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.

Seashells have been the most coveted and collected of nature's creations for thousands of years. They were money before coins, jewellery before gems, art before canvas. In The Sound of the Sea, Cynthia Barnett blends cultural history and environmental science to trace our long love affair with seashells and the hidden lives of the mollusks that make them. From the mysterious glow of giant clams to the surprising origin of Shell Oil as a family business importing exotic shells, the book is filled with unforgettable stories. As it explores the perfect symmetry of a Chambered Nautilus, the pink-glossed lip of a Queen Conch or what we hear when we hold a shell to the ear, it makes a powerful argument for listening to shells-and acting on what they are telling us about the impacts of climate change on the seas, marine life and humanity.

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.

Although a member of the Royal Geographical Society, and author of a number of books on geography, little is known of William Bisiker. Published in 1902, this is an account of an expedition, led by him, across central Iceland in 1900. The five men and one woman journeyed from the north-east of the country down to the south-west, and the book also gives accounts of visits to the Faroe Islands and coastal journeys to the fjords. Including maps, photographs and an extensive appendix compiled by expedition member and botanist Arthur William Hill on the island's plant life, this work remains a detailed and engaging portrait. The impressions made upon the party by natural features such as geysers, quicksand and lava formations are vividly described, as are the visits to isolated settlements and farms. The chapter on Reykjavik covers the political situation in the country, still under Danish rule.

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.

Canada is a bounded land - a nation situated between rock and cold to the north and a border to the south. Cole Harris traces how society was reorganized - for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike - when Europeans resettled this distinctive land. Through a series of vignettes that focus on people's experiences on the ground, he exposes the underlying architecture of colonialism, from first contacts, to the immigrant experience in early Canada, to the dispossession of First Nations. In the process, he unearths fresh insights on the influence of Indigenous peoples and argues that Canada's boundedness is ultimately drawing it toward its Indigenous roots.

Exploring the creation, transformation, and imagination of Russian space as a lens through which to understand Russia's development over the centuries, this volume makes an important contribution to Russian studies and the "new spatial history." It considers aspects of the relationship between place and power in Russia from the local level to the national and from the eighteenth century through the present. Essays include: Melissa K. Stockdale, "What is a Fatherland? Changing Notions of Duty, Rights and Belonging in Russia"; Mark Bassin, "Nationhood, Natural Regions, Mestorazvitie: Environmental Discourses in Classic Eurasianism"; John Randolph, "Russian Route: The Politics of the Petersburg-Moscow Road, 1700-1800"; Richard Stites, "On the Dance Floor: Royal Power, Class, and Nationality in Servile Russia"; Patricia Herlihy, "Ab Oriente ad Ultimum Oriente: Eugen Scuyler, Russia and Central Asia"; Robert Argenbright, "Soviet Agitational Vehicles: Colonization from Place to Place"; Christopher Ely, "Street Space and Political Culture under Alexander II"; Sergei Zhuk, "Unmaking the Sacred Landscape of Orthodox Russia: Religious Pluralism, Identity Crisis, and Religious Politics on the Ukrainian Borderlands of the late Russian Empire"; Cathy A. Frierson, "Filling in the Map for Vologda's Post-Soviet Identity"; and Lisa A, "Kirschenbaum, Place, Memory and the Politics of Identity: Historical Buildings and Street Names in Leningrad-St. Petersburg."

Moldova is a new nation-state with a long history. Despite only recently gaining independence, following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moldova's roots stretch all the way back to the Principality of Moldavia, established in 1359. After centuries toiling under Ottoman control, and latterly Russian Imperial rule, the Moldovans briefly tasted independence in the early twentieth century, before being annexed by the Soviet Union. In recent times, the Transnistrian Dispute has once again threatened the sovereignty, and indeed the independence, of Moldova and this conflict remains unresolved today. For the first time in English, this book places the problems of contemporary Moldova in a long-term historical perspective. It argues that the Moldovans' complex relations with the Russians and the West are not simply the product of the Soviet era but have their roots in earlier centuries. Haynes contends that the Moldovan lands, and Moldovan identity and culture, have long been contested: by the Roman and Byzantine Empires of antiquity, by the expanding Hungarian and Polish-Lithuanian kingdoms in the Middle Ages, by the Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian and Soviet empires in more recent centuries, and by the Romanian state. The book provides a political and cultural history of the growth and development of the medieval Principality of Moldova, the Principality's partition and Russian rule in Bessarabia from 1812, Bessarabia under Romanian rule in the inter-war period, Soviet Moldova and the independent Republic of Moldova.

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.

This open access book provides a multi-perspective approach to the caravan trade in the Sahara during the 19th century. Based on travelogues from European travelers, recently found Arab sources, historical maps and results from several expeditions, the book gives an overview of the historical periods of the caravan trade as well as detailed information about the infrastructure which was necessary to establish those trade networks. Included are a variety of unique historical and recent maps as well as remote sensing images of the important trade routes and the corresponding historic oases. To give a deeper understanding of how those trading networks work, aspects such as culturally influenced concepts of spatial orientation are discussed. The book aims to be a useful reference for the caravan trade in the Sahara, that can be recommended both to students and to specialists and researchers in the field of Geography, History and African Studies.

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.

