In The Roots of Flower City, Camden Burd explores the economic and ecological significance of Rochester plant nurserymen over the course of the nineteenth century. As the first boomtown in the United States, Rochester was an embodiment of nineteenth-century market economies and social reform movements. Connected to the eastern seaboard by the Erie Canal, the city's unique economic, cultural, and environmental conditions fostered and sustained a vast and influential commercial plant nursery industry that attracted the nation's most prominent horticulturists and nurserymen. Rochester-area nurserymen built parks and rural cemeteries, landscaped homes and schools, and promoted horticultural pursuits regionally and nationally. As their influence grew, many of these horticultural entrepreneurs developed into the city's elite and played a leading role in shaping Rochester's economic, social, and physical landscape. Most significantly, nurserymen enthusiastically participated in the American imperial project, selling and distributing fruit, shade, and ornamental trees, shrubs, and flowers across the continent, transforming landscapes and ecologies far beyond New York. The Roots of Flower City tells the remarkable history of Rochester's outsized influence on the homes, estates, towns, and cities of nineteenth-century America as it weathered economic downturns and competition from other regions. One threat, however, proved to be too much to overcome. As Burd details, the spread of the destructive San Jose scale through the transcontinental plant trade prompted federal legislation that would lead to the decline of the Rochester plant nursery industry in the last decade of the nineteenth century, ending a sustained era of success and ecological impact.

This book focuses on the rapidly changing sociology of music as manifested in Chinese society and Chinese education. It examines how social changes and cultural politics affect how music is currently being used in connection with the Chinese dream. While there is a growing trend toward incorporating the Chinese dream into school education and higher education, there has been no scholarly discussion to date. The combination of cultural politics, transformed authority relations, and officially approved songs can provide us with an understanding of the official content on the Chinese dream that is conveyed in today’s Chinese society, and how these factors have influenced the renewal of values-based education and practices in school music education in China.

"Written by respected members of the premier non-profit group promoting livability, Partners for Livable Communities (representing 1,000 organizations), The Livable City gives you innovative tools that help you get a handle on the problems of cities today: traffic congestion, urban sprawl, disaffected citizens, physical decay, institutional breakdown, crime.".

Blake McKelvey has updated this new edition on Rochester at 150 years old, adding fresh material about its changing economy, rejuvenated downtown, and current housing and educational programs. He also includes informed and thought-provoking projections about the city's future.