from the editor

THIS ISSUE perhaps more than any other since I became editor exemplifies the richness of our field. In the lead article, Christine Meisner Rosen joins environmental history and legal history to provide fresh insight into the ways Americans tried to make sense of new forms of pollution in the mid-nineteenth century. Anthropologist Melissa Johnson uses a case study of colonial British Honduras to raise important questions about the connection between ideas about race and ideas about how people relate to nature. Ellen Stroud reflects on what she learned when she asked her students to ponder the environmental history of dead bodies. In the second reflections essay, Rolf Diamant shares his experience as the first superintendent of a new national park devoted to interpreting the history and evolution of conservation stewardship in America. Bernard Mergen's review essay opens up a vast subject the relationship of children to nature that so far has received little attention from historians. In different ways, the cover image and the Gallery essay draw attention to the widespread use of landscape imagery in promoting development. The Norman Rockwell painting of Glen Canyon Dam on the cover is part of a fascinating collection of art works commissioned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. To see other works in the bureau s collection, go to http://www.usbr.gov/museumproperty/art/homepage.htm. Connie Chiang's essay offers a wonderful reading of an ad for a toll-road owned by the Pebble Beach Company: Mother Nature's Drive-Thru. . . .