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Books > Earth & environment > Geography > Historical geography
Imagine what the world once looked like as you discover places that have disappeared from modern atlases in this stunningly illustrated and award-winning book. Have you ever wondered about cities that lie forgotten under the dust of newly settled land? Rivers and seas whose changing shape has shifted the landscape around them? Or, even, places that have seemingly vanished, without a trace? Following the international bestselling success of Atlas of Improbable Places and Atlas of the Unexpected, Travis Elborough takes you on a voyage to all corners of the world in search of the lost, disappearing and vanished. Discover ancient seats of power and long-forgotten civilizations through the Mayan city of Palenque; delve into the mystery of a disappeared Japanese islet; and uncover the incredible hidden sites like the submerged Old Adaminaby, once abandoned but slowly remerging. With beautiful maps and stunning colour photography, Atlas of Vanishing Places shows these places as they once were as well as how they look today: a fascinating guide to lost lands and the fragility of our relationship with the world around us. WINNER Illustrated Book of the Year - Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2020 Also in the Unexpected Atlas series: Atlas of Improbable Places, Atlas of Untamed Places, Atlas of the Unexpected.
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.
As the first book-length examination of the role of German print culture in mediating Europe’s knowledge of the newly discovered people of Africa, South Asia, and the Americas, this work highlights a unique and early incident of visual accuracy and an unprecedented investment in the practice of ethnography.
The Spanish word cimarron, meaning "wild" or "untamed," refers to a region in the southern Rocky Mountains where control of timber, gold, coal, and grazing lands long bred violent struggle. After the U.S. occupation following the 1846-1848 war with Mexico, this tract of nearly two million acres came to be known as the Maxwell Land Grant. WhenCimarron Meant Wild presents a new history of the collision that occurred over the region's resources between 1870 and 1900. Author David L. Caffey describes the epic late-nineteenth-century range war in an account deeply informed by his historical perspective on social, political, and cultural issues that beset the American West to this day. Cimarron country churned with the tensions of the Old West-land disputes, lawlessness, violence, and class war among miners, a foreign corporation, local elites, Texas cattlemen, and the haughty "Santa Fe Ring" of lawyerly speculators. And present, still, were the indigenous Jicarilla Apache and Mouache Ute people, dispossessed of their homeland by successive Spanish, Mexican, and American regimes. A Mexican grant of uncertain size and bounds, awarded to Carlos Beaubien and Guadalupe Miranda in 1841 and later acquired by Lucien Maxwell, marked the beginning of a fight for control of the land and set off overlapping conflicts known as the Colfax County War, the Maxwell Land Grant War, and the Stonewall War. Caffey draws on new research to paint a complex picture of these events, and of those that followed the sale of the claim to investors in 1870. These clashes played out over the following thirty years, involving the new English owners, miners and prospectors, livestock grazers and farmers, and Native Americans. Just how wild was the Cimarron country in the late 1800s? And what were the consequences for the region and for those caught up in the conflict? The answers, pursued through this remarkable work, enhance our understanding of cultural and economic struggle in the American West.
THE TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE Drowned. Buried by sand. Decimated by plague. Plunged off a cliff. This is the forgotten history of Britain's lost cities, ghost towns and vanished villages: our shadowlands. 'A beautiful book, truly original . . . It is a marvellous achievement.' IAN MORTIMER, author of The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England 'Well researched, beautifully written and packed with interesting detail.' CLAIRE TOMALIN 'An exquisitely written, moving and elegiac exploration.' SUZANNAH LIPSCOMB 'Consistently interesting . . . Green's passion and historical vision bursts from the page, summoning up the past in surround sound and sensual prose.' CAL FLYN, THE TIMES (author of Islands of Abandonment) Historian Matthew Green travels across Britain to tell the forgotten history of our lost cities, ghost towns and vanished villages. Revealing the extraordinary stories of how these places met their fate - and exploring how they have left their mark on our landscape and our imagination - Shadowlands is a deeply evocative and dazzlingly original account of Britain's past. 'An eloquent tour of lost communities.' PD SMITH, GUARDIAN 'A haunting, lyrical tour around the lost places of Britain.' CHARLOTTE HIGGINS, author of Under Another Sky 'A miraculous work of resurrection, stinging in a perpetual present'. IAIN SINCLAIR, author of The Gold Machine 'Beautifully written.' SUNDAY TIMES 'Startling.' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Splendid.' THE HERALD 'Compelling.' HISTORY TODAY 'Excellent.' THE SPECTATOR 'Fascinating.' DAILY MAIL 'Accomplished.' CAUGHT BY THE RIVER 'Outstanding.' MIRROR
Originally published in 1957. Within the compact range of fifty-six maps, this atlas depicts clearly and concisely the expansion of Islam outwards from the Arabian Peninsula and outlines the rise and decline of the various Muslim states and dynasties over a territory stretching from Spain to China. Maps have also been devoted to trade products and routes, both in the heartland of Islam and in the basins of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. This volume represents a series of maps which together present a full survey of the history of Islam in time and space.
