This Place These People

The numbers of farms and farmers on the Great Plains are dwindling. Disappearing even faster are the farm places—the houses, barns, and outbuildings that made the rural landscape a place of habitation. Nancy Warner's photographs tell the stories of buildings that were once loved yet have now been abandoned. Her evocative images are juxtaposed with the voices of Nebraska farm people, lovingly recorded by sociologist David Stark. These plainspoken recollections tell of a way of life that continues to evolve in the face of wrenching change. Warner's spare, formal photographs invite readers to listen to the cadences and tough-minded humor of everyday speech in the Great Plains. Stark's afterword grounds the project in the historical relationship between people and their land. In the tradition of Wright Morris, this combination of words and images is both art and document, evoking memories, emotions, and questions for anyone with rural American roots.

David Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University, where he directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. His most recent book is The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life. Nancy Warner is a fine-art and portrait photographer based in San Francisco. Many of the photographs in this book were first exhibited at the Great Plains Art Museum as Going Back: Midwestern Farm Places (2008).

Celebrated former Chicago Sun-Times columnist Dave Hoekstra unearths stories as he travels, tastes, and talks his way through 20 of America's soul food restaurants Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. loved the fried catfish and lemon icebox pie at Memphis's Four Way restaurant. In New Orleans, beloved chef Leah Chase recalls introducing George W. Bush to baked cheese grits and scolding Barack Obama for putting Tabasco sauce on her gumbo. Following the "soul food corridor" from the South through northern industrial cities, The People's Place gives voice to the remarkable chefs, workers, and small business owners who provided sustenance and a safe haven for civil rights pioneers, not to mention presidents and politicians; music, film, and sports legends; and countless everyday, working-class people. Featuring photographs, recipes, and ruminations from notable regulars—including Minnijean Brown, one of the Little Rock Nine who integrated Little Rock Central High School in 1957; former congressman and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young; jazz legend Ramsey Lewis; James Meredith, the first African American student admitted to the segregated University of Mississippi; and many others—The People's Place is an unprecedented celebration of soul food and community.

First Published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Includes the Rite of Dedication of a Church and an Altar, a rite to use in a sacred place that has been desecrated, and a ritual for a church that is being closed.

The People, Place, and Space Reader brings together the writings of scholars, designers, and activists from a variety of fields to make sense of the makings and meanings of the world we inhabit. They help us to understand the relationships between people and the environment at all scales, and to consider the active roles individuals, groups, and social structures play in creating the environments in which people live, work, and play. These readings highlight the ways in which space and place are produced through large- and small-scale social, political, and economic practices, and offer new ways to think about how people engage the environment in multiple and diverse ways. Providing an essential resource for students of urban studies, geography, sociology and many other areas, this book brings together important but, till now, widely dispersed writings across many inter-related disciplines. Introductions from the editors precede each section; introducing the texts, demonstrating their significance, and outlining the key issues surrounding the topic. A companion website, PeoplePlaceSpace.org, extends the work even further by providing an on-going series of additional reading lists that cover issues ranging from food security to foreclosure, psychiatric spaces to the environments of predator animals.

In the United States, places of drink are historically linked to community and social interactions, and such establishments often possess loyal patrons for whom going to the local bar is a natural and routine part of their daily life. In People, Place, and Attachment in Local Bars, John McEwen places drinking establishments at the fore of American geography as containers of material culture and collective history. McEwen draws on ethnographic data collected in four local bars in West Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to present a new unified theory of people-place relationships. McEwen highlights sense of place, place attachment, and the concept of rootedness.

This book investigates the sociohistorical making of place and people in Copenhagen from around 1900 to the present day. Drawing inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of social space and symbolic power, and from Loïc Wacquant’s hypothesis of advanced marginality and territorial stigmatisation, the book explores the genesis and development of the notorious neighbourhood of Copenhagen North West. As an extraordinary place, the North West provides an illustrative case of Danish welfare and urban history that questions the epitome on inclusive Copenhagen. Through detailed empirical analysis, the book spotlights three angles and entanglements of the social history of this area of Copenhagen: the production of socio-spatial constructions and authoritative categorisations of the neighbourhood, especially by the state and the media; the local social pedagogical interventions and symbolic boundary drawings by welfare agencies in the neighbourhood; and the residents’ subjective experiences of place, social divisions and (dis)honour. In this way, The Making of Place and People in the Danish Metropolis analyses how social, symbolical, and spatial structures dynamically intertwine and contribute to the fashioning of divisions of inequality and marginality in the city over the course of some 125 years. It will appeal to scholars of sociology, urban studies, and urban history, with interests in social welfare.