Cape Town's iconic Table Mountain and the surrounding peninsula has been a crucible for attempts to integrate the social and ecological dimensions of wild fire. This environmental history of humans and wildfire outlines these interactions from the practices of Khoikhoi herders to the conflagrations of January 2000. The region's unique, famously diverse fynbos vegetation has been transformed since European colonial settlement, through urbanisation and biological modifications, both intentional (forestry) and unintentional (biological invasions). In all the diverse visions people have formed for Table Mountain, aesthetic and utilitarian, fire has been regarded as a central problem. This book shows how scientific understandings of fire in fynbos developed slowly in the face of strong prejudices. Human impacts were intensified in the twentieth century, which provides the temporal focus for the book. The disjunctures between popular perception, expert knowledge, policy and management are explored, and the book supplements existing short-term scientific data with proxies on fire incidence trends recovered from historical records.

The Gold Rush era was an amazing time in our country's history. California had just been occupied during the Mexican-American War and wasn't officially a U.S. territory yet when gold was discovered in 1848. Suddenly the whole world was electrified by the news and tales of men digging vast amounts of wealth out of the ground, even finding gold nuggets just lying around. Within five years, 250,000 miners dug up more than $200 million in gold--about $600 billion in today's dollars."Gold "offers a feel for what it was like to live through the heady days of the discovery and exploitation of gold in California in the mid-1800s through firsthand accounts, short stories, and tall tales written by the people who were there. These eyewitness accounts offer an immediacy that brings the events to life.

The act of writing is intimately bound up with the flow and eddy of a writer's being-within-the-world; the everyday practices, encounters and networks of social life. Exploring the geographies of literary practice in the period 1840-1910, this book takes as its focus the work, or craft, of authorship, exploring novels not as objects awaiting interpretation, but as spatial processes of making meaning. As such, it is interested in literary creation not only as something that takes place - the situated nature of putting pen to paper - but simultaneously as a process that escapes such placing. Arguing that writing is a process of longue duree, the book explores the influence of family and friends in the creative process, it draws attention to the role that travel and movement play in writing and it explores the wider commitments of authorial life, not as indicators of intertextuality, but as part of the creative process. In taking this seventy year period as its focus, this book moves beyond the traditional periodisations that have characterised literary studies, such as the Victorian or Edwardian novel, the nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century novel or Romanticism, social realism and modernism. It argues that the literary environment was not one of watershed moments; there were continuities between writers separated by several decades or writing in different centuries. At the same time, it draws attention to a seventy year period in which the value of literary work and culture were being contested and transformed. Place and the Scene of Literary Practice will be key reading for those working in Human Geography, particularly Cultural and Historical Geography, Literary Studies and Literary History.

After multiple editions and printings in just two years, the bestselling 'The Maps of Gettysburg' is available for the first time in a full-color, hardcover edition

Thousands of books and articles have been written about Gettysburg, but the operation remains one of the most complex and difficult to understand. Bradley Gottfried's groundbreaking 'The Maps of Gettysburg: An Atlas of the Gettysburg Campaign, June 3 - July 13, 1863' is a unique and thorough study of this multifaceted campaign.

The 'Maps of Gettysburg' breaks down the entire operation into thirty map sets or "action-sections" enriched with 144 detailed, full-page color maps comprising the entire campaign. These cartographic originals bore down to the regimental and battery level and include the march to and from the battlefield and virtually every significant event in between. At least two-and as many as twenty-maps accompany each map set. Keyed to each piece of cartography is a full facing page of detailed text describing the units, personalities, movements, and combat (including quotes from eyewitnesses) depicted on the accompanying map, all of which makes the Gettysburg story come alive.

This presentation makes it easy for readers to quickly locate a map and text on virtually any portion of the campaign, from the march into Pennsylvania during June to the last Confederate withdrawal of troops across the Potomac River on July 13, 1863. Serious students of the battle will appreciate the extensive and authoritative endnotes and complete order of battle. They will also want to bring the book along on their trips to the battlefield.

Perfect for the easy chair or for stomping the hallowed ground of Gettysburg, 'The Maps of Gettysburg' is a seminal work that belongs on the bookshelf of every serious and casual student of the battle.

