4,054 research outputs found
Letter from Rachel Colby to John Muir, undated
No full textDear Mr. Muir, Please do not feel distressed over your informal departure on Sunday. I have seen Mr. Colby do just such things and know the reasons, either mental fatigue, or concentration in the subject uppermost in his mind. I truly enjoyed the trip to Del Monte, and my hope that Marian and I were not so bothersome as “John Burroughs’s Ladies.” If Mil [?] can get […] we are hoping soon to visit you on a Sunday-to go up I Mother’s [?] automobile. Yours most cordially, Rachel […] Colby […] […] May 27t
Letter from Rachel Colby to John Muir, undated
No full textDear Mr. Muir, Please do not feel distressed over your informal departure on Sunday. I have seen Mr. Colby do just such things and know the reasons, either mental fatigue, or concentration in the subject uppermost in his mind. I truly enjoyed the trip to Del Monte, and my hope that Marian and I were not so bothersome as “John Burroughs’s Ladies.” If Mil [?] can get […] we are hoping soon to visit you on a Sunday-to go up I Mother’s [?] automobile. Yours most cordially, Rachel […] Colby […] […] May 27t
Letter from Rachel Colby to John Muir, undated
No full textDear Mr. Muir […] changed the date of our evening from Dec 31 to Wednesday, Dec 29th. I hope you can come on the 29th just the same. Cordially, R V Colby […] […] Monda
Letter from Rachel Colby to John Muir, undated
No full textDear Mr. Muir […] changed the date of our evening from Dec 31 to Wednesday, Dec 29th. I hope you can come on the 29th just the same. Cordially, R V Colby […] […] Monda
Author interview: Q&A with Rachel O’Neill on Seduction: men, masculinity and mediated intimacy
No full textIn this author interview, we speak to Rachel O’Neill about her recent book, Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy, which offers an ethnographic study of the ‘seduction industry’. In the interview, she discusses the seduction industry as part of a continuum of mediated intimacy, the ways in which neoliberal rationalities are shaping masculine subjectivity today, how the book relates to contemporary discussions surrounding consent and women’s sexual agency and the particular challenges of undertaking this fieldwork. If you are interested in this interview, you can read a review of Seduction on LSE RB here. Q&A with Rachel O’Neill, author of Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy (Polity, 2018
John Muir Newsletter, Spring 1993
No full textJohn Muir Newsletter spring 1993 university of the pacific volume 3, number 2 1993 EARTH DAY CELEBRATES TH MUIR IMAGE by Janene Ford On a clear, sunny spring day the Earth Day Conservation Fair in Sacramento attracted thousands of people including large groups of school children. Sponsored by the California Department of Conservation, many organizations were invited to participate by setting up booths in front of the Capitol showing various aspects of recycling, alternative energy, conservation, and other reflections on The Muir Image. The University of the Pacific, the John Muir National Historical Site, the Sierra Club and a number of government agencies such as the California Conservation Corps and Cal Trans were represented. Two staff members of the UOP Library, this author and Rachel Fenske, set up a display on The John Muir Papers and answered questions for visitors and distributed a handout. Their interaction with the younger students revealed that several children thought that John Muir invented Earth Day. Many visitors expressed great interest in the photographs of pages from Muir\u27s journals, sketches, and correspondence, People seemed fascinated with the photographs of two of Muir\u27s inventions, the bed and study desk. Many of John Muir\u27s great-grandchildren and a few of the great-great-grandchildren were present and received framed proclamations and attended a family picnic. Allison Lincoln, thirteen year old daughter of Lynne Hanna Lincoln of Dixon, wrote a poem about her grandfather and how he might feel about the earth today; it was read by Bill Hanna of Napa during the mid-day ceremony. Some of the crowd wore T-shirts with the words The Muir Image emblazoned on their backs. Entertainment, music, jugglers, and happy children carrying give-away shoe strings, pencils, tree seedlings, business cards, pamphlets, bags, and key rings marked the day. It is heartening to know that the Muir Message is not only still relevant, but is especially thriving in California. Those of us who work intimately with Muir\u27s original journals, books and other papers on a daily basis see serious scholars, authors, and students undertaking research, but seldom see young children or have the opportunity to show them the wealth of materials that are in our keeping. Extra copies of the handout are available. If readers would like one, please send a stamped self-addressed envelope to the Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections, University of the Pacific Libraries, Stockton, CA 95211. CONTRIBUTIONS WANTED FOR THE NEWSLETTER As in earlier issues of this Newsletter, the staff wishes to invite its subscribers and readers to submit news, announcements, reviews and information to the Newsletter for consideration for publication. It is the goal of this Newsletter to keep its readers informed of all environmental news so that we can be as aware of relevant activities as possible. Please share your information with us so that we can spread the word. The editor welcomes your submissions and will determine whether they may be published in a forthcoming issue.
