Michael P. Conzen's Books

Surface and Depth

The Quest for Legibility in American Culture

By: Michael T. Gilmore

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Surface and Depth

The Quest for Legibility in American Culture

By: Michael T. Gilmore

The idea of a common American culture has been in retreat for a generation or more. Arguments emphasizing difference have discredited the grand synthetic studies that marginalized groups and perspectives at odds with the master narrative. Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture is a fresh attempt to revitalize an interpretive overview. It seeks to recuperate a central tradition while simultaneously recognizing how much that tradition has occluded. The book focuses on the American zeal for knowing or making accessible. This compulsion has a long history stretching back to Puritan anti-monasticism; to the organization of the landscape into clearly delineated gridwork sections; and to the creation of a national government predicted on popular vigilance. It can be observed in the unmatched American receptivity to the motion pictures and to psychoanalysis: the first a technology of visual surfaces, the second a technique for plumbing interior depths. Popular literature, especially the Western and the detective story, has reinscribed the cult of legibility. Each genre features a plot that drives through impediments to transparent resolution. Elite literature has adopted a more contradictory stance. The landmarks of the American canon typically embark on journeys of discovery while simultaneously renouncing the possibility of full disclosure (as in Ahab's doomed pursuit of the "inscrutable" white whale). The notorious modernism of American literature, its precocious attraction to obscurity and multiple meaning, evolved as an effort to block the intrusions of a hegemonic cultural dynamic. The American passion for knowability has been prolific of casualties. Acts of making visible have always entailed the erasure and invisibility of racial minorities. American society has also routinely trespassed on customary areas of reserve. A nation intolerant of the hidden paradoxically pioneered the legal concept of privacy, but it did so in reaction to its own invasive excesses.

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Page Count

234

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

019803587X

ISBN 13

9780198035879

After a California Earthquake

Attitude and Behavior Change

By: Risa Palm,Michael E. Hodgson

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After a California Earthquake

Attitude and Behavior Change

By: Risa Palm,Michael E. Hodgson

Shortly before the Loma Prieta earthquake devastated areas of Northern California in 1989, Risa Palm and her associates had surveyed 2,500 homeowners in the area about their perception of risk from earthquakes. After the quake they surveyed the homeowners again and found that their perception of risk had increased but that most respondents were fatalistic and continued to ignore self-protective measures; those who personally experienced damage were more likely to buy insurance. A rare opportunity to analyze behavior change directly before and after a natural disaster, this survey has implications for policy makers, insurance officials, and those concerned with risk management.

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Page Count

150

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226644995

ISBN 13

9780226644998

Eden on the Charles

The Making of Boston

By: Michael Rawson

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Eden on the Charles

The Making of Boston

By: Michael Rawson

Drinking a glass of tap water, strolling in a park, hopping a train for the suburbs: some aspects of city life are so familiar that we don’t think twice about them. But such simple actions are structured by complex relationships with our natural world. The contours of these relationships—social, cultural, political, economic, and legal—were established during America’s first great period of urbanization in the nineteenth century, and Boston, one of the earliest cities in America, often led the nation in designing them. A richly textured cultural and social history of the development of nineteenth-century Boston, this book provides a new environmental perspective on the creation of America’s first cities. Eden on the Charles explores how Bostonians channeled country lakes through miles of pipeline to provide clean water; dredged the ocean to deepen the harbor; filled tidal flats and covered the peninsula with houses, shops, and factories; and created a metropolitan system of parks and greenways, facilitating the conversion of fields into suburbs. The book shows how, in Boston, different class and ethnic groups brought rival ideas of nature and competing visions of a “city upon a hill” to the process of urbanization—and were forced to conform their goals to the realities of Boston’s distinctive natural setting. The outcomes of their battles for control over the city’s development were ultimately recorded in the very fabric of Boston itself. In Boston’s history, we find the seeds of the environmental relationships that—for better or worse—have defined urban America to this day.

