American Nature

American Nature PDF Author:
Publisher: Reader's Digest Association
ISBN: 9780895779489
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
Contains the answers to over 500 questions about American natural history including how do hibernating animals know when to wake up, how were the Great Lakes formed, and how do woodpeckers detect food through solid wood.

American Nature

American Nature PDF Author:
Publisher: Reader's Digest Association
ISBN: 9780895779489
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
Contains the answers to over 500 questions about American natural history including how do hibernating animals know when to wake up, how were the Great Lakes formed, and how do woodpeckers detect food through solid wood.

Nature and the American

Nature and the American PDF Author: Hans Huth
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803272477
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hans Huth was for many years Curator of Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago and a consultant for the U.S. National Park Service. For this new Bison Book edition, Douglas H. Strong has written an introduction discussing recent developments in the environmental movement and the contribution of Nature and the American to the burgeoning crusade for nature.

Nature and Culture : American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875, With a New Preface

Nature and Culture : American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875, With a New Preface PDF Author: Barbara Novak Altschul Professor of Art History Barnard College and Columbia University (Emerita)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195345665
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this richly illustrated volume, featuring more than fifty black-and-white illustrations and a beautiful eight-page color insert, Barbara Novak describes how for fifty extraordinary years, American society drew from the idea of Nature its most cherished ideals. Between 1825 and 1875, all kinds of Americans--artists, writers, scientists, as well as everyday citizens--believed that God in Nature could resolve human contradictions, and that nature itself confirmed the American destiny. Using diaries and letters of the artists as well as quotes from literary texts, journals, and periodicals, Novak illuminates the range of ideas projected onto the American landscape by painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand, Fitz H. Lane, and Martin J. Heade, and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederich Wilhelm von Schelling. Now with a new preface, this spectacular volume captures a vast cultural panorama. It beautifully demonstrates how the idea of nature served, not only as a vehicle for artistic creation, but as its ideal form. "An impressive achievement." --Barbara Rose, The New York Times Book Review "An admirable blend of ambition, elan, and hard research. Not just an art book, it bears on some of the deepest fantasies of American culture as a whole." --Robert Hughes, Time Magazine

American States of Nature

American States of Nature PDF Author: Mark Somos
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190909560
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Get Book Here

Book Description
American States of Nature transforms our understanding of the American Revolution and the early makings of the Constitution. The journey to an independent United States generated important arguments about the existing condition of Americans, in which rival interpretations of the term "state of nature" played a crucial role. "State of nature" typically implied a pre-political condition and was often invoked in support of individual rights to property and self-defense and the right to exit or to form a political state. It could connote either a paradise, a baseline condition of virtue and health, or a hell on earth. This mutable phrase was well-known in Europe and its empires. In the British colonies, "state of nature" appeared thousands of times in juridical, theological, medical, political, economic, and other texts from 1630 to 1810. But by the 1760s, a distinctively American state-of-nature discourse started to emerge. It combined existing meanings and sidelined others in moments of intense contestation, such as the Stamp Act crisis of 1765-66 and the First Continental Congress of 1774. In laws, resolutions, petitions, sermons, broadsides, pamphlets, letters, and diaries, the American states of nature came to justify independence at least as much as colonial formulations of liberty, property, and individual rights did. In this groundbreaking book, Mark Somos focuses on the formative decade and a half just before the American Revolution. Somos' investigation begins with a 1761 speech by James Otis that John Adams described as "a dissertation on the state of nature," and celebrated as the real start of the Revolution. Drawing on an enormous range of both public and personal writings, many rarely or never before discussed, the book follows the development of America's state-of-nature discourse to 1775. The founding generation transformed this flexible concept into a powerful theme that shapes their legacy to this day. No constitutional history of the Revolution can be written without it.

Nature Next Door

Nature Next Door PDF Author: Ellen Stroud
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804459
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
The once denuded northeastern United States is now a region of trees. Nature Next Door argues that the growth of cities, the construction of parks, the transformation of farming, the boom in tourism, and changes in the timber industry have together brought about a return of northeastern forests. Although historians and historical actors alike have seen urban and rural areas as distinct, they are in fact intertwined, and the dichotomies of farm and forest, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture break down when the focus is on the history of Northeastern woods. Cities, trees, mills, rivers, houses, and farms are all part of a single transformed regional landscape. In an examination of the cities and forests of the northeastern United States-with particular attention to the woods of Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont-Ellen Stroud shows how urbanization processes there fostered a period of recovery for forests, with cities not merely consumers of nature but creators as well. Interactions between city and hinterland in the twentieth century Northeast created a new wildness of metropolitan nature: a reforested landscape intricately entangled with the region's cities and towns.

