In Aspects of Ancient Institutions and Geography colleagues and students honor Richard J.A. Talbert for his numerous contributions and influence on the fields of ancient history, political and social science, as well as cartography and geography. This collection of original and useful examinations is focused around the core theme of Talbert's work - how ancient individuals and groups organized their world, through their institutions and geography. The first half of the book considers institutional history in chapters on such diverse topics as the Roman Senate, Roman provincial politics and administration, healing springs, gladiators, and soldiers. Chapters on the geography of Thucydides and Alexander III, imperial geography, tracking letters and using sundials round out the second half of the book.

Deep within our own Unites States Government and elements within and outside our nation, there appears to be an insidious plot to destroy our Christian heritage and our American way of life. This will never happen as long as our citizens are armed as provided for in our Constitution. Unfortunately, most citizens are immersed in their day-to-day activities to provide for their families and do not have the time to sift through and analyze the wealth of information provided by modern technology. Those that have the time to monitor the internet and other media are flooded with information, much of which is disinformation. This causes uncertainty, fear, worry and stress on our citizens. This Decision Paper puts together seven situations that, if not acted upon and corrected, will destroy this great nation. All nations should realize that if America, as the world knows it is destroyed, the free world will cease to exist.

Volume 33 of Geographers Biobibliographical Studies adds significantly to the corpus of scholarship on geography's multiple histories and biographies with eight essays on individuals who have made major contributions to the development of geography in the twentieth century. This volume focuses on European geographers, including essays on individuals from Britain, France and Hungary. These are individuals who have made important and distinctive contributions to a diverse range of fields, including cartography, physical geography, oceanography and urban theory. As with previous volumes, these biographical essays demonstrate the importance of geographers' lives in terms of the lived experience of geography in practise.

Deserts - vast, empty places where time appears to stand still. The very word conjures images of endless seas of sand, blistering heat and a virtual absence of life. However, deserts encompass a large variety of landscapes and life beyond our stereotypes. As well as magnificent Saharan dunes under blazing sun, the desert concept encompasses the intensely cold winters of the Gobi, the snow- covered expanse of Antarctica and the rock- strewn drylands of Pakistan. Deserts are environments in perpetual flux and home to peoples as diverse as their surroundings, peoples who grapple with a broad spectrum of cultural, political and environmental issues as they wrest livelihoods from marginal lands. The cultures, environments and histories of deserts, while fundamentally entangled, are rarely studied as part of a network. To bring different disciplines together, the 1st Oxford Interdisciplinary Deserts Conference in March 2010 brought together a wide range of researchers from backgrounds as varied as physics, history, archaeology anthropology, geology and geography. This volume draws on the diversity of papers presented to give an overview of current research in deserts and drylands. Readers are invited to explore the wide range of desert environments and peoples and the ever-evolving challenges they face.

In this sequel to Kingston, Jamaica: Urban Development and Social Change, 1692 to 1962 (1975) Colin Clarke investigates the role of class, colour, race, and culture in the changing social stratification and spatial patterning of Kingston, Jamaica since independence in 1962. He also assesses the strains - created by the doubling of the population - on labour and housing markets, which are themselves important ingredients in urban social stratification. Special attention is also given to colour, class, and race segregation, to the formation of the Kingston ghetto, to the role of politics in the creation of zones of violence and drug trading in downtown Kingston, and to the contribution of the arts to the evolution of national culture. A special feature is the inclusion of multiple maps produced and compiled using GIS (geographical information systems). The book concludes with a comparison with the post-colonial urban problems of South Africa and Brazil, and an evalution of the de-colonization of Kingston.

In Apocalyptic Cartography: Thematic Maps and the End of the World in a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript, Chet Van Duzer and Ilya Dines analyse Huntington Library HM 83, an unstudied manuscript produced in Lubeck, Germany. The manuscript contains a rich collection of world maps produced by an anonymous but strikingly original cartographer. These include one of the earliest programs of thematic maps, and a remarkable series of maps that illustrate the transformations that the world was supposed to undergo during the Apocalypse. The authors supply detailed discussion of the maps and transcriptions and translations of the Latin texts that explain the maps. Copies of the maps in a fifteenth-century manuscript in Wolfenbuttel prove that this unusual work did circulate. A brief article about this book on the website of National Geographic can be found here.

