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Changes in the land : William Cronon : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
4 e de couverture: Changes in the Land, winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, offers an original and persuasive interpretation of the changing circumstances in New England's plant and animal communities that occurred with the shift from Indian to European dominance. With the tools of both historian and ecologist, William Cronon constructs a brilliant interdisciplinary analysis of how the 3,5/5(6). William Cronon PDF [BOOK] Changes In The Land: Indians, Colonists, And The Ecology Of New England By William Cronon click here to access This Book: FREE DOWNLOAD Seasons of want and plenty by historian William Cronon Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, scattered over many square miles of land. All aspects of Indian life Changes in the land | william cronon | macmillan Changes . Changes in the Land | Cronon, William | ISBN: | Kostenloser Versand für alle Bücher mit Versand und Verkauf duch blogger.coms:
Changes in the land cronon pdf download
Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize Changes in the Land offers an original and persuasive interpretation of the changing circumstances in New England's plant and animal communities that occurred with the shift from Indian to European dominance. With the tools of both historian and ecologist, Cronon constructs an interdisciplinary analysis of how the land and the people influenced one another, changes in the land cronon pdf download, and how that complex web of relationships shaped New England's communities.
Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App, changes in the land cronon pdf download. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required, changes in the land cronon pdf download. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. Changes in the Land is almost the equal of Cronon's masterpiece, Nature's Metropolisa monumental study of the ecological effects of Chicago on the entire central portion of the United States in the s.
Highly Recommended to specialists and general readers alike. All rights reserved. He had recently read the book New England's Prospect, in which the English traveler William Wood recounted his voyage to southern New England and described for English readers the landscape he had found there.
Now Thoreau sought to annotate the ways in which Wood's Massachusetts was different from his own. The changes seemed sweeping indeed. Equally abundant were gooseberries, raspberries, and especially currants, which, Thoreau mused, "so many old writers speak of, but so few moderns find wild.
On the coast, where Indian settlement had been greatest, the woods had presented a more open and parklike appearance to the first English settlers, without the underbrush and coppice growth so common in nineteenth-century Concord. To see such a forest nowadays, Thoreau wrote, it was necessary to make an expedition to "the sample still left in Maine. But if the forest was much reduced from its former state, most of its tree species nevertheless remained.
This was more than could be said for many of its animal inhabitants. Thoreau's list of those that were now absent was stark: "bear, moose, changes in the land cronon pdf download, deer, porcupines, 'the grim-fac'd Ounce, and rav'nous howling Wolf,' and beaver. Bass had once been caught two or three thousand at a time. The progeny of the alewives had been "almost incredible. Of the birds, changes in the land cronon pdf download, Thoreau wrote: "Eagles are probably less common; pigeons of course Probably more owls then, and cormorants, etc.
A year after his encounter with William Wood's New England ofhe returned to its lessons in more explicitly moral language. There is nothing new to the observation that European settlement transformed the American landscape.
Long before Thoreau, naturalists and historians alike were commenting on the process which was converting a "wilderness" into a land of European agricultural settlement.
Whether they wrote of Indians, the fur trade, the forest, or the farm, colonial authors were constantly aware that fundamental alterations of the changes in the land cronon pdf download fabric were taking place around them. The changes in the land cronon pdf download increased as time went on.
By the late eighteenth century, many individuals--Peter Kalm, Peter Whitney, Jeremy Belknap, and Timothy Dwight chief among changes in the land cronon pdf download commenting extensively on these changes. For the most part, unlike Thoreau, they did so approvingly. As early asthe historian Edward Johnson could count it as one of God's providences that a "remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness" had been transformed in a generation into "a second England for fertilness.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the metaphors for environmental change had become more humanistic than providential, but were no less enthusiastic about the progress such change represented.
In a passage partially anticipating Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, for instance, Benjamin Rush described a regular sequence for clearing the forest and civilizing the wilderness. The first settler is nearly related to an Indian in his manners--In the second, the Indian manners are more diluted: It is in the third species of settlers only, that we behold civilization completed. Environmental change was of secondary interest.
