Author: Vera S. Candiani Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804791074 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 409
Book Description
Not long after the conquest, the City of Mexico's rise to become the crown jewel in the Spanish empire was compromised by the lakes that surrounded it. Their increasing propensity to overflow destroyed wealth and alarmed urban elites, who responded with what would become the most transformative and protracted drainage project in the early modern America—the Desagüe de Huehuetoca. Hundreds of technicians, thousands of indigenous workers, and millions of pesos were marshaled to realize a complex system of canals, tunnels, dams, floodgates, and reservoirs. Vera S. Candiani's Dreaming of Dry Land weaves a narrative that describes what colonization was and looked like on the ground, and how it affected land, water, biota, humans, and the relationship among them, to explain the origins of our built and unbuilt landscapes. Connecting multiple historiographical traditions—history of science and technology, environmental history, social history, and Atlantic history—Candiani proposes that colonization was a class, not an ethnic or nation-based phenomenon, occurring simultaneously on both sides of an Atlantic, where state-building and empire-building were intertwined.
Author: Fernando Luiz Lara Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1527576531 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
This collection of essays presents an innovative and provocative set of concepts to understand the spaces of the Americas through local lenses. The disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter; however, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge in these fields originates in another continent and is external to the lived experience in such regions. The book introduces seven new concepts that have not been sufficiently addressed, and would make a significant contribution to the field: namely, gridded spaces; spaces of agriculture; space as image; watered spaces; spaces as labor; racialized spaces; and gendered spaces. This book, thus, introduces a broader conceptual framework to foster the analysis of the spatial histories of the Americas.
Author: Ana Schwartz Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469671786 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
New England's Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a social process. It fueled examinations of inner lives, governed behavior, and provided a standard against which both could be judged. In a remote, politically volatile frontier, settlers gambled that sincerity would reinforce social cohesion and shore up communal happiness. Sincere feelings and the discursive practices that manifested them promised a safe haven in a world of grinding uncertainty. But as Ana Schwartz demonstrates, if sincerity promised much, it often delivered more: it bred shame and resentment among the English settlers and, all too often, extraordinary violence toward their Algonquian neighbors and the captured Africans who lived among them. Populating her "city on a hill" with the stock characters of Puritan studies as well as obscure actors, Schwartz breathes new life into our understanding of colonial New England.
Author: Mil Penner Publisher: ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
"In this collection of brief, evocative vignettes, Penner traces the influence of pioneer roots on the present generation as he chronicles the transformation of the land from untouched prairie to productive farm. As a boy, young Mil rubbed shoulders with the very pioneers who tamed the prairies, and he now draws on those recollections and memories passed on by his father to make the past come alive."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: EJ Fredrickson Publisher: Lulu.com ISBN: 1387768441 Category : Adventure stories Languages : en Pages : 124
Book Description
THERE IS A STORM COMING... A mysterious tale of TREASURE lost & found. What happens when a ten-year-old pirate finds herself MAROONED on dry land with a step-family of landlubbers and a school bully who looks just like BLACKBEARD? Can she discover the secrets of the caves under the Red Cliffs, which are rumoured to conceal the plunder of Grace O'Malley the Pirate Queen? And will she ever DIG-UP the truth about her own ship-shape jewels, that are disappearing one shiny piece at a time? There is a storm coming...so get ready for a HEAVYWEATHER ADVENTURE!
Author: John Soluri Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 1785333917 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 310
Book Description
Though still a relatively young field, the study of Latin American environmental history is blossoming, as the contributions to this definitive volume demonstrate. Bringing together thirteen leading experts on the region, A Living Past synthesizes a wide range of scholarship to offer new perspectives on environmental change in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Each chapter provides insightful, up-to-date syntheses of current scholarship on critical countries and ecosystems (including Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, the tropical Andes, and tropical forests) and such cross-cutting themes as agriculture, conservation, mining, ranching, science, and urbanization. Together, these studies provide valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing the region.
