Driving across I-70 in southern Utah one can’t help but wonder about the magnificent upturned rocks of the San Rafael Reef. With A Travelers Guide to the Geology of the Colorado Plateau in hand, you’ll soon discover that you were driving through Page and Navajo Sandstone formations, sharply folded into a monocline along one of the "Basin and Range" fault lines. Nearing Flagstaff, Arizona, on Highway 89, you will learn that Mt. Humphry of the San Francisco Peaks, a Navajo Sacred Mountain, was once an active volcano. Keep reading and you’ll find many things worth a slight detour.
A Traveler's Guide to the Geology of the Colorado Plateau will enrich and enliven all of your trips through the varied landscapes of the Colorado Plateau as you learn about the geological forces that have shaped its natural features. The mile-by-mile road logs will take you from Vernal, Utah, in the north to the southernmost reaches of the Plateau in Sedona, Arizona; from the red rocks of Cedar Breaks National Monument near Cedar City, Utah, to the edges of the soaring peaks of the San Juan Mountains near Durango, Colorado. The most comprehensive geological guide to the Colorado Plateau
An easy-to-read geological history of the amazing red rock landscapes in southeastern Utah.
Towering red buttes, plunging canyon walls, domes, pinnacles, spires, ten thousand strangely carved forms—what visitor hasn’t marveled at the land of rock in southeastern Utah that is Canyonlands Country?
Canyonlands Country offers a unique geological history of this awesome landscape, in language understandable by the non-geologist. The story is as strange and fascinating as the land itself. Each exposed rock layer has a different geologic history: one is a stream deposit, another is an ancient field of dunes, another was deposited by shallow tropic seas. The Green and Colorado Rivers began carving canyons thirty million years ago, but to understand such relatively recent events Canyonlands Country takes us on a journey of two billion years.
Tours include Arches National Park, Island in the Sky, Needles District, The Maze and Elaterite Basin, Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons, Meander Canyon, and Cataract Canyon.
Not just an exploration of our early Western European roots, these rich chronicles read as literature, first-person narratives of the greatest exploration adventures in historic times.
From the Platonic vision of Atlantis to Arthur’s Avalon, pre-Columbus Europeans imagined fabulous lands to the west—and after 1492, initial reports of a new world filled with golden El Dorados, warrior queens, and Fountains of Youth merely provided confirmation.
Although these dreams were soon tempered by reality, explorers continued to set off with expectation that shaped what they say, how they saw, and how they reacted. This complex of attitudes continues to affect the way we view our world, and these accounts provide an excellent source for insight into the metaphorical systems that have permeated European and American writing about the West since the Sixteenth century.
Into the Wilderness Dreams draws from the best of three dozen accounts by the Spanish, French, English, and American explorers who came before Lewis and Clark, and explores the roots of present Western Euro-American culture.
The original scheme for the modern Olympic Games was hatched at an international sports conference at the Sorbonne in June 1894. At the time, few provisions were made for the financial underwriting of the project—providence and the beneficence of host cities would somehow take care of the costs. For much of the first century of modern Olympic history, this was the case, until the advent of television and corporate sponsorship transformed that idealism.
Now, linking with the five-ring logo is good business. Advertising during the Olympic Games guarantees a global audience unmatched in size by any other sports audience in the world. However, if the image begins to tarnish and the corporate sector loses interest, television companies can’t sell advertising to business interests. This was the greatest threat posed by the scandal surrounding Salt Lake City’s bid.
Selling the Five Rings outlines the rise of the Olympic movement from an envisioned instrument of peace and brotherhood, to a transnational commercial giant of imposing power and influence. Using primary source documents such as minutes of the IOC General Sessions, minutes and reports of various IOC sub-committees and commissions concerned with finance, reports of key marketing agencies, and the letters and memoranda written to and by the major figures in Olympic history, the authors track the history of a fascinating global institution.
As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal program of the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided relief jobs to millions of Americans. One facet of the WPA was the hiring of men and women to document the history and folklore of America so as to capture the “soul” of the nation. While researching at the Montana Historical Society Research Center more than a decade ago, historian Matthew Basso stumbled upon copies of six stories that had been submitted for inclusion in a volume titled Men at Work.They arrived too late to be considered. Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) staff had already chosen thirty-four stories from submissions across the country and the volume was nearing publication. In the end, however, that publication was waylaid by the eruption of World War II and the manuscript was forgotten. Now, Basso is bringing these rediscovered stories to their intended audience—the American people.