For Enlightenment thinkers like Rush, in each stage, theshape of the landscape was a visible confirmation of the state of human society. Both underwent an evolutionary development from savagery to civilization. The replacement of Indians by predominantly European populations in New England was as much an ecological as a cultural revolution, and the human side of that revolution cannot be fully understood until it is embedded in the ecological one.
Doing so requires a history, not only of human actors, conflicts, and economies, but of ecosystems as well. How might we construct such an ecological history? The types of evidence which can be used to evaluate ecological change before are not uniformly reliable, and some are of a sort not ordinarily used by historians.
It is therefore important to reflect on how they should best be criticized and used. The descriptions of travelers and early changes in the land cronon pdf download, for instance, provide observations of what New England looked like in the early days of European settlement, and how it had changed by the end of the eighteenth century, changes in the land cronon pdf download.
As such, they provide the backbone of this study. But to use them properly requires that we evaluate each traveler's skills as a naturalist, something for which there is often only the evidence of his or her writings. Moreover, we can only guess at how ideological commitments such as Thoreau's or Rush's colored the ways they saw the landscape.
How much did William Wood's evident wish to promote the Massachusetts Bay Colony lead him to idealize its environment? To what extent did the anonymous author of American Husbandry shape his critique of American agriculture to serve his purpose of preserving colonial attachments to Britain? Even if we can remove most of these ideological biases to discover what it was a traveler actually saw, we must still acknowledge that each traveler visited only a tiny fraction of the region.
As Timothy Dwight once remarked, "Your travelers seize on a single person, or a solitary fact, and make them the representatives of a whole community and a general custom. We cannot always know with certainty whether a governmental action anticipated or reacted to a change in the environment. When a law was passed protecting changes in the land cronon pdf download on a town commons, for example, did this mean that a timber shortage existed?
Or was the town merely responding with prudent foresight to the experience of other localities? If a shortage existed, how severe was it? Was it limited only to certain species of trees?
And so on. Only by looking at the overall pattern of legal activity can we render a reasonable judgment on such questions. These problems notwithstanding, town and colony records address almost the entire range of ecological changes in colonial New England: deforestation, the keeping of livestock, conflicts between Indians and colonists over property boundaries, the extermination of predators such as wolves, and similar matters. Deeds and surveyor records can be used statistically to estimate the composition of early forests, and are usually more accurate than travelers' accounts even though subject to sampling errors.
Relict stands of old-growth timber, such as the Cathedral Pines near Cornwall, Connecticut, can suggest what earlier forests may have looked like. The relict stands which exist today, however, are by no means identical to most of the forests which existed in colonial times, so that the record of earlier forests must be sought in less visible places.
Ecologists have done very creative detective work in analyzing tree rings, charcoal deposits, rotting trunks, and overturned stumps to determine the history of several New England woodlands.
The fossil pollen in pond and bog sediments is a reliable but fuzzy indicator of the changing species composition of surrounding vegetation; despite problems in determining the absolute age of such pollen, it supplies some of the most reliable evidence for reconstructing past forests.
In addition, a wide variety of archaeological evidence can be used to assess past environments, particularly the changing relations of human inhabitants to them.
These include microscopic changes in soil fauna and flora, soil compaction, changes in the transpiration rates of forests, and so on. Here all arguments become somewhat speculative. Given what we know of ecosystem dynamics, however, it would be wrong simply to ignore such changes, since some of them almost certainly occurred even though no one noticed them at the time.
I will occasionally appeal to modern ecological literature to assert the probability of such changes, and trust that, by so doing, I am not straying too far from the historian's usual canon for evaluating evidence. Silences in the historical record sometimes require us to make the best-informed interpolations we can, and I have tried always to be conservative on the few occasions when I have been forced to do this. Although caution is required in handling all these various forms of evidence and nonevidencetogether they provide a remarkably full portrait of ecological change in colonial New England.