The Great Bahamas Hurricane of 1929, also known as the Great Andros Island Hurricane of 1929, was the only major hurricane during the very inactive 1929 North Atlantic hurricane season. The Great Bahamas Hurricane of 1929 was perhaps one of the greatest and deadliest hurricanes to impact the Bahamas and is often regarded as the greatest Bahamian hurricane of the twentieth century. It was the only storm on record to last for three consecutive days over the Bahamas, with pounding torrential rainfall and strong, gusty winds. The storm killed 134 persons in the Bahamas, mostly mariners and sponge fishermen, as it directly hit the islands of Nassau and Andros. This thoroughly researched history considers this intense storm and its aftermath, offering an exploration of an important historical weather event that has been neglected in previous study. Also included is a harrowing account of a dog called Speak Your Mind who rescued a sponge fisherman at sea. Through unique historical photographs of actual damage, author and veteran meteorologist Wayne Neely shows the widespread devastation left in the wake of this tremendous storm. Drawing upon many newspaper accounts, ship reports, and Family Island Commissioners reports from throughout the Bahamas, the author provides a fascinating glimpse of this hurricane and the devastation it caused the Bahamas.
Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India's constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s-60s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India's future federal constitution. Despite this the conference is unanimously read as a failure, for not having comprehensively reconciled the competing demands of liberal and Indian National Congress politicians, of Hindus and Muslims, and of British versus Princely India. This book argues that the conference's three sessions were vital sites of Indian and imperial politics that demand serious attention. It explores the spatial politics of the conference in terms of its imaginary geographies, infrastructures, host city, and how the conference was contested and represented. The book concludes by asking who gained through representing the conference as a failure and explores it, instead, as a teeming political, social and material space.
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.
William Bartram's journeys around North America in the late 18th century crossed through much of what was then Native American territory. In the 1790s when this book was first published, the United States was newly formed and was expanding beyond its original thirteen colonies. However, American settlement into the distant lands beyond the Appalachians was limited and gradual. The vast expanse of land was unknown, and much was inhabited by Native American tribes. Determined to traverse and discover the lands of North America, William Bartram set out from the city of Philadelphia, making his way toward the south of the continent. Along his way he describes the wilderness terrain, rivers, landscape and peoples he meets. Many of the Native American tribes he encountered were welcoming, viewing Bartram as a strange curiosity. He would join the natives to eat at feasts, observing their lives and customs, learning their dialects and eventually gaining their trust and friendship.
Ancient Chinese walls, such as the Great Wall of China, were not sovereign border lines. Instead, sovereign space was zonally exerted with monarchical powers expressed gradually over an area, based on possibilities for administrative action. The dynamically shifting, ritualized articulation of early Chinese sovereignty affects the interpretation of the spatial application of state force, including its cartographic representations. In Designing Boundaries in Early China, Garret Pagenstecher Olberding draws on a wide array of source materials concerning the territorialization of space to make a compelling case for how sovereign spaces were defined and regulated in this part of the ancient world. By considering the ways sovereignty extended itself across vast expanses in early China, Olberding informs our understanding of the ancient world and the nature of modern nation-states.
Brill's Companion to Ancient Geography edited by S. Bianchetti, M. R. Cataudella, H. J. Gehrke is the first collection of studies on historical geography of the ancient world that focuses on a selection of topics considered crucial for understanding the development of geographical thought. In this work, scholars, all of whom are specialists in a variety of fields, examine the interaction of humans with their environment and try to reconstruct the representations of the inhabited world in the works of ancient historians, scientists, and cartographers. Topics include: Eudoxus, Dicaearchus, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Agatharchides, Agrippa, Strabo, Pliny and Solinus, Ptolemy, and the Peutinger Map. Other issues are also discussed such as onomastics, the boundaries of states, Pythagorism, sacred itineraries, measurement systems, and the Holy Land.
