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577 books match the query 'Earth Sciences' and 40 start with m

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Make It Rain

State Control of the Atmosphere in Twentieth-Century America

Kristine C. Harper

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Weather control. Juxtaposing those two words is enough to raise eyebrows in a world where even the best weather models still fail to nail every forecast, and when the effects of climate change on sea level height, seasonal averages of weather phenomena, and biological behavior are being watched with interest by all, regardless of political or scientific persuasion. But between the late nineteenth century—when the United States first funded an attempt to “shock” rain out of clouds—and the late 1940s, rainmaking (as it had been known) became weather control. And then things got out of control.

In Make It Rain, Kristine C. Harper tells the long and somewhat ludicrous history of state-funded attempts to manage, manipulate, and deploy the weather in America. Harper shows that governments from the federal to the local became helplessly captivated by the idea that weather control could promote agriculture, health, industrial output, and economic growth at home, or even be used as a military weapon and diplomatic tool abroad. Clear fog for landing aircraft? There’s a project for that. Gentle rain for strawberries? Let’s do it! Enhanced snowpacks for hydroelectric utilities? Check. The heyday of these weather control programs came during the Cold War, as the atmosphere came to be seen as something to be defended, weaponized, and manipulated. Yet Harper demonstrates that today there are clear implications for our attempts to solve the problems of climate change.

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Making the Mission

Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco

Ocean Howell

University of Chicago Press, 2015

In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, residents of the city’s iconic Mission District bucked the city-wide development plan, defiantly announcing that in their neighborhood, they would be calling the shots. Ever since, the Mission has become known as a city within a city, and a place where residents have, over the last century, organized and reorganized themselves to make the neighborhood in their own image.

In Making the Mission, Ocean Howell tells the story of how residents of the Mission District organized to claim the right to plan their own neighborhood and how they mobilized a politics of place and ethnicity to create a strong, often racialized identity—a pattern that would repeat itself again and again throughout the twentieth century. Surveying the perspectives of formal and informal groups, city officials and district residents, local and federal agencies, Howell articulates how these actors worked with and against one another to establish the very ideas of the public and the public interest, as well as to negotiate and renegotiate what the neighborhood wanted. In the process, he shows that national narratives about how cities grow and change are fundamentally insufficient; everything is always shaped by local actors and concerns.

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Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth

Edited by William L. Thomas Jr.

University of Chicago Press, 1956

This book presents a large-scale multidisciplinary evaluation of what has happened and is happening to the earth under man's impress. It includes the papers presented by fifty-three eminent scholars at a major conference on ecology—one of the first ever held—sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. A pioneering publication in the field of environmental research, the work has steadily contributed to ecological studies, and is now considered a classic.

The volume is organized into three parts. Part 1 deals with man's rise to the status of ecological dominance, and includes discussions of such topics as the role of fire as the first great force harnessed by man, early food-producing populations, the clearing of Europe's woodlands, subsistence economies and commercial economies, and the natural history of urbanization.

Part 2 investigates environmental changes such as man's impact upon the seas and coastlines. The highly topical ecology of wastes is discussed, as well as urban-industrial demands and the depletion of natural resources.

Part 3 is concerned with the limits of the earth's resources. It includes papers dealing with the population spiral, possible limitations of raw-material consumption and energy use, and technological denudation.

Each part is accompanied by a report summarizing the ideas discussed at the conference by the participants.

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Map Men

Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe

Steven Seegel

University of Chicago Press, 2018

More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of political projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. In Map Men, Steven Seegel takes us through some of these historical dramas with a detailed look at the maps that made and unmade the world of East Central Europe through a long continuum of world war and revolution. As a collective biography of five prominent geographers between 1870 and 1950—Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pál Teleki—Map Men reexamines the deep emotions, textures of friendship, and multigenerational sagas behind these influential maps.

Taking us deep into cartographical archives, Seegel re-creates the public and private worlds of these five mapmakers, who interacted with and influenced one another even as they played key roles in defining and redefining borders, territories, nations—and, ultimately, the interconnection of the world through two world wars. Throughout, he examines the transnational nature of these processes and addresses weighty questions about the causes and consequences of the world wars, the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and the reasons East Central Europe became the fault line of these world-changing developments.

At a time when East Central Europe has surged back into geopolitical consciousness, Map Men offers a timely and important look at the historical origins of how the region was defined—and the key people who helped define it.

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Mapping Europe's Borderlands

Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire

Steven Seegel

University of Chicago Press, 2012

The simplest purpose of a map is a rational one: to educate, to solve a problem, to point someone in the right direction. Maps shape and communicate information, for the sake of improved orientation. But maps exist for states as well as individuals, and they need to be interpreted as expressions of power and knowledge, as Steven Seegel makes clear in his impressive and important new book.

