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No evolution of a geographical region was more rapid and transformative than that of the American West at Mid-Century. "New West" explores the innovations that shaped this unique architectural landscape, through the vibrant, compelling images of the colour-saturated, highly-textured, popular art form of the Linen Post Card. Collision, eruption, and erosion are the formative forces that account for the raw vitality and breathtaking beauty of the American West. While it has taken 4.5 billion years to write the complex geological and hydrological history embedded in this region, it has taken less than 200 years to write the story of its modern transformation into an interdependent network of cities, parks, roads, infrastructure, and communications. "New West" draws from over 500 Mid-Century Linen Post Card images, to explore in detail the changes that the four waves of innovation; steam, steel, oil, and information, have wrought upon the land
Originally published in 1974, this book is now regarded as a classic book of photography in the pantheon of landmark projects exploring American culture and society.
Inspired by Chicago’s successful 1893 World Columbian Exposition, the cities of Portland, Seattle, San Diego, and San Francisco all held fairs between 1905 and 1915. From the start of the Lewis and Clark Exposition to the close of the Panama-California Exposition a decade later, millions of Americans visited exhibits, watched live demonstrations and performances, and wandered amusement zones. Millions more thumbed through brochures or read news articles. Fair publicity directors embraced the emerging science of consumer marketing. Conceived to attract new citizens, showcase communities, and highlight farming and industrial opportunities, the four expositions’ promotional campaigns and vendor and exhibit choices offer a unique opportunity to examine western leaders’ perceptions of their city and region, as well as their future goals and how they both fed and tried to mitigate misconceptions of a wild, wooly West. They also expose biased attitudes toward Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Filipinos, and others. Boosting a New West explores the fairs’ cultural and social meaning by focusing on and comparing the promotions that surrounded them. It details their origins and describes why each city chose to host, conveying the expected economic, social, and cultural benefits. It also shows how organizers articulated their significance to urban, regional, and national audiences, and how they attempted to shape a new western identity.
In the early 1970s, empowered by the civil rights and women's movements, a new group of women writers began speaking to the American public. Their topic, broadly defined, was the postmodern American West. By the mid-1980s, their combined works made for a bona fide literary groundswell in both critical and commercial terms. However, as Krista Comer notes, despite the attentions of publishers, the media, and millions of readers, literary scholars have rarely addressed this movement or its writers. Too many critics, Comer argues, still enamored of western images that are both masculine and antimodern, have been slow to reckon with the emergence of a new, far more "feminine," postmodern, multiracial, and urban west. Here, she calls for a redesign of the field of western cultural studies, one that engages issues of gender and race and is more self-conscious about space itself_especially that cherished symbol of western "authenticity," open landscape. Surveying works by Joan Didion, Wanda Coleman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Pam Houston, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Mary Clearman Blew, Comer shows how these and other contemporary women writers have mapped new geographical imaginations upon the cultural and social spaces of today's American West.
Novelist Larry McMurtry loaned a collection of glass plate negatives to the University of Texas Press for investigation. "Most appear to be the work of pioneer woman photographer Alice Snearly and her brother-in-law Lon Kelly, who worked in the heart of Comanche territory on the Texas-Oklahoma border. These images preserve the "interim" generation of Comanches ... who endured reservation life and forced moves to individual allotments of farm and ranch land .. A few images of Anglo settlers and towns complete the picture of life in Indian Territory at this moment of change."--Publisher description.
At a recent meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, it was reported that a ghost was haunting the deliberations of the assembled global elite - that of the renowned social scientist and economic historian, Karl Polanyi. In his classic work, The Great Transformation, Polanyi documented the impact of the rise of market society on western civilization and captured better than anyone else the destructive effects of the economic, political and social crisis of the 1930s. Today, in the throes of another Great Recession, Polanyi’s work has gained a new significance. To understand the profound challenges faced by our democracies today, we need to revisit history and revisit his work. In this new collection of unpublished texts - lectures, draft essays and reports written between 1919 and 1958 - Polanyi examines the collapse of the liberal economic order and the demise of democracies in the inter-war years. He takes up again the fundamental question that preoccupied him throughout his work - the place of the economy in society - and aims to show how we might return to an economy anchored in society and its cultural, religious and political institutions. For anyone concerned about the danger to democracy and social life posed by the unleashing of capital from regulatory control and the dominance of the neoliberal ideologies of market fundamentalism, this important new volume by one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century is a must-read.
When Jim Stiles moved west from Kentucky in the 1970s to make Moab, Utah, his home, that corner of the rural West had already endured decades of obscurity, a uranium boom and then a bust, and was facing an identity crisis. What kind of economy would prevent Moab from becoming yet another ghost town? For more than two decades, environmentalists in southeast Utah have had a simple answer to this question: replace extractive industries--mining, timber, and cattle--with an economy catering to "green" tourists with hotels, restaurants, and bars. They feel that if these lands can be spared further degradation by huge industries, the West could begin to thrive on something cleaner and more lucrative. But Stiles sees a downside to this seemingly idyllic vision. Bringing insight based on decades of residence in Moab, he makes a provocative and compelling argument that the economy most environmentalists hail as the solution to the woes of the rural West is in fact creating an unprecedented impact of its own. In recent years, Moab and other rural towns across the West have seen a massive influx of urbanites fleeing crowded cities in search of a simpler life. Yet Stiles also observes that these transplants are often unwilling to accept the isolation and lack of services that characterize genuine rural life. Believing themselves to be liberal, sensitive, enlightened environmentalists, they nevertheless bring with them exactly the type of lifestyle and ecological impact that they sought to leave behind and, in the process, create a community that no longer serves the native inhabitants. With a blend of travelogue, local color, and geography, Stiles engages readers with folksy humor while defending the lifestyle of the "pre-cappuccino rural Westerners" and exposing the paradox that underlies the professed good intentions of liberal newcomers.
Although the rights of Indian reservations to water were specified by the Supreme Court as early as 1908, the settlement of Native American claims has become a crucial matter in recent years as economic and demographic growth in the West places extreme demands on this limited resource. This collection of essays on Indian water rights seeks to assess these ongoing processes of conflict and accommodation among competing claimants. It brings together the views of engineers, lawyers, ecologists, economists, professional mediators, federal officials, an anthropologist, and a Native American tribal leader - all either students of these processes or protagonists in them - to discuss how the legitimate claims of both Indians and non-Indians to scarce water in the West are being settled. Because the number of cases settled to date is but a small fraction of those pending, this volume offers an invaluable perspective on an active issue and points to the need for negotiation rather than litigation. It complements the existing literature on water law with a divergence of outlooks on an issue of vast complexity.
Lost in the New West investigates a group of writers – John Williams, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx and Thomas McGuane – who have sought to explore the tensions inherent to the Western, where the distinctions between old and new, myth and reality, authenticity and sentimentality are frequently blurred. Collectively these authors demonstrate a deep-seated attachment to the landscape, people and values of the West and offer a critical appraisal of the dialogue between the contemporary West and its legacy. Mark Asquith draws attention to the idealistic young men at the center of such works as Williams's Butcher's Crossing (1960), McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) and Border Trilogy, Proulx's Wyoming stories and McGuane's Deadrock novels. For each writer, these characters struggle to come to terms with the difference between the suspect mythology of the West that shapes their identity and the reality that surrounds them. They are, in short, lost in the new West.