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Author: Stephen E. Ambrose Publisher: National Geographic Society ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
An exploration of the Mississippi River, tracing its length from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, and discussing its important role in the history of the United States. Includes photographs, period illustrations, artwork, documents, and maps.
Author: Stephen E. Ambrose Publisher: National Geographic Society ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
An exploration of the Mississippi River, tracing its length from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, and discussing its important role in the history of the United States. Includes photographs, period illustrations, artwork, documents, and maps.
Author: Thomas Ruys Smith Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807143081 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
Even in the decades before Mark Twain enthralled the world with his evocative representations of the Mississippi, the river played an essential role in American culture and consciousness. Throughout the antebellum era, the Mississippi acted as a powerful symbol of America's conception of itself -- and the world's conception of America. As Twain understood, "The Mississippi is well worth reading about." Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams is an examination of the Mississippi's role in the antebellum imagination, exploring its cultural position in literature, art, thought, and national life. Presidents, politicians, authors, poets, painters, and international celebrities of every variety experienced the Mississippi in its Golden Age. They left an extraordinary collection of representations of the river in their wake, images that evolved as America itself changed. From Thomas Jefferson's vision for the Mississippi to Andrew Jackson and the rowdy river culture of the early nineteenth century, Smith charts the Mississippi's shifting importance in the making of the nation. He examines the accounts of European travelers, including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose views of the river were heavily influenced by the world of the steamboat and plantation slavery. Smith discusses the growing importance of visual representations of the Mississippi as the antebellum period progressed, exploring the ways in which views of the river, particularly giant moving panoramas that toured the world, echoed notions of manifest destiny and the westward movement. He evokes the river in the late antebellum years as a place of crime and mystery, especially in popular writing, and most notably in Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man. An epilogue discusses the Mississippi during the Civil War, when possession of the river became vital, symbolically as well as militarily. The epilogue also provides an introduction to Mark Twain, a product of the antebellum river world who was to resurrect its imaginative potential for a post-war nation and produce an iconic Mississippi that still flows through a wide and fertile floodplain in American literature. From empire building in the Louisiana Purchase to the trauma of the Civil War, the Mississippi's dominant symbolic meanings tracked the essential forces operating within the nation. As Smith shows in this groundbreaking work, the story of the imagined Mississippi River is the story of antebellum America itself.
Author: Philip Gould Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807172227 Category : Photography Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Bridging the Mississippi: Spans across the Father of Waters portrays in words and stunning photographs the manmade structures that cross the nation’s most important and, during the mid-nineteenth century, most daunting natural waterway. Philip Gould spent three years photographing Mississippi River bridges, from the Crescent City Connection in New Orleans to the span of boulders at the river’s headwaters in Lake Itasca, Minnesota. This book features seventy-five of the river’s more than 130 spans, progressing from south to north, in rural, small-town, and metropolitan settings. In every season and from numerous angles, Gould captured images of historical, architectural, and engineering significance as well as dramatic natural beauty. In addition, his photos reflect the many perspectives of people whose lives intersect with the bridges, including riverboat captains, construction workers, pedestrians, drivers, cyclists, wedding parties, recreational boaters and fishers, business owners, and train engineers. Margot Hasha offers a fascinating overview of bridge construction on the Mississippi, starting with the waterway’s geology and the earliest-known settlement along the banks of Misi-ziibi, what Native Americans called the “father of waters.” She discusses the impact of steel production on the expansion of railroad bridges, hazards encountered by river pilots today, the preservation of vintage structures, and the latest bridge designs. Hasha and Gould profile select crossings in eleven cities and towns, explaining each one’s unique story and importance to its riverside community. Architectural and engineering feats; focal points for urban renewal; essential links in the nation’s transportation and commerce; aesthetic frames for parks, riverwalks, and levee trails—the Mississippi River’s bridges come into full focus in this visual tribute.
Author: Calvin R. Fremling Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press ISBN: 9780299202941 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 452
Book Description
This engaging and well-illustrated primer to the Upper Mississippi River presents the basic natural and human history of this magnificent waterway. Immortal River is written for the educated lay-person who would like to know more about the river's history and the forces that shape as well as threaten it today. It melds complex information from the fields of geology, ecology, geography, anthropology, and history into a readable, chronological story that spans some 500 million years of the earth's history. Like the Mississippi itself, Immortal River often leaves the main channel to explore the river's backwaters, floodplain, and drainage basin. The book's focus is the Upper Mississippi, from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Cairo, Illinois. But it also includes information about the river's headwaters in northern Minnesota and about the Lower Mississippi from Cairo south to the river's mouth ninety miles below New Orleans. It offers an understanding of the basic geology underlying the river's landscapes, ecology, environmental problems, and grandeur.