To date, over sixty medieval parks have been identified in Hertfordshire - a large number for a relatively small county. In this ground-breaking study of parks created in Hertfordshire between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries, author Anne Rowe has adopted a holistic approach to landscape history. The geographical locations of the parks have been determined and, in most cases, mapped using a combination of field- and place-name evidence, old maps and detailed fieldwork. The documentary history for each park has been compiled, including, where available, details from manorial accounts, which provide an insight into park management in medieval times. All the data for each park is presented in a valuable gazetteer, together with the cartographic and field evidence which has been used to locate the parks in today's landscape. In addition, Anne Rowe has carried out detailed analysis of the parks and their owners and explains how the parks related to the physical and social geography of the county in medieval times. There was a marked difference in the numbers of parks in different parts of the county: the density of parks in the east was double that in the west. The underlying reasons for this pattern are explored, focusing in particular on the unusual relationship between the distribution of the parks and the distribution of woodland in the county at Domesday. Based on an enormous amount of original work, this meticulously researched book opens a window onto medieval Hertfordshire and illuminates a significant aspect of the county's landscape history. A second volume, Tudor and Early Stuart Parks of Hertfordshire (2019), is also published by University of Hertfordshire Press.

Throughout history, maps have been fundamental in shaping our view of the world, and our place in it. But far from being purely scientific objects, maps of the world are unavoidably ideological and subjective, intimately bound up with the systems of power and authority of particular times and places. Mapmakers do not simply represent the world, they construct it out of the ideas of their age. In this scintillating book, Jerry Brotton examines the significance of 12 maps - from the almost mystical representations of ancient history to the satellite-derived imagery of today. He vividly recreates the environments and circumstances in which each of the maps was made, showing how each conveys a highly individual view of the world. Brotton shows how each of his maps both influenced and reflected contemporary events and how, by reading it, we can better understand the worlds that produced it. Although the way we map our surroundings is changing, Brotton argues that maps today are no more definitive or objective than they have ever been, but that they continue to define, shape and recreate the world. Readers of this book will never look at a map in quite the same way again.

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. This comprehensive and dynamic textbook is richly illustrated throughout with full-colour figures and photographs. The book will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and professionals in Earth Science, Environmental Science, Physical Geography, Geology, Botany, Zoology, Ecology, Archaeology and Anthropology

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.

To join a conversation, one must know what is being said. Writing Early America is a field report on the current state of the historiography on the colonial era-from the time of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 to the end of the American Revolution around 1784. Based on a close reading of nearly four hundred articles in leading journals published over the past decade, Trevor Burnard provides an unprecedented analysis of the direction of the field encompassed by the popular hashtag #VastEarlyAmerica. He examines scholarship on the most important areas of current research-Indigenous history, slavery and race, and gender. Burnard also demonstrates how important imperialism has become in providing a framework for colonial American history, especially for new scholarship on the American War of Independence, which historians increasingly see in its context as part of a broader Age of Revolutions. This is the first book in over thirty years to offer advanced undergraduate and graduate students and scholars a comprehensive guide to the historiography of early America.

Indonesia and its more than 17,000 islands are spread out over a surface area equivalent to that of the European Union. As an area of confluences and encounters, the Indonesian archipelago has always been one of the most important crossroads of world trade, where Austronesian ships, Arab dhows, Chinese junks, Iberian caravels, and other ships of the East India Companies berthed long before the container ships and oil tankers of today. The history of this archipelago is that of a multitude of links and connections, where the near and the far intermingle, forced to compete in a ubiquitous maritime world. The sea brings together more than she separates, and the monsoon winds have made this intersection a mandatory stop for merchants, clerics, and foreign diplomats, whose presence has left traces in the myths, monuments, arts, and traditions of contemporary Indonesia. Overlapped, blended, reinterpreted by rich and complex societies, these inflows have forged multiple worlds that the relationship with the sea has finely coloured and chiselled. Archipel invites us to discover this world, with the sea as the common thread, and an exceptional collection of major artworks as markers of a history to be discovered and admired.

In" The Lure of the Local" Lucy R. Lippard weaves together cultural studies, history, geography, and contemporary art to provide a fascinating examination of our multiple senses of place.

Divided into five parts--Around Here; Manipulating Memory; Down to Earth: Land Use; The Last Frontiers: Cities and Suburbs; and Looking Around--the book extends far beyond the confines of the art worlds, including issues of community, land use, perceptions of nature, how we produce the landscape, and how the landscape affects our lives. Praised by critics and readers alike, she consistently makes unexpected connections between contemporary art and its political, social, and cultural contexts.

Map reverse carries an illustrated gazetteer of sites of interest: approx. 6,600 wordsMap cover carries inside a brief history of Hull: 1,300 words. Illustrations: coloured engravings and early views of buildings, monuments and street scenesA full colour map, based on an Ordnance Survey map of 1928, with buildings and sites of interest picked out. Few cities have experienced Hull's uninterrupted position as one of Britain's leading centres of population and economic activity over nine centuries. The variety and richness of its architecture are too often overlooked. The map shows the main medieval and post-medieval buildings in this remarkable and interesting city, the second-most historic city of Yorkshire. The map's cover has a short introduction to the city's history, and on the reverse an illustrated and comprehensive gazetteer of Hull's main buildings and sites of interest, from medieval monasteries to cinemas and theatres, and the huge fortified citadel.

Just as global perceptions of Xinjiang have shifted dramatically, so too has scholarship on the history, culture, and politics of the Uyghur homeland experienced a sea-change. A field once dominated by philology and geopolitical analysis has, since the 1990s, become a site of vibrant interdisciplinary practice. Uyghur studies - particularly research on gender, family, and the village economy - are now often found at the intersection of anthropological fieldwork, discursive analysis, textual studies, and social history. This volume collects a series of studies on these themes, drawing upon the innovative work of one of the field's leading figures, Ildiko Beller-Hann. The result is a snapshot both of the Uyghur region (and beyond) in the midst of change, and of a field of scholarship that is evolving as the voices of people from the region themselves increasingly come to the fore. More than a reflection on the genealogy of this field's knowledge and methodologies, this is a celebration of scholarly community - and of the people at its center.

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.