So Glorious a Landscape

Nature and the Environment in American History and Culture

By (author) Chris J. Magoc

Publication date:

01 October 2001

Length of book:

301 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9780842026956

So Glorious a Landscape: Nature and the Environment in American History and Culture surveys the vast and interdiscipli-nary subject of American natural and environmental studies. It examines the literary landscape that has inspired a local, regional, and national sense of place; explores the dynamic meaning and significance of nature across time, place, culture, and gender; and looks at the essence and history of environmental change.

The first all-encompassing introductory survey of environ-mental history and cultural studies, this volume provides students and scholars with carefully chosen selections from major essayists, naturalists, preachers, geographers,novelists, scientists, and historians whose works have shaped the fields of literary ecology and environmental history. The essays trace the changing American landscape and ideas about nature from the seventeenth century to the present.

By analyzing a range of material, So Glorious a Landscape provides a fresh perspective on what nature is in American life, what forces have shaped its profound place and changing definition, and what the work of environmental historians tells about the relationship of nature, culture, and power in America. So Glorious a Landscape is an excellent resource for courses in American studies, environmental history, and American culture.

Part 1 I Indian Ecology, American Conquest
Chapter 2 Acoma Pueblo Creation Myth
Chapter 3 Tewa Sky Looms
Chapter 4 William Bradford, A Hideous and Desolate Wilderness (1647)
Chapter 5 Thomas Morton, Potential of the New English Canaan (1632)
Chapter 6 Carolyn Merchant, Fate of the Abenaki in the Colonial Ecological Revolution
Chapter 7 The Northwest Ordinance (1787)
Chapter 8 William Gilpin, The Untransacted Destiny of the American People (1846)
Chapter 9 Monterey Californian, Americans Spread All Over California (1846)
Chapter 10 Joaquin Miller, Social and Environmental Degradation in the California Gold Country (1890)
Chapter 11 Wintu Indian Kate Luckie, The Soreness of the Land (1925)
Part 12 II Nature's Nation: The American Landscape and the Nature Writing Tradition
Chapter 13 Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived and What I Lived For (1854)
Chapter 14 John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (1868)
Chapter 15 John Burroughs, Spring at the Capital (1871)
Chapter 16 Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (1903)
Chapter 17 Annie Dillard, The Present at Tinker Creek (1974)
Part 18 Science, Nature, and the Emergence of an Ecological Ethic
Chapter 19 William Bartram, The Animal Creation and the Importance of Ephemera (1791)
Chapter 20 George Perkins Marsh, The Destructiveness of Man (1864)
Chapter 21 Ellen Swallow Richards, Human Ecology and the Habits of Sanitation in the Modern Urban Environment (1907)
Chapter 22 Aldo Leopold, Land-Use Ethics and Economic Self-Interest (1949)
Part 23 IV Power and Place: The Meeting of Social and Environmental History
Chapter 24 Robert Gottlieb, Alice Hamilton Explores the Dangerous Trades
Chapter 25 David R. Brower, Preserving the Hallowed Ground of Dinosaur National Monument (1954)
Chapter 26 Harry M. Caudill, The Rape of the Appalachians (1962)
Chapter 27 Lois Gibbs, What Happened at Love Canal (1982)
Chapter 28 Eileen Maura McGurty, The Origins of the Environmental Justice Movement (1997)
Part 29 V The Environmental Era: Responses to Nature in Distress
Chapter 30 Robinson Jeffers, Passenger Pigeons (1949)
Chapter 31 Lynn White, Jr., The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis (1967)
Chapter 32 Edward Abbey, Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks (1968)
Chapter 33 Leslie Marmon Silko, The Fate of All Living Things (1977)
Chapter 34 The National Environmental Policy Act (1969)
Chapter 35 Lawrence W. Libby and Rodney L. Clouser, Population and Global Economic Patterns (1990)
Chapter 36 Ron Arnold, Wise Use: What Do We Believe (1996)
Chapter 37 Andree Collard with Joyce Contrucci, Women and Ecology (1988)

As our national conversation centers increasingly on the use and abuse of the natural environment, it becomes crucial that environmental history provide the ballast for these debates. So Glorious a Landscape combines a vast array of pungent culturalcommentary with keen historical insight. The voices Professor Magoc has arranged here are the wellspring of American environmentalism. There is something in this volume for everyone concerned about the relationship Americans have had with their natural world.