Mapping And Imagination In The Great Basin

Mapping And Imagination In The Great Basin
Author: Richard V. Francaviglia
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2005-03-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0874176409

The Great Basin was the last region of continental North America to be explored and mapped, and it remained largely a mystery to Euro-Americans until well into the nineteenth century. In Mapping and Imagination in the Great Basin, geographer-historian Richard Francaviglia shows how the Great Basin gradually emerged from its “cartographic silence” as terra incognita and how this fascinating process both paralleled the development of the sciences of surveying, geology, hydrology, and cartography and reflected the changing geopolitical aspirations of the European colonial powers and the United States. Francaviglia’s interdisciplinary account of the mapping of the Great Basin combines a chronicle of the exploration of the region with a history of the art and science of cartography and of the political, economic, and cultural contexts in which maps are created. It also offers a compelling, wide-ranging discussion that combines a description of the daunting physical realities of the Great Basin with a cogent examination of the ways humans, from early Native Americans to nineteenth-century surveyors to twentieth-century highway and air travelers, have understood, defined, and organized this space, psychologically and through the medium of maps. Mapping and Imagination in the Great Basin continues Francaviglia’s insightful, richly nuanced meditation on the Great Basin landscape that began in Believing in Place.

The Great Basin

The Great Basin
Author: Donald Grayson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2011-04-18
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0520948718

Covering a large swath of the American West, the Great Basin, centered in Nevada and including parts of California, Utah, and Oregon, is named for the unusual fact that none of its rivers or streams flow into the sea. This fascinating illustrated journey through deep time is the definitive environmental and human history of this beautiful and little traveled region, home to Death Valley, the Great Salt Lake, Lake Tahoe, and the Bonneville Salt Flats. Donald K. Grayson synthesizes what we now know about the past 25,000 years in the Great Basin—its climate, lakes, glaciers, plants, animals, and peoples—based on information gleaned from the region’s exquisite natural archives in such repositories as lake cores, packrat middens, tree rings, and archaeological sites. A perfect guide for students, scholars, travelers, and general readers alike, the book weaves together history, archaeology, botany, geology, biogeography, and other disciplines into one compelling panorama across a truly unique American landscape.

No Communication with the Sea

No Communication with the Sea
Author: Tim Sullivan
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2010-11-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0816528950

Few other places in the United States are as high, dry, sparsely inhabited—and urbanized—as the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada. The great majority of the population of this rapidly growing region lives in the two metropolitan areas at its edges, Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Front, and Reno and the Truckee Meadows. These cities embody the allure and the challenge of the contemporary American West, deemed by some “The New American Heartland.” No Communication with the Sea is a journey through this urbanizing Great Basin landscape. Here, the land fosters illusions of limitless space and resources, but its space and resources are severely limited; its people live clustered in cities but are often reluctant to embrace urbanity. These tensions led journalist and urban planner Tim Sullivan to explore the developing centers and edges of the Great Basin cities and the ways some are trying to build livable and sustainable urban environments. In this highly readable book of creative nonfiction, Sullivan employs a variety of methods—including interviews, research, travelogues, and narrative—to survey the harsh landscape for clues to the ways cities can adapt to their geography, topography, ecology, hydrography, history, and culture. No Communication with the Sea embarks on a quest for a livable future for the heart of the interior West. In the process, it both unearths the past and ponders the present and future Great Basin cities.

Whither the Waters

Whither the Waters
Author: John L. Kessell
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826358233

This book places the man and the map in historical context, reminding readers of the enduring significance of Miera y Pacheco.

Mythical River

Mythical River
Author: Melissa L. Sevigny
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2016-03-15
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 160938394X

In a lyrical mix of natural science, history, and memoir, Melissa L. Sevigny ponders what it means to make a home in the American Southwest at a time when its most essential resource, water, is overexploited and undervalued. Mythical River takes the reader on a historical sojourn into the story of the Buenaventura, an imaginary river that led eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explorers, fur trappers, and emigrants astray for seventy-five years. This mythical river becomes a metaphor for our modern-day attempts to supply water to a growing population in the Colorado River Basin. Readers encounter a landscape literally remapped by the search for “new” water, where rivers flow uphill, dams and deep wells reshape geography, trees become intolerable competitors for water, and new technologies tap into clouds and oceans. In contrast to this fantasy of abundance, Sevigny explores acts of restoration. From a dismantled dam in Arizona to an accidental wetland in Mexico, she examines how ecologists, engineers, politicians, and citizens have attempted to secure water for desert ecosystems. In a place scarred by conflict, she shows how recognizing the rights of rivers is a path toward water security. Ultimately, Sevigny writes a new map for the future of the American Southwest, a vision of a society that accepts the desert’s limits in exchange for an intimate relationship with the natural world.

