Results by title
603 books match the query 'Description and travel' and 31 start with r
Ramona Memories
Tourism and the Shaping of Southern CaliforniaDydia DeLyser
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Raptor
A Journey through BirdsJames Macdonald Lockhart
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Taking as his guide the nineteenth-century Scottish naturalist and artist William MacGillivray, Lockhart loosely follows the historical trail forged by MacGillivray as he ventured from Aberdeen to London filling his pockets with plants and writing and illustrating the canonical A History of British Birds. Linking his journey to that of his muse, Lockhart shares his own encounters with raptors ranging from the scarce osprey to the successfully reintroduced red kite, a species once protected by medieval royal statute, revealing with poetic immediacy the extraordinary behaviors of these birds and the extreme environments they call home.
Creatures both worshipped and reviled, raptors have a talon-hold on the human heart and imagination. With his book, Lockhart unravels these complicated ties in a work by turns reverent and euphoric—an interweaving of history, travel, and nature writing at its best. A hymn to wanderers, to the land and to the sky, and especially to the birds, Raptor soars.
Reading the River
A Voyage Down the YukonJohn Hildebrand
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
“John Hildebrand sets out in a canoe . . . to explore the great riverway of northwestern Canada and Alaska. . . . The geography is closely rendered and the characters especially sharply drawn. The country is filled with mad dropouts at river fish camps, good-hearted girls in the towns, sullen natives in tumbledown villages, cranky old-timers, terrible drunks and worse moralizers who live off the wild landscape and its abundant resources. . . . This is a fine work, and Hildebrand is a fine writer.”—Charles E. Little, Wilderness
Real Places
An Unconventional Guide to America's Generic LandscapeGrady Clay
University of Chicago Press, 1994
"This book provides a language for the architecture of everyday life."—Ross Miller, Chicago Tribune
"Spirited observations and capsule histories."—Suzanne Stephens, New York Times Book Review
"Compelling. . . . Included here are many nuggets of insight and illumination."—Brad Knickerbocker, Christian Science Monitor
"An amusing and touching book about the reality we Americans have captured in our language."—Boston Sunday Globe
Rebels and Outliers
Real Stories of the American WestJohn M Glionna
University of Nevada Press, 2025
This vibrant collection invites readers to journey through the rugged landscapes and tight-knit communities that define the American West. Along the way, you’ll meet individuals whose grit, resilience, and pioneering spirit embody the heart of this region’s legacy.
A captivating follow-up to Glionna’s 2022 book, Outback Nevada: Real Stories of the Silver State, Rebels and Outliers is a testament to the untamed, enduring character of the people who call the West home.
Reconnaissance in Sonora
Charles D. Poston’s 1854 Exploration of Mexico and the Gadsden PurchaseC. Gilbert Storms
University of Arizona Press, 2015
Poston led his party through Sonora and the territory of the 1854 Gadsden Purchase, which today encompasses southern Arizona and a portion of southern New Mexico. The syndicate’s charge to the young adventurer was to acquire land in Mexico in anticipation of the Gadsden Purchase and the building of the transcontinental railroad. Reconnaissance in Sonora details Poston’s expedition, including the founding of the town of Colorado City at the site of present-day Yuma, Arizona.
C. Gilbert Storms explores the American ideas of territorial expansion and Manifest Destiny, the national debate over a route for a transcontinental railroad, the legends of rich gold and silver mines in northern Mexico, and the French and American filibusters that plagued northern Mexico in the early 1850s.
Red Line
By Charles Bowden, foreword by James Galvin
University of Texas Press, 2018
“At its best, Red Line can read like an original synthesis of Peter Matthiessen and William Burroughs . . . a brave and interesting book.”
—David Rieff, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Charles Bowden’s Red Line is a look at America through the window of the southwest. His vision is as nasty, peculiar, brutal, as it is intriguing and, perhaps, accurate. Bowden offers consciousness rather than consolation, but in order to do anything about our nightmares we must take a cold look and Red Line casts the coldest eye in recent memory.”
—Jim Harrison
One of Charles Bowden’s earliest books, Red Line powerfully conveys a desert civilization careening over the edge—and decaying at its center. Bowden’s quest for the literal and figurative truth behind the assassination of a murderous border-town drug dealer becomes a meditation on the glories of the desert landscape, the squalors of the society that threatens it, and the contradictions inherent in trying to save it.
Red Virgin
Memoirs Of Louise MichelLouise Michel, edited and translated by Bullitt Lowry and Elizabeth Gunter
University of Alabama Press, 1981
Personal memoires of influential French feminist socialist and radicalist Louise Michel, a participant and observer in the Paris Commune.
Louise Michel was born illegitimate in 1830 and became a schoolmistress in Paris. She was involved in radical activities during the twilight of France’s Second Empire, and during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the siege of Paris. She was a leading member of the revolutionary groups controlling Montmarte. Michel emerged as one of the leaders of the insurrection during the Paris Commune of March-May 1871; and French anarchists saw her as martyr and saint, "the Red Virgin." These are her memoires.
When the Versailles government crushed the Commune in May 1871, Michel was sentenced to exile in New Caledonia, until the general amnesty of 1880, when she returned to France and great popular acclaim and support from the working people of the country. Michel was arrested again during a demonstration in Paris in 1883 and sentenced to six years in prison. Pardoned after three years, she continued her speeches and writing, although she spent the greater part of her time from 1890 until her death in 1905 in England in self-imposed exile. It was during her prison term from 1883 to 1886 that she compiled her Memoires, now available in English.
These memoirs offer readers a view of the non-Marxist left and give an in-depth look into the development of the revolutionary spirit. The early chapters treat her childhood, the development of her revolutionary feelings, and her training as a schoolteacher. The next section describes her activities as a schoolteacher in the Haute-Marne and Paris and therefore contains much of interest on education in 19th-century Europe. Her chapters on the siege of Paris, the Commune, and her first trial show those events from the point of view of a major participant. Of particular interest is a chapter on women’s rights, which Michel saw as part of the search for the rights of all people, male and female, and not as a separate struggle.
The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel will be useful to both scholars and students of 19th-century French history and women’s studies.
Rediscovering National Parks in the Spirit of John Muir
Michael Frome
University of Utah Press, 2015
As a journalist, advocate, and professor, Michael Frome has spent decades engaged with conservation topics and has taken particular interest in America’s national parks. He draws on this experience and knowledge to address what remains to be done in order to truly value and preserve these special places. Part memoir, part history, and part broadside against those who would diminish this heritage, Rediscovering National Parks in the Spirit of John Muir, through thoughtful reflections and ruminations, bears witness to the grandeur of our parks and to the need for a renewed sense of appreciation and individual responsibility for their care.
In recollections of his encounters and conversations with key people in national park history, Frome discusses park politics, conflicts between use and preservation, and impacts of commercialization. He proposes a dedicated return to the true spirit in which the parks were established, in the manner of John Muir. He advocates maintaining these lands as wild sanctuaries, places where we can find inspiration, solitude, silence, balance, and simplicity, reminding us why we must preserve our national treasures and why we need to connect with the deeper values they hold.
Rediscovering the Maine Woods
Thoreau's Legacy in an Unsettled LandJohn J. Kucich
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
Inspired partly by this expedition, the accessible and engaging essays here offer valuable new perspectives on conservation, the cultural ties that connect Native communities to the land, and the profound influence the geography of the Maine Woods had on Thoreau and writers and activists who followed in his wake. Together, these essays offer a rich and multifaceted look at this special place and the ways in which Thoreau's Maine experiences continue to shape understandings of the environment a century and a half later.
Contributors include the volume editor, Kathryn Dolan, James S. Finley, James Francis, Richard W. Judd, Dale Potts, Melissa Sexton, Chris Sockalexis, Stan Tag, Robert M. Thorson, and Laura Dassow Walls.
Reflecting a Prairie Town
A Year in PetersonDrake Hokanson
University of Iowa Press, 1994
In Reflecting a Prairie Town Drake Hokanson takes a prolonged look at a common place in an uncommon fashion. He presents Peterson, Iowa, through a singular combination of words and images, a remarkable synthesis of history, geography, direct observation, climatology, botany, oral history, archaeology, agricultural science, literature, geology, photography, and even a bit of astronomy. This vernacular landscape study is lavishly illustrated with photographs taken by the author, including stunning panoramic views.
