Download Free The Making Of The Modern West Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Making Of The Modern West and write the review.

To many Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the West was simultaneously the greatest symbol of American opportunity, the greatest story of its history, and the imagined blank slate on which the country's future would be written. From the Spanish-American War in 1898 to the Great Depression's end, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, policymakers at various levels and large-scale corporate investors, along with those living in the West and its borderlands, struggled over who would define modernity, who would participate in the modern American West, and who would be excluded. In Making a Modern U.S. West Sarah Deutsch surveys the history of the U.S. West from 1898 to 1940. Centering what is often relegated to the margins in histories of the region--the flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders--Deutsch attends to the region's role in constructing U.S. racial formations and argues that the West as a region was as important as the South in constructing the United States as a "white man's country." While this racial formation was linked to claims of modernity and progress by powerful players, Deutsch shows that visions of what constituted modernity were deeply contested by others. This expansive volume presents the most thorough examination to date of the American West from the late 1890s to the eve of World War II.
A fascinating and novel exploration of the transformative role played by the American West in the development of modernism in the United States Drawing extensively from various disciplines including ethnology, geography, geology, and environmental studies, this groundbreaking book addresses shifting concepts of time, history, and landscape in relation to the work of pioneering American artists during the first half of the 20th century. Paintings, watercolors, and photographs by renowned artists such as Frederic Remington, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, Dorothea Lange, and Jackson Pollock are considered alongside American Indian ledger drawings, tempuras, and Dineh sandpaintings. Taken together, these works document the quest to create a specifically American art in the decades prior to World War II. The Modern West begins with a captivating meditation on the relationship between human culture and the physical landscape by Barry Lopez, who traveled the West in the artists' footsteps. Emily Ballew Neff then describes the evolving importance of the West for American artists working out a radically new aesthetic response to space and place, from artist-explorers on the turn-of-the-century frontier, to visionaries of a Californian arcadia, to desert luminaries who found in its stark topography a natural equivalent to abstraction. Beautifully illustrated and handsomely designed, this book is essential to anyone interested in the West and the history of modernism in American art.
The day-by-day inside story of the making of Tombstone (1993) as told to the author by those who were there--actors, extras, crew members, Buckaroos, historians and everyone in between. Historical context that inspired Kevin Jarre's screenplay is included. Production designers, cameramen, costume designers, composers, illustrators, screenwriter, journalists, set dressers, prop masters, medics, stuntmen and many others share their recollections--many never-before-told--of filming this epic Western.
"A brilliant inquiry into culture and society over some seven centuries, Mary Evans explores the origins and trajectories of modernity from the Reformation through the Enlightenment to the contemporary period. Her intellectual control of complex ideas and diverse forms of evidence is consistently impressive. Exploring various pessimistic, dystopian strands in European perspectives on modernity by Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber and Theodor Adorno, she defends a balanced view of both the negative and positive consequences of modernization. This is historical sociology at its best: judicious, theoretically informed, carefully crafted, grounded in empirical research, and above all intellectually clever. A Short History of Society will prove to be a valuable companion to the student who needs a concise scholarly and sociological overview of modernity." Bryan Turner, National University of Singapore A Short History of Society is a concise account of the emergence of modern western society. It looks at how successive generations have understood and explained the world in which they lived, and examines significant events since the Enlightenment that have led to the development of society as we know it today. The book spans the period 1500 to the present day and discusses the social world in terms of both its politics and its culture. This book is ideal for undergraduate students in the social sciences who are perplexed by the myriad of events and theories with which their courses are concerned, and who need a historical perspective on the changes that shaped the contemporary world.
