Winner of the Western Writers of America 2014 Spur Award for Best Western Nonfiction, Contemporary Mention the Colorado high country today and vacation imagery springs immediately to mind: mountain scenery, camping, hiking, skiing, and world-renowned resorts like Aspen and Vail. But not so long ago, the high country was isolated and little visited. Vacationland tells the story of the region's dramatic transformation in the decades after World War II, when a loose coalition of tourist boosters fashioned alluring images of nature in the high country and a multitude of local, state, and federal actors built the infrastructure for high-volume tourism: ski mountains, stocked trout streams, motels, resort villages, and highway improvements that culminated in an entirely new corridor through the Rockies, Interstate 70. Vacationland is more than just the tale of one tourist region. It is a case study of how the consumerism of the postwar years rearranged landscapes and revolutionized American environmental attitudes. Postwar tourists pioneered new ways of relating to nature, forging surprisingly strong personal connections to their landscapes of leisure and in many cases reinventing their lifestyles and identities to make vacationland their permanent home. They sparked not just a population boom in popular tourist destinations like Colorado but also a new kind of environmental politics, as they demanded protection for the aesthetic and recreational qualities of place that promoters had sold them. Those demands energized the American environmental movement-but also gave it blind spots that still plague it today. Peopled with colorful characters, richly evocative of the Rocky Mountain landscape, Vacationland forces us to consider how profoundly tourism changed Colorado and America and to grapple with both the potential and the problems of our familiar ways of relating to environment, nature, and place.

Traces the history of a bustling New England seaport from its colonial beginnings to the present

The American West conjures up images of pastoral tranquility and wide open spaces, but by 1970 the Far West was the most urbanized section of the country. Exploring four intriguing cityscapes—Disneyland, Stanford Industrial Park, Sun City, and the 1962 Seattle World's Fair—John Findlay shows how each created a sense of cohesion and sustained people's belief in their superior urban environment. This first book-length study of the urban West after 1940 argues that Westerners deliberately tried to build cities that differed radically from their eastern counterparts. In 1954, Walt Disney began building the world's first theme park, using Hollywood's movie-making techniques. The creators of Stanford Industrial Park were more hesitant in their approach to a conceptually organized environment, but by the mid-1960s the Park was the nation's prototypical "research park" and the intellectual downtown for the high-technology region that became Silicon Valley. In 1960, on the outskirts of Phoenix, Del E. Webb built Sun City, the largest, most influential retirement community in the United States. Another innovative cityscape arose from the 1962 Seattle World's Fair and provided a futuristic, somewhat fanciful vision of modern life. These four became "magic lands" that provided an antidote to the apparent chaos of their respective urban milieus. Exemplars of a new lifestyle, they are landmarks on the changing cultural landscape of postwar America.

First published in 1965 under title: Nicknames of cities and States of the U.S.

A place called Crockett's Corner began as a seventeenth century colonial settlement that grew into a stable and sustainable nineteenth century American agrarian landscape. During thetwentieth century, in a rapid but staged process, the landscape was changed into an edge city. These changes were the direct result, especially after 1938, of prevailing public policies which acted to constrain some land uses while supporting others.Landscape change has had unintended consequences, including local social network destruction,historic building demolition, and unmitigated air and non-point source water pollution. Raising awareness of the deep history of this place may help empower advocates for historic preservation, open space, environmental protection and more sustainable land use practices in the future.

Every family is unique. Loyal and Katherine Nash raised their four children to be honest, fair, and proud of their origins. Born during a Vermont blizzard, Beatrice was welcomed by her older brothers and nine cows. But as would happen several times in her childhood, her family soon moved, packing up and heading for the Northwest. In a fascinating memoir accompanied by original photographs, Beatrice chronicles her childhood from birth through her varied experiences as her family eventually traveled from the Northwest to an isolated farm in Maine shortly after the Second World War. As she details how she contended with her older brothers and explored as far as her curiosity and legs would take her, Beatrice shares a glimpse into her coming-of-age journey as she played heated games of cowboys and Indians, ran through the sprinkler, built imaginary cities in the hay, and knelt in school bathroom stalls to protect herself from the Communists. But it was not until she turned thirteen and enrolled in boarding school that Beatrice finally saw a world beyond that of her parents’ dreams. Some Stories is the memoir of a girl’s mid-twentieth century New England childhood as she learned lessons, found happiness in the simple gifts, and ultimately attained independence.