Nature\u27s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991, xxiii + 530 pp., maps, illus., bibl., index. Reviewed by Roderick Frazier Nash, [Editor\u27s note: With this issue, we inaugurate a policy of occasionally reprinting book reviews of noteworthy books dealing with the environment. The following review is reprinted from the American Historical Review with the kind permission of the Review and of the book reviewer. It appeared in the AHR 97 (June 1992): 939.] In Nature\u27s Metropolis William Cronon continues a scholarly career dedicated to demonstrating what history can learn from ecology. Cronon\u27s first major book, the celebrated Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (1983), examined environmental modification immediately before and after the initial contact of European settlers with the northeastern coast. Here, and in the present volume, Cronon points out that what we call nature is a complex mosaic of original and constructed, people-caused conditions. Obviously original or, in Cronon\u27s terms, first nature (p. 264), determined the pre-human environment. But thereafter, the most powerful force shaping the ecosystem derived from human ambition and human ingenuity. Cronon\u27s goal for environmental history is very close to that of ecology: understanding the interrelationships between mankind and the natural world. In the book at hand. Cronon shifts his focus several centuries later and several thousand miles westward from colonial New England. His narrative revolves around the city of Chicago, but his thesis is neither this metropolis nor any city can be understood apart from its environmental and economic hinterland,. In the case of Chicago, that region was nothing less than a huge slice of North America extending from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains - the Great West. Cronon takes pains to tell the city-country story as a unified narrative (p. xiv). Ecology-like, he integrates rather than separates. Constantly he emphasizes that urban and rural areas are parts of an interconnected landscape and share an interconnected history. The environment, Cronon argues, is not jut nature. Environmental historians must study urban and economic developments as well. History, like ecology, should strive for seamlessness. So, Cronon writes, The history of the Great West is a long dialogue between the place we call the city and the place we call the country (p. 54). Today, as the centennial of his controversial essay on the American frontier approaches in 1993, Frederick Jackson Turner has apparently become the whipping boy of every Western historian. Cronon is gracious about it, but he follows suit. His principal complaint is that Turner persuaded several generations of Americans that the frontier, way out there, had nothing to do with the urban civilization thousands of miles to the east. The frontier was the new world, and by the time cities appeared it had vanished. Cronon does not see it this way. The frontier, or as he calls it the country, is linked commercially and, in a real sense ecologically, to the city. For Turner, in other words, the isolation of the frontier explained American development. For Cronon the frontier was never isolated. The West was not a wilderness but part of an urban empire. Nature\u27s Metropolis sweeps from the 1830s, when Chicago (the place of wild garlic) took shape as a white community, to 1893 when the city on the lake hosted the World\u27s Fair (at which, parenthetically, Turner delivered his famous frontier address). As might be expected in this kind of integrative book, Cronon writes about a wide range of subjects. Most of them have been treated in more detail by others, but Cronon\u27s forte is synthesis. We learn in his book about railroads, reapers, refrigerated meat cars, grain elevators, credit and bankruptcy networks, and futures market. These chapters are organized around specific resources: grain, lumber and beef. In each case Cronon shows how the chains of causation that altered, and he is frank to point out, devastated some environments, extend from the frontier through Chicago to Eastern European markets. The buffalo gave way to cows, the native prairie grasses to wheat, and the majestic white pine to the desolate Cutover Lands. Cronon is sensitive to the liabilities as well as the (continued on page 6) JOHN MUIR NEWSLETTER. VOL. Ill, #2 (NEW SERIES) SPRING, 1993 Published quarterly by the John Muir Center for Regional Studies, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 Editor Center Director Staff © Sally M. Miller R.H. Limbaugh This Newsletter is printed on recycled paper.
