Important scholars in the past have recognized how the connection between the natural world and human society shaped our history. For example, Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis pointed to the way in which the availability of western land—or its absence—shaped American democracy, and colonial historians recognized the way in which climate, topography, and disease played critical parts in shaping distinctive settlement patterns. Today, the interest in this topic has motivated scholars to explore these connections in new and novel ways. Essays by six of these scholars are presented in this issue of History Now.

In “Climate Anxiety, Climate Ambition, and Early American Infrastructure,” Keith Pluymers reminds us that although we face unprecedented climate change today, concerns about climate and public health and the desire to create innovative infrastructure in the face of climate woes have been a foundational problem for the United States. As far back as 1797, as yellow fever raged through Philadelphia, Dr. Benjamin Rush and others feared that the epidemic pointed to dangerous and uncertain climate changes in America. Rush had been concerned about the links between unstable weather patterns and disease for more than a decade, and he issued a warning that rapid deforestation, problems with standing water, and atypical rainfall patterns had created conditions for epidemic fevers. He recommended planting trees in order to purify the air. But his focus had been on rural areas; the yellow fever epidemic was an urban nightmare.

Throughout the eighteenth century, proposals were made to deal with hot temperatures and with stagnant air, primarily through municipal wells and pumps in urban areas. Infrastructure changes were suggested, including the building of an aqueduct that would carry river water to Philadelphia. Benjamin Latrobe believed Philadelphia suffered from extremes of climate and argued that a series of fountains would help produce purer air and moderate temperatures. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century reformers thus linked urban water infrastructure and climate. Today, Pluymers argues, we too need to face the challenge of reexamining infrastructure, climate, and public health.

And what about city parks? In “How City Parks Came to Resemble What They Are Today,” Catherine McNeur discusses the many uses of city parks, arguing that they are microcosms of their cities and communities. Taking New York as her example, she notes that rapid urbanization and migration of rural Americans along with immigration led to changes in attitudes toward city parks in the nineteenth century. In 1811, city leaders saw little need for parks in New York. The presence of good sea air made parks, they said, unnecessary for public health. But city residents wanted parks to serve as ornaments that would show—to foreign tourists—that their culture was equal to that of European cities. Washington Square Park was a result of this civic pride and competitive spirit. It opened in 1827 and, as an added benefit, property values around it soared. When cholera hit New York in the 1830s and ’40s, parks were seen as sources of fresh air by those who escaped the disease, even though cholera was actually transmitted through contaminated water. Soon Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were designing a huge park in the center of Manhattan as a “breathing zone and healthful place” for residents of all social classes. Unfortunately, creating the park meant the displacement of Black and Irish residents of Seneca Village on what would be Central Park land. It also meant that New Yorkers who used the area as a commons, harvesting food and fuel and pasturing animals, would lose these rights. By 1887 the Small Parks Act added pocket parks and, in the twentieth century, playgrounds. In recent decades, McNeur points out, parks and playgrounds have been made accessible for disabled visitors.

In “Madeline Traces: Confronting the Marks of History,” Lauret E. Savoy offers us an account of her personal encounter with the rich history of Madeline Island in Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands. She begins with a lesson on cultural dominance: White society renamed the local Native American peoples as Ojibwa or Chippewa although they knew themselves as the Anishinaabeg. As a child, Savoy accepted as true the “discoveries” of Henry Schoolcraft, known as the father of American folklore and anthropology, and the descriptions of Native life offered by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She would later realize that Schoolcraft was reworking living oral narratives in order to accommodate the federal government’s claim on the mineral-rich land surrounding Lake Superior. Savoy challenges the “scientific” findings that supported treaties that led to the removal of Indians from their homeland and gave the US access to rich copper veins in what came to be known as the Mineral District. By the 1850s, the original occupants of the Lake Superior area had been removed to a reservation in Minnesota. The geology of the region, with its rich mineral deposits, was eagerly studied by geologists, but it also led to the relocation of Native residents from their ancestral lands. Savoy concludes that the Indigenous population and their traditions were, like the land itself, “objectified and commodified, mined and collected.”

