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Books > Earth & environment > Geography > Historical geography
Safari Nation opens new lines of inquiry in the study of national
parks in Africa and the rest of the world. The Kruger National Park
is South Africa's most iconic nature reserve, renowned for its rich
flora and fauna. According to author Jacob Dlamini, there is
another side to the park, a social history neglected by scholars
and popular writers alike in which blacks (meaning Africans,
Coloureds, and Indians) occupy center stage. Safari Nation details
the ways in which black people devoted energies to conservation and
to the park over the course of the twentieth century--engagement
that transcends the stock (black) figure of the laborer and the
poacher. By exploring the complex and dynamic ways in which blacks
of varying class, racial, religious, and social backgrounds related
to the Kruger National Park, and with the help of previously unseen
archival photographs, Dlamini's narrative also sheds new light on
how and why Africa's national parks--often derided by scholars as
colonial impositions--survived the end of white rule on the
continent. Relying on oral histories, photographs, and archival
research, Safari Nation engages both with African historiography
and with ongoing debates about the "land question," democracy, and
citizenship in South Africa.
Reproduction of 48 maps from Lincolnshire's past sheds new light on
the county's history. The low-lying parts of Lincolnshire are
covered by an array of maps of intermediate scope, covering a
greater area than a single parish but less than the whole county.
Typically produced in connection with drainage or water transport,
and considerably predating the Ordnance Survey, to which many are
comparable, they go back as far as the medieval period, with the
remarkable Kirkstead Psalter Map of the West and Wildmore Fens
[c.1232-39], and continue to the late nineteenth century. . This
volume covers the Witham Valley, with the East, West and Wildmore
Fens north of Boston, but extending as far as Grantham and
Skegness, reproducing the most important of the maps and listing
the less useful ones. The history of the drainage of the area is
unusually dramatic. By 1750 the Witham was a failed river: the
winter floods were worse than they had been for centuries and
navigation from Boston to Lincoln had ceased. Over the following
sixty years, local interests, aided by some able engineers, brought
both navigation and drainage to a state of perfection that made
Lincolnshire prosperous and fed the industrial north. These maps,
reproduced here to a very high quality and in both colour and black
and white, are an essential tool for understanding this history,
and the volume thus illuminates certain episodes that have
previously been opaque. They are accompanied by a cartobibliography
and introduction.
The so-called land question dominates political discourse in
British Columbia. Unstable Properties reverses the usual approach
– investigating Aboriginal claims to Crown land – to reframe
the issue as a history of Crown attempts to solidify claims to
Indigenous territory. From the historical-geographic processes
through which the BC polity became entrenched in its present
territory to key events of the twenty-first century, the authors
highlight the unstable ideological foundation of land and title
arrangements. In the process, they demonstrate that only by
understanding diverse interpretations of sovereignty, governance,
territory, and property can we move toward meaningful
reconciliation.
Located in the often-contentious center of the European continent,
German territory has regularly served as a primary tool through
which to understand and study Germany's economic, cultural, and
political development. Many German geographers throughout the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became deeply invested in
geopolitical determinism-the idea that a nation's territorial
holdings (or losses) dictate every other aspect of its existence.
Taking this as his premise, Mingus focuses on the use of maps as
mediums through which the United States, Great Britain, and the
Soviet Union sought to reshape German national identity after the
Second World War. As important as maps and the study of geography
have been to the field of European history, few scholars have
looked at the postwar development of occupied Germany through the
lens of the map-the most effective means to orient German citizens
ontologically within a clearly and purposefully delineated spatial
framework. Mingus traces the institutions and individuals involved
in the massive cartographic overhaul of postwar Germany. In doing
so, he explores not only the causes and methods behind the
production and reproduction of Germany's mapped space but also the
very real consequences of this practice.
Hundreds of exceptional cartographic images are scattered
throughout medieval and early modern Arabic, Persian, and Turkish
manuscript collections. The plethora of copies created around the
Islamic world over the course of eight centuries testifies to the
enduring importance of these medieval visions for the Muslim
cartographic imagination. With Medieval Islamic Maps, historian
Karen C. Pinto brings us the first in-depth exploration of medieval
Islamic cartography from the mid-tenth to the nineteenth century.
Pinto focuses on the distinct tradition of maps known collectively
as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik,
or KMMS), examining them from three distinct angles--iconography,
context, and patronage. She untangles the history of the KMMS maps,
traces their inception and evolution, and analyzes them to reveal
the identities of their creators, painters, and patrons, as well as
the vivid realities of the social and physical world they depicted.
In doing so, Pinto develops innovative techniques for approaching
the visual record of Islamic history, explores how medieval Muslims
perceived themselves and their world, and brings Middle Eastern
maps into the forefront of the study of the history of cartography.
