Land in America PDF Download

Author: Peter M. Wolf
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 9780394504377
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Author: Andro Linklater
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452284597
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In 1790, America was in enormous debt, having depleted what little money and supplies the country had during its victorious fight for independence. Before the nation's greatest asset, the land west of the Ohio River, could be sold it had to be measured out and mapped. And before that could be done, a uniform set of measurements had to be chosen for the new republic out of the morass of roughly 100,000 different units that were in use in daily life. Measuring America tells the fascinating story of how we ultimately gained the American Customary System—the last traditional system in the world—and how one man's surveying chain indelibly imprinted its dimensions on the land, on cities, and on our culture from coast to coast.

Author: Robert Olmstead
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780805051193
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Juliet and Redfield, two confused, star-crossed cousins, help each other find a sense of purpose and identity as they journey together across the country in search of the baby Juliet gave up for adoption

Author: Dan Barry
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal
ISBN: 0316415480
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 515

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Book Description
A landmark collection by New York Times journalist Dan Barry, selected from a decade of his distinctive "This Land" columns and presenting a powerful but rarely seen portrait of America. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and on the eve of a national recession, New York Times writer Dan Barry launched a column about America: not the one populated only by cable-news pundits, but the America defined and redefined by those who clean the hotel rooms, tend the beet fields, endure disasters both natural and manmade. As the name of the president changed from Bush to Obama to Trump, Barry was crisscrossing the country, filing deeply moving stories from the tiniest dot on the American map to the city that calls itself the Capital of the World. Complemented by the select images of award-winning Times photographers, these narrative and visual snapshots of American life create a majestic tapestry of our shared experience, capturing how our nation is at once flawed and exceptional, paralyzed and ascendant, as cruel and violent as it can be gentle and benevolent.

Author: Sonia A. Hirt
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801454700
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Why are American cities, suburbs, and towns so distinct? Compared to European cities, those in the United States are characterized by lower densities and greater distances; neat, geometric layouts; an abundance of green space; a greater level of social segregation reflected in space; and—perhaps most noticeably—a greater share of individual, single-family detached housing. In Zoned in the USA, Sonia A. Hirt argues that zoning laws are among the important but understudied reasons for the cross-continental differences.Hirt shows that rather than being imported from Europe, U.S. municipal zoning law was in fact an institution that quickly developed its own, distinctly American profile. A distinct spatial culture of individualism—founded on an ideal of separate, single-family residences apart from the dirt and turmoil of industrial and agricultural production—has driven much of municipal regulation, defined land-use, and, ultimately, shaped American life. Hirt explores municipal zoning from a comparative and international perspective, drawing on archival resources and contemporary land-use laws from England, Germany, France, Australia, Russia, Canada, and Japan to challenge assumptions about American cities and the laws that guide them.

Author: Katharine Emsden
Publisher: Applewood Books
ISBN: 1878668234
Category : Immigrants
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
Excerpts from diaries and letters provide glimpses into the lives of Russian, Lithuanian, Italian, Greek, Swedish, and Irish immigrants who passed through Ellis Island around the turn of the century.

Author: Daegan Miller
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022633631X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
“The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That’s largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today: a country expanding unstoppably, bending the continent’s natural bounty to the national will, heedless of consequence. A country of slavery and of Indian wars. There’s much truth in that vision. But if you know where to look, you can uncover a different history, one of vibrant resistance, one that’s been mostly forgotten. This Radical Land recovers that story. Daegan Miller is our guide on a beautifully written, revelatory trip across the continent during which we encounter radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress in the very landscapes around them, even as the runaway engine of capitalism sought to steamroll everything in its path. Here we meet Thoreau, the expert surveyor, drawing anticapitalist property maps. We visit a black antislavery community in the Adirondack wilderness of upstate New York. We discover how seemingly commercial photographs of the transcontinental railroad secretly sent subversive messages, and how a band of utopian anarchists among California’s sequoias imagined a greener, freer future. At every turn, everyday radicals looked to landscape for the language of their dissent—drawing crucial early links between the environment and social justice, links we’re still struggling to strengthen today. Working in a tradition that stretches from Thoreau to Rebecca Solnit, Miller offers nothing less than a new way of seeing the American past—and of understanding what it can offer us for the present . . . and the future.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780895774040
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Each state is profiled with color photos (printed to less-than- dazzling effect), descriptive text, maps featuring major attractions, basic statistics, and such information as "historical highlights," "famous sons and daughters," "places to visit and things to do," and "oddities and specialties." No bibliographies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Wilfred M. McClay
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1594039380
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 642

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Book Description
For too long we’ve lacked a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that offers American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their country. Such a fresh retelling of the American story is especially needed today, to shape and deepen young Americans’ sense of the land they inhabit, help them to understand its roots and share in its memories, all the while equipping them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. Too often they reflect a fragmented outlook that fails to convey to American readers the grand trajectory of their own history. This state of affairs cannot continue for long without producing serious consequences. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding and its aspirations; and it needs to be able to convey that narrative to its young effectively. Of course, it goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale of the past. It will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But as Land of Hope brilliantly shows, there is no contradiction between a truthful account of the American past and an inspiring one. Readers of Land of Hope will find both in its pages.

Author: David Stebenne
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982102713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
"Explains how the American middle class ballooned at mid-century until it dominated the nation, showing who benefited and what brought the expansion to an end"--