Devastation and Renewal

Devastation and Renewal PDF

Author: Joel A. Tarr

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre

Published: 2004-08-11

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0822972867

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Every city has an environmental story, perhaps none so dramatic as Pittsburgh's. Founded in a river valley blessed with enormous resources-three strong waterways, abundant forests, rich seams of coal-the city experienced a century of exploitation and industrialization that degraded and obscured the natural environment to a horrific degree. Pittsburgh came to be known as “the Smoky City,” or, as James Parton famously declared in 1866, “hell with the lid taken off.” Then came the storied Renaissance in the years following World War II, when the city's public and private elites, abetted by technological advances, came together to improve the air and renew the built environment. Equally dramatic was the sweeping deindustrialization of Pittsburgh in the 1980s, when the collapse of the steel industry brought down the smokestacks, leaving vast tracks of brownfields and riverfront. Today Pittsburgh faces unprecedented opportunities to reverse the environmental degradation of its history. In Devastation and Renewal, scholars of the urban environment post questions that both complicate and enrich this story. Working from deep archival research, they ask not only what happened to Pittsburgh's environment, but why. What forces-economic, political, and cultural-were at work? In exploring the disturbing history of pollution in Pittsburgh, they consider not only the sooty skies, but also the poisoned rivers and creeks, the mined hills, and scarred land. Who profited and who paid for such “progress”? How did the environment Pittsburghers live in come to be, and how it can be managed for the future? In a provocative concluding essay, Samuel P. Hays explores Pittsburgh's “environmental culture,” the attitudes and institutions that interpret a city's story and work to create change. Comparing Pittsburgh to other cities and regions, he exposes exaggerations of Pittsburgh's environmental achievement and challenges the community to make real progress for the future. A landmark contribution to the emerging field of urban environmental history, Devastation and Renewal will be important to all students of cities, of cultures, and of the natural world.

Preserving the World's Great Cities

Preserving the World's Great Cities PDF

Author: Anthony M. Tung

Publisher: Three Rivers Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13:

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Both epic and intimate, this is the story of the fight to save the world’s architectural and cultural heritage as it is embodied in the extraordinary buildings and urban spaces of the great cities of Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Never before have the complexities and dramas of urban preservation been as keenly documented as inPreserving the World’s Great Cities. In researching this important work, Anthony Tung traveled throughout the world to visit remarkable buildings and districts in China, Italy, Greece, the U.S., Japan, and elsewhere. Everywhere he found both the devastating legacy of war, economics, and indifference and the accomplishments of people who have worked and sometimes risked their lives to preserve and renew the most meaningful urban expressions of the human spirit. From Singapore’s blind rush to become the most modern city of the East to Warsaw’s poignant and heroic effort to resurrect itself from the Nazis’ systematic campaign of physical and cultural obliteration, from New York and Rome to Kyoto and Cairo, we see the city as an expression of the best and worst within us. This is essential reading for fans of Jane Jacobs and Witold Rybczynski and everyone who is concerned about urban preservation.

Isaiah (Understanding the Bible Commentary Series)

Isaiah (Understanding the Bible Commentary Series) PDF

Author: John Goldingay

Publisher: Baker Books

Published: 2012-07-01

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1441238379

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The book of Isaiah depicts for its readers what happens when Isaiah volunteers to become Yahweh's gofer--when he acts and speaks on Yahweh's behalf with Yahweh's authority. In this careful and insightful commentary on Isaiah, Goldingay unfolds the voices and messages of those prophetic actions and experiences. While doing this he points out that three attributes of Yahweh come into distinctive focus in Isaiah: Yahweh's majesty and authority, Yahweh's passion in anger and compassion, and Yahweh's insight and capacity to formulate a plan and put it into effect. Goldingay also examines the way Isaiah thinks about the people of God and the relationship between the vision of who they could be, the reality of who they were, the calamity of that contrast, and ultimately the promise Yahweh offers to them.

The Making of Urban America

The Making of Urban America PDF

Author: Raymond A. Mohl

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-10-03

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 1493083627

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The revised and updated third edition of The Making of Urban America includes seven new articles and a richly detailed historiographical essay that discusses the vast urban history literature added to the canon since the publication of the second edition. The authors’ extensively revised introductions and the fifteen reprinted articles trace urban development from the preindustrial city to the twentieth-century city. With emphasis on the social, economic, political, commercial, and cultural aspects of urban history, these essays illustrate the growth and change that created modern-day urban life. Dynamic topics such as technology, immigration and ethnicity, suburbanization, sunbelt cities, urban political history, and planning and housing are examined. The Making of Urban America is the only reader available that covers all of U.S. urban history and that also includes the most recent interpretive scholarship on the subject.

