Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West
10 best books like Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Donald Worster): When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, Dam Nation: How Water Shaped the West and Will Determine Its Future, Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
| Author | Rámon A. Gutiérrez |
| ISBN | 0804718326 |
Ramon Gutierrez states that his intent is to give voice to the Pueblo Indians who inhabited the land that is now New Mexico. He builds his social history around the institution of marriage and argues that it was through marriage and sexuality that the people who encountered each other in New Mexico beginning...
| Author | William Cronon |
| ISBN | 0393308731 |
In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America's most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens a new window onto our...
| Author | Thomas G. Andrews |
| ISBN | 0674031016 |
On a spring morning in 1914, in the stark foothills of southern Colorado, members of the United Mine Workers of America clashed with guards employed by the Rockefeller family, and a state militia beholden to Colorado’s industrial barons. When the dust settled, nineteen men, women, and children...
| Author | Steven Solomon |
| ISBN | 0060548304 |
“I read this wide-ranging and thoughtful book while sitting on the banks of the Ganges near Varanasi—it's a river already badly polluted, and now threatened by the melting of the loss of the glaciers at its source to global warming. Four hundred million people depend on it, and there's no backup...
Dam Nation: How Water Shaped the West and Will Determine Its Future
| Author | Stephen Grace |
| ISBN | 0762770651 |
Overall Assessment: Return To Sender
Commentary:
Interestingly enough, Dam Nation is quite readable. So why the Return to Sender assessment? Well there are two essential reasons.
The first reason is that Dam Nation provides no real new insights or information over what Marc...
| Author | Jeffrey A. Lockwood |
| ISBN | 0465041671 |
In 1876, the U.S. Congress declared the locust “the single greatest impediment to the settlement of the country between Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains.” Throughout the nineteenth century, swarms of locusts regularly swept across the American continent, turning noon into dusk, devastating...
The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States
| Author | Mark Fiege |
| ISBN | 0295991674 |
In the dramatic narratives that comprise The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege reframes the canonical account of American history based on the simple but radical premise that nothing in the nation's past can be considered apart from the natural circumstances in which it occurred. Revisiting historical...
| Author | Richard White |
| ISBN | 0809015838 |
The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics.
In this pioneering study, White explores the relationship between the natural history of the Columbia River and the human history of the Pacific Northwest...
| Author | Shepard Krech III |
| ISBN | 0393321002 |
The idea of the Native American living in perfect harmony with nature is one of the most cherished contemporary myths. But how truthful is this larger-than-life image? According to anthropologist Shepard Krech, the first humans in North America demonstrated all of the intelligence, self-interest,...
| Author | Henry Nash Smith |
| ISBN | 0674939557 |
The spell that the West has always exercised on the American people had its most intense impact on American literature and thought during the nineteenth century. Henry Nash Smith shows, with vast comprehension, the influence of the nineteenth-century West in all its variety and strength, in special...
| Author | Alfred W. Crosby |
| ISBN | 0521546184 |
People of European descent form the bulk of the population in most of the temperate zones of the world--North America, Australia and New Zealand. The military successes of European imperialism are easy to explain because in many cases they were achieved by using firearms against spears. Alfred Crosby,...
| Author | Patricia Nelson Limerick |
| ISBN | 0393304973 |
The 'settling' of the American West has been perceived throughout the world as a series of quaint, violent, and romantic adventures–most with happy endings–and a process that came to an end with the 'closing' of the frontier in the 1890s.
But in fact, Patricia Nelson Limerick argues,...
On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape
| Author | Jared Farmer |
| ISBN | 0674027671 |
Shrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no "Indian" legend graced the mount until Mormon settlers conjured it--once they had displaced the local Indians, the Utes, from their actual landmark, Utah Lake. "On Zion's Mount" tells the story...
| Author | Karl Jacoby |
| ISBN | 0520239091 |
Crimes against Nature reveals the hidden history behind three of the nation's first parklands: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Focusing on conservation's impact on local inhabitants, Karl Jacoby traces the effect of criminalizing such traditional practices as hunting, fishing,...
| Author | Elliott West |
| ISBN | 0700610294 |
Deftly retracing a pivotal chapter in one of America's most dramatic stories, Elliott West chronicles the struggles, triumphs, and defeats of both Indians and whites as they pursued their clashing dreams of greatness in the heart of the continent.
The Contested Plains recounts the rise...
| Author | Susan Lee Johnson |
| ISBN | 0393320995 |
Historical insight is the alchemy that transforms the familiar story of the Gold Rush into something sparkling and new. The world of the Gold Rush that comes down to us through fiction and film—of unshaven men named Stumpy and Kentuck raising hell and panning for gold—is one of half-truths. In this...
| Author | Ned Blackhawk |
| ISBN | 0674022904 |
Ned Blackhawk’s Violence over the Land presents the history of the Great Basin Indians and their interactions with the Spanish, British, and American empires. Blackhawk responds in this book to many harmful myths about the conquest of the American West. Most importantly, he undermines the idea...
| Author | Edward Abbey |
| ISBN | 0452265649 |
You are about to visit some of the most exciting places on earth. Not the sort of excitement that makes morning headlines or the nightly news. Instead it is the excitement that comes from experiencing the natural world as it always has been and should be, and seeing human beings living in tune with its subtlest...
| Author | George J. Sanchez |
| ISBN | 0195096487 |
Twentieth-century Los Angeles has been the locus of one of the most profound and complex interactions between variant cultures in American history. Yet this study is among the first to examine the relationship between ethnicity and identity among the largest immigrant group to that city. By focusing...
