Vanishing America

Miles A. Powell's Vanishing America treads familiar historiographical ground, but its approach is just unique enough to warrant a glance from historians interested in the emergence of the modern environmental movement, the cultural legacies of western expansion, and the ways scientifically minded thinkers between 1850 and 1950 understood human difference. By using the topic of species extinction as a wedge to break open an evolving nexus of ideas connected to race, science, culture, and “nature,” Powell “attempts both to expose the racial ideas underlying modern environmentalism and to carve out a place for the environment in the history of American race-making” (p. 6). The fear that species extinction (and its related effects on the natural environment) portended or reflected the degeneration of white—more properly “Nordic”—racial stock is central to Powell's argument. Not surprisingly, these concerns peaked during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, but, as Powell shows, variations of them can be found both before and after those periods

Archaeology · Environmental ethics · Environmentalism · Ethnology · Extinction (optical mineralogy · Historiography · Natural (archaeology · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Sociology · Warrant · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeology and Natural History · Gender Studies · History · History of Science and Natural History · Law · Philosophy