Ibn Battuta was, without doubt, one of the world’s truly great travelers. Born in fourteenth-century Morocco, and a contemporary of Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta left an account in his own words of his remarkable journeys, punctuated by adventure and peril, throughout the Islamic world and beyond. Whether sojourning in Delhi and the Maldives, wandering through the mazy streets of Cairo and Damascus, or contesting with pirates and shipwreck, the indefatigable Ibn Battuta brought to vivid life a medieval world brimming with marvel and mystery. Carefully observing the great diversity of civilizations that he encountered, Ibn Battuta exhibited an omnivorous interest in such matters as food and drink; religious differences among Christians, Hindus, and Shia Muslims; and ideas about purity and impurity, disease, women, and sex.
David Waines offers here a graceful analysis of Ibn Battuta’s travelogue. This is a gripping treatment of the life and times of one of history’s most daring, and at the same time most human, adventurers.
The essential guide to Texas’s state parks and historic sites.
Updated with a new park, Palo Pinto Mountains State Park west of Forth Worth; new historic sites; and scores of beautiful new photographs, the Official Guide to Texas State Parks has all the essential information organized by geographical regions to help you plan your great Texas adventure. The only complete resource of its kind on Texas, Laurence Parent’s Official Guide to Texas State Parks is the trusted source, with more than sixty-five thousand copies sold over the past thirty years.
Praise for Previous Editions
“Texas state-park fans should be thrilled. . . . Official Guide to Texas State Parks is the ultimate book detailing Texas’s state parks.”—Dallas Morning News
“This book will make you want to hit the road to visit the natural splendor of Texas.”—Houston Chronicle
“It’s good enough for a coffee table or a campfire. The Official Guide to Texas State Parks gives you sleek photography, maps, narratives, and loads of information.”—Southern Living
“The newly updated Official Guide to Texas State Parks and Historic Sites . . . has beautiful color photographs and insights on camping, fishing, horseback riding, and other recreational opportunities around the state.”—Texas Journey
Delightfully funny and insightful, Old Blue’s Road links the colorful history and vibrant present from Whiteside’s unique vantage point, recognizing and reflecting on the processes of change that made the West what it is today. The book will interest the general reader and western historian alike, leading to new appreciation for the complex ways in which the American West's past and present come together.
In the high country of the northern Wasatch Mountains, lies what is left of one of the West’s largest ranches. Deseret Live Stock Company was reputed at various times to be the largest private landholder in Utah and the single biggest producer of wool in the world. The ranch began as a sheep operation, but as it found success, it also ran cattle. Incorporated in the 1890s by a number of northern Utah ranchers who pooled their resources, the company was at the height of successful operations in the mid-twentieth century when a young Dean Frischknecht, bearing a recent degree in animal science, landed the job of sheep foreman. In his memoir he recounts in detail how Deseret managed huge herds of livestock, vast lands, and rich wildlife and recalls through lively anecdotes how stockmen and their families lived and worked in the Wasatch Mountains and Skull Valley’s desert wintering grounds.
Elko County, in the old heart of Nevada, is rich in historic sites, many of them hitherto uncharted and some verging on disappearing. For the first time, historian Shawn Hall identifies and locates the ghost towns and old mining camps of Elko County and recounts their colorful histories. Following a guidebook format, Hall divides the county into five easily accessible regions, then lists the historic sites within each region and provides directions to reach them. He offers a brief history of each site as well as a description of its extant structures and their present condition. The result is a lively compilation of local history and mining and ranching lore that records the dramatic past of Nevada’s northeast corner, its pioneers and prospectors, its towns and mines, its outlaws, ranchers, merchants, mining concerns, and civic leaders. The book offers never-before available information about the old heart of Nevada and the people who settled there. It will be of enduring value to tourists and weekend explorers, historic preservationists, and all those interested in the history and artifacts of this region.
Edinburgh and Glasgow enjoy a famously scratchy relationship. Resembling other intercity rivalries throughout the world, from Madrid and Barcelona, to Moscow and St. Petersburg, to Beijing and Shanghai, Scotland’s sparring metropolises just happen to be much smaller and closer together—like twin stars orbiting a common axis. Yet their size belies their world-historical importance as cultural and commercial capitals of the British Empire, and the mere forty miles between their city centers does not diminish their stubbornly individual nature.
