American Tropics

American Tropics PDF Author: Megan Raby
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469635615
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, Megan Raby details how ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research. From these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American "tropical biologists" developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity. Considering U.S. biological fieldwork from the era of the Spanish-American War through the anticolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this study combines the history of science, environmental history, and the history of U.S.–Caribbean and Latin American relations. In doing so, Raby sheds new light on the origins of contemporary scientific and environmentalist thought and brings to the forefront a surprisingly neglected history of twentieth-century U.S. science and empire.

American Tropics

American Tropics PDF Author: Megan Raby
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469635615
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, Megan Raby details how ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research. From these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American "tropical biologists" developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity. Considering U.S. biological fieldwork from the era of the Spanish-American War through the anticolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this study combines the history of science, environmental history, and the history of U.S.–Caribbean and Latin American relations. In doing so, Raby sheds new light on the origins of contemporary scientific and environmentalist thought and brings to the forefront a surprisingly neglected history of twentieth-century U.S. science and empire.

American Tropics

American Tropics PDF Author: Allan Punzalan Isaac
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9781452909059
Category : American literature
Languages : id
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description


Overseas American

Overseas American PDF Author: Gene H. Bell-Villada
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617032226
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
A moving exploration of what it means to be an American born and reared abroad

American Tropic

American Tropic PDF Author: Thomas Sanchez
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307961389
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the author of Mile Zero come a heart-racing, “power-packed thriller" (San Francisco Chronicle) set in Key West that illuminates a world of dark desires, hidden truths, and colliding destinies at America’s famous southernmost continental point. Key West is being terrorized by a series of bizarre murders committed by a mysterious voodoo assassin. With each new kill, it becomes clearer that the skeleton-clad executioner has an ecological agenda. Everyone dreads becoming the killer’s next victim: the rapacious developers, the ruthless scammers, and the common folk undertaking heroic acts to save their community. As the clock counts down to the end of hurricane season, the town will come together in a final dramatic explosion of fear, rage, and striking revelations.

Ariel's Ecology

Ariel's Ecology PDF Author: Monique Allewaert
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816689016
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, Monique Allewaert contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, Ariel’s Ecology explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. Allewaert’s examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings’ interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare’s Tempest and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws to Spivak’s theories of subalternity. In Allewaert’s interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara’s dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with “perfect knowledge of the ground.”

An Eye for the Tropics

An Eye for the Tropics PDF Author: Krista A. Thompson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388561
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Get Book Here

Book Description
Images of Jamaica and the Bahamas as tropical paradises full of palm trees, white sandy beaches, and inviting warm water seem timeless. Surprisingly, the origins of those images can be traced back to the roots of the islands’ tourism industry in the 1880s. As Krista A. Thompson explains, in the late nineteenth century, tourism promoters, backed by British colonial administrators, began to market Jamaica and the Bahamas as picturesque “tropical” paradises. They hired photographers and artists to create carefully crafted representations, which then circulated internationally via postcards and illustrated guides and lectures. Illustrated with more than one hundred images, including many in color, An Eye for the Tropics is a nuanced evaluation of the aesthetics of the “tropicalizing images” and their effects on Jamaica and the Bahamas. Thompson describes how representations created to project an image to the outside world altered everyday life on the islands. Hoteliers imported tropical plants to make the islands look more like the images. Many prominent tourist-oriented spaces, including hotels and famous beaches, became off-limits to the islands’ black populations, who were encouraged to act like the disciplined, loyal colonial subjects depicted in the pictures. Analyzing the work of specific photographers and artists who created tropical representations of Jamaica and the Bahamas between the 1880s and the 1930s, Thompson shows how their images differ from the English picturesque landscape tradition. Turning to the present, she examines how tropicalizing images are deconstructed in works by contemporary artists—including Christopher Cozier, David Bailey, and Irénée Shaw—at the same time that they remain a staple of postcolonial governments’ vigorous efforts to attract tourists.

