|
|
|
Book Review
| American Environmental History. Edited by Louis S. Warren. Blackwell Readers in American Social and Cultural History, 12. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, Pub., 2003. xvii + 359 pp. Illustrations, map, references, index. Cloth $68.95, paper $31.95.
|
| Integrating social and environmental history more skillfully and more thoroughly than any undergraduate reader yet published, Louis Warren's American Environmental History fills a significant pedagogical gap. |
1
|
|
Guided by series editor Jacqueline Jones's charge "to introduce students to cutting-edge historical scholarship" while "encourag[ing] students to 'do' history themselves by examining some of the primary texts upon which that scholarship is based" (p. xii), Warren has compiled a wonderful teaching resource. After a concise introduction, the book's thirteen topical chapters provide roughly three pages of analytic essays for every page of documents. Anchoring the first chapters are proven teaching pieces by William Denevan on native land use, Alfred Crosby on virgin soil epidemics, and William Cronon on the commodification of English colonial environments. Chapters 4 through 8 span a long nineteenth century. Articles by Alan Taylor, Mart Stewart, Charles Rosenberg, Dan Flores, Benjamin Johnson, and Bill Cronon underpin chapters on "Forest and Plantation," "Urban Nature and Urban Reforms," bison decline, conservation, and preservation, respectively. Excerpts from James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Law Olmsted, Gifford Pinchot, and John Muir join more unusual sources such as a Thanksgiving Menu from the Drake Hotel or a white southern conservationist's indictment of African-American land use practices. After largely skipping the 1920s and 1930s, Warren resumes his story with chapters on radiation and pesticides, the environmental movement, and environmental justice. Essays by Robert Gottlieb, J. Brooks Flippen, and Ellen Stroud lend this section a compelling mixture of coherence and variety that aptly echoes the diversity of the movements it explores. Warren calls the past quarter-century of environmental history so "recent" that "we await a comprehensive historical evaluation for [it]" (p. 324); unlike the earlier chapters, those on the Reagan backlash and "Legacies" consist entirely of documents. |
2
|
|
Those interested in assigning American Environmental History should consider the book's tight geographic focus on British North America and the United States, its materialist emphasis, and its occasionally uneven coverage. The best test of any teaching book is not its comprehensiveness, though, but rather its effectiveness in the unpredictable laboratory of the classroom. Flannery Burke and I recently experimented with Warren's compilation by assigning it in our undergraduate course on U.S. environmental history at a large, state-supported university in metropolitan Los Angeles. Perhaps it is unfair to expect a course reader to sustain an argument, but Burke and I were delighted with how effectively American Environmental History provoked a group of students from diverse racial, economic, and ideological backgrounds to probe more deeply into historical connections between social power and non-human nature. |
3
|
|
As the field of U.S. environmental history continues to grow, the social and political movements from which the discipline sprang struggle to survive amidst political hostility and cultural cynicism. In this context, Louis Warren's timely book challenged our students to eschew easy answers and dig more deeply into the interconnected past, present, and future of this land and its many peoples. In so doing, American Environmental History offered Burke and me some hope that perhaps environmental historians may yet have a role to play in fostering the progressive change necessary to achieve fuller social and environmental equity, justice, and longevity. In a world that seems to grow madder with every passing moment and a nation whose leaders seek to reverse many of the most significant social and environmental reforms of the last century, Warren's book managed to catalyze optimism in our classroom, a feat of no little magnitude and, we can now hope, of no small consequence. |
4
|
|
Thomas G. Andrews is assistant professor history at California State University, Northridge. He currently is revising a manuscript entitled Power, Toil, and Trouble: The Nature of Industrial Struggle in the Colorado Coalfields through the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|