The History of Costa Rica

The History of Costa Rica PDF Author: Iván Molina Jiménez
Publisher: Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica
ISBN: 9789977674681
Category : Costa Rica
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description

The History of Costa Rica

The History of Costa Rica PDF Author: Iván Molina Jiménez
Publisher: Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica
ISBN: 9789977674681
Category : Costa Rica
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description


The Green Republic

The Green Republic PDF Author: Sterling Evans
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292789289
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
With over 25 percent of its land set aside in national parks and other protected areas, Costa Rica is renowned worldwide as "the green republic." In this very readable history of conservation in Costa Rica, Sterling Evans explores the establishment of the country's national park system as a response to the rapid destruction of its tropical ecosystems due to the expansion of export-related agriculture. Drawing on interviews with key players in the conservation movement, as well as archival research, Evans traces the emergence of a conservation ethic among Costa Ricans and the tangible forms it has taken. In Part I, he describes the development of the national park system and "the grand contradiction" that conservation occurred simultaneously with massive deforestation in unprotected areas. In Part II, he examines other aspects of Costa Rica's conservation experience, including the important roles played by environmental education and nongovernmental organizations, campesino and indigenous movements, ecotourism, and the work of the National Biodiversity Institute.

Costa Rican Natural History

Costa Rican Natural History PDF Author: Daniel H. Janzen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022616120X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 829

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Book Description
This volume is a synthesis of existing knowledge about the flora and fauna of Costa Rica. The major portion of the book consists of detailed accounts of agricultural species, vegetation, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds, and insects. "This is an extraordinary, virtually unique work. . . . The tremendous amount of original, previously unpublished, firsthand information is remarkable."—Peter H. Raven, Director, Missouri Botanical Garden "An essential resource for anyone interested in tropical biology. . . . It can be used both as an encyclopedia—a source of facts on specific organisms—and as a source of ideas and generalizations about tropical ecology."—Alan P. Smith, Ecology

The Costa Rica Reader

The Costa Rica Reader PDF Author: Steven Palmer
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822382814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Long characterized as an exceptional country within Latin America, Costa Rica has been hailed as a democratic oasis in a continent scorched by dictatorship and revolution; the ecological mecca of a biosphere laid waste by deforestation and urban blight; and an egalitarian, middle-class society blissfully immune to the violent class and racial conflicts that have haunted the region. Arguing that conceptions of Costa Rica as a happy anomaly downplay its rich heritage and diverse population, The Costa Rica Reader brings together texts and artwork that reveal the complexity of the country’s past and present. It characterizes Costa Rica as a site of alternatives and possibilities that undermine stereotypes about the region’s history and challenge the idea that current dilemmas facing Latin America are inevitable or insoluble. This essential introduction to Costa Rica includes more than fifty texts related to the country’s history, culture, politics, and natural environment. Most of these newspaper accounts, histories, petitions, memoirs, poems, and essays are written by Costa Ricans. Many appear here in English for the first time. The authors are men and women, young and old, scholars, farmers, workers, and activists. The Costa Rica Reader presents a panoply of voices: eloquent working-class raconteurs from San José’s poorest barrios, English-speaking Afro-Antilleans of the Limón province, Nicaraguan immigrants, factory workers, dissident members of the intelligentsia, and indigenous people struggling to preserve their culture. With more than forty images, the collection showcases sculptures, photographs, maps, cartoons, and fliers. From the time before the arrival of the Spanish, through the rise of the coffee plantations and the Civil War of 1948, up to participation in today’s globalized world, Costa Rica’s remarkable history comes alive. The Costa Rica Reader is a necessary resource for scholars, students, and travelers alike.

"What Happen"

Author: Paula Palmer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Black people
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description


Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia

Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia PDF Author: Jeffrey Quilter
Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks
ISBN: 9780884022947
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The lands between Mesoamerica and the Central Andes are famed for the rich diversity of ancient cultures that inhabited them. Throughout this vast region, from about AD 700 until the sixteenth-century Spanish invasion, a rich and varied tradition of goldworking was practiced. The amount of gold produced and worn by native inhabitants was so great that Columbus dubbed the last New World shores he sailed as Costa Rica—the "Rich Coast." Despite the long-recognized importance of the region in its contribution to Pre-Columbian culture, very few books are readily available, especially in English, on these lands of gold. Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia now fills that gap with eleven articles by leading scholars in the field. Issues of culture change, the nature of chiefdom societies, long-distance trade and transport, ideologies of value, and the technologies of goldworking are covered in these essays as are the role of metals as expressions and materializations of spiritual, political, and economic power. These topics are accompanied by new information on the role of stone statuary and lapidary work, craft and trade specialization, and many more topics, including a reevaluation of the concept of the "Intermediate Area." Collectively, the volume provides a new perspective on the prehistory of these lands and includes articles by Latin American scholars whose writings have rarely been published in English.

