Worlds to Explore

Worlds to Explore
Author: Mark Jenkins
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2007-04-17
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 9781426200441

"Polar fleece, titanium, and GPS have forever changed the face of exploration. Today an explorer can make a phone call from the top of Mount Everest and geo-locate himself in the thickest rain forest or the widest desert. Yet despite these advances, few modern adventures get close to the charm and romance of "The Desert Road to Turkestan," "Mysterious Temples of the Jungle," and "Airplanes Come to the Isles of Spice." In those bygone days, the pages of National Geographic were as close as most people could get to high adventure and faraway lands-and here's a chance to recapture them. Alongside noteworthy names like Robert Peary, Amelia Earhart, and Teddy Roosevelt, other less famous travelers take us on long-forgotten trips to places few Americans had gone. We follow as "An American Girl Cycles Across Transylvania," trek "A Thousand Miles Along the Great Wall of China," and glide "By Felucca Down the Nile." Introduced by brief essays that provide context and perspective, these engaging, engrossing selections speak for themselves-and trace the National Geographic Society's growth as it explored the unknown and brought it to readers eager for knowledge of "the world and all that is in it"--Publisher's description.

American Orientalism

American Orientalism
Author: Douglas Little
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 462
Release: 2009-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807877611

Douglas Little explores the stormy American relationship with the Middle East from World War II through the war in Iraq, focusing particularly on the complex and often inconsistent attitudes and interests that helped put the United States on a collision course with radical Islam early in the new millennium. After documenting the persistence of "orientalist" stereotypes in American popular culture, Little examines oil, Israel, and other aspects of U.S. policy. He concludes that a peculiar blend of arrogance and ignorance has led American officials to overestimate their ability to shape events in the Middle East from 1945 through the present day, and that it has been a driving force behind the Iraq war. For this updated third edition, Little covers events through 2007, including a new chapter on the Bush Doctrine, demonstrating that in many important ways, George W. Bush's Middle Eastern policies mark a sharp break with the past.

Qanat

Qanat
Author: Dale Lightfoot
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 881
Release: 2024-08-22
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0755650808

Qanats are ubiquitous, yet unseen, and a clever way to create streams where none exist in nature. For 3,000 years, they have made life possible in impossible places and still sustain life and livelihoods in many countries today. After 30 years of field research, Dale Lightfoot provides the first comprehensive study of the qanat and sheds new light on their unique locations and distribution, their origins and history, their ecology, current status and use. Qanats are remarkably engineered underground aqueducts, using gravity to bring water to villages and towns where reliable flowing surface water is scarce or absent. Although an ancient technology, more than 46,000 of them still flow around the world today, with their sustainable nature making them a focus of renewed interest. Richly illustrated with images and a series of original maps, this is the most complete record to date of the locations and distribution of qanats worldwide, including examples from the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, Central Asia, China, India, Mexico and South America.

Historical Dictionary of Yemen

Historical Dictionary of Yemen
Author: Robert D. Burrowes
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 616
Release: 2010
Genre: Yemen (Republic)
ISBN: 0810855283

A small and extremely poor Islamic country, Yemen is located on the edge of the Arab world in the southernmost corner of the Arabian Peninsula. It was the product of the unification of the Yemen Arab Republic and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen in May 1990. The location of the two Yemens on the world's busiest sea-lane at the southern end of the Red Sea where Asia almost meets Africa gave them strategic significance from the start of the age of imperialism through the Cold War. More vital today is the fact that Yemen shares a long border with oil-rich Saudi Arabia and is a key to efforts both to spread and to end global revolutionary Islam and its use of terror. The second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Yemen has been thoroughly updated and greatly expanded. Through its list of acronyms and abbreviations, a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 800 cross-referenced dictionary entries, greater attention has been given to foreign affairs, economic institutions and policies, social issues, religion, and politics.

A History of Water Engineering and Management in Yemen

A History of Water Engineering and Management in Yemen
Author: Ingrid Hehmeyer
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2018-12-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004387714

In A History of Water Engineering and Management in Yemen, Ingrid Hehmeyer describes the three-way relationship between water, land, and humans from ancient to medieval and premodern times. As illustrated in case studies from four sites, individual ecosystems necessitated different engineering and management approaches in order to make good use of the scarce water resources for both irrigated agriculture and domestic consumption. Material remains and written sources provide the evidence for a comprehensive examination of continuity and change; technical and managerial struggles, failures, and successes; the question of technology transfer; the impact of the religion of Islam on water use and allocation; and people’s reactions in times of severe crisis.

Veils and Daggers

Veils and Daggers
Author: Linda Steet
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2000
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9781566397520

National Geographic magazine is an American popular culture icon that, since its founding in 1888, has been on a nonstop tour classifying and cataloguing the peoples of the world. With more than ten million subscribers, National Geographic is the third largest magazine in America, following only TV Guide and Reader's Digest. National Geographic has long been a staple of school and public libraries across the country. In Veils and Daggers, Linda Steet provides a critically insightful and alternative interpretation of National Geographic. Through an analysis of the journal's discourses in Orientalism, patriarchy, and primitivism in the Arab world as well as textual and visual constructions of Arab men and women, Islam, and Arab culture, Veils and Daggers unpacks the ideological perspectives that have guided National Geographic throughout its history. Drawing on cultural, feminist, and postcolonial criticism, Steet generates alternative readings that challenge the magazine's claims to objectivity. In this fascinating journey, it becomes clear that neither text nor image in the magazine can be regarded as natural or self-evident and she artfully demonstrates that the act of representing others "inevitably involves some degree of violence, decontextualization, miniaturization, etc." The subject area known as Orientalism, she shows, is a man-made concept that as such must be studied as an integral component of the social, rather than the natural or divine world. Veils and Daggers repositions and redefines National Geographic as an educational journal. Steet's work is an important and groundbreaking contribution in the area of social construction of knowledge, social foundations of education, educational media, and social studies as well as racial identity, ethnicity, and gender. Once encountered, readers of National Geographic will never regard it in the same manner again. Author note: Linda Steet is Assistant Professor of Social Foundation of Education and Co-Coordinator of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of Michigan, Flint.

The Arabian Peninsula

The Arabian Peninsula
Author: Library of Congress. Orientalia Division
Publisher:
Total Pages: 128
Release: 1951
Genre: Arabian Peninsula
ISBN:

Bilad Al-Sudan: Islam, Africa and Afrocentricity

Bilad Al-Sudan: Islam, Africa and Afrocentricity
Author: Wesley Muhammad
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2016-12-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1365525457

Bilad al-Sudan is a companion volume to Black Arabia and the African Origin of Islam. A collection of distinct essays written since the publication of Black Arabia, Bilad al-Sudan offers:Further evidence that the Arabs of the first Muslim community of 7th century Arabia were an Africoid people.A correction to the mistaken belief that the pre-Islamic Arabs were white and racist, as seen by their alleged treatment of Bilal, Companion of the Prophet Muhammad.A refutation of recent Muslim attempts to defend the White Supremacist paradigm in Islam.A critical analysis of Afrocentric discourse on Islam.An introduction to a new paradigm: Ma'atic Islam.Dr. Wesley Muhammad is an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and author of several books. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Religious Studies from Morehouse College as well as a Masters Degree and PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Michigan. Dr. Muhammad is currently a scholarly aide to The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan.