River Cities, City Rivers

River Cities, City Rivers PDF Author: Thaisa Way
Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection
ISBN: 9780884024255
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cities have been built alongside rivers throughout history--shaping the development of urban landscapes and altering ecologies. Yet we have rarely given these urban landscapes their due. River Cities, City Rivers explores how such histories have shaped the present and how they might inform our visions of the future.

River Cities, City Rivers

River Cities, City Rivers PDF Author: Thaisa Way
Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection
ISBN: 9780884024255
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cities have been built alongside rivers throughout history--shaping the development of urban landscapes and altering ecologies. Yet we have rarely given these urban landscapes their due. River Cities, City Rivers explores how such histories have shaped the present and how they might inform our visions of the future.

River City and Valley Life

River City and Valley Life PDF Author: Christopher J. Castaneda
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822979187
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Get Book Here

Book Description
Often referred to as “the Big Tomato,” Sacramento is a city whose makeup is significantly more complex than its agriculture-based sobriquet implies. In River City and Valley Life, seventeen contributors reveal the major transformations to the natural and built environment that have shaped Sacramento and its suburbs, residents, politics, and economics throughout its history. The site that would become Sacramento was settled in 1839, when Johann Augustus Sutter attempted to convert his Mexican land grant into New Helvetia (or “New Switzerland”). It was at Sutter’s sawmill fifty miles to the east that gold was first discovered, leading to the California Gold Rush of 1849. Nearly overnight, Sacramento became a boomtown, and cityhood followed in 1850. Ideally situated at the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers, the city was connected by waterway to San Francisco and the surrounding region. Combined with the area’s warm and sunny climate, the rivers provided the necessary water supply for agriculture to flourish. The devastation wrought by floods and cholera, however, took a huge toll on early populations and led to the construction of an extensive levee system that raised the downtown street level to combat flooding. Great fortune came when local entrepreneurs built the Central Pacific Railroad, and in 1869 it connected with the Union Pacific Railroad to form the first transcontinental passage. Sacramento soon became an industrial hub and major food-processing center. By 1879, it was named the state capital and seat of government. In the twentieth century, the Sacramento area benefitted from the federal government’s major investment in the construction and operation of three military bases and other regional public works projects. Rapid suburbanization followed along with the building of highways, bridges, schools, parks, hydroelectric dams, and the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant, which activists would later shut down. Today, several tribal gaming resorts attract patrons to the area, while “Old Sacramento” revitalizes the original downtown as it celebrates Sacramento’s pioneering past. This environmental history of Sacramento provides a compelling case study of urban and suburban development in California and the American West. As the contributors show, Sacramento has seen its landscape both ravaged and reborn. As blighted areas, rail yards, and riverfronts have been reclaimed, and parks and green spaces created and expanded, Sacramento’s identity continues to evolve. As it moves beyond its Gold Rush, Transcontinental Railroad, and government-town heritage, Sacramento remains a city and region deeply rooted in its natural environment.

River Town

River Town PDF Author: Peter Hessler
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062028987
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Get Book Here

Book Description
A New York Times Notable book, this memoir by a journalist who lived in a small city in China is “a vivid and touching tribute to a place and its people” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the complex processes of understanding that take place when one is immersed in a radically different society. Poignant, thoughtful, funny, and enormously compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be. “This touching memoir of an American dropped into the center of China transcends the boundaries of the travel genre and will appeal to anyone wanting to learn more about the heart and soul of the Chinese people. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal “This is a colorful memoir from a Peace Corps volunteer who came away with more understanding of the Chinese than any foreign traveler has a right to expect.” —Booklist

River City

River City PDF Author: John Farrow
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
ISBN: 1443408328
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1010

Get Book Here

Book Description
On the night of the Rocket Richard Riot in 1955, the legendary Cartier Dagger is stolen from Montreal’s Sun Life Building. Many believe the dagger gives whoever possesses it mystical powers, and its journey through history is as spectacular as it is bloodstained. The same night, a police informer is found murdered in a nearby park with a dagger wound to his heart. But who murdered him, and why? Thirteen years later, Pierre Elliott Trudeau is prime minister, and the separatist movement is gaining momentum in Quebec. The case is still unsolved, and a young constable named Émile Cinq-Mars is asked to investigate. Suspenseful and labyrinthine, River City is at once a prequel to John Farrow’s bestselling novels City of Ice and Ice Lake, a panoramic window onto a city’s storied past, and a brilliant novel of politics, greed, murder and myth.

Great River City

Great River City PDF Author: Andrew Wanko
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781883982959
Category : Mississippi River
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This book examines the importance of the Mississippi River across time and through the lens of a single city: St. Louis. Features hundreds of maps, artifacts, and fascinating historic images, spanning back to St. Louis's founding and even earlier"--

Cold Mountain Path: The Ghost Town Decades of McCarthy-Kennecott, Alaska

Cold Mountain Path: The Ghost Town Decades of McCarthy-Kennecott, Alaska PDF Author: Tom Kizzia
Publisher: Porphyry Press
ISBN: 9781736755815
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book Here

Book Description
We all have ghost towns. Impermanent places we dream of returning to. Here was Alaska's. In 1938, the last copper train left the Wrangell Mountains. But the spirit of the old days-free-wheeling, self-reliant, bounty-blessed-lived on in the remote town of McCarthy. The valley's few holdouts were joined over time by a gallery of prospectors, grifters, back-to-the-landers, dreamers, escape artists, hippies, speculators, preachers, and outlaws. While the rest of Alaska boomed in the new oil age, an old and makeshift way of life persisted against the quiet undertow of the past, that ebbing toward the wilderness that was here before us. Then the modern world found its way back in. A road, a bridge, a national park. A mass shooting that left six dead. Cold Mountain Path is a deeply American saga of renunciation and renewal--a rollicking local history that is also a lyrical exploration of time, loss, and change. . . and a pulsating account of the morning that brought Alaska's ghost town decades to an end. Tom Kizzia's previous book, Pilgrim's Wilderness, was an Amazon Top-Ten Book of the Year and was named Alaska's best True Crime book by the New York Times. Kizzia has written for The New Yorker and was a longtime reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. He has a place of his own near McCarthy.

Red River Rising

Red River Rising PDF Author: Ashley Shelby
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
ISBN: 9780873515009
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
The gripping, true-life story of one of the most destructive floods in U.S. history and its effect on one city and its citizens.

River City Empire

River City Empire PDF Author: Orville D. Menard
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803248334
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"An exploration of political bossism and machine politics of the early twentieth century focused on Omaha, Nebraska, and Thomas Dennison"--Provided by publisher.

A River and Its City

A River and Its City PDF Author: Ari Kelman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520936515
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
This engaging environmental history explores the rise, fall, and rebirth of one of the nation's most important urban public landscapes, and more significantly, the role public spaces play in shaping people's relationships with the natural world. Ari Kelman focuses on the battles fought over New Orleans's waterfront, examining the link between a river and its city and tracking the conflict between public and private control of the river. He describes the impact of floods, disease, and changing technologies on New Orleans's interactions with the Mississippi. Considering how the city grew distant—culturally and spatially—from the river, this book argues that urban areas provide a rich source for understanding people's connections with nature, and in turn, nature's impact on human history.

River City

River City PDF Author: Patricia L. Walsh
Publisher: Toa Press LLC
ISBN: 9780982298909
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Walsh chronicles the dedication, self sacrifice, trials, and triumphs of practicing combat medicine in Vietnam in 1967.