Description
Book SynopsisEssays that investigate issues of race, class, consumption, and the body in an array of urban places, across a broad period from the late Renaissance to the present. This volume explores the intersection of cities and the natural environment in an array of urban places, including New York, London, New Orleans, Venice, and Seattle, across a broad period from the late Renaissance to the present.The essays investigate the ecological context of revolts-both real and imagined-by urban squatters and slaves; urban epidemics and their cultural and political consequences; the social and economic impact of natural catastrophesupon urban places; and the environmental history of the rise and fall of cities. The Nature of Cities brings together the work of scholars employing new methods of research in urban and environmental history. The contributors to the volume, who include Karl Appuhn, Joanna Dyl, Ari Kelman, Matthew Klingle, Emmanuel Kreike, Sara Pritchard, Peter Thorsheim, and Ellen Stroud, represent a new generation of scholars in urban environmental history. Their innovative and interdisciplinary work draws on race, class, consumerism, landscape studies, and culture to address such questions as racial and class conflicts in urban public spaces; the cultural construction and control of publicspaces by economic and government powers; and the idealization of cities as apart from nature. Andrew C. Isenberg is Associate Professor of History at Temple University. He is the author of The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (New York, 2000), and Mining California: An Ecological History (New York, 2005).
Trade ReviewThe Nature of Cities demonstrates how environmental historians can better communicate their ideas to historians in other fields, suggests how social and cultural historians can interpret the past if they strive to integrate the insights of environmental historians, and indicates what environmental historians can produce by synthesizing a wide variety of scholarly literature. * ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: New Directions in Urban Environmental History - Andrew C. Isenberg Part 1: Urban Spaces, Death, and the Body New Orleans's Phantom Slave Insurrection of 1853: Racial Anxiety, Urban Ecology, and Human Bodies as Public Spaces - Ari Kelman Green Space and Class in Imperial London - Peter Thorsheim The War on Rats vs. The Right to Keep Chickens: Plague and the Paving of San Francisco, 1907-1908 - Joanna L. Dyl Dead Bodies in Harlem: Environmental History and the Geography of Death - Ellen Stroud Part II: The Geography of Power and Consumption Friend or Flood? The Dilemmas of Water Management in Early Modern Venice - Karl Appuhn Banking on Sacramento: Urban Development, Flood Control, and Political Legitimization, 1848-1862 - Andrew C. Isenberg Fair Play: Outdoor Recreation and Environmental Inequality in Twentieth-Century Seattle - Matthew Klingle Part III: Cities Deconstructed The Palenque Paradox: Bush Cities, Bushmen, and the Bush - Emmanuel Kreike "Paris et le désert français": Urban and Rural Environments in Post-World War II France - Sara Pritchard