Robert Crawford dares to bring both cities to life between the covers of one book. His story of the fluctuating fortunes of each city is animated by the one-upping that has been entrenched since the eighteenth century, when Edinburgh lost parliamentary sovereignty and took on its proud wistfulness, while Glasgow came into its industrial promise and defiance. Using landmarks and individuals as gateways to their character and past, this tale of two cities mixes novelty and familiarity just as Scotland’s capital and its largest city do. Crawford gives us Adam Smith and Walter Scott, the Scottish Enlightenment and the School of Art, but also tiny apartments, a poetry library, Spanish Civil War volunteers, and the nineteenth-century entrepreneur Maria Theresa Short. We see Glasgow’s best-known street through the eyes of a Victorian child, and Edinburgh University as it appeared to Charles Darwin.
Crawford's lively account, drawing on a wealth of historical and literary sources, affirms what people from Glasgow and Edinburgh have long doubted—that it is possible to love both cities at the same time.
A giant of the discipline of biogeography and co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace was the most famous naturalist in the world when he died in 1913. To mark the centennial of Wallace's death, James Costa offers an elegant edition of the "Species Notebook" of 1855-1859, which Wallace kept during his legendary expedition in peninsular Malaysia, Indonesia, and western New Guinea. Presented in facsimile with text transcription and annotations, this never-before-published document provides a new window into the travels, personal trials, and scientific genius of the co-discoverer of natural selection.
In one section, headed "Note for Organic Law of Change"--an extended critique of geologist Charles Lyell's anti-evolutionary arguments--Wallace sketches a book he would never write, owing to the unexpected events of 1858. In that year he sent to Charles Darwin an essay announcing his discovery of the mechanism for species change: natural selection. Darwin's friends Lyell and the botanist Joseph Hooker proposed a "delicate arrangement": a joint reading at the Linnean Society of his essay with Darwin's earlier private writings on the subject. Darwin would publish On the Origin of Species in 1859, to much acclaim; pre-empted, Wallace's first book on evolution waited two decades, but by then he had abandoned his original concept.
On the Organic Law of Change realizes in spirit the project Wallace left unfinished, and asserts his stature as not only a founder of biogeography and the preeminent tropical biologist of his day but as Darwin's equal among the pioneers of evolution.
Why do nearly five million people travel to the Grand Canyon each year? Mark Neumann answers this question with a book as compelling as the panoramic vistas of the canyon. In On the Rim, he describes how the Grand Canyon became an internationally renowned tourist attraction and cultural icon, and delves into the meanings the place holds for the individuals who live, work, and travel there.
Weaving history, ethnography, documentary photography, and autobiography, Neumann exposes the roots—the personal and social dimensions—of America’s pursuit of leisure. He shows how people visiting the Grand Canyon create their own experiences, even while they are affected by one hundred years of social history and cultural expectations. On the Rim examines the lines between progress and nostalgia, science and spirituality, nature and culture, authenticity and mass production, and work and leisure—all of which crisscross the tourist experience.
To support his argument, Neumann uses evidence from tourist registers and Park Service records, first-person narratives, interviews, and scenes from television shows, Hollywood movies, and popular novels. Heavily illustrated with historical and contemporary photographs, the narrative shifts back and forth between early descriptions of the canyon and modern tourist stories, the past illuminating the present at every step.
From Albert Einstein’s visit and the hunt for the fugitive Danny Horning to the everyday experiences of local Native Americans, park rangers, and vacationing families, Neumann reminds us that every trip to the Grand Canyon is a complex journey, fueled by shared expectations but always open to the possibility of surprise. On the Rim is a multilayered, nuanced study of the place and its many visitors.
If I had let myself be ruled by reason alone, I would surely be lying dead somewhere or another in the Siberian frost.
The Siberian taiga: a massive forest region of roughly 4.5 million square miles, stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Bering Sea, breathtakingly beautiful and the coldest inhabited region in the world. Winter temperatures plummet to a bitter 97 degrees below zero, and beneath the permafrost lie the fossilized remains of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and other ice age giants. For the Yukaghir, an indigenous people of the taiga, hunting sable is both an economic necessity and a spiritual experience—where trusting dreams and omens is as necessary as following animal tracks. Since the fall of Communism, a corrupt regional corporation has monopolized the fur trade, forcing the Yukaghir hunters into impoverished servitude.