The fundamental truth of experience on this continent has always lain in the challenges and opportunities of space. Place mattered because we were so few before the immensity of the land. But place at the same time rooted us in that immensity. Even now our appreciation for place is not quite dead; locked in our urban environments we continue to crave a “view,” be it of mountains, forests, or prairies. These “views” crop up unexpectedly as photographic murals in office buildings or posters in dentists' offices. It is to this stifled sense of the importance of place that Hokanson speaks; he invites us to remember and to be revitalized.
The magic of Reflecting a Prairie Town is the revelation that Peterson, Iowa, is a small town that is also uncannily large. In capturing the essence of this one place Hokanson helps us to understand our own worlds better—he asks the simple questions many of us would like to ask were we given the opportunity. To enter this book is to come back to a place we have never really seen before.
Reflections on the Neches
A Naturalist's Odyssey along the Big Thicket's Snow RiverGeraldine Ellis Watson
University of North Texas Press, 2003
Remarkable Curiosity
Dispatches from a New York City Journalist's 1873 Railroad Trip across the American WestJerald T. Milanich
University Press of Colorado, 2008
Although today he is virtually unknown, during his lifetime Cummings was one of the most famous newspapermen in the United States, in part because of stories like these. Complete with a biographical sketch and historical introduction, A Remarkable Curiosity is an enjoyable read for anybody interested in the American West in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Remote
Finding Home in the BitterrootsDJ Lee
Oregon State University Press, 2020
When DJ Lee’s dear friend vanishes in the vast Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana, she travels there to seek answers. The journey unexpectedly brings to an end her fifteen-year quest to uncover the buried history of her family in this remote place. Although Lee doesn’t find all the answers, she comes away with a penetrating memoir that weaves her present-day story with past excursions into the region, wilderness history, and family secrets.
As she grapples with wild animal stand-offs, bush plane flights in dense fog, raging forest fires, and strange characters who have come to the wilderness to seek or hide, Lee learns how she can survive emotionally and how the wilderness survives as an ecosystem. Her growing knowledge of the life cycles of salmon and wolverine, the regenerative role of fire, and Nimíipuu land practices helps her find intimacy in this remote landscape.
Skillfully intertwining history, outdoor adventure, and mystery, Lee’s memoir is an engaging contribution to the growing body of literature on women and wilderness and a lyrical tribute to the spiritual connection between people and the natural world.
Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America
and a Stay of Several Years Along the Missouri (During the Years 1824-1827)Gottfried Duden; James W. Goodrich, General Editor; George H. Kellner, Elsa Nagel, Adolf E. Schroeder, and W. M. Senner, Editors and Translators
University of Missouri Press, 1980
The mass migrations to the United States from Europe that began in the 1830s were strongly influenced by what is known today as emigration literature--travelers' writings about their experiences in the New World. Such accounts were particularly popular with German readers; over 150 examples of the genre were published in Germany between 1827 and 1856. Gottfried Duden's Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America, published in 1829, was one of the most influential of these books. The timing, format, coverage, and literary qualities of the Report, and its idyllic descriptions of pioneer farming in Missouri, combined to make it an instant success. It attracted thousands of Germans to the Midwest, and particularly to Missouri, the focus of Duden's account. This edited and annotated translation is the first complete version to be published in English. It provides for the general public and the professional historian a significant contribution to U.S. immigration history and a unique and delightful fragment of Missouri's rich German heritage.
Duden presented his account in the form of personal letters, a style that helped make the book believable. The Mississippi- Missouri valley reminded him of his native Rhineland where the rivers facilitated trade and transportation, and fertile river bottomland offers the perfect environment for agriculture. Duden farmed the land he bought during his sojourn in Missouri, and his book includes meticulous descriptions of clearing, fencing, and harvesting. His pro-emigration bias, colored by the fact that he himself had been able to hire help on his Missouri farm, made his view of the farmer's life, it turned out, more idyllic than practical. Many would-be gentlemen farmers, inspired by his book to come to Missouri, found pioneer farming more strenuous than they had expected.
