Showing titles in Human Geography

‘Morland predicts the future of humanity in 10 illuminating statistics (could the Japanese and Italians now go the way of the dodo?) and looks back to how ebbs and flows of population have shaped history’ - The Daily Telegraph ‘The Best Books for Summer 2022’ The great forces of...

'Historical insights and human stories . . . Highly readable' - Ian Stewart, author of What's the Use? 'An adventure' - Edward Brooke-Hitching, author of The Phantom Atlas How does a delivery driver distribute hundreds of packages in a single working day? Why does remote Alaska have such a large...

A forceful and clarifying challenge to conventional accounts of geopolitics, Near and Far Waters offers an accessible introduction to the combination of economic and political relations that are the reason behind, and the result of, the development of seapower to control near waters and project force into far waters.

A spirited and incisive survey of economic geography, A World Made for Money begins with the author stopped at a red light in Norman, Oklahoma. Observing the landscape of drugstores and banks, and for that matter the stoplight and roads themselves, Bret Wallach observes, "Everything I see has been built to make money" or, at the very least, to facilitate making money. This, he argues, is a global phenomenon that nonetheless has occurred only within the past hundred years or so.

Long at the forefront of a movement advocating for gun reform as a matter of public health, Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl has been on constant media call in the aftermath of fatal shootings. But the 2018 Nashville killings led him on a path toward recognizing the limitations of biomedical frameworks for fully diagnosing or treating the impassioned complexities of American gun politics. As he came to understand it, public health is a harder sell in a nation that fundamentally disagrees about what it means to be safe, healthy, or free.

Discover a world of wild, mysterious and audacious journeys In Wild Journeys Bruce Ansley retraces the path of the doomed surveyor John Whitcombe across the Southern Alps, follows the raiding party of the northern chief Te Puoho along the West Coast, sails around New Zealand's northern and...

Jo Guldi tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their own hands. The Long Land War provides a definitive narrative of land redistribution alongside an unflinching critique of its failures.

Since the publication of her prize-winning memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake, writer and artist Kim Mahood has been returning to the Tanami desert country in far north-western Australia where, as a child, she lived with her family on a remote cattle station. The land is timeless, but much has changed: the station has been handed back to its traditional owners, the mining companies have arrived and Aboriginal art has flourished.

Nick Neely chronicles his 650-mile trek on foot from San Diego to San Francisco, following the route of the first overland Spanish expedition into what was soon called Alta California. Led by Gaspar de Portolá in 1769, the expedition sketched a route that would become, in part, the famous El Camino Real. It laid the foundation for the Golden State we know today, a place that remains as mythical and captivating as any in the world.

Meth alchemists all over the United States tap the occulted potencies of industrial chemical and big pharma products to try to cure the ills of precarious living: underemployment, insecurity, and the feeling of idleness. Meth fires up your attention and makes repetitive tasks pleasurable, whether it’s factory work or tinkering at home. Users are awake for days and feel exuberant and invincible. In one person’s words, they “get more life”.

From a leading Brookings Institution fellow and author of To Rule the Waves comes a vivid and bracing examination of today’s most secretive geopolitical conflict: the battle for dominance beneath the oceans. Sub War explores a high-stakes, largely invisible race that is reshaping global...

First published in 2012, Borders: A Very Short Introduction began with the premise that "we live in a very bordered world." The intervening decade has witnessed a flurry of events and developments that continue to highlight the centrality of borders in contemporary domestic and international affairs, as well as the interstices between the two....

While Americans have been deeply absorbed with the topic of immigration for generations, emigration from the United States has been almost entirely ignored. Following the US Civil War, an estimated 10,000 Confederates left the US South, most of them moving to Brazil, where they became known as Confederados, Portuguese for “Confederates”. These Southerners were the largest organized group of White Americans to ever voluntarily emigrate from the United States.

Organized in keeping with our knowledge of the migration of human groups through history, with statistics and a cultural portrait of each ethnic group, People of the World becomes a fascinating round-the-world tour of customs and traditions, as well as a go-to source for background information to round out one's own family history. From the Tuvans of Siberia to the Samoans and Tahitians of Polynesia, from the Mapuche of Chile to the Sami of Scandinavia, 222 of the world's 10,000-plus ethnic groups are featured.

Drawing on a variety of sources from film, literature, and popular culture, and analyzing different historical moments, including the establishment of the Wilderness Act in 1964 and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Finney reveals the perceived and real ways in which nature and the environment are racialized in America. Looking toward the future, she also highlights the work of African Americans who are opening doors to greater participation in environmental and conservation concerns.

In this visionary Shortest History of Migration, Ian Goldin uncovers key moments of cultural exchange while carefully examining empire, slavery, and war. Throughout, we meet famous explorers (Zheng He), exiles (Pablo Neruda), and everyday people in extraordinary circumstances: a Jewish man saved by the Kindertransport, a Japanese gardener who blossomed in Mexico City.

More people traveled internationally in 2019 than in any year in history. After COVID began its rapid spread throughout the world, though, international travel plummeted, and nations across the world hardened their borders. For the first time, governments took the same tools that have been used against less privileged migrants and asylum seekers and turned them on citizens from countries that had long enjoyed relatively unfettered travel—and sometimes on their own citizens.

The United States is an exceptionally violent country, increasingly unable or unwilling to stem violence in its many forms. A growing corporate crime wave has gone unprosecuted and unpunished. Meanwhile, the country has doubled down on pursuing people accused of street and drug crimes and immigration offenses. Corporate impunity, the financialization of the economy, militarized policing, the burgeoning carceral state, and the forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere all have fostered corporate, economic, and state violence in America.

In The Time beneath the Concrete, Nasser Abourahme argues that settler colonialism is always as much an attempt to conquer time as it is to conquer land. Taking as his primary object Palestinian refugee camps, created in the fallout of the eliminatory violence of Israel's founding, Abourahme shows how these camps become the primary place where settler colonial attempts to dominate space and time encounter Indigenous refusal. Seen from the camps, Israel becomes a settler colonial project defined by its inability to move past the past—a project stuck at its foundational moment of conquest.

During the civil war that ravaged Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002, an estimated 20,000 children were forced to join the fighting. As villages were raided and youths rounded up, it was not uncommon for a child to be ordered to kill a friend, relative, or neighbor. The goal was to make it impossible for the captives to return home and be accepted back into their communities. Betancourt's study provides insight into the long-term psychological and developmental effects of family separation, war, and exposure to violence.