Author: Emery N. Castle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 592
Get Book
Book Description
The literature on rural America, to the extent that it exists, has largely been written by urban-based scholars perpetuating out-of-date notions and stereotypes or by those who see little difference between rural and agricultural concerns. As a result, the real rural America remains much misunderstood, neglected, or ignored by scholars and policymakers alike. In response, Emery Castle offers The Changing American Countryside, a volume that will forever change how we look at this important subject. Castle brings together the writings of eminent scholars from several disciplines and varying backgrounds to take a fresh and comprehensive look at the "forgotten hinterlands." These authors examine the role of non-metropolitan people and places in the economic life of our nation and cover such diverse issues as poverty, industry, the environment, education, family, social problems, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, government, public policy, and regional diversity The authors are especially effective in demonstrating why rural America is so much more than just agriculture. It is in fact highly diverse, complex, and interdependent with urban America and the international market place. Most major rural problems, they contend, simply cannot be effectively addressed in isolation from their urban and international connections. To do so is misguided and even hazardous, when one-fourth of our population and ninety-seven per cent of our land area is rural. Together these writings not only provide a new and more realistic view of rural life and public policy, but also suggest how the field of rural studies can greatly enrich our understanding of national life.
Author: Thomas R. Vale
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780299094843
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198
Get Book
Book Description
Photographs and descriptions show how U.S. Highway 40, from Atlantic City to San Francisco, has changed since 1953.
Author: Elizabeth Rudd
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 146163430X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Get Book
Book Description
This collection explores the dynamics of the modern, middle-class American family and its near-constant state of transition. The editors introduce the book by situating it within the context of work, family, and ethnographic research on middle-class families in the United States. Emerging and established scholars contributed chapters based on their original field research, following each chapter with a personal reflection on doing field work. The volume concludes with an original essay by Kathryn Dudley, an anthropologist who has spent decades studying the intersections of work, family, and class in American culture. As a whole, the volume highlights how culture shapes family life amid shifting social and economic landscapes. The authors, working in the fields of anthropology and sociology, observed daily life at workplaces and in homes, interviewing people about their work, their children, and their ideas about what makes a good family. They report on their fieldwork in essays rich with the detail of everyday life, revealing the fascinating diversity of American middle-class families through chapters about gay co-father families, African American stay-at-home mothers, first-time fathers, rural refugees from corporate America, well-off white mothers, Taiwanese immigrant churches, the fetal ultrasound, and more. The Changing Landscape of Work and Family in the American Middle Class is an excellent text for classes in anthropology, sociology, American culture, family studies, work and family, and gender studies.
Author: Ronald L. Lewis
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807862975
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Get Book
Book Description
In 1880, ancient-growth forest still covered two-thirds of West Virginia, but by the 1920s lumbermen had denuded the entire region. Ronald Lewis explores the transformation in these mountain counties precipitated by deforestation. As the only state that lies entirely within the Appalachian region, West Virginia provides an ideal site for studying the broader social impact of deforestation in Appalachia, the South, and the eastern United States. Most of West Virginia was still dominated by a backcountry economy when the industrial transition began. In short order, however, railroads linked remote mountain settlements directly to national markets, hauling away forest products and returning with manufactured goods and modern ideas. Workers from the countryside and abroad swelled new mill towns, and merchants ventured into the mountains to fulfill the needs of the growing population. To protect their massive investments, capitalists increasingly extended control over the state's legal and political systems. Eventually, though, even ardent supporters of industrialization had reason to contemplate the consequences of unregulated exploitation. Once the timber was gone, the mills closed and the railroads pulled up their tracks, leaving behind an environmental disaster and a new class of marginalized rural poor to confront the worst depression in American history.
Author: Timothy Silver
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521387392
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Get Book
Book Description
Silver traces the effects of English settlement on South Atlantic ecology, showing how three cultures interacted with their changing environment.
Author: Benjamin R. Cohen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300154925
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 287
Get Book
Book Description
This text examines the cultural conditions that brought agriculture and science together in 19th-century America. Integrating the history of science, environmental history and science studies, this text shows how and why agrarian Americans accepted, resisted and shaped scientific ways of knowing the land.
Author: Samuel N. Stokes
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801855474
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 484
Get Book
Book Description
"[These] stories—of stopping unwanted highways, protecting open space, finding financing to preserve historical buildings—make Saving America's Countryside an inspiring resource guide."—Utne Reader A new edition of the book that received the Historic Preservation Book Prize and the American Society for Landscape Architects' Honor Award Since publication of the first edition of Saving America's Countryside in 1989, the fight to save America's rural resources has met with much success. Approaches considered experimental just a decade ago—greenways and heritage areas, for example—are now widespread. Yet at the same time, such disquieting developments as continuing suburban sprawl, the weakening of federal laws, and the so-called property rights movement all suggest that work remains to be done. Saving America's Countryside was the first and is still the only comprehensive, step-by-step guide to protecting the natural, historic, scenic, and agricultural resources of a rural community. The authors show how to organize a conservation effort, inventory available resources, pass effective new laws, set up land trusts, take advantage of federal programs, and change public attitudes. The thoroughly revised and updated second edition reports on changes in conservation over the past eight years and adds a chapter on making economic development compatible with rural conservation. It includes new case studies, more than fifty new illustrations, and a section on heritage tourism. As in the previous edition, the detailed case studies document a variety of successful—and often surprisingly innovative—conservation efforts by residents of rural communities throughout the United States.
Author: Peggy Levitt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Get Book
Book Description
A provocative examination of how new realities of religion and migration are subtly challenging the very definition of what it means to be an American. Sociology professor Levitt argues that immigrants no longer trade one membership card for another, but stay close to their home countries, indelibly altering American religion and values with experiences and beliefs imported from Asia, Latin America and Africa. The book is a pointed response to Samuel Huntington's famous clash of civilisations thesis and looks at global religions' organisation for the first time.
Author: Chris Wilson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520229617
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Get Book
Book Description
A collection of seventeen essays examining the field of American cultural landscapes past and present. The role of J. B. Jackson and his influence on the field is a explored in many of them.
Author: Carmelo Esterrich
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822983451
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Get Book
Book Description
From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Puerto Rico was swept by a wave of modernization, transforming the island from a predominantly rural society to an unquestionably urban one. A curious paradox ensued, however. While the island underwent rapid urbanization, and the rhetoric of economic development reigned over official discourses, the newly installed insular government, along with some academic circles and radio and television media, constructed, promoted, and sponsored a narrative of Puerto Rican culture based on rural subjects, practices, and spaces. By examining a wide range of cultural texts, but focusing on the film production of the Division of Community Education, the popular dance music of Cortijo y su combo, and the literary texts of Jose Luis Gonzalez and Rene Marques, Concrete and Countryside offers an in-depth analysis of how Puerto Ricans responded to this transformative period. It also shows how the arts used a battery of images of the urban and the rural to understand, negotiate, and critique the innumerable changes taking place on the island.