The Human Footprint

The Human Footprint PDF

Author: Anthony N. Penna

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-12-31

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1118912462

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The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History, Second Edition, presents a multidisciplinary global history of Earth from its origins to the present day. Provides a comprehensive, global, multidisciplinary history of the planet from its earliest origins to the present era Draws on the most recent research in geology, climatology, evolutionary biology, archaeology, anthropology, history, demography and the social and physical sciences Features the latest research findings on planetary history, human evolution, the green agricultural revolution, climate change, global warming and the nature of world/human history interdependencies Offers in-depth analyses of topics relating to human evolution, agriculture, population growth, urbanization, manufacturing, consumption, industrialization, and fossil fuel dependency.

Holy Scripture

Holy Scripture PDF

Author: John Webster

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-10-23

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 9780521538466

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May we speak, in the present age, of holy scripture? And what validation of that claim can be offered, robust enough to hold good for both religious practice and intellectual enquiry? John Webster argues that while any understanding of scripture must subject it to proper textual and historical interrogation, it is necessary at the same time to acknowledge the special character of scriptural writing. His 2003 book is an exercise in Christian dogmatics, a loud reaffirmation of the triune God at the heart of a scripture-based Christianity. But it is written with intellectual rigour by a theologian who understands the currents of modern secular thought and is able to work from them towards a constructive position on biblical authority. It will resonate with anyone who has wondered or worried about the grounds on which we may validly regard the Bible as God's direct communication with humanity.

Beyond Rust

Beyond Rust PDF

Author: Allen Dieterich-Ward

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0812247671

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Beyond Rust chronicles the rise, fall, and rebirth of metropolitan Pittsburgh, an industrial region that once formed the heart of the world's steel production and is now touted as a model for reviving other hard-hit cities of the Rust Belt. Writing in clear and engaging prose, historian and area native Allen Dieterich-Ward provides a new model for a truly metropolitan history that integrates the urban core with its regional hinterland of satellite cities, white-collar suburbs, mill towns, and rural mining areas. Pittsburgh reached its industrial heyday between 1880 and 1920, as vertically integrated industrial corporations forged a regional community in the mountainous Upper Ohio River Valley. Over subsequent decades, metropolitan population growth slowed as mining and manufacturing employment declined. Faced with economic and environmental disaster in the 1930s, Pittsburgh's business elite and political leaders developed an ambitious program of pollution control and infrastructure development. The public-private partnership behind the "Pittsburgh Renaissance," as advocates called it, pursued nothing less than the selective erasure of the existing social and physical environment in favor of a modernist, functionally divided landscape: a goal that was widely copied by other aging cities and one that has important ramifications for the broader national story. Ultimately, the Renaissance vision of downtown skyscrapers, sleek suburban research campuses, and bucolic regional parks resulted in an uneven transformation that tore the urban fabric while leaving deindustrializing river valleys and impoverished coal towns isolated from areas of postwar growth. Beyond Rust is among the first books of its kind to continue past the collapse of American manufacturing in the 1980s by exploring the diverse ways residents of an iconic industrial region sought places for themselves within a new economic order.

Ruin and Renewal

Ruin and Renewal PDF

Author: Paul Betts

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2020-11-17

Total Pages: 494

ISBN-13: 154167247X

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Winner of the American Philosophical Society’s 2021 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History From an award-winning historian, a panoramic account of Europe after the depravity of World War II. In 1945, Europe lay in ruins. Some fifty million people were dead, and millions more languished in physical and moral disarray. The devastation of World War II was unprecedented in character as well as in scale. Unlike the First World War, the second blurred the line between soldier and civilian, inflicting untold horrors on people from all walks of life. A continent that had previously considered itself the very measure of civilization for the world had turned into its barbaric opposite. Reconstruction, then, was a matter of turning Europe's "civilizing mission" inward. In this magisterial work, Oxford historian Paul Betts describes how this effort found expression in humanitarian relief work, the prosecution of war crimes against humanity, a resurgent Catholic Church, peace campaigns, expanded welfare policies, renewed global engagement and numerous efforts to salvage damaged cultural traditions. Authoritative and sweeping, Ruin and Renewal is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand how Europe was transformed after the destruction of World War II.

Root Shock

Root Shock PDF

Author: Mindy Thompson Fullilove

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2016-10-24

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1613320205

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Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, a clinical psychiatrist, exposes the devastating outcome of decades of urban renewal projects to our nation’s marginalized communities. Examining the traumatic stress of “root shock” in three African American communities and similar widespread damage in other cities, she makes an impassioned and powerful argument against the continued invasive and unjust development practices of displacing poor neighborhoods.

Williamsburg

Williamsburg PDF

Author: Victor Lederer

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 9780738537924

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There is no New York neighborhood that boasts a richer history or more exciting present than Williamsburg. At first a quiet waterside community, Williamsburg briefly became a wealthy suburb of Manhattan in the middle of the nineteenth century. Heavy industrialization and a tidal wave of immigrants later turned Williamsburg into New York's poorest, most crowded quarter. With images drawn chiefly from the rich photographic collection of the Brooklyn Historical Society, Williamsburg illustrates the neighborhood's transformation from one of New York's most impoverished and least fashionable neighborhoods to a modern-day example of the city's capacity for self-renewal.