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Page Count

382

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674266579

ISBN 13

9780674266575

Creating Chicago's North Shore

A Suburban History

By: Michael H. Ebner

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Creating Chicago's North Shore

A Suburban History

By: Michael H. Ebner

They are the suburban jewels that crown one of the world's premier cities. Evanston, Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Glencoe, Highland Park, Lake Forest, Lake Bluff: together, they comprise the North Shore of Chicago, a social registry of eight communities that serve as a genteel enclave of affluence, culture, and high society. Historian Michael H. Ebner explains the origins and evolution of the North Shore as a distinctive region. At the same time, he tells the paradoxical story of how these suburbs, with their common heritage, mutual values, and shared aspirations, still preserve their distinctly separate identities. Embedded in this history are important lessons about the uneasy development of the American metropolis.

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Page Count

380

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226182053

ISBN 13

9780226182056

The Automobile in American History and Culture

A Reference Guide

By: Michael L. Berger

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The Automobile in American History and Culture

A Reference Guide

By: Michael L. Berger

This comprehensive reference guide reviews the literature concerning the impact of the automobile on American social, economic, and political history. Covering the complete history of the automobile to date, twelve chapters of bibliographic essays describe the important works in a series of related topics and provide broad thematic contexts. This work includes general histories of the automobile, the industry it spawned and labor-management relations, as well as biographies of famous automotive personalities. Focusing on books concerned with various social aspects, chapters discuss such issues as the car's influence on family life, youth, women, the elderly, minorities, literature, and leisure and recreation. Berger has also included works that investigate the government's role in aiding and regulating the automobile, with sections on roads and highways, safety, and pollution. The guide concludes with an overview of reference works and periodicals in the field and a description of selected research collections. The Automobile in American History and Culture provides a resource with which to examine the entire field and its structure. Popular culture scholars and enthusiasts involved in automotive research will appreciate the extensive scope of this reference. Cross-referenced throughout, it will serve as a valuable research tool.

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Page Count

516

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0313016062

ISBN 13

9780313016066

City of Wood

San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry

By: James Michael Buckley

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City of Wood

San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry

By: James Michael Buckley

In City of Wood, architectural historian James Buckley explores San Francisco's rapid urban development as a product of the physical and economic transformation of the natural environment of the American West. San Francisco is best known as a product of the gold and silver that were mined from California's mountains and streams, but as Buckley shows, the city's growth was in fact fueled by a wide range of natural resources that could be converted into marketable commodities. City of Wood investigates the architecture of a typical Western resource industry--redwood lumber--to determine how the exploitation of California's natural resources shaped the built environment of both San Francisco and its broader hinterland"--

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Page Count

367

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1477330240

ISBN 13

9781477330241

Regional Geography of the United States and Canada

Fifth Edition

By: Daniel R. Montello,Michael T. Applegarth,Tom L. McKnight

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Regional Geography of the United States and Canada

Fifth Edition

By: Daniel R. Montello,Michael T. Applegarth,Tom L. McKnight

The fifth and thoroughly revised edition of Regional Geography of the United States and Canada provides a rich and comprehensive overview of both the physical and human geography of these two countries, and in the true spirit of geography, the interactions and interrelations of the physical and human. Following long traditions of the discipline of geography, this text incorporates words, maps, drawings, photographs, and numerical data to present its information in an engaging way. After covering beneficial precursor topics—such as the basics of physical and human geography—the text explores fifteen regions of the US and Canada. The authors observe and describe our planet’s geography in thorough and accessible detail, while laying out the spatial basics of the location, shape, and size of the different regions, and summarizes their most distinctive thematic qualities. Physical topics covered include the region’s topography and landforms, soils, climate, hydrography, vegetation, and wildlife. The human topics include the region’s population; the ethnicities and settlement history of its people; economic activities, including agriculture, forestry, mining, fishing, manufacturing, and service industries; cities; and transportation. In-depth essays expand on specific topics of interest and importance, while outlook sections prognosticate about the near future of the regions. Each chapter concludes with a bibliography of books, articles, and reports that provide further sources for the interested reader.