About the Author: Bradley M. Gottfried, Ph.D., is the President of the College of Southern Maryland. An avid Civil War historian, Dr. Gottfried is the author of five books, including 'Brigades of Gettysburg: The Union and Confederate Brigades at the Battle of Gettysburg' (2002). He is currently working with co-editor Theodore P. Savas on a Gettysburg Campaign encyclopedia.

Volume thirty-one of Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies brings together nine essays on leading geographers and their work. With its publication, the cumulative record of geographers' lives and works in GBS exceeds 460 essays. Here, the editors bring forward critical appraisals of six French geographers, and so illustrate the rich traditions of geographical scholarship in that country; of a leading Portuguese figure; a Briton who played a major role in establishing geography in modern New Zealand; and a British woman who pioneered connections between the history of geography in practice and the histories of science and technology. Geographers' lives and geography's making is wonderfully illuminated in international, national and cross-disciplinary context.

A timely examination of the ways in which sixteenth-century understandings of the world were framed by classical theory. The long sixteenth century saw a major shift in European geographical understanding: in the space of little more than a hundred years Western Europeans moved to see the world as a place in which all parts of the sphere were made by God for human exploitation and to interact with one another. Taking such a scenario as its historical backdrop, Framing the Early Modern World examines the influence of Greek and Roman ideas on the formulation of new geographical theories in sixteenth-century western Europe. While discussions of inhabitability dominate the geographical literature throughout the sixteenth century, humanist geographers of the sixteenth century, trained in Greek and Roman writings, found in them the key intellectual tools which allowed the oikoumene (the habitable world) to be redefined as a globally-connected world. In this world, all parts of the sphere were designed to be in communication with one another. The coincidence of the Renaissance and the period of European exploration enabled a new geographical understanding fashioned as much by classical theory as by early modern empirical knowledge. Newly discovered lands could then be defined, exploited and colonized. In this way, the author argues, the seeds of the modern era of colonization, expansionism and ultimately globalization were sown. Framing the Early Modern World is a timely work, contributing to a growing discourse on the origins of globalization and the roots of modernity.

Volume twenty-nine of Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies has as its subject matter seven essays covering British and French regionalists, one of the world's leading cultural geographers, a quantitative geographer turned historical geographer and student of geopolitics, a pioneering medical geographer and a leading theoretician of geography's multiple engagements with the urban experience. In their different ways and with reference to Australia, Britain, France, Sweden and the United States of America, all were products of - and direct influences upon - the emergence, strength and thematic diversity of geography in the twentieth century. Geographers 29 thus provides key insight into the shaping of a discipline and of its practitioners in modern context.

Originally published in 1844, also in two volumes, The Historical Geography of Arabia is now an important document in the historical development of Christian theological study. With the rapid expansion of European interests in the Middle East during the nineteenth century, the Christian Church discovered a reawakened interest in the lands from which its religion had sprung. At the same time, closer contacts with the Muslim faith produced in many churchmen the need to reassert their own faith and to seek for proofs of the foundations of their religion in its Old Testament setting. In Arabia, it was believed, resided the very roots of Christianity, hidden for centuries by the desert sands but now revealed to explorers and questing theologians. 'We may now know, in their own handwriting, what the earliest post-diluvian men and nations thought, and felt, and believed, not merely about this life...but about God, about religion.'It is to the study of these 'post-diluvian' men, their settlements and their ancient inscriptions that the Rev. Forster devotes much of his work: 'if I may resume briefly the evidence here in question...their amount is this: in the Adite monument at Hisn Ghorab stands registered the incontrovertible fact, that the oldest monument in the world contains, at once, the fullest, and purest declaration of the great central truth of the Gospel. ..'

Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire provides the first wide-ranging environmental history of the heyday of European imperialism, from the late nineteenth century to the end of the colonial era. It focuses on the ecological dimensions of the explosive growth of tropical commodity production, global trade, and modern resource management-transformations that still visibly shape our world today-and how they were related to broader social, cultural, and political developments in Europe's colonies. Covering the overseas empires of all the major European powers, Corey Ross argues that tropical environments were not merely a stage on which conquest and subjugation took place, but were an essential part of the colonial project, profoundly shaping the imperial enterprise even as they were shaped by it. The story he tells is not only about the complexities of human experience, but also about people's relationship with the ecosystems in which they were themselves embedded: the soil, water, plants, and animals that were likewise a part of Europe's empire. Although it shows that imperial conquest rarely represented a sudden bout of ecological devastation, it nonetheless demonstrates that modern imperialism marked a decisive and largely negative milestone for the natural environment. By relating the expansion of modern empire, global trade, and mass consumption to the momentous ecological shifts that they entailed, this book provides a historical perspective on the vital nexus of social, political, and environmental issues that we face in the twenty-first-century world.

The dramatic, tumultuous, often tragic human events that erupted in the Balkan Peninsula following the collapse of communism between 1989 and 1991 have captured the Western world's attention throughout the past decade. The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of the Balkans provides 50 two-color, full-page maps, each accompanied by a facing page of explanatory text. These maps illustrate key moments in Balkans history in a way that is immediate and comprehensible, making it come alive. Students will regard it as a useful reference, and general readers will enjoy it for its clarity and wealth of information.

Originally published in 1844, also in two volumes, 'The Historical Geography of Arabia' is now an important document in the historical development of Christian theological study. With the rapid expansion of European interest in the Middle East during the nineteenth century, the Christian Church discovered a reawakened interest in the lands from which its religion had sprung. At the same time, closer contacts with the Muslim faith produced in many Churchmen the need to reassert their own faith and to seek for proofs of the foundations of their religion in its Old Testament setting. In Arabia, it was believed, resided the very roots of Christianity, hidden for centuries by the desert sands but now revealed to explorers and questing theologians. 'We may now know, in their own handwriting, what the earliest post-diluvian men and nations thought, and felt, and believed, not merely about this life...but about God, about religion.' It is to the study of these 'post-diluvian' men, their settlements and their ancient inscriptions that the Rev. Forster devotes much of his work: 'If I may resume briefly the eivdences here in question...their amount is this: in the Adite monument at Hisn Ghorab stands registered the incontrovertible fact, that the oldest monument in the world contains, at once, the fullest, and purest declaration of the great central truth of the Gospel. ..' Such evidence, and the conclusion reached by the author, are here republished in facsimile.

By examining the metropolitan fringes of Houston in Montgomery County, Texas, and Washington, D.C., in Loudoun County, Virginia, this book combines rural, environmental, and agricultural history to disrupt our view of the southern metropolis. Andrew C. Baker examines the local boosters, gentlemen farmers, historical preservationists, and nature-seeking suburbanites who abandoned the city to live in the metropolitan countryside during the twentieth century. These property owners formed the vanguard of the antigrowth movement that has defined metropolitan fringe politics across the nation. In the rural South, subdivisions, reservoirs, homesteads, and historical villages each obscured the troubling legacies of racism and rural poverty and celebrated a refashioned landscape. That landscape's historical and environmental "authenticity" served as a foil to the alienation and ugliness of suburbia. Using a source base that includes the records of preservation organizations and local, state, and federal government agencies, as well as oral histories, Baker explores the distinct roots of the environmental politics and the shifting relationship between city and country within these metropolitan fringe regions.

The latest in the series that includes best-selling That's Not in My American History Book and That's Not in My Science Book, this book brings geography to life exploring the "who" behind the discovery of various lands and the "what" behind how our world changes. From the earliest compass to today's handheld GPS systems, author Kate Kelly shows how people throughout time have navigated the world. She also rectifies the past by explaining why some people have gotten short shrift in geography books. (If Leif Eriksson's mom were alive, she would pre-order a copy of this book ) Kelly also explores "human geography," including such diverse subjects as how geography affects the spread of human disease and how the global marketplace is causing our world to shrink. While discovery of new lands may have been the most vital part of the world five hundred years ago, today preservation is key to maintaining the land we have. The last section of the book examines what we do to our world and what will happen if we fail at conservation. And don't forget about water our most important natural resource and seventy percent of our world's surface A chapter in this section is devoted to this vital substance.