Works of fiction that have a creative nonfiction feel, these narratives stem from direct observation of or participation in the work described and offer portraits of Americans from diverse ethnic backgrounds who labored in jobs as varied as logging, mining, fruit packing, and rodeo riding. The writers, directed by editor Harold Rosenberg, also represent a variety of backgrounds and experience. Some, like Jack Conroy, Jim Thompson, and Chester Himes, became strong voices in the literary world. The vivid accounts in Men at Work illuminate the meaning of work during a time when jobs were scarce and manual labor highly valued. With our country once again in financial crisis and workers facing an anemic job market, today’s readers will find these stories especially poignant.
People of the Water is an ethnographic analysis of the cultural practices of the Uru-Chipayans—how they have maintained their culture and how they have changed. The Chipayans are an Andean people whose culture predates the time of the Incas (c. AD 1400), but they were almost wiped out by 1940, when only around 400 remained. Yet their population has quadrupled in the last 60 years. Joseph Bastien has spent decades living with and studying the Chipayans, and here for the first time he discusses the dynamics between traditional, social, and religious practices and the impending forces of modernity upon them. With the support of more than 100 illustrations he documents how, in spite of challenges, the Chipayans maintain ecological sustainability through an ecosystem approach that is holistic and symbolically embedded in rituals and customs.
Chipayans have a resilient and innovative culture, maintaining dress, language, hairstyle, rituals, and behavior while also re-creating their culture from a dialectic between themselves and the world around them. Bastien provides the reader with a series of experienced observations and intimate details of a group of people who strive to maintain their ancient traditions while adapting to modern society. This ethnographic study offers insightful, surprising, and thoughtful conclusions applicable to interpreting the world around us.
Complexity science transects many fields ranging from physics to economics to biology. Its focus is the study of systems of interacting factors, which has lately been extended to include behavior in human societies. In prehistoric societies, whether these agents are defined at the scale of individuals, groups, households, or villages all agents are connected in such a way that change in the actions of one affects many others.
Complex Systems and Archaeology presents a useful introduction to complexity theory followed by a series of case studies in which human societies and environments are viewed as open systems into and out of which matter or energy can flow. Examples of such systems include the introduction of new crops, the creation of new artifacts, or the flux of products in a market.
This volume will have important implications for how archaeologists understand the dynamics of culture change and how they think about chronological stages, unique events, and the role of human agents.
Sherman Alexie is, by many accounts, the most widely read American Indian writer in the United States and likely in the world. A literary polymath, Alexie's nineteen published books span a variety of genres and include his most recent National Book Award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
Now, for the first time, a volume of critical essays is devoted to Alexie's work both in print and on the big screen. Editors Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush have assembled twelve leading scholars of American Indian literature to provide new perspectives on a writer with his finger on the pulse of America.
Interdisciplinary in their approach to Alexie's work, these essays cover the writer's entire career, and are insightful and accessible to scholars and lay readers alike. This volume is a worthy companion to the work of one of our nations's most recognized contemporary voices.
"There is something ominous about a swift river, and something thrilling about a river of any kind."—from Beyond the Hundredth Meridian by Wallace Stegner
Beginning above Flaming Gorge Dam in southwestern Wyoming, the Green River traverses the complete variety of terrain on the Colorado Plateau before joining the Colorado River above Cataract Canyon in southeastern Utah. Like its more famous cousin, the Colorado, the Green has captivated, capsized, and cajoled all types of characters with challenges and beauty to match its geologic variety.
In A Green River Reader editor Alan Blackstock brings this mysterious, magnificent, thrilling river to the reader with an interpretive guide that will inform both river novices and river veterans. Assembled here is every significant written testament to this "awesome ditch," from Domínguez-Escalante to Kit Carson and John C. Frémont; to contemporary American naturalists and writers including Wallace Stegner, Bernard DeVoto, David Brower, Ann Zwinger, Ellen Melloy, and Edward Abbey. Those with a story to tell—those who trapped the Green’s beavers, endured its wild rapids, were humbled by its imposing canyon walls, fought for its beautiful landscapes, or whose "pulse was hurried" by the "lofty chasms, walled in by precipices of red rock"—are collected here.
