Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness is an autobiographical exploration of author Bill Sherwonit’s relationship with the Alaska wilderness. Written in three parts, it first describes Sherwonit’s introduction to the Brooks Range and his years as an exploration geologist. Taking a step back, the author then takes us into the past to explore his childhood roots in rural Connecticut and his recognition of wild nature as a refuge. He concludes with his emergence as a nature writer and wilderness advocate.
An engrossing, fascinating, and eye-opening tale of one man’s life and of wilderness conceptions, this vivid description of an area of Alaska that few people get to experience is authentic and enlightening. It is an extraordinary contribution to the literature of place from one of Alaska’s most accomplished nature writers.
Essayist Catharine Savage Brosman explores the relationship of human beings to their environment, traveling from American deserts to dense European urban settings. Whether sipping wine in a Parisian café, partying with the jet set in Aspen, or contemplating the arid desert West that she loves, Brosman inhabits these settings, and many others, with a sense of adventure and discovery. To read these essays is to enjoy the company of a lively, thoughtful, original mind. Brosman’s "higher ground" is that place we all seek, where we can find and express our own best selves.
Bollywood movies and their signature song-and-dance spectacles are an aesthetic familiar to people around the world, and Bollywood music now provides the rhythm for ads marketing goods such as computers and a beat for remixes and underground bands. These musical numbers have inspired scenes in Western films such as Vanity Fair and Moulin Rouge.
Global Bollywood shows how this currency in popular culture and among diasporic communities marks only the latest phase of the genre’s world travels. This interdisciplinary collection describes the many roots and routes of the Bollywood song-and-dance spectacle. Examining the reception of Bollywood music in places as diverse as Indonesia and Israel, the essays offer a stimulating redefinition of globalization, highlighting the cultural influence of Hindi film music from its origins early in the twentieth century to today.
Contributors: Walter Armbrust, Oxford U; Anustup Basu, U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Colorado College; Edward K. Chan, Kennesaw State U; Bettina David, Hamburg U; Rajinder Dudrah, U of Manchester; Shanti Kumar, U of Texas, Austin; Monika Mehta, Binghamton U; Anna Morcom, Royal Holloway College; Ronie Parciack, Tel Aviv U; Biswarup Sen, U of Oregon; Sangita Shrestova; Richard Zumkhawala-Cook, Shippensburg U.
Sangita Gopal is assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon. Sujata Moorti is professor of women’s and gender studies at Middlebury College.
Travelers from Europe, North, and South America often perceive Mexico as a mythical place onto which they project their own cultures’ desires, fears, and anxieties. Gómez argues that Mexico’s role in these narratives was not passive and that the environment, peoples, ruins, political revolutions, and economy of Mexico were fundamental to the configuration of modern Western art and science. This project studies the images of Mexico and the ways they were contested by travelers of different national origins and trained in varied disciplines from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. It starts with Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist whose fame sprang from his trip to Mexico and Latin America, and ends with Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean novelist whose work defines Mexico as an “oasis of horror.” In between, there are archaeologists, photographers, war correspondents, educators, writers, and artists for whom the trip to Mexico represented a rite of passage, a turning point in their intellectual biographies, their scientific disciplines, and their artistic practices.
When his father developed Alzheimer’s disease, Don Lago realized that the stories and traditions of his Swedish ancestors would be lost along with the rest of his father’s memories. Haunted by this inevitable tragedy, Lago set out to fight back against forgetting by researching and reclaiming his long-lost Scandinavian roots.
Beginning his quest with a visit to his ancestral home of Gränna, Sweden, Lago explores all facets of Scandinavian America—Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Icelandic—along the way. He encounters Icelanders living in the Utah desert, a Titanic victim buried beneath a gigantic Swedish coffee pot in Iowa, an Arkansas town named after the famous Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, a real-life Legoland in southern California, and other unique remnants of America’s Scandinavian past. Visits to Sigurd Olson’s legendary cabin on the banks of Burntside Lake in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Carl Sandburg’s birthplace in Galesburg, Illinois, further provide Lago with an acute sense of the Scandinavian values that so greatly influenced, and continue to influence, American society.
More than just a travel memoir, On the Viking Trail places Scandinavian immigrants and their history within the wider sweep of American culture. Lago’s perceptive eye and amusing tales remind readers of all ethnic backgrounds that to truly appreciate America one must never forget its immigrant past.
Throughout the nineteenth-century, itinerant painters traveled the length and breadth of Europe and American in search of patronage. In the company of the his crupulous wife, Emma S. Cameron (1825–1907), the Scots-born James Cameron (1816–1882) sought to fulfill his ambitious dream of becoming an artist.
