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Ground Work: Conservation in American Culture
Char Miller
Ground Work offers intriguing insights into American conservation history. Miller demonstrates his remarkable ability as a historian to cast new light on familiar events and figures, such as Bernhard Fernow and Gifford Pinchot, and create a deeper and richer understanding of their significance, both in their times and in our own. Ground Work is a series of vignettes rather than a chronologically continuous tale. It spans topics from the Progressive Era roots of the American conservation movement, on which Miller has proven his virtuosity in earlier works such as Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism, to new insights into the impact of documentary films on the environmental perceptions of 21st-century urban America. Advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in environmental and forest history will find these essays stimulating, general nonfiction readers very enlightening.
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Choreographing Identities: Ethnicity, Folk Dance, and Festival in North America
Anthony Shay
Throughout its history, the United States has become a new home for thousands of immigrants, all of whom have brought their own traditions and expressions of ethnicity. Not least among these customs are folk dances, which over time have become visual representations of cultural identity. Naturally, however, these dances have not existed in a vacuum. They have changed--in part as a response to ever-changing social identities, and in part as a reaction to deliberate manipulations by those within as well as outside of a particular culture. Compiled in great part from the author’s own personal dance experience, this volume looks at how various cultures use dance as a visual representation of their identity, and how "traditional" dances change over time. It discusses several "parallel layers" of dance: dances performed at intra-cultural social occasions, dances used for representation or presentation, and folk dance performances. Individual chapters center on various immigrant cultures. Chiefly the work focuses on cultural representation and how it is sometimes manipulated. Key folk dance festivals in the United States and Canada are reviewed. Interviews with dancers, teachers, and others offer a first-hand perspective. An extensive bibliography encompasses concert programs and reviews as well as broader scholarly sources.
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On the Border: An Environmental History of San Antonio
Char Miller
This collection of eleven essays examines the environmental history of San Antonio, drawing on an interdisciplinary array of authors and insights to highlight the evolving relationship between the city’s residents and the South Texas landscape and showing how the human community and the natural environment have shaped each other. The border of the title refers to San Antonio’s location at the edge of the Great Plains on the north and the coastal plain on the South, at the intersection of the eastern half of the country with the western half.
On the Border traces San Antonio’s environmental history over the last 300 years, from Spanish exploration to present-day suburbanization. Many of the essays discuss issues that challenge contemporary San Antonio—urban sprawl, water rights, and unchecked economic development—and reveal their complex evolution. They also assess the city’s social ecology, concluding that San Antonio’s power brokers “did not conceive of the community as a community.”
Miller and his contributors point a way toward the future by understanding the past.
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Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism and Harem Fantasy
Anthony Shay
For over a century, solo improvised dance, especially belly dance, has had enormous popularity, and by the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the feminist movement, over a million women in the United States, and many more thousands in Western Europe became devotees of this choreographic form. This volume traces several strands of this phenomenon. Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young provide an overview of solo improvised dance in the Middle East and in the West.
Several essays address the dance tradition in the Middle East: Najwa Adra describes and analyzes the performance of solo improvised dance in domestic circles in the Arab world, Anthony Shay analyzes the issue of how Islam and individuals among the Moslem clergy perceive and react to dance, Stavros Stavrou deconstructs the famous encounter between Gustave Flaubert and the Egyptian dancer Kuchek Hanum in terms of colonialism, Roberta Dougherty analyzes the popular images of the belly dancer in the Egyptian cinema, Shay addresses the question of male dancers and their performances, and Linda Swanson adds a whimsical interpretation of the famous twentieth century Egyptian belly dancer Tahia Carioca. The dance was frequently seen in the West by millions of visitors to world fairs and exhibitions that were popular in the 19th century and Sol Bloom, the entrepreneur of the Chicago World Fair of 1893 coined the term “belly dance.” From that period, belly dance became a popular entertainment in the United States. American women found the dance to be a liberating vehicle and a means of adopting new and exotic persona. They developed several new genres of the dance. Barbara Sellers-Young describes and analyzes tribal belly dance, a genre that was invented in San Francisco, Anne Rasmussen provides an overview of the music used in Arab nightclubs in the United States and a description of the musicians and the club milieu, Donnalee Dox analyzes the spiritual belly dance movement, Andrea Deagon addresses the enduring trope of oriental dance: Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils through performances both from the turn of the century and contemporary versions, Nancy Lee Ruyter gives a historical perspective of La Meri’s, one of the earlier interpreters of belly dance, Jennifer Fisher looks at the orientalist implications of the Arabian dance from the Nutcracker, often inspired by oriental dancing and seen by millions of audience members across America. An epilogue by the editors provides an overview of the topic and integrates the scholarly material for the reader. -
