Summary
The Impact of Human-Environmental Interactions
From the Columbian Exchange beginning in 1492, the development of slavery as a southern institution, and the westward movement in the 19th century to the dust bowl of the 1930s, the Endangered Species Act and other landmark legislation of the 1970s, and the impact of climate change in the 21st century, human interaction with the environment in America has been continuous, open-ended, and dynamic. How communities and individuals have used land, water, and natural resources has profoundly shaped U.S. history, influencing settlement patterns, social relations, cultural life, economic systems, and political institutions. In the past generation, scholars have examined these human-environmental interactions in myriad ways, giving birth to the exciting, new field of environmental history. By shedding light on new issues and recasting familiar views of major events and developments in our nation's past, environmental historians have reinterpreted American history in a way that is gripping, immediate, and timely.
Definitive Coverage of Every Aspect of Environmental History
The essential reference to this critical topic and the only work of its kind, the four-volume Encyclopedia of American Environmental History, Second Edition, begins with eight broad thematic essays, which highlight the major issues and topics in environmental history and serve as an entryway to other, more specific articles throughout the reference. Arranged alphabetically, more than 750 articles cover every significant issue, event, law, and figure in U.S. environmental history. All articles are written and signed by leading environmental historians, scholars, and experts, many of them members of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH). The Board of Advisers is composed of a wide array of distinguished historians, and many of them are ASEH founders and members. Useful reference features include 200 illustrations, 100 original documents, 80 maps, 20 charts, a master chronology, bibliography, and an index.
About the Author(s)
Kathleen A. Brosnan is the Paul and Doris Eaton Travis Chair of Modern History at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change along the Front Range (2002) and coeditor of many books, including The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region’s Environmental Histories (2021), Mapping Nature Across the Americas (2020), City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History (2020), Energy Capitals: Global Influence, Local Impact (2014), and City Dreams, Country Schemes: Community and Identity in the American West (2011).
Howard R. Ernst is a professor of political science at the United States Naval Academy, director of the Environmental Leadership Program at Gettysburg College’s Eisenhower Institute, and a senior scholar at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. He is the author of Fight for the Bay: Why a Dark Green Environmental Awakening Is Needed to Save the Chesapeake Bay (2009) and coauthor of numerous books, including Encyclopedia of American Political Parties and Elections (2022), Clash of Ideals: Cases in American Political Development (2009), The Political Science Toolbox: A Research Companion to American Government (2008), and Dangerous Democracy? The Battle over Ballot Initiatives in America (2001).