BiblioVault - Books about Land

Taking the Land to Make the City

A Bicoastal History of North America

By Mary P. Ryan

University of Texas Press, 2019

The history of the United States is often told as a movement westward, beginning at the Atlantic coast and following farmers across the continent. But cities played an equally important role in the country’s formation. Towns sprung up along the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, as Spaniards and Englishmen took Indian land and converted it into private property. In this reworking of early American history, Mary P. Ryan shows how cities—specifically San Francisco and Baltimore—were essential parties to the creation of the republics of the United States and Mexico.

Baltimore and San Francisco share common roots as early trading centers whose coastal locations immersed them in an international circulation of goods and ideas. Ryan traces their beginnings back to the first human habitation of each area, showing how the juggernaut toward capitalism and nation-building could not commence until Europeans had taken the land for city building. She then recounts how Mexican ayuntamientos and Anglo American city councils pioneered a prescient form of municipal sovereignty that served as both a crucible for democracy and a handmaid of capitalism. Moving into the nineteenth century, Ryan shows how the citizens of Baltimore and San Francisco molded landscape forms associated with the modern city: the gridded downtown, rudimentary streetcar suburbs, and outlying great parks. This history culminates in the era of the Civil War when the economic engines of cities helped forge the East and the West into one nation.

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Teaching About Place

Learning From The Land

Laird Christensen

University of Nevada Press, 2008

The sixteen essays in this anthology describe the practice of teaching about place, with the goal of inspiring educators as well as other readers to discover the value of close investigation of their own places. The contributors discuss places from the desert river canyons of the American West, to the bayous of Texas, to wildlife refuges on the Atlantic Coast, to New England’s forests and river, and back to the wildland-urban interface in suburban Southern California. These essays reveal broader lessons about the possibilities and limitations that come with teaching about place and inhabiting our own places outside the classroom. Contributors include: Ann Zwinger, Bradley John Monsma, SueEllen Campbell, Terrell Dixon, and John Elder.

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Temporary Monuments

Art, Land, and America's Racial Enterprise

Rebecca Zorach

University of Chicago Press, 2024

How art played a central role in the design of America’s racial enterprise—and how contemporary artists resist it.

Art has long played a key role in constructing how people understand and imagine America. Starting with contemporary controversies over public monuments in the United States, Rebecca Zorach carefully examines the place of art in the occupation of land and the upholding of White power in the US, arguing that it has been central to the design of America’s racial enterprise. Confronting closely held assumptions of art history, Zorach looks to the intersections of art, nature, race, and place, working through a series of symbolic spaces—the museum, the wild, islands, gardens, home, and walls and borders—to open and extend conversations on the political implications of art and design.

Against the backdrop of central moments in American art, from the founding of early museums to the ascendancy of abstract expressionism, Zorach shows how contemporary artists—including Dawoud Bey, Theaster Gates, Maria Gaspar, Kerry James Marshall, Alan Michelson, Dylan Miner, Postcommodity, Cauleen Smith, and Amanda Williams—have mined the relationship between environment and social justice, creating works that investigate and interrupt White supremacist, carceral, and environmentally toxic worlds. The book also draws on poetry, creative nonfiction, hip-hop videos, and Disney films to illuminate crucial topics in art history, from the racial politics of abstraction to the origins of museums and the formation of canons.

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Territorial Ambition

Land and Society in Arkansas, 1800-1840

S. Charles Bolton

University of Arkansas Press, 2020

Both modern historians and early nineteenth-century observers have emphasized the wild and picturesque aspects of the Arkansas Territory, suggesting that the settlers here were more preoccupied with indolence or brawling than with economic progress. This study, first published in 1993, demonstrates that despite all its frontier roughness, Arkansas was characterized by a restless ambition that transformed the area from frontier and subsistence living to a highly productive agricultural society. This ambition – with its brutal Indian removal and expansion of slave labor – rendered Arkansas more similar to its southern neighbors than contemporary and modern portrayals would make it seem.

