True Gardens of the Gods

True Gardens of the Gods PDF Author: Ian Tyrrell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520920856
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
One of the most critical environmental challenges facing both Californians and Australians in the 1860s involved the aftermath of the gold rushes. Settlers on both continents faced the disruptive impacts of mining, grazing, and agriculture; in response to these challenges, environmental reformers attempted to remake the natural environment into an idealized garden landscape. As this cutting-edge history shows, an important result of this nineteenth-century effort to "renovate" nature was a far-reaching exchange of ideas between the United States—especially in California—and Australia. Ian Tyrrell demonstrates how Californians and Australians shared plants, insects, personnel, technology, and dreams, creating a system of environmental exchange that transcended national and natural boundaries. True Gardens of the Gods traces a new nineteenth-century environmental sensibility that emerged from the collision of European expansion with these frontier environments. Tyrrell traces historical ideas and personalities, provides in-depth discussions of introduced plants species (such as the eucalyptus and Monterey Pine), looks at a number of scientific programs of the time, and measures the impact of race, class, and gender on environmental policy. The book represents a new trend toward studying American history from a transnational perspective, focusing especially on a comparison of American history with the history of similar settler societies. Through the use of original research and an innovative methodology, this book offers a new look at the history of environmentalism on a regional and global scale.

True Gardens of the Gods

True Gardens of the Gods PDF Author: Ian Tyrrell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520920856
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 518

Get Book

Book Description
One of the most critical environmental challenges facing both Californians and Australians in the 1860s involved the aftermath of the gold rushes. Settlers on both continents faced the disruptive impacts of mining, grazing, and agriculture; in response to these challenges, environmental reformers attempted to remake the natural environment into an idealized garden landscape. As this cutting-edge history shows, an important result of this nineteenth-century effort to "renovate" nature was a far-reaching exchange of ideas between the United States—especially in California—and Australia. Ian Tyrrell demonstrates how Californians and Australians shared plants, insects, personnel, technology, and dreams, creating a system of environmental exchange that transcended national and natural boundaries. True Gardens of the Gods traces a new nineteenth-century environmental sensibility that emerged from the collision of European expansion with these frontier environments. Tyrrell traces historical ideas and personalities, provides in-depth discussions of introduced plants species (such as the eucalyptus and Monterey Pine), looks at a number of scientific programs of the time, and measures the impact of race, class, and gender on environmental policy. The book represents a new trend toward studying American history from a transnational perspective, focusing especially on a comparison of American history with the history of similar settler societies. Through the use of original research and an innovative methodology, this book offers a new look at the history of environmentalism on a regional and global scale.

Squatter's Republic

Squatter's Republic PDF Author: Tamara Venit Shelton
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520289099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Who should have the right to own land, and how much of it? A Squatter's Republic follows the rise and fall of the land question in the Gilded AgeÑand the rise and fall of a particularly nineteenth-century vision of landed independence. More specifically, the author considers the land question through the anti-monopolist reform movements it inspired in late nineteenth-century California. The Golden State was a squatter's republicÑa society of white men who claimed no more land than they could use, and who promised to uphold agrarian republican ideals and resist monopoly, the nemesis of democracy. Their opposition to land monopoly became entwined with public discourse on Mexican land rights, industrial labor relations, immigration from China, and the rise of railroad and other corporate monopolies.

An American Urban Residential Landscape, 1890-1920

An American Urban Residential Landscape, 1890-1920 PDF Author:
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621969827
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description


Replenishing the Earth

Replenishing the Earth PDF Author: James Belich
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199604541
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 587

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Book Description
Pioneering study of the anglophone 'settler boom' in North America, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand between the early 19th and early 20th centuries, looking at what made it the most successful of all such settler revolutions, and how this laid the basis of British and American power in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Down to Earth

Down to Earth PDF Author: Ted Steinberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198032102
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
In this ambitious and provocative text, environmental historian Ted Steinberg offers a sweeping history of our nation--a history that, for the first time, places the environment at the very center of our story. Written with exceptional clarity, Down to Earth re-envisions the story of America "from the ground up." It reveals how focusing on plants, animals, climate, and other ecological factors can radically change the way that we think about the past. Examining such familiar topics as colonization, the industrial revolution, slavery, the Civil War, and the emergence of modern-day consumer culture, Steinberg recounts how the natural world influenced the course of human history. From the colonists' attempts to impose order on the land to modern efforts to sell the wilderness as a consumer good, the author reminds readers that many critical episodes in our history were, in fact, environmental events. He highlights the ways in which we have attempted to reshape and control nature, from Thomas Jefferson's surveying plan, which divided the national landscape into a grid, to the transformation of animals, crops, and even water into commodities. The text is ideal for courses in environmental history, environmental studies, urban studies, economic history, and American history. Passionately argued and thought-provoking, Down to Earth retells our nation's history with nature in the foreground--a perspective that will challenge our view of everything from Jamestown to Disney World.