A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, by Clive Ponting. New York: St. Martin\u27s Press, 1991, i-xiv + 432 pp., maps, graphs, bib., index. Reviewed by Dan Flores, Hammond Professor of History, University of Montana Clive Ponting\u27s A Green History of the World sets a challenging task for itself — to tell in a single 400 page volume the environmental history of our planet from the spread of gathering-hunting societies across the globe 25,000 years ago through the pressing environmental issues of the late twentieth century. John Muir, were he alive today, would find this book valuable but perhaps too utilitarian in focus, too short on values and soaring inspirational language. Aldo Leopold, I suspect, would react very favorably to Ponting\u27s effort at a global and holistic treatment including his heavy reliance on statistical data — but like Muir might wonder what role an environmental ethic (particularly the Land Ethic) plays in Ponting\u27s story. The answer is: not much. Looking at the sweep of human history, Ponting sees the accelerating press of human population and major technological ratchet- effects like the Neolithic Revolution and the Industrial Revolution as far more central to the real story of environmental history. In sharp contrast to books like Clarence Glacken\u27s Traces on the Rhodian Shore, Roderick Nash\u27s The Rights of Nature, Max Oelschlaeger\u27s The Idea of Wilderness, or J. Baird Callicott\u27s various articles exploring comparative environmental ethics and values, Ponting appears to believe that the various ways humans have thought about nature have really made previous little practical difference on the long-term story of environmental history. After digesting the mass of data in this book, I think that he may well be right. Without being preachy or heavy-handed about it, A Green History of the World takes readers into the heart of the historical debate about humans and the planet. Is there an evolving environmental crisis? The trends of history suggest that, while many of the specific issues we face are nothing new, there is a long-term, unfolding crisis. Viewing the arguments of scholars like Lynn White, Jr., who suggests that the values of the Judeo-Christian tradition are the cause, Barry Commoner\u27s idea that the new technology is the culprit, and Paul Erhlich\u27s belief that the swelling human population is the problem, Ponting seems to rank White\u27s causation a distant third. about nature — the animism of primary cultures, the various Far Eastern religions, Judeo-Christian traditions, the Scientific Revolution, capitalism, or Marxism — have not influenced the nuances of the human/environment relationships. They have, and in ways that are important to the quality of both the environment and of human life. But the fact is that despite the wide range of values and beliefs that these ways of thinking represent, history provides examples of societies adhering to all of them that have destroyed nature and undermined themselves. Animistic beliefs did not prevent the Paleolithic hunters, the residents of Easter Island, the Maya or the Sumerians from bringing their worlds crashing down on them. Nor have Taoism or Buddhism prevented large-scale environmental devastation in China or India, any more than Christianity, capitalism, or Marxism have in the modern West. What Ponting\u27s examination of la longue duree demonstrates instead is that since gathering-hunting societies filled up the available space on the planet by about 10,000 years ago, the press of human population has fostered an efflorescence of ethnological fixes to enable more and more of us to survive. It took roughly two million years to build up a planetary population of four million of us at the climax of our lives as gatherer-hunters. Agriculture boosted that population to 200 million within just 8,000 years. For 1500 years after Christ, the exchange of epidemic diseases between formerly isolated human gene pools kept the world\u27s population from mushrooming. But as populations genetically resistant to those diseases have evolved, and as the Industrial Revolution and a global economy have accelerated the pace of technological innovation, the human population has inundated the Earth like a spreading mold, fouling water, air, and land in a process that 10,000 years of history has long since internalized. The human population reached the one billion mark in 1825. Within a century there were two billion; by 1960, three billion; by 1975, four billion. We humans surged to more than five billion by the later 1980s. Faced with such a scenario, Ponting asserts, modern environmental legislation has been little more than cosmetic (p. 400). While this book provides us with no reason to be optimistic, it does seem to clarify a few important issues. One is that our nostalgia for an environmental Golden Age is misplaced unless we are willing to reach 10,000 years into the past for a global model. The second is that reducing the human population by the 99 % that the model would require is, frankly, an ecological and certainly a moral impossibility. It seems to me that Ponting is suggesting that the technology that ratcheted us here is now probably our only hope for saving our skins. It is not that the diverse range of human belief systems
