Samuel P. Hays

interview

Retirement has obviously not diminished the intellectual creativity of Samuel P. Hays, one of the founders of our field. In this interview, we asked Sam to discuss how his personal and academic experiences have shaped his choice of scholarly topics from his first major publication, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Harvard, 1958), to his most recent one, Wars in the Woods (Pittsburgh, 2006).

Editor and Associate Editor: We are delighted that you have agreed to do this interview. In his foreword to your Explorations in Environmental History (Pittsburgh, 1998), Joel Tarr tells us that you have founded and endowed a nature reserve on the 360 acres of your father's former Guernsey dairy farm in southern Indiana. Could you tell us something about your Indiana boyhood and your early experience of the natural world?	1
Hays: I grew up in Corydon, a small town in southern Indiana, population about 1,800, the first capital of the state. A considerable number of my ancestors had migrated there in the early 1800s, and so I was surrounded by family and community history. My parents had inherited three farms and my father organized them to support a Guernsey dairy farm. There was nothing special about this rural setting. It was just there and a part of our lives. I worked on the farm off and on. In terms of evolving interests in conservation, my first acquaintance with a federal agency was the Soil Conservation Service (SCS). We knew the local SCS representative and I especially remember the soil maps that he developed for our farm and which we sought to follow. We had a twenty-acre woodlot on the "home" farm but the thought of managing it for wood production never occurred to us. In fact, we pastured cattle and hogs in the woods, which is a "no no" so far as growing trees systematically is concerned.	2
Editor and Associate Editor: Your experience with forest and conservation issues goes back at least to the early 1940s, when you worked for a government agency in the forests of western Oregon. You've written about that experience in your autobiographical introduction to Explorations in Environmental History, but could you say something about it for our readers as well?	3
Hays: During my early college years I had personal experience, a "learning experience" you might call it, with federal conservation-related agencies. In 1941, I participated in a Quaker work camp in eastern Tennessee, in which we built a barn on a "demonstration farm" in the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) area and learned quite a bit about the TVA program, which sought to revamp southern cotton-corn agriculture to promote soil-building pastures and dairy farming. We had a considerable number of speakers about the TVA program, visited firsthand the famous Copper Hill in northern Alabama, and in general learned about New Deal programs to improve southern agriculture. In 1942 I participated in another Quaker camp, this time in the "boot heel" of southeast Missouri, in which I got to know firsthand the sharecrop country of the Mississippi Delta and the work of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. We lived in a community of homes built by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) for farm day laborers, and I had an opportunity to learn about the wide range of efforts by the FSA on behalf of farm workers. I wrote an extensive paper on one of the FSA cooperative farm projects, LaForge farms, for an economics class at Swarthmore College, and I got to know about a wide range of farm problems, which were being written about by a half dozen college students from other work camps in other parts of the country when we were together in a seminar at the University of Michigan for three weeks. When I was drafted into the Civilian Public Service in 1943 and began work with the Oregon and California Revested Lands Administration (the O&C), the next few years expanded my range of educational experiences. It was my first encounter with forests and forest management. I read a considerable number of books and pamphlets, most of them distributed by the U.S. Forest Service, and got to know officials in the O&C and became an advocate of "sustained yield management." Because of this interest I became "project education" director with the job of telling others about the O&C. And I wrote a document about the history of the O&C program. This interest in forest management has stuck with me, and the various articles I have written about it, as well as my recent book, Wars in the Woods: The Rise of Ecological Forestry in America (Pittsburgh, 2006), is a result.	4
Editor and Associate Editor: Why did you decide to become a historian? And could you tell us something about your mentor, Professor Frederick Merk, at Harvard?	5
Hays: In college my first interest was in philosophy. I liked the breadth of the issues dealt with and the lively argumentation that often went with it. But it began to appear rather abstract to me. I began to be interested in psychology, which focused more on how people thought and acted. At that time Swarthmore was a center of that particular approach in psychology known as "gestalt psychology," which emphasized the central role of perception in understanding human behavior. I adopted its theme of trying to understand people through the way they perceive and understand the world. Thereafter this infused the way I approached history and especially the attempt to bring social and political history together. Then in the spring of 1943 I took my first course in history, modern European history, taught by Daniel Boorstin. He was a lively and excellent teacher, one of the best I ever had; it provided the breadth of interest I was always looking for and the intellectual challenge of thinking about the larger meaning of things. Even more important, the Honors Program at Swarthmore, with its emphasis on independent thinking and paper writing, provided an opportunity to explore widely; this satisfied my incessant curiosity about people and how they thought and acted. A Swarthmore faculty member, Fred Tolles, who obtained a doctorate at Harvard, encouraged me to work with Frederick Merk, because of his specialty in the history of the West and my interest in natural resources. And so I did. I didn't find the Harvard history faculty too helpful or intellectually stimulating. I learned more from Oscar Handlin and his interest in social history than from anyone else, but Merk was very humane and approachable as a mentor; he let me do what I wanted to do and fostered my interest in resource history. My first paper in his seminar on the West was on the origins of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, which fitted to a "t" that stream of my development. Handlin's influence was less immediate and more for the future.	6