In his essay “Slavery and the Environment,” David Silkenat shows us the ways in which the environment conspired with slaveholders to keep African Americans in bondage yet sometimes aided those who succeeded in escaping. The natural dangers escapees faced were many: large and small rivers, lakes, and predatory animals including panthers, bears, snakes, and alligators, not to mention the bloodhounds used to track a runaway man or woman. Yet enslaved people knew the southern environment better than their masters, for they labored in the fields by day and at night took secretly to the woods and swamps to visit relatives and to hunt. The escape accounts Silkenat offers us are harrowing: Solomon Northup tells of seeing hundreds of moccasin snakes in the swamp and recounts his fear of being crushed in the jaws of an alligator. Yet the swamp proved a refuge for some who formed maroon communities hidden deep within swamps like the Great Dismal Swamp. These communities shared the swamp with black bears, beavers, bobcats, bald eagles, panthers, as well as the ever-present snakes. White society knew of these maroon communities but was unable to penetrate the swamps to recapture them. During the Civil War, knowledge of the environment proved useful to African Americans who succeeded in reaching the Union army. General Abner Doubleday offered freedom in exchange for work as spies, scouts, and guides.

In “Yellowstone: National Parks as National Resources,” Megan Kate Nelson traces the struggle to convince politicians to set aside land for public use rather than for development. She notes that for thousands of years, tribal nations used the Yellowstone Basin as a hunting ground, a thoroughfare, and a site for medicinal herb gathering. In the 1860s, the gold rush brought thousands of miners to Montana and soon curious civilians began to explore Yellowstone. The US government hoped that scientists like Ferdinand Hayden would evaluate the Yellowstone Basin’s capacity for farming, ranching, and other development. By 1871 scientists took samples of water and earth, and collected rocks and plants. But it was Jay Cooke, an investor in the Northern Pacific Railroad, who wanted to boost tourist traffic in the area and supported the preservation of Yellowstone as a national park. The Yellowstone Park Protection Act was passed in 1872 over objections by lawmakers who wanted the area for White settlers. Some Congressmen thought the creation of the park was a dangerous example of federal government overreach. No one seemed to care that the desires of Indigenous peoples were ignored. Few Americans came to the park until the railroad was completed in 1883. By 1948, a million visitors visited Yellowstone and today more than four million come each year. Still, corporations make bids to mine for natural resources on the edges of the park and some politicians continue to oppose national park lands. Today there are efforts to remove their protected status and allow development within them.

In “People and Nature in the American West: A Brief Deep History,” Sara Dant tracks the American West’s relationship to changes in climate and use of the lands over thousands of year. She notes that the first humans on the North American continent arrived in the West and proved to be community builders and constant innovators. They produced new tools, developed agriculture, and irrigated their environment. As she notes, “Through careful management of scarce natural resources,” they wrested a living from the sometimes harsh environments of the American West. They were adaptable: When a profoundly dry and hot interval geologists call the Altithermal struck over five thousand years ago, Native people responded by moving away from areas that could no longer sustain human communities. But the people of the United States showed an insatiable demand for privately held land, and by the nineteenth century much of the public land of the West was turned over to private ownership. Federal acts including the Homestead Act and the General Mining Act created a giveaway of public lands that one historian has called “the Great Barbeque.” President Theodore Roosevelt saw this devastation of the ecosystems of the West and became a champion of conservation. By 1916, the National Park Service was acting to control poaching and destruction. In modern times, the federal government has managed natural resources on the remaining public lands. But today, Dant reminds us, global climate change threatens our lives. Driving this problem is carbon dioxide emissions, and the primary source of these emissions is the burning of fossil fuels. Climate change—including heat waves, flooding, more droughts, larger storms, and higher sea levels—has cost the US nearly $183 billion in damages. We will be forced, Dant explains, to confront the myth of inexhaustibility. Cooperation, not rugged individualism, is required of us.

As is our custom, we have included in this issue other Gilder Lehrman resources on the nexus between nature and society, including previous issues of History Now on related topics, videos, lesson plans, and Spotlights on Primary Sources. The special feature is a pair of Book Breaks presentations by two of the issue’s contributors, Megan Kate Nelson (on her book Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America) and Keith Pluymers (on his book No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic).

For History Now, Nicole Seary, Melissa Reyes, and I want to issue a warm welcome back to school and hope this new semester will be rich with learning and discovery for both the students and the teachers.

Carol Berkin, Editor, History Now
Presidential Professor of History, Emerita, Baruch College & the Graduate Center, CUNY

Nicole Seary, Associate Editor, History Now
Senior Editor, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

Melissa Reyes, Contributing Editor, History Now 76
Dartmouth College, Class of 2025