Enter Rane Willerslev, a young Danish anthropologist who ventures into this frozen land on an idealistic mission to organize a fair-trade fur cooperative with the hunters. From the outset, things go terribly wrong. The regional fur company, with ties to corrupt public officials, proves it will stop at nothing to maintain its monopoly: one of Willerslev’s Yukaghir business partners is arrested on spurious charges of poaching and illegal trading; another drowns mysteriously. When police are sent to arrest him, Willerslev fears for his life, and he and a local hunter flee to a remote hunting lodge even deeper in the icy wilderness. Their situation turns even more desperate right away: they manage to kill a moose but lose the meat to predators and begin to starve, frostbitten and isolated in the frozen taiga.
Thus begins Willerslev’s extraordinary, chilling tale of one year living in exile among Yukaghir hunters in the stark Siberian taiga region. At turns shocking and quietly moving, On the Run in Siberia is a pulse-pounding tale of idealism, political corruption, starvation, and survival (with a timely assist from Vladimir Putin) as well as a striking portrait of the Yukaghirs’ shamanistic tradition and their threatened way of life, a drama unfolding daily in one of the world’s coldest, most enthralling landscapes.
A Mesoamerican travel book from two perspectives and two centuries.
In 1839 John Lloyd Stephens, then 31 years old, and his traveling companion, artist Frederick Catherwood, disappeared into the vast rain forest of eastern Guatemala. They had heard rumors that remains of a civilization of incomparable artistic and cultural merit were moldering in the steamy lowland jungles. They braved Indian uprisings, road agents, heat, and biting insects to eventually encounter what is today known as the lost civilization of the Maya.
In 1841 Stephens published Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan to instant acclaim with both American and international audiences. His conversational style was fresh and crisp and his subject matter, the search for lost cities on the Central American isthmus, was romantic and adventurous. Stephens's book has been characterized as the "great American nonfiction narrative of the 19th century." Indeed, what Stephens wrote about the Maya makes a major contribution to Maya studies.
Steve Glassman retraces Stephens's route, visiting the same archaeological sites, towns, markets, and churches and meeting along the way the descendants of those people Stephens described, from mestizo en route to the cornfields to town elders welcoming the Norte Americanos. Glassman's work interlaces discussion of the history, natural environment, and architecture of the region with descriptions of the people who live and work there. Glassman compares his 20th-century experience with Stephens's 19th-century exploration, gazing in awe at the same monumental pyramids, eating similar foods, and avoiding the political clashes that disrupt the governments and economies of the area.
Stephens's books are still widely available, but his importance to literary professionals has been overlooked. With this new travelogue, Glassman reaffirms Stephens's reputation and brings his work to wider critical and public attention.
When his father developed Alzheimer’s disease, Don Lago realized that the stories and traditions of his Swedish ancestors would be lost along with the rest of his father’s memories. Haunted by this inevitable tragedy, Lago set out to fight back against forgetting by researching and reclaiming his long-lost Scandinavian roots.
Beginning his quest with a visit to his ancestral home of Gränna, Sweden, Lago explores all facets of Scandinavian America—Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Icelandic—along the way. He encounters Icelanders living in the Utah desert, a Titanic victim buried beneath a gigantic Swedish coffee pot in Iowa, an Arkansas town named after the famous Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, a real-life Legoland in southern California, and other unique remnants of America’s Scandinavian past. Visits to Sigurd Olson’s legendary cabin on the banks of Burntside Lake in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Carl Sandburg’s birthplace in Galesburg, Illinois, further provide Lago with an acute sense of the Scandinavian values that so greatly influenced, and continue to influence, American society.
More than just a travel memoir, On the Viking Trail places Scandinavian immigrants and their history within the wider sweep of American culture. Lago’s perceptive eye and amusing tales remind readers of all ethnic backgrounds that to truly appreciate America one must never forget its immigrant past.