Mapping Europe’s Borderlands takes the familiar problems of state and nation building in eastern Europe and presents them through an entirely new prism, that of cartography and cartographers. Drawing from sources in eleven languages, including military, historical-pedagogical, and ethnographic maps, as well as geographic texts and related cartographic literature, Seegel explores the role of maps and mapmakers in the East Central European borderlands from the Enlightenment to the Treaty of Versailles. For example, Seegel explains how Russia used cartography in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and, later, formed its geography society as a cover for gathering intelligence. He also explains the importance of maps to the formation of identities and institutions in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania, as well as in Russia. Seegel concludes with a consideration of the impact of cartographers’ regional and socioeconomic backgrounds, educations, families, career options, and available language choices.

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Mapping Latin America

A Cartographic Reader

Edited by Jordana Dym and Karl Offen

University of Chicago Press, 2011

For many, a map is nothing more than a tool used to determine the location or distribution of something—a country, a city, or a natural resource. But maps reveal much more: to really read a map means to examine what it shows and what it doesn’t, and to ask who made it, why, and for whom. The contributors to this new volume ask these sorts of questions about maps of Latin America, and in doing so illuminate the ways cartography has helped to shape this region from the Rio Grande to Patagonia.

In Mapping Latin America,Jordana Dym and Karl Offen bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to examine and interpret more than five centuries of Latin American maps.Individual chapters take on maps of every size and scale and from a wide variety of mapmakers—from the hand-drawn maps of Native Americans, to those by famed explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt, to those produced in today’s newspapers and magazines for the general public. The maps collected here, and the interpretations that accompany them, provide an excellent source to help readers better understand how Latin American countries, regions, provinces, and municipalities came to be defined, measured, organized, occupied, settled, disputed, and understood—that is, how they came to have specific meanings to specific people at specific moments in time.

The first book to deal with the broad sweep of mapping activities across Latin America, this lavishly illustrated volume will be required reading for students and scholars of geography and Latin American history, and anyone interested in understanding the significance of maps in human cultures and societies.

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Mapping Nature across the Americas

Edited by Kathleen A. Brosnan & James R. Akerman

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Maps are inherently unnatural. Projecting three-dimensional realities onto two-dimensional surfaces, they are abstractions that capture someone’s idea of what matters within a particular place; they require selections and omissions. These very characteristics, however, give maps their importance for understanding how humans have interacted with the natural world, and give historical maps, especially, the power to provide rich insights into the relationship between humans and nature over time. That is just what is achieved in Mapping Nature across the Americas. Illustrated throughout, the essays in this book argue for greater analysis of historical maps in the field of environmental history, and for greater attention within the field of the history of cartography to the cultural constructions of nature contained within maps. This volume thus provides the first in-depth and interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between maps and environmental knowledge in the Americas—including, for example, stories of indigenous cartography in Mexico, the allegorical presence of palm trees in maps of Argentina, the systemic mapping of US forests, and the scientific platting of Canada’s remote lands.

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Mapping Paradise

A History of Heaven on Earth

Alessandro Scafi

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Throughout history, humans have searched for paradise. When early Christians adopted the Hebrew Bible, and with it the story of Genesis, the Garden of Eden became an idyllic habitat for all mankind. Medieval Christians believed this paradise was a place on earth, different from this world and yet part of it, situated in real geography and indicated on maps. From the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, the mapping of paradise validated the authority of holy scripture and supported Christian faith. But from the early nineteenth century onwards, the question of the exact location of paradise was left not to theologians but to the layman. And at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is still no end to the stream of theories on the location of the former Garden of Eden.

Mapping Paradise is a history of the cartography of paradise that journeys from the beginning of Christianity to the present day. Instead of dismissing the medieval belief in a paradise on earth as a picturesque legend and the cartography of paradise as an example of the period’s many superstitions, Alessandro Scafi explores the intellectual conditions that made the medieval mapping of paradise possible. The challenge for mapmakers, Scafi argues, was to make visible a place that was geographically inaccessible and yet real, remote in time and yet still the scene of an essential episode of the history of salvation. Mapping Paradise also accounts for the transformations, in both theological doctrine and cartographical practice, that brought about the decline of the belief in a terrestrial paradise and the emergence of the new historical and regional mapping of the Garden of Eden that began at the time of the Reformation and still continues today.

The first book to show how paradise has been expressed in cartographic form throughout two millennia, Mapping Paradise reveals how the most deeply reflective thoughts about the ultimate destiny of all human life have been molded and remolded, generation by generation.

