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Finding Higher Ground: A Life of Travels (Enivromental Arts and Humanities Series)
Catharine Savage Brosman
Manufacturer: University of Nevada Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0874175380 |
Book Description
Catharine Savage Brosman explores the places of her own life in the essays in Finding Higher Ground. The tour, for the reader, is one of delight and wonder. Brosman's places range from the West Texas desert of her girlhood to a chilly flat in the North of England, from the flooded streets of New Orleans to the sublimities of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Even as her meditations reflect on her connections to these places and the ways they have shaped her life, at the same time they also examine the broader connections between individual and community, culture and society, experience and memory. Her voice is unique--combining a poet's sensitivity to nuances of setting and behavior with salty good sense, passionate engagement in the world of letters, sly wit, and a rugged independence of character inherited from generations of her Western ancestors.
Book Description
Say "New England" and you likely conjure up an image in the mind of your listener: the snowy woods or stone wall of a Robert Frost poem, perhaps, or that quintessential icon of the region--the idyllic white village. Such images remind us that, as Joseph Conforti notes, a region is not just a territory on the ground. It is also a place in the imagination.
This ambitious work investigates New England as a cultural invention, tracing the region's changing identity across more than three centuries. Incorporating insights from history, literature, art, material culture, and geography, it shows how succeeding generations of New Englanders created and broadcast a powerful collective identity for their region through narratives about its past. Whether these stories were told in the writings of Frost or Harriet Beecher Stowe, enacted in historical pageants or at colonial revival museums, or conveyed in the pages of a geography textbook or Yankee magazine, New Englanders used them to sustain their identity, revising them as needed to respond to the shifting regional landscape.
Customer Reviews:
Imagining New England a Masterful Historical Exploration .......2005-06-13
Imagine New England and one thinks of rocky beaches, bucolic towns, grassroots democracy, intelectual, and progressive ideals. Imagine New England and one wants to be taken back to a purer, simpler, and more ideal time; a better life of white houses and steeple churches where one is apart of the history of who are and want to be as Americans and patriots.
In "Imagining New England," Joseph Conforti deconstructs the creation of the regional identify of New England in exquisite historical detail. In a blend of history and sociology, Professor Conforti searches for the "real" New England. The New England he had heard of but not seen or experienced as child growing up in the most un-New England of New England of cities, Fall River.
This book is a substantial contribution to American history. New England, the cultural invention, the concept, represents the best we want to be as Americans. It is a concept the country and the region itself continually reach for as an anchor to our roots despite the fact that the region itself long ago left it behind. Joseph Conforti captures the essence of this complex identity, both real and manufactured.
Superb overview of the "idea" of New England.......2003-09-23
This is an exceptionally well researched and beautifully written book which, for me, opened up all kinds of new ideas about the nature of "region" and "place" in general, and New England in particular. I was fascinated from the earliest section describing how the "second generation" in New England inherited the region from their parents and tried to "reinvent" the place for their own purposes, all the way to the wonderful discussion of Frost and the evolution of Yankee magazine. Conforti develops the theory that the locus of New England moved from Boston, with a brief recapture by Plymouth, on to Connecticut and now to northern New England. (Anybody see the Boston Globe magazine last week about "Magnetic North"? It fits perfectly into Conforti's theme.) What happened to Lawrence and Fall River and the immigrant population; you'll have to read to find out. If you love New England, this book is highly readable, profound, and worth the price!
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The Delaware Valley in the Early Republic: Architecture, Landscape, and Regional Identity (Creating the North American Landscape)
Gabrielle M. Lanier
Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830
ASIN: 0801879663 |
Book Description
"History, after all, has a corporeal aspect--every event occupies a physical dimension, and all actions are ultimately grounded, one way or another, in the landscape. Places, which possess their own geography, natural history, and embedded perceptions, not only ground the physicality of historical events -- they also can constitute both actor and stage." -- from The Delaware Valley in the Early Republic. The Delaware Valley's role in shaping national identity during the formative years of the early American republic has long been overshadowed by New England and the South, both more readily identified as distinct and coherent regions than the broad geographic swath that includes Delaware, southwestern New Jersey, and southeastern Pennsylvania. For architectural historians, geographers, and folklorists, the Delaware River valley offers a fascinating example of a true cultural crossroads. Comprising several distinctive and intensely local subregions -- each with its own building traditions, populations, land use patterns, and material cultures -- this "region of regions" provides rich insights into late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America.
Gabrielle Lanier challenges prevailing characterizations of the region as culturally monolithic and reassesses its role in the formation of a distinctly American identity through the history, geography, and architecture of three of the valley's diverse cultural landscapes: Pennsylvania's predominantly Germanic Warwick Township; New Jersey's Mannington Township, settled by English Quakers; and Delaware's North West Fork Hundred, an area strongly influenced by its proximity to the Chesapeake region and its position between the slave South and the free North.
