Rivers of Empire - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Rivers of Empire write by Donald Worster. This book was released on 1992. Rivers of Empire available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The American West, blessed with an abundance of earth and sky but cursed with a scarcity of life's most fundamental need, has long dreamed of harnessing all its rivers to produce unlimited wealth and power. In Rivers of Empire, award-winning historian Donald Worster tells the story of this dream and its outcome. He shows how, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Mormons were the first attempting to make that dream a reality, damming and diverting rivers to irrigate their land. He follows this intriguing history through the 1930s, when the federal government built hundreds of dams on every major western river, thereby laying the foundation for the cities and farms, money and power of today's West. Yet while these cities have become paradigms of modern American urban centers, and the farms successful high-tech enterprises, Worster reminds us that the costs have been extremely high. Along with the wealth has come massive ecological damage, a redistribution of power to bureaucratic and economic elites, and a class conflict still on the upswing. As a result, the future of this "hydraulic West" is increasingly uncertain, as water continues to be a scarce resource, inadequate to the demand, and declining in quality.
Reseña de "Rivers of Empire . Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West" de Donald Worster
Reseña de "Rivers of Empire . Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West" de Donald Worster - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Reseña de "Rivers of Empire . Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West" de Donald Worster write by Jacinta Palerm Viqueira. This book was released on 2004. Reseña de "Rivers of Empire . Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West" de Donald Worster available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
Rivers of Gold
Rivers of Gold - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Rivers of Gold write by Hugh Thomas. This book was released on 2013-11-20. Rivers of Gold available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. From one of the greatest historians of the Spanish world, here is a fresh and fascinating account of Spain’s early conquests in the Americas. Hugh Thomas’s magisterial narrative of Spain in the New World has all the characteristics of great historical literature: amazing discoveries, ambition, greed, religious fanaticism, court intrigue, and a battle for the soul of humankind. Hugh Thomas shows Spain at the dawn of the sixteenth century as a world power on the brink of greatness. Her monarchs, Fernando and Isabel, had retaken Granada from Islam, thereby completing restoration of the entire Iberian peninsula to Catholic rule. Flush with success, they agreed to sponsor an obscure Genoese sailor’s plan to sail west to the Indies, where, legend purported, gold and spices flowed as if they were rivers. For Spain and for the world, this decision to send Christopher Columbus west was epochal—the dividing line between the medieval and the modern. Spain’s colonial adventures began inauspiciously: Columbus’s meagerly funded expedition cost less than a Spanish princess’s recent wedding. In spite of its small scale, it was a mission of astounding scope: to claim for Spain all the wealth of the Indies. The gold alone, thought Columbus, would fund a grand Crusade to reunite Christendom with its holy city, Jerusalem. The lofty aspirations of the first explorers died hard, as the pursuit of wealth and glory competed with the pursuit of pious impulses. The adventurers from Spain were also, of course, curious about geographical mysteries, and they had a remarkable loyalty to their country. But rather than bridging earth and heaven, Spain’s many conquests bore a bitter fruit. In their search for gold, Spaniards enslaved “Indians” from the Bahamas and the South American mainland. The eloquent protests of Bartolomé de las Casas, here much discussed, began almost immediately. Columbus and other Spanish explorers—Cortés, Ponce de León, and Magellan among them—created an empire for Spain of unsurpassed size and scope. But the door was soon open for other powers, enemies of Spain, to stake their claims. Great men and women dominate these pages: cardinals and bishops, priors and sailors, landowners and warriors, princes and priests, noblemen and their determined wives. Rivers of Gold is a great story brilliantly told. More significant, it is an engrossing history with many profound—often disturbing—echoes in the present.
Under Western Skies
Under Western Skies - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Under Western Skies write by Donald Worster. This book was released on 1992. Under Western Skies available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. ns explore our environmental history, uncover the role of nature and the land in the western past, and examine the West as the world's first multicultural society.
Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome
Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome write by Brian Campbell. This book was released on 2012-08-15. Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Figuring in myth, religion, law, the military, commerce, and transportation, rivers were at the heart of Rome's increasing exploitation of the environment of the Mediterranean world. In Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome, Brian Campbell explores the role and influence of rivers and their surrounding landscape on the society and culture of the Roman Empire. Examining artistic representations of rivers, related architecture, and the work of ancient geographers and topographers, as well as writers who describe rivers, Campbell reveals how Romans defined the geographical areas they conquered and how geography and natural surroundings related to their society and activities. In addition, he illuminates the prominence and value of rivers in the control and expansion of the Roman Empire--through the legal regulation of riverine activities, the exploitation of rivers in military tactics, and the use of rivers as routes of communication and movement. Campbell shows how a technological understanding of--and even mastery over--the forces of the river helped Rome rise to its central place in the ancient world.
