| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Wilderness: A New History. Ed. by Michael Lewis. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. viii, 290 pp. Cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-0-19-517415-1. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-19-517414-4.)
As a summary of recent scholarship, these essays offer an alternative to Roderick Nash's classic Wilderness and the American Mind (1967). Like Nash's work, they highlight the ambivalent nature of wilderness, but they also reflect new influences on the field: the application of postmodern and social history methods; the emergence of environmental justice as an analytical category; and the global spread of preservationist policies. Where earlier histories celebrated a one-dimensional wilderness, these essays are critical and sensitive to multiple meanings.	1
American Indians shaped nature to their own needs, as Melanie Perreault points out, suggesting that the Puritan "wilderness" was as symbolic as it was real. The new arrivals found nature a source of contradictory anticipations, and Mark Stoll traces those meanings forward to John Muir and the church camps of the twentieth century. Steven Stoll broadens meanings of nature by linking wilderness to the symbolism of agricultural expansion, and Bradley P. Dean and Angela Miller describe literary and artistic representations of nature in the romantic era, noting the heady symbolism that suffused the borderland between domestic and wild. Each shows wilderness to be as troubling as it was comforting.	. . .

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