Through narratives of individual lives, aggregate data from tax rolls and censuses, archival research, and close analysis of the built vernacular environment, she examines the unique ethnic, class, and religious constitution of each subregion, as well as its racial diversity, political orientation, economic organization, and cultural imprint on the landscape. The Delaware Valley emerges from this boldly interdisciplinary study as a mosaic of localities that reflects underlying tensions in the American experience.
Book Description
This is the complex story of New Hampshire's White Mountains, from the range's days as the majestic homeland of the Abenaki, first seen by English colonists four centuries ago, to its unassailable standing today as one of America's most beloved national forests, comprising 112,000 acres of protected wilderness.
Christopher Johnson, an avid hiker intimately familiar with the White Mountains, achieves two important objectives in This Grand and Magnificent Place. He lovingly explores their rich ecological, political, economic, and cultural history and, more broadly, opens a panoramic window on the evolution of American attitudes and policies toward wilderness over time.
Two competing visions of wilderness historically have coexisted in America: the instrumental, in which the wilderness is seen as a conglomeration of resources to be exploited for the benefit of entrepreneurs and consumers, and the aesthetic, in which the wilderness is appreciated for its natural beauty, the personal growth that it stimulates, the national pride it engenders, and the spiritual truth it offers. Johnson never loses sight of this fundamental dichotomy as he shares marvelous true tales of the first intrepid European settlers who "tamed" the Whites. He discusses Ethan Allen Crawford, the area's first innkeeper, the emergence of tourism, and America's love affair with the "wilderness experience"; and he explores tales of Thomas Cole, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other renowned artists who immortalized these mountains in their works. He considers the coming of grand resort hotels--and the contemporaneous wilderness revival--in the late nineteenth century and the passing of the landmark 1911 Weeks Act, which was instrumental in preserving American wilderness in the face of development and threats of irreparable environmental damage. Johnson traces the perilous course of the twentieth-century movement toward wilderness preservation, which has successfully conserved the Whites, an extraordinary American treasure, for future generations. Finally, he poses thoughtful and essential questions regarding the destiny of this American wilderness, exploring the balance between maintaining its usefulness while conserving its glorious heritage.
This skillful and accessible history will rivet general readers, students, and professionals interested in the history, culture, and politics of the White Mountains, as well as those fascinated by environmental history and wilderness protection everywhere.
Customer Reviews:
This Grand and Magnificent Place.......2007-02-01
I am about halfway through reading this book, which is a new purchase for the Wentworth Library in Sandwich, NH. After all the books that have been written about White Mountain history and background, I found this new work intriguing in its depth and excellence. I first came across much of the legend and lore portrayed in here while attending the last UNH Forestry Camp at Passaconaway in 1964. We were too rowdy a bunch for this institution to continue further, but it introduced me to the beauty of these unique mountains and Doc Stevens fascinated me with their stories. I climbed Mt. Trypyramid with Keith Kidder as my first 4,000 footer, clambering up the slide to the Middle Peak as described herein by pioneer trampers. Later, I would work at Mizpah Hut for the AMC and pack to many of the huts in the summer of 1965. I missed the mountains like crazy while in the Army, so convinced my friend Fred Stetson to accompany me on a week long trip in the Pemi following Flight School. He has been visiting and writing about this mountainous area ever since, too. Efforts to describe and paint the experience of the White Mountains continue to produce historic memories of the past, and this book indeed does the job. I especially like the portrayals of Thomas Cole and Hawthorne, and how the region has stimulated considerable aesthetic reflections and deep intelligent regard. There is something truly inspirational here, and I enjoy introducng my friends from afar with why I am stuck on the place. It is grand in its magnificence; nothing compares to it, despite attempts to try. I am too old now to climb all like I used to, but I can still read about these summits and regain the reasons I originally chose to live out my life here. This book will be a keeper to relish this wild region so special to us....
Book Description
Look Away! considers the U.S. South in relation to Latin America and the Caribbean. Given that some of the major characteristics that mark the South as exceptional within the United States—including the legacies of a plantation economy and slave trade—are common to most of the Americas, Look Away! points to postcolonial studies as perhaps the best perspective from which to comprehend the U.S. South. At the same time it shows how, as part of the United States, the South—both center and margin, victor and defeated, and empire and colony—complicates ideas of the postcolonial. The twenty-two essays in this comparative, interdisciplinary collection rethink southern U.S. identity, race, and the differences and commonalities between the cultural productions and imagined communities of the U.S. South and Latin America.