The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered
Kenneth Baxter Wolf
Saint Francis of Assisi is arguably the most attractive saint ever produced by the Catholic Church. The unusually high regard with which he is held has served to insulate him from any real criticism of the kind of sanctity that he embodied: sanctity based first and foremost on his deliberate pursuit of poverty. In this book, Kenneth Baxter Wolf takes a fresh look at Francis and the idea of voluntary poverty as a basis for Christian perfection. Wolf's point of departure is a series of simple but hitherto unasked questions about the precise nature of Francis's poverty: How did he go about transforming himself from a rich man to a poor one? How successful was this transformation? How did his self-imposed poverty compare to the involuntary poverty of those he met in and around Assisi? What did poor people of this type get out of their contact with Francis? What did Francis get out of his contact with them? Wolf finds that while Francis's conception of poverty as a spiritual discipline may have opened the door to salvation for wealthy Christians like himself, it effectively precluded the idea that the poor could use their own involuntary poverty as a path to heaven. Based on a thorough reconsideration of the earliest biographies of the saint, as well as Francis's own writings, Wolf's work sheds important new light on the inherent ironies of poverty as a spiritual discipline and its relationship to poverty as a socio-economic affliction.
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Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life in South Texas
Char Miller
Char Miller's essays cover a wide range of South Texas topics, from natural and environmental history to urban development to San Antonio's future. Miller uses simple subjects—the First Friday Art Walks in South Town, for example—as a springboard for a deeper discussion of urban city planning and an elusive future of sensible growth and diversity. Moving farther afield, he examines the water wars between the U.S. and Mexico, a quarry turned upscale shopping center, and San Antonio's curious attempts to brand itself as a health resort.
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Fifty Years of the Texas Observer
Char Miller
For the past five decades the Texas Observer has been an essential voice in Texas culture and politics, championing honest government, civil rights, labor, and the environment, providing a platform for many of the state’s most passionate and progressive voices. Included here are ninety-one selections, including Roy Bedichek, Lou Dubose, Ronnie Dugger, Dagoberto Gilb, Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, Larry McMurtry, Maury Maverick Jr., Willie Morris, and Debbie Nathan.
To mark the Texas Observer’s fiftieth anniversary in 2004, Char Miller has selected a cross section of the best work to appear in its pages. Not only does the collection pay homage to an important alternative voice in Texas journalism, it also serves as a progressive chronicle of a half-century of life in the Lone Star State—a state that has spawned three presidents in the last forty years. If Texas is, as some say, a crucible for national politics, then Fifty Years of the Texas Observer can be read as casebook for issues that concern citizens in all fifty states. With a foreword by Molly Ivins, these pieces form a progressive chronicle of a half-century of life in Texas.
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The Atlas of U.S. and Canadian Environmental History
Char Miller
This visually dynamic historical atlas chronologically covers American environmental history through the use of four-color maps, photos, and diagrams, and in written entries from well known scholars.
Organized into seven categories, each chapter covers: agriculture * wildlife and forestry * land use and management * technology and industry * pollution and human heath * human habitats * and ideology and politics.
With valuable reference aids--including bibliographies, sources for further research, an extensive index, and newly designed maps--this is an indispensable tool for students and educators alike.
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Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Ensembles, Representation and Power
Anthony Shay
Over the past fifty years national dance companies from Turkey, Egypt, Mexico, Greece, the former USSR and Croatia have dominated concert stages throughout the world. Anthony Shay makes coherent sense of these national programs, which have previously received scant academic attention. Specifically, he looks at the ways through which these companies spread political, ethnic and cultural messages by accruing symbolic and cultural capital for their respective nation-states. In his analysis, Shay draws on cultural studies, political science and anthropology to create a work that cuts across disciplines. As the first book to address the topic of state-sponsored folk dance ensembles and their structures, Choreographic Politics examines the repertoires, performances and choreographic strategies of these companies within the political, social, gendered and ethnic contexts in which each company was created. In addition, Shay’s study includes a look at music, costumes, and various artistic directors and choreographers.
