The Environment in American History Nature and the Formation of the United States

About this book

The Environment in American History is a detailed environmental history of America from the era prior to European contact to the present day. Jeff Crane shows the critical role of nature and the natural wealth of the continent in determining the type of society that emerged in the New World, as well as in America's rise to wealth and power. The Environment in American History is organized into 15 chronologically focused chapters, each bolstered with a selection of primary documents, as well as images and profiles of key figures or events.

Within this chronological outline, Crane discusses land use, environmental change, destruction of habitats and species, the impact of environmental change on humans, and responses of the United States to the destruction of nature, both at home and in the world at large. This text takes students from where they are, in a time when most undergraduates think that environmentalism only means making sure to recycle, and shows them how US society has always been related to its environment.

Contents

Preface

1 Indians, Nature, and Faith
2 Pathogens and Plows in the Land of Plenty
3 A Great Fur and Hide Marketplace
4 A Great Farming Nation
5 "A Newer Garden of Creation"
6 Naturally Horrifying: Environment in the Civil War
7 Western Lands of Wealth and Violence
8 Conserving Resources, Saving Sacred Spaces, and Cleaning the Cities: America in the Conservation Era
9 Repairing and Restoring the Land in the 1920s and 1930s
10 Abundance and Terror: Americans in World War II
11 Environmental Consensus in the Republic of Abundance
12 Environmental Reform and Schism
13 A Time of Environmental Contradictions

Epilogue

Customer Reviews

Biography

Jeff Crane is Associate Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. He is the author of Finding the River: An Environmental History of the Elwha, and co-editor of Natural Protest: Essays on the History of American Environmentalism.