Editor and Associate Editor: Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Harvard, 1959) is approaching the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. It is one of the few historical monographs published in the 1950s that is still widely read today. Could you describe for our readers the genesis of the book and its initial reception? How controversial was your challenge to the traditional view of Progressive reform as "a moral struggle between the virtuous 'people' and the evil 'interests'"? Has subsequent research in the field persuaded you to modify any of your emphases and/or conclusions?	7
Hays: One day Merk told me about a fellowship sponsored by the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Association and urged me to apply. The only requirement was that the dissertation be about some aspect of Roosevelt's life; and Merk thought that a study of Roosevelt's conservation policy would be a good topic. The Roosevelt papers were in the Widener Library at Harvard and a project to publish his papers was underway. So I applied and held the fellowship for two years. I spent the summer of 1951 in Washington using administrative records in the National Archives and Pinchot papers at the Library of Congress. I received the PhD in 1953, spent some more time one summer in Washington using other archives, and the dissertation was published in 1959. I never thought much about the "people versus the interests" as a theme, but was preoccupied just with organizing the diverse strands of Rooseveltian conservation, and it turned out to emphasize the "top down" rather than the "bottom up" character of conservation. I interpreted the popular view of the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy as more a case of political influence in public lands matters and only peripheral to the main direction of conservation affairs. Today I would put much more emphasis on the role of Pinchot in narrowing the perspective of the Forest Service and making it less capable of responding to the changing public interest in agency affairs.	8
Editor and Associate Editor: Writing in 1981, Geoffrey Blodgett greeted the appearance of your American Political History as Social Analysis (Tennessee, 1980) as follows: "For disciples and skeptics alike, Hays was our John the Baptist for new ways of thinking about political history—ideas whose time came swiftly, did their work, and inspired a whole new literature in the field." What was new about your approach to political history? How did that work in political history influence your subsequent work on the history of environmental politics?	9
Hays: When I started looking for a teaching job I wrote every "ag" school in the country inquiring about a possible position in conservation history. There were no takers. And so in the 1950s I began to be interested in voting behavior and to understand political history in terms of voting patterns. I became involved in the project of a group of historians in collecting and analyzing election returns at the local level. The project was connected with the Survey Research Center at Ann Arbor, and the primary historical figure in the effort was Lee Benson. I worked on Iowa precinct election data, analyzed patterns in it over a seventy-year period and wrote my first article on the results, emphasizing the ethno-cultural patterns and also that issues such as Sabbatarianism, liquor, religion, and ethnicity were far more important in election outcomes than were the usually emphasized issues of the late nineteenth century such as banking and currency, the tariff, and civil service. This work sparked my interest in the "grassroots" of politics, which was quite different from the focus of the conservation book. It gave my perspective a combination of administrative politics on the one hand, and concern with more widespread human values on the other, and set my interests in political history from thenceforth as the task of bringing the two together. The essays in American Political History as Social Analysis reflect a combination of all this plus the approach to social history I absorbed beginning with Handlin, plus the "perception" approach of the psychology I had at Swarthmore, all of which added up to a focus on the historical analysis of social patterns and trends. Hence the title of the book I worked out with Dewey Grantham, who promoted it at the University of Tennessee Press.	10
Editor and Associate Editor: One of the distinctive features of your work is your simultaneous command of the broad sweep and deep structure of American politics on the one hand, and the intricacies of technical, scientific, and administrative issues on the other. Could you comment on how you and your wife Barbara succeeded in melding political history and ecological analysis in your pioneering book Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge, 1987)?	11
