Creating a National Home

Creating a National Home PDF

Author: Patrick J. Kelly

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780674175600

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

For tens of thousands of Union veterans, Patrick Kelly argues, the Civil War never ended. Many Federal soldiers returned to civilian life battling the lifelong effects of combat wounds or wartime disease. Looking to the federal government for shelter and medical assistance, war-disabled Union veterans found help at the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. Established by Congress only weeks prior to the Confederate surrender, this network of federal institutions had assisted nearly 100,000 Union veterans by 1900. The National Home is the direct forebear of the Veterans Administration hospital system, today the largest provider of health care in the United States. Kelly places the origins of the National Home within the political culture of U.S. state formation. Creating a National Home examines Congress's decision to build a federal network of soldiers' homes. Kelly explores the efforts of the Home's managers to glean support for this institution by drawing upon the reassuring language of domesticity and "home." He also describes the manner in which the creators of the National Homes used building design, landscaping, and tourism to integrate each branch into the cultural and economic life of surrounding communities, and to promote a positive image of the U.S. state. Drawing upon several fields of American history--political, cultural, welfare, gender--Creating a National Home illustrates the lasting impact of war on U.S. state and society. The building of the National Home marks the permanent expansion of social benefits offered to citizen-veterans. The creation of the National Home at once defined an entitled group and prepared the way for the later expansion of both the welfare and the warfare states.

New Rooms for Old Houses

New Rooms for Old Houses PDF

Author: Frank Shirley

Publisher: Taunton Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1561588857

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Provides advice for adding additions to older homes, considering balance, transition, public versus private space, and materials; and including photographs, floor plans, and illustrations.

What Home Buyers Really Want, 2021 Edition

What Home Buyers Really Want, 2021 Edition PDF

Author: Rose Quint

Publisher: Builderbooks

Published: 2021-02-22

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9780867187830

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This resource is the latest in NAHB's long commitment to home buyer preferences research. It provides the most current and accurate information on buyer preferences so that you can deliver the home (and community) that today's buyers want and are willing to pay for. In this latest study, the analysis shows not only what the typical, average buyer wants in terms of features, layout, technology or community amenities, but also how those preferences differ based on demographic factors, such as age, race/ethnicity, geographic location, income or price point.

Customer Service for Home Builders

Customer Service for Home Builders PDF

Author: Carol Smith

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780867185621

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"Act as if you like your customer," says customer service expert Carol Smith. She shows builders and their management staffs how to make their home buyers' experience a positive one from initial contact through warranty service. Satisfied customers aren't born that way. They're created. A successful customer service program is one of the key elements in closing sales and getting referrals. You can increase sales by developing stronger customer service goals and organizing the activities necessary to reach them. Customer Service for Home Builders explores the fundamental customer service challenges that every service-oriented company faces: - staff - quality - documentation - internal communication - policies and procedures Carol Smith examines the sequence of a builder's relationship with home buyers and shows builders how to initiate service and successfully manage customers' experiences instead of just reacting to issues customers raise. In "Daily Operations: Working with Customers," she focuses on-- - expectations - preliminaries - customers and construction - new home delivery - warranty service The book --with its forms, checklists, documents, and resources guide- provides what you need to give your customer service program new life. It includes what you need to easily institute a comprehensive customer service program. Create satisfied customers every time with Carol Smith's industry-tested guidelines.

Bringing Nature Home

Bringing Nature Home PDF

Author: Douglas W. Tallamy

Publisher: Timber Press

Published: 2009-09-01

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1604691468

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

“With the twinned calamities of climate change and mass extinction weighing heavier and heavier on my nature-besotted soul, here were concrete, affordable actions that I could take, that anyone could take, to help our wild neighbors thrive in the built human environment. And it all starts with nothing more than a seed. Bringing Nature Home is a miracle: a book that summons butterflies." —Margaret Renkl, The Washington Post As development and habitat destruction accelerate, there are increasing pressures on wildlife populations. In his groundbreaking book Bringing Nature Home, Douglas W. Tallamy reveals the unbreakable link between native plant species and native wildlife—native insects cannot, or will not, eat alien plants. When native plants disappear, the insects disappear, impoverishing the food source for birds and other animals. Luckily, there is an important and simple step we can all take to help reverse this alarming trend: everyone with access to a patch of earth can make a significant contribution toward sustaining biodiversity by simply choosing native plants. By acting on Douglas Tallamy's practical and achievable recommendations, we can all make a difference.

