This Radical Land
A Natural History of American Dissent
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- 22,99 €
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- 22,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
“The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That’s largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today: a country expanding unstoppably, bending the continent’s natural bounty to the national will, heedless of consequence. A country of slavery and of Indian wars. There’s much truth in that vision.
But if you know where to look, you can uncover a different history, one of vibrant resistance, one that’s been mostly forgotten. This Radical Land recovers that story. Daegan Miller is our guide on a beautifully written, revelatory trip across the continent during which we encounter radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress in the very landscapes around them, even as the runaway engine of capitalism sought to steamroll everything in its path. Here we meet Thoreau, the expert surveyor, drawing anticapitalist property maps. We visit a black antislavery community in the Adirondack wilderness of upstate New York. We discover how seemingly commercial photographs of the transcontinental railroad secretly sent subversive messages, and how a band of utopian anarchists among California’s sequoias imagined a greener, freer future. At every turn, everyday radicals looked to landscape for the language of their dissent—drawing crucial early links between the environment and social justice, links we’re still struggling to strengthen today.
Working in a tradition that stretches from Thoreau to Rebecca Solnit, Miller offers nothing less than a new way of seeing the American past—and of understanding what it can offer us for the present . . . and the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this inventive debut, landscape historian Miller argues that since landscapes are human creations they all have a history. His reading of 19th-century American landscapes uncovers "histories of dissent, of freedom, of equality, and of justice" that are rooted in concerns over a rapidly industrializing country. Miller organizes the book into four "acts," with an intermission of indeterminate value. The first act opens in Massachusetts, where Henry David Thoreau investigates the best use of the Concord River: powering mills or sustaining agriculture and green landscapes. The second and fourth acts are the most intriguing. In act two, African-American settlers in the Adirondacks envision a utopian agrarianism that challenges racial views during a time when slavery debates are tearing the country apart. In act four, giant sequoias in California inspire the creation of the socialist Kaweah Colony, which sought to sustain both human and nonhuman life. Act three is the most esoteric and densely jargoned; here, Miller explores how photographer A.J. Russell refashioned Rocky Mountain landscape aesthetics to critique manifest destiny. Miller tries too hard to craft elegant prose and the interspersed first-person narratives don't mesh with the rest of the material. Still, Miller's book should be valued by scholars for its creative linking of radicalism and landscape. Illus.