{"title":"Books by Richard White","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780393243062","title":"California Exposures – Envisioning Myth and History","description":"“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This indelible quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance applies especially well to California, where legend has so thoroughly become fact that it is visible in everyday landscapes. Our foremost historian of the West, Richard White, never content to “print the legend,” collaborates here with his son, a talented photographer, in excavating the layers of legend built into California’s landscapes. Together they expose the bedrock of the past, and the history they uncover is astonishing.   Jesse White’s evocative photographs illustrate the sites of Richard’s historical investigations. A vista of Drakes Estero conjures the darkly amusing story of the Drake Navigators Guild and its dubious efforts to establish an Anglo-Saxon heritage for California. The restored Spanish missions of Los Angeles frame another origin story in which California’s native inhabitants, civilized through contact with friars, gift their territories to white settlers. But the history is not so placid. A quiet riverside park in the Tulare Lake Basin belies scenes of horror from when settlers in the 1850s transformed native homelands into American property. Near the lake bed stands a small marker commemorating the Mussel Slough massacre, the culmination of a violent struggle over land titles between local farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1870s. Tulare is today a fertile agricultural county, but its population is poor and unhealthy. The California Dream lives elsewhere. The lake itself disappeared when tributary rivers were rerouted to deliver government-subsidized water to big agriculture and cities. But climate change ensures that it will be back—the only question is when.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56420357996917,"sku":"9780393243062","price":35.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780393243062_e6bd2ee8-1d65-4921-bed9-0fb21d6e8a18.jpg?v=1786032894"},{"product_id":"the-republic-for-which-it-stands","title":"The Republic for Which It Stands","description":"The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multivolume history of the American nation. In the newest volume in the series, The Republic for Which It Stands, acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America.At the end of the Civil War the leaders and citizens of the victorious North envisioned the country's future as a free-labor republic, with a homogenous citizenry, both black and white. The South and West were to be reconstructed in the image of the North. Thirty years later Americans occupied an unimagined world. The unity that the Civil War supposedly secured had proved ephemeral. The country was larger, richer, and more extensive, but also more diverse. Life spans were shorter, and physical well-being had diminished, due to disease and hazardous working conditions. Independent producers had become wage earners. The country was Catholic and Jewish as well as Protestant, and increasingly urban and industrial. The \"dangerous\" classes of the very rich and poor expanded, and deep differences -- ethnic, racial, religious, economic, and political -- divided society. The corruption that gave the Gilded Age its name was pervasive. These challenges also brought vigorous efforts to secure economic, moral, and cultural reforms. Real change -- technological, cultural, and political -- proliferated from below more than emerging from political leadership. Americans, mining their own traditions and borrowing ideas, produced creative possibilities for overcoming the crises that threatened their country.In a work as dramatic and colorful as the era it covers, White narrates the conflicts and paradoxes of these decades of disorienting change and mounting unrest, out of which emerged a modern nation whose characteristics resonate with the present day.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57481643786613,"sku":"9780190053765","price":22.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780190053765.jpg?v=1786089928"},{"product_id":"the-thinking-books","title":"The Thinking Books","description":"Everyone wants children to become more effective and purposeful learners. How should we go about it? Susan Swan and Richard White describe in this book (first published in 1994) how one procedure, the Thinking Books, affected a class of eight-year-olds, overcoming many of their difficulties with learning. Through the many accounts in the children’s own writing of their ideas about learning, we witness their progress from passive and ineffective pupils to active and reflective learners. Moving case studies illustrate how a teacher can make a profound difference to a child’s life. The authors use their experience with the procedure to derive general principles about teaching and learning.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57555404489077,"sku":"9781041464488","price":103.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781041464488.jpg?v=1792425265"},{"product_id":"finishing-nature","title":"Finishing Nature","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe immense waters of Tulare Lake were repurposed long ago for irrigation of industrial farms in the Central Valley, leaving a dry expanse. But even now wet years conjure the ghost of the lake: Recent atmospheric rivers have flooded nearly 100,000 acres of nearby farmland. The Eaton fire, the failure of Oroville Dam, depleted aquifers, land subsidence, megadroughts that bring contaminated wells-whether sudden or incremental, these disasters all arise from California's attempts to reengineer nature. The state's immense infrastructure of levees, dams, transmission towers, and aqueducts, built across centuries to remedy its natural deficiencies and dangers, has itself become a threat in an age of global warming. California has become a victim of its own success.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFinishing nature was originally a Jeffersonian idea of improvement adopted by California horticulturists. But with the growth of a modernist complex of industry, cities, and bureaucratic management, improvement became control as efforts to reorganize nature exploded in scale and ambition. Large landholders, big agriculture, public utilities, the fishing industry, and other interests all worked politics and the courts for control of resources. State and federal agencies created to manage the power of these interests—the Forest Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, the State Water Project—became intertwined with them, strengthening their influence. With the state’s highway system supporting a heavy reliance on the automobile, California made significant contributions to climate change and the new order of environmental challenges we are experiencing.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom one of our finest historians, \u003cem\u003eFinishing Nature\u003c\/em\u003e is an absorbing story of hubris, corruption, and the failure of expertise.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57555413729653,"sku":"9781324073895","price":22.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-richard-white.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}