A tour de force of writing and analysis, Down to Earth offers a sweeping history of our nation, one that for the first time places the environment at the very center of our story. Writing with marvelous clarity, historian Ted Steinberg sweeps across the centuries, re-envisioning the story of America as he recounts how the environment has played a key role in virtually every social, economic, and political development. Ranging from the colonists' attempts to impose orderon the land to the modern efforts to sell the wilderness as a consumer good, packaged in national parks and Alaskan cruises, Steinberg reminds readers that many critical episodes in our history were, in fact, environmental events: the California Gold Rush, for example, or the great migration ofAfrican Americans to the North in the early twentieth century (in part the consequence of an insect infestation)...
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Jun 29, 2012 In this ambitious and provocative text, environmental historian Ted Steinberg offers a sweeping history of the United States—a history that places the environment at the very center of the narrative. Now in a new edition, Down to Earth reenvisions the story of America 'from the ground up.' It reveals how focusing on plants, animals, climate. Feb 22, 2018 Steinberg's Down to Earth is on the right path by emphasizing the central importance of the planet's ecology. As we hurtle forward into increasingly unstable and less hospitable planetary biosphere, this approach should —and likely will — become the norm, rather than the exception.
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.
Steinberg's focus is materialist. He...
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