Landscapes of Promise is the first comprehensive environmental history of the early years of a state that has long been associated with environmental protection. Covering the period from early human habitation to the end of World War II, William Robbins shows that the reality of Oregon's environmental history involves far more than a discussion of timber cutting and land-use planning.
Robbins demonstrates that ecological change is not only a creation of modern industrial society. Native Americans altered their environment in a number of ways, including the planned annual...
Landscapes of Promise is the first comprehensive environmental history of the early years of a state that has long been associated with envi...
Throughout the history of the United States, the concepts of "land" and "the West" have fired the American imagination and fueled controversy. The essays in Land in the American West deal with complex, troublesome, and interrelated questions regarding land: Who owns it? Who has access to it? What happens when private rights infringe upon the public good, or when one ethnic group is pitted against another, or when there is a conflict between economic and environmental values? Many of these questions have deep historical roots. They all have special significance in the modern American...
Throughout the history of the United States, the concepts of "land" and "the West" have fired the American imagination and fueled controversy. The ...
Post-World War II Oregon was a place of optimism and growth, a spectacular natural region from ocean to high desert that seemingly provided opportunity in abundance. With the passing of time, however, Oregon's citizens -- rural and urban -- would find themselves entangled in issues that they had little experience in resolving. The same trees that provided income to timber corporations, small mill owners, loggers, and many small towns in Oregon, also provided a dramatic landscape and a home to creatures at risk. The rivers whose harnessing created power for industries that helped sustain...
Post-World War II Oregon was a place of optimism and growth, a spectacular natural region from ocean to high desert that seemingly provided opportu...
Blessed with vast expanses of virgin timber, a good harbor, and a San Francisco market for its lumber, the Coos Bay area once dubbed itself "a poor man's paradise." A new Prologue and Epilogue by the author bring this story of gyppo loggers, longshoremen, millwrights, and whistle punks into the twenty-first century, describing Coos Bay's transition from timber town to a retirement and tourist community, where the site of a former Weyerhaeuser complex is now home to the Coquille Indian Tribe's The Mill Casino.
Blessed with vast expanses of virgin timber, a good harbor, and a San Francisco market for its lumber, the Coos Bay area once dubbed itself "a poor...
Popular writers and historians alike have perpetuated the powerful myth of the rugged-individualist single-handedly transforming the American West. In reality, William Robbins counters, it was the Guggenheims and Goulds, the Harrimans and Hearsts, and the Morgans and Mellons who masterminded what the West was to become. Remove the romance, he shows, and a darker West emerges--a colonial-like region where "industrial statesmen," aided by eastern U.S. and European capital, manipulated investments in pursuit of private gain while controlling wage-earning cowboys and miners. Robbins argues...
Popular writers and historians alike have perpetuated the powerful myth of the rugged-individualist single-handedly transforming the American West. In...
Nothing is better for a person than to have an opportunity to do meaningful work," says Norman Best in this memoir detailing his forty-eight years as a blue-collarworker. During those years, he built and maintained highways and bridges in Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and Montana, and served stints as a machinist in the San Francisco shipyards and as business agent for Local 86 of the International Association of Machinists.
In A Celebration of Work he shows how the construction of rural roads, railroad bridges, and modern superhighways depended on the expertise of skilled workers who...
Nothing is better for a person than to have an opportunity to do meaningful work," says Norman Best in this memoir detailing his forty-eight years as ...
For years the logging industry and the rich timberlands of the East and West coasts have evoked images of Jigger Jones and Paul Bunyan, lusty lumbermen of folk history. Behind these myths, however, lie the realities of ruthless competition, heedless exploitation of forestlands, and massive overproduction that once threatened to destroy the lumber industry. William G. Robbins reveals a sharply revisionist view of the lumber industry in the first half of the twentieth century, a period of drastic growth and change. He offers a unique national perspective on the dominant figures in...
For years the logging industry and the rich timberlands of the East and West coasts have evoked images of Jigger Jones and Paul Bunyan, lusty lumberme...
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the greater Northwest was ablaze with change and seemingly obsessed with progress. The promotional literature of the time praising railroads, population increases, and the growing sophistication of urban living, however, ignored the reality of poverty and ethnic and gender discrimination. During the course of the next century, even with dramatic changes in the region, one constant remained inequality. With an emphasis on the region s political economy, its environmental history, and its cultural and social heritage, this lively and colorful...
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the greater Northwest was ablaze with change and seemingly obsessed with progress. The promotional literatu...
