Nature's Metropolis

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: WW Norton, 1991)

Here, Cronon looks at Chicago as both a product of and a shaper of the "first-nature" environment surrounding its metropolitan areas. This is the best possible example of how environmental history could integrate the urban and the rural and downplay the concept of "wilderness," a goal that everyone is always talking about. Cronon shows how Chicago used its position on Lake Michigan to attract railroads, which in turn attracted trade from the "great West"'s hinterlands, which in turn located Chicago as a gateway city: raw goods would enter the city and exit as value-added commodities, with Chicago performing the work of abstracting the commodity from its original context. Chicago was dependent on the strength and financial capital of New York and Philadelphia, which financed the railroads and established Chi-town as the broker of Midwestern ecological capital.

Commodities that Cronon looks at include wheat, lumber, and meat. In each case, Cronon argues, manufacturers in Chicago figured out how to use economies of scale to aggregate these goods into mass quantities and to abstract their value from their physical presence. This last happening worked especially well with wheat, which created the modern concept of the "exchange," at which people traded wheat without ever even seeing the wheat in question. (Here is where I figured out what a "futures market" is - it's more fascinating than one could ever imagine.)

Cronon writes that Chicago's effect upon the rural sites which came within its orbit was both positive for people's lives (easier selling of their goods; better access to cheaper things) and negative (they were at the mercy of distant forces for their livelihood; if they were merchants, they were undercut by cheaper Chicago prices). Cronon shows how certain small-potatoes merchants and farmers resisted the pressure of the giant Chicago firms through associations (sometimes more effective, other times less).

I've been waiting to read this one for a long time, and it was definitely un-disappointing. Cronon's ability to be both a good storyteller and a "man of infinite research" (as TR said about Henry Adams) is a thing to envy. His inclusion of financial records, technological analysis, and cultural productions (novels, esp. in the World's Fair chapter) makes this book a model of enviable American Studies practice.

The Bulldozer in the Countryside

Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge UP, 2001)

I can't decide if I love it or hate it when a book tells me all of its major arguments in the introduction, summarized in bullet-pointed numbers and even bolded for my convenience. Part of me thinks that this is a sign that I should forsake trying to read this whole book and simply read the intro. But then the other part of me thinks "If I stick to the intro, maybe I will miss something really cool..." Like, for example, the chapter on septic tanks in this book.

Rome argues that environmentalism really took shape around the time of the development of the postwar suburbs (194os-1970s). Contrary to earlier interpretations, Rome says that gov't agencies (such as Fish and Game) had a much bigger hand in conservation efforts than previously thought; that scientists and policymakers acted for conservation even before the publication of Silent Spring (1962) and that common perceptions that citizen action formed the basis of environmentalism are erroneous; and that consumerism, in this case epitomized by the purchase of homes, works counter to environmentalism. Comfort-seekers of the post-war era, many of whom were working-class and were being offered the opportunity to own a house for the first time in their lives, were not apt to mind when developers cut corners with environmental protections.

Rome looks at the septic tank (which was intended to facilitate development of areas distant from the city center) as an exemplar of the way that developers tended to push the limits of the topography where they operated, and that home-owners did not look too closely at the specifics of their new homes (until the tanks failed and it was too late). The anti-detergents outrage, which took hold after some homeowners in Long Island and New Jersey found suds in their tap water, was another crusade that, Rome argues, came about only because of inconveniences to homeowners - not because of fearfulness about damaged ecosystems. The chapter on the fight to preserve open space was also interesting, because of its inclusion of homeowner activists.

Rome teaches at Penn State, and writes that he is working on a book about Earth Day and another about environmentalism of the Progressive Era. I hope he comes out with the latter before I write my dissertation, so that I may read it.

Natural Visions

Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)

Dunaway's book looks at imagery of environmentalism in the twentieth century, examining how photographers and filmmakers participated in and were funded by organizations both governmental and non-governmental whose mandate was to foster environmental awareness. Dunaway moves from looking at a Progressive-era photographer, Herbert Gleason, who created romantic-sublime imagery of the West; to the New Deal-era documentaries of Robert Flaherty, who lamented the death of the farm family, and Pare Lorentz (whose "The Plow That Broke The Plains" provides this image of a baby with the implement in question, which Dunaway argues exemplifies Lorentz' belief that the early pioneers were like prodigal children who wrecked the land without thinking); to the Sierra Club coffee-table books by the likes of Eliot Porter, which were the brainchildren of David Brower, whose vision of a nature outside of technology and humanity directly contradicted the New Deal technophilic imagination.

Throughout, Dunaway argues that environmental reformers who used art in their appeals passed over Benjamin's anxieties about the efficacy of the mechanically reproduced work of art, choosing instead to believe that their art could create a new "ecological sublime" (shades of David Nye) which would "rejoin beauty and sublimity, turn the ordinary into the astonishing, find awe in the diminutive, seek wonder in the everyday" (212).

But my question is: does it work? Do people change their minds after seeing pictures of bugs or cows? Nye's argument was that the technological sublime operates in part by bringing people together to witness something that exemplified human progress. How could the ecological sublime take advantage of this same dynamic? Nye also argues that the technological sublime always trumps the ecological sublime - at least, the "bigger" ecological sublime, of Adams' Yosemite and the like.

Dunaway is a professor of history at Trent University in Ontario. I know he has an article in the recent American Quarterly about use of imagery in seventies environmentalism.

Through Other Continents

Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

This book is a call to think outside the limits of American literary study (and study of other literatures as well). Dimock calls for interpreting American culture as an extreme holism incorporating human experiences reaching back into "deep time" and across the globe, a paradigm she sees as best illustrated by the spread of religion and languages. (She also uses Deleuze/Guattari's rhizome idea to illustrate this.)

Articulating an understanding of humans as fundamentally connected through the experience of embodiment, she then goes on to destabilize any number of other supposed "connections" which create the categories by which we define our academic studies. "Eras," she argues, should be seen as more plastic; even death should not curtail our inclusion or exclusion of particular people in categories of inquiry (this is a post-human moment). Dimock argues that the nineteenth century, with its expanding scientific knowledge, created opportunities for some people to see themselves as part of a "species" instead of as nations.

