The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot

The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot PDF Author: Matthew Spady
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823289435
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 523

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Book Description
“An illuminating treat! . . . it retraces the neighborhood’s fascinating arc from remote woodland estate to the enduring Beaux Arts streetscape.” —Eric K. Washington, award-winning author of Boss of the Grips This fully illustrated history peels back the many layers of a rural society evolving into an urban community, enlivened by the people who propelled it forward: property owners, tenants, laborers, and servants. It tells the intricate tale of how individual choices in the face of family dysfunction, economic crises, technological developments, and the myriad daily occurrences that elicit personal reflection and change of course pushed Audubon Park forward to the cityscape that distinguishes the neighborhood today. A longtime evangelist for Manhattan’s Audubon Park neighborhood, author Matthew Spady delves deep into the lives of the two families most responsible over time for the anomalous arrangement of today’s streetscape: the Audubons and the Grinnells. Beginning with the Audubons’ return to America in 1839 and John James Audubon’s purchase of fourteen acres of farmland, The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot follows the many twists and turns of the area’s path from forest to city, ending in the twenty-first century with the Audubon name re-purposed in today’s historic district, a multiethnic, multi-racial urban neighborhood far removed from the homogeneous, Eurocentric Audubon Park suburb. “This well-documented saga of demographics chronicles a dazzling cast of characters and a plot fraught with idealism, speculation, and expansion, as well as religious, political, and real estate machinations.” —Roberta J.M. Olson, PhD, Curator of Drawings, New-York Historical Society The story of the area’s evolution from hinterland to suburb to city is comprehensively told in Matthew Spady’s fluidly written new history.” —The New York Times

The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot

The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot PDF Author: Matthew Spady
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823289435
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 523

Get Book Here

Book Description
“An illuminating treat! . . . it retraces the neighborhood’s fascinating arc from remote woodland estate to the enduring Beaux Arts streetscape.” —Eric K. Washington, award-winning author of Boss of the Grips This fully illustrated history peels back the many layers of a rural society evolving into an urban community, enlivened by the people who propelled it forward: property owners, tenants, laborers, and servants. It tells the intricate tale of how individual choices in the face of family dysfunction, economic crises, technological developments, and the myriad daily occurrences that elicit personal reflection and change of course pushed Audubon Park forward to the cityscape that distinguishes the neighborhood today. A longtime evangelist for Manhattan’s Audubon Park neighborhood, author Matthew Spady delves deep into the lives of the two families most responsible over time for the anomalous arrangement of today’s streetscape: the Audubons and the Grinnells. Beginning with the Audubons’ return to America in 1839 and John James Audubon’s purchase of fourteen acres of farmland, The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot follows the many twists and turns of the area’s path from forest to city, ending in the twenty-first century with the Audubon name re-purposed in today’s historic district, a multiethnic, multi-racial urban neighborhood far removed from the homogeneous, Eurocentric Audubon Park suburb. “This well-documented saga of demographics chronicles a dazzling cast of characters and a plot fraught with idealism, speculation, and expansion, as well as religious, political, and real estate machinations.” —Roberta J.M. Olson, PhD, Curator of Drawings, New-York Historical Society The story of the area’s evolution from hinterland to suburb to city is comprehensively told in Matthew Spady’s fluidly written new history.” —The New York Times

Grinnell: America's Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West

Grinnell: America's Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West PDF Author: John Taliaferro
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631490141
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 843

