The Americas -- Introducing North America -- North America: landforms -- North America: climate, plants and animals -- North America: history and culture -- Introducing South America -- South America: landforms -- South America: climate, plants and animals -- South America: history and culture -- Continental connections and plate tectonics -- Land bridges: the narrow link -- Land bridges: dropping seas.

"In this evocative memoir, Cassandra Lane deftly uses the act of imagination to reclaim her ancestors’ story as a backdrop for telling her own. The tradition of Black women’s storytelling leaps forward within these pages—into fresh, daring, and excitingly new territory." —Bridgett M. Davis, author of The World According to Fannie Davis When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdelene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt's lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his southern town. We Are Bridges turns to creative nonfiction to reclaim a family history from violent erasure so that a mother can gift her child with an ancestral blueprint for their future. Haunting and poetic, this debut traces the strange fruit borne from the roots of personal loss in one Black family—and considers how to take back one’s American story.

Data of geology, oceanography, paleontology, plant geography, and anthropology focus on problems and lessons of Beringia. Includes papers presented at Symposium held at VII Congress of International Association for Quaternary Research, Boulder, Colorado, 1965.

This autobiography by one of rock-and-roll's most important foremothers, June Millington, tells the story that's never been told: how girls in the mid-60's started all-girl bands, learned to play electric, and became Fanny, one of the first all-female rock bands to be signed to a major label. Fanny soon began recording and touring worldwide with bands like Chicago and Dr. John. After Fanny, June became involved in the women's music movement when she was asked to play on and tour behind Cris Williamson's "The changer and the changed," which would become the defining album of that genre. Women's music quickly evolved into an independent feminist music network that included (often collectively run) production companies,venues, festivals, record labels, and distribution networks. Land of a thousand bridges chronicles the story of a young girl born to a mixed-race couple in the Phillipines, who traveled to the US with big dreams of becoming a rock star, and made those dreams come true.

In Mysteries of Terra Firma, James Lawrence Powell tells an engrossing three-part tale of how we came to understand the ground on which we walk, and how that ground holds the key to the greatest secrets of deep space and time. Naming his profound stories Time, Drift, and Chance, he tells of the three twentieth-century revolutions in thought that created the amazing science of Earth -- and of all planets to the edge of the universe. The riddle that drove the first revolution is obvious and yet in 1904 remained impenetrable: how old is Earth? An encounter between the imperious Lord Kelvin and a New Zealand farm-boy-turned-physicist, Ernest Rutherford, set the stage for the solution and launched a golden century of geology. As a result, scientists learned that if the 4.5 billion years of geologic time were compressed into a single twenty-four-hour period, Homo sapiens would have arrived only in the last second. The geological Revolution of Time reveals how long the ground on which we walk has existed, and how briefly we have trod that ground. In the early twentieth century, German meteorologist and polar explorer Alfred Wegener proposed a counterintuitive, heretical theory: that terra firma is not so firm; instead of being fixed in place, continents drift. In 1926, petroleum geologists convened in New York City to discuss Wegener's radical idea, where it was met with outrage and skepticism: "If we are to believe Wegener's hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the last seventy years and start all over again," one attendee said. Forty years later, a new generation did exactly that. The Revolution of Drift, the second part of Powell's narrative, showed us how the ground on which we walk moves. Throughout geologic time, meteorites have incessantly bombarded everything in the solar system. Far from serene and predictable, the planets are ruled by random violence on an unimaginable scale. Once a mountain-sized meteorite flew through space, struck the Earth, killed the dinosaurs and two-thirds of all species, and spared the small hamster-sized creature that happened to be our ancestor. The chance of that happening again is essentially zero. So, the final revolution in Powell's history of a golden century of geology is the Revolution of Chance. Simply put, this revolution in thought has transformed our understanding of how lucky we really are. If we can learn so much from considering no more than the rocks beneath our feet, what will we learn when we begin walking on other planets? Mysteries of Terra Firma is both charming in its storytelling and staggering in its implications. Discovering the ground on which we stand is a fascinating journey into our past -- and our future.

In this path-breaking work, Paul Thagard draws on the history and philosophy of science, cognitive psychology, and the field of artificial intelligence to develop a theory of conceptual change capable of accounting for all major scientific revolutions. The history of science contains dramatic episodes of revolutionary change in which whole systems of concepts have been replaced by new systems. Thagard provides a new and comprehensive perspective on the transformation of scientific conceptual systems. Thagard examines the Copernican and the Darwinian revolutions and the emergence of Newton's mechanics, Lavoisier's oxygen theory, Einstein's theory of relativity, quantum theory, and the geological theory of plate tectonics. He discusses the psychological mechanisms by which new concepts and links between them are formed, and advances a computational theory of explanatory coherence to show how new theories can be judged to be superior to previous ones.

The rapidly increasing number of threatened flora and fauna species worldwide is one of the chief problems confronting environmental professionals today. This problem is largely due to the impact humans have had on land use through development (e.g. agricultural, residential, industrial, infrastructure and mining developments). The requirement for developers to implement measures to reduce the impacts of development on wildlife is underpinned by government legislation. A variety of measures or strategies are available to reduce such impacts, including those to reduce impacts on flora and fauna during land clearance, to deter fauna from potential hazards, to facilitate the movement of fauna around and through a development site as well as those to provide additional habitat. In recent years, considerable advances have been made in the techniques used to reduce the impacts of development on wildlife in Australia and overseas. Reducing the Impacts of Development on Wildlife contains a comprehensive range of practical measures to assist others to reduce the impacts resulting from development on terrestrial flora and fauna, and promotes ecologically sustainable development. It will be very useful to environmental consultants and managers, developers, strategists, policy makers and regulators, as well as community environmental groups and students. 2012 Whitley Award Commendation for Zoological Text.

Land Uprising reframes Indigenous land reclamation as a horizon to decolonize the settler colonial conditions of literary, intellectual, and activist labor. Simón Ventura Trujillo argues that land provides grounding for rethinking the connection between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms. Trujillo situates his inquiry in the cultural production of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a formative yet understudied organization of the Chicanx movement of the 1960s and 1970s. La Alianza sought to recover Mexican and Spanish land grants in New Mexico that had been dispossessed after the Mexican-American War. During graduate school, Trujillo realized that his grandparents were activists in La Alianza. Written in response to this discovery, Land Uprising bridges La Alianza’s insurgency and New Mexican land grant struggles to the writings of Leslie Marmon Silko, Ana Castillo, Simon Ortiz, and the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. In doing so, the book reveals uncanny connections between Chicanx, Latinx, Latin American, and Native American and Indigenous studies to grapple with Native land reclamation as the future horizon for Chicanx and Latinx indigeneities.