An example of a person in the nineteenth century American scene whose thought must be seen as transcending these boundaries is Thoreau, whose interest in the Bhagavad Gita Dimock sees as a "translation" across time. (John Brown, she argues, is also translated "across death" by his actions and by Thoreau's writings.) The acts of reading, writing, and translation are all radical acts, she argues, which challenge the primacy of time and allow us to hear the dead and reaffirm connections between ourselves and those who live far from us. Ezra Pound and fascism; Henry James in Italy; Robert Lowell and Vietnam all show up in different chapters. Her final chapter, on Gary Snyder and Native American and Japanese thought about tricksters (liminal animal/human figures), animals and ecology, reaffirms her conclusion that embodiment points the way to connection and empathy.

Dimock is in the English and American Studies departments at Yale. She recently co-edited a book on transnationalism and literary studies, Shades of the Planet, with Lawrence Buell; has written a book on Melville and individualism; and co-edited, with Priscilla Wald, a special issue of American Literature which I should read: Literature and Science: Cultural Forms, Conceptual Exchanges (Duke UP, 2002).

Crimes Against Nature

Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, and Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation (University of California Press, 2001)

Jacoby, who now teaches at Brown (and who got his PhD from Yale's history program), is working on a second book about cultural remembrance of violence against Native Americans since frontier times. He describes himself as interested in how "human and non-human actors" create history in mutuality.

Teddy Roosevelt's picture is here as a reminder of the way that famous conservationists get all the credit for early 20th-c conservationism, while, as Jacoby claims, we forget to mention all of the people whose lives were altered for the worse by this new understanding of who should be in charge of the land. Jacoby describes conflicts between more elite conservationists and different brands of environmental transgressors, suddenly categorized as abusers by the new environmental order: hunters who persist in ranging over the Adirondack reserves of the wealthy New York set; poachers who kill Yellowstone bison (the Army was actually sent out to stop them!); and Havasupai Indians in the Southwest who continue to hunt in the new national forests which are established on the peripheries of their new, land-poor reservations.

Throughout, Jacoby contends with Roderick Nash's assessment that wilderness "appreciation" appeared first in the Eastern elite (2) and tries to reach an understanding of what he calls the "moral ecology" of the working-class residents of newly conserved lands.

American Technological Sublime

David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994)

Nye teaches at the University of Southern Denmark, and has written several other books on technology and modernity in the US, including Electrifying America (on my list) and Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies. I'm not sure if he was trained in American Studies, but he apparently got his degree from Minnesota, so it seems likely. Regardless, this book could easily be used to answer the question "What does an ideal American Studies book look like?"

This book approaches its subject not through some artificially delineated rubric defined by race, age, gender, or time ("Italian immigrants in the cities, 1881-1911"). Nye picks an idea - that there is a particularly American form of expression/social interaction, called the "technological sublime" - and then picks a bunch of examples throughout American history in order to develop this idea. He effectively, then, creates a new rubric or a new category. And he uses the breadth of methodological sources that I would want from an American Studies book - responses from observers both "high" and "low"; examples from public entertainment settings (such as from expositions) and from cityscapes and defense departments (this shows how "technological sublime" is produced and managed by various agencies, with a larger or smaller degree of intent); the inclusion of fiction. I do think he could have had more in here about film, though.

Nye traces how the sublime, originally a concept articulated by Burke and Kant in order to describe a response to a natural object of great magnitude or impressiveness, shifted its boundaries in America to encompass the technological. On the way, Nye argues, the experience of facing the sublime shifted from an individual to a crowd context; from being provoked by nature to being provoked by machinery; and from an experience of "substance" into an electric image (277). His examples of various varieties of "technological sublime" include the electric sublime (see: lighting displays at World's Fairs); the industrial sublime (the curving, uniform lines of the factory walls at Manchester, NH's Amoskeag Mills - "complexity and order on a massive scale" [113]); the geometric sublime (skyscrapers and dams) and the dynamic sublime (the railroads).

His penultimate chapter, which describes the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986, shows how the technological sublime as practiced in these public contexts participates in a utopianism that promises not a difference in social interactions but a difference in the kind of "stuff" that we own. These sort of un-radical (or even repressive) historical precedents for the technological sublime of television can be found way earlier, however, in the "industrial sublime," which subsumed images of workers below images of machinery, beginning in the late nineteenth century, and in the "geometric sublime," embodied by skyscrapers that shut out and alienated the street-level public while impressing a generalized "public" with their mass.

There is interesting thought in here too about the interplay between nature and technology - Nye claims that if a naturally sublime site faces down a technologically sublime possibility, as in the case of dam construction, the naturally sublime will always lose to the potential of construction, because while the natural sublime speaks of limits, the technological sublime speaks of "the idea of reason in constant evolution" (60).

Do Glaciers Listen?

Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005)

Cruikshank, a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, specializes in the ways in which different types of knowledge - scientific, "folk," native - struggle to establish themselves as legitimate; and works in the Yukon and also sometimes in Siberia.

This book is about the way that native Alaskans (Tlingit and Huna in the St. Elias Mountains area) look/ed at glaciers, and the difference between their conception of glacier "consciousness" and the scientific bent of Western explorers with whom they have come into contact. Following Harold Innis' ideas about the way that empire establishes itself by eliminating alternative forms of communication and knowledge; Bahktin's belief that storytelling and folk humor can equal resistance; and Benjamin's understanding of the tragedy of the loss of interactive storytelling, Cruikshank looks at stories told by Tlingit and Huna elders about the place of social glaciers in their cultural history, and compares these stories to white/"scientific" conceptions of the glacier as natural fact.

Glaciers, to the Yukon women Cruikshank interviews, are social beings, sensitive to being excluded or made fun of, and obedient to laws of their own (for example, they hate it when you cook with grease nearby them; glacier travel requires boiled food only). There is a reciprocal relationship between men and glaciers - a relationship not recognized by white men, or at least not by most white men - John Muir is cited as an example of an American who approaches sensitivity when it comes to interactions with the natural world, although his insensitivity to the native people who guided him through that world troubles that approbation a bit.

In a weird coincidence, a couple of days after reading this book I read this article in the New Yorker about a composer who makes music according to the rhythms of various instruments which measure activity of the earth. It would be interesting to know what the Native Alaskans might think about this...

Moby-Dick

Images from leftist artist Rockwell Kent's 1930 illustrated version of Moby-Dick, which was sold through the Book-of-the-Month Club and revived the book's popularity. Kent was asked to do a version of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, but proposed the Melville classic instead. Weirdly enough, the cover of this version did not credit Melville (is Moby-Dick himself the author? V. fitting).

