"This book collects and describes every known North American streamlined - or semi-streamlined - steam locomotive with photographs of every class and every significant design variation and it packages those descriptions with information about the locomotives' origins, service lives and ultimate destinies."--Book

This classic text retains the superb scholarship of the first edition in a thoroughly revised and accessibly written new edition. With both new and updated essays by distinguished American and Canadian authors, the book provides a comprehensive historical overview of the formation and growth of North American regions from European exploration and colonization to the second half of the twentieth century. Collectively the contributors explore the key themes of acquisition of geographical knowledge, cultural transfer and acculturation, frontier expansion, spatial organization of society, resource exploitation, regional and national integration, and landscape change. With six new chapters, redrawn maps, a new introduction that explores scholarly trends in historical geography since publication of the first edition, and a new final chapter guiding students to the basic sources for historical geographic enquiry, North America will be an indispensable text in historical geography courses.

The Manhattan skyline is one of the great wonders of the modern world. But how and why did it form? Much has been written about the city's architecture and its general history, but little work has explored the economic forces that created the skyline. In Building the Skyline, Jason Barr chronicles the economic history of the Manhattan skyline. In the process, he debunks some widely held misconceptions about the city's history. Starting with Manhattan's natural and geological history, Barr moves on to how these formations influenced early land use and the development of neighborhoods, including the dense tenement neighborhoods of Five Points and the Lower East Side, and how these early decisions eventually impacted the location of skyscrapers built during the Skyscraper Revolution at the end of the 19th century. Barr then explores the economic history of skyscrapers and the skyline, investigating the reasons for their heights, frequencies, locations, and shapes. He discusses why skyscrapers emerged downtown and why they appeared three miles to the north in midtown-but not in between the two areas. Contrary to popular belief, this was not due to the depths of Manhattan's bedrock, nor the presence of Grand Central Station. Rather, midtown's emergence was a response to the economic and demographic forces that were taking place north of 14th Street after the Civil War. Building the Skyline also presents the first rigorous investigation of the causes of the building boom during the Roaring Twenties. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the boom was largely a rational response to the economic growth of the nation and city. The last chapter investigates the value of Manhattan Island and the relationship between skyscrapers and land prices. Finally, an Epilogue offers policy recommendations for a resilient and robust future skyline.

In A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History, Michael Hoberman introduces cultural geography as an alternative approach to the immigrant model. Cultural geography allows Hoberman to restore Jewish American writers to their roles as important, active members of the American literary landscape from the 1850s to the present, and to argue that Jewish history, American literary history, and the inhabitation of American geography are, and always have been, contiguous entities. A Hundred Acres of America makes its case by investigating both canonical and extra-canonical literary depictions of six geographies: the frontier, the small town, the urban, the suburban, America as seen from Europe, and Israel as seen from America. Hoberman reads dozens of representative texts closely, and analyzes a wide range of authors, from frontier-era memoirists and turn-of-the-century native-born reformers to contemporary novelists. He adroitly demonstrates that Jewish American authors are not only present throughout American literary history, but actively shaped this history with writings that often subverted or contradicted the ways their non-Jewish peers depicted these geographies"--