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Dismissed by the first Spanish explorers as worthless, the Grand Canyon was nearly doomed to be forgotten, an incidental landform. Luckily, as Stephen Pyne explores in this book, in the next four hundred years we learned to see - and also to make maps, to understand geology and measure the earth's history, to embrace nature rather than shun it.
A complex coalescence of science, art, literature, nationalism, and personalities allowed us to create a cultural canyon as deep and resonant as the physical one.
How the Canyon Became Grand is both a chronicle of discovery, recounting the achievements of explorers, geologists, artists, and writers, from John Wesley Powell and Clarence Dutton to Wallace Stegner, and a provocative explanation of how they turned the Canyon into a symbol of American grandeur, and later of wilderness - in other words, how they transformed an almost overlooked phenomenon into a fixture of the American identity.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
History, Nature, Nonfiction, Historia, New York Times reviewed, Grand canyon (ariz.)Places
Grand Canyon (Ariz.)Showing 3 featured editions. View all 3 editions?
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1
How the Canyon Became Grand
2010, Penguin USA, Inc.
Electronic resource
in English
1101176504 9781101176504
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2
How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History
July 1, 1999, Penguin (Non-Classics)
in English
0140280561 9780140280562
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3 |
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-187) and index.
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The Physical Object
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Internet Archive item record
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marc_columbia MARC record
First Sentence
"The gorges of the Colorado Plateau are remarkably elusive."
Work Description
Dismissed by the first Spanish explorers as a wasteland, the Grand Canyon lay virtually unnoticed for three centuries until nineteenth- century America rediscovered it and seized it as a national emblem. This extraordinary work of intellectual and environmental history tells two tales of the Canyon: the discovery and exploration of the physical Canyon and the invention and evolution of the cultural Canyon--how we learned to endow it with mythic significance. Acclaimed historian Stephen Pyne examines the major shifts in Western attitudes toward nature, and recounts the achievements of explorers, geologists, artists, and writers, from John Wesley Powell to Wallace Stegner, and how they transformed the Canyon into a fixture of national identity. This groundbreaking book takes us on a completely original journey through the Canyon toward a new understanding of its niche in the American psyche, a journey that mirrors the making of the nation itself.
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- Created April 1, 2008
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July 14, 2024 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
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