![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Earth & environment > Geography > Historical geography
This alternative guidebook for one of the world's most popular tourist destinations explores all five boroughs to reveal a people's New York City. The sites and stories of A People's Guide to New York City shift our perception of what defines New York, placing the passion, determination, defeats, and victories of its people at the core. Delving into the histories of New York's five boroughs, you will encounter enslaved Africans in revolt, women marching for equality, workers on strike, musicians and performers claiming streets for their art, and neighbors organizing against landfills and industrial toxins and in support of affordable housing and public schools. The streetscapes that emerge from these groups' struggles bear the traces, and this book shows you where to look to find them. New York City is a preeminent global city, serving as the headquarters for hundreds of multinational firms and a world-renowned cultural hub for fashion, art, and music. It is among the most multicultural cities in the world and also one of the most segregated cities in the United States. The people that make this global city function-immigrants, people of color, and the working classes-reside largely in the so-called outer boroughs, outside the corporations, neon, and skyscrapers of Manhattan. A People's Guide to New York City expands the scope and scale of traditional guidebooks, providing an equitable exploration of the diverse communities throughout the city. Through the stories of over 150 sites across the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island as well as thematic tours and contemporary and archival photographs, a people's New York emerges, one in which collective struggles for justice and freedom have shaped the very landscape of the city.
This book considers how nature - in both its biological and environmental manifestations - has been invoked as a dynamic force in human history. It shows how historians, philosophers, geographers, anthropologists and scientists have used ideas of nature to explain the evolution of cultures, to understand cultural difference, and to justify or condemn colonization, slavery and racial superiority. It examines the central part that ideas of environmental and biological determinism have played in theory, and describes how these ideas have served in different ways at different times as instruments of authority, identity and defiance. The book shows how powerful and problematic the invocation of nature can be. "The Problem of Nature" covers a whole cycle of environmental history and its interpretation, from the Black Death in the fourteenth century, the first European voyages of discovery and the opening of the American frontier through to the imperialism of the nineteenth century and the example of India under colonial rule. David Arnold shows how both the natural environment and ideas about nature have changed radically over the last five centuries. The author describes the profound influence that historical and social theory and the biological sciences have had upon each other. He shows how the outcomes of their interaction not only informed and shaped the European impact upon the world and on itself, but how crucial they are to American conceptions of the society and history of the United States. He provides provocative answers to the questions of what role the environment should have in the conceptualization of time and place; and of how far societies and their histories can beunderstood from the perspectives of natural and biological sciences.
Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the increasing accuracy and legibility of cartographic projections, the proliferation of empirically based chorographies, and the popular vogue for travel narratives served to order, package, and commodify space in a manner that was critical to the formation of a unified Britain. In tandem with such developments, however, a trenchant anti-cartographic skepticism also emerged. This critique of the map can be seen in many literary works of the period that satirize the efficacy and value of maps and highlight their ideological purposes. Against the Map argues that our understanding of the production of national space during this time must also account for these sites of resistance and opposition to hegemonic forms of geographical representation, such as the map. This study utilizes the methodologies of critical geography, as well as literary criticism and theory, to detail the conflicted and often adversarial relationship between cartographic and literary representations of the nation and its geography. While examining atlases, almanacs, itineraries, and other materials, Adam Sills focuses particularly on the construction of heterotopias in the works of John Bunyan, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, and Jane Austen. These "other" spaces, such as neighborhood, home, and country, are not reducible to the map but have played an equally important role in the shaping of British national identity. Ultimately, Against the Map suggests that nation is forged not only in concert with the map but, just as important, against it.