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Fluid Arguments: Five Centuries of Western Water Conflict
Char Miller
Water— or the lack of it— has shaped the contours of the American West and continues to dominate the region's development. From the incursions of the Spanish conquistadores to the dams of the New Deal era, humans have sought water in these arid lands as the key to survival and success. And as the West becomes more urbanized, water is an issue as never before. This book sets contemporary and often bitter debates over water in their historical contexts by examining some of the most contentious issues that have confronted the region over five centuries. Seventeen contributors— representing history, geography, ethnography, political science, law, and urban studies— provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the many dimensions of water in the West: Spanish colonial water law, Native American water rights, agricultural concerns, and dam building. A concluding essay looks toward the future by examining the impact of cities on water and of water marketing on the western economy. As farmers and ranchers from Kansas to California compete for water with powerful urban economies, the West will continue to be reshaped by this scarce and precious resource. Fluid Arguments clearly shows that many of the current disputes over water take place without a real appreciation for the long history of the debate. By shedding new light on how water allocation is established— and who controls it— this book makes a vital contribution to our understanding of water and growth in the region.
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Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Pioneers of Conservation)
Char Miller
Gifford Pinchot is known primarily for his work as first chief of the US Forest Service and for his argument that resources should be used to provide the "greatest good for the greatest number of people". But Pinchot was a more complicated figure than has generally been recognized, and more than half a century after his death, he continues to provoke controversy. This biography offers a fresh interpretation of the life and work of the famed conservationist and Progressive politician. In addition to considering Pinchot's role in the environmental movement, historian Char Miller sets forth an engaging description and analysis of the man - his character, passions and personality -and the larger world through which he moved. Miller begins by describing Pinchot's early years and the often overlooked influence of his family and their aspirations for him. He examines Pinchot's post-graduate education in France and his ensuing efforts in promoting the profession of forestry in the United States and in establishing and running the Forest Service. While Pinchot's 12 years as chief forester (1898-1910) are the ones most historians and biographers focus on, Miller also offers an extensive examination of Pinchot's post-federal career as head of The National Conservation Association and as two-term governor of Pennsylvania. In addition, he looks at Pinchot's marriage to feminist Cornelia Bryce and discusses her role in Pinchot's political radicalization throughout the 1920s and 1930s. An epilogue explores Pinchot's final years and writings. Miller offers a provocative reconsideration of key events in Pinchot's life, including his relationship with friend and mentor John Muir and their famous disagreement over damming Hetch Hetchy Valley. The author brings together insights from cultural and social history and recently discovered primary sources to support a new interpretation of Pinchot - whose activism not only helped environmental politics in early 20th century America but remains strikingly relevant today.
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Water and the Environment: Global Perspectives (History in Dispute, Volume 7)
Char Miller
What caused the fall of the Roman empire? What did the second amendment to the U.S. constitution mean to the founding fathers? What was the role of black troops in the American Civil War?
History in Dispute addresses these heavily debated questions by offering students different critical perspectives on major historical events, drawn from all time periods and from all parts of the globe. The intent of this biennial series is to provide students with an enhanced understanding of events only summarized in history texts, help stimulate critical thinking and provide ideas for papers and assignments.
Each volume in the History in Dispute series has a thematic, era or subject-specific focus that coincides with the way history is studied at the academic level. Each volume contains roughly 50 entries, chosen by an advisory board of historians and academics. Entries begin with a brief overview summarizing the controversy. This introduction is followed by two or more signed, point-counterpoint essays of 1,500 to 2,000 words each. Features include excerpts from primary source documents to illuminate the viewpoints presented with each entry; photographs and drawings of individuals, sites, objects or documents pertinent to the event or topic; and a chronological list of events. Volumes include a cumulative subject index.
Volume 7, Water and the Environment: Global Perspectives, covers water and environmental issues from a global perspective.
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When Topology Meets Chemistry: A Topological Look at Molecular Chirality
Erica Flapan
In this superb topology text, the readers not only learn about knot theory, 3-dimensional manifolds, and the topology of embedded graphs, but also their role in understanding molecular structures. Most results described in the text are motivated by the questions of chemists or molecular biologists, though they often go beyond answering the original question asked. No specific mathematical or chemical prerequisites are required. The text is enhanced by nearly 200 illustrations and 100 exercises. With this fascinating book, undergraduate mathematics students escape the world of pure abstract theory and enter that of real molecules, while chemists and biologists find simple and clear but rigorous definitions of mathematical concepts they handle intuitively in their work.
