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169 books match the query 'Land' and 4 start with r

cover of Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands

Recharting the Caribbean

Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands

Bill Maurer

University of Michigan Press, 2000

If, as many cultural critics have asserted, the world is becoming more like the Caribbean, then the task of charting what we mean by "the Caribbean" is an urgent one. This careful study of the British Virgin Islands (BVI) calls attention to the ways in which ideas about nature and choice have come to justify a social order in which half the population is deemed not to belong and is denied legal rights. The BVI, one of Britain's few remaining colonial possessions, has become an important destination point for Caribbean migrants and a center for international financial services. Bill Maurer traces how the BVI came to be defined, legally and popularly, as a territorial entity, and how BVIslanders came to define themselves as a "people" sharing a "culture." He argues that law has been central to the construction of ethnic, racial, and cultural differences that create boundaries between peoples and places and that facilitate the exploitation of labor, the exclusion of people from the political process, and the globalization of capital. Recharting the Caribbean will be important reading for anthropologist, legal scholars, and historians of colonial discourse. Bill Maurer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Irvine.
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cover of Reconstructors: Land, Work, and Engineering After the Civil War

Reconstructors

Land, Work, and Engineering After the Civil War

John Dean Davis

University of Chicago Press, 2026

Explores the institutional and environmental transformations that occurred during the Reconstruction Era. 

While the Reconstruction Era in America saw a paradigmatic realignment of the country’s core institutions and values, there was a physical quality to Reconstruction as well: the country was not only rebuilding the South after the Civil War, but flat-out building as it expanded westward. 

In Reconstructors, John Dean Davis details how the Army Corps of Engineers and its subcontractors designed and redesigned the infrastructural landscape to support the republic’s rebirth. The Corps’ projects not only transformed the landscape; they created markets, fostered a distinctive expansionist culture, and—for a time—enacted a less discriminatory economic and social agenda across the South and West. Davis aims to bring federal power, environmentalism, and capitalism into a frame that reveals the landscape's power to further ideology. 

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cover of Ricky's Atlas: Mapping a Land on Fire

Ricky's Atlas

Mapping a Land on Fire

Li

Oregon State University Press, 2016

American Association for the Advancement of Science / Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books, Best Hands-On Science Book 2017

In this sequel to Ellie’s Log: Exploring the Forest Where the Great Tree Fell, Ricky Zamora brings his love of map-making and his boundless curiosity to the arid landscapes east of the Cascades Mountains.  He arrives during a wild thunderstorm, and watches his family and their neighbors scramble to deal with a wildfire sparked by lightning. Joined by his friend Ellie, he sees how plants, animals, and people adjust to life with wildfires. 
 
While hiking across a natural prairie, climbing up a fire tower, and studying historical photos and maps, Ricky and Ellie learn about the role of fire in shaping the landscape of the semi-arid plateau east of the mountains. They experience the scary days of wildfire in progress, explore a gritty site after a wildfire, and discover how some plants and animals depend on fire to survive.
 
Color pen-and-ink drawings accompany the text and vividly illustrate plants, animals, and events encountered in this exciting summer adventure. With his friend Ellie, Ricky creates a brightly colored diary of the fire, with maps, timelines, and sketches of what they see in this fire-prone land.  Ricky’s notebook about his summer visit to his uncle’s ranch becomes an atlas of fire ecology, weather patterns, and life in the rain shadow.
 
Upper elementary kids will enjoy the mixture of amazing adventures with actual historical, physical, and ecological data about the region.  Woven into the story are the small pleasures of ranch life, intriguing histories of Native Americans and early settlers, and almost unbelievable views of ancient fossils.  Ricky and Ellie’s explorations, accompanied by their hand-written notes, introduce readers to a very special landscape and history east of the mountains.
 
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cover of Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax-Priísta, 1940–1962

Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata

The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax-Priísta, 1940–1962

Tanalís Padilla

Duke University Press, 2008

In Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, Tanalís Padilla shows that the period from 1940 to 1968, generally viewed as a time of social and political stability in Mexico, actually saw numerous instances of popular discontent and widespread state repression. Padilla provides a detailed history of a mid-twentieth-century agrarian mobilization in the Mexican state of Morelos, the homeland of Emiliano Zapata. In so doing, she brings to the fore the continuities between the popular struggles surrounding the Mexican Revolution and contemporary rural uprisings such as the Zapatista rebellion.

The peasants known in popular memory as Jaramillistas were led by Rubén Jaramillo (1900–1962). An agrarian leader from Morelos who participated in the Mexican Revolution and fought under Zapata, Jaramillo later became an outspoken defender of the rural poor. The Jaramillistas were inspired by the legacy of the Zapatistas, the peasant army that fought for land and community autonomy with particular tenacity during the Revolution. Padilla examines the way that the Jaramillistas used the legacy of Zapatismo but also transformed, expanded, and updated it in dialogue with other national and international political movements.

The Jaramillistas fought persistently through legal channels for access to land, the means to work it, and sustainable prices for their products, but the Mexican government increasingly closed its doors to rural reform. The government ultimately responded with repression, pushing the Jaramillistas into armed struggle, and transforming their calls for local reform into a broader critique of capitalism. With Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, Padilla sheds new light on the decision to initiate armed struggle, women’s challenges to patriarchal norms, and the ways that campesinos framed their demands in relation to national and international political developments.

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