Down to earth : nature's role in American history
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Down to earth : nature's role in American history
Oxford University Press, c2013
3rd ed.
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 331-353) and index (p. 355-372)
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In this ambitious and provocative text, environmental historian Ted Steinberg offers a sweeping history of the United States--a history that places the environment at the very center of the narrative. Now in a new edition, Down to Earth reenvisions the story of America "from the ground up." It reveals how focusing on plants, animals, climate, and other ecological factors can radically change the way that we think about the past. Examining such familiar
topics as colonization, the industrial revolution, slavery, the Civil War, and the emergence of consumer culture, Steinberg recounts how the natural world influenced the course of human history. From the colonists'
attempts to impose order on the land to modern efforts to sell the wilderness as a consumer good, he reminds readers that many critical episodes in U.S. history were, in fact, environmental events. The text highlights the ways in which Americans have attempted to reshape and control nature, from Thomas Jefferson's surveying plan, which divided the national landscape into a grid, to the transformation of animals, crops, and even water into commodities. In this third
edition, Steinberg addresses the role of corporations in U.S. environmental history, in part by exploring the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He has also updated the discussion of
climate change in order to offer a fuller assessment of U.S. policy and its world-historical importance.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments to the Third Edition
Acknowledgments to the Second Edition
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Rocks and History
Part One: Chaos to Simplicity
1. Wilderness under Fire
2. A Truly New World
3. Reflections from a Woodlot
Part Two: Rationalization and Its Discontents
4. A World of Commodities
5. King Climate in Dixie
6. The Great Food Fight
7. Extracting the New South
8. The Unforgiving West
9. Conservation Reconsidered
10. Death of the Organic City
Part Three: Consuming Nature
11. Moveable Feast
12. The Secret History of Meat
13. America in Black and Green
14. Throwaway Society
15. Shade of Green
16. In Corporations We Trust
Notes
Bibliography
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"