Steven Stoll
A major history of early Americans' ideas about conservation
Fifty years after the American
Revolution, the yeoman farmers who made up a large part of the new country's
voters faced a crisis. The very soil of American farms seemed to be failing,
and agricultural prosperity, upon which the Republic was founded, was threatened.
Steven Stoll's passionate and brilliantly argued book explores the tempestuous
debates that erupted between "improvers," who believed in practices
that sustained and bettered the soil of existing farms, and "emigrants,"
who thought it was wiser and more "American" to move westward as the
soil gave out. Stoll examines the dozens of journals, from New York to Virginia,
that gave voice to the improvers' cause. He also focuses especially on two groups
of farmers, in Pennsylvania and South Carolina. He analyzes the similarities
and differences in their farming habits in order to illustrate larger regional
concerns about the "new husbandry" in free and slave states.
Farming has always been
the human activity that most disrupts nature, for good or ill. The decisions
these early Americans made about how to farm not only expressed their political
and social faith, but also influenced American attitudes about the environment
for decades to come. Larding the Lean Earth is a signal work of environmental
history and an original contribution to the study of antebellum America.
Quotes
"Steven Stoll's brilliantly original Larding the Lean Earth unearths hidden
layers of meaning behind American antebellum farm practices and the westward
movement. This thoughtful and far-reaching work traces the origins of today's
ecological crisis to the failure of the antebellum ethic of 'improvement.' Evocative
and provocative, written with verve and passion and with new insights on every
page, this is a book that every nineteenth-century historian will want to read."--Daniel
Feller, University of New Mexico
"Nineteenth-century
Americans were overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, and westwardly mobile. No wonder,
then, that ordinary folks and the profoundest minds were preoccupied with dirt
-- soils' quality, conservation, abandonment -- for civilization was, after
all, founded upon thriving, stable agriculture. Now we have at last a thorough
and imaginative history of American soil that is scientifically and agronomically
astute, politically contexturalized, and often poetic of expression."--Jack
Temple Kirby, Miami University
Author Biography
Steven Stoll, an assistant professor of history at Yale University, is the author
of The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California.
He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Hill and Wang
320 pages
Size: 6 x 9
20 B&W Illustrations, Notes, Index
$30.00
Hardcover Pub Date: 07/2002
ISBN: 0-8090-6431-6
Martha Saxton
A pathbreaking new study of women and morality
How do people decide what
is "good" and what is "bad"? How does a society set moral
guidelines -- and what happens when the behavior of various groups differs from
these guidelines? Martha Saxton tackles these and other fascinating issues in
Being Good, her history of the moral values prescribed for women in early America.
Saxton begins by examining seventeenth-century Boston, then moves on to eighteenth-century
Virginia and nineteenth-century St. Louis. Studying women throughout the life
cycle -- girls, young unmarried women, young wives and mothers, older widows
-- through their diaries and personal papers, she also studies the variations
due to different ethnicities and backgrounds. In all three cases, she is able
to show how the values of one group conflicted with or developed in opposition
to those of another. And, as the women's testimonies make clear, the emotional
styles associated with different value systems varied. A history of American
women's moral life thus gives us a history of women's emotional life as well.
In lively and penetrating prose, Saxton argues that women's morals changed from
the days of early colonization to the days of westward expansion, as women became
at once less confined and less revered by their men -- and explores how these
changes both reflected and affected trends in the nation at large.
Author Biography
Martha Saxton is an assistant professor of history and women's and gender studies
at Amherst College. She is the author of several books, including Louisa May
Alcott: A Modern Biography. She lives in New York City.
Hill and Wang
480 pages
Size: 6 x 9
Notes, Index
$30.00
Hardcover Pub Date: 08/2002
ISBN: 0-374-11011-5
Edward Countryman
A newly revised version of a classic in American history
When The American Revolution
was first published in 1985, it was praised as the first synthesis of the Revolutionary
War to use the new social history. Edward Countryman offered a balanced view
of how the Revolution was made by a variety of groups-ordinary farmers as well
as lawyers, women as well as men, blacks as well as whites-who transformed the
character of American life and culture.
In this newly revised edition,
Countryman stresses the painful destruction of British identity and the construction
of a new American one. He expands his geographical scope of the Revolution to
include areas west of the Alleghenies, Europe, and Africa, and he draws fresh
links between the politics and culture of the independence period and the creation
of a new and dynamic capitalist economy. This innovative interpretation of the
American Revolution creates an even richer, more comprehensive portrait of a
critical period in America's history.
Quotes
"Fine, concise history . . . Better than any comparable treatment."
-- Sean Wilentz, In These Times
"As a synthesis of modern scholarship on the Revolution, this important
book has no rival. " -- Pauline Maier, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Author Biography
Edward Countryman, professor of history at Southern Methodist University, is
the author of Americans (H&W, 1996) and A People in Revolution: Political
Society in New York, 1760-1790, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize in 1982.
He lives in Dallas.
Hill and Wang
304 pages
Size: 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Bibliographical Essay, Index
$14.00
Trade Paperback Pub Date: 01/2003
ISBN: 0-8090-2562-0
The Adventures and Fate
of the First English Colonists in America
By Giles Milton
Big Chief Elizabeth is the swashbuckling story of the extraordinary attempts
by English adventurers to claim, divide, and colonize what would be the biggest
jewel in Queen Elizabeth's crown: North America. From Richard Hore's 1536
journey to the ill-fated Sir Humfrey Gilbert's attempt, to Sir Walter Ralegh's
extravagant expeditions to Roanoke Island and Jamestown, which led to the first
permanent English settlements in America, Milton tells a tale of startling greed,
ruthless ambition, terrible hardship, and horrific wars between settlers and
indigenous peoples.
This was the era of great naval exploration fueled by speculative fervor, of
maritime daring and nautical disasters. In April 1586 Queen Elizabeth I acquired
a new and exotic title. A tribe of Native Americans had made her their
weroanza -- a word that meant "big chief." The news was received with
great
joy, both by the queen and by her flirtatious favorite, Sir Walter Ralegh. His
first American expedition had brought back a captive, Manteo, whose tattooed
face and otter-skin cloak had caused a sensation in Elizabethan London. In 1587,
Manteo was returned to his homeland as Lord of Roanoke along with more than
one hundred English men, women, and children. In 1590, an English supply ship
arrived at the coastal colony, but the settlers had disappeared.
For almost twenty years the fate of Ralegh's colonists was to remain a mystery.
When a new wave of settlers sailed to America to found Jamestown, their
efforts to locate the lost colony were frustrated by the mighty chieftain
Powhatan -- father of Pocahontas -- who vowed to drive the English out of
America, though Pocahontas herself made valiant attempts to thwart the
massacre of settlers. While Ralegh's "savage" Manteo had played a
pivotal role
in establishing the first English settlement in America, he had also unwittingly
contributed to one of the earliest chapters in the decimation of the Native
American population.
A riveting historical mystery of colonial America and Elizabethan England, of
the clash between old worlds and new, of civilization and savagery, Big Chief
Elizabeth confirms Giles Milton's reputation as one of our most colorful and
engaging popular historians.
Author
Giles Milton is the author, most recently, of the critically acclaimed Nathaniel's
Nutmeg (FSG, 1999).
He lives in London.
Published by Farrar, Straus
and Giroux
November 2000; $24.00US; 0-374-26501-1
September 5, 2002