Hays: Barbara's contribution was twofold. First, in her work on an MA in environmental health she took up the biological aspects of municipal sewage treatment and brought that into our thinking; she also took up the issue of acid rain, went to conferences on the subject in the United States and Europe, and added that; she never let me forget the ecological context of the relationship between population and consumption on the one hand and the "limits of the earth" on the other. Second, as "evidence" kept coming in the mails we discussed regularly its environmental and ecological implications, and this kept the ideas churning just as to what it all meant. The same process took place as we walked, traveled, and observed environmental circumstances in England, Germany, France, Central America (Costa Rica and Belize), New Zealand, Taiwan, and Japan, as well as in the United States. She was the ecologist and I was the political analyst. I should add that the title Beauty, Health, and Permanence came from E. F. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) who stressed that these were the three main values in human life. That seemed to fit our ruminations and it stuck.	12
Editor and Associate Editor: A History of Environmental Politics Since 1945 (Pittsburgh, 2000) covers a longer period than Beauty, Health, and Permanence, yet it is a shorter book. How does the more recent book build on its predecessor, and yet at the same time achieve such impressive concision?	13
Hays: Beauty, Health, and Permanence was a rather long look, too long not just for students, but, as I found out, also for environmental historians. A shorter book seemed to be called for and this required a new sequence of topics that would retain the main themes of the longer book. And there were twists and turns as a result of evidence and thinking that had come up since publishing the first book (thirteen years lapsed between the two). So it was a matter of some reorganization that would be more condensed and yet provide a similar analysis.	14
Editor and Associate Editor: For many years now you have employed a tripartite analysis, organized (as you tell us in the introduction to Explorations in Environmental History) "around three major segments of the political forces implicit in environmental affairs: (1) the impulse to bring environmental objectives to the public arena and to focus on these public values in continuous and progressive fashion; (2) the opposition to those impulses, which seeks to retard their role in public affairs; and (3) the middle ground of professionals and administrators, legislators and courts, who, with a focus on implementing policy, seek to mediate between the first two and establish lines of adjustment and compromise." Was that model already implicit in Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, or did it develop later in your career?	15
Hays: This "tripartite" analysis is a result of examining environmental politics after World War II and has little connection with my earlier work on conservation. Certainly the focus on both national decision making and the role of interest groups continued to carry over, but the emphasis on environmental values was quite different, leading to my concept of "environmental culture." I also added the insight that comes from state comparative analysis, and gave it considerable prominence in Wars in the Woods. In addition, I have emphasized two quite different realms of environmental understanding, one at the media level and other at the institutional level, focusing on the distinction between what people do and what people say.	16
Editor and Associate Editor: One of the most important themes of your work on environmental politics is the abiding strength of the environmental opposition. You have suggested that environmental historians should pay more attention to the opposition, although it is, because of its complexity and lack of transparency, more difficult to study than the environmental movement it opposes. Have you noticed any encouraging signs that the field has begun to move in this direction?	17
Hays: Environmental historians tend to derive their views of contemporary environmental affairs from the media and therefore their perspective is limited by the media perspective. This world of environmental affairs is quite separate from the world of environmental decision making, much of which is administrative politics. There are two problems here. One is that administrative politics is more complex; environmental historians don't learn about it in their academic training and don't become aware of it until the media write about it. The second problem is that information about administrative politics is available, but few environmental historians know about it, libraries don't acquire it, and it is expensive to obtain. I spent over $5,000 a year (the Washington-based newsletters were the biggest expense) just to acquire the essential evidence because it wasn't otherwise available. Much was easier to obtain when the Internet became available. I see little improvement in these circumstances. If one sticks with the media level, considerable distortion of environmental affairs results. For example, most writers put a great emphasis on Earth Day 1970, without much sense of the way in which the environmental opposition had already developed the institutional capacity to thwart the more visible environmental action of the time and had become a controlling influence while environmental institutions were only beginning to be formed and were very weak.	18
Editor and Associate Editor: In recent years you have been a practitioner of contemporary history, writing about events you have lived through and sometimes participated in. Could you tell us something about the distinctive challenges and possibilities of writing this kind of history? We're especially interested in your practice of collecting and preserving documents produced by some of the very grassroots organizations you have helped to create, and about whose work you have probed so diligently, most notably in your recent Wars in the Woods.	19