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Mapping an Empire

The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843

Matthew H. Edney

University of Chicago Press, 1997

In this fascinating history of the British surveys of India, Matthew H. Edney relates how imperial Britain used modern survey techniques to not only create and define the spatial image of its Empire, but also to legitimate its colonialist activities.

"There is much to be praised in this book. It is an excellent history of how India came to be painted red in the nineteenth century. But more importantly, Mapping an Empire sets a new standard for books that examine a fundamental problem in the history of European imperialism."—D. Graham Burnett, Times Literary Supplement

"Mapping an Empire is undoubtedly a major contribution to the rapidly growing literature on science and empire, and a work which deserves to stimulate a great deal of fresh thinking and informed research."—David Arnold, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

"This case study offers broadly applicable insights into the relationship between ideology, technology and politics. . . . Carefully read, this is a tale of irony about wishful thinking and the limits of knowledge."—Publishers Weekly

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Mapping and Empire

Soldier-Engineers on the Southwestern Frontier

Edited by Dennis Reinhartz and Gerald D. Saxon

University of Texas Press, 2005

From the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, Spain, then Mexico, and finally the United States took ownership of the land from the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico to the Pacific Coast of Alta and Baja California—today's American Southwest. Each country faced the challenge of holding on to territory that was poorly known and sparsely settled, and each responded by sending out military mapping expeditions to set boundaries and chart topographical features. All three countries recognized that turning terra incognita into clearly delineated political units was a key step in empire building, as vital to their national interest as the activities of the missionaries, civilian officials, settlers, and adventurers who followed in the footsteps of the soldier-engineers.

With essays by eight leading historians, this book offers the most current and comprehensive overview of the processes by which Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. soldier-engineers mapped the southwestern frontier, as well as the local and even geopolitical consequences of their mapping. Three essays focus on Spanish efforts to map the Gulf and Pacific Coasts, to chart the inland Southwest, and to define and defend its boundaries against English, French, Russian, and American incursions. Subsequent essays investigate the role that mapping played both in Mexico's attempts to maintain control of its northern territory and in the United States' push to expand its political boundary to the Pacific Ocean. The concluding essay draws connections between mapping in the Southwest and the geopolitical history of the Americas and Europe.

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Mapping the Nation

History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America

Susan Schulten

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation’s past.

All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map.

Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century, when Americans learned to see themselves and their nation in new dimensions.

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Maps and Civilization

Cartography in Culture and Society, Third Edition

Norman J. W. Thrower

University of Chicago Press, 2008

In this concise introduction to the history of cartography, Norman J. W. Thrower charts the intimate links between maps and history from antiquity to the present day. A wealth of illustrations, including the oldest known map and contemporary examples made using Geographical Information Systems (GIS), illuminate the many ways in which various human cultures have interpreted spatial relationships.
The third edition of Maps and Civilization incorporates numerous revisions, features new material throughout the book, and includes a new alphabetized bibliography.

Praise for previous editions of Maps and Civilization:
“A marvelous compendium of map lore. Anyone truly interested in the development of cartography will want to have his or her own copy to annotate, underline, and index for handy referencing.”—L. M. Sebert, Geomatica

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Maps and Politics

Jeremy Black

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Do maps accurately and objectively present the information we expect them to portray, or are they instead colored by the political purposes of their makers? In this lively and well-illustrated book, Jeremy Black investigates this dangerous territory, arguing persuasively that the supposed "objectivity" of the map-making and map-using process cannot be divorced from aspects of the politics of representation.

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Maps in Tudor England

P. D. A. Harvey

University of Chicago Press, 1993

In the England of 1500 maps were rare objects, little used or understood. By 1600 they had become a familiar part of everyday life, created and used for practical purposes, woven into tapestries, illustrating bibles, and even printed on playing cards.

In Maps in Tudor England, P. D. A. Harvey traces this revolution of production, understanding, and use of maps in England from 1485 to 1603. By the mid-sixteenth century, mapmapers had begun to draw maps to a consistent scale, reproducing the results of measured survey. By the end of the century, maps drawn to scale and showing features by conventional signs were commonly used throughout England.

In this survey Harvey focuses on maps of small areas, up to the size of a county, exploring their impact on the political and social life of England in the spheres of the military, government, towns, landed estates, buildings, and the law. Richly illustrated with thirty color and fifty black and white reproductions of rare maps, his account is an informative and accessible introduction to this revolutionary period in the history of cartography, as well as a unique visual history of Tudor England.

