Creating the North American Landscape – serie

After prospering in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, America's great urban centers faced economic, demographic, and political decline during the depression of the 1930s. When the Second World War brought economic recovery, politicians and planners of the 1940s confidently anticipated a new golden age for big cities. But the postwar boom never came, and urban America has been waiting for the "renaissance" ever since. In"The Rough Road to Renaissance", Jon C. Teaford describes efforts in twelve older central cities in the Northeast and Midwest to achieve revitalization during the period from 1940 to 1985. Focusing on the "view from City Hall" rather than on state or federal perspectives, Teaford explores the changing trends in city politics and municipal finance as well as the policies that pursued the elusive goal of urban renaissance. He also considers the environmental, transportation, rehabilitation, and reconstruction programs undertaken to create better cities and to close the widening competitive gap with suburbia. In the early fifties, Teaford explains, big cities were planning for a bright future.Crosstown highways, low-income highrises, and vigorous demolition drastically altered the urban landscape and confidently anticipated new development. But the automobile culture was already derailing urban renewal as city dwellers sought the good life in the suburbs. By the late sixties, rising crime, racial tension, labor militancy, and a wave of abandonment seemed to offer further evidence of impending urban demise. Yet in the 1980s, "messiah mayors" and visionary planners boosted the hopes and morale of urban residents. Once again there was talk of renaissance, but beneath the facade of revival serious problems persisted. In "The Rough Road to Renaissance", Jon Teaford tells a story that residents of Boston, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and other famous urban centers will recognize-- a story that is still being written

A collection of twenty-two original essays by noted authorities on the distinctive cultural landscapes created by the immigration of various European groups, mostly in the nineteenth century, and the migrations of Black and Native American groups. A rich portrait of the ethnic groups that have helped mold the cultures of the United States and Canada.

In this text, Ford offers an account of the relationship between urban architecture - especially vernacular architecture - and the spatial arrangement and development of cities in North America. From office towers in the central business district to commercial strips in the "edge city", Ford shows how changes in the built environment parallel changes in urban economies and human culture. Focusing on ordinary structures rather than famous landmarks, the book aims to provide a guide to understanding the changing character of any urban landscape. Ford describes how the idea - as well as the appearance - of the modern city has changed with the evolution of buildings such as skyscrapers, skid-row hotels, single family bungalows and ranches, large apartment buildings, public-housing towers, motels, mini-malls and festival market-places. Through illustrated case studies of specific building types in particular places, Ford explores the conflicting forces of decline, revitalization and preservation that constantly transform the urban scene.

Critics of the turn-of-the-century's City Beautiful Movement denounced its projects-broad, tree-lined boulevards and monumental but low-lying civic buildings-as grandiose and unnecessary. In this masterful analysis, William H. Wilson sees the movement as its founders did: as an exercise in participatory politics aimed at changing the way citizens thought about cities.

From Brooklyn's parks and parkways, across the Iowa prairie, to Big Sur's coastal highway, people are drawing green lines on local maps and building "greenways"—linear open spaces that preserve and restore the skein of nature in cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Charles Little's Greenways for America describes this remarkable citizen-led effort to get Americans out of their cars and into the landscape via greenways. Such greenways provide paths or trails for recreation and "link" a region's traditional parks and open spaces. They preserve natural corridors for wildlife migration and protect scenic and historic routes from commercial development. In this first comprehensive account of the movement that is now gathering power in every region of the country, Little describes dozens of greenway projects that have imporved environmental quality, invigorated local economies, and preserved outdoor spaces for millions of citizen.s

From the eighteenth-century single-room "mansions" of Delaware's Cypress Swamp district to the early twentieth-century suburban housing around Philadelphia and Wilmington, the architectural landscape of the mid-Atlantic region is both rich and varied. In this pioneering field guide to the region's historic vernacular architecture, Gabrielle Lanier and Bernard Herman describe the remarkably diverse building traditions that have overlapped and influenced one another for generations. With more than 300 illustrations and photographs, Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic explores the character of pre-1940 domestic and agricultural buildings in the towns and rural landscapes of southern New Jersey, Delaware, and coastal Maryland and Virginia. Approaching their subject "archaeologically," the authors examine the "layers" of a structure's past to show how it has changed over time and to reveal telling details about its occupants and the community in which they lived. The book provides architectural information as well as a working methodology for anyone wanting to explore and learn from traditional architecture and landscapes.The authors conclude that, as a vital cultural artifact, the distinctive architecture of the mid-Atlantic needs to be identified, recorded, and preserved. Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic gives proof to the insights architecture offers into who we are culturally as a community, a region, and a nation.

