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Sacred Gardens and Landscapes
Ritual and Agency
Michel Conan
Harvard University Press, 2007
Studies of rituals in sacred gardens and landscapes offer tantalizing insights into the significance of gardens and landscapes in the societies of India, ancient Greece, Pre-Columbian Mexico, medieval Japan, post-Renaissance Europe, and America. Sacred gardens and landscapes engaged their visitors into three specific modes of agency: as anterooms spurring encounters with the netherworld; as journeys through mystical lands; and as a means of establishing a sense of locality, metaphorically rooting the dweller’s own identity in a well-defined part of the material world. Each section of this book is devoted to one of these forms of agency. Together the essays reveal a profound cultural significance of gardens previously overlooked by studies of garden styles.
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Sacred Places
American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century
John F. Sears
University of Massachusetts Press, 1999
Tourism emerged as an important cultural activity in the United States in the 1820s as steamboats and canals allowed for greater mobility and the nation's writers and artists focused their attention on American scenery. From the 1820s until well after the Civil War, American artists, like Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, depicted American tourist attractions in their work, and often made their reputations on those paintings. Writers like Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, and James described their visits to the same attractions or incorporated them into their fiction. The work of these artists and writers conferred value on the scenes represented and helped shape the vision of the tourists who visited them. This interest in scenery permeated the work of both serious and popular writers and artists, and they produced thousands of images and descriptions of America's tourist attractions for the numerous guidebooks, magazines, and other publications devoted to travel in the United States during the period.

Drawing on this fascinating body of material, Sacred Places examines the vital role which tourism played in fulfilling the cultural needs of nineteenth-century Americans. America was a new country in search of a national identity. Educated Americans desperately wished to meet European standards of culture and, at the same time, to develop a distinctly American literature and art. Tourism offered a means of defining America as a place and taking pride in the special features of its landscape. The country's magnificent natural wonders were a substitute for the cathedrals and monuments, the sense of history that Europe had built over the centuries. Moreover, Sears argues, tourist attractions like Mammoth Cave, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Yosemite, and Yellowstone functioned as sacred places for a nation with a diversity of religious sects and without ancient religious and national shrines. For nineteenth-century Americans, whose vision was shaped by the aesthetics of the sublime and the picturesque and by the popular nineteenth-century Romantic view of nature as temple, such places fulfilled their urgent need for cultural monuments and for places to visit which transcended ordinary reality.

But these nineteenth-century tourist attractions were also arenas of consumption. Niagara Falls was the most sublime of God's creations, a sacred place, which, like Mount Auburn Cemetery, was supposed to have a profound moral effect on the spectator. But it was also an emporium of culture where the tourist shopped for Niagara's wonders and for little replicas of the Falls in the form of souvenirs. In Sacred Places, Sears describes how this strange, sometimes amusing, juxtaposition of the mythic and the trivial, the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the commercial remained a significant feature of American tourist attractions even after efforts were made at Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Niagara Falls to curb commercial and industrial intrusions.

Sears also explores how the nineteenth-century idealization of home stimulated the tourists' response to such places as the Willey House in the White Mountains, the rural cemeteries, and even the newly established asylums for the deaf, dumb, blind, and insane. And, in an intriguing account of Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, he examines the reasons why an important nineteenth-century anthracite transportation center was also a major tourist attraction.

Most of the attractions discussed in this book are still visited by millions of Americans. By illuminating their cultural meaning, Sacred Places prompts us to reflect on our own motivations and responses as tourists and reveals why tourism was and still is such an important part of American life.
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Schools in the Landscape
Localism, Cultural Tradition, and the Development of Alabama's Public Education System, 1865-1915
Edith M. Ziegler
University of Alabama Press, 2010

This richly researched and impressively argued work is a history of public schooling in Alabama in the half century following the Civil War. It engages with depth and sophistication Alabama’s social and cultural life in the period that can be characterized by the three “R”s: Reconstruction, redemption, and racism. Alabama was a mostly rural, relatively poor, and culturally conservative state, and its schools reflected the assumptions of that society.

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Schools That Heal
Design with Mental Health in Mind
Claire Latané
Island Press, 2021
What would a school look like if it was designed with mental health in mind? Too many public schools look and feel like prisons, designed out of fear of vandalism and truancy. But we know that nurturing environments are better for learning. Research consistently shows that access to nature, big classroom windows, and open campuses reduce stress, anxiety, disorderly conduct, and crime, and improve academic performance. But too few school designers and decision-makers apply this research to create healthy schools. Schools That Heal details the myriad opportunities—from furniture to classroom improvements to whole campus renovations—to make supportive learning environments for our children and teenagers.

