The early history of photography in America coincided with the Euro-American settlement of the West. This thoughtful book argues that the rich history of western photography cannot be understood by focusing solely on the handful of well-known photographers whose work has come to define the era. Art historian Rachel Sailor points out that most photographers in the West were engaged in producing images for their local communities. These pictures didn’t just entertain the settlers but gave them a way to understand their new home. Photographs could help the settlers adjust to their new circumstances by recording the development of a place—revealing domestication, alteration, and improvement. The book explores the cultural complexity of regional landscape photography, western places, and local sociopolitical concerns. Photographic imagery, like western paintings from the same era, enabled Euro-Americans to see the new landscape through their own cultural lenses, shaping the idea of the frontier for the people who lived there.

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"A diverse set of place makers describe how they transformed contested or empty "spaces" into vibrant and functional "places." Spanning four countries and ten U.S. locales, these projects range from building affordable housing, to community building in the aftermath of racial violence, to the integration of the arts in community development. By recounting how they built trust, diagnosed local problems, and convened stakeholders to invent solutions, place makers offer pragmatic, instructive strategies to employ in other communities"--

A focused study on the concept of place as an ideal starting point and useful analytical unit for archeological studies by explaining the form, structure, and temporality of the meanings humans ascribe to their environment.

In Reading and Writing Place: Connecting Rural Schools and Communities Erika L. Bass and Amy Price Azano suggest there is a need to add nuance to the ways we consider and engage with place in the classroom. Using a narrative writing project completed with two rural schools in two states, the authors provide an explanation of critical placed education and how students' explorations of place through writing led the authors to develop a concept of place (Big "P" and small "p" place). Students' explorations of place highlighted the how internalizations and externalizations of place impact identity formation and sense of belonging.

'Wicked Problems' are those problems facing the planet and its inhabitants, present and future, which are hard (if not impossible) to resolve and for which bold, creative, and messy solutions are typically required. The adjective 'wicked' describes the mischievous and even evil quality of these problems, where proposed solutions often turn out to be worse than the symptoms. This wide-ranging and innovative book encourages readers to think about archaeology in an entirely new way, as fresh, relevant, and future-oriented. It examines some of the novel ways that archaeology (alongside cultural heritage practice) can contribute to resolving some of the world's most wicked problems, or global challenges as they are sometimes known. With chapters covering climate change, environmental pollution, health and wellbeing, social injustice, and conflict, the book uses many and diverse examples to explain how, through studying the past and present through an archaeological lens, in ways that are creative, ambitious, and both inter- and transdisciplinary, significant 'small wins' can be achieved. Through these small wins, archaeologists can help to mitigate some of those most pressing of wicked problems, contributing therefore to a safer, healthier, and more stable world.

Meaningful Interpretation captures the essential philosophy and best practices of the National Park Service Interpretive Development Program (IDP). The IDP was created by hundrends of field interpreters through a series of workshops and training courses, and defines professional standards for National Park Service interpretation through a national benchmark curriculum."--pub. desc.