| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780–1880. By Lynn A. Nelson. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. xx, 295 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-2627-6.)

Pharsalia, the Nelson County, Virginia, plantation that is the subject of Lynn A. Nelson's brilliantly successful environmental biography, was named for the poet Lucan's epic history of Rome's civil wars. In a sense, the name proved appropriate, because William Massie, who established Pharsalia in 1815, spent the almost five decades until his death in 1862 in conflict with the environment of the Piedmont region of the Old Dominion. Massie's primary enemy in the struggle to build a plantation that met all his expectations—ecological, financial, and personal independence—was soil degradation, and his efforts at conservation provide the focus of this inaugural volume in the Environmental History and the American South series published by the University of Georgia Press. Historians have tended to blame the farmers themselves for the soil depletion that contributed so heavily to the poverty of the rural South, but Nelson's study offers a convincing analysis of the overwhelming difficulties facing those who attempted soil conservation.

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