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Maps of Paradise

Alessandro Scafi

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Where is paradise? It always seems to be elsewhere, inaccessible, outside of time. Either it existed yesterday or it will return tomorrow; it may be just around the corner, on a remote island, beyond the sea. Across a wide range of cultures, paradise is located in the distant past, in a longed-for future, in remote places or within each of us. In particular, people everywhere in the world share some kind of nostalgia for an innocence experienced at the beginning of history. For two millennia, learned Christians have wondered where on earth the primal paradise could have been located. Where was the idyllic Garden of Eden that is described in the Bible? In the Far East? In equatorial Africa? In Mesopotamia? Under the sea? Where were Adam and Eve created in their unspoiled perfection?

Maps of Paradise charts the diverse ways in which scholars and mapmakers from the eighth to the twenty-first century rose to the challenge of identifying the location of paradise on a map, despite the certain knowledge that it was beyond human reach. Over one hundred illustrations celebrate this history of a paradox: the mapping of the unmappable. It is also a mirror to the universal dream of perfection and happiness, and the yearning to discover heaven on earth.

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Maps with the News

The Development of American Journalistic Cartography

Mark Monmonier

University of Chicago Press, 1989

Maps with the News is a lively assessment of the role of cartography in American journalism. Tracing the use of maps in American news reporting from the eighteenth century to the 1980s, Mark Monmonier explores why and how journalistic maps have achieved such importance.

"A most welcome and thorough investigation of a neglected aspect of both the history of cartography and modern cartographic practice."—Mapline

"A well-written, scholarly treatment of journalistic cartography. . . . It is well researched, thoroughly indexed and referenced . . . amply illustrated."—Judith A. Tyner, Imago Mundi

"There is little doubt that Maps with the News should be part of the training and on the desks of all those concerned with producing maps for mass consumption, and also on the bookshelves of all journalists, graphic artists, historians of cartography, and geographic educators."—W. G. V. Balchin, Geographical Journal

"A definitive work on journalistic cartography."—Virginia Chipperfield, Society of University Cartographers Bulletin

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Maps

Finding Our Place in the World

Edited by James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow Jr.

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Maps are universal forms of communication, easily understood and appreciated regardless of culture or language. This truly magisterial book introduces readers to the widest range of maps ever considered in one volume: maps from different time periods and a variety of cultures; maps made for divergent purposes and depicting a range of environments; and maps that embody the famous, the important, the beautiful, the groundbreaking, or the amusing. Built around the functions of maps—the kinds of things maps do and have done—Maps confirms the vital role of maps throughout history in commerce, art, literature, and national identity.

The book begins by examining the use of maps for wayfinding, revealing that even maps as common and widely used as these are the product of historical circumstances and cultural differences. The second chapter considers maps whose makers employed the smallest of scales to envision the broadest of human stages—the world, the heavens, even the act of creation itself. The next chapter looks at maps that are, literally, at the opposite end of the scale from cosmological and world maps—maps that represent specific parts of the world and provide a close-up view of areas in which their makers lived, worked, and moved.

Having shown how maps help us get around and make sense of our greater and lesser worlds, Maps then turns to the ways in which certain maps can be linked to particular events in history, exploring how they have helped Americans, for instance, to understand their past, cope with current events, and plan their national future. The fifth chapter considers maps that represent data from scientific instruments, population censuses, and historical records. These maps illustrate, for example, how diseases spread, what the ocean floor looks like, and how the weather is tracked and predicted. Next comes a turn to the imaginary, featuring maps that depict entire fictional worlds, from Hell to Utopia and from Middle Earth to the fantasy game World of Warcraft. The final chapter traces the origins of map consumption throughout history and ponders the impact of cartography on modern society.

A companion volume to the most ambitious exhibition on the history of maps ever mounted in North America, Maps will challenge readers to stretch conventional thought about what constitutes a map and how many different ways we can understand graphically the environment in which we live. Collectors, historians, mapmakers and users, and anyone who has ever “gotten lost” in the lines and symbols of a map will find much to love and learn from in this book.

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Marine Macroecology

Edited by Jon D. Witman and Kaustuv Roy

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Pioneered in the late 1980s, the concept of macroecology—a framework for studying ecological communities with a focus on patterns and processes—revolutionized the field. Although this approach has been applied mainly to terrestrial ecosystems, there is increasing interest in quantifying macroecological patterns in the sea and understanding the processes that generate them. Taking stock of the current work in the field and advocating a research agenda for the decades ahead, Marine Macroecology draws together insights and approaches from a diverse group of scientists to show how marine ecology can benefit from the adoption of macroecological approaches.