But they also raise intriguing questions, questions which are both empirical and theoretical. One, for instance, follows directly from the imprecision of the data: travelers' accounts and other colonial writings are not only subjective but often highly generalized.
Colonial nomenclature could be quite imprecise, so much so that the French traveler Chastellux wrote of the impoverishment of American English as a result: Anything that had no English name has here been given only a simple designation: the jay is the blue bird, the cardinal the red bird; every water bird is simply a duck, from the teal to the wood duck, and to the large black duck which we do not have in Europe. They call them "red ducks," "black ducks," "wood ducks.
For instance, many early descriptions, including those by William Wood, make no mention at all of hemlock, although they do mention fir and spruce.
On just such evidence, Thoreau concluded--incorrectly --that the fir tree had been much more common in colonial times. But since fir and spruce are now largely absent in southern New England, and since fossil pollen shows that hemlock has long been a significant component of the New England forest, it seems reasonable to conclude that "hemlock" was subsumed by colonists under the names of "fir," "spruce," and probably "pine.
Only the fossil pollen can tell us. As another example, the hickory was rarely mentioned by name, but instead was for a long time known as the "walnut," an entirely different genus of tree. Because white pine was valuable economically, many early visitors seem to have seen it everywhere, thus leading them to exaggerate its numerical significance. Colonists confused the native junipers with European cedars for the same economic reasons, so that the red cedar has carried a misleading name ever since.
All of these problems of nomenclature must be borne in mind if one is not to give a distorted picture of the colonial ecosystem.
This will not always do. Not all the environmental changes which took place after European settlement were caused by it. Some were part of much longer trends, and some were random: neither type need have had anything to do with the Europeans. Trickier still are instances where Europeans may or may not have altered the rate at which a change was already occurring. Unless one can show some plausible mechanism whereby settlement could and probably did cause a change, it seems best not to attribute it to European influence.
One cannot escape the fallacy altogether--any discussion of causality in history must encounter it with some frequency--but one must at least be aware of when one is flirting with it. I shall have occasion to do so here. This brings us to the heart of the theoretical difficulties involved in doing ecological history, changes in the land cronon pdf download.
When one asks how much anecosystem has been changed by human influence, the inevitable next question must be: "changed in relation to what? Before we can analyze the ways people alter their environments, we must first consider how those environments change in the absence of human activity, and that in turn requires us to reflect on what we mean by an ecological "community.
The first generation of academic ecologists, led by Frederic Clements, defined the communities they studied literally as superorganisms which experienced birth, growth, maturity, and sometimes death much as individual plants and animals did.
Under this model, the central dynamic of community change could be expressed in the concept of "succession. This last stage was assumed to be stable and was known as the "climax," a more or less permanent community which would reproduce itself indefinitely if left undisturbed. Its equilibrium state defined the mature forest "organism," so that all members of the community could be interpreted as functioning to maintain the stability of the whole.
Here was an apparently objective point of reference: any actual community could be compared with the theoretical climax, and differences between them could then usually be attributed to "disturbance. If all ecological change was either self equilibrating moving toward climax changes in the land cronon pdf download nonexistent remaining in the static condition of climaxthen history was more or less absent except in the very long time frame of climatic change or Darwinian evolution.
The result was a paradox. Ecologists trying to define climax and succession for a region like New England were faced with an environment massively altered by human beings, yet their research program demanded that they determine what that environment would have been like without a human presence.
By peeling away the corrupting influences ofman and woman, changes in the land cronon pdf download, they could discover the original ideal community of the climax.
Changes in the Land newest
, time: 16:44Changes in the land cronon pdf download
In Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, Cronon uses a two-pronged approach to understand how the ecological and cultural changes in New England during colonization. The changes in modes of production between Indian and European dominance are central to his thesis, which contends that the complex ecological and cultural relationships are tied directly to 2,3/5(9). Changes in the Land | Cronon, William | ISBN: | Kostenloser Versand für alle Bücher mit Versand und Verkauf duch blogger.coms: Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England - Kindle edition by Cronon, William. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England.
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