Report on the Island and Diocese of Puerto Rico (1647)
Don Diego Torres y Vargas, Translated by Jaime R. Vidal
University of Scranton Press, 2010
Composed at the request of the Royal Spanish Chronicler of the Indies, Don Diego Torres y Vargas’s Report on the Island & Diocese of Puerto Rico was the first history of Puerto Rico written by a native of the Spanish island colony. Torres y Vargas, a fourth generation Puerto Rican and descendant of Ponce de Leon, records here the history of the Catholic Church in Puerto Rico as well as the political, social, military, economic, and natural history of the island.
This translation—the first ever into English—includes three historical essays by eminent Puerto Rican and Latino Studies scholar Anthony Stevens-Arroyo and extensive translator notes to guide the reader through the realities of seventeenth-century Puerto Rican culture and society.
Rim to River
Looking into the Heart of ArizonaTom Zoellner
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Rim to River is the story of this extraordinary journey through redrock country, down canyons, up mesas, and across desert plains to the obscure valley in Mexico that gave the state its enigmatic name. The trek is interspersed with incisive essays that pick apart the distinctive cultural landscape of Arizona: the wine-colored pinnacles and complex spirituality of Navajoland, the mind-numbing stucco suburbs, desperate border crossings, legislative skullduggery, extreme politics, billion-dollar copper ventures, dehydrating rivers, retirement kingdoms, old-time foodways, ghosts of old wars, honky-tonk dreamers, murder mysteries, and magical Grand Canyon reveries.
In Rim to River, Zoellner does for Arizona what Larry McMurtry did for Texas in In a Narrow Grave and what Wallace Stegner did for Utah in Mormon Country: paint an enduring portrait of a misunderstood American state. An indictment, a love letter, and a homecoming story all at once.
Rise and Fall of the Confederacy
The Memoir of Senator Williamson S. Oldham, CSAEdited & Intro by Clayton E. Jewett
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Rising Ground
A Search for the Spirit of PlacePhilip Marsden
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Rising Ground is a record of that journey, but it is also so much more: a beautifully written meditation on place, nature, and human life that encompasses history, archaeology, geography, and the love of place that suffuses us when we finally find home. Firmly in a storied tradition of English nature writing that stretches from Gilbert White to Helen MacDonald, Rising Ground reveals the ways that places and peoples have interacted over time, from standing stones to footpaths, ancient habitations to modern highways. What does it mean to truly live in a place, and what does it take to understand, and honor, those who lived and died there long before we arrived?
Like the best travel and nature writing, Rising Ground is written with the pace of a contemplative walk, and is rich with insight and a powerful sense of the long skein of years that links us to our ancestors. Marsden’s close, loving look at the small patch of earth around him is sure to help you see your own place—and your own home—anew.
River Fever
Adventures on the Mississippi, 1969-1972Will Bagley
Signature Books, 2019
Beginning in the spring of 1969, Huckleberry Finn inspired a question: Could you build a raft, float down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and on the way learn something about America and its peoples? Will Bagley, a vagrant longhair and future prize-winning western historian, and his friends could, and did. Now, a half century after the adventure, Bagley tells his story.
Road Sides
An Illustrated Companion to Dining and Driving in the American SouthBy Emily Wallace
University of Texas Press, 2019
An illustrated glovebox essential, Road Sides explores the fundamentals of a well-fed road trip through the American South, from A to Z. There are detours and destinations, accompanied by detailed histories and more than one hundred original illustrations that document how we get where we’re going and what to eat and do along the way.
Learn the backstory of food-shaped buildings, including the folks behind Hills of Snow, a giant snow cone stand in Smithfield, North Carolina, that resembles the icy treats it sells. Find out how kudzu was used to support a burgeoning highway system, and get to know Edith Edwards—the self-proclaimed Kudzu Queen—who turns the obnoxious vine into delicious teas and jellies. Discover the roots of kitschy roadside attractions, and have lunch with the state-employed mermaids of Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida.
Road Sides is for everyone—the driver in search of supper or superlatives (the biggest, best, and even worst), the person who cannot resist a local plaque or snack and pulls over for every historical marker and road stand, and the kid who just wants to gawk at a peach-shaped water tower.