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They Live on The Land

Life in an Open Country Southern Community

Paul W. Terry

University of Alabama Press, 1993

"First published in 1940 as part of the information-gathering effort of the TVA, the work examines Gorgas, Alabama, a predominantly white farming settlement. Hailed as the most intensive case study ever made in the South, the book provides a detailed portrait of southern rural life on the verge of extinction."
—Florida Historical Quarterly

"One of the finest examples of the genre of the community survey. . . The book is remarkably free of special pleading. And every chapter is paced with fascinating data and insights. The University of Alabama Prss is to be congratulated for reissuing this splendid community study; the volume fits the description of a classic. And Clarence L. Mohr's introduction alone is worth the price of the volume."
—Journal of Southwest Georgia History

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They Sought a Land

A Settlement in the Arkansas River Valley, 1840–1870

William Oates Ragsdale

University of Arkansas Press, 1997

They Sought a Land, originally published in 1997, is the study of the rise and decline of a group of pioneers from the Carolinas who came to the Arkansas River Valley in the mid nineteenth century. Pisgah, as their settlement came to be known, drew five hundred pioneers from 1840 to 1870, forming a community bound by blood, friendship, and a strong Calvinist heritage.

Pisgah grew and prospered, developing increasingly successful farming practices, landholding patterns, and trading strategies. But the Civil War took a heavy toll, taking workers away from farms, subjecting those left on the home front to deprivation and violence, and creating division in the community. By 1870, the people of Pisgah had dispersed into Arkansas’s larger developing society.

Absorbing to read and rich with colorful detail, They Sought a Land is an important story of the westward expansion of the United States and the settling of the American South during the nineteenth century.

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Timber!

A Northwoods Story of Lumberjacks, Logging, and the Land

Susan Apps-Bodilly

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2024

A heavily illustrated children’s history of the logging boom in the 19th century and the conservation efforts that followed.

How did the logging boom begin? What was it like to work in the woods? What happened to the land after the trees were cut down? The latest book for young readers from father-daughter duo Jerry Apps and Susan Apps-Bodilly explores the origin story of Wisconsin’s logging boom, the devastation it caused to the land, and the extraordinary efforts to restore the cutover land and log sustainably.

Timber! helps young readers examine a complex and pivotal chapter in our state and nation’s history, covering a wide range of topics, including:

• how Native people used, shared, and relied on natural resources for thousands of years

• the forced removal of Native people from forested lands

• how the lumber industry made possible the westward expansion of the United States

• what it was like to work in a logging camp, on a log drive, and inside a sawmill

• the roles on a logging team, from sawyer to cook

• the destructive legacy of early logging practices and early efforts to restore the land

• the emergence of sustainable forestry practices

This comprehensive yet easy-to-read history includes letters, postcards, and other primary sources paired with discussion questions designed to engage young readers’ creativity and critical-thinking skills. Timber! also features more than 100 images, a glossary, suggested activities, and an extensive list of related resources, including books, websites, teaching materials, museums, and outdoor places to visit. Timber! will inspire readers of all ages to explore, protect, and learn about trees and forests in their own communities.