Schools around the world have been designed to support students’ health. A Japanese community decimated by a tsunami has incorporated water elements into the school campus to reconnect students to nature in a supportive way and promote environmental stewardship. Sandy Hook Elementary, creating a completely redesigned campus in the wake of a school shooting, began with an inclusive design process to ensure the new school could be a place of healing and learning. And while the larger mental and physical impacts of how COVID-19 has changed schooling aren’t known yet, Latané discusses how building elements like large windows—that can open to circulate fresh air—were once common in schools and could once again be useful as a cost-effective tactic for reducing virus exposure.

Backed by decades of research, Schools That Heal showcases clear and compelling ways to create schools that support students’ mental health and feelings of safety. Written in an accessible tone, this book reviews the evidence connecting design to mental health and makes design and advocacy recommendations to support students’ well-being and sense of safety.

With invaluable advice for school administrators, public health experts, teachers, and parents, Schools That Heal is a call to action and a practical resource to envision and implement nurturing and inspiring school environments. Healthy, healing campuses will better prepare students to take care of themselves, their communities, their cities, and their planet.
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Script and Glyph
Pre-Hispanic History, Colonial Bookmaking, and the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca
Dana Leibsohn
Harvard University Press, 2009

The Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca was created at a pivotal transitional moment, bridging an era when pictorial manuscripts dominated and one that witnessed the rising hegemony of alphabetic texts. The Historia was composed using both systems, yet, as Dana Leibsohn notes, neither was fully trusted. Leibsohn analyzes the choices made by the patron, don Alonso de Castañeda, and tlacuilos enlisted to create the manuscript. How does one create a history? Which narratives are included, and which are strikingly absent? Which modes of representation are called upon to convey certain types of information? Leibsohn argues how the very practice of history-keeping itself sustains or challenges a current reality.

Central to the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca is the creation, representation, and understanding of landscape. In the recording of ancestral migrations, don Alonso delineates territory, noting boundaries and their histories, and also reveals relationships with a sacred landscape, detailing how relationships with territory were constantly re-inscribed. In this sense, Script and Glyph is a particularly appropriate volume for Dumbarton Oaks, as it crosses the boundaries of Pre-Columbian and Landscape areas of study. The volume is beautifully illustrated with color images from the manuscript itself.

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Segregation and Resistance in the Landscapes of the Americas
Eric Avila and Thaïsa Way
Harvard University Press
Histories of racial segregation and its impacts have been the focus of urban research for over a century, and yet the role of space, place, and land in these narratives has been largely overlooked. How have land use policies and land access shaped the experience of place? What markings have made evident the lived experience of segregation and its impacts? And how have individuals and communities resisted segregation in their own efforts to make place? With a focus on the Americas, the essays in this volume move across time and space to ask questions about place-making and community building. They explore landscapes and their hidden struggles between segregation and resistance. Drawing upon the collective work of the “Segregation and Resistance in America’s Urban Landscapes” symposium organized by Dumbarton Oaks in 2020, these histories of segregation and resistance consider how cultural and spatial practices of separation, identity, response, and revolt are shaped by place and, in turn, inform practices of place-making.
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Senses of Landscape
John Sallis
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Beginning with the assertion that earth is the elemental place that grants an abode to humans and to other living things, in Senses of Landscape the philosopher John Sallis turns to landscapes, and in particular to their representation in painting, to present a power­ful synthetic work.

Senses of Landscape proffers three kinds of analyses, which, though distinct, continually intersect in the course of the book. The first consists of extended analyses of distinctive landscapes from four exemplary painters, Paul Cezanne, Caspar David Friedrich, Paul Klee, and Guo Xi. Sallis then turns to these art­ists’ own writings—treatises, essays, and letters—about art in general and landscape painting in particular, and he sets them into a philosophical context. The third kind of analysis draws both on Sallis’s theoretical writings and on the canonical texts in the philosophy of art (Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Heidegger). These analyses present for a wide audience a profound sense of landscape and of the earthly abode of the human.

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Shading Our Cities
A Resource Guide For Urban And Community Forests
Edited by Gary Moll and Sara Ebenreck; Foreword by Dale Robertson; American Forestry Association
Island Press, 1989

Shading Our Cities is a handbook to help neighborhood groups, local officials, and city planners develop urban forestry projects, not only to beautify their cities, but also to reduce energy demand, improve air quality, protect water supplies, and contribute to healthier living conditions.