To sail the oceans needed skill as well as courage and experience, and the sea chart with, where appropriate, the coastal view, was the tool by which ships of trade, transport or conquest navigated their course. This book looks at the history and development of the chart and the related nautical map, in both scientific and aesthetic terms, as a means of safe and accurate seaborne navigation. The Italian merchant-venturers of the early thirteenth century developed the earliest 'portulan' pilot charts of the Mediterranean. The subsequent speed of exploration by European seafarers, encompassing the New World, the extraordinary voyages around the Cape of Good Hope and the opening up of the trade to the East, India and the Spice Islands were both a result of the development of the sea chart and additionally as an aid to that development. By the eighteenth century the discovery and charting of the coasts and oceans of the globe had become a strategic naval and commercial requirement. Such involvements led to Cook's voyages in the Pacific, the search for the Northwest Passage and races to the Arctic and Antarctic. The volume is arranged along chronological and then geographical lines. Each of the ten chapters is split into two distinct halves examining the history of the charting of a particular region and the context under which such charting took place following which specific navigational charts and views together with other relevant illustrations are presented. Key figures or milestones in the history of charting are then presented in stand-alone story box features. This new edition features around 40 new charts and accompanying text.
From Improvement to City Planning emphasizes the ways people in nineteenth-century America managed urban growth. Historian Henry Binford shows how efforts to improve space were entwined with the evolution of urban governance (i.e., regulation)-and also influenced by a small group of advantaged families. Binford looks specifically at Cincinnati, Ohio, then the largest and most important interior city west of the Appalachian Mountains. He shows that it was not just industrialization, but also beliefs about morality, race, health, poverty, and "slum" environments, that demanded an improvement of urban space. As such, movements for public parks and large-scale sanitary engineering in the 1840s and '50s initiated the beginning of modern city planning. However, there were limitations and consequences to these efforts.. Many Americans believed that remaking city environments could also remake citizens. From Improvement to City Planning examines how the experiences of city living in the early republic prompted city dwellers to think about and shape urban space.
The landscape of the Netherlands has been changing constantly since the end of the last ice age, some 11,700 years ago. Where we walk today was once a polar desert, a river delta or a shallow sea. The end of the last ice age marked the beginning of a new geological period - the Holocene, the relatively warm geological epoch in which we are still living today. The Atlas of the Holocene Netherlands contains special maps, supplemented by archaeological and historical information. These maps show the geographical situation for thirteen different points in time since the last ice age, based on tens of thousands of drill samples and the latest geological, soil and archaeological research. This magnificent atlas also paints a surprising picture of the position we humans have occupied in the landscape. It addresses such questions as: How did we take advantage of the opportunities offered by the landscape? And how did we mould the landscape to suit our own purposes? The Atlas of the Holocene Netherlands will change once and for all the way you look at the Dutch landscape.
What is-and what was-"the world"? Though often treated as interchangeable with the ongoing and inexorable progress of globalization, concepts of "world," "globe," or "earth" instead suggest something limited and absolute. This innovative and interdisciplinary volume concerns itself with this central paradox: that the complex, heterogeneous, and purportedly transhistorical dynamics of globalization have given rise to the idea and reality of a finite-and thus vulnerable-world. Through studies of illuminating historical moments that range from antiquity to the era of Google Earth, each contribution helps to trace the emergence of the world in multitudinous representations, practices, and human experiences.
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.
WINNER OF THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2020 A SUNDAY TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, THE TIMES AND BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR For most of human history, the seas and oceans have been the main means of long-distance trade and communication between peoples - for the spread of ideas and religion as well as commerce. This book traces the history of human movement and interaction around and across the world's greatest bodies of water, charting our relationship with the oceans from the time of the first voyagers. David Abulafia begins with the earliest of seafaring societies - the Polynesians of the Pacific, the possessors of intuitive navigational skills long before the invention of the compass, who by the first century were trading between their far-flung islands. By the seventh century, trading routes stretched from the coasts of Arabia and Africa to southern China and Japan, bringing together the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific and linking half the world through the international spice trade. In the Atlantic, centuries before the little kingdom of Portugal carved out its powerful, seaborne empire, many peoples sought new lands across the sea - the Bretons, the Frisians and, most notably, the Vikings, now known to be the first Europeans to reach North America. As Portuguese supremacy dwindled in the late sixteenth century, the Spanish, the Dutch and then the British each successively ruled the waves. Following merchants, explorers, pirates, cartographers and travellers in their quests for spices, gold, ivory, slaves, lands for settlement and knowledge of what lay beyond, Abulafia has created an extraordinary narrative of humanity and the oceans. From the earliest forays of peoples in hand-hewn canoes through uncharted waters to the routes now taken daily by supertankers in their thousands, The Boundless Sea shows how maritime networks came to form a continuum of interaction and interconnection across the globe: 90 per cent of global trade is still conducted by sea. This is history of the grandest scale and scope, and from a bracingly different perspective - not, as in most global histories, from the land, but from the boundless seas.
