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Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History. By Ted Steinberg. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. XIV, 347. Preface, acknowledgments, prologue, illustrations, conclusion, notes, bibliography, index. $30.00.)
It's the darndest thing about American environmental history. The field has drawn the most enthusiastic attention over the past twenty years and has produced books that we all acknowledge have reshaped our understanding. And yet in our overall national narrative those new insights have made barely a ripple. Compared, for instance, to revisionist studies of race and racism from the 1960s and 1970s, environmental history's influence on monographs in other fields, and certainly on our textbooks, has been negligible. In this marvelous new synthesis, Ted Steinberg sets out to integrate the environmental with the political, social, and cultural. The goal, as he begins his preface, is to "change the way you think about American history."
History may be the account of what people have done, but environmental history reminds us that every human act occurs within a unique...