Roger G. Kennedy - Böcker

Wildfires are a fact of life throughout many arid and semi-arid regions, such as the American West. With growing population pressures in these regions, human communities are increasingly developing in so-called urban-wildland interface zones, where severe fire driven ecosystems co-exist uneasily with humans and their property. This edited volume addresses this problem and its potential solutions from an interdisciplinary perceptive, with contributions from authors in public policy, sociology, economics, ecology, computer modeling, planning, and ecology. The first section of the book addresses institutional and policy aspects, including chapters on national fire policy in the United States, local fire planning and policy, smart growth approaches to planning in fire zones, and institutional roadblocks to fuels management. The second section deals with economic aspects, including chapters on the role of information and disclosure of hazards in real estate markets, methods of underwriting fire insurance, and the consequences of state-mandated fire insurers of last resort. The third section deals with community level involvement in fire management, addressing a wide range of issues including models of community engagement, criteria for success, and approaches for institutionalizing this process, both in the US and abroad. The final section deals with management and ecology and includes chapters on the predicted effects of climate change on wildfire activity, new computer modeling tools for mitigating fire risk, and complex institutional mechanisms behind large-fire suppression in the US. It addresses institutional and policy aspects, economic aspects, community level involvement in fire management, and the management and ecology of wildfires.

This book restores Aaron Burr to his place as a central figure in the founding of the American Republic. Abolitionist, proto-feminist, friend to such Indian leaders as Joseph Brant, Burr was personally acquainted with a wider range of Americans, and of the American continent, than any other Founder except George Washington. He contested for power with Hamilton and then with Jefferson on a continental scale. The book does not sentimentalize any of its three protagonists, neither does it derogate their extraordinary qualities. They were all great men, all flawed, and all three failed to achieve their full aspirations. But their struggles make for an epic tale. Written from the perspective of a historian and administrator who, over nearly fifty years in public life, has served six presidents, this book penetrates into the personal qualities of its three central figures. In telling the tale of their shifting power relationships and their antipathies, it reassesses their policies and the consequences of their successes and failures. Fresh information about the careers of Hamilton and Burr is derived from newly-discovered sources, and a supporting cast of secondary figures emerges to give depth and irony to the principal narrative. This is a book for people who know how political life is lived, and who refuse to be confined within preconceptions and prejudices until they have weighed all the evidence, to reach their own conclusions both as to events and character. This is a controversial book, but not a confrontational one, for it is written with sympathy for men of high aspirations, who were disappointed in much, but who succeeded, in all three cases, to a degree not hitherto fully understood.

This sweeping work of history explains the westward spread of cotton agriculture and slave labor across the South and into Texas during the decades before the Civil War. In arguing that the U.S. acquisition of Texas originated with planters' need for new lands to devote to cotton cultivation, celebrated author Roger G. Kennedy takes a long view. Locating the genesis of Southern expansionism in the Jeffersonian era, Cotton and Conquest stretches from 1790 through the end of the Civil War, weaving international commerce, American party politics, technological innovation, Indian-white relations, frontier surveying practices, and various social, economic, and political events into the tapestry of Texas history.The innumerable dots the author deftly connects take the story far beyond Texas. Kennedy begins with a detailed chronicle of the commerce linking British and French textile mills and merchants with Southern cotton plantations. When the cotton states seceded from the Union, they overestimated British and French dependence on Southern cotton. As a result, the Southern plantocracy believed that the British would continue supporting the use of slaves in order to sustain the supply of cotton - a miscalculation with dire consequences for the Confederacy.As cartographers and surveyors located boundaries specified in new international treaties and alliances, they violated earlier agreements with Indian tribes. The Indians were to be displaced yet again, now from Texas cotton lands. The plantation system was thus a prime mover behind Indian removal, Kennedy shows, and it yielded power and riches for planters, bankers, merchants, millers, land speculators, Indian-fighting generals and politicians, and slave traders.In Texas, at the plantation system's farthest geographic reach, cotton scored its last triumphs. No one who seeks to understand the complex history of Texas can overlook this book.