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"Middle West -- Description and travel"
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Barnstorming the Prairies
To Midwesterners tucked into small towns or farms early in the twentieth century, the landscape of the American heartland reached the horizon-and then imagination had to provide what lay beyond. But when aviation took off and scenes of the Midwest were no longer earthbound, the Midwestern landscape was transformed and with it, Jason Weems suggests in this book, the very idea of the Midwest itself.
Barnstorming the Prairiesoffers a panoramic vista of the transformative nature and power of the aerial vision that remade the Midwest in the wake of the airplane. This new perspective from above enabled Americans to conceptualize the region as something other than isolated and unchanging, and to see it instead as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America's agrarian character with the more abstract forms of twentieth-century modernity. In the maps and aerial survey photography of the Midwest, as well as the painting, cinema, animation, and suburban landscapes that arose through flight, Weems also finds a different and provocative view of modernity in the making. In representations of the Midwest, from Grant Wood's iconic images to the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright to the design of greenbelt suburbs, Weems reveals aerial vision's fundamental contribution to regional identity-to Midwesternness as we understand it.
Reading comparatively across these images, Weems explores how the cognitive and perceptual practices of aerial vision helped to resymbolize the Midwestern landscape amid the technological change and social uncertainty of the early twentieth century.
eBook
Reorienting the East
Reorienting the Eastexplores the Islamic world as it was encountered, envisioned, and elaborated by Jewish travelers from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. The first comprehensive investigation of Jewish travel writing from this era, this study engages with questions raised by postcolonial studies and contributes to the debate over the nature and history of Orientalism as defined by Edward Said.
Examining two dozen Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic travel accounts from the mid-twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries, Martin Jacobs asks whether Jewish travelers shared Western perceptions of the Islamic world with their Christian counterparts. Most Jews who detailed their journeys during this period hailed from Christian lands and many sailed to the Eastern Mediterranean aboard Christian-owned vessels. Yet Jacobs finds that their descriptions of the Near East subvert or reorient a decidedly Christian vision of the region. The accounts from the crusader era, in particular, are often critical of the Christian church and present glowing portraits of Muslim-Jewish relations. By contrast, some of the later travelers discussed in the book express condescending attitudes toward Islam, Muslims, and Near Eastern Jews. Placing shifting perspectives on the Muslim world in their historical, social, and literary contexts, Jacobs interprets these texts as mirrors of changing Jewish self-perceptions. As he argues, the travel accounts echo the various ways in which premodern Jews negotiated their mingled identities, which were neither exclusively Western nor entirely Eastern.
eBook
Mutual Othering
For the first time, readings of Moroccan travel writing in Arabic
are juxtaposed with French and British writing about Morocco in a
critical exploration of nineteenth-century concepts of modernity.
Ahmed Idrissi Alami investigates the complex dynamics concerning
colonial expansion, military conflict, and societal values.
Mutual Othering sets out to rethink generally accepted
concepts of European modernity by critically examining its
production and contestation within a subaltern context in which the
native other-in this case, religious scholars or imams
accompanying political missions to Paris and London-presents
aspects of European culture to elite members of the Moroccan
imperial court. This work also connects the arguments of these
texts to the rethinking of tradition and modernity, the rhetoric of
reform, democracy and the Arab state, and the compatibility of
Islam with the West and secular values in the post-9/11 world. The
inclusion of citations in the original French and Arabic, alongside
English translations, allows a range of readers to enjoy this
critical addition to the fields of literature, travel writing,
North African studies, history, international relations, and
philosophy, as well as cultural and religious studies.
eBook
Every Traveller Needs a Compass
A varied and charming collection of 17 papers that bring something new about the people from many countries and backgrounds who traveled to, from and within Egypt and the Near East, either singly or as a group, and explored, observed and recorded, or stayed for a short period of time to improve their health or simply to enjoy the experience. While some travelers kept a diary or journal that has survived until today, others did not. Their travels have to be extracted from the wide range of manuscript sources that are thankfully retained in libraries and archives, or which still remain with their descendants. Sometimes, the name of a traveler is only contained in a few words within a single piece of correspondence or journal entry, yet from such small beginnings and through detective work to link the chance meetings between travelers with a location, or news of a shared event, it is often possible to chart part of a traveler’s journey and bring to life a person who has long been forgotten. These minor characters and their travails often bring a new perspective to well-known places and events.
eBook
Imagining the forest
Forests have always been more than just their trees. The forests in Michigan (and similar forests in other Great Lakes states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota) played a role in the American cultural imagination from the beginnings of European settlement in the early nineteenth century to the present. Our relationships with those forests have been shaped by the cultural attitudes of the times, and people have invested in them both moral and spiritual meanings.Author John Knott draws upon such works as Simon Schama'sLandscape and Memoryand Robert Pogue Harrison'sForests: The Shadow of Civilizationin exploring ways in which ourrelationships with forests have been shaped, using Michigan---its history of settlement, popular literature, and forest management controversies---as an exemplary case. Knott looks at such well-known figures as William Bradford, James Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Teddy Roosevelt; Ojibwa conceptions of the forest and natural world (including how Longfellow mythologized them); early explorer accounts; and contemporary literature set in the Upper Peninsula, including Jim Harrison'sTrue Northand Philip Caputo'sIndian Country.Two competing metaphors evolved over time, Knott shows: the forest as howling wilderness, impeding the progress of civilization and in need of subjugation, and the forest as temple or cathedral, worthy of reverence and protection.Imagining the Forestshows the origin and development of both.
eBook
Prairie
North America's grasslands once stretched from southern Canada to northern Mexico, and across this considerable space different prairie types evolved to express the sum of their particular longitude and latitude, soils, landforms, and aspect. This prairie guide is your roadmap to what remains of this varied and majestic landscape.
Suzanne Winckler's goal is to encourage travelers to get off the highways, out of their cars, and onto North America's last remaining prairies. She makes this adventure as easy as possible by providing exact driving directions to the more than three hundred sites in her guide. She also includes information about size, management, phone numbers, and outstanding characteristics for every prairie site and provides readers with a thorough list of recommended readings and Web sites.
The scope of the guide is impressive. It encompasses prairies found within national grasslands, parks, forests, recreation areas, wildlife refuges, state parks, preserves, and natural areas and on numerous working ranches in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. A series of maps locate the prairies both geographically and by name.
From \"the largest restoration project within the historic range of tallgrass prairie\" at Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa to Big Bend National Park in Texas, where \"the Chisos Mountains, completely surrounded by the park, rise up majestically from the Chihuahuan Desert floor,\" Winckler celebrates the dramatic expanses of untouched prairie, the crown jewels of prairie reconstruction and restoration, and the neglected remnants that deserve to be treasured.
eBook