Jens Jensen was one of America's greatest landscape designers and conservationists. Using native plants and "fitting" designs, he advocated that our gardens, parks, roads, playgrounds, and cities should be harmonious with nature and its ecological processes-a belief that was to become a major theme of modern American landscape design. In Jens Jensen: Maker of Natural Parks and Gardens, Robert E. Grese draws on Jensen's writings and plans, interviews with people who knew him, and analyses of his projects to present a clear picture of Jensen's efforts to enhance and preserve "native" landscapes.

Magnetic Los Angeles challenges the widely held view of the expanding twentieth-century city as the sprawling product of dispersion without planning and lacking any discernable order. Using Los Angeles as a case study, Greg Hise argues that the twentieth-century metropolitan region is the product of conscious planning-by policy makers, industrialists, design professionals, community builders, and homebuyers-in direct response to political and economic conditions of the 1920s and the Depression, the defense emergency, and the immediate postwar years.

In the first geographic and environmental analysis of the recreational and retirement community industry, Hubert B. Stroud shows how and why certain communities had positive impacts on the surrounding region while others did not. Focusing on well-known developments in Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Arkansas, and Tennessee, he finds that most developments were poorly planned, resulting in environmental damage, overtaxing of public services, and social and economic problems. Yet Stroud acknowledges that future development is inevitable, as recreational and retirement communities continue to lure urban America with the promise of paradise.

A pair of gleaming rails embedded in a farmhouse driveway. A wooded cycling trail that traces an oddly level path through suburban hills. An abandoned high fill that briefly parallels the interstate. Today, little remains of the vast network of passenger and freight railroad lines that once crisscrossed much of eastern and midwestern America. But in 1946, the steam locomotive was king, the automobile was just beginning to emerge from wartime restrictions, passenger trains still made stops in nearly every town, and freight trains carried most of the nation's intercity commerce. In A Railroad Atlas of the United States in 1946, Richard C. Carpenter provides a unique record of this not-so-distant time, when traveling out of town meant, for most Americans, taking the train. The first volume of this multivolume series covers the mid-Atlantic states and includes detailed maps of every passenger railroad line in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. When completed, the series will provide a comprehensive atlas of the U.S. railroad system at its post-World War II high point-a transportation network that many considered the finest railroad passenger system in the world.Meticulously crafted and rich in detail, these hand-drawn color maps reveal with skilled precision-at a scale of 1 inch to 4 miles (or 1:250,000)-the various main and branch railroad passenger and freight lines that served thousands of American towns. The maps also include such features as long-since-demolished steam locomotive and manual signal tower installations, towns that functioned solely as places where crews changed over, track pans, coaling stations, and other rail-specific sites. Currently, there exists no comprehensive, historic railroad atlas for the U.S. This volume, with its 202 full-scale and detail maps, is sure to remain the standard reference work for years to come, as will the others to follow in the series.

In the eighteenth century, Virginia's Shenandoah Valley became a key corridor for America's westward expansion through the Cumberland Gap. Known as "New Virginia," the region west of the Blue Ridge Mountains set off the world of the farmer from that of the planter, grain and livestock production from tobacco culture, and a free labor society from a slave labor society. In The Planting of New Virginia Warren Hofstra offers the first comprehensive geographical history of one of North America's most significant frontier areas. By examining the early landscape history of the Shenandoah Valley in its regional and global context, Hofstra sheds new light on social, economic, political, and intellectual developments that affected both the region and the entire North American Atlantic world. Paying special attention to the Shenandoah Valley's backcountry frontier culture, Hofstra shows how that culture played a unique role in the territorial struggle between European empires and Native American nations. He weaves together the broad cultural and geographic threads that underlie the story of the valley's place in the early European settlement of eastern North America.He also reveals the distinctive ways in which settlers shaped the valley's geography during the eighteenth century, a pattern that evolved from "discrete open-country neighborhoods" into a complex "town and country settlement" that would come to characterize-and in many ways epitomize-middle America. An important addition to scholarship of the geography and history of colonial and early America, The Planting of New Virginia, rethinks American history and the evolution of the American landscape in the colonial era.

