Search results for ""author wade graham""

From Frederick Law Olmsted to Richard Neutra, Michelle Obama to our neighbors, Americans throughout history have revealed something of themselves - their personalities, desires, and beliefs - in the gardens they create. Monticello's gardens helped Jefferson reconcile his conflicted feelings about slavery - and take his mind off his increasing debt. Edith Wharton's gardens made her feel more European and superior to her wealthy but insufficiently sophisticated countrymen. Martha Stewart's how-to instructions helped bring Americans back into their gardens, while at the same time stoking and exploiting our anxieties about social class. Melding biography, history, and cultural commentary in a one-of-a-kind narrative, "American Eden" presents a dynamic, sweeping look at this country's landscapes and the visionaries behind them. "American Eden" offers an inclusive definition of the garden, considering intentional landscapes that range from domestic kitchen gardens to city parks and national parks, suburban backyards and golf courses, public plazas and Manhattan's High Line park, reclaimed from freight train tracks. And it exposes the overlap between garden-making and painting, literature, and especially architecture-the garden's inseparable sibling-to reveal the deep interconnections between the arts and their most inspired practitioners. Beautifully illustrated with color and black-and-white images, "American Eden" is at once a different kind of garden book and a different kind of American history, one that offers a compelling, untold story-a saga that mirrors and illuminates our nation's invention, and constant reinvention, of itself.

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Dream Cities is a lively, unique and accessible cultural history of modern cities which allows us to view them through the planning, design, architects and movements that inspired and built them. It explores our urban areas in a new way – as expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live, work, play, make, buy and think – and tells the stories of the people who imagined the cities that became the blueprints for the world we live in. Starting in the nineteenth century and continuing to today, what began as visionary concepts – sometimes utopian, sometimes outlandish, always controversial – were gradually adopted and constructed on a massive scale in cities around the world, from Dubai to Ulan Bator, London to Los Angeles. Our leafy suburbs, city skyscraper districts, infotainment-driven shopping malls and ‘sustainable’ eco-developments are seen here as never before, from the fantasy villages of Bertram Goodhue to the superblocks of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City. In this elegantly designed and illustrated book, Graham uncovers the original plans of brilliant, obsessed and sometimes megalomaniacal designers, revealing the foundations of today’s varied urban environment. Dream Cities is nothing less than a field guide to our modern world.

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Braided Waters sheds new light on the relationship between environment and society by charting the history of Hawaii’s Molokai island over a thousand-year period of repeated settlement. From the arrival of the first Polynesians to contact with eighteenth-century European explorers and traders to our present era, this study shows how the control of resources—especially water—in a fragile, highly variable environment has had profound effects on the history of Hawaii. Wade Graham examines the ways environmental variation repeatedly shapes human social and economic structures and how, in turn, man-made environmental degradation influences and reshapes societies. A key finding of this study is how deep structures of place interact with distinct cultural patterns across different societies to produce similar social and environmental outcomes, in both the Polynesian and modern eras—a case of historical isomorphism with profound implications for global environmental history.

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