Working primarily as a landscapist and portraitist—he was also an inventor, a missionary, an ordained minister, a land agent, farmer, clothing merchant, and Sunday school teacher—Cameron produced a small collection of paintings during the ten-year period the couple resided in East Tennessee and the American South. Driven by the wife’s lively journals, correspondence, and Civil War diary, Moffatt’s narrative details the couple’s marriage, their extended honeymoon in revolutionary Italy and, following a brief excursion in the Adirondacks, their subsequent residencies in Knoxville, Chattanooga, Memphis, Nashville, Augusta, central Mississippi, and New Orleans, between 1856 and 1868. While in Chattanooga, they settled near Col. James A. Whiteside’s fashionable summer resort, Lookout Mountain Hotel, where James reigned as resident artist and Emma, reluctantly, served as the house nurse and social entertainer. In the late 1860s they lived in Maine and, after 1874, in California, where they founded separate Presbyterian churches.
The book emphasizes Cameron’s painting career, the patrons who supported it, and discusses his best-known works, all of which are reproduced here. The study demonstrated how persisted while working under a cultural cloud that often devalued artistic achievement Emma’s journals reveal her to be a perceptive observer of Protestant middle class “life-on-the-run” and yields insight into historic events in the making, including the Italian Risorgimento, the American Civil War, and the settlement of America’s Western frontier. Moffatt’s detailed joint biography provides a valuable contribution to women’s studies, art history, nineteenth-century frontier expansionism, and social history.
On any night in early June, if you stand on the right beaches of America’s East Coast, you can travel back in time all the way to the Jurassic. For as you watch, thousands of horseshoe crabs will emerge from the foam and scuttle up the beach to their spawning grounds, as they’ve done, nearly unchanged, for more than 440 million years.
Horseshoe crabs are far from the only contemporary manifestation of Earth’s distant past, and in Relics, world-renowned zoologist and photographer Piotr Naskrecki leads readers on an unbelievable journey through those lingering traces of a lost world. With camera in hand, he travels the globe to create a words-and-pictures portrait of our planet like no other, a time-lapse tour that renders Earth’s colossal age comprehensible, visible in creatures and habitats that have persisted, nearly untouched, for hundreds of millions of years.
Naskrecki begins by defining the concept of a relic—a creature or habitat that, while acted upon by evolution, remains remarkably similar to its earliest manifestations in the fossil record. Then he pulls back the Cambrian curtain to reveal relic after eye-popping relic: katydids, ancient reptiles, horsetail ferns, majestic magnolias, and more, all depicted through stunning photographs and first-person accounts of Naskrecki’s time studying them and watching their interactions in their natural habitats. Then he turns to the habitats themselves, traveling to such remote locations as the Atewa Plateau of Africa, the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and the lush forests of the Guyana Shield of South America—a group of relatively untrammeled ecosystems that are the current end point of staggeringly long, uninterrupted histories that have made them our best entryway to understanding what the prehuman world looked, felt, sounded, and even smelled like.
The stories and images of Earth’s past assembled in Relics are beautiful, breathtaking, and unmooring, plunging the reader into the hitherto incomprehensible reaches of deep time. We emerge changed, astonished by the unbroken skein of life on Earth and attentive to the hidden heritage of our planet’s past that surrounds us.
This important Henry Rowe Schoolcraft work, first issued by Michigan State University Press in 1953, is now available as the second title in MSU Press's Schoolcraft Series. The book was originally published in 1821 under the long and pretentious title Narrative Journey of travels through the Northwestern Regions of the United States, extending from Detroit through the Great Chain of American Lakes to the Sources of the Mississippi River, Performed as a Member of the expedition under Governor Cass, in the Year 1820; it recounts Schoolcraft's participation in the John C. Calhoun-sponsored 1820 expedition to explore the cast, uncharted territory stretching from the upper Great Lakes into what is now northern Minnesota.
This volume, a marvelous blend of reportage, scientific findings, and the author's personal observations, contains a wealth of information about geography and topography woven together with vivid descriptions of scenic beauty, Native American culture, and day-to-day life as a member of an exploring expedition.
Wade Davis has been called "a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life's diversity." In Shadows in the Sun, he brings all of those gifts to bear on a fascinating examination of indigenous cultures and the interactions between human societies and the natural world.
Ranging from the British Columbian wilderness to the jungles of the Amazon and the polar ice of the Arctic Circle, Shadows in the Sun is a testament to a world where spirits still stalk the land and seize the human heart. Its essays and stories, though distilled from travels in widely separated parts of the world, are fundamentally about landscape and character, the wisdom of lives drawn directly from the land, the hunger of those who seek to rediscover such understanding, and the consequences of failure.
