Richard V. Francaviglia
See sub-page for "The Cast Iron Forest: A Cross Timbers History" presented at the DeLuca Symposiums.
OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
The Shape of Texas: Maps as Metaphors
Texas-shaped ashtrays, belt buckles, earrings, kitchen utensils--"Texas kitsch"--fill gift shops alongside highways and in airports. The Lone Star State's unmistakable shape is appropriated by advertisers to hawk everything from beans to automobiles inside Texas' borders and beyond. As a billboard-sized neon sign glowing atop a popular honkey-tonk, the Texas map illuminates the Fort Worth night sky, attracting tourists in search of a good time--and a share of the Texas experience. Over the years America's most recognizable state outline has become one of its most potent symbols, a metaphor for Texas popular culture. In the last decade, the private, commercial, and official use of the Texas map as cultural symbol has boomed. Richard V. Francaviglia identifies this current trend as "Tex-map mania," and contends that the Texas map as icon integrates geography with history--and gives shape to a mythic landscape and to abstracted notions of what Texas is and who Texans are. Written in a lively style that engages both the scholar and the general reader in a discussion of the power of symbol and the meaning and significance of a shared aesthetic, The Shape of Texas is at the crossroads of cartography and popular culture. Francaviglia uses more than one hundred illustrations in offering a provocative visual and written account of this important, yet much neglected, aspect of Texas history and the dynamics of a still emerging Texas identity.
Over the Range: A History of the Promontory Summit Route of the Pacific
Francaviglia looks anew at the geographical-historical context of the driving of the golden spike in May 1869. He gazes outward from the site of the transcontinental railroad's completion—the summit of a remote mountain range that extends south into the Great Salt Lake. The transportation corridor that for the first time linked America's coasts gave this distinctive region significance, but it anchored two centuries of human activity linked to the area's landscape.
Francaviglia brings to that larger story a geographer's perspective on place and society, a railroad enthusiast's knowledge of trains, a cartographic historian's understanding of the knowledge and experience embedded in maps, and a desert lover's appreciation of the striking basin-and-range landscape that borders the Great Salt Lake.
Hard Places: Reading the Landscape of America's Historic Mining Districts
Richard Francaviglia identifies the visual clues that indicate an area has been mined and tells us how to read them, showing the interconnections among all of America's major mining districts. With a style as bold as the landscapes he reads and with photographs to match, he interprets the major forces that have shaped the architecture, design, and topography of mining areas. Covering many different types of mining and mining locations, he concludes that mining landscapes have come to symbolize the turmoil between what our society elects to view as two opposing forces: culture and nature.
Believing in Place: A Spiritual Geography of the Great Basin
The austere landscape of the Great Basin has inspired diverse responses from the people who have moved through or settled in it. In this insightful book, Richard Francaviglia examines the varying human perceptions of and relationships with the Great Basin landscape--from the region's Native American groups to contemporary tourists and politicians--to determine the spiritual issues that have shaped our connections with this place.
Mapping and Imagination in the Great Basin: A Cartographic History
The Great Basin was the last region of continental North America to be explored and mapped, and it remained largely a mystery to European-Americans until well into the nineteenth century. In Mapping and Imagination in the Great Basin, geographer-historian Richard Francaviglia shows how the Great Basin's gradual emergence from its large cartographic silence both paralleled the development of the sciences of surveying, geology, hydrology, and cartography, and reflected the changing geopolitical aspirations of the European colonial powers and the United States.
Go East, Young Man: Imagining the American West as the Orient
Transference of orientalist images and identities to the American landscape and its inhabitants, especially in the West--in other words, portrayal of the West as the "Orient"--has been a common aspect of American cultural history. Place names, such as the Jordan River or Pyramid Lake, offer notable examples, but the imagery and its varied meanings are more widespread and significant. Understanding that range and significance, especially to the western part of the continent, means coming to terms with the complicated, nuanced ideas of the Orient and of the North American continent that European Americans brought to the West.
Railroad Station Planbook
The Railroad Station, once the center of activity across North America, is enjoying a revival of public interest. There is one place, of course, where railroad stations have always been the center of activity and focal point of interest...on the thousands of model railroad layouts throughout the U.S. and Canada. Railroad Station Planbook is packed with drawings, photos, and information about 28 prototype railroad stations that are varied in architecture and purpose. From these pages modelers can choose the style of station - from the High Victorian of Perris to the Spanish colonial mission of Fort Myers - that will lend the most interest to their layouts, or they can select specific features and combine them into the scratchbuilt structure that is perfectly suited for the 'home railroad.'
The Mormon Landscape
A geographical study of the "Mormon culture zone"--including Utah and parts of Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. It details the physical features common to early Mormon settlements (irrigation, town layout, building styles, and typical vegetation like the Lombardy poplar) and discusses the history behind why these things are typical.
Mining town trolleys : a history of Arizona's Warren-Bisbee Railway
Francaviglia makes use of old timers' remembrances, accounts of local newspapers and mining company records, maps and rare photographs, as he traces "the rise and fall of this traction line, its impact on the settlement of the Warren District, and the vestiges which still can be seen today in the district's remarkable landscape." The idea of a streetcar line in Bisbee was not accepted at first. He writes, "As early as 1902 a request was made to the city council for a franchise to construct and operate a streetcar line, but. ..it was promptly denied as being totally absurd. The sheer engineering problems alone were too great". The Warren-Bisbee Railway was one of the most sinuous and steepest interurban lines in the United States.