Books about Bicentennial from Amazon.com

Lewis and Clark’s Voyage of Discovery defined the American spirit like no other event of the 19th century Now, in celebration of its bicentennial, Stephen E. Ambrose offers a refreshing look at the explorers and their legendary journey in this IMAX® bicentennial edition of Lewis & Clark: Voyage of Discovery. In a new illustrated introduction, Ambrose talks about the making of the film and its significance in commemorating and documenting the expedition, and the land it crossed, 200 years later. Voyage of Discovery is an exceptional work of history and photography that National Geographic is proud to feature in coordination with the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council and their celebration of 2003-2006.

Changed by time but timeless in its inspiration, the Lewis and Clark Trail comes to life through Stephen E. Ambrose’s inspired narrative, rich commentary, personal selections from the explorers’s journals, and an accompaniment of stunning new photographs that exhibit the undying beauty of the American West. National Geographic photographer Sam Abell presents an array of compelling modern images from the Missouri to the Pacific Coast that offset rare historic photos, art, and maps—some sketched by Lewis and Clark themselves.

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Price: $15.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s two hundredth birthday comes this breathtakingly illustrated picture book about the president and his two youngest sons. Tad and Willie Lincoln were mischievous pranksters who treated the White House as their personal playground. They tormented nearly everyone they encountered—except their doting father. Even when they demanded a full presidential pardon for their soldier doll, he was happy to oblige. For him, the boys were a welcome distraction from the looming Civil War. Based on true events, Mr. Lincoln’s Boys reveals a playful side of one of history’s greatest presidents..
Price: $9.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Body is our first environment," writes Andrea Olsen. "It is the medium through which we know the earth." In a remarkable integration of environmental science, biology, meditation, and creative expression, Olsen, a dancer who teaches in the environmental studies program at Middlebury College, offers a guide to a holistic understanding of person and place. Part workbook, part exploration, Body and Earth considers the question of how we can best, most responsibly inhabit both our bodies and our planet.

Olsen displays an easy command of fields as diverse as geology, biochemistry, ecology, and anatomy as she explores the ways in which our bodies are derived from and connected to the natural world. But Body and Earth is not just a lesson, it is also an investigation. Arranged as a 31-day program, the book offers not only a wealth of scientific information, but also exercises for both exploring the body and connecting with place; illustrations and works of art that illuminate each chapter's themes; and Olsen's own meditations and reflections, connecting the topics to her personal history and experience.

Olsen insists that neither body nor landscape are separate from our fundamental selves, but in a culture which views the body as a mechanism to be trained and the landscape as a resource to be exploited, we need to learn to see again their fundamental wholeness and interconnection. Through hard data, reflection, exercises, and inspiration, Body and Earth offers a guide to responsible stewardship of both our planet and our persons..
Price: $18.78 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Reknowned historian Roger Chartier, one of the most brilliant and productive of the younger generation of French writers and scholars now at work refashioning the Annales tradition, attempts in this book to analyze the causes of the French revolution not simply by investigating its “cultural origins” but by pinpointing the conditions that “made is possible because conceivable.”
Chartier has set himself two important tasks. First, while acknowledging the seminal contribution of Daniel Mornet’s Les origens intellectuelles de la Révolution française (1935), he synthesizes the half-century of scholarship that has created a sociology of culture for Revolutionary France, from education reform through widely circulated printed literature to popular expectations of government and society. Chartier goes beyond Mornet’s work, not be revising that classic text but by raising questions that would not have occurred to its author.
Chartier’s second contribution is to reexamine the conventional wisdom that there is a necessary link between the profound cultural transformation of the eighteenth century (generally characterized as the Enlightenment) and the abrupt Revolutionary rupture of 1789. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution is a major work by one of the leading scholars in the field and is likely to set the intellectual agenda for future work on the subject..
Price: $14.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Touted by Publisher's Weekly as "an unprecedented record," the new book in the New York series, New York 2000, is indeed an exceptional survey of this great city's architectural heritage. As the world's financial and cultural capital, New York demands the best in architectural design and balances the constant pressure to build with the need to preserve its historic fabric.

Author Robert A. M. Stern and his colleagues trace the rise and fall of the real estate market, the impact of the designation of historic districts and new zoning on development, and the emergence of new commercial and residential centers. The survey is organized geographically, moving north from Lower Manhattan and covering the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island as well.

New York 2000 documents milestones in the city's architectural history over the past forty years—the development of Battery Park City, the rebirth of Harlem and Times Square, the creation of the cultural precinct around the new MoMA, and the reclaiming of the waterfront along the East and Hudson Rivers as recreational parkland—and celebrates the achievements of internationally recognized architects such as Sir Norman Foster, Cesar Pelli, Richard Meier, and Renzo Piano..
Price: $62.91 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Vermont's natural communities -- its northern hardwood forests, dry oak woodlands, alpine tundra, red maple swamps, bogs, and marshes -- are described in this comprehensive book. Richly illustrated with beautiful line drawings and color photographs, the guide describes each of Vermont's 80 upland and wetland natural communities. Ecological settings, including geology, soils, climate, and natural disturbance processes, are described for each community, along with complete lists of characteristic plants and animals, and public lands readers may visit.

Wetland, Woodland, Wildland contains detailed information on natural communities that is not available elsewhere, and practical information for naturalists, teachers, students, landowners, land managers, foresters, conservation planners, and all those with a love of the outdoors who want to learn more about their surroundings..
Price: $16.64 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Landscape history or natural history without humans is incomplete history," write authors Christopher McGrory Klyza and Stephen C. Trombulak. In their very readable portrayal of geological, biological, and cultural forces that produced the Vermont of today, they use interconnectedness as a lens to view the changing landscape. Sections such as "From Forestland to Farmland to Funland" describe reciprocal influences of ecosystems, humans, and topography over time. Sections on specific bioregions explain unique interactions of climate and the living world. Whether writing about the emergence of mountain ranges millennia ago, building interstate highways, encounters of indigenous cultures with Europeans, or Act 250's environmental impact, they make it clear that this is not a typical nature guide.

They describe the pre-human evolution of the area and its development into distinct biophysical regions, and then show how pre-Columbian inhabitants engaged and altered the landscape. They trace both the enormous effects of European settlement, as well as how the ecosystem influenced human habitation and activity. Finally, they examine Vermont's three natural communities: forest, open terrestrial, and aquatic. Throughout, they impart much specific knowledge about Vermont, speculate on its future, and foster an appreciation of the complex synergy of forces that produced this region..
Price: $13.79 [Notify me when price goes down.]