Tall, Tangled, and True Tales of the Mountain Men, 1805-1850
The early plans for Mount Rushmore called for blasting heroic likenesses of mountain men--Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and John Colter--into the solid mountain granite of South Dakota. Readers of this colorful volume will see the heroics and the brutally rugged individualism that made these fur trappers candidates for legend and infamy. The accounts ......
The issue of religious authority has long fascinated and ignited scholars across a range of disciplines: history, anthropology, the sociology of religion, and political science. Religious Knowledge, Authority, and Charisma juxtaposes religious leadership in premodern and modern Islam with examples from the Judaic tradition. By illustrating various ......
Hohokam Rock Art, Ritual Practice, and Social Transformation
The petroglyphs and pictographs of the American Southwest are intriguing, but we commonly ask what they "mean". Religion on the Rocks redirects our attention to the equally important matter of what compelled ancient peoples to craft rock art in the first place. To examine this question, Aaron Wright presents a case study from Arizona's South ......
Reimagining a Place for the Wild contains a diverse collection of personal stories that describe encounters with the remaining wild creatures of the American West and critical essays that reveal wildlife's essential place in western landscapes. Gleaned from historians, journalists, biologists, ranchers, artists, philosophers, teachers, and ......
The world is at a critical moment, when humans must grapple with thinking about the planet's oceans from ecological, physical, social, and legal perspectives. Warming ocean temperatures, changing currents, cultural displacement, Indigenous resilience, melting polar ice, habitat loss, are but a few of the global issues reflected in the planetary ......
The world is at a critical moment, when humans must grapple with thinking about the planet's oceans from ecological, physical, social, and legal perspectives. Warming ocean temperatures, changing currents, cultural displacement, Indigenous resilience, melting polar ice, habitat loss, are but a few of the global issues reflected in the planetary ......
As a journalist, advocate, and professor, Michael Frome has spent decades engaged with conservation topics and has taken particular interest in America's national parks. He draws on this experience and knowledge to address what remains to be done in order to truly value and preserve these special places. Part memoir, part history, and part ......
Ranching in the Grand Staircase, Escalante Canyons, and Arizona Strip Country
The red rock country of southern Utah, though used for many things, has for more than a century been synonymous with livestock ranching. Federal ownership and management of public lands there have led generations of socially isolated ranchers to mistrust federal officials and exhibit outright hostility toward environmentalists intent on removing ......
TThe collapse of classic Maya civilization at the end of the eighth century AD is still an enigma, but the reason behind it is likely more than a clash of warring city-states. New research indicates that ecological degradation and nutritional deficiency may be as important to our understanding of Maya cultural processes as deciphering the rise and ......