Tropic of Hopes

Tropic of Hopes PDF Author: Knight, Henry
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813048419
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
Just after the Civil War, two states prominently laid claim to being America's paradise destinations. Private companies, state agencies, and journalists all lent a hand in creating a seductive, expansionist imagery that promoted semitropical California and Florida and helped "sell" Americans on the idea of an attainable paradise within the United States. In Tropic of Hopes, Henry Knight examines the promotion of California and Florida from the end of the Civil War to the eve of the Great Depression, a period when both states were transformed from remote, sparsely populated locales into two of the most publicized and dreamed-about destinations in America. Using the discussion of climate, geography, race, and environment to link agricultural, tourist, and urban development in these regions, Knight provides a highly original and informative account.

Tropic

Tropic PDF Author: Aldo Brando
Publisher: Villegas Asociados
ISBN: 9589393314
Category : Colombia
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
Everything in this book invites us to marvel at the Colombian tropics. As the point of convergence of the tectonic plates, flora and fauna of three American continents, the world's two largest oceans and its most variegated mountains, it is a territory of excess. The restless lens of Aldo Brando focuses on this natural setting, furnishing us with a panoply of images that excite both the eye and the imagination. As he eminent Colombian writer German Arciniegas points out, this book is "a vertical exploration of a country which is the synthesis of the Americas." Novel and unique, it is a summary of fifteen years work by a photojournalist whose documentation of wild life goes beyond capturing the physical contours of the seas, islands, jungles, savannahs, mountains and inhabitants of Colombia. "It penetrates into the beauty and soul" of natural wonders, as one of the world's leading professionals in the field-- the American wildlife photographer Art Wolfe-- recognizes in his prologue. The book's five chapters are accompanied by an essay written by the Colombian journalist, Arturo Guerrero, who invites us to share in the astonishment and poetry found in nature and science. The dazzling photographs of this book evoke the magic of the tropical ecosystems of the new world, and draw near to the intimacy of nature. It also allows us to reflect upon mankind's contradictory relationship with the natural world. Professor Sir Ghillean Prance, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, writes in his introduction: "It is my hope that this book helps to encourage the conservation of Colombian ecosystems, which are a valuable resource, not only for inhabitants of that nation but also for the world."The book concludes with a heartfelt message by the Colombian poet William Ospina. Aldo Brando. As a student of marine biology in the early 1980's, Brando became interested in wildlife photography and film-making, specializing in Colombia's tropical ecosystems. His work has appeared in such books as "Coral Reefs of the Caribbean," "Mangroves," "Paramos," "Colombia from the air," "For a Country Within the Reach of the Children," all published by Villegas Editores; "Malpelo, Oceanic Island of Colombia," published by Imprenta Mariscal/National Geographic. His photographs have also appeared in "Americas," "BBC Wildlife," "Earth," "Climbing," "Natural History," "Terre Sauvage," the" San Francisco Examiner," "Sinra and Wildlife Conservation," among other magazines. His collective exhibitions include the Smithsonian's international display on tropical rainforests, and "Forests Revisited: Expeditions at the End of the Millennium," held at the United Nations in New York.

Intimate Frontiers

Intimate Frontiers PDF Author: Felipe Martínez-Pinzón
Publisher:
ISBN: 178694183X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
A collection of multinational scholarly contributions on various cultural aspects of the Amazon region in the 20th century.

Mourning El Dorado

Mourning El Dorado PDF Author: Charlotte Rogers
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813942675
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 521

Get Book Here

Book Description
What ever happened to the legend of El Dorado, the tale of the mythical city of gold lost in the Amazon jungle? Charlotte Rogers argues that El Dorado has not been forgotten and still inspires the reckless pursuit of illusory wealth. The search for gold in South America during the colonial period inaugurated the "promise of El Dorado"—the belief that wealth and happiness can be found in the tropical forests of the Americas. That assumption has endured over the course of centuries, still evident in the various modes of natural resource extraction, such as oil drilling and mining, that characterize the region today. Mourning El Dorado looks at how fiction from the American tropics written since 1950 engages with the promise of El Dorado in the age of the Anthropocene. Just as the golden kingdom was never found, natural resource extraction has not produced wealth and happiness for the peoples of the tropics. While extractivism enriches a few outsiders, it results in environmental degradation and the subjugation, displacement, and forced assimilation of native peoples. This book considers how the fiction of five writers—Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, Mario Vargas Llosa, Álvaro Mutis, and Milton Hatoum—criticizes extractive practices and mourns the lost illusion of the forest as a place of wealth and happiness.