Twenty years ago, Dan Flores' Caprock "Canyonlands" became one of the first books ever to treat the flat, arid landscape of the southern High Plains as a place of uncommon beauty and enduring spirit. Now a classic, "Caprock Canyonlands" has been favorably compared by readers to the work of such icons of nature and environmental writing as William Bartram, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Henry David Thoreau. Containing the author's stunning photography, a foreword by Puliczer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx, author of "Brokeback Mountain", an afterword by environmental historian Thomas R....

Most people would not consider north central Kansas' Waconda Lake to be extraordinary. The lake, completed in 1969 by the federal Bureau of Reclamation for flood control, irrigation, and water supply purposes, sits amid a region known--when it is thought of at all--for agriculture and, perhaps to a few, as the home of "The World's Largest Ball of Twine" (in nearby Cawker City).
Yet, to the native people living in this region in the centuries before Anglo incursion, this was a place of great spiritual power and mystic significance. Waconda Spring, now beneath the waters of the lake, was...

Water is essential to human life, as mythology, religion, and history alike have recognized. Its availability has been a key determinant in patterns of settlement and agriculture, but its crucial role in shaping the layout and economic development of cities has not always been recognized. This structuralist history, first published in French in 1983, traces sixteen centuries of hydrographic technological change and urban development in eighteen cities of northern France. Hydrographic systems were first developed around religious sites, which developed into cities, and during the late Roman...