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Page Count

602

Publisher

Waveland Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1478647124

ISBN 13

9781478647126

Deforesting the Earth

From Prehistory to Global Crisis

By: Michael Williams

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Deforesting the Earth

From Prehistory to Global Crisis

By: Michael Williams

Since humans first appeared on the earth, we've been cutting down trees for fuel and shelter. Indeed, the thinning, changing, and wholesale clearing of forests are among the most important ways humans have transformed the global environment. With the onset of industrialization and colonization the process has accelerated, as agriculture, metal smelting, trade, war, territorial expansion, and even cultural aversion to forests have all taken their toll. Michael Williams surveys ten thousand years of history to trace how, why, and when human-induced deforestation has shaped economies, societies, and landscapes around the world. Beginning with the return of the forests to Europe, North America, and the tropics after the Ice Ages, Williams traces the impact of human-set fires for gathering and hunting, land clearing for agriculture, and other activities from the Paleolithic through the classical world and the Middle Ages. He then continues the story from the 1500s to the early 1900s, focusing on forest clearing both within Europe and by European imperialists and industrialists abroad, in such places as the New World and India, China, Japan, and Latin America. Finally, he covers the present-day and alarming escalation of deforestation, with the ever-increasing human population placing a possibly unsupportable burden on the world's forests. Accessible and nonsensationalist, Deforesting the Earth provides the historical and geographical background we need for a deeper understanding of deforestation's tremendous impact on the environment and the people who inhabit it.

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Page Count

716

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226899268

ISBN 13

9780226899268

Township

Diffusion and Persistence of Grassroots Government in Illinois, 1850-2000

By: Michael D. Sublett

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Township

Diffusion and Persistence of Grassroots Government in Illinois, 1850-2000

By: Michael D. Sublett

The contemporary method of township government arrived in Illinois in the middle of the nineteenth century. Replacing the commission method of county government, which Illinois had employed since statehood in 1818, the township innovation spread south and westward across Illinois, almost completely ousting the county commissioners. Today, the commission format survives only in seventeen peripheral and largely rural Illinois counties. This book asserts that townships have persisted partly because they offer vital services at a reasonable cost to taxpayers, but also because of a vigorous defense of the method made by township officials with political connections in the Illinois general assembly. Discussing the successes and failures of attempts by abolition-minded citizens to eliminate all or individual townships in various counties, Township focuses on the spatial diffusion, periodic threats to, and determined persistence of the township system.

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Page Count

420

Publisher

Peter Lang

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820470554

ISBN 13

9780820470559

1889

The Boomer Movement, the Land Run, and Early Oklahoma City

By: Michael J. Hightower

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1889

The Boomer Movement, the Land Run, and Early Oklahoma City

By: Michael J. Hightower

After immigrants flooded into central Oklahoma during the land rush of 1889 and the future capital of Oklahoma City sprang up “within a fortnight,” the city’s residents adopted the slogan “born grown” to describe their new home. But the territory’s creation was never so simple or straightforward. The real story, steeped in the politics of the Gilded Age, unfolds in 1889, Michael J. Hightower’s revealing look at a moment in history that, in all its turmoil and complexity, transcends the myth. Hightower frames his story within the larger history of Old Oklahoma, beginning in Indian Territory, where displaced tribes and freedmen, wealthy cattlemen, and prospective homesteaders became embroiled in disputes over public land and federal government policies. Against this fraught background, 1889 travels back and forth between Washington, D.C., and the Oklahoma frontier to describe the politics of settlement, public land use, and the first stirrings of urban development. Drawing on eyewitness accounts, Hightower captures the drama of the Boomer incursions and the Run of ’89, as well as the nascent urbanization of the townsite that would become Oklahoma City. All of these events played out in a political vacuum until Congress officially created Oklahoma Territory in the Organic Act of May 1890. The story of central Oklahoma is profoundly American, showing the region to have been a crucible for melding competing national interests and visions of the future. Boomers, businessmen, cattlemen, soldiers, politicians, pundits, and African and Native Americans squared off—sometimes peacefully, often not—in disagreements over public lands that would resonate in western history long after 1889.

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Page Count

345

Publisher

University of Oklahoma Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0806162341

ISBN 13

9780806162348

Book's by Michael P. Conzen

Surface and Depth

Surface and Depth

After a California Earthquake

After a California Earthquake

Eden on the Charles

Eden on the Charles

Creating Chicago's North Shore

Creating Chicago's North Shore

The Automobile in American History and Culture

The Automobile in American History and Culture

City of Wood

City of Wood

Regional Geography of the United States and Canada

Regional Geography of the United States and Canada

Deforesting the Earth

Deforesting the Earth

Township

Township

1889

1889

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