a narrative for NATURE'S NATION: CONSTANCE LINDSAY SKINNER AND THE MAKING OF RIVERS OF AMERICA

NICOLAAS MINK

ABSTRACT

Most environmental historians are acquainted with Farrar and Rinehart's Rivers of America book series, but few know much about its genesis and context. This essay examines the six works edited by the series founder, Constance Lindsay Skinner, and argues that these books shed light on interwar environmental thought and suggest that environmental history, at least in its public form, is not as new as many historians in the field have supposed.

I was convinced that rivers—the perpetual motion in the quiet land—had had, and must ever have, a powerful influence on the temperament and imagination of mankind. Constance Lindsay Skinner
ON A CHILLY early March night in 1939, the packed ballroom at New York City's Town Hall Club fell silent as Constance Lindsay Skinner approached the podium. Feeling slightly ill, the 61-year-old Canadian-born editor rose to deliver her talk about the founding and development of the series she had first envisioned nearly a decade before: Rivers of America. With the crowd's eyes intently upon her, Skinner proceeded to tell those in attendance that Americans were economically and culturally demoralized by the Depression and that they needed to rethink their past with an eye toward nature. By recasting the nation's history around its rivers and the landscapes they adorned, Skinner asserted, people could rekindle their nation's seemingly listless culture by seeing that their ancestors had created "a new faith and theory of government out of practical and physical struggle with the earth."1	1
At the time of the Town Hall Club gala, Robert Coffin's Kennebec, Walter Havighurst's Upper Mississippi, Cecile Matschat's Suwannee River, Struthers Burt's Powder River, and Blair Niles's The James had already reached the public. These volumes garnered rave reviews from critics and their first printings all sold out within several months. The hunger for Rivers of America seemed insatiable. "Seeing place through the events which gives it meaning, and events before the background which conditions it," lauded New York Times reviewer Horace Reynolds, "this series offers the reader an intimate description of America which combines in new form history, geography and biogeography." This praise of a new and broader vision of history reads as if Reynolds were greeting the arrival of an early work by Samuel Hays or Roderick Nash. But the year was 1939—more than two decades before those pioneers of environ-mental history made their debuts.2	2
Figure 1. Constance Lindsay Skinner. Courtesy Constance Lindsay Skinner Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Skinner was founder of Rivers of America and editor of its first six volumes. Though forgotten by modern-day environmental historians, Skinner's story sheds new light on the beginnings of the field, especially in its public form.   . . . There are about 10362 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.