Garden of the World

Garden of the World PDF Author: Cecilia M. Tsu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199875960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Nearly a century before it became known as Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara Valley was world-renowned for something else: the succulent fruits and vegetables grown in its fertile soil. In Garden of the World, Cecilia Tsu tells the overlooked, intertwined histories of the Santa Clara Valley's agricultural past and the Asian immigrants who cultivated the land during the region's peak decades of horticultural production. Weaving together the story of three overlapping waves of Asian migration from China, Japan, and the Philippines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Tsu offers a comparative history that sheds light on the ways in which Asian farmers and laborers fundamentally altered the agricultural economy and landscape of the Santa Clara Valley, as well as white residents' ideas about race, gender, and what it meant to be an American family farmer. At the heart of American racial and national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the family farm ideal: the celebration of white European-American families operating independent, self-sufficient farms that would contribute to the stability of the nation. In California by the 1880s, boosters promoted orchard fruit growing as one of the most idyllic incarnations of the family farm ideal and the lush Santa Clara Valley the finest location to live out this agrarian dream. But in practice, many white growers relied extensively on hired help, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was largely Asian. Detailing how white farmers made racial and gendered claims to defend their dependence on nonwhite labor, how those claims shifted with the settlement of each Asian immigrant group, and how Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos sought to create their own version of the American dream in farming, Tsu excavates the social and economic history of agriculture in this famed rural community to reveal the intricate nature of race relations there.

The World Turned Inside Out

The World Turned Inside Out PDF Author: Lorenzo Veracini
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839763833
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
Many would rather change worlds than change the world. The settlement of communities in 'empty lands' somewhere else has often been proposed as a solution to growing contradictions. While the lands were never empty, sometimes these communities failed miserably, and sometimes they prospered and grew until they became entire countries. Building on a growing body of transnational and interdisciplinary research on the political imaginaries of settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination, this book uncovers and critiques an autonomous, influential, and coherent political tradition - a tradition still relevant today. It follows the ideas and the projects (and the failures) of those who left or planned to leave growing and chaotic cities and challenging and confusing new economic circumstances, those who wanted to protect endangered nationalities, and those who intended to pre-empt forthcoming revolutions of all sorts, including civil and social wars. They displaced, and moved to other islands and continents, beyond the settled regions, to rural districts and to secluded suburbs, to communes and intentional communities, and to cyberspace. This book outlines the global history of a resilient political idea: to seek change somewhere else as an alternative to embracing (or resisting) transformation where one is.

Natural States

Natural States PDF Author: Richard W. Judd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136524592
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Richard Judd and Christopher Beach define the environmental imagination as the attempt to secure 'a sense of freedom, permanence, and authenticity through communion with nature.' The desire for this connection is based on ideals about nature, wilderness, and the livable landscape that are personal, variable, and often contradictory. Judd and Beach are interested in the public expression of these ideals in post-World War II environmental politics. Arguing that the best way to study the relationship between popular values and politics is through local and regional records, they focus on Maine and Oregon, states both rich in natural beauty and environmentalist traditions, but distinct in their postwar economic growth. Natural States reconstructs the environmental imagination from public commentary, legislative records, and other documents. Judd and Beach trace important divisions within the environmental movement, noting that they were balanced by a consistent, civic-minded vision of environmental goods shared by all. They demonstrate how tensions from competing ideals sustained the movement, contributed to its successes, but also limited its achievements. In the process, they offer insight into the character of the broader environmental movement as it emerged from the interplay of local, state, and national politics. The study ends in the 1970s when spectacular legislative achievements at the national level were masking a decline in mainstream civic engagement in state politics. The authors note the rise of the private ecotopia and the increasing complexity in the way Americans viewed their connections with the natural world. Yet, today, despite wide variations in beliefs and lifestyles, a majority of Americans still consider themselves to be environmentalists. In Natural States, environmental politics emerges less as a conflict between people who do and do not value nature, and more as a debate about the way people define and then chose to live with nature. In their attempt to place the passion for nature within a changing political and cultural context, Judd and Beach shed light on the ways that ideals unify and divide the environmental movement and act as the source of its enduring popularity.

Environmental History in East Asia

Environmental History in East Asia PDF Author: Tsui-jung Liu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317974905
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
As environmental history has developed as growing sub-discipline within the study of history, great emphasis has been placed on the importance of adopting an interdisciplinary approach. Indeed, as Environmental History in East Asia shows, by drawing on research and methodologies from the fields of science, technology, geography, geology and ecology, we are able to develop a much richer understanding of a region’s history. This book provides a comprehensive examination of environmental history in East Asia, ranging temporally from the Ming dynasty to the 21st Century and spatially across China, Japan and Taiwan. Split into four parts, the chapters cover a wide range of fascinating topics, comparing environmental thought and policy in the East and West, the transformation of the landscape, land resource utilization and impact of agriculture and disasters and diseases across the region. A diverse selection of case studies are used to illustrate the chapters, including the role of Daoism, Qing pasturelands and 21st century swine flu. Truly interdisciplinary in approach, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian environmentalism, environmental history, Asian anthropology, Asian development studies and Asian history more generally.

A Passion for Nature

A Passion for Nature PDF Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199782245
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Donald Worster's A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards, yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores his marriage and family life, his relationship with his abusive father, his many friendships with the humble and famous (including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and his role in founding the modern American conservation movement. Inspired by Muir's passion for the wilderness, Americans created a long and stunning list of national parks and wilderness areas, Yosemite most prominent among them. Yet the book also describes a Muir who was a successful fruit-grower, a talented scientist and world-traveler, a doting father and husband, and a self-made man of wealth and political influence. The winner of numerous book awards, A Passion for Nature was also named a Best Book of 2008 by Washington Post Book World. It is the first comprehensive biography of Muir to appear in six decades.