Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Environmental History
Why have Americans perceived nature as something to be conquered?
Most people who have reflected at all upon the known history of the Americas, particularly North America, have been impressed one way or another with its dominant quality of fierceness.
The Seasons of Man in the Ozarks
Sometime in the sleep of every year, between the browning of the oaks and the first greening of the spring wild grasses, that country flamed.
Our Frontier Heritage of Waste
Historians of the future, looking back on the twilight years of the twentieth century, may designate the mid-1970’s as worthy of that supreme accolade accorded only the most significant dates in history: to serve as a dividing point between chapters in their textbooks.
A trip to the Ozarks in 1910 has left us a unique record of a people by-passed by progress
The Ozarks—a young reporter from Kansas City named Charles Phelps Cushing thought in 1910—were “not stunning Rocky Mountains, just graceful old hills.
THE AMERICAN BALD EAGLE
Do we still want him for our national bird?
IN THE DELTA
The low-lying Delta—six and a half million acres of land rich with soil left by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers in flood—was first opened to a cotton-hungry world in the mid-1820’s. The price of cotton was high.
OR HOW THE BOY SCOUTS CAME TO AMERICA
Africa was part of my childhood. The attic in our Detroit home smelled like a zoo. There were lion, leopard, zebra, antelope, and colobus monkey skins that my sister and I and our friends used to take out of their trunks and forget to put back.
These hardy Texas beasts with “too much legs, horns, and speed” had long since been replaced by stodgier breeds. Now they were facing extinction…
If you are someone who thought the Texas longhorn was as dead as the passenger pigeon, here is a bit of news.
In 1879 Jim McCauley lured his sweetheart onto Overhanging Rock at Glacier Point, California, and threatened to push her off if she didn’t marry him. This rather hardnosed method of popping the question worked, or so McCauley said.
A Welsh waif adopted a new country and a new name and then became—thanks to a New York newspaper—the most famous African explorer of his time
On Sunday, December 8, 1872, the manager of the Theatre Comique on Broadway took the unusual step of buying up almost the entire front page of the New York Herald to puff the triumph of his latest presentation.
Riding to hounds has been as much of a sport among well-to-do Americans as among the British gentry
Ask anyone where fox hunting originated and odds are he will respond promptly, “Why, the British Isles, of course.” Indeed, the cry of “Tallyho!” conjures up visions of Lord or Lady Poddlesmere galloping across the English countryside, leaping mammoth hedges for hours on end, a
CUMBERLAND ISLAND AND HOW MODERN TIMES AT LAST HAVE REACHED IT
One of the good things that happened in America in 1970—a year otherwise noted for spreading oil slicks, raging forest fires, mercury in rainbow trout, and burgeoning pipelines in the tundra—was the decision by the National Park Service to purchase Cumberland
The old gray mare was not the ecological marvel, in American cities, that horse lovers like to believe
To many urban Americans in the 1970’s, fighting their way through the traffic’s din and gagging on air heavy with exhaust fumes, the,automobile is a major villain in the sad tale of atmospheric pollution.
Pilgrims and Puritans, naturally, hated the water, but by the turn of the century certain pleasures had been rediscovered
For some two hundred years the Europeans who planted themselves on our Atlantic shoreline turned their backs on the sea or merely farmed it.
CONSERVATION
The lake was liberated from glacial ice ten thousand years before Babylon was built. Thus, it had more than fifteen thousand years in which to transform from an almost sterile, ice-gouged river valley into fecund, prosperous Lake Erie.
The Rough Rider rode roughshod over writers who took liberties with Mother Nature’s children
It was an early spring evening in 1907. Theodore Roosevelt and Edward B.
Everyone knows a little about the rise and fall of DDT—how it was once hailed as a great boon to mankind; how useful it was in field and garden, house and yard; and how at last to our dismay it was unmasked as a killer, the chemical Al Capone, a threat to our
The shore line of Pyramid Lake, one of the West's great natural wonders, is steadily receding, robbed of the water it needs by a Bureau of Reclamation irrigation project.
On January 10, 1844, Lieutenant John C.
From a way Down East came a stench of politics and potatoes, and news of a border incident that true patriots will long remember as
The traveller who leaves Maine on Route 6 and enters New Brunswick at Centreville encounters a curious monument beside the road only fifty feet inside the Canadian border.
In a mere three hundred years we have despoiled a rich continent and seriously disturbed its balance of life. Nature may not let us escape the consequences much longer
Coming from an Old World intensively cut over, cultivated, and grazed by domestic animals, Europeans were awed and often overwhelmed by their first glimpses of North America—the clouds of sea birds enveloping rocky islands off Newfoundland, the waterfowl crowding sandy beaches and inland rivers, the stately forests with their “tribes” both feathered and furred that knew not the yoke of man.
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