Title: Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (1851). I read the Penguin Classics edition, introduced by Andrew Delbanco.

Author: Herman Melville, 1819-1891. It's sad to think how early in his life he wrote this amazing book, and how anti-climatically it was received. Melville's first couple of books, which were more conventional adventure stories, got a degree of popular acclaim, but Moby-Dick didn't sit so well with the type of readers who had gone for his more salty (sorry) stuff. Melville saw a revival in the 1920s, spearheaded by the writing of several biographies (Lewis Mumford wrote one in 1929! was there anything the Mum couldn't do?), as well as the belated publication of Billy Budd, Sailor in 1924. See above caption for info about the popular revival of Moby-Dick. There have also been a couple of film version of this book, including one made in 1930 and one in 1956, directed by John Huston and script-written by Ray Bradbury, which I would really like to see.

Some words: This book was totally wasted on seventeen-year-old me the first time I read it. It's a fever dream, it's obsessive, it's beautiful, it's funny and very sad.

I appreciated Andrew Delbanco's introduction for a number of reasons, but I most profited by keeping in mind his comment about the looseness of the narrative form. He writes that there are times in the novel when there's no way that Ishmael can still be the narrator, in the traditional first-person sense, and the reader must give up on wondering "How could Ishmael know what Ahab said to himself in the belowdecks...or what Starbuck said to Ahab in private conversations..." etc.

Forewarned, I pictured the narrative more as Ishmael's scrapbook on the fall of the Pequod, a series of texts, accounts of things he witnessed, reports of his studies, but also things he might have imagined or foreseen or projected. (I suppose you could also look at the book as alternating between first and third person narrators, but I think my way is more fun.)

I kept a list of the different narrative forms that these small texts/chapters took, and I came up with: Dramatic script or soliloquy; affadavit; natural history (these were the chapters on the whale's anatomy, which I thought were hundreds of pages long when I was in high school reading this, but were actually much shorter); adventure story; yarn-within-a-story, a la Heart of Darkness (the chapter on the Town-Ho!); Emersonian essay (the amazing "Whiteness of the Whale"); object study resulting in multiplicity of character perspectives (the chapter in which each character reacts to the doubloon pounded into the mast); and horror story (the appearance of the dead Parsee, lashed to Moby-Dick's back and staring at Ahab, was an indelible image worthy of Poe). This is a very postmodern book, perhaps. I'm sure somebody has written on that.

I am going to forebear to comment too much on the questions of what Moby-Dick means for America or American literature, since I'm pretty sure a couple of the authors I have yet to read will do that, but I am interested to know if anyone has written an ecocritical or animal-studies analysis of the book. The chapter on the possible future extinction of the whale (in which Ishmael points to the buffalo, who, he argues in 1851, are commonly slaughtered without going extinct, as evidence of the whale's similar ability to withstand constant culling - heh) is one candidate for an analysis, but I also kept fixating on how Ishmael constantly points out how ironic it is that the whale lights the scene of his own slaughter. There's something here about the way that the body of the animal is made to betray itself, and how the nineteenth-century character sees this as somehow grotesque yet inevitable.


Also, the entire project of Moby-Dick could be seen as a forced re-marriage of production and consumption; during a time in which whale oil is used to light the ceremonies and celebrations of humanity, Ishmael writes, fewer and fewer humans seem to understand the risks and death involved in the killing of whales (risks and death both for the whales and the humans). The chapters on the floating factory that is the Pequod after a kill point toward a sort of a Jungle for the whaling industry, but with a less activist slant - it seems as though Ishmael simply wants the landlubber to realize the ultimate madness of technological achievement that their desires can stimulate.

In a way, the madness of Ahab is the ultimate extension of an endeavor (whale-hunting) which comes about because of the mad strivings of humanity. Even Starbuck (aka reasonableness/rationality) is unable to stop it. The human bond, as between Ahab and Starbuck, is finally unable to slow down Ahab's mad desires - after Ahab bids Starbuck to come close and "let [him] look into a human eye", which gaze is "better than to gaze upon God" (591), the bond that's created doesn't stop Ahab from continuing, but seems rather to seal Starbuck's fate. The first mate is unable to make a moral stand against Ahab's madness, because he sees Ahab's humanity. So, Melville says, we are all complicit in allowing each other to run amuck with doing and fixing and pushing and achieving.


Other books I've read which analyze this one: In Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current, he points to both Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1938) and the writings of J.N. Reynolds (most prominently the story "Mocha-Dick" [1839]) which he describes as antecedents to Moby-Dick. Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden juxtaposes the chapter in which Ishmael sits on the masthead and meditates on the meaning of life and the dirty, dark production chapters, in order to show the conflict in American life between lofty transcendentalism and the underpinnings of capitalism and material progress.

Vocab words: "puissant" ("possessed of or wielding power"); "poniard" ("a small, slim dagger"); "tierce" ("a third part").

1491

Machu Picchu. The Inka, for Mann, are a paradigmatic example of the role of disease and political fragmentation in the conquest of American civilization by the Europeans.

Title: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Vintage, 2005).

Author: Charles C. Mann, journalist, who writes (mostly) science coverage for the Atlantic Monthly, Nat'l Geo, Vanity Fair, etc. His other books include @ Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion (1998, with David Freedman); Noah's Choice: The Future of Endangered Species (1996, with Mark Plummer); The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine, and 100 Years of Rampant Competition (1991, with Mark Plummer); and The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics (1986, with Robert Crease).

My review: Mann's book is an overview of debates in archaeology, anthrophology, ethnobotany, paleontology, paleography, paleobotany, ancient history, and any number of other specialized fields, all of whom are trying to determine what the "New World" looked like before Europeans got here. The overall impact is a shift from a view of a sparsely populated, wild place filled with primitives who lived by the grace of the land, to a conception of continents covered with people who maintained the landscape for their particular needs, sometimes living in balance with the ecology and sometimes failing to do so.

Mann echoes Shephard Krech and William Cronon's lines of argument, discussing some of the same examples as Krech (including the controversy over the Pleistocene extinctions) and citing both authors. He also owes a major debt to Alfred Crosby, previously of UT American Studies, and geographer Jared Diamond.

The book covers a very wide range of subjects, and does a very adroit job of using early chapters to set up a trio of final chapters that bring together his conclusions into a neat bundle. For example, Mann discusses the debates over demography, which run like so: Some posit, based on the difference between early travelers' accounts and later observations, that so many Indians were killed off by early epidemics transmitted by arrivistes such as De Soto that by the time more Europeans came to survey and colonize, there weren't nearly as many Indians as there were a short time before. Thus, when we estimate how many Indians used to inhabit the continent, we should assume many more than we previously thought.

Moreover, those Indians that were left were in a state of political turmoil. Mann illustrates this theory using the story of Squanto, reconstructing it in such a way that Squanto's friendliness toward the Europeans can be explained by the deaths of most of his tribesmen, leaving him vulnerable; and that the willingness of Massasoit of the Wampanoag to cooperate with the Plymouth colony could be due to the same thing (since most of M's tribesmen had died, he was left with little choice but to ally with the English against the Narragansett).

Having set this up, in later chapters Mann describes the new understandings we have of the way in which Amazonian Indians may have managed the growth of fruit trees and sowed charcoal into the soil in order to create a more human-friendly environment. He concludes that, in fact, the entire "untouched" Amazon may be a human artifact. He then adds this to the knowledge we have of the way that Indians on the East Coast burned their forests for ease of access and management of food species (see Krech, Cronon again).

Combining the knowledge we have of these systems of ecological management, with the ideas coming to the fore about the way that populations were affected by early epidemics, Mann posits that the "wild" forests that the Pilgrims saw thronging the coastline, the throngs of passenger pigeons, many of the signifiers of "abundant America", may all have been due to the recent disappearance of the groups of managing Indians who had previously kept these ecosystems at equilibrium. Wow! Now, that's what I call a revelation.

I admire the way that Mann handles the issue of the impact of these debates over the past on the current political situation. Although I was wary of the fact that the New York Sun endorsed the book, and was occasionally annoyed when Mann came down heavily on the wise-use side of environmental ethics, he definitely recognizes that the information in the book could prove useful to conservatives wanting to expiate ancestors from charges of genocide and environmental misuse (like so: "well, if the Indians were all killed by germs, and they were ecological abusers anyway, then what's the big deal?") To this end, Mann distinguishes carefully between the conventional idea of Indians at the mercy of their environment and the importance of a new understanding of Indians as creative maintainers of the landscape.

Artist's rendering of what the city around Cahokia, in modern-day Missouri, may have looked like around AD 1000-ish. This was a real revelation to me, though others may have heard of it - the mounds in that area reveal evidence of a city of 120 acres, holding between 10,000 and 20,000 people.

Reception: All of the popular press reviews of this book were totally in love with it, so there's that.

I love reading the paperback copies of these kinds of books, because the afterwords often tell you exactly what specific criticism the authors received after the publication of the hardback. Mann stepped into many already raging controversies, and he acknowledges that he was bound to make some people mad and get some arguments wrong. (The great thing about this kind of intelligent-layman book is that he has an automatic out whenever questioned on technical matters - well, at least, I think so.) The most pressing criticism is that a lot of these "revelations" are actually over fifty years old - but, as Mann says, if the general public/those in public schools aren't taught about them, they lose their importance. Hence, the book.

Yanomami family, by Victor Englebert (photographing for an advocacy group). Mann points out that by the time the Yanomami were encountered in the seventeenth century, they may already have moved from an agricultural lifestyle to a hunter-gatherer one because of the upheaval caused by disease communicated by other groups which had made contact with Europeans. Thus, the conventional image of their lives is one that fails to acknowledge the full history of the tribe before contact and assumes that they have always been so.

Vocab words: "ramose" ("branching"); "theogony" (theology which studies the origins of gods); "coruscate" ("to give forth intermittent or vibratory flashes of light"); "fissiparous" ("producing new individuals by fission").

Leads: This book has an extensive bibliography. Secondary: Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1980); C. Ponting, Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (1991); Stephen Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (1982); R. Temple, The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention (1998).

The Sexual Politics of Meat

I'm pretty sure this book did not mention the 1972 movie "Prime Cut", in which Lee Marvin finds Sissy Spacek naked, in a pen full of hay, in a barn, about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. But it sure should have.

Title: The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990)

Author: Carol J. Adams, who has a masters in divinity and an extensive career as an activist outside of her academic writings. She's not affiliated with an academic institution, so far as I can see, but guest-lectures at many, and seems to travel extensively, giving a slide show based on this book. Other books she's written include Help! My Child Stopped Eating Meat (2004); The Pornography of Meat (2004); and Living Among Meat Eaters (2003). Adams lives in Dallas, which is brave on many levels, considering her political commitments.

My review: Adams hopes to make the point that the act of eating meat has been persistently gendered male, and that the inherent assumptions of meat-eating are similiar to the assumptions of woman-oppressing. What are these assumptions? Adams argues that the "sexual politics of meat" include "the idea[s] that the end justifies the means...the objectification of other beings is a natural part of life...and that violence can and should be masked" (24). Adams uses the concept of the "absent referent" to anchor the various implications of these assumptions or ideas. For her, the act of eating meat obscures the life of the actual animal, just as the acts of objectification or violence or misogyny obscure the life of the actual female. Both the woman and the animal are unimportant in the greater system of meaning constructed by the patriarchy. (For this reason, Adams advocates inserting a "[sic]" after any sentence in which an animal is called "it", just as we would after a sentence in which "he" is used as a universal pronoun.) (See chapter "The Rape of Animals, the Butchering of Women", p 50.)

Adams wants to restore what she sees as a lost history of associations between feminism and vegetarianism, arguing that first-wave feminist activists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century recognized the connections between their own struggles for political recognition and the choice to be vegetarian. She also uses a wide array of literary sources, including utopic novels such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915; see Bryson entry); Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906); and children's lit such as Charlotte's Web (1952). She recounts anecdotes from her experience as a domestic violence counselor. She also uses images collected from advertisements and (very interestingly) from publications internal to the meat industry.

"Truck Accident" (2004), by artist Sue Coe, whose Dead Meat is a book of paintings and writings about slaughterhouses.

This book can be difficult for one who lies on the other side of the divide between meat-chewing and meat-eschewing. To her credit, Adams seems to know that the conversion to her "side" can be one that is so absolute as to be almost mystical. But there are moments in this book that feel disingenous, as when she cites a description of a snuff film but neglects to write that the film in question was not actually a snuff film at all (see Snopes.com's debunking of the matter - thanks to Nick for telling me that this was an urban legend and rescuing me from many nightmares); or when she suggests that the school shooters of the 1990s may have shot kids because they were hunters so they were "used to it". Not only that, but the book, I think, assumes too much when it comes to correlation vs. causation. Just because, historically, men have been given more meat to eat even when women require the protein for breast-feeding, does that mean that meat is inherently patriarchal? Did English laborers of the nineteenth century really participate in patriarchy by giving the male members of the family more meat to eat? Should they have tried to find a nice mix of quinoa and kale to serve up instead? Is my skepticism or pickiness about this book derived from some deep guilt about or ambivalence about my meat-eating, which will some day be unearthed in a flood of veganism? Only time will tell.

Reviews of others: In Environmental Ethics, Deborah Slicer wrote that the book should have been written in clearer, easier-to-follow language (it didn't seem too bad to me!) and that Adams' analyses of race and class issues were unnecessarily truncated. (This is true - there was an interesting bit on Western imposition of meat diets on colonized cultures, but it was brief and undeveloped. There's plenty of room for further investigation in this area - and of the questions of diet imposition in general. The Inuit, for example, eat plenty of meat, but American and English explorers still found their diet disgusting.)

Apparently, in a later book Adams addresses the abhorrent PETA ad phenomenon.

Books to follow up on: Primary: Henry Salt, ed., Killing for Sport: Essays by Various Writers (1914); the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children.

Secondary: Linda Birke, Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew (1994); Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (1985); Mary Douglas, "Deciphering a Meal", in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (1975); Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (1985); Carolyn Steedman, "Landscape for a Good Woman", in Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties (1985).

Additionally, the book's bibliography is helpfully separated into subject areas, including "Vegetarian Writings", "Animal Concerns and Animal Defense", "Feminist Writings", "Sexual and Domestic Violence", "Literary Criticism", "History, Autobiography, Biography", "Fiction, Poetry, Drama", "Medical and Nutritional Writings", and "Other".

The Unsettling of America

Title: The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977)

Author: Wendell Berry, author of many books: novels, poetry, and essays. Also a longtime resident of northwestern Kentucky, farmer of 125 acres, former teacher of college creative writing, former Stegner Fellow.

My review:

This is a still from the recent documentary King Corn, which was co-made by/costars an alum from my high school, Ian Cheney. In this film, two city-raised kids who have old family roots in agricultural America try to return to Iowa, buy an acre of corn, and live the agdream. Of course, they end up on a tour through all of the technological boondoggles of contemporary monoculture. My favorite moment is when Ian tries to make high fructose corn syrup on his stove, and the process is so complicated that he almost can't do it. The number of friends I have who care a lot about farming (yet, interestingly, don't have farms themselves) is quite large (see, for example, Elanor Starmer's blog), and I am so implicated in this system of thought that reading a book like Unsettling almost felt like overkill. Plus, my conception of Berry's writing came completely from a couple of poems of his I had read and loved in high school, and which were kind of smushy in a latter-day Unitarian earth-love sort of way. (Here's one, "The Peace of Wild Things".)

Unsettling was much more of a jeremiad than I had ever expected, and addressed much deeper issues of National Character (or, more specifically, Modern Character) than I had thought. Berry's thought on technology (broadly defined) and its place in human endeavor goes beyond Luddism or antimodernism (although you could certainly slot him in there - he also really loves the Amish). For Berry, who employs what I would call a heavily Marxist mode of analysis, our "attitude toward work" has caused us to create a Frankensteinian system of technology and impersonal management methods, all designed to distance ourself from our own physical bodies.

As for the structure of the book, which Berry specifically cast as a response to what he saw as "modern or orthodox agriculture" (and remember, this was the 1970s, post-Earl Butz and Green Revolution...), Berry seems to get off with a bang, or three chapters which use the word "crisis" twice in their titles. Then there are more extended meditations on aspects of the crisis, including a chapter, "The Body and the Earth", which seeks to re-place the body in the ecological system and which follows a Carolyn Merchant-esque path in describing the tragic consequences of the divorce of body and soul.

Passages such as this startling one make his point, namely that technology is another method of alienation, leading to increasing enslavement of people and energy. Question: I see his point, but I find it objectionable to compare slavery and, say, modern irrigation systems. Is this direct equivalence, in itself, dehumanizing? Viz: "We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from...Out of this contempt for work arose the idea of a n****r: at first some person, and later some thing, to be used to relieve us of the burden of work. If we began by making n****rs of people, we have ended by making a n****r of the world. We have taken the irreplaceable energies and materials of the world and turned them into jimcrack 'labor-saving devices'. We have made of the rivers and oceans and winds n****rs to carry away our refuse, which we think we are too good to dispose of decently ourselves. And in doing this to the world that is our common heritage and bond, we have returned to making n****rs of people: we have become each other's n****rs" (12).

Some other potentially objectionable facets of this argument - beyond the comparison between slaves and tractors - include Berry's lament on the divorce of sexuality from childbearing marriages, which he says has destroyed the fabric of community and devalued the sacred act of sex. Pretty heteronormative, and also fairly biologically determinist, which is interesting, because his call for technological limitation is kind of anti-evolutionary. If you think that humans should be fulfilling the family structures their biology "demands" of them, then you also have to accept the human drive for technological improvement and reduction of work. A family structure that reaches beyond the boundaries of the "traditional" procreative one is a creative reimagining of biology, just like Berry's ideal farming structure would be.

All of Berry's critiques stem from the concept of human limitation, which he argues is necessary for our own health, bodily and spiritually speaking. Human limitation, which might involve limiting technology used (a la the Amish) or production itself (a la all previous versions of agriculture before the Green Revolution) is, of course, not a particularly popular concept, with the dominant visions of technocratic elites focused on the "way forward". Because of this, Berry visualizes himself on the "margins" of contemporary agriculture, and maybe also contemporary society, but says that the "margins" are a totally necessary and fruitful contributor to societal planning. (Once again, I wonder why he can't, then, get with the idea of marginal families or family units.)

Reception: I believe my colleague Lisa Powell will be sending me her paper on the reception of this book, so that I can put more in this section. From what I remember of her work, it seemed that Unsettling was the catalyst of a new small-farming movement, and that many new organic/small/local farmers could trace their "awakening" to this book (or, at least, that was her thesis - but then the paper explored the difficulty of pinpointing the origins of a movement or following the influence of a text through said movement - see, for example, Abbey's Monkeywrench Gang and ELF...) More to come on that.


I found this picture of Wendell Berry attached to a fascinating document: a 1976 debate published on NASA's website, in which Berry responded to a contest held for students to plan space settlement colonies. There's a long debate between him and one of the responsible adults. Sample of Berry: "I think you have wandered into a trap - one that is crowded with so many glamorous captives that you think it is some kind of escape. The trap is that a technological 'solution' on the scale of this one is bound to create a whole set of new problems, ramifying ahead of foresight." (See also Markley's Dying Planet on the anti-environmentalism of space colonization.)

Things to follow up on: The 1914 Smith-Lever act created the cooperative extension service. Was there a childhood education component at that point?

Last Child in the Woods

Image of schoolchildren pulling carrots comes from the website of The Edible Schoolyard, a school-garden project in Berkeley, spearheaded by Alice Waters. Caption: "'The garden looks beautiful, it smells great, it tastes like heaven, the sounds are very calming, and the feel of the plants is wonderful.' - Emily, 6th Grade". The emphasis on the multi-layered sensual experience echoes Louv's ideas about the ways that plants or the outdoors could calm children with ADHD or other behavorial disorders.

Title: Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005)

Author: Richard Louv, journalist, columnist for the San Diego Union-Trib. Chairman of an org. called The Children and Nature Network. Author of other books about childhood and general life in America: Web of Life: Weaving the Values that Sustain Us (1998); 101 Things You Can Do For Our Children's Future (1993); and Childhood's Future (1992).

My review:

It's a difficult thing to read a book whose premises you fundamentally agree with, but whose presentation elides nuance and is ahistorical and alarmist. (Reminds me of watching "Fahrenheit 9/11" - ugh.) Yes, I do agree that kids spend too much time indoors playing video games; that it is a terrible thing that communities have little space for children to play in; that it sucks that parents are too afraid to let kids bike around by themselves, so they rein them in with cell phones and GPS devices or don't let them out at all; that it's bogus that science education seems not to foster a generalized love of the outdoors, instead directing children toward specialized technological achievement. But Louv's discussion of these matters relies so heavily on anecdote, and on fear, that I find myself picking holes in it almost against my will (and not just because I think Louv's characterization of the problem as "nature deficit disorder" is fundamentally opportunist - the man wanted to sell books, or his editor did, anyway).

A great kid-in-nature tome of earlier years: Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost (1909).

In many ways, Louv's central concerns are very similar to those of Progressive-era educational thinkers such as John Dewey (who he references on p 65, on the virtues of primary experience) and G. Stanley Hall (who idealized his own farm-based upbringing). Louv's book is mostly free from the nastier racial implications of the late nineteenth-century anxiety re: "overcivilization" and degeneration (nobody back then ever seemed to worry about whether black sharecroppers' kids in the South were becoming proper men - all that anxiety was reserved for cream-of-the-crop white children). However, Louv sometimes seems to assume that the standard-issue "kid" is a white suburban one. There are a couple mentions of the problem of equal access to natural areas, and a few interviews with black or Latino kids who come back from wilderness-ed programs fundamentally changed, but they feel like gestures.

Teddy Roosevelt had Louv-like fears a hundred years before Louv louved. Here he is, at about the age when "Teedie" would have started discovering his affinity for the outdoors - a lifelong affection he credited for his vitality and right-thinkingness. See his "The Strenuous Life" for more.

Although Louv does not prescribe the benefits of Outside as a tonic for race regeneration, he does focus on the benefits - a very androcentric approach, which totally ignores a deep-ecology or biocentric POV. Humans, and human kids, are what matters here, not the environment per se. I'll go into pick-apart mode here: Louv is basically arguing that human kids will become stronger, more mentally acute, be cured of behavior problems, and probably get better grades and better scores on their SATs, if they go wander into a forest every once in a while. Will driven middle-class parents everywhere now begin scheduling in nature-time for their little babies, to give them every advantage in the race for success? If it doesn't "work", will they stop? Is this any way to create a new environmental paradigm?

Louv's book touches on very complex contemporary environmental issues, such as whether or not religious groups will embrace a movement which they see as embodying some animistic pagan qualities (292) and even cites Jennifer Wolch's idea of the "zoopolis", or the new interpolation of wildlife and natural growth into the city. But his fundamental stance seems unprepared to grapple with the implications of the scope of the topic.

The questions I see arising here include the most basic ones about the aim of our society, including whether or not we believe in equal economic rights (and thus, access to nature) for all children; whether technological education and environmental education can ever go hand in hand; whether we are willing to control capitalism (in the form of development) in order to create an environmentally aware society; and whether the system of labor and settlement brought about by advanced capitalism can be amended so that humans continue to get a good dose of "nature time" when they are young - and whether these humans will be able to maintain their contact with nature once they are working full-time, as are the parents reading this book, or whether they will be so straitened with the need to earn a living that they will not be able to do so. The alienation of childhood from the natural world is not the problem. This is a symptom of the way society is going today, and as such, will not be "fixed" in and of itself, but needs to be viewed as a part of a constellation of larger issues around environmental ethics and human rights.

Caption text from article by Michael B. Smith, "The Ego Ideal of 'The Good Camper' and the Nature of Summer Camp", Environmental History, January 2006 (link): "Boys at Camp Dudley, the first YMCA camp in the country, learn the finer points of axmanship, a skill intended to reconnect them with both nature and the "good life" of their frontier forbearers. As critics of this romantic construction of both nature and American history would later point out, learning to use an ax did not in itself prepare children very well for life in a modern city or suburb. (Courtesy of the YMCA of the USA and the Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University of Minnesota.)"

Books to follow up on:

The American Boys' Handy Book, written by Daniel Carter Beard (of the Boy Scouts) at the turn of the century, was reissued in a centennial edition in 2003 - a circumstance I find fascinating.

