| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History. By Ted Steinberg. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv, 347 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-19-514009-5.)

With this book, Ted Steinberg boldly places the environment at the center of an important new synthesis of American history. Writing for a broad audience of American historians and their students who might otherwise ignore nature altogether, he rebuts any notion that environmental history is marginal to the larger field. In the process, he offers an original periodization of American history organized around three themes: colonization (1500–1800), rationalization (1800–1900), and consumption (1900–2000). The first chapters recount the attempts of newcomers to work within new and unfamiliar ecologies, whether the New England climate or the southern tidelands. The section on rationalization focuses on the ways those ecologies were modified as they were incorporated into the capitalist market, while the final chapters emphasize how modern consumer society has increasingly obscured the ecological networks within which Americans live and work.

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