Author: Manda Scott Publisher: Dell ISBN: 044024109X Category : Britons Languages : en Pages : 512
Book Description
Boudica, “She Who Brings Victory.” Born to the Eceni, a tribe of dreamers and warriors, she is her people’s last hope: a copper-haired warrior who can lead her tribe in battle—and speak the language of the sacred dreamers. But in the face of a battle half won, Boudica has retreated with the living and wounded. Because across a river is the world’s mightiest army. And with the invaders comes a strange, bloodthirsty warrior astride a pied horse—a man who seems to know the Eceni as well as they know themselves. For just as destiny marked the young queen for greatness, it was destiny, too, that drove Boudica’s half brother to a far different path. Now brother and sister will stand on opposite sides of a brutal war of attrition, each unknowingly determined to see the other dead.
Author: Margaret Somerville Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0415503965 Category : Reference Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
Water in a Dry Land is a story of research about water as a source of personal and cultural meaning. The site of this exploration is the iconic river system which forms the networks of natural and human landscapes of the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. In the current geological era of human induced climate change, the desperate plight of the system of waterways has become an international phenomenon, a symbol of the unsustainable ways we relate to water globally. The Murray-Darling Basin extends west of the Great Dividing Range that separates the densely populated east coast of Australia from the sparsely populated inland. Aboriginal peoples continue to inhabit the waterways of the great artesian basin and pass on their cultural stories and practices of water, albeit in changing forms. A key question informing the book is: What can we learn about water from the oldest continuing culture inhabiting the world's driest continent? In the process of responding to this question a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers formed to work together in a contact zone of cultural difference within an emergent arts-based ethnography. Photo essays of the artworks and their landscapes offer a visual accompaniment to the text on the Routledge Innovative Ethnography Series website, http://www.innovativeethnographies.net/. This book is perfect for courses in environmental sociology, environmental anthropology, and qualitative methods.
Author: Elizabeth Reddy Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262374374 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 227
Book Description
A lively account of a controversial technology developed to mitigate earthquake risk and change how we live with threatening environments. The Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano is the world’s oldest public earthquake early warning system. Given the unpredictability of earthquakes, the technology was designed to give the people of Mexico City more than a minute to prepare before the next big quake hits. How does this kind of environmental monitoring technology get built in the first place? How does its life-saving promise align with reality? And who shapes modern risk mitigation? In ¡Alerta!, Elizabeth Reddy surveys this innovation to shed light on what it means to imagine a world where sirens could sound out an ¡alerta sísmica! at any moment—and what it would be like to live in such a world. Proponents of earthquake early warnings have long held that the technology can save lives and limit economic losses. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival data, Reddy conducts a thorough, qualitative analysis of these claims and considers the requirements and uses of the alert system. She embeds her study in a rich narrative of the engineers who designed the system in conjunction with contingent political and environmental conditions. The result demonstrates how addressing earthquake dangers is no small task: it means trying to change relationships between the environment, society, and technology. Doing so, she critiques universalist and techno-centric approaches to hazard risk mitigation and celebrates the potential of contextually appropriate and broadly supported efforts. ¡Alerta! takes readers on a vivid journey into the world of Mexican earthquake risk mitigation, with critical insights for anthropologists and science and technology studies scholars, as well as specialists in the geosciences, engineering, and emergency management.
Author: Mikael D. Wolfe Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822373068 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
In Watering the Revolution Mikael D. Wolfe transforms our understanding of Mexican agrarian reform through an environmental and technological history of water management in the emblematic Laguna region. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico and the United States, Wolfe shows how during the long Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) engineers’ distribution of water paradoxically undermined land distribution. In so doing, he highlights the intrinsic tension engineers faced between the urgent need for water conservation and the imperative for development during the contentious modernization of the Laguna's existing flood irrigation method into one regulated by high dams, concrete-lined canals, and motorized groundwater pumps. This tension generally resolved in favor of development, which unintentionally diminished and contaminated the water supply while deepening existing rural social inequalities by dividing people into water haves and have-nots, regardless of their access to land. By uncovering the varied motivations behind the Mexican government’s decision to use invasive and damaging technologies despite knowing they were ecologically unsustainable, Wolfe tells a cautionary tale of the long-term consequences of short-sighted development policies.
Author: Vera S. Candiani
Author: Fernando Luiz Lara
Author: Ana Schwartz
Author: Mil Penner
Author: EJ Fredrickson
Author: John Soluri
Author: Manda Scott
Author: Margaret Somerville
Author: Elizabeth Reddy
Author: Mikael D. Wolfe