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A Time Before New Hampshire

The Story of a Land and Native Peoples

Michael J. Caduto

University Press of New England, 2004

In this masterful and elegant book, Michael J. Caduto tells the complete story of the land of New Hampshire—starting with the formation of earth 4.6 billion years ago and continuing with changes to its peoples and the environment through the seventeenth century. Part I offers a comprehensive look at every aspect of the ancient natural world—including geology, glaciology, botany, climatology, ecology, zoology, and paleobotany. It describes the formation of the land hundreds of millions of years ago as a result of major movements in the tectonic plates; chronicles the rise and fall of reptiles, mammals, birds, and plants and other life forms stemming from climatic changes; and explores the arrival of human beings during and after the relatively recent ice age. The rest of the volume immerses the reader in the history of the human populations in New Hampshire, beginning with the Paleoindian period of hunter gatherers over twelve thousand years ago and continuing through the arrival of horticulture among the Alnôbak (Abenaki) and beyond. Caduto explores the Alnôbak’s day-to-day existence, culture, and traditional tales as preserved by archeologists, anthropologists, historians, and living cultures. Emphasizing the beliefs, cultures, and practices of these native people, Caduto details the Alnôbak’s relationship to the natural world as he tells the story of coevolution between the land and people through time. Caduto takes the reader on an exploration through New Hampshire’s rich and diverse history—using first-hand experiences, re-creations of natural and human environments, journeys through historical landscapes and visits with the families of ancient people—to present a thorough profile of the early beginnings of the Granite State. The volume features an epilogue by Charlie True, Member of the Tribal Council, Abenaki Nation of New Hampshire, and nearly one hundred photographs, illustrations, and detailed maps depicting past peoples, historical trails, and indigenous cultures and environments of New Hampshire.

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To Come to the Land

Immigration and Settlement in 16th-Century Eretz-Israel

Abraham David, translated by Dena Ordan

University of Alabama Press, 1999

To Come to the Land makes available in English a vast body of research,
previously available only in Hebrew, on the early history of the land now
known as Israel.

Abraham David here focuses on the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who fled
the Iberian Peninsula during the 16th century, tracing the beginnings of
Sephardic influence in the land of Israel.

After the Ottoman Turks conquered Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in 1516,
the Ottoman regime, unlike their Mamluk predecessors, encouraged economic
development and settlement throughout the region. This openness to immigration
offered a solution to the crisis Iberian Jews were undergoing as a result
of their expulsion from Spain and the forced conversions in Portugal. Within
a few years of the Ottoman conquest, Jews of Spanish extraction, many of
them clustered in urban areas, dominated the Jewish communities of Eretz-Israel.

In this carefully researched study, David examines the lasting impression
made by these enterprising Jewish settlers on the commercial, social, and
intellectual life of the area under early Ottoman rule. Of particular interest
is his examination of the cities of Jerusalem and Safed and David's succinct
biographies of leading Jewish personalities throughout the region.

This first English translation of a ground-breaking Hebrew work provides
a comprehensive overview of a significant chapter in the history of Israel
and explores some of the factors that brought to it the best minds of the
age. Essential for scholars of late Medieval Jewish history, To Come to
the Land will also be an important resource for scholars of intellectual
history, as it provides background crucial to an understanding of the intellectual
flourishing of the period.

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To Possess The Land

A Biography Of Arthur Rochford Manby

Frank Waters

Ohio University Press, 1993

Ambitious and only twenty-four years old, Arthur Manby arrived from England to the Territory of New Mexico in 1883 and saw in its wilderness an empire that he believed himself destined to rule. For his kingdom, he chose a vast Spanish land grant near Taos, a wild 100,000 acres whose title was beyond question. Obsessed, he poured more than twenty years into his dream of glory, and schemed, stole, lied, cajoled, begged, and bribed to take the vast grant from its rightful owners. With great mastery, Waters draws us into this obsession, and the intense drama of these years is at once psychological and historical. In May 1913, Manby came at last to possess the grant, but within three years it had slipped again from his grasp.

The story does not end there, and perhaps only Frank Waters could have portrayed the strange disintegration of Manby’s personality as he aged, his frantic but ingenious efforts to regain “his” land. Among these was the creation of a secret society which terrorized whole towns and villages, becoming so powerful that even Manby no longer knew all its members and workings. At the same time he turned deeper inward, locked and bolted his gates against the outside world which hated and feared him more than ever. On July 3, 1929, a swollen, headless body was discovered in Manby’s Taos home. Some said it was murder; others swore the body was not Manby’s; still others reported seeing him alive afterward. The story blazed into national headlines and an official inquiry followed. Step by step, Waters takes us into the web of strange clues, evidence, more murders and complications—an investigation which the New Mexican government inexplicably called to a halt. The case remains one of the West’s greatest unsolved mysteries.