Author: Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 1782384324 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 204
Book Description
Rivers figure prominently in a nation’s historical memory, and the Volga and Mississippi have special importance in Russian and American cultures. Beginning in the pre-modern world, both rivers served as critical trade routes connecting cultures in an extensive exchange network, while also sustaining populations through their surrounding wetlands and bottomlands. In modern times, “Mother Volga” and the “Father of Waters” became integral parts of national identity, contributing to a sense of Russian and American exceptionalism. Furthermore, both rivers were drafted into service as the means to modernize the nation-state through hydropower and navigation. Despite being forced into submission for modern-day hydrological regimes, the Volga and Mississippi Rivers persist in the collective memory and continue to offer solace, recreation, and sustenance. Through their histories we derive a more nuanced view of human interaction with the environment, which adds another lens to our understanding of the past.
Author: Ann Ostendorf Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 082033975X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 274
Book Description
Sounds American provides new perspectives on the relationship between nationalism and cultural production by examining how Americans grappled with musical diversity in the early national and antebellum eras. During this period a resounding call to create a distinctively American music culture emerged as a way to bind together the varied, changing, and uncertain components of the new nation. This played out with particular intensity in the lower Mississippi River valley, and New Orleans especially. Ann Ostendorf argues that this region, often considered an exception to the nation—with its distance from the center of power, its non-British colonial past, and its varied population—actually shared characteristics of many other places eventually incorporated into the country, thus making it a useful case study for the creation of American culture. Ostendorf conjures the territory's phenomenally diverse “music ways” including grand operas and balls, performances by church choirs and militia bands, and itinerant violin instructors. Music was often associated with “foreigners,” in particular Germans, French, Irish, and Africans. For these outsiders, music helped preserve collective identity. But for critics concerned with developing a national culture, this multitude of influences presented a dilemma that led to an obsessive categorization of music with racial, ethnic, or national markers. Ultimately, the shared experience of categorizing difference and consuming this music became a unifying national phenomenon. Experiencing the unknown became a shared part of the American experience.
Author: Joseph Crespino Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691140944 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 382
Book Description
In the 1960s, Mississippi was the heart of white southern resistance to the civil-rights movement. To many, it was a backward-looking society of racist authoritarianism and violence that was sorely out of step with modern liberal America. White Mississippians, however, had a different vision of themselves and their country, one so persuasive that by 1980 they had become important players in Ronald Reagan's newly ascendant Republican Party. In this ambitious reassessment of racial politics in the deep South, Joseph Crespino reveals how Mississippi leaders strategically accommodated themselves to the demands of civil-rights activists and the federal government seeking to end Jim Crow, and in so doing contributed to a vibrant conservative countermovement. Crespino explains how white Mississippians linked their fight to preserve Jim Crow with other conservative causes--with evangelical Christians worried about liberalism infecting their churches, with cold warriors concerned about the Communist threat, and with parents worried about where and with whom their children were schooled. Crespino reveals important divisions among Mississippi whites, offering the most nuanced portrayal yet of how conservative southerners bridged the gap between the politics of Jim Crow and that of the modern Republican South. This book lends new insight into how white Mississippians gave rise to a broad, popular reaction against modern liberalism that recast American politics in the closing decades of the twentieth century.
Author: Paul Schneider Publisher: Henry Holt and Company ISBN: 0805098364 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 416
Book Description
A fascinating account of how the Mississippi River shaped America In Old Man River, Paul Schneider tells the story of the river at the center of America's rich history—the Mississippi. Some fifteen thousand years ago, the majestic river provided Paleolithic humans with the routes by which early man began to explore the continent's interior. Since then, the river has been the site of historical significance, from the arrival of Spanish and French explorers in the 16th century to the Civil War. George Washington fought his first battle near the river, and Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman both came to President Lincoln's attention after their spectacular victories on the lower Mississippi. In the 19th century, home-grown folk heroes such as Daniel Boone and the half-alligator, half-horse, Mike Fink, were creatures of the river. Mark Twain and Herman Melville led their characters down its stream in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Confidence-Man. A conduit of real-life American prowess, the Mississippi is also a river of stories and myth. Schneider traces the history of the Mississippi from its origins in the deep geologic past to the present. Though the busiest waterway on the planet today, the Mississippi remains a paradox—a devastated product of American ingenuity, and a magnificent natural wonder.
Author: Mark Twain Publisher: ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 444
Book Description
?Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs.? --William Faulkner A brilliant amalgam of remembrance and reportage, by turns satiric, celebratory, nostalgic, and melancholy, Life on the Mississippi evokes the great river that Mark Twain knew as a boy and young man and the one he revisited as a mature and successful author. Written between the publication of his two greatest novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Twain?s rich portrait of the Mississippi marks a distinctive transition in the life of the river and the nation, from the boom years preceding the Civil War to the sober times that followed it. Library of America Paperback Classics feature authoritative texts drawn from the acclaimed Library of America series and introduced by today?s most distinguished scholars and writers. Each book features a detailed chronology of the author?s life and career, and essay on the choice of the text, and notes. The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings, volume number 5 in the Library of America series. It is joined in the series by six companion volumes, gathering the collected works of Mark Twain.
Author: Stephen E. Ambrose
Author: Stephen E. Ambrose
Author: Douglas Brinkley
Author: Thomas Ruys Smith
Author: Philip Gould
Author: Calvin R. Fremling
Author: Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted
Author: Ann Ostendorf
Author: Joseph Crespino
Author: Paul Schneider
Author: Mark Twain