95afa38
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Killing was a relatively simple matter--a blow to the head, a knife to the throat--complicated only by how much one cared about the pain or terrors animals felt in dying.... The animal also died a second death. Severed from the form in which it had lived, severed from the act that had killed it, it vanished from human memory as one of nature's creatures.
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William Cronon |
1266e01
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Von Thunen's abstract principles had strikingly concrete geographical consequences. A series of concentric agricultural zones would form around the town, each of which would support radically different farming activities. Nearest the town would be a zone producing crops so heavy, bulky, or perishable that no farmer living farther away could afford to ship them to market. Orchards, vegetable gardens, and dairies would dominate this first zon..
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William Cronon |
d90ac50
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What farmers could profitably raise at any given location would depend on two key variables: how much people in the city were willing to pay for different crops, and how much it cost to transport those crops to market.
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William Cronon |
524367a
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Repeatedly in the nineteenth century, western cities came into being when eastern capital created remote colonies in landscapes that as yet contained relatively few people. Movements of capital helped explain why large cities developed so much more quickly in the West than Turner's evolutionary frontier stages suggest.
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William Cronon |
514ad38
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By what peculiar twist of perception, I wondered, had I managed to see the plowed fields and second-growth forests of southern Wisconsin--a landscape of former prairies now long vanished--as somehow more "natural" than the streets, buildings, and parks of Chicago? All represented drastic human alterations of earlier landscapes."
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rural-history
urban-history
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William Cronon |
bf000aa
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Resources, waterways, and climatic zones loom so large in their writings that one can almost forget that people have something to do with the building of cities.
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environmental-history
historiography
urban-history
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William Cronon |
47a74f7
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T]he people of plenty were a people of waste.
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history
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William Cronon |