Veterans' Policies, Veterans' Politics

Veterans' Policies, Veterans' Politics PDF

Author: Stephen R Ortiz

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2012-11-04

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0813042542

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The study of military veterans and politics has been a growing topic of interest, but to date most research on the topic has remained isolated in specific, unconnected fields of inquiry. Veterans' Policies, Veterans' Politics is the first multidisciplinary, comprehensive examination of the American veteran experience. Stephen Ortiz has compiled some of the best work on the formation and impact of veterans' policies, the politics of veterans' issues, and veterans' political engagement over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States. By examining the U.S. government's treatment of veterans vis-à-vis such topics as health care, disability, race, the GI Bill, and combat exposure, the contributors reveal how debates regarding veterans' policies inevitably turn into larger political battles over citizenship and the role of the federal government. With the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq now the longest military operations in U.S. history and the numbers of veterans returning from overseas deployment higher than they've been in a generation, this is a timely and necessary book.

Missing Middle Housing

Missing Middle Housing PDF

Author: Daniel G. Parolek

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1642830542

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Today, there is a tremendous mismatch between the available housing stock in the US and the housing options that people want and need. The post-WWII, auto-centric, single-family-development model no longer meets the needs of residents. Urban areas in the US are experiencing dramatically shifting household and cultural demographics and a growing demand for walkable urban living. Missing Middle Housing, a term coined by Daniel Parolek, describes the walkable, desirable, yet attainable housing that many people across the country are struggling to find. Missing Middle Housing types—such as duplexes, fourplexes, and bungalow courts—can provide options along a spectrum of affordability. In Missing Middle Housing, Parolek, an architect and urban designer, illustrates the power of these housing types to meet today’s diverse housing needs. With the benefit of beautiful full-color graphics, Parolek goes into depth about the benefits and qualities of Missing Middle Housing. The book demonstrates why more developers should be building Missing Middle Housing and defines the barriers cities need to remove to enable it to be built. Case studies of built projects show what is possible, from the Prairie Queen Neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska to the Sonoma Wildfire Cottages, in California. A chapter from urban scholar Arthur C. Nelson uses data analysis to highlight the urgency to deliver Missing Middle Housing. Parolek proves that density is too blunt of an instrument to effectively regulate for twenty-first-century housing needs. Complete industries and systems will have to be rethought to help deliver the broad range of Missing Middle Housing needed to meet the demand, as this book shows. Whether you are a planner, architect, builder, or city leader, Missing Middle Housing will help you think differently about how to address housing needs for today’s communities.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar PDF

Author: Gene Andrew Jarrett

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-06-07

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 0691150524

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

On the 150th anniversary of his birth, a definitive new biography of a pivotal figure in American literary history A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the “poet laureate of his race” hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a “caged bird” that sings. Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist. A prolific and successful poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and Broadway librettist, he was also a friend of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Orville and Wilbur Wright. But while audiences across the United States and Europe flocked to enjoy his literary readings, Dunbar privately bemoaned shouldering the burden of race and catering to minstrel stereotypes to earn fame and money. Inspired by his parents’ survival of slavery, but also agitated by a turbulent public marriage, beholden to influential benefactors, and helpless against his widely reported bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, he came to regard his racial notoriety as a curse as well as a blessing before dying at the age of only thirty-three. Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and generously illustrated, this biography presents the richest, most detailed, and most nuanced portrait yet of Dunbar and his work, transforming how we understand the astonishing life and times of a central figure in American literary history.