| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concordd. By Brian Donahue. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. xx + 311 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, index. $35.00.
New England's environmental history was seemingly set in stone several years ago with publication of William Cronon's Changes in the Land (Hill and Wang, 1983) and Carolyn Merchant's Ecological Revolutions (North Carolina, 1989). Together, these two books spun out a story of ecological decline in which market-oriented colonials set the land on the downward spiral that Harold Wilson described so poignantly in his depressing classic, Hill Country of Northern New England (Columbia, 1936). Recent books by Sheila Connor, John Cumbler, Diana Muir, and others present a more complex interaction, and now Brian Donahue brings to fruition this revisionist point of view.	1
In the tradition of colonial historiography, Donahue presents an intensive study of a single town, whose inhabitants he decodes through painstaking research in deeds, probates, and wills. Donahue brings to this tradition a working knowledge of Concord's stony soils and an innovative technique in GIS mapping. This allows him to explain and interpret the land-holding strategies that supported the agricultural system of colonial Concord. His conclusions challenge much of what we know about New England environmental history.	. . .

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