Fossil fuels don't simply impact our ability to commute to and from work. They condition our sensory lives, our erotic experiences, and our aesthetics; they structure what we assume to be normal and healthy; and they prop up a distinctly modern bargain with nature that allows populations and economies to grow wildly beyond the older and more clearly understood limits of the organic economy. Carbon Nation ranges across film and literary studies, ecology, politics, journalism, and art history to chart the course by which prehistoric carbon calories entered into the American...
Fossil fuels don't simply impact our ability to commute to and from work. They condition our sensory lives, our erotic experiences, and our aesthe...
Early in the twentieth century, the political humorist Will Rogers was arguably the most famous cowboy in America. And though most in his vast audience didn't know it, he was also the most famous Indian of his time. Those who know of Rogers's Cherokee heritage and upbringing tend to minimize its importance, or to imagine that Rogers himself did so--notwithstanding his avowal in interviews: "I'm a Cherokee and they're the finest Indians in the World." The truth is, throughout his adult life and his work the Oklahoma cowboy made much of his American Indian background. And in doing so, as Amy...
Early in the twentieth century, the political humorist Will Rogers was arguably the most famous cowboy in America. And though most in his vast audienc...
When Charles Lindbergh landed at LeBourget Airfield on May 21, 1927, his transatlantic flight symbolized the new era-not only in aviation but also in American culture. The 1920s proved to be a transitional decade for the United States, shifting the nation from a production-driven economy to a consumption-based one, with adventurous citizens breaking new ground even as many others continued clinging to an outmoded status quo. In his new book, Charles Shindo reveals how one year in particular encapsulated the complexity of this transformation in American culture. Shindo's absorbing look at...
When Charles Lindbergh landed at LeBourget Airfield on May 21, 1927, his transatlantic flight symbolized the new era-not only in aviation but also in ...
When prospector "Ed" Schieffelin set out from Fort Huachuca in 1877 in search of silver, skeptics told him all he'd find would be his own tombstone. What he did discover, of course, was one of the richest veins of silver in the West--a strike he wryly called Tombstone. Briefly a boomtown, in less than a decade Tombstone was fading into what, for the next half-century, looked more like a ghost town. How is it, Kara McCormack asks, that the resurrection of a few of the town's long-dead figures, caught forever in a thirty-second shoot-out, revived the moribund Tombstone--and turned it into what...
When prospector "Ed" Schieffelin set out from Fort Huachuca in 1877 in search of silver, skeptics told him all he'd find would be his own tombstone. W...
Ralph Emerson Twitchell Award They all came to Taos: Georgia O'Keefe, D. H. Lawrence, Carl Van Vechten, and other expatriates of New York City. Fleeing urban ugliness, they moved west between 1917 and 1929 to join the community that art patron Mabel Dodge created in her Taos salon and to draw inspiration from New Mexico's mountain desert and "primitive" peoples. As they settled, their quest for the primitive forged a link between "authentic" places and those who called them home. In this first book to consider Dodge and her visitors from a New Mexican perspective,...
Ralph Emerson Twitchell Award They all came to Taos: Georgia O'Keefe, D. H. Lawrence, Carl Van Vechten, and other expatriates of ...
Order, planning, and reason--in the depths of the Great Depression, with the nation teetering on the brink of collapse, this was what was needed. And this, Kenneth J. Bindas suggests, was what the ideas and ideals of modernity offered--a way to make sense of the chaos all around. In Modernity and the Great Depression, Bindas offers a new perspective on the provenance and power of modernist thought and practice in early twentieth-century America. In the midst of a terrible economic, social, and political crisis, modernism provided an alternative to the response of many traditional...
Order, planning, and reason--in the depths of the Great Depression, with the nation teetering on the brink of collapse, this was what was needed. And ...
Why - in the face of dire warnings, rising expense, and declining effectiveness - do we cling to our chemicals? Michelle Mart wondered. Her book, a cultural history of pesticide use in postwar America, offers an answer.
Why - in the face of dire warnings, rising expense, and declining effectiveness - do we cling to our chemicals? Michelle Mart wondered. Her book, a cu...
At the turn of the twentieth century, soybeans grew on so little of America's land that nobody bothered to track the total. By the year 2000, they covered upward of 70 million acres. How this little-known Chinese transplant turned into a ubiquitous component of American farming, culture, and cuisine is the story Matthew Roth tells in Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America.
At the turn of the twentieth century, soybeans grew on so little of America's land that nobody bothered to track the total. By the year 2000, they cov...