JOHN MUIR IN NEW ENGLAND by Ron Limbaugh (Editor\u27s Note: Following the death of his father-in- law, John Strentzel, and the reorganization of the family orchard business in the Alhambra Valley of California, John Muir made plans for a European trip that would revive his creative energies. His wife Louie encouraged him; she would stay home with the two children while he and his Scottish friend William Keith, the San Franciso landscape painter, would revisit the Scottish moors they had last seen nearly a half-century before. In the spring of 1893 they made plans to travel separately to New York, then rendezvous there and sail jointly to Liverpool. The plans went awry, however, when Muir reached the East Coast. Robert Underwood Johnson, associate editor of Century and Muir\u27s acting literaiy agent, wanted to introduce him to the eastern literary establishment. The result was a whirlwind tour that dazzled Muir but delayed his departure for Europe. Tire following is an excerpt from a forthcoming book entitled John Muir and Stickeen: the Evolution of a Dog Story. It is used by permission of the author.) Muir\u27s eastern visit was intended as a brief stop en route to Europe. But Johnson converted it into a six- weeks celebrity tour, with Muir as the reluctant debutante. With Johnson opening doors and directing the agenda, Muir found himself the center of attention, a backwoods rustic with a repertoire of colorful anecdotes. He performed dutifully, meeting the social and intellectual elite, stuffing himself at banquets, and telling stories. A visit with John Burroughs was one of the first items on Muir\u27s agenda. Only a year older, yet in 1983 much better known than Muir, Burroughs was late- nineteenth century America\u27s most popular nature writer.1 He was a hesitant host, but at Johnson\u27s insistance he agreed to meet the visiting naturalist at Slabsides, Burroughs\u27 rustic home near Esopus, New York. Later known by their mutual acquaintances as The Two Johns, Burroughs and Muir became fond friends despite their contrasting personalities. Muir was an incessant talker whose wiry frame seemed to thrive on nervous energy in contrast to the portly Sage of Slabsides, who had acquired more conventional sleeping and eating habits.2 At their first meeting Burroughs was condescending, describing Muir as an interesting man with the Western look upon him, but a tiring conversationalist. You must not be in a hurry, he wrote, or have any pressing duty, when you start his stream of talk and adventure. Ask him to tell you his famous dog story ... and you get the whole theory of glaciation thrown in. 3 Moving north to Brahmin country, Johnson and Muir spent several days in and around Boston. They had a delightful day in the company of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, famed Civil War colonel of a black regiment, author and advocate of women\u27s rights. He escorted them on a Cambridge cultural tour which included the homes of James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, both poets Muir knew well from the books in his personal library. At Harvard Muir was introduced to a number of prominent faculty, including Josiah Royce, the California philosopher, and Francis Parkman, prominent American historian whose books Muir read avidly. But the writer whose work he knew best was Charles S. Sargent, Director of the Arnold Arboretum and author of the multi-volume Silva of North America. At his home in nearby Brookline Sargent hosted a banquet with Muir the honored guest. Writing his family later, Muir said he had to repeat the dog story I don\u27t know how often .4 More banquets and story-telling followed. At a dinner party in Manchester, New Hampshire, wrote Muir, Sarah Orne Jewett was there, and all was delightful. Here, of course, Johnson made me tell that dog story as if that were the main result of glacial action and all my studies, but I got in a good deal of ice-work ... and never had better listeners. 5 A quick pilgrimage to Concord highlighted Muir\u27s New England visit. Johnson took him to all the shrines: Concord Bridge, Hawthorne\u27s Old Manse, the Alcott residence, the graves of Emerson and Thoreau on Author\u27s Hill in Sleepy Hollow Cemetary, and, of course, Walden Pond, an easy saunter from town. After a delightful P.M. with Emerson\u27s son Edward Waldo and his father-in-law Judge John S. Keyes, where the dog story doubtless surfaced again, the two visitors caught the night train back to Boston.6 The New England tour concluded, Muir and Johnson returned to New York, where a final round of parties and story-telling delayed his departure for Europe. At Gramercy Park Muir dined at the family estate of Gifford Pinchot. In a letter home he described the scene: Here and at many other places I had to tell the story of the minister\u27s dog. Everybody seems to think it wonderful for the views it gives of the terrible crevasses of the glaciers as well as for the recognition of danger and the fear and joy of the dog. I must have told it at least twelve times at the request of Johnson or others who had previously heard it.... When I am telling it at the dinner-tables, it is curious to see how eagerly the liveried servants listen from behind screens, half-closed doors, etc. 7 The six weeks Muir spent in the East ended with his departure for Europe late in June, 1893—without William Keith, who had tired of waiting and sailed alone. But Muir could look back with no small satisfaction: he had mingled with some of the best minds of the continent; he had come as a stranger and had been (continued on page 7)
