BiblioVault - Books about Western

Geological Evolution of the Colorado Plateau of Eastern Utah and Western Colorado

Robert Fillmore

University of Utah Press, 2010

Robert Fillmore’s clear, easy-to-read text documents spectacular features of the eastern Colorado Plateau, one of the most interesting and scenic geologic regions in the world. The area covered in detail stretches from the Book Cliffs to the deep canyons of the San Juan River area. The events that shaped this vast region are clearly described and include the most recent interpretations of ongoing geologic forces. The book also includes mile-by-mile road logs with explanations of the various features for most of the scenic roads in the region, including Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, and the Natural Bridges area.

[more]

German City, Jewish Memory

The Story of Worms

Nils Roemer

Brandeis University Press, 2010

German and Jewish ways of life have been interwoven in Worms, Germany, for over a thousand years. Despite radical changes brought about by expulsion of Jews, wartime devastation, social advancement, cultural and religious renewal, and the Jewish community’s destruction during the Holocaust, the Jewish sites of Worms display a remarkable degree of continuity, which has contributed to the development of distinct urban Jewish cultures, memories, and identities. Tracing the recollection and invention of local Jewish historical traditions in religious commemorations, historical writings, museums, and historical monuments, and the transformation from “sites” to “sights” in the form of tourism from the Middle Ages to the present, Roemer’s rich study of Worms offers a blueprint for historians interested in developing similar studies of cities over the longue durée.

[more]

Ghetto

The History of a Word

Daniel B. Schwartz

Harvard University Press, 2019

Just as European Jews were being emancipated and ghettos in their original form—compulsory, enclosed spaces designed to segregate—were being dismantled, use of the word ghetto surged in Europe and spread around the globe. Tracing the curious path of this loaded word from its first use in sixteenth-century Venice to the present turns out to be more than an adventure in linguistics.

Few words are as ideologically charged as ghetto. Its early uses centered on two cities: Venice, where it referred to the segregation of the Jews in 1516, and Rome, where the ghetto survived until the fall of the Papal States in 1870, long after it had ceased to exist elsewhere.

Ghetto: The History of a Word offers a fascinating account of the changing nuances of this slippery term, from its coinage to the present day. It details how the ghetto emerged as an ambivalent metaphor for “premodern” Judaism in the nineteenth century and how it was later revived to refer to everything from densely populated Jewish immigrant enclaves in modern cities to the hypersegregated holding pens of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. We see how this ever-evolving word traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, settled into New York’s Lower East Side and Chicago’s Near West Side, then came to be more closely associated with African Americans than with Jews.

Chronicling this sinuous transatlantic odyssey, Daniel B. Schwartz reveals how the history of ghettos is tied up with the struggle and argument over the meaning of a word. Paradoxically, the term ghetto came to loom larger in discourse about Jews when Jews were no longer required to live in legal ghettos. At a time when the Jewish associations have been largely eclipsed, Ghetto retrieves the history of a disturbingly resilient word.

[more]