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Water in the West: A High Country News Reader
Char Miller
Water in the West offers a lively primer on the region's most precious and scarce resource. It collects the best reporting on the subject, drawn from the pages of High Country News, the newspaper that sets the standard for coverage of environmental issues in the West.
Beginning with an exhilarating account of the 1983 Colorado River floods that almost destroyed Glen Canyon Dam and proceeding through recent articles tracking the water quests of Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix, and Tucson, this book provides compelling perspectives on the issues and controversies that have roiled water politics in the West over the past two decades. The tensions between the need for water and society's demands that rivers and their wildlife be restored to health are explored in chapters on the Northwest salmon crisis, Glen Canyon Dam, federal and urban water projects, Native American water rights, watershed restoration, and water management.
Readers will find smart, incisive writings that probe the West's efforts to balance competing needs. The contributors to the book — among them activists, scholars, scientists, and many of the nation's finest environmental journalists — offer captivating portrayals of local efforts to solve water conflicts. Together, these stories bring a refreshing focus and clarity to the West's most complex and contentious environmental issue.
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The Greatest Good: 100 Years Of Forestry In America
Char Miller and Rebecca Staebler
The Greatest Goodis a compelling photographic history of forestry in the United States. The new edition, which inaugurates the centennial year of the USDA Forest Service, celebrates 100 years of professional forestry in America.
Chapter One reveals how crucial wood was to the livelihood of nineteenth-century Americans, and chronicles the advent of the belief that forestry was the key to producing timber without destroying the forests. Chapter Two explores the growth of the profession, including the creation of the Forest Service, and identifies the controversies that often erupted over new practices and controls. Chapter Three highlights the intensified demand for wood for housing after World War II and the subsequent emergence of environmental consciousness that brought new challenges to the profession. Finally, Chapter Four examines the birth of sustainable forestry and documents how the scientific and technological advances of the past 25 years have enabled foresters to extend the nation s wood supply and restore the land.
Through photograph and word, The Greatest Good illustrates the many contributions that foresters and forestry have made to our society.
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Choreophobia: Solo Improvised Dance in the Iranian World
Anthony Shay
Choreophobia is the term coined by Dr. Shay, in this first full-length study of Iranian dance, to characterize the widespread ambiguous and negative reactions to solo improvised dance, the most popular dance form in the Iranian world. This dance form appears to constitute an ambiguous, powerful, and highly negative symbol in Iranian society. The central project of this study, designed for both scholars and general readers, is to identify and analyze what factors currently contribute and have historically contributed to the ambiguous position solo improvised dance occupies in an Iranian context. This is reflected both currently and historically in attempts to ban its public performances. In spite of the negative reactions solo improvised dance can evoke, nonetheless it is also loved and performed throughout the Iranian world, emphasizing the ambiguity that accompanies its performances in various social contexts. The author draws a portrait of solo improvised dance by detailing its movement practices and describing and analyzing the aesthetic and creative impulses utilized by performers of the genre. By showing the ways in which solo improvised dance shares important formal aesthetic and creative elements with other Iranian expressive forms such as calligraphy, music, and traditional theatre through the use of geometry and improvisation, the author demonstrates how dance is firmly linked with other Iranian art forms. Shay addresses the topic of historical evidence for this dance genre concentrating on how dance appears in visual art forms such as the Persian miniature and the limitations of the visual arts as a source for historical reconstruction. He describes the Iranian world providing the historical, cultural and social contexts for the study. Several authors have posited Islamic attitudes as the single reason for negative reactions toward dance, an assumption that Shay questions. Using several dance events as examples, the author proposes a model for describing and analyzing the elements that constitute choreophobia, arguing that such a model may have wider implications in the study of dance.