Hays: First, I distinguish between "public history," which is more concerned with history occupations other than academic, and "contemporary history," which is more concerned with placing contemporary affairs amid concepts about long-run change. I should add that this is very different from the search for "historical roots," which is more a matter of organizing the past to support one's ideas about the present. Second is the need for historians to collect material now so that it will be available in the future. I first became interested in this while at the University of Iowa where the librarian, Ralph Ellsworth, was very interested in the role of libraries in developing such collections and I became involved in doing this for the radical right and the radical left. I continued this at the University of Pittsburgh and by the late 1960s had gathered quite a sizeable amount of such material. Only one article came out of this, but I left my collection to the archives, which I established there. As my interest in contemporary environmental politics grew, I did the same thing. I found that libraries had little interest in collecting "contemporary" material; it was called "ephemera" and they didn't know how to deal with it. A massive amount of material pertaining to environmental affairs was being issued regularly and unless it was collected and preserved by historians, future research would be hampered. I developed my own personal archive of such material, stored it in five different rooms of my house, and when I left Pittsburgh in 2000 deposited some eight hundred storage boxes of material in the environmental section of the archives and prepared an extensive index of the material for the use of researchers. Similar material, on which my recent book on forest politics is based, is there as well. In connection with that book, I prepared a collection of relevant documents in spiral-bound photocopy form to make them more readily usable for researchers who might be interested in such affairs. The range of this material is easily observed in the notes to the environmental books I have written in recent years. I followed the same practice during the year I spent at Oxford, collecting material about environmental affairs in England and also some in western Europe, brought it back to the United States, and deposited it in the environmental archives at Pittsburgh. I wrote an article for the Journal of American History some years ago emphasizing the need for historians to collect and preserve this kind of contemporary material, but I am not aware that much of it has been done. I might add that this is not just a matter of records from "grassroots" organizations but also of the many topical newsletters produced in Washington, D.C., about administrative politics.	20
Editor and Associate Editor: Have you experienced any tension between your own work as an activist in the forest wars and your role as a professional historian of forest policy? You have repeatedly emphasized the importance of opposing sets of values (as well as interests) in environmental politics. How difficult is it to write about political actors whose values are antithetical to your own?	21
Hays: My involvement in environmental affairs, mainly with the Sierra Club, was very useful in learning firsthand what the issues and the circumstances of public decision making were all about. I wrote a considerable number of papers and gave testimony at a number of hearings, all of which were like writing papers in college and graduate school, an opportunity to find out what the issues and the give-and-take of decision making were all about. The same learning experience was very much a part of the various groups organized by professional "foresters" in which I took part; I could find out firsthand how they thought and acted. In many cases the issues I brought up and the questions I raised were intended to elicit reactions which filled out the details of their own values. In one case, the 1977 federal strip mine legislation, I got a good firsthand experience as to how the coal industry lawyers could change key words in legislation which, in fact, changed its entire meaning, and had some part in changing the words back to restore the initial meaning, which had been crafted by those wishing a more effective program. But rarely did I have such personal experience with "administrative politics." All in all there was little tension involved here, but simply various ways in which I was trying to understand how it all worked.	22
Editor and Associate Editor: You've drawn a contrast between the "production values" of the early conservationists—their concern with the more efficient use of national resources—and the "amenity values" of the postwar environmental movement, rooted in a society organized around different patterns of consumption, education, and leisure. Do you think it is likely that public awareness of the huge stakes involved in climate change will usher in a new pattern of environmental politics in the United States in the first half of the twenty-first century?	23
Hays: In some ways the public debate about "climate change" is very conventional, a media-style "awareness" that is filled with very general ideas and sound bites. But there is a lot of action taking place in the form of energy efficiency at the local municipal and state levels that appears to be rather substantial and concrete. This, however, doesn't change the basic pattern of environmental politics, for it involves, and will continue to involve, a constant tension between pros and antis, especially in the context of administrative policies, with the now conventional contest over science, technology, and cost. A new field of politics but with quite similar actors and issues.	24
Editor and Associate Editor: A veteran of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War is supposed to have said: "They [Franco and the Nationalists] won the War, but we had all the best songs." Some environmentalists (and environmental historians) have been tempted to write similar epitaphs about the American environmental movement. Could you comment on these increasingly common expressions of pessimism about the prospects of the American environmental movement?	25
