Author :
Publisher : Reader's Digest Association
Page : 342 pages
File Size : 40,2 MB
Release : 1997
Category : Nature
ISBN : 9780895779489
Contains the answers to over 500 questions about American natural history including how do hibernating animals know when to wake up, how were the Great Lakes formed, and how do woodpeckers detect food through solid wood.
Author : Ellen Stroud
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 26,75 MB
Release : 2012-12-15
Category : Nature
ISBN : 0295804459
The once denuded northeastern United States is now a region of trees. Nature Next Door argues that the growth of cities, the construction of parks, the transformation of farming, the boom in tourism, and changes in the timber industry have together brought about a return of northeastern forests. Although historians and historical actors alike have seen urban and rural areas as distinct, they are in fact intertwined, and the dichotomies of farm and forest, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture break down when the focus is on the history of Northeastern woods. Cities, trees, mills, rivers, houses, and farms are all part of a single transformed regional landscape. In an examination of the cities and forests of the northeastern United States-with particular attention to the woods of Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont-Ellen Stroud shows how urbanization processes there fostered a period of recovery for forests, with cities not merely consumers of nature but creators as well. Interactions between city and hinterland in the twentieth century Northeast created a new wildness of metropolitan nature: a reforested landscape intricately entangled with the region's cities and towns.
Author : Hans Huth
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 29,97 MB
Release : 1990-01-01
Category : Nature
ISBN : 9780803272477
Hans Huth was for many years Curator of Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago and a consultant for the U.S. National Park Service. For this new Bison Book edition, Douglas H. Strong has written an introduction discussing recent developments in the environmental movement and the contribution of Nature and the American to the burgeoning crusade for nature.
Author : Gregg Mitman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 27,75 MB
Release : 1992-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226532370
Although science may claim to be "objective," scientists cannot avoid the influence of their own values on their research. In The State of Nature, Gregg Mitman examines the relationship between issues in early twentieth-century American society and the sciences of evolution and ecology to reveal how explicit social and political concerns influenced the scientific agenda of biologists at the University of Chicago and throughout the United States during the first half of this century. Reacting against the view of nature "red in tooth and claw," ecologists and behavioral biologists such as Warder Clyde Allee, Alfred Emerson, and their colleagues developed research programs they hoped would validate and promote an image of human society as essentially cooperative rather than competitive. Mitman argues that Allee's religious training and pacifist convictions shaped his pioneering studies of animal communities in a way that could be generalized to denounce the view that war is in our genes.
Author : Barbara Novak Altschul Professor of Art History Barnard College and Columbia University (Emerita)
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 18,2 MB
Release : 2007-01-05
Category : Art
ISBN : 0195345665
In this richly illustrated volume, featuring more than fifty black-and-white illustrations and a beautiful eight-page color insert, Barbara Novak describes how for fifty extraordinary years, American society drew from the idea of Nature its most cherished ideals. Between 1825 and 1875, all kinds of Americans--artists, writers, scientists, as well as everyday citizens--believed that God in Nature could resolve human contradictions, and that nature itself confirmed the American destiny. Using diaries and letters of the artists as well as quotes from literary texts, journals, and periodicals, Novak illuminates the range of ideas projected onto the American landscape by painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand, Fitz H. Lane, and Martin J. Heade, and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederich Wilhelm von Schelling. Now with a new preface, this spectacular volume captures a vast cultural panorama. It beautifully demonstrates how the idea of nature served, not only as a vehicle for artistic creation, but as its ideal form. "An impressive achievement." --Barbara Rose, The New York Times Book Review "An admirable blend of ambition, elan, and hard research. Not just an art book, it bears on some of the deepest fantasies of American culture as a whole." --Robert Hughes, Time Magazine
Author : Mark Somos
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 509 pages
File Size : 22,23 MB
Release : 2019-04-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0190909560
