The American Wilderness

The American Wilderness
Author: Thomas R. Vale
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2005
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780813923369

Interpretations of wild nature and wilderness are particularly diverse in the American mind, given our history, our collective economic success, and our diverse social and cultural mix. Although the meanings we attribute to nature reflect our different views of the role humans should play in the natural world, there remains a divide between how we embrace protected landscapes and how we consider natural landscapes, or nature itself. Thomas Vale explores this phenomenon in The American Wilderness: Reflections on Nature Protection in the United States. In his examination of protected landscapes at all scales, from the wooded corners of a city park and the local reserve of wetland, to the vast wilderness of the Everglades and Okeefenokee, to Central Park and Yosemite, Vale argues that nature protection is an act of place-creation, an act that necessarily links humans to nature and depends on a diverse array of human interactions. A rare combination of celebration and criticism, Vale's argument is twofold: landscapes of protected nature in the United States represent a legitimate natural resource, and contrary to expressions in some recent literature, such landscapes bond people to nature. Providing extensive historical and modern data about the national park, national wilderness, and national wildlife refuge systems, Vale argues for the validity of landscape protection and the benefits of achieving both strict preserves and mixed-commodity places in a democratic society. His goal is to unite the often disparate threads of nature protection into a fabric that will enhance an appreciation for the extent and richness of nature protection sentiment and action in the United States.

Carleton Watkins in Yosemite

Carleton Watkins in Yosemite
Author: Weston J. Naef
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 90
Release: 2008
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0892369450

This is an illustrated volume that takes readers on a tour through Yosemite Valley from the view at Inspiration Point to the panorama high above the valley at Glacier Point, all from the perspective of one of Yosemite's first surveyors.

Wilderness A to Z

Wilderness A to Z
Author: Rachel Carley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2001
Genre: Outdoor life
ISBN: 0743200578

The Whole Earth Catalog meets the Boy Scout Manual in this comprehensive and irresistible compendium of wilderness wisdom, natural history and practical know-how. Illustrations, maps, photos throughout.

Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation

Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation
Author: Costanza Caraffa
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2014-12-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3110331837

Das "lange 19. Jahrhundert" der Nationalstaatenbildung ist auch das Jahrhundert der "Erfindung" der Fotografie wie auch der Geburt der modernen Archivwissenschaften. Die Fotografie wurde bald von den Nationalstaaten in ihrem Bedürfnis nach bildlicher Visualisierung in den Dienst genommen. Nach dem II. Weltkrieg, dem Zerfall der kolonialistischen Systeme und schließlich dem Fall der Berliner Mauer erlangten nationale Fragen erneut Aktualität - nun in einem globalen Rahmen. Die Beiträge in diesem Band untersuchen den Zusammenhang zwischen Fotografie/Fotoarchiven und der Idee der Nation, wobei das Objektiv sich nicht auf einzelne Ikonen, sondern auf die weitreichende Dimension des Archivs richtet.

The Photographic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston

The Photographic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston
Author: Maria Elizabeth Ausherman
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2022-08-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0817360514

"One of the first women to work in an emerging field dominated by men, Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) achieved acclaim in the late nineteenth century as an accomplished photographer. Her career spanned nearly seventy years, during which she became respected for her portraiture, artistic studies, photojournalism, and garden and architectural photography. She was instrumental in defining the medium and inspiring women to train in and appreciate photography. Though the socially well-connected Johnston was popular among prestigious celebrities of the day - she worked as the official White House photographer for five administrations - it is her monumental, nine-state survey of southern American architecture that stands as her most significant contribution to the history and development of photography both as art and as documentary. Drawing upon Johnston's original papers and photographs from the Library of Congress, Maria Ausherman's examination of this extraordinary photographer's career shows both the early origins of her style and vision and her attempts to change society through her art"--

Pilgrimage to the National Parks

Pilgrimage to the National Parks
Author: Lynn Ross-Bryant
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 0415893801