Look Away! presents work by respected scholars in comparative literature, American studies, and Latin American studies. The contributors analyze how writers—including the Martinican Edouard Glissant, the Cuban-American Gustavo Pérez Firmat, and the Trinidad-born, British V. S. Naipaul—have engaged with the southern United States. They explore William Faulkner’s role in Latin American thought and consider his work in relation to that of Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges. Many essays re-examine major topics in southern U.S. culture—such as race, slavery, slave resistance, and the legacies of the past—through the lens of postcolonial theory and postmodern geography. Others discuss the South in relation to the U.S.–Mexico border. Throughout the volume, the contributors consistently reconceptualize U.S. southern culture in a way that acknowledges its postcolonial status without diminishing its distinctiveness.
Contributors. Jesse Alemán, Bob Brinkmeyer, Debra Cohen, Deborah Cohn, Michael Dash, Leigh Anne Duck, Wendy Faris, Earl Fitz, George Handley, Steve Hunsaker, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Dane Johnson, Richard King, Jane Landers, John T. Matthews, Stephanie Merrim, Helen Oakley, Vincent Pérez, John-Michael Rivera, Scott Romine, Jon Smith, Ilan Stavans, Philip Weinstein, Lois Parkinson Zamora
Book Description
How does one "read" a landscape? Inspired by the classic work of Hans Kurath documenting the dialect geography sub-regions of New England, Christopher J. Lenney set out to determine whether such patterns of linguistic migration were repeated in the everyday features of our man-made landscape. Through inspired conjecture and methodical fieldwork, Lenney discovered that at least six cultural and material artifacts could be mapped into similar flows and clusters: placenames, boundaries, townplans, roads, houses, and gravestones.
With infectious enthusiasm and wit, Lenney guides the reader through a historical and cultural examination of how this artificial landscape came to be. Of the many possible sources of placenames, for example, there are evident patterns of Algoquian and transplanted English; there is the obvious irony of patriot and Tory honored side by side. But what do we make of the apparent hodgepodge of placename suffixes that dot our maps--the -fields, -tons, -hams, and -burys that append themselves to our life and land? And how do we explain the "Great-Big" line, a dramatic yet invisible scar across the map of Maine?
The other five cultural markers similarly reveal themselves in a surprising patterning of the New England countryside--in the areas where the connected farmstead dominates, where recessed balconies or twin rearwall chimneys distinguish the scene; in the migration of gravestone cutters and their motifs, which left odd undulating waves of artistic expression throughout the region. Lenney forces the reader to reconsider the shape of the village greens, to wonder why old roads go where they go, and to question where (good neighbors and Robert Frost notwithstanding) we built stone walls.
By pushing us beyond mere sightseeing to "sightseeking," Lenney dares to fundamentally alter the way we--old-time Yankee, newcomer, and tourist alike--experience and interpret the New England landscape.
Customer Reviews:
Man's imprint on the landscape of New England.......2007-04-07
In this interesting book, Lenney looks at six man-made features of the New England landscape (placenames, boundaries, townplans, roads, houses, and gravestones) and attempts to "map" them while tracing their trends. Some of his discoveries are most intriguing: the "Great-Big Line" that can be drawn east-west across central Maine, north of which placenames employ the term Big, while south of the line Great is the overwhelming choice is one example; another is the fact that many early boundary lines run slightly NW-SE rather than straight N-S because the magnetic pole changes over time and during the 1600s magnetic north was farther NW than it is today. The shear number of ways Lenney details variants as he "seeks" New England landscape characteristics is truly amazing: the number of townplans discussed, for instance, is over a dozen and the number of house types is even higher (over 17). The book is simply loaded with fascinating information that will make anyone's next excursion through New England more worthwhile than ever - even if it's just via a book of detailed maps while sitting in an easy chair. Lenney is an engaging writer as well. The only fault I can find with the book is its total lack of photographs. Other than that, it's worth "seeking" out.
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The Gardiners of Massachusetts: Provincial Ambition and the British-American Career (Revisiting New England: the New Regionalism)
T. A. Milford
Manufacturer: New Hampshire
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1584655046 |
Book Description
The Gardiners of Massachusetts examines late eighteenth-century American political and cultural history through the lives and careers of three men from successive generations of a prominent New England family. Silvester Gardiner, who established the family's fortunes in Boston, was a colonial surgeon, a dedicated Anglican, and a Loyalist. He received his medical training in Britain before settling in Massachusetts, where he became a giant in the drugs trade. In the mid-eighteenth century, as a director of the Kennebeck Company, he acquired vast landholdings in what became the state of Maine.
At the end of the Revolution, when Silvester's estates were in jeopardy, his son John returned to his native New England after a long absence. Fully at ease within the British Atlantic Empire, John relied on his knowledge of imperial administration and on his connections at Whitehall and Westminster to enhance his career. He attended university in Glasgow during the Scottish Enlightenment and studied law at London's Inns of Court. His legal practice took him to Wales and the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Returning to Boston in the 1780s, he emerged as a figure of considerable public controversy. John's son, J.S.J. Gardiner, was an Episcopal priest and a leader of Boston's Federalist literati.
As Milford describes the careers of these three men, he contends that the Gardiners exemplified the ambitions of the cosmopolitan middle class throughout the British Empire and English-speaking Atlantic world during the decades just before and after the American Revolution. He also uses this history to intervene in the long-running scholarly debate over the relative influence of liberalism and republicanism in the political culture of the early republic. The Gardiners' ambitions, Milford suggests, demonstrate a deep allegiance to the liberal vocabulary of private gains and public good--a vocabulary in which Americans had been schooled by their imperial engagements. Because of this attachment to liberalism, the disintegration of British authority in the colonies presented an acute dilemma for those New Englanders for whom the British Empire had offered an expanding array of professional opportunities.
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Franconia Notch and the Women Who Saved It (Revisiting New England: the New Regionalism)
Kimberly Jarvis
Manufacturer: New Hampshire
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A Thousand Splendid Suns
ASIN: 1584656271 |
Book Description
The "heart of New Hampshire," the 6,000-acre Franconia Notch nestled deep in the majestic White Mountains, has been a well-loved summer resort and tourist destination since the nineteenth century. When in 1923 a devastating fire destroyed the famous grand hotel the Profile House and the hotel owners decided against rebuilding, lumber companies eagerly moved in to evaluate the timber in the region. A vigorous campaign to save the pristine Franconia Notch wilderness rapidly galvanized around the efforts of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, the Granite State's premier force dedicated to conservation. Support poured in from local, state, regional, and national sources as the Franconia Notch campaign gathered steam in a bid to acquire and preserve the Notch.The New Hampshire Federation of Women's Clubs was a particularly spirited participant--and a key to the campaign's success. In 1928 the effort culminated in the creation of Franconia Notch Forest Reservation and War Memorial, today's magnificent Franconia Notch State Park.
Franconia Notch and the Women Who Saved It is the story of this remarkable grassroots movement. In crisp prose, author Kimberly A. Jarvis applies meticulous scholarly skills to previously untapped archival material and weaves her findings into the dynamic conversations now being carried on among environmental historians and scholars of New England regional culture. Scholars and readers who love history and nature will enjoy Jarvis's fresh take on a story they thought they knew well.
Book Description
In The Man Who Found Thoreau Donald Linebaugh presents a succinct, articulate examination of the work of the pioneering but controversial archaeologist Roland Wells Robbins (1908-1987) and the development of historical archaeology in America. In 1945 the self-taught Robbins discovered the remains of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond. He excavated the site, documented his findings, and in 1947 published a short book, Discovery at Walden, about the experience. This project launched Robbins's career in archaeology, restoration, and reconstruction, and he went on to excavate at a number of New England iron works and other sites, including the Philipsburg Manor Upper Mills in New York, Stawbery Banke in New Hampshire, and Shadwell, Thomas Jefferson's Virginia birthplace. Although lacking academic training, Robbins quickly developed remarkably sophisticated techniques for the period. However, his "pick and shovel" methods were considered suspect and increasingly frowned upon by the emerging American historical archaeological establishment. As the profession evolved, trained American historical archaeologists, according to Donald Linebaugh, too scrupulously wrote Robbins out of the history of their emerging field. With the help of previously unpublished information, the author offers a balanced assessment of Robbins and his place in New England regional history and the history of American historical archaeology. The Man Who Found Thoreau is a must-read for scholars, students, and historical archaeology buffs alike.
Book Description
The son and grandson of slaves owned by abolitionist Moses Brown, William J. Brown was a free African American born in Providence in 1814. Brown published his captivating autobiography, The Life of William J. Brown of Providence, R.I., in 1883. His compelling and insightful story is a memorable portrait of life and society in nineteenth-century New England: his childhood, his unusually good educational opportunities, employment, contemporary race relations, the port's bustling seafaring life, temperance, religion, organized societies, and local and national politics. He wrote of prominent African American contemporaries, including Frederick Douglass and Henry Bibb, and of African American troops in the Civil War. This is an impressively rich text, remarkable for its time and place. Unlike official records and other types of primary sources--frequently written from the opaque, self-interested perspective of upper-middle-class white Americans--this extraordinary memoir provides an authentic window on black experiences in nineteenth-century New England.
Expertly framed by Rosalind C. Wiggins's engaging preface and a new scholarly introduction by historian Joanne Pope Melish, The Life of William J. Brown of Providence, R.I. will spellbind readers interested in African American and New England literature, history, and culture.
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