Costa Rica After Coffee

Costa Rica After Coffee PDF Author: Lowell Gudmundson
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807176788
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
Costa Rica After Coffee explores the political, social, and economic place occupied by the coffee industry in contemporary Costa Rican history. In this follow-up to the 1986 classic Costa Rica Before Coffee, Lowell Gudmundson delves deeply into archival sources, alongside the individual histories of key coffee-growing families, to explore the development of the co-op movement, the rise of the gourmet coffee market, and the societal transformations Costa Rica has undergone as a result of the coffee industry’s powerful presence in the country. While Costa Rican coffee farmers and co-ops experienced a golden age in the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence and expansion of a gourmet coffee market in the 1990s drastically reduced harvest volumes. Meanwhile, urbanization and improved education among the Costa Rican population threatened the continuance of family coffee farms, because of the lack of both farmland and a successor generation of farmers. As the last few decades have seen a rise in tourism and other industries within the country, agricultural exports like coffee have ceased to occupy the same crucial space in the Costa Rican economy. Gudmundson argues that the fulfillment of promises of reform from the co-op era had the paradoxical effect of challenging the endurance of the coffee industry.

The Saints of Progress

The Saints of Progress PDF Author: Carmen Kordick
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817320024
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
A reshaping of traditional understandings of Costa Rica and its national identity The Saints of Progress: A History of Coffee, Migration, and Costa Rican National Identity chronicles the development of the Tarrazú Valley, a historically remote—although internationally celebrated—coffee-growing region. Carmen Kordick’s work traces the development of this region from the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twenty-first century to consider the nation-building process from the margins, while also questioning traditional scholarly works that have reproduced, rather than deconstructed, Costa Rica’s exceptionalist national mythology, which hail Costa Rica as Central America’s “white,” democratic, nonviolent, and egalitarian republic. In this compelling political, economic, and lived history, Kordick suggests that Costa Rica’s exceptionalist and egalitarian mythology emerged during the Cold War, as revolution, civil war, military dictatorship, and state violence plagued much of Central America. From the vantage point of Costa Rica’s premier coffee-producing region, she examines local, national, and transnational processes. This deeply textured narrative details the inauguration of coffee capitalism, which heightened existing class divisions; a successful armed revolt against the national government, which forged the current political regime; and the onset of massive out-migration to the United States. Kordick’s research incorporates more than one hundred oral histories and thousands of archival sources gathered in both Costa Rica and the United States to produce a human history of Costa Rica’s past. Her work on the recent past profiles the experiences of migrants in the United States, mostly in New Jersey, where many undocumented Costa Ricans find low-paid work in the restaurant and landscaping sectors. The result is a fine-grained examination of Tarrazú’s development from the 1820s to the present that reshapes traditional understandings of Costa Rica and its national past.

The Butterflies of Costa Rica and Their Natural History

The Butterflies of Costa Rica and Their Natural History PDF Author: Philip J. DeVries
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691028897
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Volume II of biologist Philip J. DeVries's study of the butterflies of Costa Rica and their natural history provides the first detailed treatment of over 250 species of Costa Rican butterflies in the family Riodinidae. This work is a sequel to Volume I which focused on butterflies of the Papilionidae, Pieridae, and Nymphalidae groups. color plates; 80 halftones; 13 line illus. 3 maps and 13 tables.

The Ecolaboratory

The Ecolaboratory PDF Author: Robert Fletcher
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 081654011X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Despite its tiny size and seeming marginality to world affairs, the Central American republic of Costa Rica has long been considered an important site for experimentation in cutting-edge environmental policy. From protected area management to ecotourism to payment for environmental services (PES) and beyond, for the past half-century the country has successfully positioned itself at the forefront of novel trends in environmental governance and sustainable development. Yet the increasingly urgent dilemma of how to achieve equitable economic development in a world of ecosystem decline and climate change presents new challenges, testing Costa Rica’s ability to remain a leader in innovative environmental governance. This book explores these challenges, how Costa Rica is responding to them, and the lessons this holds for current and future trends regarding environmental governance and sustainable development. It provides the first comprehensive assessment of successes and challenges as they play out in a variety of sectors, including agricultural development, biodiversity conservation, water management, resource extraction, and climate change policy. By framing Costa Rica as an “ecolaboratory,” the contributors in this volume examine the lessons learned and offer a path for the future of sustainable development research and policy in Central America and beyond.