The only compact yet comprehensive survey of environmental and
cultural forces that have shaped the visual character and
geographical diversity of the settled American landscape. The book
examines the large-scale historical influences that have molded the
varied human adaptation of the continent's physical topography to
its needs over more than 500 years. It presents a synoptic view of
myriad historical processes working together or in conflict, and
illustrates them through their survival in or disappearance from
the everyday landscapes of today.
A full colour map, where the city in about 1480 is shown against a
background of a detailed Ordnance Survey of the early 20th century.
In 1480, a high-ranking official called William Worcestre revisited
his native city of Bristol and wrote a detailed description of all
the streets and their buildings and the activities that went on
there. Worcestre's description, combined with archaeological
information and historical research, has allowed the recreation in
map form of the city at that time. It was a prosperous and growing
city, already trading extensively with Europe and poised to start a
new trade with the Americas. Its merchant houses, churches and
largely vanished city walls show a town that was easily one of the
top five in England in the late Middle Ages. The map's cover has a
short introduction to the city in 1480 and an explanation of who
William Worcestre was. On the reverse is an illustrated and
comprehensive gazetteer of Bristol's main sites of medieval
interest. Produced in association with the University of Bristol.
Prussian-born cartographer Oscar Hinrichs was a key member of
Stonewall Jackson's staff, collaborated on maps with Jedediah
Hotchkiss, and worked alongside such prominent Confederate leaders
as Joe Johnston, Richard H. Anderson, and Jubal Early. After being
smuggled along the Rebel Secret Line in southern Maryland by John
Surratt Sr., his wife Mary, and other Confederate sympathizers,
Hinrichs saw action in key campaigns from the Shenandoah Valley and
Antietam to Gettysburg, Petersburg, and Appomattox. After the
Confederate surrender, Hinrichs was arrested alongside his friend
Henry Kyd Douglas and imprisoned under suspicion of having played a
role in the Booth conspiracy, though the charges were later
dropped.
Hinrichs's detailed wartime journals, published here for the first
time, shed new light on mapmaking as a tool of war, illuminate
Stonewall Jackson's notoriously superior strategic and tactical use
of terrain, and offer unique perspectives on the lives of common
soldiers, staff officers, and commanders in Lee's army.
Impressively comprehensive, Hinrichs's writings constitute a
valuable and revelatory primary source from the Civil War
era.
This open access book uses an interdisciplinary approach that not
only focuses on social organization but also analyzes how societies
and ecological settings were interwoven. How did early modern
indigenous Sami inhabitants in interior northwest Fennoscandia
build institutions for governance of natural resources? The book
answers this question by exploring how they made decisions
regarding natural resource management, mainly with regard to wild
game, fish, and grazing land and illuminate how Sami users, in a
changing economy, altered the long-term rules for use of land and
water in a self-governance context. The early modern period was a
transforming phase of property rights due to fundamental changes in
Sami economy: from an economy based on fishing and hunting to an
economy where reindeer pastoralism became the main occupation for
many Sami. The book gives a new portrayal of how proficiently and
systematically indigenous inhabitants organized and governed
natural assets and how capable they were in building highly
functioning institutions for governance.
Muskoka. Now a premier destination for nature tourists and wealthy
cottagers, the region underwent a profound transition at the turn
of the twentieth century. Making Muskoka uncovers the connections
between lived experience and identity in rural communities shaped
by tourism at a time when sustainable opportunities for a sedentary
life were few on the Canadian Shield. This rocky section of Ontario
was transformed from an Indigenous homeland to a settler community
and a part-time playground for tourists and cottagers. But what
were the consequences for those who lived there year-round?
"WESTWARD HO! FOR OREGON AND CALIFORNIA!" In the eerily warm spring
of 1846, George Donner placed this advertisement in a local
newspaper as he and a restless caravan prepared for what they hoped
would be the most rewarding journey of a lifetime. But in eagerly
pursuing what would a century later become known as the "American
dream," this optimistic-yet-motley crew of emigrants was met with a
chilling nightmare; in the following months, their jingoistic
excitement would be replaced by desperate cries for help that would
fall silent in the deadly snow-covered mountains of the Sierra
Nevada. We know these early pioneers as the Donner Party, a name
that has elicited horror since the late 1840s. With The Best Land
Under Heaven, Wallis has penned what critics agree is "destined to
become the standard account" (Washington Post) of the notorious
saga. Cutting through 160 years of myth-making, the "expert
storyteller" (True West) compellingly recounts how the unlikely
band of early pioneers met their fate. Interweaving information
from hundreds of newly uncovered documents, Wallis illuminates how
a combination of greed and recklessness led to one of America's
most calamitous and sensationalized catastrophes. The result is a
"fascinating, horrifying, and inspiring" (Oklahoman) examination of
the darkest side of Manifest Destiny.
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