Divided into three parts, Marine Macroecology first provides an overview of marine diversity patterns and offers case studies of specific habitats and taxonomic groups. In the second part, contributors focus on process-based explanations for marine ecological patterns. The third part presents new approaches to understanding processes driving the macroecolgical patterns in the sea. Uniting unique insights from different perspectives with the common goal of identifying and understanding large-scale biodiversity patterns, Marine Macroecology will inspire the next wave of marine ecologists to approach their research from a macroecological perspective.

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Mastering Iron

The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868

Anne Kelly Knowles

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Veins of iron run deep in the history of America. Iron making began almost as soon as European settlement, with the establishment of the first ironworks in colonial Massachusetts. Yet it was Great Britain that became the Atlantic world’s dominant low-cost, high-volume producer of iron, a position it retained throughout the nineteenth century. It was not until after the Civil War that American iron producers began to match the scale and efficiency of the British iron industry.

In Mastering Iron, Anne Kelly Knowles argues that the prolonged development of the US iron industry was largely due to geographical problems the British did not face. Pairing exhaustive manuscript research with analysis of a detailed geospatial database that she built of the industry, Knowles reconstructs the American iron industry in unprecedented depth, from locating hundreds of iron companies in their social and environmental contexts to explaining workplace culture and social relations between workers and managers. She demonstrates how ironworks in Alabama, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia struggled to replicate British technologies but, in the attempt, brought about changes in the American industry that set the stage for the subsequent age of steel.

Richly illustrated with dozens of original maps and period art work, all in full color, Mastering Iron sheds new light on American ambitions and highlights the challenges a young nation faced as it grappled with its geographic conditions.

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Mastering the Niger

James MacQueen's African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery

David Lambert

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In Mastering the Niger, David Lambert recalls Scotsman James MacQueen (1778–1870) and his publication of A New Map of Africa in 1841 to show that Atlantic slavery—as a practice of subjugation, a source of wealth, and a focus of political struggle—was entangled with the production, circulation, and reception of geographical knowledge. The British empire banned the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery itself in 1833, creating a need for a new British imperial economy. Without ever setting foot on the continent, MacQueen took on the task of solving the “Niger problem,” that is, to successfully map the course of the river and its tributaries, and thus breathe life into his scheme for the exploration, colonization, and commercial exploitation of West Africa.

Lambert illustrates how MacQueen’s geographical research began, four decades before the publication of the New Map, when he was managing a sugar estate on the West Indian colony of Grenada. There MacQueen encountered slaves with firsthand knowledge of West Africa, whose accounts would form the basis of his geographical claims. Lambert examines the inspirations and foundations for MacQueen’s geographical theory as well as its reception, arguing that Atlantic slavery and ideas for alternatives to it helped produce geographical knowledge, while geographical discourse informed the struggle over slavery.

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Masters of All They Surveyed

Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado

D. Graham Burnett

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Chronicling the British pursuit of the legendary El Dorado, Masters of All They Surveyed tells the fascinating story of geography, cartography, and scientific exploration in Britain's unique South American colony, Guyana. How did nineteenth-century Europeans turn areas they called terra incognita into bounded colonial territories? How did a tender-footed gentleman, predisposed to seasickness (and unable to swim), make his way up churning rivers into thick jungle, arid savanna, and forbidding mountain ranges, survive for the better part of a decade, and emerge with a map? What did that map mean?

In answering these questions, D. Graham Burnett brings to light the work of several such explorers, particularly Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, the man who claimed to be the first to reach the site of Ralegh's El Dorado. Commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society and later by the British Crown, Schomburgk explored and mapped regions in modern Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana, always in close contact with Amerindian communities. Drawing heavily on the maps, reports, and letters that Schomburgk sent back to England, and especially on the luxuriant images of survey landmarks in his Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana (reproduced in color in this book), Burnett shows how a vast network of traverse surveys, illustrations, and travel narratives not only laid out the official boundaries of British Guiana but also marked out a symbolic landscape that fired the British imperial imagination.

Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated, Masters of All They Surveyed will interest anyone who wants to understand the histories of colonialism and science.

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Masters of Uncertainty

Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth

Phaedra Daipha

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Though we commonly make them the butt of our jokes, weather forecasters are in fact exceptionally good at managing uncertainty. They consistently do a better job calibrating their performance than stockbrokers, physicians, or other decision-making experts precisely because they receive feedback on their decisions in near real time. Following forecasters in their quest for truth and accuracy, therefore, holds the key to the analytically elusive process of decision making as it actually happens.