Both fire and climatic variability have monumental impacts on the dynamics of temperate ecosystems. These impacts can sometimes be extreme or devastating as seen in recent El Nino/La Nina cycles and in uncontrolled fire occurrences. This volume brings together research conducted in western North and South America, areas of a great deal of collaborative work on the influence of people and climate change on fire regimes. In order to give perspective to patterns of change over time, it emphasizes the integration of paleoecological studies with studies of modern ecosystems. Data from a range of spatial scales, from individual plants to communities and ecosystems to landscape and regional levels, are included. Contributions come from fire ecology, paleoecology, biogeography, paleoclimatology, landscape and ecosystem ecology, ecological modeling, forest management, plant community ecology and plant morphology. The book gives a synthetic overview of methods, data and simulation models for evaluating fire regime processes in forests, shrublands and woodlands and assembles case studies of fire, climate and land use histories. The unique approach of this book gives researchers the benefits of a north-south comparison as well as the integration of paleoecological histories, current ecosystem dynamics and modeling of future changes.

In 1875, a team of cartographers, geologists, and scientists under the direction of Ferdinand V. Hayden entered the Four Corners area for what they thought would be a calm summer's work completing a previous survey. Their accomplishments would go down in history as one of the great American surveying expeditions of the nineteenth century. By skillfully weaving the surveyors' diary entries, field notes, and correspondence with newspaper accounts, historians Robert S. McPherson and Susan Rhoades Neel bring the Hayden Survey to life. Mapping the Four Corners provides an entertaining, engaging narrative of the team's experiences, contextualized with a thoughtful introduction and conclusion. Accompanied by the great photographer William Henry Jackson, Hayden's team quickly found their trip to be more challenging than expected. The travelers describe wrangling half-wild pack mules, trying to sleep in rain-soaked blankets, and making tea from muddy, alkaline water. Along the way, they encountered diverse peoples, evidence of prehistoric civilizations, and spectacular scenery - Hispanic villages in Colorado and New Mexico; Mesa Verde, Hovenweep, and other Anasazi sites; and the Hopi mesas. Not everyone they met was glad to see them: in southeastern Utah surveyors fought and escaped a band of Utes and Paiutes who recognized that the survey meant dispossession from their homeland. Hayden saw his expedition as a scientific endeavor focused on geology, geographic description, cartographic accuracy, and even ethnography, but the search for economic potential was a significant underlying motive. As this book shows, these pragmatic scientists were on the lookout for gold beneath every rock, grazing lands in every valley, and economic opportunity around each bend in the trail. The Hayden Survey ultimately shaped the American imagination in contradictory ways, solidifying the idea of ""progress"" - and government funding of its pursuit - while also revealing, via Jackson's photographs, a landscape with a beauty hitherto unknown and unimagined.

This book is the first to explore the deep and lasting impacts of the largest colonial trading company, the British East India Company on the natural environment. The contributors - drawn from a wide range of academic disciplines - illuminate the relationship between colonial capital and the changing environment between 1600 and 1857.

The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict traces not only the tangled and bitter history of the Arab-Jewish struggle from the early twentieth century to the present, including the death of Yasser Arafat and recent proposals for compromise and co-operation, it also illustrates the current moves towards finding peace, and the efforts to bring the horrors of the fighting to an end through negotiation and agreed boundaries. In 227 maps, the complete history of the conflict is revealed, including: The Prelude and Background to the Conflict - from the presence of Jews in Palestine before the Arab conquest to the attitude of Britain to the Arabs and Jews since 1915 The Jewish National Home - from the early Jewish settlement and the Zionist plan for Palestine in 1919 to the involvement of the Arab world from 1945 to the present day The Intensification of the Conflict - from the Arab response to the United Nations partition plan of November 1947 to the declaration of Israeli independence in May 1948 The State of Israel - from the Israeli War of Independence and the Suez and Six Day Wars to the October War (the Yom Kippur War), the first and second intifadas, the suicide-bomb campaign, the Israel-Hezbollah War of 2006, Operation Cast lead against the Gaza Strip in 2009, the Gaza Flotilla of 2012 and Nakba Day 2011 The Moves to find Peace - from the first and second Camp David talks and the death of Arafat, to the continuing search for peace, including the Annapolis Conference, 2007, the work of the Quartet Emissary, Tony Blair 2007-2011, and the ongoing Palestinian search for statehood.