Books

The weekly magazine Garden and Forest existed for only nine years (1888-1897). Yet, in that brief span, it brought to light many of the issues that would influence the future of American environmentalism. In The City Natural, Shen Hou presents the first “biography” of this important but largely overlooked vehicle for individuals with the common goal of preserving nature in American civilization. As Hou reveals, Garden and Forest was instrumental in redefining the fields of botany and horticulture, while also helping to shape the fledgling professions of landscape architecture and forestry.

Pastoral and Monumental chronicles America’s longtime fascination with dams as represented on picture postcards from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Through over four hundred images, Donald C. Jackson documents the remarkable transformation of dams and their significance to the environment and culture of America.

Char Miller chronicles the history of the Pinchot Institute for Conservation Studies and describes its iconic national historic site, Grey Towers, offered by Pinchot’s family as a lasting gift to the American people. As a union of the United States Forest Service and the Conservation Foundation, the institute was created to formulate policy and develop conservation education programs. Miller explores the institute’s unique fusion of policy makers, scientists, politicians, and activists and their efforts to increase our understanding of and responses to urban and rural forestry, water quality, soil erosion, air pollution, endangered species, land management and planning, and hydraulic fracking.

Robert D. Lifset offers an original case history of a major event in environmental history—when a small group of local residents initiated a landmark case of ecology versus energy production and challenged the construction of the Storm King pumped-storage hydroelectric power plant on the Hudson River in the 1960s.

Daniel French examines the American social perceptions of electricity as an energy technology between the mid-19th and early decades of the 20th centuries. Arguing that both technical and cultural factors played a role, French shows how electricity became an invisible and abstract form of energy in American society, leading Americans to culturally construct electricity as unlimited and environmentally inconsequential—a newfound “basic right” of life in the United States.

A journalist, diplomat, and writer, William Christian Bullitt was a member of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference (1919), the first Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1933-1936) and France (1936-1940), and the Special Representative of the President of the United States in the Middle East (1940). He played a huge role in the establishment of US-USSR relations on the eve of World War II. Based on Bullitt’s unpublished papers and diplomatic documents from the Russian archives, this new biography presents Bullitt as a truly cosmopolitan American, one of the first politicians of the global era.

A compelling study of the sea change brought about in politics, society, and gender roles during World Wars I and II by campaigns to recruit Women’s Land Armies in Great Britain and the United States to cultivate victory gardens. Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant compares and contrasts the outcomes of war in both nations as seen through women’s ties to labor, agriculture, the home, and the environment. She sheds new light on the cultural legacies left by the Women’s Land Armies and their major role in shaping national and personal identities.

Administration in time of war has come to revolve around the President, and much of the administrative authority of the President is then delegated to extralegal agents. Grundstein’s analysis of the experiences of World War I show that such delegation is inevitable.

A detailed study of housing reform at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing on the tenements of New York City and the work of Lawrence Veiller, the dominant figure in Progressive Era housing reform.

This book profiles the events, laws, utilities and dominant industry and political players that shaped the development of national power policies during a period when the federal government sought to make affordable electricity available to all Americans.