In Masters of Uncertainty, Phaedra Daipha develops a new conceptual framework for the process of decision making, after spending years immersed in the life of a northeastern office of the National Weather Service. Arguing that predicting the weather will always be more craft than science, Daipha shows how forecasters have made a virtue of the unpredictability of the weather. Impressive data infrastructures and powerful computer models are still only a substitute for the real thing outside, and so forecasters also enlist improvisational collage techniques and an omnivorous appetite for information to create a locally meaningful forecast on their computer screens. Intent on capturing decision making in action, Daipha takes the reader through engrossing firsthand accounts of several forecasting episodes (hits and misses) and offers a rare fly-on-the-wall insight into the process and challenges of producing meteorological predictions come rain or come shine. Combining rich detail with lucid argument, Masters of Uncertainty advances a theory of decision making that foregrounds the pragmatic and situated nature of expert cognition and casts into new light how we make decisions in the digital age.

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Maxwell Street

Writing and Thinking Place

Tim Cresswell

University of Chicago Press, 2019

What is the nature of place, and how does one undertake to write about it? To answer these questions, geographer and poet Tim Cresswell looks to Chicago’s iconic Maxwell Street Market area. Maxwell Street was for decades a place where people from all corners of the city mingled to buy and sell goods, play and listen to the blues, and encounter new foods and cultures. Now, redeveloped and renamed University Village, it could hardly be more different.

In Maxwell Street, Cresswell advocates approaching the study of place as an “assemblage” of things, meanings, and practices. He models this innovative approach through a montage format that exposes the different types of texts—primary, secondary, and photographic sources—that have attempted to capture the essence of the area. Cresswell studies his historical sources just as he explores the different elements of Maxwell Street—exposing them layer by layer. Brilliantly interweaving words and images, Maxwell Street sheds light on a historic Chicago neighborhood and offers a new model for how to write about place that will interest anyone in the fields of geography, urban studies, or cultural history.

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Measuring the New World

Enlightenment Science and South America

Neil Safier

University of Chicago Press, 2008

Prior to 1735, South America was terra incognita to many Europeans. But that year, the Paris Academy of Sciences sent a mission to the Spanish American province of Quito (in present-day Ecuador) to study the curvature of the earth at the Equator. Equipped with quadrants and telescopes, the mission’s participants referred to the transfer of scientific knowledge from Europe to the Andes as a “sacred fire” passing mysteriously through European astronomical instruments to observers in South America.

By taking an innovative interdisciplinary look at the traces of this expedition, Measuring the New World examines the transatlantic flow of knowledge from West to East. Through ephemeral monuments and geographical maps, this book explores how the social and cultural worlds of South America contributed to the production of European scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment. Neil Safier uses the notebooks of traveling philosophers, as well as specimens from the expedition, to place this particular scientific endeavor in the larger context of early modern print culture and the emerging intellectual category of scientist as author.

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Medieval Islamic Maps

An Exploration

Karen C. Pinto

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Hundreds of exceptional cartographic images are scattered throughout medieval and early modern Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscript collections. The plethora of copies created around the Islamic world over the course of eight centuries testifies to the enduring importance of these medieval visions for the Muslim cartographic imagination. With Medieval Islamic Maps, historian Karen C. Pinto brings us the first in-depth exploration of medieval Islamic cartography from the mid-tenth to the nineteenth century.

Pinto focuses on the distinct tradition of maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS), examining them from three distinct angles—iconography, context, and patronage. She untangles the history of the KMMS maps, traces their inception and evolution, and analyzes them to reveal the identities of their creators, painters, and patrons, as well as the vivid realities of the social and physical world they depicted. In doing so, Pinto develops innovative techniques for approaching the visual record of Islamic history, explores how medieval Muslims perceived themselves and their world, and brings Middle Eastern maps into the forefront of the study of the history of cartography.

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Meteorite Craters

Kathleen Mark

University of Arizona Press, 1987

The scientific community has argued for decades over the origin of giant craters on the earth. In a highly readable fashion, Kathleen Mark recounts the fascinating detective story of how scientists came to recognize metorite craters, both ancient and relatively recent.

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Metroburbia, USA

Knox, Paul L

Rutgers University Press, 2008

Decades of economic prosperity in the United States have redefined the American dream. Paul Knox explores how extreme versions of this dream have changed the American landscape. Increased wealth has led America's metropolitan areas to develop into vast sprawling regions of "metroburbia"ùfragmented mixtures of employment and residential settings, combining urban and suburban characteristics.

