| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.4

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Environmental History: An Introduction. By Carolyn Merchant. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. xxii + 480 pp. Illustrations, figures, bibliography, and index. Cloth $74.50, paper $24.50.

This introductory student text and multipart guide to the field is, in effect, a second edition of Merchant's 2002 Columbia Guide to American Environmental History. Updated and somewhat expanded, part 1, Historical Overview offers students a brief introduction to the field, broken into ten, approximately twenty-page chapters which are arranged chronologically to cover from the precontact period to contemporary twenty-first century global issues. They cover native-European encounters, the New England wilderness, the tobacco and cotton South, nature and the market economy, western frontiers, cities, conservation and preservation, Indian land policy, ecology, and globalization. Illustrations, a number taken by the author herself, nicely complement the text. Instructors who have utilized Merchant's documents and essays collection, Major Problems in American Environmental History, 2nd ed. (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), will immediately recognize the main topics and themes as they draw heavily on that volume's format and its explanatory head notes. As such, the two texts would work well together, although most instructors would likely wish to deepen the analysis of key topics either with their lecture material or additional readings. Throughout part 1, Merchant attempts to navigate a path between overly progressive or declensionist narratives.

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