In 1918, the end of the First World War triggered the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France after almost fifty years of annexation into the German Empire. Enthusiastic crowds in Paris and Alsace celebrated the return of the 'lost provinces,' but return proved far more difficult than expected. Over the following two decades, politicians, administrators, industrialists, cultural elites, and others grappled with the question of how to make the region French again. Differences of opinion emerged, and reintegration rapidly descended into a multi-faceted struggle as voices at the Parisian centre, the Alsatian periphery, and outside France's borders offered their views on how to introduce French institutions and systems into its lost borderland. Throughout these discussions, the border itself shaped the process of reintegration, by generating contact and tensions between populations on the two sides of the boundary line, and by shaping expectations of what it meant to be French and Alsatian. Borderland is the first comprehensive account of the return of Alsace to France which treats the border as a driver of change. It draws upon national, regional, and local archives to follow the difficult process of Alsace's reintegration into French society, culture, political and economic systems, and legislative and administrative institutions. It connects the microhistory of the region with the 'macro' levels of national policy, international relations, and transnational networks, and with the cross-border flows of ideas, goods, people, and cultural products that shaped daily life in Alsace as its population grappled with the meaning of return to France. In revealing the multiple voices who contributed to the region's reintegration, it underlines the ways in which regional populations and cross-border interactions have forged modern nations.
Discover Scotland with this authoritative guide to clans, tartans, and their origins. These popular maps are highly detailed, showing hundreds of arms, official insignia, crests, and tartans of the Scottish clans. This beautifully illustrated map is both decorative and informative. This map includes: Two double-sided, full-colour maps of Scotland More than 170 arms, the official insignia of clan chiefs, crest badges, and the locations of their ancient territories around the time of King James VI More than 240 tartans with corresponding clan/ family names, alphabetically arranged for easy look-up Additional information about the history of the clans and their tartans The map is ideal for those those with an interest in Scottish heraldry, clans and family history. Other titles in the series include: * Castles Map of Scotland (99780007508532) * Whiskey Map of Scotland (9780008368319)
From Improvement to City Planning emphasizes the ways people in nineteenth-century America managed urban growth. Historian Henry Binford shows how efforts to improve space were entwined with the evolution of urban governance (i.e., regulation)-and also influenced by a small group of advantaged families. Binford looks specifically at Cincinnati, Ohio, then the largest and most important interior city west of the Appalachian Mountains. He shows that it was not just industrialization, but also beliefs about morality, race, health, poverty, and "slum" environments, that demanded an improvement of urban space. As such, movements for public parks and large-scale sanitary engineering in the 1840s and '50s initiated the beginning of modern city planning. However, there were limitations and consequences to these efforts.. Many Americans believed that remaking city environments could also remake citizens. From Improvement to City Planning examines how the experiences of city living in the early republic prompted city dwellers to think about and shape urban space.
Was Gasoline, Texas, named in honor of a gas station? Nope, but the name does honor the town's original claim to fame: a gasoline-powered cotton gin. Is Paris, Texas, a reference to Paris, France? Yes: Thomas Poteet, who donated land for the town site, thought it would be an improvement over "Pin Hook," the original name of the Lamar County seat. Ding Dong's story has a nice ring to it; the name was derived from two store owners named Bell, who lived in Bell County, of course. Tracing the turning points, fascinating characters, and cultural crossroads that shaped Texas history, Texas Place Names provides the colorful stories behind these and more than three thousand other county, city, and community names. Drawing on in-depth research to present the facts behind the folklore, linguist Edward Callary also clarifies pronunciations (it's NAY-chis for Neches, referring to a Caddoan people whose name was attached to the Neches River during a Spanish expedition). A great resource for road trippers and historians alike, Texas Place Names alphabetically charts centuries of humanity through the enduring words (and, occasionally, the fateful spelling gaffes) left behind by men and women from all walks of life.
