Bøger af James H. S. McGregor

The garden was the cultural foundation of the early Mediterranean peoples; they acknowledged their reliance on and kinship to the land, and they understood nature through the lens of their diversely cultivated landscape. Their image of the garden underwrote the biblical book of Genesis and the region's three major religions. In this important melding of cultural and ecological histories, James H. S. McGregor suggests that the environmental crisis the world faces today is a result of Western society's abandonment of the "e;First Nature"e; principle--of the harmonious interrelationship of human communities and the natural world. The author demonstrates how this relationship, which persisted for millennia, effectively came to an end in the late eighteenth century, when "e;nature"e; came to be equated with untamed landscape devoid of human intervention. McGregor's essential work offers a new understanding of environmental accountability while proposing that recovering the original vision of ourselves, not as antagonists of nature but as cultivators of a biological world to which we innately belong, is possible through proven techniques of the past.

Revered as the birthplace of democracy, Athens is much more than an open-air museum filled with crumbling monuments to ancient glory. Athens takes readers on a journey from the classical city-state to today's contemporary capital, revealing a world-famous metropolis that has been resurrected and redefined time and again.

There is a Paris for the medievalist, and another for the modernist-a Paris for expatriates, philosophers, artists, romantics, and revolutionaries. McGregor brings these perspectives into focus throughout this concise, unique history. Color maps and identifying illustrations make the city accessible to visitors by foot, Metro, or riverboat.

Venice emerged on mudflats at the edge of the habitable world. Protected in a tidal estuary from invaders and Byzantine overlords, the fishermen and traders who settled there crafted a way of life unique in the Roman Empire. McGregor recreates this world, with its waterways rather than roads and its livelihood harvested from the sea.

Rome is not one city but many, each with its own history unfolding from a different center. Beginning with the shaping of the ground on which Rome first rose, this book conjures all these cities, conducting the reader through time and space to the complex and shifting realities-architectural, historical, political, and social-that constitute Rome.