Hays: Expressions of environmental pessimism abound, but most of these are from "environmental thinkers" who were captured by ideological optimism and therefore easily sink into pessimism. Those who have been involved in the more practical political tasks of forging institutional capabilities at the state, private, and federal levels have a more cautious sense of optimism about "incremental changes" within the fields that they work. Environmental politics involves many different issues and many of the "activists" in one field have little knowledge or experience about other fields; hence optimism may prevail in one field and pessimism in another. Those that elevate this to a broad ideology of either optimism or pessimism usually concentrate on just what they know and emphasize. The problem here is the focus on an "environmental movement" and the subsequent reaction that if that "movement" does not fulfill one's expectation it has "failed." If you think of it all in terms of an "environmental culture" that infuses many aspects of life, public and private, which either spreads or fails to spread in influence, then you have a more realistic grasp of both the possibilities and limitations in environmental affairs. You work from the basic fact that our society is committed to growth in its most dominant institutions and that environmental affairs play a continuing subordinate role in that context. The challenge of contemporary environmental history is to examine realistically the way in which those with environmental objectives have been able to occupy particular niches in the realm of public affairs but have had less success in confronting growth institutions directly.	26
Editor and Associate Editor: You have drawn a contrast between your approach to environmental history and that of Roderick Nash: "My own approach is not to examine the intellectual forerunners of developments such as the wilderness movement ... but to understand the more widely shared popular values that arise less from reading what these prominent authors have said and more from direct human experience, much of which is personal, visual, and perceptual rather than intellectual" (Explorations in Environmental History, p. 452). Could you elaborate? Is the methodological issue one of "ideas" versus "values"?	27
Hays: There is a big difference between understanding public affairs in terms of broad ideological constructs that clash, rise, and fall in significance in the world of ideas, and understanding public affairs in terms of institutions and values that are inherent in personal and daily life that constitute the action world of public affairs. Writers and academics are often attracted to the simplicity of ideological constructs, but the practitioners work within institutions and personal values with their limits and possibilities. Thus, to understand the world of wilderness action, personal experience and visual images are more important, and ideologies that are perpetuated in most environmental academic courses are less important.	28
Editor and Associate Editor: We were surprised to learn from Joel Tarr that you never taught a graduate course on environmental history or politics, and had only one graduate student in the field. If you were to teach such a course today, what kind of training would you envision for your students? How would that training differ from the training you received at Harvard more than half a century ago?	29
Hays: I would not attribute very much of my professional development to what I took up at Harvard. Swarthmore was far more influential. Harvard provided an opportunity to pursue my own direction; Merk was sensitive to that and helped to provide those opportunities. To train environmental historians today would call for (a) an appropriate academic curriculum, but equally important (b) experiential learning by participating in environmental affairs. I had almost no academic training in the subjects of what I would now consider important: geography, ecology, administrative politics, and how institutions develop and the role they play in public affairs. Most of my "training" came from experience. As I observe contemporary circumstances, most young people training to become environmental historians can't begin to understand environmental politics until they take part in it.	30
Editor and Associate Editor: In American Political History as Social Analysis, you wrote: "My own relationship to the past is to look upon it as a challenging field for detective work and as a maturing experience which generates satisfactions from the encounter with a variety of people and human circumstances. I have not sought out the past to decide what values, personal or political, to support in the present or to reinforce these values, and I have never considered the historical inquiries in which I engaged to be directly relevant to those choices. ... If there is a mission within these pages, it is to emphasize the realities of power in American political life ... The relationship of past to present is one of sensitizing people to their contemporary surroundings rather than providing direct answers to current problems" (p. 5). We presume that this credo applies to your work in the field of environmental history as well. Please forgive this very broad question, but what is your view, briefly, of the "mission" of environmental history?	31
Hays: The general perspective, as stated in EH, that the subject of environmental history is the "history of human interaction with the natural world" reflects accurately the wide variety of environmental writing. But it is so vague and diffuse as to provide little systematic historical understanding. The "mission" should be to understand the "impact of an ever growing human population and consumption on the finite natural world"—a statement much closer to the spirit of the "environmental awakening" of the late twentieth century from which this historical interest has arisen. This requires that one free oneself from the perceptual boundaries of both "movement" and "problem-policy" ideology. Some specifics as to what this involves are contained in chapters 1 and 2 of my A History of Environmental Politics Since 1945.	32
Editor and Associate Editor: What articles or books, if any, are you currently working on?	33
Hays: I am "in process" with a book on the history of the U.S. Forest Service, which will be organized not around the conventional focus on administrative history but about the relationship between the agency and the society around it examined through a more fruitful detachment from agency perspective.	34
Editor and Associate Editor: Many thanks for reviewing your career with us!	35
Interview conducted April 2007