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Shaping Roman Landscape
Ecocritical Approaches to Architecture and Wall Painting in Early Imperial Italy
Mantha Zarmakoupi
J. Paul Getty Trust, The
A groundbreaking ecocritical study that examines how ideas about the natural and built environment informed architectural and decorative trends of the Roman Late Republican and Early Imperial periods.
 
Landscape emerged as a significant theme in the Roman Late Republican and Early Imperial periods. Writers described landscape in texts and treatises, its qualities were praised and sought out in everyday life, and contemporary perceptions of the natural and built environment, as well as ideas about nature and art, were intertwined with architectural and decorative trends.
 
This illustrated volume examines how representations of real and depicted landscapes, and the merging of both in visual space, contributed to the creation of novel languages of art and architecture. Drawing on a diverse body of archaeological, art historical, and literary evidence, this study applies an ecocritical lens that moves beyond the limits of traditional iconography. Chapters consider, for example, how garden designs and paintings appropriated the cultures and ecosystems brought under Roman control and the ways miniature landscape paintings chronicled the transformation of the Italian shoreline with colonnaded villas, pointing to the changing relationship of humans with nature. Making a timely and original contribution to current discourses on ecology and art and architectural history, Shaping Roman Landscape reveals how Roman ideas of landscape, and the decorative strategies at imperial domus and villa complexes that gave these ideas shape, were richly embedded with meanings of nature, culture, and labor.
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Shifting Sands
Landscape, Memory, and Commodities in China's Contemporary Borderlands
Xiaoxuan Lu
University of Texas Press, 2023

How China’s borderlands transformed politically and culturally throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

China’s land borders, shared with fourteen other nations, are the world’s longest. Like all borders, they are not just lines on a map but also spaces whose histories and futures are defined by their frontier status. An ambitious appraisal of China’s borderlands, Shifting Sands addresses the full scope and importance of these regions, illustrating their transformation from imperial backwaters to hotbeds of resource exploitation and human development in the age of neoliberal globalization.

Xiaoxuan Lu brings to bear an original combination of archival research, fieldwork, cartography, and landscape analysis, broadening our understanding of the political economy and cultural changes in China’s borderlands in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While conventional wisdom looks to the era of Deng Xiaoping for China’s “opening,” Lu shows the integration of China’s borderlands into national and international networks from Sun Yat-sen onward. Yet, while the state has left a firm imprint on the borderlands, they were hardly created by China alone. As the Chinese case demonstrates, all borderlands are transnational, their physical and socioeconomic landscapes shaped by multidirectional flows of materials, ideas, and people.

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Signs in America's Auto Age
Signatures of Landscape and Place
John A. & Keith A. Jakle & Sculle
University of Iowa Press, 2004
Signs orient, inform, persuade, and regulate. They help give meaning to our natural and human-built environment, to landscape and place. In Signs in America’s Auto Age, cultural geographer John Jakle and historian Keith Sculle explore the ways in which we take meaning from outdoor signs and assign meaning to our surroundings—the ways we “read” landscape. With an emphasis on how the use of signs changed as the nation’s geography reorganized around the coming of the automobile, Jakle and Sculle consider the vast array of signs that have evolved since the beginning of the twentieth century.
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Sites Unseen
Landscape and Vision
Dianne Harris
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007
Sites Unseen challenges conventions for viewing and interpreting the landscape, using visual theory to move beyond traditional practices of describing and classifying objects to explore notions of audience and context.  While other fields, such as art history and geography, have engaged poststructuralist theory to consider vision and representation, the application of such inquiry to the natural or built environment has lagged behind.  This book, by treating landscape as a spatial, psychological, and sensory encounter, aims to bridge this gap, opening a new dialogue for discussing the landscape outside the boundaries of current art criticism and theory. 

As the contributors reveal, the landscape is a widely adaptable medium that can be employed literally or metaphorically to convey personal or institutional ideologies. Walls, gates, churchyards, and arches become framing devices for a staged aesthetic experience or to suit a sociopolitical agenda. The optic stimulation of signs, symbols, bodies, and objects combines with physical acts of climbing and walking and sensory acts of touching, smelling, and hearing to evoke an overall “vision” of landscape.

Sites Unseen considers a variety of different perspectives, including ancient Roman visions of landscape, the framing techniques of a Moghul palace, and a contemporary case study of Christo's The Gates, as examples of human attempts to shape our sensory, cognitive, and emotional experiences in the landscape.
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Sound and Scent in the Garden
D. Fairchild Ruggles
Harvard University Press

While we often approach gardens as things to be seen—thus engaging the rational, intellectual part of the human brain—Sound and Scent in the Garden explores the more elusive experiences of sound and smell. These senses are important dimensions of garden design and performance and often have a powerful effect on the human body, yet they may also be ephemeral and difficult to study.

