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William Butler Ogden was a pioneer railroad magnate, one of the earliest founders and developers of the city of Chicago, and an important influence on U.S. westward expansion. His career as a businessman stretched from the streets of Chicago to the wilds of the Wisconsin lumber forests, from the iron mines of Pennsylvania to the financial capitals in New York and beyond. Jack Harpster’s The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago: A Biography of William B. Ogden is the first chronicle of one of the most notable figures in nineteenth-century America. Harpster traces the life of Ogden from his early experiences as a boy and young businessman in upstate New York to his migration to Chicago, where he invested in land, canal construction, and steamboat companies. He became Chicago’s first mayor, built the city’s first railway system, and suffered through the Great Chicago Fire. His diverse business interests included real estate, land development, city planning, urban transportation, manufacturing, beer brewing, mining, and banking, to name a few. Harpster, however, does not simply focus on Ogden’s role as business mogul; he delves into the heart and soul of the man himself. The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago is a meticulously researched and nuanced biography set against the backdrop of the historical and societal themes of the nineteenth century. It is a sweeping story about one man’s impact on the birth of commerce in America. Ogden’s private life proves to be as varied and interesting as his public persona, and Harpster weaves the two into a colorful tapestry of a life well and usefully lived.
Thomas Berry is one of the most eminent cultural historians of our time. Here he presents the culmination of his ideas and urges us to move from being a disrupting force on the Earth to a benign presence. This transition is the Great Work -- the most necessary and most ennobling work we will ever undertake. Berry's message is not one of doom but of hope. He reminds society of its function, particularly the universities and other educational institutions whose role is to guide students into an appreciation rather than an exploitation of the world around them. Berry is the leading spokesperson for the Earth, and his profound ecological insight illuminates the path we need to take in the realms of ethics, politics, economics, and education if both we and the planet are to survive.
This book explores what many consider to be the most important issue in the re-wilding of America today-roads. Not highways, but the 500,000 miles of roads built on federal forest lands to access natural resources and then abandoned when the resources were removed. A Road Runs Through It features a collection of essays by some of today's finest nonfiction writers: Peter Matthiessen, Barry Lopez, Janisse Ray, David Quammen, David Petersen, Stephanie Mills, William Kittredge, and two dozen others. Together, they cover all aspects of roads and their impact on the wilderness. As all royalties from this book are being donated to Wildlands CPR, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and reviving wild places by promoting road removal and re-vegetation, this book not only educates and informs on the issues of roads-it becomes part of the solution. Book jacket.
In 1869, Jay Cooke, the brilliant but idiosyncratic American banker, decided to finance the Northern Pacific, a transcontinental railroad planned from Duluth, Minnesota, to Seattle. M. John Lubetkin tells how Cooke’s gamble reignited war with the Sioux, rescued George Armstrong Custer from obscurity, created Yellowstone Park, pushed frontier settlement four hundred miles westward, and triggered the Panic of 1873. Staking his reputation and wealth on the Northern Pacific, Cooke was soon whipsawed by the railroad’s mismanagement, questionable contracts, and construction problems. Financier J. P. Morgan undermined him, and the Crédit Mobilier scandal ended congressional support. When railroad surveyors and army escorts ignored Sioux chief Sitting Bull’s warning not to enter the Yellowstone Valley, Indian attacks—combined with alcoholic commanders—led to embarrassing setbacks on the field, in the nation’s press, and among investors. Lubetkin’s suspenseful narrative describes events played out from Wall Street to the Yellowstone and vividly portrays the soldiers, engineers, businessmen, politicians, and Native Americans who tried to build or block the Northern Pacific.
In The Small Nation Solution, eminent anthropologist John H. Bodley argues that the contemporary global problems of poverty, conflict, and environmental degradation are problems of scale and power. Bodley’s solution involves keeping nations small so as to limit the power of elite directors. It is a simple idea with profound implications. He spotlights successful small nations around the world as the best working models of sustainable sociocultural systems and shows how these diverse small nations can be the building blocks of a transformed global system that could save the world.
A chief innovation of Explorations in Ecocriticism is to push ecological criticism beyond its focus on literary studies to engage with other arts and culture. One chapter closely examines the pictures commissioned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to valorize its big dam projects. Previously, no one has written about the large art collection that toured the nation under the auspices of the Smithsonian in the early 1970s, when the Bureau of Reclamation was under fire and new environmental regulations were becoming law. Another chapter, “An Iconography of Sabotage,” previously published in France as part of a Paris symposium, looks at the pictorial dimension of saboteurs throughout American history, with a special emphasis on the IWW and Earth First! The book draws extensively on the social sciences. Ecology and environment are treated too often as technical topics that go over the heads of lay readers. Many Americans care about air and water quality, the extinction of species, and the unfortunate politicization of science. But they also find the discourse daunting, the details exceedingly complex. By leavening such heavy subjects with current events, Explorations in Ecocriticism makes environmental issues accessible to lay readers and offers routes to sustainability in the United States today.
The essays selected for this volume show how the Pacific rapidly became part of an industrializing world. Its raw materials (notably rubber and copper) were critical, some of its handicraft industries were devastated by mechanized competition, others survived and adapted, contributing to distinctive patterns of industrialization that made Japan a new center of power, and also laid the groundwork for later growth in Taiwan, Korea, and coastal China. The Pacific coast of the Americas was also first drawn into an industrial world largely as an exporter of raw materials, but North and South diverged rapidly, portending futures even more different than those of Northeast and Southeast Asia. By the 1930s - when the uneven effects of industrialization would have much to do with plunging the Pacific into war - one can already glimpse in outline the structural bases for many of the region's contemporary characteristics. All this is set in context in the important introduction by Kenneth Pomeranz.