collection of disciplinary boundaries enshrined not only in specialized publications but also in university academic departments and in professional organizations. As a scholarly enterprise, the study of history necessarily crosses these boundaries of knowledge in order to provide a comprehensive view of the past. Over the last few years, social and cultural historians have reached across the disciplines to understand the history of the British North American colonies and the United States in all its fullness. Unfortunately, much of that scholarship, published in specialized monographs and journals, remains inaccessible to undergraduates. Consequently, instructors often face choices that are not very appealing – to ignore the recent scholarship altogether, assign bully readers that are too detailed for an undergraduate audience, or cobble together packages of recent articles that lack an overall contextual framework. The individual volumes of this series, however, each focus on a significant topic in American history, and bring new, exciting scholarship to students in a compact, accessible format. The series is designed to complement textbooks and other general readings assigned in undergraduate courses. Each editor has culled particularly innovative and provocative scholarly essays from widely scattered books and journals, and provided an introduction summarizing the major themes of the essays and documents that follow. The essays reproduced here were chosen because of the authors’ innovative (and often interdisciplinary) methodology and their ability to reconceptualize historical issues in fresh and insightful ways. Thus, students can appreciate the rich complexity of an historical topic and the way that scholars have explored the topic from different perspectives, and in the process transcend the highly artificial disciplinary boundaries that have served to compartmentalize knowledge about the past in the United States. Also included in each volume are primary texts, at least some of which have been drawn from the essays themselves. By linking primary and secondary material, the editors are able to introduce students to the historian’s craft, allowing them to explore this material in depth; and draw additional insights – or interpretations contrary to those of the scholars under discussion – from it.
Jacqueline Jones
Brandeis University
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to all the friends and colleagues who helped in the making of this edition, especially Lissa Wadewitz, as well as Matthew Booker, Mark Fiege, Matt Klingle, Neil Maher, Ruth Oldenziel, Cindy Ott, Jenny Price, Mart Stewart, Paul Sutter, Julie Sze, and Mike Ziser. Rachel St. John was, as usual, the perfect consultant and frequent provocateur; the book is better for our conversations.
I extend a huge thank you also to the then-graduate students, now PhDs, who provided critical research and feedback: Nick Perrone, Miles Powell, Mary Mendoza, Lizzie Grennan Browning, Cori Knudten, and Rebecca Egli. At John Wiley and Sons, Jennifer Manias and Andrew Minton were a huge help in navigating the complicated process of compiling, permitting, and finally publishing this book. Many, many thanks.
During the research, writing, and editing of this book, I have been especially grateful to have had the generous fellowship support of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, Germany; the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University; the Bill Lane Center of the American West, Stanford University; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; and small grants from the Faculty Research Grants program at the University of California, Davis.
Introduction
What is environmental history? At its most fundamental level, environmental historians explore the changing relations between people and nature. Such a broad definition can be more of a hindrance than a help, however. So let’s be more specific. Environmental historians study how people have lived in the natural systems of the planet, and how they have perceived nature and reshaped it to suit their own ideas of good living. They examine, too, how nature has changed in response to human action, and how nature, in changing, has required people to reshape their cultures, economies, and politics to meet new realities. As we’ll see in the pages that follow, such processes are not without social friction and unrest. People in history have battled mightily and often over how best to live in nature.
As a field of study, environmental history has been around for more than a generation. To many, it is most familiar as the history of the environmental movement. Obviously, the kinds of relations and processes I am discussing here go far beyond that, but, to be sure, the history of environmental reform and politics is central to the field.
The articles and documents in this volume illuminate how people have made themselves at home in the natural systems of the American landscape since before the time of Columbus to the present day. Read with enthusiasm and care, they will provide some startling and illuminating new perspectives on American history. The early centuries of American history were a period of enormous transformations. We shall see how American Indians lived on the earth and worked both to change it and to maintain its abundance. The coming of European colonists brought new organisms to the Americas, with consequences both disastrous and liberating for Indians. We shall read how colonists introduced the natural products of America’s ecosystems to the insatiable demands of the Atlantic market system, and how early American settlers sought to turn forests into lumber, pasture, plantation, and farm to escape their poverty. For white people, Native Americans could be shunted off the most productive land and left to starve on the margins of fertile settlements, while slave bodies, consigned to lifetimes in malarial lowlands and cotton fields shimmering with summer heat, could be destroyed virtually at will. Enslaved people carved out their own relations with the natural world, as we shall see. Nonetheless, dark bodies became a buffer between white bodies and environmental peril, a characteristic of Americans’ ideas of race that would shape natural and social relations of race down to the present day.
Environmental history is not just about the countryside. It encompasses also the tangled relations between people and nature at the heart of the city. Thus, we shall explore how concentrating people in nineteenth-century cities with close trade links to Eurasia brought new and dangerous disease environments, especially cholera, as well as increasing fire and sanitation risks. We shall see how Americans ameliorated those conditions, sometimes with controversial measures that stigmatized immigrants, the poor, and racial minorities and linked city to countryside in new ways.
The nineteenth century was a period of rapid industrialization and urbanization. Together, these two trends underwrote huge changes in America’s natural systems, many of them destructive. The passenger pigeon disappeared, the bison edged toward extinction, and a host of other species followed. To address the increasing pace and scale of destruction, the progressive conservation movement arose at the turn of the twentieth century. The history of conservation provides a window on dramatic environmental and social change. The movement drew inspiration partly from fear that a dissipated nature would harm centers of culture, the cities. Conservationist solutions entailed radical approaches to allocating nature’s bounty, and new ways of determining who was entitled to game, lumber, and water, and to how much. Through the work of prominent reformers the movement also encompassed industrial reforms to bring some margin of safety to the toxic, often lethal factory workplace.
Environmental history offers not just new ways of thinking about history, but new ways of thinking about nature, too. Perceptions of nature have changed over time. In exploring how, historians question many of the most pervasive and popular understandings of nature around us. Thus, we shall see how Americans went from abhorring the wilderness as the home of Indians and wild animals to loving it once it had been largely dispossessed of Native inhabitants. In the late nineteenth century, national parks emerged in part to valorize the “uninhabited wilderness” as a national landscape, a kind of natural badge of American identity. We shall ask whether the new regard for wilderness did not come with a host of other problems, some of which may have created new obstacles to environmental protection.
Calamitous events are often the birth pangs of new thinking.