“People’s lives are written on the fields of old farms. The rows of the fields are like lines on a page, blank and white in winter, filled in with each year’s story of happiness, disappointment, drought, rain, sun, scarcity, plenty. The chapters accumulate, and people enter and leave the narrative. Only the farm goes on.”—From the Introduction
In One Small Farm, Craig Schreiner’s evocative color photographs capture one family as they maintain the rhythms and routines of small farm life near Pine Bluff, Wisconsin. “Milk in the morning and milk at night. Feed the cows and calves. Plant crops. Grind feed. Chop and bale hay. Cut wood. Clean the barn. Spread manure on the fields. Plow snow and split wood in winter. In spring, pick rocks from the fields. Cultivate corn. Pick corn. Harvest oats and barley. Help calves be born. Milk in the morning and milk at night.”
There’s much more to life on the farm than just chores, of course, and Schreiner captures the rhythms and richness of everyday life on the farm in all seasons, evoking both the challenges and the joys and providing viewers a window into a world that is quickly fading. In documenting the Lamberty family’s daily work and life, these thoughtful photos explore larger questions concerning the future of small farm agriculture, Wisconsin cultural traditions, and the rural way of life.
When Melissa Clark purchased a box of old scrapbooks online, she knew only that she had bought something relating to the University of Utah and Zion Park. What came in the mail was much more than she had expected. Instead of random mementos, two albums arrived full of photographs and newspaper clippings dating to 1920 that document a trip made by six young women from the University of Utah into the newly formed Zion National Park. Part of a promotional campaign developed by the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad to advertise its national park shuttle service, the women entered Zion Canyon as its first offical tourists. When Melissa bought those timeworn scrapbooks she found a forgotten treasure: the opening of Zion.
With text by John Clark, the scrapbooks are now the basis of a one-of-a-kind publication. Part fashion spread, part adventure guide, and all Utah cultural treasure, Opening Zion is a stunning visual record of the park. Remarkably detailed black-and-white photographs show the young adventurers scrambling over rocky outcrops, pondering the dizzying height of Zion's sheer walls, and singing camp songs by the campfire. We are introduced anew to the "gigantic grandeur" of Zion National Park. As one of the women wrote, "One can think only beautiful thoughts amid such splendor."
Gathering for the first time all of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on Japanese civilization, The Other Face of the Moon forms a sustained meditation into the French anthropologist’s dictum that to understand one’s own culture, one must regard it from the point of view of another.
Exposure to Japanese art was influential in Lévi-Strauss’s early intellectual growth, and between 1977 and 1988 he visited the country five times. The essays, lectures, and interviews of this volume, written between 1979 and 2001, are the product of these journeys. They investigate an astonishing range of subjects—among them Japan’s founding myths, Noh and Kabuki theater, the distinctiveness of the Japanese musical scale, the artisanship of Jomon pottery, and the relationship between Japanese graphic arts and cuisine. For Lévi-Strauss, Japan occupied a unique place among world cultures. Molded in the ancient past by Chinese influences, it had more recently incorporated much from Europe and the United States. But the substance of these borrowings was so carefully assimilated that Japanese culture never lost its specificity. As though viewed from the hidden side of the moon, Asia, Europe, and America all find, in Japan, images of themselves profoundly transformed.
As in Lévi-Strauss’s classic ethnography Tristes Tropiques, this new English translation presents the voice of one of France’s most public intellectuals at its most personal.
This richly illustrated volume tells the story of thehome that has served as Ohio’s executive residence since 1957, and of the nine governors and their families who have lived in the house. Our First Family’s Home offers the first complete history of the residence and garden that represent Ohio to visiting dignitaries and the citizens of the state alike. Once in a state of decline, the house has been lovingly restored and improved by itsresidents. Development of the Ohio Heritage Garden has increased the educational potential of the house and has sparked an interest in the preservation of native plant species. Looking toward the future, the Residence is also taking the lead in promoting environmental issues such as solar powerand green energy.
Photographs by award-winning environmental photographer Ian Adams and botanical art by Dianne McElwain showcase the beauty of the home’s architecture and the myriad of native plants that grace the three acres on which the Residence stands. Dianne McElwain is a member of the American Society of Botanical Artists in New York. Her botanical paintings have won numerous awards and are found in prestigious collections throughout the United States.
Essays highlight the Jacobethan Revival architecture and the history of the home. The remaining pieces cover the garden and include an intimate tour of the Heritage Garden, which was inspired by Ohio’s diverse landscape. Finally, former Governor Ted Strickland and First Lady Frances Strickland discuss the increasing focus on green energy at the Governor’s Residence and First Lady Emerita Hope Taft explains how native plants can help sustain the environment.
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