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Between Land and Sea : The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England / Christopher L. Pastore.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2014]Copyright date: ©2014Description: 1 online resource (276 p.) : 21 halftones, 3 mapsContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780674281417
  • 9780674736078
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 577.69/9
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Prologue: From Sweetwater to Seawater -- 1. Clams, Dams, and the Desiccation of New England -- 2. Shoveling Dung against the Tide -- 3. The Geographic Quicksilver of Narragansett Bay -- 4. Natural Knowledge and a Bay in Transition -- 5. Improving Coastal Space during a Century of War -- 6. Carving the Industrial Coastline -- Epilogue: Between Progress and the Pull of the Sea -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index
Summary: One of the largest estuaries on the North Atlantic coast, Narragansett Bay served as a gateway for colonial expansion in the seventeenth century and the birthplace of American industrialization in the late eighteenth. Christopher Pastore presents an environmental history of this watery corner of the Atlantic world, beginning with the first European settlement in 1636 and ending with the dissolution of the Blackstone Canal Company in 1849. Between Land and Sea traces how the Bay's complex ecology shaped the contours of European habitation, trade, and resource use, and how littoral settlers in turn reconfigured the physical and cultural boundaries between humans and nature. Narragansett Bay emerges in Pastore's account as much more than a geological formation. Rather, he reimagines the nexus of land and sea as a brackish borderland shaped by the tension between what English settlers saw as improvable land and the perpetual forces of the North Atlantic Ocean. By draining swamps, damming rivers, and digging canals, settlers transformed a marshy coastal margin into a clearly defined edge. The resultant "coastline" proved less resilient, less able to absorb the blows of human initiative and natural variation than the soggy fractal of water and earth it replaced. Today, as sea levels rise and superstorms batter coasts with increasing ferocity, Between Land and Sea calls on the environmentally-minded to make a space in their notions of progress for impermanence and uncertainty in the natural world.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780674736078

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Prologue: From Sweetwater to Seawater -- 1. Clams, Dams, and the Desiccation of New England -- 2. Shoveling Dung against the Tide -- 3. The Geographic Quicksilver of Narragansett Bay -- 4. Natural Knowledge and a Bay in Transition -- 5. Improving Coastal Space during a Century of War -- 6. Carving the Industrial Coastline -- Epilogue: Between Progress and the Pull of the Sea -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

One of the largest estuaries on the North Atlantic coast, Narragansett Bay served as a gateway for colonial expansion in the seventeenth century and the birthplace of American industrialization in the late eighteenth. Christopher Pastore presents an environmental history of this watery corner of the Atlantic world, beginning with the first European settlement in 1636 and ending with the dissolution of the Blackstone Canal Company in 1849. Between Land and Sea traces how the Bay's complex ecology shaped the contours of European habitation, trade, and resource use, and how littoral settlers in turn reconfigured the physical and cultural boundaries between humans and nature. Narragansett Bay emerges in Pastore's account as much more than a geological formation. Rather, he reimagines the nexus of land and sea as a brackish borderland shaped by the tension between what English settlers saw as improvable land and the perpetual forces of the North Atlantic Ocean. By draining swamps, damming rivers, and digging canals, settlers transformed a marshy coastal margin into a clearly defined edge. The resultant "coastline" proved less resilient, less able to absorb the blows of human initiative and natural variation than the soggy fractal of water and earth it replaced. Today, as sea levels rise and superstorms batter coasts with increasing ferocity, Between Land and Sea calls on the environmentally-minded to make a space in their notions of progress for impermanence and uncertainty in the natural world.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)