The contributors to the volume explore the sensory experience of gardens specifically as places where people encounter landscape in a staged manner, as a result of intentional design. How do the senses shape the experience of those places? In what ways are plants, gardens, and landscapes produced so as to stimulate the senses? What evidence do we have of historical sensory experiences? What is lost when we forget to acknowledge the sensory environment of the past or simply overlook its traces?

The volume demonstrates a wide variety of approaches to apply to the study of sensory history and illuminates this important dimension of the experience of gardens—past and present, East and West.

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Sowing Empire
Landscape And Colonization
Jill H. Casid
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Planting and transplanting, seeding and reshaping—landscaping practices that emerged in the eighteenth century—are inextricable from the contested terrain of empire within which they operated. From the plantations of the “nabobs” to the island gardens of narrative fiction, from William Beckford’s estate at Fonthill to Marie Antoinette’s ornamented farm, Sowing Empire considers imperial relandscaping—its patriarchal organization, heterosexual reproduction, and slavery—and how it contributed to the construction of imperial power. At the same time, the book shows how these picturesque landscapes and sugar plantations contained within them the seeds of resistance—how, for instance, slave gardens and the Afro-Caribbean practice of Vodou threatened authority and created new possibilities for once again transforming the landscape.In an ambitious work of wide-ranging literary, visual, and historical allusion, Jill H. Casid examines how landscaping functioned in an imperial mode that defined and remade the “heartlands” of nations as well as the contact zones and colonial peripheries in the West and East Indies. Revealing the colonial landscape as far more than an agricultural system—as a means of regulating national, sexual, and gender identities—Casid also traces how the circulation of plants and hybridity influenced agriculture and landscaping on European soil and how colonial contacts materially shaped what we take as “European.”Utilizing a wide range of both visual and written sources—maps, literature, and travel writing—this book is interdisciplinary in its methodology and in its scope. Sowing Empire explores how postcolonial and queer studies can alter art history and visual studies and, in turn, what close attention to the visual may offer to both postcolonial theorizing and historically and materially based colonial cultural studies.Jill H. Casid is assistant professor of art history and part of the developing transdisciplinary program in visual culture studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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St Peter-On-The-Wall
Landscape and Heritage on the Essex Coast
Edited by Johanna Dale
University College London, 2023
A detailed study of one of the oldest largely intact churches in England.

The Chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, built on the ruins of a Roman fort, dates from the mid-seventh century and is one of the oldest largely intact churches in England. It stands in splendid isolation on the shoreline at the mouth of the Blackwater Estuary in Essex, where the land meets and interpenetrates with the sea and the sky. This book brings together contributors from across the arts, humanities, and social sciences to uncover the premodern contexts and modern resonances of this medieval building and its landscape setting. In analyzing the significance of the chapel and surrounding landscape over more than a thousand years, this collection additionally contributes to wider debates about the relationship between space and place, and particularly the interfaces between both medieval and modern cultures and also heritage and the natural environment.
 
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The Stages of Memory
Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between
James E. Young
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
Winner of the 2017 National Council on Public History Book Award
From around the world, whether for New York City's 9/11 Memorial, at exhibits devoted to the arts of Holocaust memory, or throughout Norway's memorial process for the murders at Utøya, James E. Young has been called on to help guide the grief stricken and survivors in how to mark their losses. This poignant, beautifully written collection of essays offers personal and professional considerations of what Young calls the "stages of memory," acts of commemoration that include spontaneous memorials of flowers and candles as well as permanent structures integrated into sites of tragedy. As he traces an arc of memorial forms that spans continents and decades, Young returns to the questions that preoccupy survivors, architects, artists, and writers: How to articulate a void without filling it in? How to formalize irreparable loss without seeming to repair it?

Richly illustrated, the volume is essential reading for those engaged in the processes of public memory and commemoration and for readers concerned about how we remember terrible losses.
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Strategic Green Infrastructure Planning
A Multi-Scale Approach
Karen Firehock
Island Press, 2015
From New York City's urban forest and farmland in Virginia to the vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona and riverside parks in Vancouver, Washington, green infrastructure is becoming a priority for cities, counties, and states across America. Recognition of the need to manage our natural assets—trees, soils, water, and habitats—as part of our green infrastructure is vital to creating livable places and healthful landscapes. But the land management decisions about how to create plans, where to invest money, and how to get the most from these investments are complex, influenced by differing landscapes, goals, and stakeholders.