The untold history of the multiracial making of the border between Canada and the United States. Often described as the longest undefended border in the world, the Canada-United States border was born in blood, conflict, and uncertainty. At the end of the American Revolution, Britain and the United States imagined a future for each of their nations that stretched across a continent. They signed treaties with one another dividing lands neither country could map, much less control. A century and a half later, they had largely fulfilled those earlier ambitions. Both countries had built nations that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and had created an expansive international border that restricted movement. The vision that seemed so clear in the minds of diplomats and politicians was never so well-defined on the ground. As A Line of Blood and Dirt argues, both countries built their border across Indigenous lands using hunger, violence, and coercion to displace existing communities and to disrupt their ideas of territory and belonging. Drawing on oral histories, map visualizations, and archival sources, Benjamin Hoy reveals the role Indigenous people played in the development of the international boundary, as well as the impact the border had on Indigenous people, European settlers, Chinese migrants, and African Americans. Unable to prevent movement at the border's physical location for over a century, Canada and the United States instead found ways to project fear across international lines. Bringing together the histories of tribes, immigration, economics, and the relationship of neighboring nations, A Line of Blood and Dirt offers a new history of Indigenous peoples and the borderland.

A full colour map, based on a digitised OS map of Beverley of about 1908, with its medieval, Georgian and Victorian past overlain and important buildings picked out. Beverley is one of England's most attractive towns with two of the country's greatest medieval parish churches, the Minster and St Mary's, and a wealth of Georgian buildings. The medieval town had three main foci: to the south the Minster, the probable origin of the town in the Saxon period, with Wednesday Market; to the north Saturday Market and St Mary's church; and to the south-east a port at the head of the canalised Beverley Beck linking to the River Hull. In the 14th century the town was one of the most populous and prosperous in Britain. This prosperity came from the cloth trade, tanning and brickmaking as well as the markets and fairs, and the many pilgrims who flocked to the shrine of St John of Beverley. By the end of the Middle Ages, the town was in decline, not helped by the dissolution of the great collegiate Minster church in 1548. Beverley's fortunes revived in the 18th century when it became the administrative capital of the East Riding of Yorkshire and a thriving social centre. The gentry, who came here for the Quarter Sessions and other gatherings together with their families, patronised the racecourse, assembly rooms, theatre and tree-lined promenade. It was they and the growing number of professionals who built the large Georgian houses, often set in extensive grounds, many of which survive. In contrast the townscape and economy of Victorian Beverley was dominated by several thriving industries, notably tanning, the manufacture of agricultural machinery and shipbuilding. The map's cover has a short introduction to the town's history, and on the reverse an illustrated and comprehensive gazetteer of Beverley's main sites of historic interest.

Using the lens of environmental history, William D. Bryan provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the post-Civil War South by framing the New South as a struggle over environmental stewardship. For more than six decades, scholars have caricatured southerners as so desperate for economic growth that they rapaciously consumed the region's abundant natural resources. Yet business leaders and public officials did not see profit and environmental quality as mutually exclusive goals, and they promoted methods of conserving resources that they thought would ensure long-term economic growth. Southerners called this idea "permanence." But permanence was a contested concept, and these business people clashed with other stakeholders as they struggled to find new ways of using valuable resources. The Price of Permanence shows how these struggles indelibly shaped the modern South. Bryan writes the region into the national conservation movement for the first time and shows that business leaders played a key role shaping the ideals of American conservationists. This book also dismantles one of the most persistent caricatures of southerners: that they had little interest in environmental quality. Conservation provided white elites with a tool for social control, and this is the first work to show how struggles over resource policy fueled Jim Crow. The ideology of "permanence" protected some resources but did not prevent degradation of the environment overall, and The Price of Permanence ultimately uses lessons from the New South to reflect on sustainability today.

This book centers on the history of polders and investigates the complex hydro-social relationships of the Jianghan Plain in late imperial China. Once a hydraulic frontier where local communities managed the polders, the Jianghan Plain had become a state-led hydro-electric powerhouse by the mid-twentieth century. Through in-depth historical analysis, this book shows how water politics, cultural practice, and ecology interplayed and transformed the landscape and waterscape of the plain from a long-term perspective. By touching on topics such as religious practice, ethnic tensions and local militarization, the author reveals a plain forever caught between land and water, and nature and culture.

This book covers new ground on the diffusion and transmission of geographical knowledge that occurred at critical junctures in the long history of the Silk Road. Much of twentieth-century scholarship on the Silk Road examined the ancient archaeological objects and medieval historical records found within each cultural area, while the consequences of long-distance interaction across Eurasia remained poorly studied. Here ample attention is given to the journeys that notions and objects undertook to transmit spatial values to other civilizations. In retracing the steps of four major circuits right across the many civilizations that shared the Silk Road, "The Journey of Maps and Images on the Silk Road" traces the ways in which maps and images surmounted spatial, historical and cultural divisions.

The conflict between Israel and Palestine has raised a plethora of unanswered questions, generated seemingly irreconcilable narratives, and profoundly transformed the land's physical and political geography. This volume seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the links between the region that is now known as Israel and Palestine and its peoples-both those that live there as well as those who relate to it as a mental, mythical, or religious landscape. Engaging the perspectives of a multidisciplinary, international group of scholars, it is an urgent collective reflection on the bonds between people and a place, whether real or imagined, tangible as its stones or ephemeral as the hopes and longings it evokes.