American States of Nature transforms our understanding of the American Revolution and the early makings of the Constitution. The journey to an independent United States generated important arguments about the existing condition of Americans, in which rival interpretations of the term "state of nature" played a crucial role. "State of nature" typically implied a pre-political condition and was often invoked in support of individual rights to property and self-defense and the right to exit or to form a political state. It could connote either a paradise, a baseline condition of virtue and health, or a hell on earth. This mutable phrase was well-known in Europe and its empires. In the British colonies, "state of nature" appeared thousands of times in juridical, theological, medical, political, economic, and other texts from 1630 to 1810. But by the 1760s, a distinctively American state-of-nature discourse started to emerge. It combined existing meanings and sidelined others in moments of intense contestation, such as the Stamp Act crisis of 1765-66 and the First Continental Congress of 1774. In laws, resolutions, petitions, sermons, broadsides, pamphlets, letters, and diaries, the American states of nature came to justify independence at least as much as colonial formulations of liberty, property, and individual rights did. In this groundbreaking book, Mark Somos focuses on the formative decade and a half just before the American Revolution. Somos' investigation begins with a 1761 speech by James Otis that John Adams described as "a dissertation on the state of nature," and celebrated as the real start of the Revolution. Drawing on an enormous range of both public and personal writings, many rarely or never before discussed, the book follows the development of America's state-of-nature discourse to 1775. The founding generation transformed this flexible concept into a powerful theme that shapes their legacy to this day. No constitutional history of the Revolution can be written without it.
Author : Sarah Bonnemaison
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 683 pages
File Size : 49,31 MB
Release : 2003-09-02
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1134455380
Winner of the 2006 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award! The word 'nature' comes from natura, Latin for birth - as do the words nation, native and innate. But nature and nation share more than a common root, they share a common history where one term has been used to define the other. In the United States, the relationship between nation and nature has been central to its colonial and post-colonial history, from the idea of the noble savage to the myth of the frontier. Narrated, painted and filmed, American landscapes have been central to the construction of a national identity. Architecture and Nature presents an in-depth study of how changing ideas of what nature is and what it means for the country have been represented in buildings and landscapes over the past century.
Author : James W. Ceaser
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 11,24 MB
Release : 2006-03-31
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780674021587
In this inaugural volume of the Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures, Ceaser traces how certain “foundational” ideas—including nature, history, and religion—have been understood and used over the course of American history. Three commentators challenge his arguments, and a spirited debate about large and enduring questions in American politics ensues.
Author : Stefanie K. Dunning
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 32,66 MB
Release : 2021-04-22
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1496832957
In Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, author Stefanie K. Dunning considers both popular and literary texts that range from Beyoncé’s Lemonade to Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. These key works restage Black women in relation to nature. Dunning argues that depictions of protagonists who return to pastoral settings contest the violent and racist history that incentivized Black disavowal of the natural world. Dunning offers an original theoretical paradigm for thinking through race and nature by showing that diverse constructions of nature in these texts are deployed as a means of rescrambling the teleology of the Western progress narrative. In a series of fascinating close readings of contemporary Black texts, she reveals how a range of artists evoke nature to suggest that interbeing with nature signals a call for what Jared Sexton calls “the dream of Black Studies”—abolition. Black to Nature thus offers nuanced readings that advance an emerging body of critical and creative work at the nexus of Blackness, gender, and nature. Written in a clear, approachable, and multilayered style that aims to be as poignant as nature itself, the volume offers a unique combination of theoretical breadth, narrative beauty, and broader perspective that suggests it will be a foundational text in a new critical turn towards framing nature within a cultural studies context.
Author : Carrie Anton
Publisher : American Girl Publishing Incorporated
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 42,98 MB
Release : 2009-12-30
Category : Nature crafts
ISBN : 9781593695842
This book is a girl's guide to having fun in the great outdoors! Designed to get girls outside, it's filled with games and craft ideas using items found in nature. Flip through the pages to find story starters and space for girls to jot down their thoughts. Plus, this book includes easy-to-follow instructions for preserving things found in nature; such as how to press leaves and flowers.
