The American West - where such landmarks as the Golden Gate Bridge rival wild landscapes in popularity and iconic significance - has been viewed as a frontier of technological innovation. Where Minds and Matters Meet calls attention to the convergence of Western history and the history of technology, showing that the region's politics and culture have shaped seemingly placeless, global technological practices and institutions. Drawing on political and social history as well as art history, the book's essays take the cultural measure of the region's great technological milestones, including San Diego's Panama-California Exposition, the building of the Hetch Hetchy Dam in the Sierras, and traffic planning in Los Angeles. Contributors: Amy Bix, Louise Nelson Dyble, Patrick McCray, Linda Nash, Peter Neushul, Matthew W Roth, Bruce Sinclair, L Chase Smith, Carlene Stephens, Aristotle Tympas, Jason Weems, Peter Westwick, and, Stephanie Young.

This book describes the beginning of life and its delicate balance, the thoughts and ideals of the flowers in the fields and their use of ancient principles to acquire success. It encourages every child in a fantastical way to think BIG. It begins with an alien invasion of untold beauty and goodness, rather than of fear and darkness. As the lilies grow, the entire landscape changes into an extraordinary garden of delight, concluding with words and music that will encourage even the youngest reader to dream of golden days and victorious outcomes.

Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement was the widespread acknowledgment that human beings were inescapably part of a larger ecosystem. With this book, Linda Nash gives us a wholly original and much longer history of ecological ideas of the body as that history unfolded in CaliforniaOCOs Central Valley. Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. In this account, the rise of germ theory and the pushing aside of an earlier environmental approach to illness constituted not a clear triumph of modern biomedicine but rather a brief period of modern amnesia. As Nash shows us, place-based accounts of illness re-emerged in the postwar decades, galvanizing environmental protest against smog and toxic chemicals. Carefully researched and richly conceptual, "Inescapable Ecologies" brings critically important insights to the histories of environment, culture, and public health, while offering a provocative commentary on the human relationship to the larger world."