Israeli landscape architects have been integral to their country's development, designing places that have become symbolic icons of the nation. The Valley of the Destroyed Communities at Yad Vashem, Haas-Sherover Promenade in Jerusalem, Ben Gurion's gravesite at Sde Boker, Yarkon Park of Tel Aviv, all of Israel's national parks, university campuses, most kibbutzim and even entire cities have been designed and planned by Israel's landscape architects. Yet despite their unique contribution to the nation's identity, their work is largely unknown outside Israel.

Dreaming Gardens: Landscape Architecture and the Making of Modern Israel (Center Books on the International Scene)

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Helphand, Kenneth Fasla

Gardening & Landscape Design

Center for Amer Places Inc

The Upland South is a regional band of natural beauty that runs from Virginia and North Carolina west through Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and their bordering states. This book explores the region's character through an analysis of its traditional cultural landscape.

The Upland South: The Making of an American Folk Region and Landscape

History

Jordan-Bychkov, Terry G.

Americas

New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape (Center Books)

In his now classic work of historical geography, published in 1976, Lewis traces the rise and expansion of New Orleans through four major historic periods. This second edition offers a revised and greatly expanded look at this unique community on the Mississippi Delta--"a fearsome place, difficult enough for buildiing houses, lunacy for wharves and skyscrapers."

New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape

Politics & Social Sciences

LEWIS

Social Sciences

Richly illustrated with historic and contemporary images, this concise, popular history traces James Madison University's growth from a normal school dedicated to polishing young women for lives as public school teachers and domestic helpmates to its current status as an outstanding university of regional and national stature. The book's narrative chronicles the achievements of each of the school's first four presidents while providing an intimate portrait of student life during each era, including the reminiscences and recollections of numerous alumni throughout the twentieth century. An epilogue summarizes the agenda that JMU's current and fifth president, Linwood H. Rose, has set for the institution as it approaches its centennial anniversary in 2008. This engaging history will appeal to students and parents, alumni, and readers interested in the history of higher education in Virginia and the nation.

Rooted on Blue Stone Hill: A History of James Madison University

Jones, Nancy Bondurant

"What do place, art, and self have in common? To what extent do place and art define who we are?" In Place, Art, and Self, the renowned humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan tackles this large question in a small, accessible, beautifully illustrated book. Through memoir and the insights gained from a peripatetic life as an international scholar, Tuan explores the idea of attachment through place and art and the role of attachment in shaping, defining, and expanding the self.
Inasmuch as a place contains sources of "nurture and identity," Tuan writes, so, too, does a painting, photograph, poem, novel, motion picture, dance, or piece of music. "The arts are likewise emblematic and revelatory. The ones I strongly like and dislike expose me, make me feel naked before the public eye, which is why I am guarded in my confessions."
Drawing from a lifetime spent thinking and writing about the connection between geography and our spiritual needs, Tuan presents a compelling and meditative foray into how place, home, and homelessness condition us as humans. Complementing his essay is a gallery of fine-art black-and-white and color plates by four emerging contemporary photographers, whose work accords with Tuan’s message.

Place, Art, And Self

Tuan, Yi-Fu

Mercure, Tammy

The City as Suburb: A History of Northeast Baltimore Since 1660

Eric L. Holcomb

Perry Dilbeck's black-and-white photographs affectionately document the disappearing livelihood of the southern truck farmer. Small and independent operators, truck farmers typically own fewer than forty acres of land and sell their vegetables and fruits at roadside stands or local farmers' markets. In recent years, the rise of large-scale commercial farming coupled with overdevelopment, which swallows up farmland daily, has greatly diminished this traditional business.
To honor these farmers, Dilbeck chose to photograph them with a Holga, the simplest of plastic cameras. The Holga was first produced in 1982 as an inexpensive mass-market camera for working-class Chinese, who used them for family portraits or at family events. The sometimes surprising effects of the Holga, including vignetting and blurring, have popularized it with fine-art photographers.
Dilbeck, who formed close relationships with the farmers he portrays, always carried a tape recorder with him. The farmers' stories and memories, which are quoted in the book, are filled with the same pride and dignity that come through in Dilbeck's photographs. The farmers' faces show signs of a vigorous life. Dilbeck's images also show the vibrant stamp of the men's presence on the landscape: their garden plots, their antique machinery, and their homes and outbuildings. A culmination of more than ten years of work, The Last Harvest pays tribute to the dignity of local ways in the face of globalism and urban expansion.

