Skyscrapers that once defined the modern era stand derelict and abandoned. Massive industrial manufactories lie rusting, their cavernous interiors dark. Formerly vibrant theaters shed bricks and terra-cotta ornaments. These desolate fragments of America's cityscapes are the legacy of decades of proud investment in the urban realm followed by decades of devastating neglect.Photographer and sociologist Camilo José Vergara has spent years documenting the decline of the built environment in New York City; Newark and Camden, New Jersey; Philadelphia; Baltimore; Chicago; Gary, Indiana; Detroit; and Los Angeles. His photographic sequences—images of the same sites taken over the course of many years—show once-sturdy structures as ghostly ruins and then as empty lots or flimsy new buildings. Grand civic edifices—the Michigan Central Railroad Station in Detroit, the Essex County Jail in New Jersey, the Camden Free Public Library—have become empty, roofless shells, dusted with snow in the winter and filled with stray plant and animal life in the summer. Monumental commercial and industrial buildings such as RCA Victor's "Nipper" Building in Camden and the Packard Automobile Plant in Detroit bear broken windows and rubble-strewn interiors. At once a scathing critique of national indifference to the plight of the inner city and a meditation on the aesthetic impact of desolate and neglected buildings, American Ruins stands as a witness to a vanishing era of the American city.

    It describes the history, chemistry, conservation, aesthetics and practice of photographic printing in Prussian blue. The unpublished experimental memoranda of Sir John Herschel, inventor if the process, are interpreted to unfold his discovery of iron-based photography, including his various formulae for cyanotype. The chemistry of the process is explained for the non-specialist, and many experimental variations on blueprinting are described. This book should interest photohistorians, curators and conservators of photographs, photoscientists concerned with 'non silver' processes and photographic print-makers who wish to use cyanotype today as an expressive artistic medium.

    In Women and Nature: Saving the "Wild" West, Glenda Riley calls for a reappraisal of the roots of the American conservation movement. This thoroughly researched study of women conservationists provides a needed corrective to the male-dominated historiography of environmental studies. The early conservation movement gained much from women’s widespread involvement. Florence Merriam Bailey classified the birds of New Mexico and encouraged appreciation of nature and concern for environmental problems. Ornithologist Margaret Morse Nice published widely on Oklahoma birds. In 1902 Mary Knight Britton established the Wild Flower Preservation Society of America. Women also stimulated economic endeavors related to environmental concerns, including nature writing and photography, health spas and resorts, and outdoor clothing and equipment. From botanists, birders, and nature writers to club-women and travelers, untold numbers of women have contributed to the groundswell of support for environmentalism.