| 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

Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South. By Jack Temple Kirby. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xxii, 361 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3057-4.)

Jack Temple Kirby's remarkable Mockingbird Song is a grand synthesis with perfect timing. It summarizes, appreciates, and expands on the recent bloom of scholarship that looks at the unique environmental history of the American South. It also provides a guide to scholarship about this region, dating back at least to Avery Odelle Craven's Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606–1860 (1926), that has focused on questions that came to be reconfigured as "environmental" late in the twentieth century. Kirby's study covers the entire environmental history of the region, from the agricultural and hunting and gathering practices of Mississippian natives to the emergence of the urban and suburban landscapes of the sun belt South and the environmental problems of "big ag" and chemical corridors. Most of the book, however, develops an environmental history of the long history of plantation agriculture in the South, and of the rural foodways and agricultural and gardening practices that were important to the society structured by plantation agriculture—subjects that have preoccupied Kirby in several of his previous seven books.

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