Brian Donahue

Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America

At first glance, Virginia DeJohn Anderson’s Creatures of Empire is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the environmental history of early America; on closer observation, the work is very much more than this. Indeed, it is more a cultural history than an environmental history. Focusing on the first seventyfive years of English colonisation, Anderson examines the ways in which ‘animals not only produced changes in the land but also in the hearts and minds and behavior of the peoples who dealt with them’ (p. 5).

Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790–1930. By John T. Cumbler. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 268 pp.

This book is a study of the impact of industrialization and urbanization on the environment of New England in general and the Connecticut River Valley in particular - and of the varied public responses to the change engendered by the impact. Part One begins with a look at the early ways of life in the valley: the struggle is to extract a living and the transformation away from settled agriculture. Part Two looks at the responses to these changes and into the roots of emerging social, economic, and political conflicts in the region, and Part Three argues that out of these conflicts emerged the idea of the state as mediating influence.