I’ve loved the countryside ever since I was a child. Every year we used to stay for a week or two on a beautiful farm hidden away in a hollow of the Leicestershire wolds. I was fascinated by the wildlife and history – the old cottages and churches, local traditions and place names. It’s no accident I became a rural historian! I’m captivated by the strange power of landscape to affect us, subtly weaving itself into our sense of being, and have devoted much of my adult life to trying to understand this. I hope you find the books on the list as rewarding as I have!
I wrote
Lifescapes: The Experience of Landscape in Britain, 1870-1960
This has to be the most original and influential book ever written on landscape history – indeed it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that Hoskins invented landscape history.
He shows us that beneath the lineaments of ordinary, everyday landscapes, a fascinating past can be discerned. A few bumps and hollows in a grassy field can indicate the site of a vanished medieval village; a double line of hedgerows might signify the boundary of an Anglo-Saxon estate. With this book in hand, we can all become landscape historians!
Most of all, I love Hoskins’s distinctive voice, eloquent and passionate in defence of the landscapes he cherishes, deploring the violence inflicted on them and those who lived in them by the ruthless forces of industrialization and modernity.
Deals with the historical evolution of the English landscape as we know it. It dispels the popular belief that the pattern of the land is a result of 18th-century enclosures and attributes it instead to a much longer evolution. This book traces the chronological development of the English landscape from pre-Roman days to the eve of the Black Death, onwards to the Industrial Revolution and up to the present day. With the help of photographs and charts, Professor Hopkins discusses the origins of Devonshire hedge-banks and lanes, the ruined churches in Norfolk and lost villages in Lincolnshire, Somerset's marshland ditches,…
Oliver Rackham is to historical landscape ecology what W.G. Hoskins is to landscape history.
More than anyone else, Rackham had the vision to understand that the pattern of woods, fields, hedges, moors, and marshes that defines the English countryside, although seemingly natural, was in fact created by a delicate and constantly shifting balance between human intervention and geological, climatological and ecological influences.
The Chiltern beechwoods I’ve enjoyed walking in since childhood, for example, exist partly because the timber was valuable for the chair-making industry that once flourished there, while the species-rich hay meadows of Swaledale that entranced me on a recent cycle tour were part and parcel of the local dairy-farming tradition, and have been put at risk by its decline.
From its earliest origins to the present day, this award-winning, beautifully written book describes the endlessly changing character of Britain's countryside.
'A classic' Richard Mabey
Exploring the natural and man-made features of the land - fields, highways, hedgerows, fens, marshes, rivers, heaths, coasts, woods and wood pastures - he shows conclusively and unforgettably how they have developed over the centuries. In doing so, he covers a wealth of related subjects to provide a fascinating account of the sometimes subtle and sometimes radical ways in which people, fauna, flora, climate, soils and other physical conditions have played their part in the…
Two women separated by time learn what happens when they embrace their inner magic in this inspiring environmental fiction novel.
Although Sara's college degree provided her an out, she always knew she’d return home to the small logging community that is like family to her. But when she learns the…
No one writes quite like Simon Schama. This is a sprawling epic of a book, global in its sweep.
It ranges from the Polish-Lithuanian forests, where bison roam oblivious of centuries of human conflict and suffering, to the Orinoco, in Walter Raleigh’s doomed and bloody footsteps, to the grandeur (or hubris?) of Mount Rushmore. Much of it, however, concerns the tangled threads of myth and collective memory that haunt the English landscape.
As someone born in Nottingham and brought up on Robin Hood, I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the medieval greenwood. Schama’s erudition and range of examples are dazzling. Throughout, he argues that Western civilization, far from being fundamentally antagonistic to nature as some have claimed, is permeated with rich, powerful and persistent myths of nature and landscape.
A Time Magazine Best Books of the Year. In Landscape and Memory, award-winning author Simon Schama ranges over continents and centuries to reveal the psychic claims that human beings have made on nature. He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art, as encyclopedic as The Golden Bough and as irresistibly readable as Schama's own…
Landscapes like the White Cliffs of Dover, the Cotswolds, or the Lake District are celebrated icons of national identity.
David Matless shows how, in the first half of the twentieth century, these landscapes became sites of contestation between different visions of the nation. For some, committed to landscape preservation but also to a self-consciously modernizing planning ethos, Englishness was about neat, tidy landscapes, free from litter, pollution, and poverty. For others the real England was traditional, hierarchical, and unplanned, exemplified by the great estates with their country houses and landscape gardens.
The fundamental question this book raised for me, one I’m still turning over in my mind, was whether and how we can find ways to harmonize our sometimes very different visions of the landscapes we care so much about.
Landscape has been central to definitions of Englishness for centuries. David Matless argues that landscape has been the site where English visions of the past, present and future have met in debates over questions of national identity, disputes over history and modernity, and ideals of citizenship and the body. Landscape and Englishness is extensively illustrated and draws on a wide range of material - topographical guides, health manuals, paintings, poetry, architectural polemic, photography, nature guides and novels. The author first examines the inter-war period, showing how a vision of Englishness and landscape as both modern and traditional, urban and rural,…
Traumatization and Its Aftermath
by
Antonieta Contreras,
A fresh take on the difference between trauma and hardship in order to help accurately spot the difference and avoid over-generalizations.
The book integrates the latest findings in brain science, child development, psycho-social context, theory, and clinical experiences to make the case that trauma is much more than a cluster…
I’ve been lucky enough to hear Paul speak on many occasions. He has a bright engaged manner and restless energy, ideas and examples pouring out almost too quickly to absorb. It’s the intellectual equivalent of standing under a waterfall.
Storied Ground reflects that energy and originality, prompting us to rethink many longstanding assumptions about the relationship between landscape and national identity. Was the English love of landscape a backwards-looking, conservative force, or a reassuring source of continuity that eased our passage into the modern age? Was it true, as Stanley Baldwin once claimed, that ‘England is the country, and the country is England’, or did the civic pride of prospering towns contribute to national identity too?
To these and many other questions, Paul gives surprising, sometimes challenging and always thought-provoking answers.
People have always attached meaning to the landscape that surrounds them. In Storied Ground Paul Readman uncovers why landscape matters so much to the English people, exploring its particular importance in shaping English national identity amid the transformations of modernity. The book takes us from the fells of the Lake District to the uplands of Northumberland; from the streetscapes of industrial Manchester to the heart of London. This panoramic journey reveals the significance, not only of the physical characteristics of landscapes, but also of the sense of the past, collective memories and cultural traditions that give these places their meaning.…
Why does landscape matter to us? We rarely articulate the often highly personal ways it can do so. Drawing on eight remarkable unpublished diaries, Lifescapes shows that responses to landscape in modern Britain were powerfully affected by individual circumstances, especially those experienced in childhood and youth. Four major patterns are identified: ‘Adherers’ valued landscape for its continuity; ‘Withdrawers’ as a refuge from perceived threats; ‘Restorers’ as a means of sustaining core value systems; and ‘Explorers’ for self-discovery and development. Lifescapes is a major study that will change the way we think about our relationship with landscape, demonstrating that landscape is a mirror reflecting our innermost selves and the psychosocial forces shaping our development.
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
An Italian Feast celebrates the cuisines of the Italian provinces from Como to Palermo. A culinary guide and book of ready reference meant to be the most comprehensive book on Italian cuisine, and it includes over 800 recipes from the 109 provinces of Italy's 20 regions.