In Petrolia, Brian Black offers a geographical and social history of a region that was not only the site of America's first oil boom but was also the world's largest oil producer between 1859 and 1873. Against the background of the growing demand for petroleum throughout and immediately following the Civil War, Black describes Oil Creek Valley's descent into environmental hell. Known as "Petrolia," the region charged the popular imagination with its nearly overnight transition from agriculture to industry. But so unrestrained were these early efforts at oil drilling, Black writes, that "the landscape came to be viewed only as an instrument out of which one could extract crude." In a very short time, Petrolia was a ruined place-environmentally, economically, and to some extent even culturally. Black gives historical detail and analysis to account for this transformation.

At the close of World War II, Americans became increasingly concerned about the problem of housing for returning veterans, relocated defense workers, and their families. Designs such as the garden city that dated from the turn of the twentieth century or earlier were prominent once again, as planners saw a renewed need for ready-made communities. One such community-among the first and, perhaps, most representative-was Park Forest, Illinois, a privately built and publicly managed town twenty-six miles south of Chicago. In this book, Gregory Randall presents the history of the planning, design, construction, and growth of Park Forest. He shows how planners-who dubbed the new community a "GI town"-drew on lessons learned from English garden cities and New Deal greenbelt towns to cope with America's emerging peacetime housing crisis. He also shows how this new town changed community planning throughout the United States, including its effects on community development up to the present.

Appalachia may be the most mythologized and misunderstood place in America, its way of life and inhabitants both caricatured and celebrated in the mainstream media. Over generations, though, the families living in the mountainous region stretching from West Virginia to northeastern Alabama have forged one of the country's richest and most distinctive cultures, encompassing music, food, architecture, customs, and language. In Appalachian Folkways, geographer John Rehder offers an engaging and enlightening account of southern Appalachia and its cultural milieu that is at once sweeping and intimate. From architecture and traditional livelihoods to beliefs and art, Rehder, who has spent thirty years studying the region, offers a nuanced depiction of southern Appalachia's social and cultural identity. The book opens with an expert consideration of the southern Appalachian landscape, defined by mountains, rocky soil, thick forests, and plentiful streams. While these features have shaped the inhabitants of the region, Rehder notes, Appalachians have also shaped their environment, and he goes on to explore the human influence on the landscape.From physical geography, the book moves to settlement patterns, describing the Indian tribes that flourished before European settlement and the successive waves of migration that brought Melungeon, Scotch-Irish, English, and German settlers to the region, along with the cultural contributions each made to what became a distinct Appalachian culture. Next focusing on the folk culture of Appalachia, Rehder details such cultural expressions as architecture and landscape design; traditional and more recent ways of making a living, both legal and illegal; foodstuffs and cooking techniques; folk remedies and belief systems; music, art, and the folk festivals that today attract visitors from around the world; and the region's dialect. With its broad scope and deep research, Appalachian Folkways accurately and evocatively chronicles a way of life that is fast disappearing.

America's westward expansion involved more than pushing the frontier across the Mississippi toward the Pacific; it also consisted of urbanizing undeveloped regions of the colonial states. In 1810, New York's future governor DeWitt Clinton marveled that the "rage for erecting villages is a perfect mania." The development of Rochester and Syracuse illuminates the national experience of internal economic and cultural colonization during the first half of the nineteenth century. Architectural historian Diane Shaw examines the ways in which these new cities were shaped by a variety of constituents-founders, merchants, politicians, and settlers-as opportunities to extend the commercial and social benefits of the market economy and a merchant culture to America's interior. At the same time, she analyzes how these priorities resulted in a new approach to urban planning. According to Shaw, city founders and residents deliberately arranged urban space into three segmented districts-commercial, industrial, and civic-to promote a self-fulfilling vision of a profitable and urbane city.Shaw uncovers a distinctly new model of urbanization that challenges previous paradigms of the physical and social construction of nineteenth-century cities. Within two generations, the new cities of Rochester and Syracuse were sorted at multiple scales, including not only the functional definition of districts, but also the refinement of building types and styles, the stratification of building interiors by floor, and even the coding of public space by class, gender, and race. Shaw's groundbreaking model of early nineteenth-century urban design and spatial culture is a major contribution to the interdisciplinary study of the American city.