Upper-middle-class Americans are moving into larger homes in greater numbers, which leads Knox to explore the relationship between built form and material culture in contemporary society. He covers changes in home design, real estate, the work of developers, and the changing wishes of consumers. Knox shows that contemporary suburban landscapes are a product of consumer demand, combined with the logic of real estate development, mediated by design and policy professionals and institutions of governance. Suburban landscapes not only echo the fortunes of successive generations of inhabitants, Knox argues, they also reflect the country's changing core values.

Knox addresses key areas of concern and importance to today's urban planners and suburban residents including McMansions, traffic disasters, house design, homeowner's associations, exclusionary politics, and big box stores. Through the inclusion of examples and photos, Metroburbia, USA creates an accessible portrait of today's suburbs supported by data, anecdotes, and social theory. It is a broad interpretation of the American metropolitan form that looks carefully at the different influences that contribute to where and how we live today.

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Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán

From Deserts to Clouds

David Yetman and Alberto Búrquez

University of Arizona Press, 2023

Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán: From Deserts to Clouds provides an accessible and photographic view of the culture, history, and environment of an extraordinary region of southern Mexico. The Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán are lauded by botanists for their spectacular plant life—they contain the densest columnar cacti forests in the world. Recent archaeological excavations reveal them also to be a formative Mesoamerican site as well. So singular is this region that it is home to the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Through firsthand experience and engaging prose, the authors provide a synthesis of the geology, ecology, history, and cultures of the valleys, showing their importance and influence as Mesoamerican arteries for environmental and cultural interchange through Mexico. It also reveals the extraordinary plant life that draws from habitats ranging from deserts to tropical forests.

The authors, both experts in their respective fields, begin with a general description of the geography of the valleys, followed by an introduction to climate and hydrology, a look at the valleys’ often bewildering geology. The book delves into cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the valleys and discusses archaeological sites that that encapsulate the valleys’ fascinating history prior to the arrival of Europeans. The book concludes by describing the flora that makes the region so singular.

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Microwave Circuit Theory and Foundations of Microwave Metrology

Glenn F. Engen

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1992

No system in science or engineering can be successfully designed, analysed and specified unless it is backed up by precise quantitative measurements. This is particularly difficult in the field of microwaves where, more often than not, the parameter(s) of interest cannot be observed directly but must be inferred from the measurement of other related parameters. Although the advent of the automated network analyser has eliminated much of the previous drudgery, the problems of interpreting the digitally displayed information still remain. One purpose of this book is to provide the reader with a thorough understanding of the microwave circuit model and its limitations, and thus eliminate the many potential pitfalls that otherwise await the unwary experimenter.

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Midlatitude Synoptic Meteorology

Dynamics, Analysis, and Forecasting

Gary Lackmann

American Meteorological Society, 2011

The past decade has been characterized by remarkable advances in meteorological observation, computing techniques, and data-visualization technology. However, the benefit of these advances can only be fully realized with the introduction of a systematic, applied approach to meteorological education that allows well-established theoretical concepts to be applied to modernized observational and numerical datasets.

This textbook links theoretical concepts to modern technology and facilitates the meaningful application of concepts, theories, and techniques using real data. As such, it will both serve those planning careers in meteorological research and weather prediction, and provide a template for the application of modern technology in a classroom and laboratory setting.

Synoptic-dynamic meteorology, synoptically driven mesoscale phenomena, weather forecasting, and numerical weather prediction are covered in depth in this text, which is intended for undergraduates and beginning graduate students in the atmospheric sciences.

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Mineralogy of Arizona

John W. Anthony, Sidney A. Williams, Richard A. Bideaux, and Raymond W. Grant

University of Arizona Press, 1995

Long awaited by professional geologists and amateur rockhounds alike, the new Mineralogy of Arizona is a completely revised and greatly expanded edition of a book first published in 1977 and updated in 1982. New material covers 232 minerals discovered in Arizona since the first edition, including 28 first identified in the state. Also new is a section on the history of Arizona mining and mineralogy, which provides context for understanding the significance of mineral discoveries and production since prehistoric times.

For nearly 20 years, Mineralogy of Arizona has been respected as the definitive reference on Arizona minerals. Now completely revised and greatly expanded with breathtaking new color photographs, the third edition covers 232 minerals discovered in Arizona since the first edition, including 28 first identified in the state.

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Mineralogy of Arizona, Fourth Edition

Raymond W. Grant, Ronald B. Gibbs, Harvey W. Jong, Jan C. Rasmussen, and Stanley B. Keith

University of Arizona Press, 2022

Completely revised and expanded, this fourth edition covers the 986 minerals found in Arizona, showcased with breathtaking new color photographs throughout the book. The new edition includes more than 200 new species not reported in the third edition and previously unknown in Arizona.