From deserts to ghost towns, from national forests to California bungalows, many of the features of the western American landscape are well known to residents and travelers alike. But in How to Read the American West, William Wyckoff introduces readers anew to these familiar landscapes. A geographer and an accomplished photographer, Wyckoff offers a fresh perspective on the natural and human history of the American West and encourages readers to discover that history has shaped the places where people live, work, and visit. This innovative field guide includes stories, photographs, maps, and diagrams on a hundred landscape features across the American West. Features are grouped according to type, such as natural landscapes, farms and ranches, places of special cultural identity, and cities and suburbs. Unlike the geographic organization of a traditional guidebook, Wyckoff's field guide draws attention to the connections and the differences between and among places. Emphasizing features that recur from one part of the region to another, the guide takes readers on an exploration of the eleven western states with trips into their natural and cultural character. How to Read the American West is an ideal traveling companion on the main roads and byways in the West, providing unexpected insights into the landscapes you see out your car window. It is also a wonderful source for armchair travelers and people who live in the West who want to learn more about the modern West, how it came to be, and how it may change in the years to come. Showcasing the everyday alongside the exceptional, Wyckoff demonstrates how asking new questions about the landscapes of the West can let us see our surroundings more clearly, helping us make informed and thoughtful decisions about their stewardship in the twenty-first century. Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYSmp5gZ4-I
Medical care in nineteenth-century China was spectacularly pluralistic: herbalists, shamans, bone-setters, midwives, priests, and a few medical missionaries from the West all competed for patients. This book examines the dichotomy between "Western" and "Chinese" medicine, showing how it has been greatly exaggerated. As missionaries went to lengths to make their medicine more acceptable to Chinese patients, modernizers of Chinese medicine worked to become more "scientific" by eradicating superstition and creating modern institutions. Andrews challenges the supposed superiority of Western medicine in China while showing how "traditional" Chinese medicine was deliberately created in the image of a modern scientific practice.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The startling true history of how one extraordinary man from a remote corner of the world created an empire that led the world into the modern age—by the author featured in Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan. The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege. From the story of his rise through the tribal culture to the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed, this brilliant work of revisionist history is nothing less than the epic story of how the modern world was made.
The Colorado River Plateau is home to two of the best-known landscapes in the world: Rainbow Bridge in southern Utah and Monument Valley on the Utah-Arizona border. Twentieth-century popular culture made these places icons of the American West, and advertising continues to exploit their significance today. In Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley, Thomas J. Harvey artfully tells how Navajos and Anglo-Americans created fabrics of meaning out of this stunning desert landscape, space that western novelist Zane Grey called “the storehouse of unlived years,” where a rugged, more authentic life beckoned. Harvey explores the different ways in which the two societies imbued the landscape with deep cultural significance. Navajos long ago incorporated Rainbow Bridge into the complex origin story that embodies their religion and worldview. In the early 1900s, archaeologists crossed paths with Grey in the Rainbow Bridge area. Grey, credited with making the modern western novel popular, sought freedom from the contemporary world and reimagined the landscape for his own purposes. In the process, Harvey shows, Grey erased most of the Navajo inhabitants. This view of the landscape culminated in filmmaker John Ford’s use of Monument Valley as the setting for his epic mid-twentieth-century Westerns. Harvey extends the story into the late twentieth century when environmentalists sought to set aside Rainbow Bridge as a symbolic remnant of nature untainted by modernization. Tourists continue to flock to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, as they have for a century, but the landscapes are most familiar today because of their appearances in advertising. Monument Valley has been used to sell perfume, beer, and sport utility vehicles. Encompassing the history of the Navajo, archaeology, literature, film, environmentalism, and tourism, Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley explores how these rock formations, Navajo sacred spaces still, have become embedded in the modern identity of the American West—and of the nation itself.
A brilliant account of religion's role in the political thinking of the West, from the Enlightenment to the close of World War II.The wish to bring political life under God's authority is nothing new, and it's clear that today religious passions are again driving world politics, confounding expectations of a secular future. In this major book, Mark Lilla reveals the sources of this age-old quest-and its surprising role in shaping Western thought. Making us look deeper into our beliefs about religion, politics, and the fate of civilizations, Lilla reminds us of the modern West's unique trajectory and how to remain on it. Illuminating and challenging, The Stillborn God is a watershed in the history of ideas.