As Davis explains, "To know that other, vastly different cultures exist is to remember that our world does not exist in some absolute sense but rather is just one model of reality. The Penan in the forests of Borneo, the Vodoun acolytes in Haiti, the jaguar Shaman of Venezuela, teach us that there are other options, other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the earth." Shadows in the Sun considers those possibilities, and explores their implications for our world.
"In May 2000 I was fired from my job as a reporter on a finance newsletter because of an obsession with a video game.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
So begins this story of personal redemption through the unlikely medium of electronic games. Quake, World of Warcraft, Eve Online, and other online games not only offered author Jim Rossignol an excellent escape from the tedium of office life. They also provided him with a diverse global community and a job—as a games journalist.
Part personal history, part travel narrative, part philosophical reflection on the meaning of play, This Gaming Life describes Rossignol’s encounters in three cities: London, Seoul, and Reykjavik. From his days as a Quake genius in London’s increasingly corporate gaming culture; to Korea, where gaming is a high-stakes televised national sport; to Iceland, the home of his ultimate obsession, the idiosyncratic and beguiling Eve Online, Rossignol introduces us to a vivid and largely undocumented world of gaming lives.
Torn between unabashed optimism about the future of games and lingering doubts about whether they are just a waste of time, This Gaming Life also raises important questions about this new and vital cultural form. Should we celebrate the “serious” educational, social, and cultural value of games, as academics and journalists are beginning to do? Or do these high-minded justifications simply perpetuate the stereotype of games as a lesser form of fun? In this beautifully written, richly detailed, and inspiring book, Rossignol brings these abstract questions to life, immersing us in a vibrant landscape of gaming experiences.
“We need more writers like Jim Rossignol, writers who are intimately familiar with gaming, conversant in the latest research surrounding games, and able to write cogently and interestingly about the experience of playing as well as the deeper significance of games.”
—Chris Baker, Wired
“This Gaming Life is a fascinating and eye-opening look into the real human impact of gaming culture. Traveling the globe and drawing anecdotes from many walks of life, Rossignol takes us beyond the media hype and into the lives of real people whose lives have been changed by gaming. The results may surprise you.”
—Raph Koster, game designer and author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design
“This is a wonderfully literate look at gaming cultures, which you don't have to be a gamer to enjoy. The Korea section blew my mind.”
—John Seabrook, New Yorker staff writer and author of Flash of Genius and Other True Stories of Invention
digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.
Travels and Traditions of Waterfowl was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
With the combined talents of naturalist, writer, and artist, H. Albert Hochbaum captures the varying moods of earth and sky and spirit of flight. For many years as director of the Delta Waterfowl Research Station in Manitoba, Canada, he has observed the ways of the waterfowl. In this book he portrays and discusses the flights and habits of the birds he has watched in the vast marsh country—the wild ducks, geese, and swans of North America.
This book is the winner of a publication award of the Wildlife Society. It is recommended by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in its AAAS Science Book List for Young Artists.With genetically modified crops we have entered uncharted territory—where visions of the triumph of biotechnology in agriculture vie with dire views of medical and environmental disaster. For two years Mark L. Winston traveled this fraught territory at home and abroad, listening to farmers, industry spokespeople, regulators, and researchers, canvassing high-security laboratories, environmentalist enclaves, and cyberspace, making a thorough survey of the facts, opinions, and practices deployed by opponents and proponents of transgenic crops.
Through his sympathetic portrayal of the passions on all sides, Winston brings a clear, unbiased perspective to this bewildering landscape. Traveling with Winston, we see the excitement and curiosity that pervade laboratories developing genetically modified crops, as well as the panic and outrage among dedicated opponents of agricultural biotechnology; the desperation of conventional farmers as they look to science for solutions to the problems driving them from their farms, as well as the deeply held values of organic farmers who dread the incursion of genetically modified crops into their expanding enterprise. And, Winston shows us, these contrasting attitudes transcend national borders, with troubling counterparts and consequences in the developing world.
As he seeks a middle ground where concerns about genetic engineering can be rationally discussed and resolved, Winston gives us, at long last, a full and balanced view of the forces at play in the chaotic debate over agricultural biotechnology.
Mies van der Rohe, master of modern architecture, declared that “Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together.” In Travels in the History of Architecture, renowned architectural writer Robert Harbison takes a closer look at these bricks, providing an engaging and concise companion to the great themes and aesthetic movements in architecture from antiquity to the present day.
Travels in the History of Architecture beings its journey with the great temples of the Egyptians and the shrines of Classical Greece and Rome and then provides a complete survey of architecture through the present day. Each chapter of this dynamic and approachable volume focuses on a movement in architectural history, including Byzantine, Baroque, Mannerism, Historicism, Functionalism, and Deconstruction. Unique to this work is Harbison’s wide-ranging approach, which draws on references and examples outside of architecture—from literature, art, sculpture, and history—to further illustrate and contextualize the themes and ideas of each period. For example, the travel writing of Pausanias illustrates the monuments of ancient Greece, a poem in praise of marble decoration reveals how the builders of the cathedral of Hagia Sophia viewed their creation, and a French rococo painting speaks to the meaning behind the design of the English landscape garden.