National Parks - 'America's Best Idea' - were from the first seen as sacred sites embodying the God-given specialness of American people and American land, and from the first they were also marked as tourist attractions. The inherent tensions between these two realities ensured the parks would be stages where the country's conflicting values would be performed and contested. As pilgrimage sites embody the values and beliefs of those who are drawn to them, so Americans could travel to these sacred places to honor, experience, and be restored by the powers that had created the American land and the American enterprise. This book explores the importance of the discourse of nature in American culture, arguing that the attributes and symbolic power that had first been associated with the 'new world' and then the 'frontier' were embodied in the National Parks. Author Ross-Bryant focuses on National Parks as pilgrimage sites around which a discourse of nature developed and argues the centrality of religion in understanding the dynamics of both the language and the ritual manifestations related to National Parks. Beyond the specific contribution to a richer analysis of the National Parks and their role in understanding nature and religion in the U.S., this volume contributes to the emerging field of 'religion and the environment,' larger issues in the study of religion (e.g. cultural events and the spatial element in meaning-making), and the study of non-institutional religion.

Wild Visions

Wild Visions
Author: Ben A Minteer
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2022-11-22
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0300268866

A stunning combination of landscape photography and thematic essays exploring how the concept of wilderness has evolved over time Our ideas of wilderness have evolved dramatically over the past one hundred and fifty years, from a view of wild country as an inviolable “place apart” to one that exists only within the matrix of human activity. This shift in understanding has provoked complicated questions about the importance of the wild in American environmentalism, as well as new aesthetic expectations as we reframe the wilderness as (to some degree) a human creation. Wild Visions is distinctive in its union of landscape photography and environmental thought, a merging of short, thematic essays with a striking visual narrative. Often, the wild is viewed in binary terms: either revered as sacred and ecologically pure or dismissed as spoiled by human activities. This book portrays wilderness instead as an evolving gamut of understandings, a collage of views and ideas that is still in process.

Literary Location and Dislocation of Myth in the Post/Colonial Anglophone World

Literary Location and Dislocation of Myth in the Post/Colonial Anglophone World
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2017-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004361405

The English-speaking world today is so diverse that readers need a gateway to its many postcolonial narratives and art forms. This collection of essays examines this diver¬sity and what brings so many different cul¬tures together. Whether Indian, Canadian, Australasian or Zimbabwean, the stories dis¬cussed focus on how artists render experi¬ences of separation, belonging, and loss. The histories and transformations postcolonial countries have gone through have given rise to a wide range of myths that retrace their birth, evolution, and decline. Myths have enabled ethnic communities to live together; the first section of this collection dwells on stories, which can be both inclusive and exclusive, under the aegis of ‘nation’. While certain essays revisit and retell the crucial role women have played in mythical texts like the Mahābhārata, others discuss how settler colonies return to and re-appro¬priate a past in order to define themselves in the present. Crises, clashes, and conflicts, which are at the heart of the second section of this book, entail myths of historical and cultural dislocation. They appear as breaks in time that call for reconstruction and redefini¬tion, a chief instance being the trauma of slavery, with its deep geographical and cul¬tural dislocations. However, the crises that have deprived entire communities of their homeland and their identity are followed by moments of remembrance, reconciliation, and rebuilding. As the term ‘postcolonial’ sug¬gests, the formerly colonized people seek to revisit and re-investigate the impact of colo¬nization before committing it to collective memory. In a more specifically literary sec¬tion, texts are read as mythopoeia, fore¬grounding the aesthetic and poetic issues in colonial and postcolonial poems and novels. The texts explored here study in different ways the process of mytho¬logization through images of location and dislocation. The editors of this collection hope that readers worldwide will enjoy reading about the myths that have shaped and continue to shape postcolonial communities and nations. CONTRIBUTORS Elara Bertho, Dúnlaith Bird, Marie–Christine Blin, Jaine Chemmachery, André Dodeman, Biljana Đorić Francuski, Frédéric Dumas, Daniel Karlin, Sabine Lauret–Taft, Anne Le Guellec–Minel, Élodie Raimbault, Winfried Siemerling, Laura Singeot, Françoise Storey, Jeff Storey, Christine Vandamme

Handbook

Handbook
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 148
Release: 1979
Genre: National parks and reserves
ISBN: