expectedly, a raft of richly imaginative articles and books about southern
subregions, beginning at the end of the s and ongoing today, began
to appear. Among these I am influenced by Conevery Bolton Valencius’s
Health of the Country(), which examines antebellum migrants to the
trans-Mississippi South and their perceptions of landscape forms and their
implications for human well-being. Many of the best new books concern
the mountain South, not least Silver’s work on Mount Mitchell and
the Black Mountains in North Carolina, which ingeniously melds interdis-
ciplinary archival research with Silver’s own local experience as climber,
hiker, fly fisherman, and naturalist. Margaret Lynn Brown’s ‘‘biog-
raphy’’ of the Great Smokies, too, is rich in scope and perspective on the
hopeless inconsistencies of national park development and management.
The southern lowlands have also received wise and diligent attention of
late, notably in David McCally’s book on the Everglades () and Rob Out-
land’s outstanding work on the naval stores industry among the longleaf
forests (). And among younger historians of American regionalism and
environmental ideas, Robert Dorman has actually had new things to say.
Geographers—both living and gone, and of rural and urban places—are
irreplaceable to the student of landscapes. The late Merle C. Prunty Jr., for
example, and his former students Sam Bowers Hilliard and Charles Aiken
largely created the lexicons of rural occupance, economic organization,
and food supply. And the contemporary urban geographers John A. Jakle
and David Wilson confirm and elaborate the dereliction of cities predicted
more than four decades ago by Jane Jacobs, whose classicDeath and Life of
Great American Cities() is my own template for built landscapes. I am
likewise obliged to geographers—but also to ethnographers, anthropolo-
gists, archaeologists, and historians—of Native America in the South. They
have accomplished near-miracles of exposition and explanation during the
past generation: Charles Hudson (the great patriarch), Shepard Kretch III,
Theda Perdue, Michael Green, Robbie Ethridge, Helen Rountree, Daniel
Usner, Patricia Galloway, William Doolittle, and others. Kretch, however,
most directly engages native cultures and ecology, and Doolittle has (at
long last) dispatched the myth of swidden (or ‘‘slash-and-burn’’) agriculture
among natives.
Third (but hardly least), I am enormously influenced by the founders of
contemporary environmental history. Samuel P. Hays’s early book on for-
est industries (), now part of the canon of conservation history, led
me, as a graduate student, to write Progressive Era political history with a
more expansive and critical view. Only later did I and others connect Hays’s
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