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To Swim with Crocodiles

Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800-1996

Jill E Kelly

Michigan State University Press, 2018

To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800–1996 offers a fresh perspective on the history of rural politics in South Africa, from the rise of the Zulu kingdom to the civil war at the dawn of democracy in KwaZulu-Natal. The book shows how Africans in the Table Mountain region drew on the cultural inheritance of ukukhonza—a practice of affiliation that binds together chiefs and subjects—to seek social and physical security in times of war and upheaval. Grounded in a rich combination of archival sources and oral interviews, this book examines relations within and between chiefdoms to bring wider concerns of African studies into focus, including land, violence, chieftaincy, ethnic and nationalist politics, and development. Colonial indirect rule, segregation, and apartheid attempted to fix formerly fluid polities into territorial “tribes” and ethnic identities, but the Zulu practice of ukukhonza maintained its flexibility and endured. By exploring what Zulu men and women knew about and how they remembered ukukhonza, Kelly reveals how Africans envisioned and defined relationships with the land, their chiefs, and their neighbors as white minority rule transformed the countryside and local institutions of governance.

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Trespassing

An Inquiry into the Private Ownership of Land

John Hanson Mitchell

University Press of New England, 2015

Trespassing, “a thoughtful, beautifully written addition to environmental and regional literature” (Kirkus Reviews), is a historical survey of the evolution of private ownership of land, concentrating on the various land uses of a 500-acre tract of land over a 350-year period. What began as wild land controlled periodically by various Native American tribes became British crown land after 1654, then private property under US law, and finally common land again in the late twentieth century. Mitchell considers every aspect of the important issue of land ownership and explores how our attitudes toward land have changed over the centuries.

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True to the Land

A History of Food in Australia

Paul van Reyk

Reaktion Books, 2022

Spanning 65,000 years, this book provides a history of food in Australia from its beginnings, with the arrival of the first peoples and their stewardship of the land, to a present where the production and consumption of food is fraught with anxieties and competing priorities. It describes how food production in Australia is subject to the constraints of climate, water, and soil, leading to centuries of unsustainable agricultural practices post-colonization. Australian food history is also the story of its xenophobia and the immigration policies pursued, which continue to undermine the image of Australia as a model multicultural society. This history of Australian food ends on a positive note, however, as Indigenous peoples take increasing control of how their food is interpreted and marketed.

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Trust in the Land

New Directions in Tribal Conservation

Beth Rose Middleton

University of Arizona Press, 2011

“The Earth says, God has placed me here. The Earth says that God tells me to take care of the Indians on this earth; the Earth says to the Indians that stop on the Earth, feed them right. . . . God says feed the Indians upon the earth.”

—Cayuse Chief Young Chief, Walla Walla Council of 1855

America has always been Indian land. Historically and culturally, Native Americans have had a strong appreciation for the land and what it offers. After continually struggling to hold on to their land and losing millions of acres, Native Americans still have a strong and ongoing relationship to their homelands. The land holds spiritual value and offers a way of life through fishing, farming, and hunting. It remains essential—not only for subsistence but also for cultural continuity—that Native Americans regain rights to land they were promised.

Beth Rose Middleton examines new and innovative ideas concerning Native land conservancies, providing advice on land trusts, collaborations, and conservation groups. Increasingly, tribes are working to protect their access to culturally important lands by collaborating with Native and non- Native conservation movements. By using private conservation partnerships to reacquire lost land, tribes can ensure the health and sustainability of vital natural resources. In particular, tribal governments are using conservation easements and land trusts to reclaim rights to lost acreage. Through the use of these and other private conservation tools, tribes are able to protect or in some cases buy back the land that was never sold but rather was taken from them.

Trust in the Land sets into motion a new wave of ideas concerning land conservation. This informative book will appeal to Native and non-Native individuals and organizations interested in protecting the land as well as environmentalists and government agencies.

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