Nevada

Nevada
Author: Michael S. Green
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Total Pages: 566
Release: 2015-03-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0874179742

Nevada: A History of the Silver State has been named a CHOICE Outstanding Title. Michael S. Green, a leading Nevada historian, provides a detailed survey of the Silver State’s past, from the arrival of the early European explorers, to the predominance of mining in the 1800s, to the rise of world-class tourism in the twentieth century, and to more recent attempts to diversify the economy. Of the numerous themes central to Green’s analysis of Nevada’s history, luck plays a significant role in the state’s growth. The miners and gamblers who first visited the state all bet on luck. Today, the biggest contributor to Nevada’s tourist economy, gaming, still relies on that same belief in luck. Nevada’s financial system has generally been based on a “one industry” economy, first mining and, more recently, gaming. Green delves deeply into the limitations of this structure, while also exploring the theme of exploitation of the land and the overuse of the state’s natural resources. Green covers many more aspects of the Silver State’s narrative, including the dominance of one region of the state over another, political forces and corruption, and the citizens’ often tumultuous relationship with the federal government. The book will appeal to scholars, students, and other readers interested in Nevada history.

Sweet Freedom's Plains

Sweet Freedom's Plains
Author: Shirley Ann Wilson Moore
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2016-10-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806156856

The westward migration of nearly half a million Americans in the mid-nineteenth century looms large in U.S. history. Classic images of rugged Euro-Americans traversing the plains in their prairie schooners still stir the popular imagination. But this traditional narrative, no matter how alluring, falls short of the actual—and far more complex—reality of the overland trails. Among the diverse peoples who converged on the western frontier were African American pioneers—men, women, and children. Whether enslaved or free, they too were involved in this transformative movement. Sweet Freedom’s Plains is a powerful retelling of the migration story from their perspective. Tracing the journeys of black overlanders who traveled the Mormon, California, Oregon, and other trails, Shirley Ann Wilson Moore describes in vivid detail what they left behind, what they encountered along the way, and what they expected to find in their new, western homes. She argues that African Americans understood advancement and prosperity in ways unique to their situation as an enslaved and racially persecuted people, even as they shared many of the same hopes and dreams held by their white contemporaries. For African Americans, the journey westward marked the beginning of liberation and transformation. At the same time, black emigrants’ aspirations often came into sharp conflict with real-world conditions in the West. Although many scholars have focused on African Americans who settled in the urban West, their early trailblazing voyages into the Oregon Country, Utah Territory, New Mexico Territory, and California deserve greater attention. Having combed censuses, maps, government documents, and white overlanders’ diaries, along with the few accounts written by black overlanders or passed down orally to their living descendants, Moore gives voice to the countless, mostly anonymous black men and women who trekked the plains and mountains. Sweet Freedom’s Plains places African American overlanders where they belong—at the center of the western migration narrative. Their experiences and perspectives enhance our understanding of this formative period in American history.

Utah Historical Quarterly

Utah Historical Quarterly
Author: J. Cecil Alter
Publisher:
Total Pages: 928
Release: 1928
Genre: Utah
ISBN:

List of charter members of the society: v. 1, p. 98-99.

The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities

The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities
Author: Tania Rossetto
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 539
Release: 2024-06-03
Genre: Science
ISBN: 104002923X

The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities offers a vibrant exploration of the intersection and convergence between map studies and the humanities through the multifaceted traditions and inclinations from different disciplinary, geographical and cultural contexts. With 42 chapters from leading scholars, this book provides an intellectual infrastructure to navigate core theories, critical concepts, phenomenologies and ecologies of mapping, while also providing insights into exciting new directions for future scholarship. It is organised into seven parts: Part 1 moves from the depths of the humans–maps relation to the posthuman dimension, from antiquity to the future of humanity, presenting a multidisciplinary perspective that bridges chronological distances, introspective instances and social engagements. Part 2 draws on ancient, archaeological, historical and literary sources, to consider the materialities and textures embedded in such texts. Fictional and non-fictional cartographies are explored, including layers of time, mobile historical phenomena, unmappable terrain features, and even animal perspectives. Part 3 examines maps and mappings from a medial perspective, offering theoretical insight into cartographic mediality as well as studies of its intermedial relations with other media. Part 4 explores how a cultural cartographic perspective can be productive in researching the digital as a human experience, considering the development of a cultural attentiveness to a wide range of map-related phenomena that interweave human subjectivities and nonhuman entities in a digital ecology. Part 5 addresses a range of issues and urgencies that have been, and still are, at the centre of critical cartographic thinking, from politics, inequalities and discrimination. Part 6 considers the growing amount of literature and creative experimentation that involve mapping in practices of eliciting individual life histories, collective identities and self-accounts. Part 7 examines the variety of ways in which we can think of maps in the public realm. This innovative and expansive Handbook will appeal to those in the fields of geography, art, philosophy, media and visual studies, anthropology, history, digital humanities and cultural studies as well as industry professionals.

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-gatherers

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-gatherers
Author: Vicki Cummings
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 1361
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199551227

This book provides a comprehensive review of hunter-gatherer studies, undertaking detailed regional and thematic case-studies that span the archaeology, history and anthropology of hunter gatherers, concluding with an in-depth review of the main opportunities, research questions, and moral obligations that lie ahead.