Whistle-stop posts along a picturesque cycling trail. An abandoned roundhouse in a new industrial park. A piece of "Black Diamond" anthracite coal lying in the grass. These are silent witnesses to the golden age of American railroading, 1946, when the steam locomotive's sonorous whistle could be heard from Pennsylvania to Vermont, from New York to Chicago. The second installation of Richard C. Carpenter's highly acclaimed series covers an area criss-crossed by some of the oldest railroad lines in America. This volume includes over 191 beautiful, hand-drawn maps of rail systems in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. These masterpieces, accompanied by detailed sections on stations, track pans, tunnels, and viaducts, capture a time when rail was king in New England, before cars, trucks, and planes became dominant.

In the eighteenth century, Virginia's Shenandoah Valley became a key corridor for America's westward expansion through the Cumberland Gap. Known as "New Virginia," the region west of the Blue Ridge Mountains set off the world of the farmer from that of the planter, grain and livestock production from tobacco culture, and a free labor society from a slave labor society. In The Planting of New Virginia Warren Hofstra offers the first comprehensive geographical history of one of North America's most significant frontier areas. By examining the early landscape history of the Shenandoah Valley in its regional and global context, Hofstra sheds new light on social, economic, political, and intellectual developments that affected both the region and the entire North American Atlantic world. Paying special attention to the Shenandoah Valley's backcountry frontier culture, Hofstra shows how that culture played a unique role in the territorial struggle between European empires and Native American nations. He weaves together the broad cultural and geographic threads that underlie the story of the valley's place in the early European settlement of eastern North America.He also reveals the distinctive ways in which settlers shaped the valley's geography during the eighteenth century, a pattern that evolved from "discrete open-country neighborhoods" into a complex "town and country settlement" that would come to characterize-and in many ways epitomize-middle America. An important addition to scholarship of the geography and history of colonial and early America, The Planting of New Virginia, rethinks American history and the evolution of the American landscape in the colonial era.

In 1865, when San Francisco's Daily Evening Bulletin asked its readers if it were not time for the city to finally establish a public park, residents had only private gardens and small urban squares where they could retreat from urban crowding, noise, and filth. Five short years later, city supervisors approved the creation of Golden Gate Park, the second largest urban park in America. Over the next sixty years, and particularly after 1900, a network of smaller parks and parkways was built, turning San Francisco into one of the nation's greenest cities. In Building San Francisco's Parks, 1850-1930, Terence Young traces the history of San Francisco's park system, from the earliest city plans, which made no provision for a public park, through the private garden movement of the 1850s and 1860, Frederick Law Olmsted's early involvement in developing a comprehensive parks plan, the design and construction of Golden Gate Park, and finally to the expansion of green space in the first third of the twentieth century.Young documents this history in terms of the four social ideals that guided America's urban park advocates and planners in this period: public health, prosperity, social coherence, and democratic equality. He also differentiates between two periods in the history of American park building, each defined by a distinctive attitude towards "improving" nature: the romantic approach, which prevailed from the 1860s to the 1880s, emphasized the beauty of nature, while the rationalistic approach, dominant from the 1880s to the 1920s, saw nature as the best setting for uplifting activities such as athletics and education. Building San Francisco's Parks, 1850-1930 maps the political, cultural, and social dimensions of landscape design in urban America and offers new insights into the transformation of San Francisco's physical environment and quality of life through its world-famous park system.

A Railroad Atlas of the United States in 1946 recalls an era when steam locomotives were still king and passenger trains stopped at nearly every town in America. Railroad companies employed over a million workers, on the trains and along the tracks. Everything moved by rail: travelers, mail, and freight-whether a massive electric generator or a child's bicycle. Richard C. Carpenter's hand-drawn color maps recapture the precise details: the various trunk and ancillary railroad passenger lines that served thousands of towns; long-since demolished steam locomotive and manual signal tower installations; towns that functioned solely as places where crews changed over; track pans; coaling stations; tunnels; bridges and viaducts; and other rail-specific sites. The third and largest volume in this acclaimed series includes 276 maps and drawings and focuses on Indiana, Lower Michigan, and Ohio. These states could be called the crossroads of the national railroad network, where east-west transcontinental lines crossed north-south inter-regional lines.Carpenter depicts the major rail centers of Indianapolis, Gary, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, and Chicago, as well as every town and rail junction from Mackinaw City, Michigan, to Tell City, Indiana.

Planner and originator of the Appalachian Trail and a cofounder of the Wilderness Society, Benton MacKaye (1879-1975) was a pioneer in linking the concepts of preservation and recreation. Spanning three-quarters of a century, his long and productive career had a major impact on emerging movements in conservation, environmentalism, and regional planning. MacKaye's seminal ideas on outdoor recreation, wilderness protection, land-use planning, community development, and transportation have inspired generations of activists, professionals, and adventurers seeking to strike a harmonious balance between human need and the natural environment. This pathbreaking biography provides the first complete portrait of this significant and unique figure in American environmental, intellectual, and cultural history. Drawing on extensive research, Larry Anderson traces MacKaye's extensive career, examines his many published works, and describes the importance of MacKaye's relationships with such influential figures as Lewis Mumford, Aldo Leopold, and Walter Lippmann.This book will appeal to students, scholars, and professionals in preservation, conservation, recreation, planning, and American studies, as well as general readers interested in these subjects.

With his meticulously crafted, hand-drawn maps of America's complex and extensive railroad network, Richard C. Carpenter recaptures a time when steam locomotives were still king and passenger trains stopped at nearly every town. Before railroad mergers forced the abandonment of thousands of miles of line and passengers chose to hop behind the wheel of a car rather than buy a train ticket, the United States, at its post-World War II apex, boasted what many considered the finest passenger railroad system in the world. The fourth volume in this acclaimed series illustrates in stunning detail the rail system in Illinois, Wisconsin, and upper Michigan. Charting not only the exact direction and distance of each rail line, Carpenter also includes with precision the railroad's operational details: both existing and long-since-demolished signal towers, interlockings, passenger stations, major rail yards, repair shops, crew change points, trackage rights and joint operations, and other rarely mapped, rail-specific sites. The book's unique format allows easy cross-referencing with U.S. Geological Survey maps and DeLorme state road atlases.Also highlighted are rivers, lakes, and state and county boundaries, as well as the mileposts for every line. These beautifully rendered maps tell the fascinating story of America's unparalleled railroad network in 1946. Anyone interested in how people and goods moved around the country will find much to learn and appreciate in Richard Carpenter's one-of-a-kind railroad atlases.

Drivers in the nation's capital face a host of hazards: high-speed traffic circles, presidential motorcades, jaywalking tourists, and bewildering signs that send unsuspecting motorists from the Lincoln Memorial into suburban Virginia in less than two minutes. And parking? Don't bet on it unless you're in the fast lane of the Capital Beltway during rush hour. Little wonder, then, that so many residents and visitors rely on the Washington Metro, the 106-mile rapid transit system that serves the District of Columbia and its inner suburbs. In the first comprehensive history of the Metro, Zachary M. Schrag tells the story of the Great Society Subway from its earliest rumblings to the present day, from Arlington to College Park, Eisenhower to Marion Barry. Unlike the pre-World War II rail systems of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the Metro was built at a time when most American families already owned cars, and when most American cities had dedicated themselves to freeways, not subways. Why did the nation's capital take a different path? What were the consequences of that decision?Using extensive archival research as well as oral history, Schrag argues that the Metro can be understood only in the political context from which it was born: the Great Society liberalism of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. The Metro emerged from a period when Americans believed in public investments suited to the grandeur and dignity of the world's richest nation. The Metro was built not merely to move commuters, but in the words of Lyndon Johnson, to create "a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community." Schrag scrutinizes the project from its earliest days, including general planning, routes, station architecture, funding decisions, land-use impacts, and the behavior of Metro riders. The story of the Great Society Subway sheds light on the development of metropolitan Washington, postwar urban policy, and the promises and limits of rail transit in American cities.

During the 1920s, enterprising realtors, housing professionals, and builders developed the models that became the inspiration for the subdivision tract housing now commonplace in the U.S.Originally published in 2001. Suburban subdivisions of individual family homes are so familiar a part of the American landscape that it is hard to imagine a time when they were not common in the U. S. The shift to large-scale speculative subdivisions is usually attributed to the period after World War II. In Entrepreneurial Vernacular: Developers' Subdivisions in the 1920s, Carolyn S. Loeb shows that the precedents for this change in single-family home design were the result of concerted efforts by entrepreneurial realtors and other housing professionals during the 1920s. In her discussion of the historical and structural forces that propelled this change, Loeb focuses on three typical speculative subdivisions of the 1920s and on the realtors, architects, and building-craftsmen who designed and constructed them. These examples highlight the "shared set of planning and design concerns" that animated realtors (whom Loeb sees as having played the "key role" in this process) and the network of housing experts with whom they associated. Decentralized and loosely coordinated, this network promoted home ownership through flexible strategies of design, planning, financing, and construction which the author describes as a new and "entrepreneurial" vernacular.

Winner of the J. B. Jackson Prize from the Association of American GeographersOriginally published in 1998. "The plantation," writes Charles Aiken, "is among the most misunderstood institutions of American history. The demise of the plantation has been pronounced many times, but the large industrial farms survive as significant parts of, not just the South's, but the nation's agriculture."In this sweeping historical and geographical account, Aiken traces the development of the Southern cotton plantation since the Civil War—from the emergence of tenancy after 1865, through its decline during the Depression, to the post-World War Two development of the large industrial farm.Tracing the geographical changes in plantation agriculture and the plantation regions after 1865, Aiken shows how the altered landscape of the South has led many to the false conclusion that the plantation has vanished. In fact, he explains, while certain regions of the South have reverted to other uses, the cotton plantation survives in a form that is, in many ways, remarkably similar to that of its antebellum predecessors.Aiken also describes the evolving relationship of African-Americans to the cotton plantation during the thirteen decades of economic, social, and political changes from Reconstruction through the War on Poverty—including the impact of alterations in plantation agriculture and the mass migration of Southern blacks to the urban North during the twentieth century.Richly illustrated with more than 130 maps and photographs (many original and many from FSA photographers), The Cotton Plantation South is a vivid and colorful account of landscape, geography, race, politics, and civil rights as they relate to one of America's most enduring and familiar institutions.

Originally published in 2003. In Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America Helen Tangires examines the role of the public marketplace—social and architectural—as a key site in the development of civic culture in America. More than simply places for buying and selling food, Tangires explains, municipally owned and operated markets were the common ground where citizens and government struggled to define the shared values of the community. Public markets were vital to civic policy and reflected the profound belief in the moral economy—the effort on the part of the municipality to maintain the social and political health of its community by regulating the ethics of trade in the urban marketplace for food. Tangires begins with the social, architectural, and regulatory components of the public market in the early republic, when cities embraced this ancient system of urban food distribution. By midcentury, the legalization of butcher shops in New York City and the incorporation of market house companies in Pennsylvania challenged the system and hastened the deregulation of this public service. Some cities demolished their marketing facilities or loosened restrictions on the food trades in an effort to deal with the privatization movement. However, several decades of experience with dispersed retailers, suburban slaughterhouses, and food transported by railroad proved disastrous to the public welfare, prompting cities and federal agencies to reclaim this urban civic space.

A fascinating overview of the lands and peoples of the United States and Canada, both past and present.Based on decades of research and written in clear, concise prose by one of the foremost geographers in North America, John C. Hudson's Across This Land is a comprehensive regional geography of the North American continent. Dividing the terrain into ten regions, which are then subdivided into twenty-seven smaller areas, Hudson's brisk narrative reveals the dynamic processes of each area's distinctive place-specific characteristics. Focusing on how human activities have shaped and have been shaped by the natural environment, Hudson considers physical, political, and historical geography. He also highlights related topics, including resource exploitation, economic development, and population change. Praised in its first edition as a readable and reliable interpretation of United States and Canadian geography, the revised Across This Land retains these strengths while adding substantial new material. Incorporating the latest available population and economic data, this thoroughly updated edition includes• reflections on new developments, such as resource schemes, Native governments in Atlantic Canada, and the role of climate change in the Arctic• a new section focused on the US Pacific insular territories west of Hawaii• evolving views of oil and gas production resulting from the introduction of hydraulic fracturing• revised text and maps involving agricultural production based on the 2017 Census of Agriculture• current place names• more than 130 photographsThe most extensive regional geography of the North American continent on the market, Hudson's Across This Land will continue as the standard text in geography courses dealing with Canada and the United States, as well as a popular reference work for scholars, students, and lay readers.

From the 18th-century, single room "mansions" of Delaware's Cypress Swamp district to the early 20th-century suburban housing around Philadelphia and Wilmington, from the gable-fronted barns of Virginia's Eastern Shore to the stone bank barns of south-eastern Pennsylvania, the architectural landscape of the mid-Atlantic region is rich and varied. In this field guide to the region's vernacular architecture, the authors view the mid-Atlantic region as a crossroads, where diverse building traditions have overlapped and influenced one and other for generations. The book explores the character of pre-1940 domestic and agricultural buildings in the towns and rural landscapes of southern New Jersey, Delaware, and coastal Maryland and Virginia. Appraoching their subject "archaeologically", the authors examine the "layers" of a structure's past to show how it changed over time and to reveal telling details about its occupants and the community in which they lived. The text provides architectual information as well as a working methodology for anyone who wants to explore and learn from traditional architecture and landscapes.The author's conclude that, as a vital cultural artifact, the distinctive architecture of the mid-Atlantic needs to be identified, recorded, and preserved.

World War II brought staggering changes to Dallas, Texas, as the city became a banking, commercial, and transportation center. The growing population strained available housing and put particular pressure on already overcrowded African-American neighborhoods. In Hamilton Park,William Wilson brings to light the stirring history of how both black and white citizens of Dallas worked together to create a thriving African-American planned community. Through interviews with pioneer residents and development planners coupled with research into the politics and problems they faced, Wilson traces the evolution of Hamilton Park from idealistic plans to true residential community. Placing this movement by Dallas blacks to obtain decent housing into the broader context of rapid postwar growth in the United States, Wilson examines how the assault on housing segregation waged by Dallas's black leadership matched the struggles of African-American leaders throughout the nation. He outlines the dilemma of identifying and procuring a suitable tract of land-one large enough, near African-American employment, and far enough from whites' neighborhoods that the development would not be opposed.He also examines individual struggles, from procuring utilities in the new neighborhood to arranging financing for new home buyers to choosing street names. Beyond these practical issues faced by early planners and pioneer residents, Wilson meticulously describes and evaluates the evolution of the community of Hamilton Park. He looks at the roles that neighborhood covenants-and residents' challenges to them-as well as civic organizations, garden clubs, public schools, and churches played in defining and redefining a dominant culture in Hamilton Park. His short biographical sketches of residents and of white elites add a compelling personal narrative to traditional landscape history and the history of planning. Hamilton Park will interest scholars of Texas history, urban studies, environmental studies, American studies, African-American studies, and sociology. Published in cooperation with the Center for American Places, Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Invisible New York is a photographic exploration of the hidden and often abandoned infrastructure of New York City. Inaccessible and unknown to most New Yorkers, the structures and machinery captured in Stanley Greenberg's luminous black-and-white prints deliver the essential services that a city's inhabitants usually take for granted. Many of these vast and imposing facilities have in recent decades been neglected or fallen into disuse. Others remain intact and in continuous use. Greenberg's dark and poetic images document how a city works, its technological evolution since the 19th century, and the toll that deterioration and years of deferred maintenance can take on the soul of a city. With a 4 x 5 monorail view camera and using only available light, Greenberg photographed sites in all five of New York's boroughs, many now permanently sealed in the interests of national security.Among the invisible places recorded are the massive valve chambers in the water tunnels 300 feet underground and other features of New York's extraordinary water system; the anchorages of the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Verrazano Narrows bridges; the dry dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; the derelict power station at Floyd Bennett Field; the elegant, turn-of-the-century steam turbine in Brooklyn's Pratt Institute; crumbling ruins on Ellis Island and Roosevelt Island; hidden sections of Grand Central Station and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine; the West Side rail yards in Manhattan; the secret Nike missile silos in the Bronx; one of the last remaining manual switch rooms in the New York subway system; the faded grandeur of the City Hall Subway Station, its bronze chandeliers and leaded glass ceilings still largely undamaged; and the vast Brooklyn Army Terminal, once the world's largest warehouse. Greenberg's photographs of this hidden city uncover long-forgotten engineering feats, magnificent examples of skilled craftsmanship, and fascinating clues about New York's industrial past, as well as reveal the increasing aesthetic apathy of today's builders.His images chronicle both the beauty and the banal necessity of this rich legacy, threatened by public ignorance and bureaucratic indifference. Invisible New York offers a unique perspective on one of the world's great cities and alerts us to the hidden sites and essential facilities found in all cities which are slowly and secretly decaying or disappearing.