Eva, my friend who teaches elementary school, recommended this one. Which reminds me that Eva; my sister Sarah, who teaches pre-K kids; and my friend Mira, who is considering going into environmental education, are all intensely concerned about the issues Louv brings up. But Eva and Sarah are criminally underpaid, and Mira will be, if she goes through with her plan. Are Americans ready to consider environmental education as something CENTRAL to childhood, not a frill to be cut as soon as the budget gets tight? If they aren't ready, why? Is it because we still think of it as something that should take place organically (ha), in the bosom of the family (or in the backyard of the family, rather), like it used to? And if it doesn't take place organically, is it still as effective? Can a kid "discover" something s/he has been pointed towards?

Fundamentalism and American Culture

A dispensationalist chart, depicting the eras of human history as told by the Book of Revelation.

Title: Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006; originally published in 1980)

Author: George M. Marsden, of the history department at Notre Dame. Teaches "American religious and intellectual history."Has a PhD in American Studies from Yale, 1965 (minted seven years after Tom Wolfe). Author of several other books on fundamentalism, and a couple of books on the state of higher education (The Soul of the American University, 1994; The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, 1997). Most recently, author of a much-lauded biography of Jonathan Edwards.

Argument: Most fundamentally (ha), Marsden argues that fundamentalism needs to be seen (and studied) as a cultural phenomenon, not just a religious aberration; and as a fluctuating cultural organism, not a monolithic set of responses. This history of the evolution of fundamentalist Protestant activity in the era of modernization hits on three major themes, as Marsden writes in his introduction: the tendency of fundamentalists to identify "sometimes with the establishment, and sometimes with the outsiders" (6); ambivalence about major questions such as the church's relationship to society, faith in human intellect, and the organization of the church itself can be traced to fundamentalism's strong ties to the intellectual and theological ideas of its eighteenth and nineteenth century forebears, which emphasized revivalism and pietism; and, finally, as hinted at in the second "theme", major questions about religion's relationship with science and with intellectual activity in general. Marsden argues that fundamentalists' dismay at the way in which modern society developed had much to do with the fact that, with the onset of Darwinism, they were almost immediately demoted (in the eyes of public culture) from keepers of the intellectual flame to foolish, bumbling rubes.

Chapter-by-chapter (These are going to be short, because the sections are numerous):

Part One: Before Fundamentalism
Evangelical America at the Brink of Crisis: Marsden introduces the underpinnings of the fundamentalist movement in the 1870s: the influences of Common Sense philosophy, which held that "common sense" could reveal the truth of the universe to any diligent observer, and of revivalism, which prized the emotional conversion of the individual. He then writes of the crisis which faced the old order in the shape of Darwinism and those within the church who attempted to find ways to reconcile religion with it.

The Paths Diverge: Henry Ward Beecher is an example of a preacher who reaches beyond the boundary of acceptable doctrine, defending evolution and equating religion more with morality than with strict Scriptural interpretation. Meanwhile, the Blanchard family of preachers and educators, father and son, provide examples of how more conservative strains in the church reacted to this challenge. While the father (Jonathan) was initially postmillennial in his thinking (he believed that society could be reformed in order to bring about the second coming of Christ), the son (Charles) took to premillennialism, "seeing little hope for society before God returned to set up his kingdom" (27).

DL Moody and a New American Evangelism: Moody, a transitional figure and extremely popular revivalist, is cited as an important progenitor of fundamentalism - he believed in premillennialism and Biblical infallibility; and he believed first and foremost in individual conversion (as opposed to helping with bodily needs) as part of the "holiness" movement.

Part Two: The Shaping of a Coalition

This Age and the Millennium
Prologue: The Paradox of Revivalist Fundamentalism: Here, Marsden refers to the central tensions in fundamentalism: first, the conflict between exclusivist doctrinal preaching, and the belief that any person can achieve salvation/a holy state through their effort. (Moody, for example, came down firmly in the second camp.) He goes on: "Sometimes [fundamentalism's] advocates were backward looking and reactionary, at other times they were imaginative innovators. On some occasions they appeared militant and divisive; on others they were warm and irenic. At times they seemed ready to forsake the whole world over a point of doctrine; at other times they appeared heedless of tradition in their zeal to win converts. Sometimes they were optimistic patriots; sometimes they were prophets shaking from their feet the dust of a doomed civilization" (43).

Two Revisions of Millennialism: The cultural context of the ideas of dispensationalism and premillennialism, which had the advantage, for evangelicals who saw the faith as shaky and in need of shoring up in the post-Civil War era, of being totally "explicit and concrete" - see, for example, the charts included in this entry, which show how this perspective simplified and concretized the Bible and faith itself (51).

Dispensationalism and the Baconian Ideal: This idea is most interesting! Empirical scientific analysis, in the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, was associated most firmly with Francis Bacon and his idea that all you had to do to know the "truth" of the world was to process the information available to you. (This also echoed ideals of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which Angela Miller also talks about in regards to Frederic Church's paintings and the cultural belief that New England and its scenery could be made to "stand in for" the nation as a whole - a belief derived from Common Sense ideas of proof.) Dispensationalism (and fundamentalists, in general) saw the Bible as their trove of information to be processed, and thus believed that they themselves were scientific - more scientific, in fact, than the Darwinists, who were acting on a mere "hypothesis". By looking at the Bible, they believed that they could break human history up into eras - or "dispensations" - and thus, predict exactly when the end of the world would arrive.

History, Society, and the Church: Further describing the fundamentalist context, Marsden points out that contrary to contemporary ideals of progress, fundamentalists believed that civilization was in decline. "The rapid spread of premillennial thought must have reflected some disillusionment with the progress of society," Marsden reflects (67). This complex of thought associated the fundamentalists with the more secular antimoderns, such as Henry Adams, or those described by TJ Jackson Lears, for example. This chapter also discusses reasons why premillennials did not feel compelled to abandon their churches (as a strict adherence to their doctrine might prescribe) - Marsden says that this is because for American religion, the key unit is the individual, not the institution (71).

Sir Francis Bacon.

Holiness
The Victorious Life: Basic ideas of "holiness", as preached by DL Moody, AC Dixon, and the Keswick theologians: "a profound personal experience of consecration, a filling with Spiritual power, and a dedication to arduous Christian service" (73). Especially pre-WWI, "experience and practice" were at the center of the movement. The major conflict over this concept had to do with whether or not the individual was seen to have the capacity for perfection.