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American Forests: Nature, Culture, and Politics (Development of Western Resources)
Char Miller
Endangered ecosystem or renewable resource? How we feel about forests has to do with more than trees. This interdisciplinary collection of essays examines the history of forestry in the United States, exploring the impact of the discipline on natural and human landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Through important articles that have helped define the field, it assesses the development of the forestry profession and the U.S. Forest Service, analyzes the political and scientific controversies that have marked forestry's evolution, and discloses the transformations in America's commitment to its forested estate. American Forests highlights the intersection of the political, social, and environmental forces that have determined the use and abuse of American forests. It examines changes both in the assumptions that have defined forest management and in the scientific approach to-and political justification for-timber harvesting in our national forests. It sheds light on the ongoing debate between utilization and conservation, addressing arguments from environmentalists, the timber industry, sportsmen, and politicians while exploring the interaction between public opinion and public policy. It provides sharp insights into the most important players in the politics of forestry, from George Perkins Marsh and Berhard Fernow to Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt. And it addresses issues as wide-ranging as budgeting, clearcutting, and the regulation of livestock grazing on national forest lands. This multifaceted volume draws on the insights of scholars in conservation and ecology, economics, history, law, and political science to make a definitive contribution to the study and practice of forestry. By both clarifying and extending recent debate about the political purpose, scientific character, and environmental rationales of forestry in America, it will help define the place of forests in our future.
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Out Of The Woods: Essays in Environmental History
Char Miller and Hal Rothman
Through the pages of Environmental History Review, now Environmental History, an entire discipline has been created and defined over time through the publication of the finest scholarship by humanists, social and natural scientists, and other professionals concerned with the complex relationship between people and our global environment. Out of the Woods gathers together the best of this scholarship.
Covering a broad array of topics and reflecting the continuing diversity within the field of environmental history, Out of the Woods begins with three theoretical pieces by William Cronon, Carolyn Merchant, and Donald Worster probing the assumptions that underlie the words and ideas historians use to analyze human interaction with the physical world. One of these - the concept of place - is the subject of a second group of essays. The political context is picked up in the third section, followed by a selection of some of the journal’s most recent contributions discussing the intersection between urban and environmental history. Water’s role in defining the contours of the human and natural landscape is undeniable and forms the focus of the fifth section. Finally, the global character of environmental issues emerges in three compelling articles by Alfred Crosby, Thomas Dunlap, and Stephen Pyne.
Of interest to a wide range of scholars in environmental history, law, and politics, Out of the Woods is intended as a reader for course use and a benchmark for the field of environmental history as it continues to develop into the next century.
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Gifford Pinchot: The Evolution of an American Conservationist (Two Essays)
Char Miller
The text looks at Gifford Pinchot and his role in the early conservation movement of the United States.
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Urban Texas: Politics and Development
Char Miller and Heywood T. Sanders
The major cities of Texas have developed through a complex web of politics, society, and economics. To describe and explain the state's urban evolution, the contributors to Urban Texas use comparative and multidisciplinary perspectives that explore the relationships among interest groups and voting; religion, reform, gender, and race; civic clubs and suburbs; infrastructure and land development. Texas' cities have experienced boom and expansion, bust and depression. They have also been marked by inequity and disadvantage. Today's cities face not only the limits of a period of economic downturn, but also the inheritance of a history of bias and public-sector inactivity. The story of such forces, challenges the myths that surround Texas' explosive growth and probes the staggering costs that growth has entailed.
Char Miller is associate professor of history at Trinity University, San Antonio, where he specializes in nineteenth-and-twentieth century U.S. social and cultural history. He is the author or editor of three other books and numerous scholarly articles.Heywood T. Sanders is associate professor of urban studies at Trinity University. He has published widely on topics in urban politics and policy.
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Selected Writings of Hiram Bingham (1814-1869): Missionary to the Hawaiian Islands
Char Miller
Excerpts from the correspondence of a pioneer missionary to Hawaii who played a controversial role in the Islands' history. This text records the crucial period when much of the indigenous leadership chose to convert to Christianity and may correct the generally negative caricature that survives in 19th- and 20th-century depictions of Bingham's work (such as Michener's Hawaii).
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Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain
Kenneth Baxter Wolf
Offers new insights into the so-called martyrdom movement that occurred in Cordoba around 850AD. It suggests that Eulogius, who witnessed and recorded the martyrdoms, recast both the events and the ideal of sanctity to make the Cordoban martyrs appear more like their ancient Roman counterparts.
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Missions and Missionaries in the Pacific
Char Miller
This work includes examples of the new mission scholarship, which employs a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective. It is the 14th work in the Symposium Series.
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Fathers and Sons, the Bingham Family and the American Mission
Char Miller
This book is a five generation biography of a public-serving American family, the Bingham family.
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