The great clod

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Mark Elvin, Liu Tsʻui-jung

This collection of essays is the first relatively comprehensive survey of the environmental history of China. Written by some of the world's leading Western and Chinese experts, Sediments of Time crystallizes a new and distinct field of scholarship that studies what happens when human social systems interact with the rest of the natural world. This book shows how deforestation, land reclamation, settlement, and water control, when combined with an ever-changing climate, shaped a distinctive and often precarious environment.

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Donald Edward Davis

"The first book-length environmental history of its kind, Where There Are Mountains explores the relationship between human inhabitants of the southern Appalachians and their environment."--BOOK JACKET. "Davis discusses the degradation of the southern Appalachians on a number of levels, from the general effects of settlement and industry to the extinction of the American chestnut due to blight and logging in the early years of this century."--BOOK JACKET. "This portrait of environmental destruction is echoed by the human struggle to survive in one of our nation's poorest areas. The farming, livestock raising, dam building, and pearl and logging industries that have gradually destroyed this region have also been the livelihood of the Appalachian people. The author explores the sometimes conflicting needs of humans and nature in the mountains while presenting impressive and comprehensive research on the increasingly threatened environment of the southern Appalachians."--BOOK JACKET.

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Nicholas A. Basbanes

Inspired by a landmark exhibition mounted by the British Museum in 1963 to celebrate five eventful centuries of the printed word, Nicholas A. Basbanes offers a lively consideration of writings that have "made things happen" in the world, works that have both nudged the course of history and fired the imagination of countless influential people.

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Carroll Thomas

In the late 1850s, with her mother dead and her brother riding for the Pony Express, Matty often finds that she must face all the dangers of pre-Civil War Kansas alone on the family farm.