The State of Nature

The State of Nature PDF Author: Gregg Mitman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226532370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although science may claim to be "objective," scientists cannot avoid the influence of their own values on their research. In The State of Nature, Gregg Mitman examines the relationship between issues in early twentieth-century American society and the sciences of evolution and ecology to reveal how explicit social and political concerns influenced the scientific agenda of biologists at the University of Chicago and throughout the United States during the first half of this century. Reacting against the view of nature "red in tooth and claw," ecologists and behavioral biologists such as Warder Clyde Allee, Alfred Emerson, and their colleagues developed research programs they hoped would validate and promote an image of human society as essentially cooperative rather than competitive. Mitman argues that Allee's religious training and pacifist convictions shaped his pioneering studies of animal communities in a way that could be generalized to denounce the view that war is in our genes.

The Cutest Nature Book Ever!

The Cutest Nature Book Ever! PDF Author: Carrie Anton
Publisher: American Girl Publishing Incorporated
ISBN: 9781593695842
Category : Nature crafts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is a girl's guide to having fun in the great outdoors! Designed to get girls outside, it's filled with games and craft ideas using items found in nature. Flip through the pages to find story starters and space for girls to jot down their thoughts. Plus, this book includes easy-to-follow instructions for preserving things found in nature; such as how to press leaves and flowers.

Wild by Nature

Wild by Nature PDF Author: Andrea L. Smalley
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421422352
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Wild by Nature answers the question: how did indigenous animals shape the course of colonization in English America? The book argues that animals acted as obstacles to colonization because their wildness was at odds with Anglo-American legal assertions of possession. Animals and their pursuers transgressed the legal lines officials drew to demarcate colonizers' sovereignty and control over the landscape. Consequently, wild creatures became legal actors in the colonizing process--the subjects of statutes, the issues in court cases, and the parties to treaties--as authorities struggled to both contain and preserve the wildness that made those animals so valuable to English settler societies in North America in the first place. Only after wild creatures were brought under the state's legal ownership and control could the land be rationally organized and possessed. The book examines the colonization of American animals as a separate strand interwoven into a larger story of English colonizing in North America. As such, it proceeds along a different and longer timeline than other colonial histories, tracing a path through various wild animal frontiers from the seventeenth-century Chesapeake into the southern backcountry in the eighteenth century and across the Appalachians in the early nineteenth to end in the southern plains in the decades after the Civil War. Along the way, it maps out an argumentative arc that describes three manifestations of colonization as it variously applied to beavers, wolves, fish, deer, and bison. Wild by Nature engages broad questions about the environment, law, and society in early America"--

Nature and History in American Political Development

Nature and History in American Political Development PDF Author: James W. Ceaser
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674021587
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this inaugural volume of the Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures, Ceaser traces how certain “foundational” ideas—including nature, history, and religion—have been understood and used over the course of American history. Three commentators challenge his arguments, and a spirited debate about large and enduring questions in American politics ensues.

Black to Nature

Black to Nature PDF Author: Stefanie K. Dunning
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496832957
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, author Stefanie K. Dunning considers both popular and literary texts that range from Beyoncé’s Lemonade to Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. These key works restage Black women in relation to nature. Dunning argues that depictions of protagonists who return to pastoral settings contest the violent and racist history that incentivized Black disavowal of the natural world. Dunning offers an original theoretical paradigm for thinking through race and nature by showing that diverse constructions of nature in these texts are deployed as a means of rescrambling the teleology of the Western progress narrative. In a series of fascinating close readings of contemporary Black texts, she reveals how a range of artists evoke nature to suggest that interbeing with nature signals a call for what Jared Sexton calls “the dream of Black Studies”—abolition. Black to Nature thus offers nuanced readings that advance an emerging body of critical and creative work at the nexus of Blackness, gender, and nature. Written in a clear, approachable, and multilayered style that aims to be as poignant as nature itself, the volume offers a unique combination of theoretical breadth, narrative beauty, and broader perspective that suggests it will be a foundational text in a new critical turn towards framing nature within a cultural studies context.