Strategic Green Infrastructure Planning addresses the nuts and bolts of planning and preserving natural assets at a variety of scales—from dense urban environments to scenic rural landscapes. A practical guide to creating effective and well-crafted plans and then implementing them, the book presents a six-step process developed and field-tested by the Green Infrastructure Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. Well-organized chapters explain how each step, from setting goals to implementing opportunities, can be applied to a variety of scenarios, customizable to the reader's target geographical location. Chapters draw on a diverse group of case studies, from the arid open spaces of the Sonoran Desert to the streets of Jersey City. Abundant full color maps, photographs, and illustrations complement the text.

For planners, elected officials, developers, conservationists, and others interested in the creation and maintenance of open space lands and urban green infrastructure projects or promoting a healthy economy, this book offers a comprehensive yet flexible approach to conceiving, refining, and implementing successful projects.
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Surveying the Landscape
Arts Integration at Research Universities: A Review of Best Practices and Challenges for Arts Integration in Higher Education
Bruce M. Mackh, PhD
Michigan Publishing Services, 2015
Under the auspices of ArtsEngine at the University of Michigan, the Mellon Research Project examines the increasingly prevalent integration of arts practice and study at research universities. ArtsEngine National’s initial mission to “transform the research university through the infusion of arts practice” in response to growing recognition of the value of arts integration practices across the landscape of higher education led to a $500,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This grant supported an initial investigation of present practices in arts integration at researchuniversities, encompassing a national network of faculty and administrators who embrace innovative methods in teaching, research, and co-curricular programming linking the arts to other disciplinary domains.
This study presents “best practices in the integration of arts practice in U.S. research universities . . . , fulfill[ing] the need for a document that articulates models, obstacles, implementation strategies, costs, and impact on students and faculty as well as on research, practice, and teaching in other knowledge areas” (ArtsEngine). Rather than providing a detailed set of instructions, this document maps the landscape of arts integration at 30 partner institutions in the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru) and at 16 other institutions. It highlights aspirational models and presents an overall guide to current practices linking the arts to other learning areas.
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Sustainable Landscape Construction
A Guide to Green Building Outdoors, Second Edition
J. William Thompson and Kim Sorvig
Island Press, 2007
Published at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Sustainable Landscape Construction took a new approach to what was then a nearly new subject: how to construct outdoor environments based on principles of sustainability. This enormously influential book helped to spur a movement that has taken root around the U.S. and throughout the world. The second edition has been thoroughly updated to include the most important developments in this landscape revolution, along with the latest scientific research in the field. It has been expanded to provide even more ideas for designing, building, and maintaining environmentally sensitive landscapes. It is essential reading for everyone with an interest in "green" landscape design.
 
Like its predecessor, the new edition of Sustainable Landscape Construction is organized around principles that reflect the authors' desire to put environmental ethics into practice. Each chapter focuses on one over-arching idea. These principles of sustainability are clearly articulated and are developed through specific examples. More than 100 projects from around the globe are described and illustrated. A new chapter details ways in which landscape architectural practice must respond to the dangers posed by fire, floods, drought, extreme storms, and climate change.
 
Sustainable Landscape Construction is a crucial complement to basic landscape construction texts, and is a one-of-a-kind reference for professionals, students, and concerned citizens.
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Sustainable Landscape Construction, Third Edition
A Guide to Green Building Outdoors
Kim Sorvig with J. William Thompson
Island Press, 2018
Since the publication of the first edition in 2000, Sustainable Landscape Construction has helped to spur a movement towards resilient outdoor environments, in the U.S. and throughout the world. The third edition has been updated to include important recent developments in this landscape revolution. It remains essential reading for everyone with an interest in "green" design of outdoor spaces and infrastructures.

Like its predecessors, the new edition of Sustainable Landscape Construction is organized around principles, recognizing that built environments, and our work in them, pose both pragmatic and ethical challenges. Each chapter focuses on one overarching site goal, such as “Pave Less,” “Heal Injured Sites,” and “Consider Origin and Fate of Materials.” These principles of land sustainability are clearly articulated and developed through specific examples of more than 100 projects from around the world, reflecting both traditions and recent innovations. Expanded coverage of industry trends toward performance monitoring, and of lessons from project failures, form an important enhancement in this edition. New content also details the necessity to plan adaptively, not just preventively, for the realities of changing climate and intensifying weather. Some of the trends covered will shift how landscape architects and contractors will do business in challenging years ahead: to survive, many professionals and clients will focus on restoration projects, motivated by ecosystem services and social justice, and funded by innovative methods.

Sustainable Landscape Construction is part of the canon of landscape construction texts, and with this update, remains a visionary, one of a kind reference for professionals and students.
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