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Book Description
Winner • National Outdoor Book Award (History/Biography) Longlisted • PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Before Rachel Carson, there was George Bird Grinnell—the man whose prophetic vision did nothing less than launch American conservation. George Bird Grinnell, the son of a New York merchant, saw a different future for a nation in the thrall of the Industrial Age. With railroads scarring virgin lands and the formerly vast buffalo herds decimated, the country faced a crossroads: Could it pursue Manifest Destiny without destroying its natural bounty and beauty? The alarm that Grinnell sounded would spark America’s conservation movement. Yet today his name has been forgotten—an omission that John Taliaferro’s commanding biography now sets right with historical care and narrative flair. Grinnell was born in Brooklyn in 1849 and grew up on the estate of ornithologist John James Audubon. Upon graduation from Yale, he dug for dinosaurs on the Great Plains with eminent paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh—an expedition that fanned his romantic notion of wilderness and taught him a graphic lesson in evolution and extinction. Soon he joined George A. Custer in the Black Hills, helped to map Yellowstone, and scaled the peaks and glaciers that, through his labors, would become Glacier National Park. Along the way, he became one of America’s most respected ethnologists; seasons spent among the Plains Indians produced numerous articles and books, including his tour de force, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life. More than a chronicler of natural history and indigenous culture, Grinnell became their tenacious advocate. He turned the sportsmen’s journal Forest and Stream into a bully pulpit for wildlife protection, forest reserves, and national parks. In 1886, his distress over the loss of bird species prompted him to found the first Audubon Society. Next, he and Theodore Roosevelt founded the Boone and Crockett Club to promote “fair chase” of big game. His influence among the rich and the patrician provided leverage for the first federal legislation to protect migratory birds—a precedent that ultimately paved the way for the Endangered Species Act. And in an era when too many white Americans regarded Native Americans as backwards, Grinnell’s cries for reform carried from the reservation, through the halls of Congress, all the way to the White House. Drawing on forty thousand pages of Grinnell’s correspondence and dozens of his diaries, Taliaferro reveals a man whose deeds and high-mindedness earned him a lustrous peerage, from presidents to chiefs, Audubon to Aldo Leopold, John Muir to Gifford Pinchot, Edward S. Curtis to Edward H. Harriman. Throughout his long life, Grinnell was bound by family and sustained by intimate friendships, toggling between the East and the West. As Taliaferro’s enthralling portrait demonstrates, it was this tension that wound Grinnell’s nearly inexhaustible spring and honed his vision—a vision that still guides the imperiled future of our national treasures.

My Stories, All True

My Stories, All True PDF Author: Pamela A. LeBlanc
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623498856
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
J. David Bamberger has been profiled in the New York Times and the New Yorker, interviewed on NPR, and featured in a National Geographic video. He and his Texas Hill Country ranch have been the subject of many articles and two books published by Texas A&M University Press. In My Stories, All True, Bamberger, now in his nineties, tells the story of his life as an entrepreneur and conservationist in his own way. He recounts to journalist and friend Pamela LeBlanc how he made a living as a vacuum cleaner salesman, struck it rich as a partner in a wildly successful chain of fried chicken restaurants, and bought, then brought back to life, the “sorriest piece of land” in Blanco County, Texas—the rural oasis he calls Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve. For more than a year, Bamberger and LeBlanc roamed the preserve—five thousand acres nursed back to environmental health with money earned from the sale of Church’s Chicken—as Bamberger reminisced about losing his father in a steel factory accident; gathering mushrooms to sell to neighbors when he was a kid; making a living as a door-to-door salesman; running a multimillion-dollar restaurant business; rubbing shoulders with the likes of Sam Walton, Jane Goodall, and Lady Bird Johnson; and, finally, turning to his land for the work that has earned national acclaim. With a storyteller’s flair and insightful commentary from LeBlanc, Bamberger shares the tales of a remarkable life—as a resourceful country boy, a savvy entrepreneur, and a consummate conservationist whose vision has set the standard for the restoration of nature on private lands worldwide.

The Power of Scenery

The Power of Scenery PDF Author: Dennis Drabelle
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496230132
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Featured in Wall Street Journal's 2021 Holiday Gift Books Guide 2021 Marfield Prize Finalist Wallace Stegner called national parks "the best idea we ever had." As Americans celebrate the 150th anniversary of Yellowstone, the world's first national park, a question naturally arises: where did the idea for a national park originate? The answer starts with a look at pre-Yellowstone America. With nothing to put up against Europe's cultural pearls--its cathedrals, castles, and museums--Americans came to realize that their plentitude of natural wonders might compensate for the dearth of manmade attractions. That insight guided the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted as he organized his thoughts on how to manage the wilderness park centered on Yosemite Valley, a state-owned predecessor to the national park model of Yellowstone. Haunting those thoughts were the cluttered and carnival-like banks of Niagara Falls, which served as an oft-cited example of what should not happen to a spectacular natural phenomenon. Olmsted saw city parks as vital to the pursuit of happiness and wanted them to be established for all to enjoy. When he wrote down his philosophy for managing Yosemite, a new and different kind of park, one that preserves a great natural site in the wilds, he had no idea that he was creating a visionary blueprint for national parks to come. Dennis Drabelle provides a history of the national park concept, adding to our understanding of American environmental thought and linking Olmsted with three of the country's national treasures. Published in time to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Yellowstone National Park on March 1, 2022, and the 200th birthday of Frederick Law Olmsted on April 26, 2022, The Power of Scenery tells the fascinating story of how the national park movement arose, evolved, and has spread around the world.

