Escaping the Dark, Gray City

Conservation was inseparable from the reforms that defined Progressive Era America. Not only did conservation produce National Park and Forest Service landscapes, it was also essential to urban reform—everything from city parks to drinkable water to gardening and the abatement of air pollution. Conservation was a vital part of progressive education, workplace health and safety, and even architecture (bungalows were conservationists' favorite). Conservationists sought cultural, not just institutional, change. In short, conservation was fundamental to the progressive attempt to humanize industrial capitalism. And yet syntheses of Progressive Era America, even such outstanding interpretations as Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent (2003) and Jackson Lears's Rebirth of a Nation (2009), hardly even mention conservation. Perhaps one reason for this troubling oversight is that historians have not produced a single volume that summarizes conservation with all its varied interests, achievements, and contradictions. Happily, Benjamin Heber Johnson's Escaping the Dark, Gray City remedies this situation, placing conservation where it belongs: at the center of the Progressive Era

Archaeology · Capitalism · Environmental ethics · Gray (unit · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Progressive era · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Archaeology and Natural History · Architecture · History · Law

• The Undercurrent of Friction”

  Joshua Nygren•Agricultural History•2025

  Add to list