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.
The central argument of The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century is that the English kingdom which existed at the time of the Norman Conquest was defined by the geographical parameters of a set of administrative reforms implemented in the mid- to late tenth century, and not by a vision of English unity going back to Alfred the Great (871-899). In the first half of the tenth century, successive members of the Cerdicing dynasty established a loose domination over the other great potentates in Britain. They were celebrated as kings of the whole island, but even in their Wessex heartlands they probably had few means to routinely regulate the conduct of the general populace. Detailed analysis of coins, shires, hundreds, and wapentakes suggests that it was only around the time of Edgar (957/9-975) that the Cerdicing kings developed the relatively standardised administrative apparatus of the so-called 'Anglo-Saxon state'. This substantially increased their ability to impinge upon the lives of ordinary people living between the Channel and the Tees, and served to mark that area off from the rest of the island. The resultant cleft undermined the idea of a pan-British realm, and demarcated the early English kingdom as a distinct and coherent political unit. In this volume, George Molyneaux places the formation of the English kingdom in a European perspective, and challenges the notion that its development was exceptional: the Cerdicings were only one of several ruling dynasties around the fringes of the former Carolingian Empire for which the late ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries were a time of territorial expansion and consolidation.
This third edition of Reconstructing Quaternary Environments has been completely revised and updated to provide a new account of the history and scale of environmental changes during the Quaternary. The evidence is extremely diverse ranging from landforms and sediments to fossil assemblages and geochemical data, and includes new data from terrestrial, marine and ice-core records. Dating methods are described and evaluated, while the principles and practices of Quaternary stratigraphy are also discussed. The volume concludes with a new chapter which considers some of the key questions about the nature, causes and consequences of global climatic and environmental change over a range of temporal scales. This synthesis builds on the methods and approaches described earlier in the book to show how a number of exciting ideas that have emerged over the last two decades are providing new insights into the operation of the global earth-ocean-atmosphere system, and are now central to many areas of contemporary Quaternary research.
While the twentieth century's conflicting visions and exploitation of the Middle East are well documented, the origins of the concept of the Middle East itself have been largely ignored. With Dislocating the Orient, Daniel Foliard tells the story of how the land was brought into being, exploring how maps, knowledge, and blind ignorance all participated in the construction of this imagined region. Foliard vividly illustrates how the British first defined the Middle East as a geopolitical and cartographic region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their imperial maps. Until then, the region had never been clearly distinguished from "the East" or "the Orient." In the course of their colonial activities, however, the British began to conceive of the Middle East as a separate and distinct part of the world, with consequences that continue to be felt today. As they reimagined boundaries, the British produced, disputed, and finally dramatically transformed the geography of the area-both culturally and physically-over the course of their colonial era. Using a wide variety of primary texts and historical maps to show how the idea of the Middle East came into being, Dislocating the Orient will interest historians of the Middle East, the British empire, cultural geography, and cartography.
Discover the most impactful and incredible episodes from human history, from the prehistoric era to the early twenty-first century, through fifty of the most surprising and often less well-known places in the world. From the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where remains of some of our earliest tool-using ancestors were found, to the CERN laboratory, where revolutionary technologies such as the World Wide Web were developed, each entry shows its influence on not just politics, but on the economy, culture, religion and society, as well as their links to great historical figures such as Alexander the Great, Buddha and Nelson Mandela. The size of the places ranges from small geographical features like a cave in Saudi Arabia where Islam began, to larger areas or regions, like Hollywood. Many entries are cities, such Jerusalem, Amritsar, and Rome, some others are buildings, like Anne Frank's House in the Netherlands or the Confucius Temple in China, and there are even some that are rooms, such as the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles Palace. No place is too big or too small to be included, as long as it has had a significant impact on history.