Original, yet authoritative, Travels in the History of Architecture will be in an indispensable guide for everyone curious to know more about the world’s most famous structures, as well as for students of art and architectural history seeking a definitive introduction.
“Even now,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Diary of 1933, “I can’t altogether believe that any of this has really happened.” Three years later, W. E. B. DuBois described Germany as “silent, nervous, suppressed; it speaks in whispers.” In contrast, a young John F. Kennedy, in the journal he kept on a German tour in 1937, wrote, “The Germans really are too good—it makes people gang against them for protection.”
Drawing on such published and unpublished accounts from writers and public figures visiting Germany, Travels in the Reich creates a chilling composite portrait of the reality of life under Hitler. Written in the moment by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Isak Dinesen, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, William Shirer, Georges Simenon, and Albert Camus, the essays, letters, and articles gathered here offer fascinating insight into the range of responses to Nazi Germany. While some accounts betray a distressing naivete, overall what is striking is just how clearly many of the travelers understood the true situation—and the terrors to come.
Through the eyes of these visitors, Travels in the Reich offers a new perspective on the quotidian—yet so often horrifying—details of German life under Nazism, in accounts as gripping and well-written as a novel, but bearing all the weight of historical witness.
The Infante Dom Pedro (1392–1449), prince of Portugal, warrior, traveler, regent, was hero and victim of a legend. In the Book of the Infante Dom Pedro, an early-sixteenth-century Spanish fantasy by Gómez de Santisteban, Pedro’s journeys may dimly reflect the Infante’s actual wanderings in Europe but also involve Amazons and Giants in a medieval world that includes the goals of Prester John’s court and Apostle Thomas’s shrine in the Indies.
Here is a full translation of the Book, with a detailed discussion of the real travels, their transformation into legend, the tale’s influence, and the Spanish author’s true purpose.
A revelatory intellectual biography of Tocqueville, told through his wide-ranging travels—most of them, aside from his journey to America, barely known.
It might be the most famous journey in the history of political thought: in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville sailed from France to the United States, spent nine months touring and observing the political culture of the fledgling republic, and produced the classic Democracy in America.
But the United States was just one of the many places documented by the inveterate traveler. Jeremy Jennings follows Tocqueville’s voyages—by sailing ship, stagecoach, horseback, train, and foot—across Europe, North Africa, and of course North America. Along the way, Jennings reveals underappreciated aspects of Tocqueville’s character and sheds new light on the depth and range of his political and cultural commentary.
Despite recurrent ill health and ever-growing political responsibilities, Tocqueville never stopped moving or learning. He wanted to understand what made political communities tick, what elite and popular mores they rested on, and how they were adjusting to rapid social and economic change—the rise of democracy and the Industrial Revolution, to be sure, but also the expansion of empire and the emergence of socialism. He lauded the orderly, Catholic-dominated society of Quebec; presciently diagnosed the boisterous but dangerously chauvinistic politics of Germany; considered England the freest and most unequal place on Earth; deplored the poverty he saw in Ireland; and championed French colonial settlement in Algeria.
Drawing on correspondence, published writings, speeches, and the recollections of contemporaries, Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America is a panoramic combination of biography, history, and political theory that fully reflects the complex, restless mind at its center.
Winner of the 2008 Honor Book by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities
Utopia. New Jersey. For most people—even the most satisfied New Jersey residents—these words hardly belong in the same sentence. Yet, unbeknown to many, history shows that the state has been a favorite location for utopian experiments for more than a century. Thanks to its location between New York and Philadelphia and its affordable land, it became an ideal proving ground where philosophical and philanthropical organizations and individuals could test their utopian theories.
In this intriguing look at this little-known side of New Jersey, Perdita Buchan explores eight of these communities. Adopting a wide definition of the term utopia—broadening it to include experimental living arrangements with a variety of missions—Buchan explains that what the founders of each of these colonies had in common was the goal of improving life, at least as they saw it.
In every other way, the communities varied greatly, ranging from a cooperative colony in Englewood founded by Upton Sinclair, to an anarchist village in Piscataway centered on an educational experiment, to the fascinating Physical Culture City in Spotswood, where drugs, tobacco, and corsets were banned, but where nudity was widespread.
Despite their grand intentions, all but one of the utopias—a single-tax colony in Berkeley Heights—failed to survive. But Buchan shows how each of them left a legacy of much more than the buildings or street names that remain today—legacies that are inspiring, surprising, and often outright quirky.
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