The boundary lines preceding Mason and Dixon, everybody knows, were a sham. What’s to follow, despite the weighty authority of astronomical science, will be no better. 

Once highly valuable, salt affords a new look at life, environment, and sovereignty in the southwest borderlands.

Poe’s work reminds us that the separation of “Arts” and “Sciences” into discrete discourses of knowledge is itself a quite recent invention.

The Dawn of Everything provides a framework that engages with “big history” or “deep history” while avoiding explanations that flirt with biological, demographic, environmental, or technological determinism.

Brockmann’s research and her insightful arguments taught me not only that plenty of knowledge production occurred in Central America before the 1820s but also that this “practical” information was designed to serve locals rather than foreigners.

William Cronon presents in Nature’s Metropolis an assertion of the fundamental interconnectedness of the city and the countryside. This is figured in the history of Chicago, primarily in the nineteenth century, as the city grew from the commodification of the produce of its rural environs.

Looking at this peaceful, productive view, you would never imagine that Barbados had recently been hit by a devastating hurricane that reduced the machinery of the booming sugar industry to smithereens and threatened to overturn the island’s slaveholding society.

We began with only a rudimentary idea of how to build the wall.

Readers are invited to imagine both the agency of plants and the very human limits to our imaginations.

Our historiographical queries pushed our scientists to think through the meaning and implications, not merely of current scientific consensuses, but also of past ones.

Celilo Falls was the economic and spiritual center of the Indian world in the Pacific Northwest.

It is an issue of authority; namely, who has enough of it to be qualified to decide what’s best for the global environment.

While other scholars have catalogued the paintings in Mount Vernon … Manca goes further to consider why Washington hung certain pictures in particular rooms or chose not to display others at all.

Earl’s painting was not just a biography; it was a local history as well.

Krech is concerned with the many spiritual meanings Indians assigned birds, whether as dark omens of sickness and death, symbols of personal power and physical prowess, sources of luck, expressions of love, or embodiments of beauty.

Written to mark the bicentennial of Whitman’s birth, my poems operate within that lacuna, occupying the dissonant threshold between Whitman’s optimistic vision for America, “out of hopeful green stuff woven,” and my own personal history.

“A garden of medicinal flowers…” “Cake!” Such answers help insofar as how many days were you a child? Or can […]

Forgetfulness is like a songthat, freed from beat and measure, wanders Hart Crane When knowledge will cover the earthlike water covers […]

Plaque commemorating Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sojourn on Schoolmaster Hill. Photograph courtesy of the author. Click to enlarge. A Walk in […]

The ruins of living beings provoked a twinned awe and horror at the transformative power of new technologies.

At a time when the wealth of the new nation derived from farming, importing exotic plants […] and establishing the systems of practice needed to make plants valuable were vitally important.

At the heart of Commerce by a Frozen Sea is the beaver hat, which by the seventeenth century had become an essential […]

Craving a taste of home—something to break the monotony of bland diets masters sometimes planned for them—African slaves applied knowledge that they possessed to grow some of their own food.

Pigeons—like some other breeds of birds—were easy to hunt, indeed, so easy that the hunt couldn’t be sustainable.

At this Point, a Confluence Less enterprising men would have left the beautiful ruin of a cityto moulder away and […]

“If you would learn the earth as it really is, learn it through its sacred places.”

The neat separation of feminine and masculine spheres existed more as an ideal than as a fact.

I set out to make something totally arcane relevant.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

“Visions of ineffable beauty and harmony, health and exhilaration of body and soul, and grand foundation lessons in Nature’s eternal love, are the sure reward of every earnest looker in this glorious wilderness.”—John Muir

Everything seemed blasted by a new, blank enormity. The world was too big to be beautiful.

To Find You III         [O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu House, Abiquiu, NM; present day] Bushes of mulberry, rosemary, cherry;trees of filbert, plum, and […]

Dry Creek Valley On the second and third wires over the wireon which forks the zinfandel vine:barbed knotsand spirals of […]

By liberating her thoughts from the space of prose and her account from the limitations of physicality, Knight can transform the landscape through her narration, using poetry to “divert” and contain the threat of the unfamiliar.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Because antebellum northern cities could be worrisome and puzzling, exactly because they were so incontestably changeful, and perhaps also because, as a result, urban vistas departed so dramatically from the iconic, reassuring visions of rural America—for such reasons, there was a generalized desire, indeed a broadly felt necessity, to develop firmer understandings of the urban milieu.

Los Angeles mirrored itself—magical and ordinary, artificial and real, blessed and damned—a dialectic of promotion that suited this prototypical culture industry, invoking truth and falsity…

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“In the end, the Old Man of the Mountain proved just as mortal as the race of creatures whose face he resembled, the race that had tried and failed to ensure that the Old Man would last forever.”

The Sesquicentennial, the National Park Service, and a Changing Nation It’s a great irony of our history: the places of […]

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Not only did it seem possible that species were radically different in the New World, but some early observers reported evidence that the boundaries between the plant and animal kingdoms were crossed in some cases.”

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Many thought Moors a sharp trader, and at times people suspected that he was crooked. This was hardly unusual during these years in Samoa. More than once Moors or one of his traders was accused of using doctored weights when measuring coconuts for purchase, and at least once this endangered the life of one of his traders. Even Robert Louis Stevenson, who relied heavily on Moors in his early years, worried that he might be a huckster.

The Scenographia Americana corresponded closely with imperial optimism in 1768.

“Would-be conquerors might hold up animal brain cases as signs of their authority, but other observers interpreted the disembodied icons according to their own assumptions about power.”

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