Chapters in this fourth edition of Mineralogy of Arizona cover gemstones and lapidary materials, fluorescent minerals, and an impressive catalog of mineral species. The authors also discuss mineral districts, including information about the geology, mineralogy, and age of mineral occurrences throughout the state. The book includes detailed maps of each county, showing the boundaries and characteristics of the mineral districts present in the state.

Arizona’s rich mineral history is well illustrated by the more than 300 color photographs of minerals, gemstones, and fluorescent minerals that help the reader identify and understand the rich and diverse mineralogy of Arizona. Anyone interested in the mineralogy and geology of the state will find this the most up-to-date compilation of the minerals known to occur in Arizona.

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Minerals of Nevada

Stephen B. Castor

University of Nevada Press, 2012

Nevada has an extraordinary diversity of minerals, some of them unique to the state and some the focus of human exploitation for millennia. Minerals of Nevada is the first synoptic catalog of Nevada minerals, listing every mineral found in the state along with the places where they occur. The book includes the geologic history of the state, the history of mining in Nevada, descriptions of significant mineral deposits and mining districts, maps, and an album of striking color photographs of rare and important minerals.

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Minnesota's Geologist

The Life of Newton Horace Winchell

Sue Leaf

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

Winner of the 2021 Minnesota Book Award for Minnesota Nonfiction

The story of the scientist who first mapped Minnesota’s geology, set against the backdrop of early scientific inquiry in the state

At twenty, Newton Horace Winchell declared, “I know nothing about rocks.” At twenty-five, he decided to make them his life’s work. As a young geologist tasked with heading the Minnesota Geological and Natural History Survey, Winchell (1839–1914) charted the prehistory of the region, its era of inland seas, its volcanic activity, and its several ice ages—laying the foundation for the monumental five-volume Geology of Minnesota. Tracing Winchell’s remarkable path from impoverished fifteen-year-old schoolteacher to a leading light of an emerging scientific field, Minnesota’s Geologist also recreates the heady early days of scientific inquiry in Minnesota, a time when one man’s determination and passion for learning could unlock the secrets of the state’s distant past and present landscape.

Traveling by horse and cart, by sailboat and birchbark canoe, Winchell and his group surveyed rock outcrops, river valleys, basalt formations on Lake Superior, and the vast Red River Valley. He studied petrology at the Sorbonne in Paris, bringing cutting-edge knowledge to bear on the volcanic rocks of the Arrowhead region. As a founder of the American Geological Society and founding editor of American Geologist, the first journal for professional geologists, Winchell was the driving force behind scientific endeavor in early state history, serving as mentor to many young scientists and presiding over a household—the Winchell House, located on the University of Minnesota’s present-day mall—that was a nexus of intellectual ferment. His life story, told here for the first time, draws an intimate picture of this influential scientist, set against a backdrop of Minnesota’s geological complexity and splendor.

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Minnesota’s Geology

Richard Ojakangas

University of Minnesota Press, 1982

The classic book on the state’s unique geology, now back in print!

Have you ever wondered how the Mississippi River was formed? Or why shark teeth have been found in the Iron Range of the Upper Midwest? Towering mountain ranges, explosive volcanoes, expansive glaciers, and long-extinct forms of both land and sea life were important parts of Minnesota’s ancient history. Today the evidence of this remarkable heritage is revealed in the state’s rocky outcroppings, stony soils, and thousands of lakes.

Minnesota’s Geology provides a history of the past 3.5 billion years in the area’s development. In accessible language, Minnesota-based geologists Richard W. Ojakangas and Charles L. Matsch tell the story of the state’s past and offer a guide for those who want to read geological history firsthand from the rocks and landscapes of today. The book’s four sections give a short introduction to geology and Minnesota’s place in geologic history; a historic timeline; a look at the metallic minerals, nonmetals, and water present today; and a geologic picture of today’s Minnesota arranged in five geographical regions. This book is both a wonderful source of information for rock hounds and the perfect backpacking companion for tourists and outdoor enthusiasts. Lavishly illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs, as well as extensive graphs and maps, Minnesota’s Geology will inform and delight for years to come."This is certainly one of the finest books about the geology of any state in the United States. It is written at a level that should satisfy the visitor, the student, and even most professionals." American Scientist"A stunning guide . . . Minnesota’s Geology will be as valuable to the rock hound or student as it is to a trained geologist." Duluth News-Tribune"Minnesota’s Geology sets a standard of excellence for books about the geology of a region. . . . an unusually well-written and well-balanced book." Science Books and FilmsRichard W. Ojakangas and Charles L. Matsch are professors in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

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