Results by title
111 books match the query 'Historical geography' and 4 start with n
Nature and History in Modern Italy
Marco Armiero
Ohio University Press, 2010
Is Italy il bel paese—the beautiful country—where tourists spend their vacations looking for art, history, and scenery? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by humanity’s greed and nature’s cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narrator’s vision of Italy. The fifteen essays in Nature and History in Modern Italy investigate that nation’s long experience in managing domesxadtixadcated rather than wild natures and offer insight into these conflicting visions. Italians shaped their land in the most literal sense, producing the landscape, sculpting its heritage, embedding memory in nature, and rendering the two different visions inseparxadable. The interplay of Italy’s rich human history and its dramatic natural diversity is a subject with broad appeal to a wide range of readers.
Neither Land nor Water
Planning Through Fringe Ecologies in the Meadowlands (1896–2020)Sevin Yildiz
University of Chicago Press, 2026
An urban and environmental history of the New Jersey Meadowlands, where marsh meets megamall.
The New Jersey Meadowlands, the vast marshes across the Hudson River from New York City, are a mysterious and complex wetland. Both strange and well-known to the millions of people who traverse the northeast corridor every year, this landscape is not well understood despite its familiarity. Seemingly natural and unnatural, human and nonhuman, the Meadowlands has long been shaped by urban development, industry, infrastructure, and countless dreams.
In Neither Land nor Water, Şevin Yıldız offers a close look at the planners, scientists, developers, politicians, industrialists, and others who have engaged with, dreamed about, or damaged this transitional ecology in different ways over the decades. She traces key periods in the area’s rich histories of urban planning and ecological thought, from the dispossession of the Lenape natives, through the dawn of ecological science, and onto both intensive industrial developments and environmental resistance to them. She examines as well how the Meadowlands exposes the inadequacies of today’s approaches to planning in the face of climate change and how they perhaps offer clues to a better future.
New Englanders in a New Land
Newark in the Proprietary Period, 1666-1702Timothy J. Crist
Rutgers University Press, 2027
New England Puritans from the former New Haven Colony settled Newark in 1666. Their fierce determination to establish scripture-based government in a close-knit township, with community control over admitting new inhabitants, often put them in direct conflict with New Jersey's proprietary government. Newark's egalitarian system for allocating land diverged sharply from the proprietors' headright approach, adapted from the West Indies and Carolina, that rewarded settler use of indentured servants and enslaved labor with larger distributions of land.
This study provides a fresh interpretation of the founding and settlement of Newark as a self-contained New England community, including their negotiations with Native Americans, formation of godly self-government, gradual allocation of township land, and introduction of slavery. To implement their New England way, Newarkers resisted the proprietary government to the point of rebellion, bringing into stark relief the inherent conflict between two sources of authority, one scriptural and community-based and the other royal and proprietary, and two systems of land distribution.
Not Yet a Placeless Land
Tracking an Evolving American GeographyWilbur Zelinsky
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
In this book, cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky challenges that nearly universal view and reaches a paradoxical conclusion: that American land and society are becoming more uniform and more diverse at the same time. After recounting the many ways in which modern technologies, an advanced capitalist market system, and a potent central political establishment have standardized the built landscape of the country's vast territory and its burgeoning population over the past two hundred and fifty years, he also considers the vigor of countervailing forces. In a carefully balanced assessment, he documents steady increases in the role of the unpredictable, in the number and variety of arbitrarily located places and activities, and the persistence of basic cultural diversities. Contrary to popular perceptions, place-to-place differences in spoken language, religion, and political behavior have not diminished or disappeared. In fact, Zelinsky shows, novel cultural regions and specialized cities have been emerging even as a latter-day version of regionalism and examples of neo-localism are taking root in many parts of the United States.