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In this ambitious and provocative text, environmental historian Ted Steinberg offers a sweeping history of the United States--a history that places the environment at the very center of the narrative. Now in a new edition, Down to Earth reenvisions the story of America 'from the ground up.' It reveals how focusing on plants, animals, climate, and other ecological factors can radically change the way that we think about the past. Examining such familiar topics as colonization, the industrial revolution, slavery, the Civil War, and the emergence of consumer culture, Steinberg recounts how the natural world influenced the course of human history. From the colonists' attempts to impose order on the land to modern efforts to sell the wilderness as a consumer good, hereminds readers that many critical episodes in U.S. history were, in fact, environmental events. The text highlights the ways in which Americans have attempted to reshape and control nature, from Thomas Jefferson's surveying plan, which divided the national landscape into a grid, to the transformation of animals, crops, and even water into commodities.

On behalf of the staff of Down To Earth we want to thank you for your business. Zeph Van Allen President Down To Earth Distributors, Inc. 1-800-234-5932 541-485-5932 Fax: 541-485-7141 downtoearthdistributors.com PO Box 1419, Eugene, OR Judkins Road, Eugene, OR 97403 DOWN TO EARTH DISTRIBUTORS, INC. INSIDE AD HOC FORESTS 31 Jan 2021. Government does not have ownership evidence over vast swathes of forestland in India. THE PAST IN PRESENT CONTINUOUS 15 May 2021. IN ITS 30TH ANNIVERSARY YEAR, DOWN TO EARTH RECAPTURES 30 STORIES FROM ITS ARCHIVES THAT FIND RESONANCE EVEN TODAY. THE NEW OIL RUSH 15 Apr. Down To Earth Author: Ted Steinberg ISBN: 106 Genre: History File Size: 49. 15 MB Format: PDF, Kindle Download: 402 Read: 412 Get This Book. In chapter 3, Ted Steinberg talks about how colonists knocked down trees to create fields, their struggles with food insecurity, and the arrival of market-oriented farming. Download PDF Print. Down To Earth Steinberg Pdf Ted Steinberg teaches history at Case Western Reserve University and is the author of Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History and American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn.

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Steinberg, Ted. Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

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Down to Earth consists of sixteen chapters organized into three parts. A brief prologue challenges students to consider why US history textbooks begin the way they do—with the Bering Strait or Columbus or Jamestown—and introduces the basic geology of North America. The three chapters in Part 1, “Chaos to Simplicity,” take the reader quickly from Paleoindians to the rise of the market in the early nineteenth century. The seven chapters in Part 2, “Rationalization and Its Discontents,” focus on key issues in the nineteenth century, including southern agriculture and slavery, westward expansion, conservation, and Gilded Age urbanization and industrialization. The six chapters in Part 3, “Consuming Nature,” move into the twentieth century and explore topics such as consumerism, environmentalism, and globalization. The layout of the book corresponds to Steinberg’s thesis that there are three key turning points in US environmental history: the arrival of Europeans on American shores, Jefferson’s adoption of the Cartesian grid as the logic by which the United States would be settled, and the “rise of consumerism in the late nineteenth century.” He argues that “the transformation of nature into a commodity was the most important single force behind these shifts.” In adopting an openly thesis-driven approach, Steinberg provides a useful pedagogical tool.

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(Text adapted from an H-Net review by Mara Drogan.)