The Last Harvest: Truck Farmers in the Deep South

Arts & Photography

Perry Dilbeck

Photography & Video

All regions of the United States can be viewed by opposites, but perhaps nowhere is this view more prevalent than in our understanding of the American South. It is to this region in particular that we apply such constructs as rural vs. urban, commoner vs. aristocrat, farm vs. factory, old vs. new, rich vs. poor, literate vs. illiterate, black vs. white, insider vs. outsider, and so on.In 1996, David Zurick, a renowned geographer with an artistic eye, began a decade-long series of journeys throughout the region to find out for himself what constitutes “the South.” Living at the fulcrum of North and South near Berea, Kentucky, at the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, Zurick was curious as to why the South is seen by outsiders as a region “apart from the rest of America” and by insiders as a place that is “losing its identity.”What ultimately captured Zurick’s attention was the region’s “southernness,” in which there are many Souths, not just the geographically defined Upland and Lowland South or the culturally defined Old and New South. Thus, we see in Zurick’s photographs and accompanying vignettes geographical excursions into the South’s myriad manifestations. Southern Crossings offers a fresh visual perspective on one of the nation’s most distinct regions. Zurick’s blending of geographical insights and artistic vision is a model for landscape photographers to emulate for years to come.

Southern Crossings: Where Geography and Photography Meet (Center Books on the American South)

Zurick, David

"I trace my ancestry back to the Mayflower," writes Andrew S. Dolkart. "Not to the legendary ship that brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, but to the more prosaic tenement on the southeast corner of East Broadway and Clinton Street named the Mayflower, where my father was born in 1914 to Russian-Jewish immigrants."
 For Dolkart, the experience of being raised in a tenement became a metaphor for the life that was afforded countless thousands of other immigrant children growing up in Lower Manhattan during the past century and more.
 Dolkart presents for us a precise and informative biography of a typical tenement house in New York City that became, in 1988, the site for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Dolkart documents, analyzes, and interprets the architectural and social history of this building at 97 Orchard Street, starting in the 1860s when it was erected, moving on to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the neighborhood started to change, and concluding in the present day as the building is reincarnated as the museum. This book is a lasting tribute to the legacy of immigrants and their children, who were part of the transformation of New York City and the fabric of everyday American urban life.

Biography of a Tenement House in New York City: An Architectural History of 97 Orchard Street

Dolkart, Andrew S.

The Florida I love is perishing, says Sudye Cauthen. In Southern Comforts, this fifth-generation Floridian blends memoir, oral history, and cultural geography to explore the tensions between community and environment in America today and her own ambivalence about Alachua, the place just north of Gainesville where she was born and reared. Cauthen raises a cry for all that is lost as Florida's―and America's―landscapes and traditions are replaced by interstates, condos, shopping malls, and the new way of life they represent.
Part self-reflection, part meditation, and part social analysis, Cauthen's work threads through the stories of blacks, whites, and Native Americans―men and women―including her own family members. Through their words and hers, Cauthen explores northern Florida's unique history, culture, and geography while she seeks a greater understanding of herself and her surroundings.
Cauthen's journey takes readers down dirt roads and city streets, to her people's tobacco fields and churches. She sifts sand at an archaeological dig for the lost Spanish mission of Santa Fe de Toloca, peers into an aboriginal grave, and everywhere marshals evidence for the primacy of place in determining who we are. One story takes us on a fox hunt; another reveals lingering racial problems. Permeating the book is the ever-present menace of growth and development and what it holds for Cauthen's Florida.

Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place

Biographies & Memoirs

Cauthen, Sudye

Community & Culture

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Books by Center for Amer Places Inc