The book reveals the mysteries of civilizations concealed in proper and personal names in ancient Indian texts. In a nutshell, using numerous examples of similar names and events, the author establishes that the geographical background and historical contexts of the ancient Indian texts such as the Rig and Atharva Vedas, Samhitas, Brahmanas, Puranas, and even the later two Epics were in the Ancient Near East. The proper names that often indicate the geographical regions are well connected with Asia, Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, and particularly, with the territory called Canaan. Canaan's location in between Mesopotamia and Egypt makes it possible to speculate the Near Eastern geographical background and historical context of the ancient Indian texts. Dr. Liny Srinivasan traces these connections with the help of historical linguistics tools such as systematic changes that may have taken place during history of languages like Sanskrit, Greek and hieroglyphic Egyptian. The toponymic names indicate some of the geographical regions that cover a large area from ancient Syria-Palestine to the coasts of Asia Minor, Egypt and even to Ethiopia. That makes it possible to think of the time of the Hyksos rule of an Empire extending from Egypt to Asia. The Rigveda authors may have been in Egypt during the rules of the Hyksos foreign kings of Egypt. The book will open up some different ways of explorations in history, language, archaeology, and culture. The scholars interested in culture and history of the entire region mentioned above will find the book exciting as this change in concepts has the potential not just to shed some light on the missing links in ancient Indian texts, it could also fill the gaps in the ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern history.
In 1937 the British Royal Commission headed by Lord Peel proposed
solving the Arab-Jewish conflict by partitioning Palestine into two
nation-states. The concept of partition in exchange for a state was
acceptable to the Jewish Agency Executive, but not the details set
out by the Royal Commission, and thus in 1937-38 the Agency
formulated an alternative plan for consideration by the British
authorities.
Contending that Japan's industrial and imperial revolutions were also geographical revolutions, Karen Wigen's interdisciplinary study analyzes the changing spatial order of the countryside in early modern Japan. Her focus, the Ina Valley, served as a gateway to the mountainous interior of central Japan. Using methods drawn from historical geography and economic development, Wigen maps the valley's changes--from a region of small settlements linked in an autonomous economic zone, to its transformation into a peripheral part of the global silk trade, dependent on the state. Yet the processes that brought these changes--industrial growth and political centralization--were crucial to Japan's rise to imperial power. Wigen's elucidation of this makes her book compelling reading for a broad audience.
Part of the What Everyone Needs to Know (R) series, David Day's book on Antarctica examines the most forbidding and formidably inaccessible continent on Earth. Antarctica was first discovered by European explorers in 1820, and for over a century following this, countries competed for the frozen land's vast marine resources-namely, the skins and oil of seals and whales. Soon the entire territory played host to competing claims by rival nations. The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 was meant to end this contention, but countries have found other means of extending control over the land, with scientific bases establishing at least symbolic claims. Exploration and drilling by the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Japan, and others has led to discoveries about the world's climate in centuries past-and in the process intimations of its alarming future. Delving into the history of the continent, Antarctic wildlife, arguments over governance, underwater mountain rangers, and the continent's use in predicting coming global change, Day's work sheds new light on a territory that, despite being the coldest, driest, and windiest continent in the world, will continue to be the object of intense speculation and competition.
This innovative book explores how the making of Edinburgh as an influential Enlightenment capital depended on a series of spatial processes that extended across urban, regional, national and global scales. Edinburgh was an Enlightenment city of regional, national and global influence. But how did the people of Enlightenment Edinburgh understand and order their world? How did they encounter, compare and produce different kinds of spaces, from the urban to the world scale? And how did this city set the universal standards by which other places should be judged and transformed? The Geographies of Enlightenment Edinburgh answers these questions by exploring the thousands of urban plans, county surveys, travel accounts and encyclopaedias that passed through a busy Edinburgh bookshop over four decades. It reveals how these geographical publications were produced and shared, and sheds light on the people who bought and used them - including moral philosophers, silk merchants, school teachers, ship's surgeons and slave owners. This is the story of how specific methods of mapping space came ultimately to predict and organize it, creating a new world in Edinburgh's image. By connecting global processes of knowledge production to intimate accounts of its reception in the city, this book deepens our understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment and the world it made.
Europe where the sun dares scarce appear For freezing meteors and congealed cold.' - Christopher Marlowe In this innovative and compelling work of environmental history, Philipp Blom chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, a crisis that would transform the entire social and political fabric of Europe. While hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, by the end of the sixteenth century the temperature plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbours were covered with ice, birds literally dropped out of the sky, and 'frost fairs' were erected on a frozen Thames - with kiosks, taverns, and even brothels that become a semi-permanent part of the city. Recounting the deep legacy and sweeping consequences of this 'Little Ice Age', acclaimed historian Philipp Blom reveals how the European landscape had ineradicably changed by the mid-seventeenth century. While apocalyptic weather patterns destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations, Blom brilliantly shows how they also gave rise to the growth of European cities, the appearance of early capitalism, and the vigorous stirrings of the Enlightenment. A sweeping examination of how a society responds to profound and unexpected change, Nature's Mutiny will transform the way we think about climate change in the twenty-first century and beyond.
"Will delight the visual learner. ... For the college student, the general reader, and the merely curious". -- American Reference Book Annual "Schmidt has filled a large gap. ... Superior quality, wide coverage, and considerable excellence". -- Journal of World History
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