Natural Rivals

Natural Rivals PDF Author: John Clayton
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643131818
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
John Muir and Gifford Pinchot have often been seen as the embodiment of conflicting environmental philosophies. Muir, the preservationist and co-founder of the Sierra Club. Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service advocating sustainability in timber harvests, instituted conservation. The idealistic Muir saw nature as something special and separate; the pragmatic Pinchot accepted that people used the products of nature. The environmental movement’s original sin, and the root of many of it's difficulties, was its inability to reconcile these two viewpoints—and these two men.So how was it that Muir and Pinchot went camping together—and delighted in each other's company? Does this mean that the seemingly irreparable divide in environmental ethos is not as unbridgeable as it might seem? The perceived rivalry between these two men has obscured a fascinating and hopeful story. Muir and Pinchot actually spent years in an alliance that lead to the original movement for public lands. Their shared commitment to the glories of natural landscapes united their disparate talents and viewpoints to create a fledgling and uniquely American vision of land ownership and management.

Last Stand

Last Stand PDF Author: Michael Punke
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006305258X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
The dramatic history of the extermination and resurrection of the American buffalo, by #1 bestselling author of The Revenant Michael Punke's The Last Stand tells the epic story of the American West through the lens of the American bison and the man who saved these icons of the Western landscape. Over the last three decades of the nineteenth century, an American buffalo herd once numbering 30 million animals was reduced to twelve. It was the era of Manifest Destiny, a Gilded Age that treated the West as nothing more than a treasure chest of resources to be dug up or shot down. The buffalo in this world was a commodity, hounded by legions of swashbucklers and unemployed veterans seeking to make their fortunes. Supporting these hide hunters, even buying their ammunition, was the U.S. Army, which considered the eradication of the buffalo essential to victory in its ongoing war on Native Americans. Into that maelstrom rode young George Bird Grinnell. A scientist and a journalist, a hunter and a conservationist, Grinnell would lead the battle to save the buffalo from extinction. Fighting in the pages of magazines, in Washington's halls of power, and in the frozen valleys of Yellowstone, Grinnell and his allies sought to preserve an icon from the grinding appetite of Robber Baron America. Grinnell shared his adventures with some of the greatest and most infamous characters of the American West—from John James Audubon and Buffalo Bill to George Armstrong Custer and Theodore Roosevelt (Grinnell's friend and ally). A strikingly contemporary story, the saga of Grinnell and the buffalo was the first national battle over the environment. Last Stand is the story of the death of the old West and the birth of the new as well as an examination of how the West was really won—through the birth of the conservation movement. It is also the definitive history of the American buffalo, written by a master storyteller of the West.

Great White Fathers

Great White Fathers PDF Author: John Taliaferro
Publisher: Public Affairs
ISBN: 9781586482053
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
Shares the accomplishments of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor responsible for the creation of Mount Rushmore, revealing his motivations for constructing the monument and the response he received after its completion.

The Father of American Conservation

The Father of American Conservation PDF Author: Thom Hatch
Publisher: Turner
ISBN: 9781684423330
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
This is the definitive biography of George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938), who is widely regarded as "The Father of American Conservation," because of his accomplishments in saving wildlife and natural resources of America-- including saving the American bison.

Ways of Nature

Ways of Nature PDF Author: John Burroughs
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Natural history
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description


American Holocaust

American Holocaust PDF Author: David E. Stannard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199838984
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
For four hundred years--from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s--the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as 100 million people. Indeed, as historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to others? His highly provocative answer: Christians. Digging deeply into ancient European and Christian attitudes toward sex, race, and war, he finds the cultural ground well prepared by the end of the Middle Ages for the centuries-long genocide campaign that Europeans and their descendants launched--and in places continue to wage--against the New World's original inhabitants. Advancing a thesis that is sure to create much controversy, Stannard contends that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust drew on the same ideological wellspring as did the later architects of the Nazi Holocaust. It is an ideology that remains dangerously alive today, he adds, and one that in recent years has surfaced in American justifications for large-scale military intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. At once sweeping in scope and meticulously detailed, American Holocaust is a work of impassioned scholarship that is certain to ignite intense historical and moral debate.