If you’re headed down the Green, make sure that your dry bag or ammo can has room for just one more thing, your copy of A Green River Reader.
In the early morning hours of July 26, 1953, several hundred Arizona state officials and police officers moved into the polygamist community of Short Creek, Arizona, to serve warrants on thirty-six men and eighty-six women. Officials staging the raid believed they were rescuing the community’s 263 children from a life of bondage and immorality.
Kidnapped from that Land is the first book to bring together the story of the 1953 raid and two previous raids in 1935 and 1944. Martha Bradley tells the story with insight and compassion for the families that were fragmented by the arrests. She also deals with the complex legal issues that persist in both Arizona and Utah, where the practice of polygamy is a felony that is no longer prosecuted.
Kidnapped from that Land will appeal to those interested in the study of Mormon history, of polygamy, and of western regional and American social history.
In the 1800s, when California was captivated by gold fever, a small group of Chinese immigrants recognized the fortune to be made from the untapped resources along the state’s coast, particularly from harvesting the black abalone of southern and Baja California. These immigrants, with skills from humble beginnings in a traditional Chinese fishing province, founded California’s commercial abalone industry, and led its growth and expansion for several decades. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, their successful livelihood was stolen from them through targeted legislation of the U.S. and California governments.
Today, the physical evidence of historical Chinese abalone fishing on the mainland has been erased by development. On California’s Channel Islands, however, remnants of temporary abalone collecting and processing camps lie scattered along the coastlines. These sites hold a treasure trove of information, stories, lifeways, and history. Braje has excavated many of these sites and uses them to explore the history of Chinese abalone fishing, presenting a microcosm of the broader history of Chinese immigrants in America—their struggles, their successes, the institutionalized racism they faced, and the unique ways in which they helped to shape the identity of the United States.
The Maya language of Yucatan is known as Yucate by linguists, but its speakers refer to it as May. Dialiectical differences are minimal across the peninsula, and the more than 750,000 speakers of Maya can be understood wherever they go. Moreover, it is not only a living language but is of great use to epigraphers working on ancient Maya glyphs.
This dictionary is the culmination of fourteen years’ labor centering on the town and dialect of Hocaba. Whereas other dictionaries of may use Latin paradigms, this is the first to provide a comprehensive, systematic listing of the stems that can be derived from each root and that give Maya its distinctive character. The entries cover the full range of Maya speech, from simple expressions and idioms to compound stems. Maya sample sentences provide a window into the richness of everyday communication, with its mixture of wit, epithets, insults, riddles, aphorisms, and exchanges of information, including a wonderful assortment of metaphorical expressions like "peccary’s eyelashes" for a type of bean, "the end of the road" for marriage, and a verb meaning "to draw breath with puckered mouth after eating chili." Among the cultural domains encompassed by the dictionary are agriculture, architecture, astronomy, culinary practices and recipes, education, folklore, games, humor, medical prescriptions, ritual, toys, and weaving, many of which have roots in the Precolumbian past. In addition to the dictionary entries, this work also contains a short grammar, a botanical index, and bibliography.
Biotic Communities catalogs and defines by biome, or biotic community, the region centered on Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Baja California Norte, plus California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Texas, Coahuila, Sinaloa, and Baja California Sur. Originally published in 1982 by the Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum, this ambitious book is still a "must-have" for those working in natural resources management and ecological research, as well as non-specialists who wish to know more about a particular locale.
Biotic Communities is arranged by climatic formation with a short chapter for each biome describing climate, physiognomy, distribution, dominant and common plant species, and characteristic vertebrates. Subsequent chapters contain careful descriptions of zonal subdivisions. The text is supplemented with over one hundred black and white photographs illustrating almost every community type.
In this volume, authors David Brown and Neil Carmony dig out the tall tales, dispel the myths, and reveal the lizard’s true character. Through a collection of biological and historical facts mixed with entertaining stories, they have created an illuminating account of America’s largest and only poisonous lizard. Written in an engaging style, The Gila Monster is a fun and educational read for all who are intrigued by the Southwest and its most mysterious denizen.