Road Trip
A Pocket History of IndianaAndrea Neal
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2016
Roads of Home
Beck, Henry
Rutgers University Press, 1983
Long regarded as folklife classics, Henry Charlton Beck's books are vivid recreations of the back roads, small towns, and legends that give New Jersey its special character. Father Henry Charlton Beck, who lived in New Jersey nearly all his life, was the author of numerous books on New Jersey folklife, state editor of the Camden Courier-Post, and writer for the Newark Star-Ledger. He is considered New Jersey's first folklorist and his painstaking work has left us with a rich collection of tales.
Roman Holidays
American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century ItalyRobert K. Martin
University of Iowa Press, 2001
Rome Measured and Imagined
Early Modern Maps of the Eternal CityJessica Maier
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In Rome Measured and Imagined, Jessica Maier explores the history of this genre—which merged the accuracy of scientific endeavor with the imaginative aspects of art—during the rise of Renaissance print culture. Through an exploration of works dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, her book interweaves the story of the city portrait with that of Rome itself.
Highly interdisciplinary and beautifully illustrated with nearly one hundred city portraits, Rome Measured and Imagined advances the scholarship on Renaissance Rome and print culture in fascinating ways.
Rome as a Guide to the Good Life
A Philosophical Grand TourScott Samuelson
University of Chicago Press, 2023
This is a guidebook to Rome for those interested in both la dolce vita and what the ancient Romans called the vita beata—the good life. Philosopher Scott Samuelson offers a thinker’s tour of the Eternal City, rooting ideas from this philosophical tradition within the geography of the city itself. As he introduces the city’s great works of art and its most famous sites—the Colosseum, the Forum, the Campo de’ Fiori—Samuelson also gets to the heart of the knotty ethical and emotional questions they pose. Practicing philosophy in place, Rome as a Guide to the Good Life tackles the profound questions that most tours of Rome only bracket. What does all this history tell us about who we are?
In addition to being a thoughtful philosophical companion, Samuelson is also a memorable tour guide, taking us on plenty of detours and pausing to linger over an afternoon Negroni, sample four classic Roman pastas, or explore the city’s best hidden gems. With Samuelson’s help, we understand why Rome has inspired philosophers such as Lucretius and Seneca, poets and artists such as Horace and Caravaggio, filmmakers like Fellini, and adventurers like Rosa Bathurst. This eclectic guidebook to Roman philosophy is for intrepid wanderers and armchair travelers alike—anyone who wants not just a change of scenery, but a change of soul.
Rome
A City out of PrintRose Marie San Juan
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
Rough-Water Man
Elwyn Blake'S Colorado River ExpeditionsRichard E. Westwood
University of Nevada Press, 2013
Rudo Ensayo
A Description of Sonora and Arizona in 1764Juan Nentvig; Translated, Clarified, and Annotated by Alberto Francisco Pradeau and Robert R. Rasmussen
University of Arizona Press, 1980
Runes Of The North
Sigurd F. Olson
University of Minnesota Press, 1997
Running to the Fire
An American Missionary Comes of Age in Revolutionary EthiopiaTim Bascom
University of Iowa Press, 2015
Running to the Fire focuses on the turbulent year the Bascom family experienced upon traveling into revolutionary Ethiopia. The teenage Bascom finds a paradoxical exhilaration in living so close to constant danger. At boarding school in Addis Ababa, where dorm parents demand morning devotions and forbid dancing, Bascom bonds with other youth due to a shared sense of threat. He falls in love for the first time, but the young couple is soon separated by the politics that affect all their lives. Across the country, missionaries are being held under house arrest while communist cadres seize their hospitals and schools. A friend’s father is imprisoned as a suspected CIA agent; another is killed by raiding Somalis.
Throughout, the teenaged Bascom struggles with his faith and his role within the conflict as a white American Christian missionary’s child. Reflecting back as an adult, he explores the historical, cultural, and religious contexts that led to this conflict, even though in doing so he is forced to ask himself questions that are easier left alone. Why, he wonders, did he find such strange fulfillment in being young and idealistic in the middle of what was essentially a kind of holy war?