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS OF RODERICK NASH
BOOKS
Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958). Second edition (Atheneum) with new preface, 1968. Reprinted by University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Second edition 1995. American Political History as Social Analysis: Essays by Samuel P. Hays (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980). Includes: History as Human Behavior (1960) The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era (1964) The Social Analysis of American Political History (1965) Archival Sources for American Political History (1965) Conservation and the Structure of American Politics: The Progressive Era (1970) The Changing Political Structure of the City in Industrial America (1974) Modernizing Values in the History of the United States (1977) With Barbara D. Hays, Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). City at the Point: Essays on the Social History of Pittsburgh (editor) (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991). Explorations in Environmental History: Essays by Samuel P. Hays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998). Includes: Introduction: An Environmental Historian Amid the Thickets of Environmental Politics (1998) The Limits to Growth Issue: A Historical Perspective (1979) Value Premises for Planning and Public Policy: The Historical Context (1979) Public Values and Management Response (1984) The Role of Urbanization in Environmental History The Future of Environmental Regulation (1996) The New Environmental Forest (1988) The New Environmental West (1991) A Challenge to the Profession of Forestry (1991) Foreword to Frederick Frankena, Strategies of Expertise in Technical Controversies (1992) Human Choice in the Great Lakes Wetlands (1982) Clean Air: From the 1970 Act to the 1977 Amendments (1979) Clean Air: From 1977 to 1990 (1998) Emissions Trading Mythology (1995) The Role of Vales in Science and Policy: The Case of Lead (1992) The Structure of Environmental Politics Since World War II (1981) Three Decades of Environmental Politics: The Historical Context (1989) A Historical Perspective on Contemporary Environmentalism (1990) Environmental Political Culture and Environmental Political Development: An Analysis of Legislative Voting, 1971–1989 (1992) The Politics of Environmental Administration (1987) A History of Environmental Politics Since 1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). Wars in the Woods: The Rise of Ecological Forestry in America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006).
ARTICLES
"The Development of Pittsburgh as a Social Order," Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 57 (1974): 431–48. "The Environmental Movement," Journal of Forest History 25 (October 1981): 219–21. "Political Choice in Regulatory Administration," in Regulation in Perspective, ed. Thomas K. McCraw (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 124–54. "Society and Politics: Politics and Society," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15 (1985): 481–99. "Theoretical Implications of Recent Work in the History of American Society and Politics," History and Theory 26 (1987): 15–31. Manuscripts for Recent History: A Proposal for a New Approach," Journal of American History 77 (June 1990): 208–16. "From the History of the City to the History of the Urbanized Society," Journal of Urban History 19 (August 1993): 3–25. "The Trouble with Bill Cronon's Wilderness," Environmental History 1 (January 1996): 29–32. (See also review of Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, Journal of American History 79 (September 1992): 612–13.) "Environmental Commitment Among the States: Integrating Alternative Approaches to State Environmental Policy," Publius: The Journal of Federalism 26 (Spring 1996): 41–58. "Toward Integration in Environmental History," Pacific Historical Review 70 (February 2001): 59–67. "From Wilderness to Wildlands: Stages in the Evolution of the Wilderness Movement," in Samuel P. Hays, Forest Papers (Boulder, Colo.: privately printed, 2003). "Revising the Response to Industrialism: Changes in Perspective Over Forty Years, 1955–1995," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3 (2004): 5–14.
INTERVIEW
Bruce M. Stave, "A Conversation with Samuel P. Hays," Journal of Urban History 2 (November 1975): 91–98.
SYMPOSIUM
Michael H. Ebner et al., "Samuel Hays and the Social Analysis of the City: A Symposium," Journal of Urban History 19 (August 1993): 85–109.

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interview

samuel p. hays

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS OF RODERICK NASH

BOOKS

ARTICLES

INTERVIEW

SYMPOSIUM