"What is it about these borderland cats which has so fired up people? Scarcity combined with beauty explains some of the appeal. So does the animal’s legendary strength and power as befits its role as the region’s top predator. The jaguar’s neotropical origins also add to its mystique...But there is something more. That such a large cat is out there somewhere...invokes the depths of our imagination. Nor does it matter one whit that the chance of any one individual actually seeing one is almost nil. The thought of such a cat’s presence is enough in itself."—from the book
In 1996 a rancher hunting mountain lions just north of the Arizona-Mexico border treed a jaguar. Instead of reaching for a rifle, the rancher went for his camera. Later that year another party photographed a jaguar in Arizona’s Baboquivari Mountains. These compelling photographs sparked public interest in jaguars and have resulted in calls for listing jaguars as an endangered species.
Borderland Jaguars documents the human-jaguar contact in the Southwest and presents jaguar folklore from both sides of the border. But the book is primarily a natural history of the jaguar, and discusses its distribution, habitats, and hunting and breeding characteristics before concluding with a section on the status and management of borderland jaguars, and a proposed conservation plan. Written in an engaging style, and replete with a wealth of photographs, Borderland Jaguars is a wonderful introduction to this elusive resident of the Southwest.
Alcohol in Ancient Mexico reconstructs the variety and extent of distillation traditions in the ancient cultures of Mexico, describing in detail the various plants and processes used to make such beverages, their prevalence, and their significance for local culture.
The art of distillation arrived in Mexico with the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. However, well before that time, native skills and available resources had contributed to a well-developed tradition of intoxicating beverages, many of which are still produced and consumed.
In the 1930’s Henry Bruman visited various Mexican and Central American Indian tribes to reconstruct the variety and extent of these ancient traditions. He discerned five distinct areas defined by the culturally most significant beverages, all superimposed over the great mescal wine region. Within these five areas he noted wine made from cactus, cactus fruit, cornstalks, and mesquite pods; beer from sprouted maize; and fermented sap from pulque agaves.
Outside the mescal region he observed widespread consumption in the Yucatan of a wine made from fermented honey and balché bark, plus lesser-known beverages in other regions. He also observed the frequent inclusion in the fermentation process of alkaloid-bearing ingredients such as peyote and tobacco, plants whose roots or bark contain saponins—which act as cardiac poisons—and even poisons from certain toads.
Alcohol in Ancient Mexico also considers the relative absence of alcoholic drink in the southwestern United States, the introduction of sills following the Spanish conquest, and possible sources for the introduction of coconut wine.
Previously unpublished, the research presented here retains its relevance today, and the photographs offer a fascinating glimpse at a traditional world that has now almost vanished.
Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society. Affiliated with the Utah Division of State History, Utah Department of Heritage & Arts.
Stories of the ordinary people who helped build Salt Lake City emerge from a study of their often humble adobe houses. Rather than focusing on men and women in positions of power and influence, the emphasis here is on the lives of people who built their sturdy, simple homes from mud.
A Modest Homestead provides architectural descriptions of ninety-four extant adobe houses. These homes are for the most part unremarkable, except for their perhaps unexpected construction material. They are as basic as the people who built them—small tradesmen and farmers, laborers and domestics. Author Laurie Bryant discusses the neighborhoods in Salt Lake City where adobe houses have survived, often much renovated and disguised, and she showcases the houses not just as they appear today but as they were originally built. Almost all the houses now have additions and improvements, and without some dissection, they are not always recognizable. They now appear both comfortable and pleasant, which was not always the case in the nineteenth century. What emerges through closer examination and Bryant’s research is a fuller picture of the roughhewn life of many early Utahns.
Finalist for the Utah State Historical Society Best Book Award.
The burgeoning field of ecocriticism is beginning to address the work of such ecopoets as Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, W. S. Merwin, and Wendell Berry, among others, whose poems increasingly deal with ecological and environmental issues. Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction assembles previously unpublished contributions from many of the most important scholars in the field as they discuss the historical and crosscultural roots of ecopoetry, while expanding the boundaries to include such themes as genocide and extinction, the lesbian body, and post colonialism. This volume gathers these necessary voices in the emerging conversation regarding poetry’s place in the environmental debate.
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