Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.85 (819 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0195086716 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-03-23 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Under Western Skies is insightful, incisive, useful, and necessary. Under Western Skies is a major contribution by a major scholar."--William Cronon, Yale University"Donald Worster's honesty, critical intelligence, and talent for writing will prove to be three of the American West's most valuable resources in the late twentieth century. He writes with the passion of a native son and offers perspectives that are as profound as they are provocative on the major environmental questions that have shaped the region's past and will define its future. "A thoughtful, sensible collection.Worster reminds us that unlimited freedom and power are dangerous goals; both must be limited if the West's delicately balanced ecology is to endure."--Publishers Weekly"Donald Worster is the dean of American environmental historians and one of our leading interpreters of the American West. These essays never fail to meet Worster's previously established high standards for rese
Donald Worster is Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Dust Bowl, Rivers of Empire, and other works of history.
For decades, the story of the American West has been told as a glorious tale of conquest and rugged individualism--the triumph of progress. government. He discusses the cowboy in terms of the new ecology that arose from livestock ranching--the endless miles of fences, the changes in the environment wrought by extensive grazing, certain species of animals almost wiped out because they were considered a danger to sheep and cattle. For example, he takes a hard look at the struggle by the Lakota to regain ownership of the Black Hills, examining not only the legal history of treaties and court cases but also the importance of the Black Hills in Indian religion and the way they have been m
A new history of the West A compelling look at the attitudes we bring, as Westerners, to the treatment of land, history and people. Worster challenges us "to look, as it were, through the eyes of the rest of nature," 'to try to examine human behavior from a nonhuman perspective." I valued his essays as I read them a decade ago, and find them compelling still.. Provocative essays arguing that the history of the American West is the history of people interacting with nature Donald Worster, a professor at the University of Kansas, is one of the leading historians of the American West. UNDER WESTERN SKIES collects eleven essays by Worster, written between 1982 and 1991, that reflect his theory that all history, to some degree, is "environmental history" -- i.e., the story of people interacting with nature.To my mind, three of the essays stand out. The first is "Hydraulic Society in California". One of Worster's theses is that what most marks the history of the American West is the scarcity of water. Some ancient peoples -- for example, those who settled the valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Nile -- fa