One of the world's oldest crossroads, the Sinai joins the great continental land masses of Africa and Eurasia. Its physical geography of rugged mountain peaks, desert plains, and sea coasts was formed by the collision of the two continental plates, while the human tides that have swept across the region over millennia have left an intricate web of cultures and ethnicities.

In this book, Ned Greenwood offers a complete, up-to-date physical geography of Sinai. After an introductory chapter that situates Sinai within world history and geography, he focuses in detail on the following areas: plate tectonics and geology, geomorphology and drainage, weather and climate, soils, and biogeography.

In the concluding chapter, Greenwood considers the human geography of Sinai, including the pressures currently posed by population growth, political extremism, and environmental constrictions on development. He offers a fully rounded picture of the physical environment of Sinai that will be vital reading for everyone concerned about the future of this strategic yet fragile land.

A land where some streams ran with gold. A landscape nearly empty of inhabitants in the wake of Apache raids from the north. And a former desert transformed by irrigation into vast fields of wheat and cotton. This was and is the state of Sonora in northwest Mexico.

In this cultural historical geography, Robert C. West explores the dual geographic "personality" of this part of Mexico's northern frontier. Utilizing the idea of "old" and "new" landscapes, he describes two Sonoras—to the east, a semiarid to subhumid mountainous region that reached its peak of development in the colonial era and still lives largely in its colonial past; and, to the west, a desert region that in the twentieth century has become a major agricultural producer and the modern center of economic and cultural activity.

After a description of the physical and biotic aspects of Sonora, West describes the aboriginal farming cultures that inhabited eastern Sonora before the Spanish conquest. Following the conquest, he traces the spread of Jesuit missions and Spanish mining and ranching communities into this land where gold, silver, and copper ores were easily extracted by surface mining. He charts the decline of eastern Sonora with the coming of Apache and Seri raids during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And he shows how western Sonora has become one of Mexico's most powerful political and economic entities in the twentieth century.

For geographers, historians, anthropologists, and economists, as well as travelers to Sonora and its coastal resorts, this lively and interesting book will be important reading.

This remarkable volume presents a panorama of geographical writings from Hesiod to Humboldt, from the beginnings of geographical thought in the Western world to the emergence of topical specialization. It includes a wealth of material from non-Western sources, particularly Moslem and Chinese, that has not been collected before.

The selections are arranged chronologically, and contain geographical theory, descriptions of terrestrial phenomena by early observers, and excerpts from major voyages of discovery. Some are obvious classics: Socrates on the nature of the Earth, Ezekiel’s description of the commerce of Tyre, Columbus’s first glimpse of the West Indies, Buffon on the history of the Earth, and Kant’s geographical lectures. Yet more commonly, George Kish provides a sense of the discovery with such finds as the ambassador’s report to the Caliph of Baghdad on the lands and customs of the Norsemen, the study of the Tartar Empire by John of Monte Corvino, Archbishop of Peking, and Jefferson’s private memo to Alexander von Humboldt seeking information on the American West.

Each section is highlighted by a brief but engagingly written introduction by the editor. Throughout, the unique cultural and professional perspective of Kish is very much in evidence.

A geographic study of race and gender, Spatializing Blackness casts light upon the ubiquitous--and ordinary--ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, Rashad Shabazz explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, he investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive Era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with--and resist--spacial containment.

A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, Spatializing Blackness examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.

The traditional Chinese notion of itself as the “middle kingdom”—literally the cultural and political center of the world—remains vital to its own self-perceptions and became foundational to Western understandings of China. This worldview was primarily constructed during the earliest imperial unification of China during the Qin and Han dynasties (221 BCE–220 CE). But the fragmentation of empire and subsequent “Age of Disunion” (220–589 CE) that followed undermined imperial orthodoxies of unity, centrality, and universality. In response, geographical writing proliferated, exploring greater spatial complexities and alternative worldviews.

This book is the first study of the emergent genre of geographical writing and the metageographies that structured its spatial thought during that period. Early medieval geographies highlighted spatial units and structures that the Qin–Han empire had intentionally sought to obscure—including those of regional, natural, and foreign spaces. Instead, these postimperial metageographies reveal a polycentric China in a polycentric world. Sui–Tang (581–906 CE) officials reasserted the imperial model as spatial orthodoxy. But since that time these alternative frameworks have persisted in geographical thought, continuing to illuminate spatial complexities that have been incompatible with the imperial and nationalist ideal of a monolithic China at the center of the world.