JAPANESE JOURNALIST RESEARCHES MUIR\u27S LIFE AND WORK Shigeyuki Okajima, Deputy Directory of the Commentary Department for The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan\u27s (and the world\u27s) largest daily newspaper, was in the United States recently on an Eisenhower Fellowship as special correspondent for global environmental issues. This was a return trip to this country; in the early 1980s he spent a year in the U.S. as visiting scholar at the University of Washington. On his latest trip he toured American archival institutions and visited environmental organizations to learn about this country\u27s green movement, and in particular, to study the life and work of John Muir. A recipient of the Global 500 Award from a United Nations agency in 1988, he is a counselor for the Nature Conservation and Wild Bird Societies of Japan, and a committee member of the Japanese Alpine Club. In 1990 he published a Japanese-language history of the American environmental movement, and a year later wrote Only One Earth, an English-language textbook for Japanese high school students. His recent tour included a visit to the Holt-Atherton Library at UOP, where he discussed Japan\u27s environmental movement and his special interest in Muir\u27s contributions to the concept of a global environmental ethics. He presented the library with a copy of his book and with copies of several environmental articles he has published in American- language newspapers. The green movement in Japan, though still in its formative stages, is gathering momentum and will soon be a major force on the international environmental scene. NEWS NOTES Richard F. Fleck, well-known for his work on Thoreau and Muir, has recently edited a book on Native American writings, soon to be published by Three Continents Press. Entitled Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction, it presents essays on six Native American novelists who have emerged as internationally acclaimed writers. The editor, formerly with Teikyo Loretto Heights University in Denver, in July will become Dean of Denver\u27s Community College. Oxford University Press is publishing a reference book for young adults, Earthkeepers: Observers and Protectors of Nature. Scheduled for publication in the fall of 1993, it will include an article on Muir and a photo from the Holt-Atherton Library. John Muir T-Shirts are available from the John Muir Memorial Association. Depicting Muir leaning on a hiking stick, the T-shirt project is a fund-raiser to support the work of the John Muir National Historic Site. A shirt can be purchased with a check for $14,00, made out and sent to the John Muir Memorial Association, c/o Dianna Ceballos, 2220 Spring Lake Drive, Martinez, CA 94553, (510) 680-7561. Another movement is afoot to Save Mount Shasta. This has long been a goal of environmental activists who recognize the need for saving Shasta\u27s biodiverse habitat from further urban-industrial encroachment. John Muir was one of the first to publicize Shasta\u27s natural treasures, a
Episode 3: Rachel Wightman, CSP Staff and Author
No full textIn this episode, CSP\u27s Associate Director of Instruction and Outreach, Rachel Wightman, shares about her new book, Faith and Fake News: A Guide to Consuming Information Wisely, including how she became interested in the topic, what led to the creation of this book, and why this topic is so important today
Rachel Swarns Book Event: The 272
No full textA conversation with Rachel Swarns, author of The GU272: The Families Who Were Enslaved And Sold To Build The American Catholic Church (Penguin Random House 2023). The conversation was moderated by Georgetown Professor Adam Rothman and hosted by Georgetown's Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies
Theodore Clement Steele: A Lecture by Rachel Perry
No full textJoin author and curator Rachel Perry for a lecture on the life and artwork of Theodore Clement (TC) Steele. Perhaps the most well-known artist of the “Hoosier Group,” Steele created impressionist portraits and landscape paintings from his studio in Nashville, Indiana.https://scholarship.depauw.edu/peeler_event/1084/thumbnail.jp
Open access self-archiving: An author study
No full textThis, our second author international, cross-disciplinary study on open access had 1296 respondents. Its focus was on self-archiving. Almost half (49%) of the respondent population have self-archived at least one article during the last three years. Use of institutional repositories for this purpose has doubled and usage has increased by almost 60% for subject-based repositories. Self-archiving activity is greatest amongst those who publish the largest number of papers. There is still a substantial proportion of authors unaware of the possibility of providing open access to their work by self-archiving. Of the authors who have not yet self-archived any articles, 71% remain unaware of the option. With 49% of the author population having self-archived in some way, this means that 36% of the total author population (71% of the remaining 51%), has not yet been appraised of this way of providing open access. Authors have frequently expressed reluctance to self-archive because of the perceived time required and possible technical difficulties in carrying out this activity, yet findings here show that only 20% of authors found some degree of difficulty with the first act of depositing an article in a repository, and that this dropped to 9% for subsequent deposits. Another author worry is about infringing agreed copyright agreements with publishers, yet only 10% of authors currently know of the SHERPA/RoMEO list of publisher permissions policies with respect to self-archiving, where clear guidance as to what a publisher permits is provided. Where it is not known if permission is required, however, authors are not seeking it and are self-archiving without it. Communicating their results to peers remains the primary reason for scholars publishing their work; in other words,
researchers publish to have an impact on their field. The vast majority of authors (81%) would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate
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