Perry Heights Press
ISBN: 9780963018144
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description


Expect Great Things

Expect Great Things PDF Author: Kevin Dann
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399184678
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Now in paperback, this thrilling, meticulous biography by naturalist and historian Kevin Dann fills a gap in our understanding of Henry Thoreau, one modern history's most important spiritual visionaries by capturing the full arc of his life as a mystic, spiritual seeker, and explorer in transcendental realms. This acclaimed, epic biography of Henry David Thoreau sees Thoreau's world as the mystic himself saw it: filled with wonder and mystery; Native American myths and lore; wood sylphs, nature spirits, and fairies; battles between good and evil; and heroic struggles to live as a natural being in an increasingly synthetic world. Above all, Expect Great Things critically and authoritatively captures Thoreau's simultaneously wild and intellectually keen sense of the mystical, mythical, and supernatural. Other historians have skipped past or undervalued these aspects of Thoreau's life. In this groundbreaking work, historian and naturalist Kevin Dann restores Thoreau's esoteric visions and explorations to their rightful place as keystones of the man himself.

Weeds

Weeds PDF Author: Zachary J. S. Falck
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822977729
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
As long as humans have existed, they’ve worked and competed with plants to shape their surroundings. As cities developed and expanded, their diverse spaces were covered with and colored by weeds. In Weeds, Zachary J. S. Falck presents a comprehensive history of “happenstance plants” in American urban environments. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the present, he examines the proliferation, perception, and treatment of weeds in metropolitan centers from Boston to Los Angeles. In dynamic city ecosystems, population movements and economic cycles establish and transform habitats where vegetation continuously changes. Americans came to associate weeds with infectious diseases and allergies, illegal dumping, vagrants, drug dealers, and decreased property values. Local governments and citizens’ groups attempted to eliminate unwanted plants to better their urban environments and improve the health and safety of inhabitants. Over time, a growing understanding of the natural environment made “happenstance plants” more tolerable and even desirable. In the twenty-first century, scientists have warned that the effects of global warming and the heat-trapping properties of cities are producing more robust strains of weeds. Falck shows that nature continues to flourish where humans have struggled: in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in the abandoned homes of the California housing bust, and alongside crumbling infrastructure. Weeds are here to stay.

Into the Heart's Land

Into the Heart's Land PDF Author: Henry Barnes
Publisher: SteinerBooks
ISBN: 0880108576
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 1303

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Book Description
Henry Barnes, the author of A Life for the Spirit, brings us a comprehensive view of the roots and development of anthroposophy throughout North America. From its seminal beginnings with a few hearty souls in New York City, it moved across the prairies to the west coast and beyond, to Canada, Mexico, and Hawaii, and took root in the hearts and minds of the "new world." Here is the story of those adventurous spirits who took responsibility for bringing the work of Rudolf Steiner to North America in the form of study groups, agricultural initiatives, Waldorf and special education, the arts, and so much more.

Proving Ground

Proving Ground PDF Author: Edward Slavishak
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421425394
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
"The Appalachian Mountains attracted an endless stream of visitors in the twentieth century, each bearing visions of the realm that they would encounter on high. The name "Appalachia" became shorthand for a series of moral and economic calculations and pop culture references. Well before large numbers of tourists took to the mountains in the latter half of the century, however, networks of missionaries, sociologists, folklorists, doctors, artists, and conservationists made Appalachia their primary site for fieldwork. Proving Ground studies a collection of these professionals in transit to show that the travelers' tales were the foundation of powerful forms of insider knowledge. The visitors represented occupational and recreational groups that used Appalachia to gain precious expertise, and it was to these groups that they became insiders. They were not immersing themselves in a regional culture, but rather in their own professional cultures. These were people who used the mountains to help themselves. Proving Ground is a cultural history of expertise, an environmental history of the Appalachian Mountains, and a historical geography of spaces and places in the twentieth century. By using these frameworks to analyze the personal papers, professional records, and popular works of these budding experts, the book presents mountain landscapes as a fluid combination of embodied sensation, narrative fantasy, and class privilege. It will attract students of Appalachian Studies who are interested in the phenomena of cultural and environmental intervention, environmental historians concerned with the construction of hybrid landscapes, and mobility scholars who recognize the organizational power derived from access and movement"--

30 Walks in New Jersey

30 Walks in New Jersey PDF Author: Kevin T. Dann
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813518121
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The thirty walks range from two-hour jaunts over level terrain to more taxing full-day hikes. Walks in the Kittatinny Ridge, the Highlands, the Piedmont, the Delaware River Valley, the Pinelands, Cape May, along the Atlantic Coast, and through communities of historical intersect are all included.

The Line Becomes a River

The Line Becomes a River PDF Author: Francisco Cantú
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735217726
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
NAMED A TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018 BY NPR and THE WASHINGTON POST WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN CURRENT INTEREST FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NONFICTION AWARD The instant New York Times bestseller, "A must-read for anyone who thinks 'build a wall' is the answer to anything." --Esquire For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the full extent of the violence it wreaks, on both sides of the line.