Root Shock examines 3 different U.S. cities to unmask the crippling results of decades-old disinvestment in communities of color and the urban renewal practices that ultimately destroyed these neighborhoods for the advantage of developers and the elite. Like a sequel to the prescient warnings of urbanist Jane Jacobs, Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove reveals the disturbing effects of decades of insensitive urban renewal projects on communities of color. For those whose homes and neighborhoods were bulldozed, the urban modernization projects that swept America starting in 1949 were nothing short of an assault. Vibrant city blocks - places rich in culture - were torn apart by freeways and other invasive development, devastating the lives of poor residents. Fullilove passionately describes the profound traumatic stress- the "root shock"that results when a neighborhood is demolished. She estimates that federal and state urban renewal programs, spearheaded by business and real estate interests, destroyed 1,600 African American districts in cities across the United States. But urban renewal didn't just disrupt black communities: it ruined their economic health and social cohesion, stripping displaced residents of their sense of place as well. It also left big gashes in the centers of cities that are only now slowly being repaired. Focusing on the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the Central Ward in Newark, and the small Virginia city of Roanoke, Dr. Fullilove argues powerfully against policies of displacement. Understanding the damage caused by root shock is crucial to coping with its human toll and helping cities become whole. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, is a research psychiatrist at New York State Psychiatric Institute and professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia University. She is the author of five books, including Urban Alchemy.
The twelve essays in this volume reexamine a handful of perennial problems in American history from a geographical point of view. From this perspective there emerges a series of reinterpretations of the central processes that defined the American experience, whether of colonization, of regional development and sectionalism, of slavery and freedom, of urbanization and industrialization, or of working-class history. The essays encompass the first three centuries of American history, beginning with the nightmarish world of disease and death that was early Virginia and ending with the melancholy demise of socialism early in this century. Geography's mission is to comprehend changes on the earth's surface, and toward that end, geographers ponder the interactive effects of nature and culture within specific locations and times. This entails connecting human actions (historical events) with their immediate environs (ecological inquiry) and specific coordinates of place and region (locational inquiry). Most of the essays in this volume employ the variant of ecological inquiry the author calls the staple approach, focusing on primary production (agriculture, forestry, fishing) and its societal ramifications. Locational inquiry queries the spatial distribution of historical events: Why was mortality in early Virginia highest in a small zone along the James River? Why did cities flourish in early Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Carolina and not elsewhere along the Atlantic seaboard? Why was Boston the vanguard of the American Revolution? The book's first four essays, on the colonial period, reinterpret American colonization and regional development. The second four essays unravel the causes ofsectional differences in the north and south during the early national and antebellum periods. The next three essays shift to the American urban scene, tracing the influence of agrarian society on the geography of labor and labor politics between the Civil War and World War I. The book then concludes with a long and ambitious overview of the periodic structure of the entire American past. This final essay offers at once a synthesis of the various historiographic case studies and a compelling interpretation of the rhythms of American macrohistory and their geographical component. The book is illustrated with 12 halftones.
In the years leading up to Charles Darwin's 1832-6 voyage on the Beagle, the ship and its captain Robert Fitzroy (1805-65) had participated in an expedition to the desolate southern coast of South America. This three-volume work, published in 1839, describes both voyages. Volumes 1 and 2, compiled by Fitzroy, contain accounts by professional mariners. Volume 3 is the first published version of the young Darwin's now famous journal. It later appeared as a free-standing publication (1840) and in a more popular second edition (1845), both reissued in this series. Darwin's preface refers to the detailed scientific publications resulting from his research: the geological studies of volcanic islands and coral reefs (also available in the Cambridge Library Collection), and the co-authored, multi-volume zoology. Darwin expresses thanks to Fitzroy for his 'most cordial friendship', to the ship's officers for their 'undeviating kindness', and particularly to his Cambridge mentor John Stevens Henslow. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
|