The Social Dimensions of Holiness: In the 1890s, holiness teachings led fundamentalists to work among the poor and working class. Postmillennialists were not alone in this project; some premillennialists, Marsden is careful to report, also took it upon themselves to work for prohibition and for humanitarian causes (though most did not).

The "Great Reversal": Why did this interest in social concerns practically vanish by the 1920s? Reactionary reasons, Marsden says. "The factor crucial to understanding this 'Great Reversal'...is the fundamentalist reaction to the liberal Social Gospel after 1900" (91). The fundamentalists saw the Social Gospel as "emphasizing social concern in an exclusivistic way which seemed to undercut the relevance of the message of eternal salvation through trust in Christ's atoning work" (92).

Holiness and Fundamentalism: More on American theologians influenced by Keswick's emphasis on the experiential, personal, and joyful, and the conflicts and confluences between these and conservative Protestants who were ready to fight intellectual and theological battles.

The Defense of the Faith
Tremors of Controversy: Overview of the conflicts which arose within American denominations between the late 1870s and WWI, most of which saw traditionalists ally with dispensationalists and holiness advocates to battle modernists or progressives. (Interestingly, Marsden writes that Southern denominations simply did not have these debates, because dissent was "not tolerated" [103].)

Presbyterians and the Truth: In Presbyterianism, the conflict was between infallibility (Common Sense-influenced views of The Truth) and previously upstanding Presbyterians who were accepting Darwinism and beginning to reject ideas of the miraculous and supernatural.

The Fundamentals: The story of a series of volumes published between 1910 and 1915, funded by a "Southern California oil millionaire" (Lyman Stewart) and characteristic of fundamentalism's opposition to modernism. "These volumes...represent the movement at a moderate and transitional stage before it was reshaped and pushed to extremes by the intense heat of controversy" (119). This moderation was exemplified by the fact that evolutionary ideas were not totally rejected out of hand.

Christianity and Culture

Four Views Circa 1910:
1. This Age Condemned: The Premillennial Extreme: In fundamentalist thinking at this time, the furthest-out idea was that everything about the modern age - including science and technology - indicated that the world was about to end, and that therefore true believers should just give up hope.

2. The Central Tension: This tension was between the ideals of dispensational premillennialism - see above - and the constant commitment to evangelism. "These two...were fused together in spite of the basic tension between them" (128).

3. William Jennings Bryan: Christian Civilization Preserved: Marsden sees WJB as a "representative of the culturally dominant evangelical coalition which took shape in the first half of the nineteenth century" - a coalition whose values held that America, as a Christian nation, had a destiny to guide the world ("Citty on a Hill" style) (132).

4. Transforming Culture By the Word: Baptists and Presbyterians believed that Christianity had "an important mission to civilization" (136), and could provide society with a basis for true faith and thus moral action. Thus, many denominations were bound together by this affinity, despite their lack of a single total understanding.

Part Three: The Crucial Years: 1917-1925
World War I, Premillennialism, and American Fundamentalism: 1917-1918: Why did fundamentalists become more militant after WWI? Marsden argues that this was partially a reaction against theological liberalism, and partially because during and after WWI, evolutionism was seen as more and more dangerous to American society: WWI had been instigated by a German barbarism which was seen to have sprung from the loins of social Darwinism. "The argument was clear: the same thing could happen in America" (149). The war also brought together various factions of conservatives who believed in different doctrinal points, uniting them all under the banner of attempts to save "Christian civilization".

Fundamentalism and the Cultural Crisis: 1919-1920: During this time, after most Americans were returning to an antebellum state, fundamentalists saw their chance to revive a long-gone religious consensus.

The Fundamentalist Offensive on Two Fronts: 1920-1921: Marsden's two fronts were the denominations themselves and the culture as a whole (especially the schools, where they tried to stop the teaching of evolution - a crusade which brought many more non-affiliated civilians into the conservative church, especially in the South). Here Marsden also discusses the importance of the mission in the maintenance of conservatism and dispensational premillennialism.

Would the Liberals be Driven From the Denominations? 1922-1923: Coverage of the crises in Presbyterian and Baptist denominations.

The Offensive Stalled and Breaking Apart: 1924-1925: Liberals began to break up the coalitions aimed at getting them out of the denominations, Marsden argues, by "appealing to the strong American tradition of tolerance" (180). Also, many fundamentalists were unwilling to purge the denominations at the expense of evangelistic efforts.

Epilogue: Dislocation, Relocation, and Resurgence: 1925-1940: Interestingly, the Scopes trial, which had a tremendous impact on fundamentalism's place in the national scene, is relegated to an epilogue. The imagery of "small town, backwoods, half-educated yokels" which emerged into the popular eye was indelible, says Marsden (185). Marsden posits that this popular image, which ignored the urban and Baconian-scientific roots of the fundamentalist idea, began somehow to *become* what the movement was like - because so many moderate fundamentalists were embarrassed by the negative publicity and dropped out of the movement. Where did the rest of the fundamentalists end up? Marsden believes that some remained within the denominations, committed to them despite the presence of inextirpable liberals; some found themselves in the South, in Pentacostal churches, etc; and some formed their own denominations or churches.

William Jennings Bryan. (Are those guys behind him laughing at him, or with him? Hard to tell.)

Part Four: Interpretations
Fundamentalism as a Social Phenomenon: Rejecting the idea of a rural vs. urban divide creating the fundamentalist movement, Marsden proposes that fundamentalism was founded by groups of "Anglo-Saxon" Protestants - especially of the lower middle class - who found themselves, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, filling the role of "immigrants" in their own land. "Faced by a culture with a myriad of competing ideals, and having little power to influence that culture, they reacted by creating their own equivalent of the urban ghetto" (204).

Fundamentalism as a Political Phenomenon: The theological movement's drift toward conservatism was, Marsden contends, partially motivated by the liberalism of the Social Gospel-ites, but was also fundamentally motivated by the idea of saving a "Christian civilization" (which meant that they would reject Marxism, Jewish people, etc.)

Fundamentalism as an Intellectual Phenomenon: This section is basically a recap of the ideas put forth in the section on dispensationalism and Baconian thought. Interestingly, Marsden uses Thomas Kuhn to explain the problems that arise at the junction of the end of one paradigm and the beginning of another.

Fundamentalism as an American Phenomenon: Why did this happen in America? Social factors: ethnic diversity and its threat to a narrowly evangelical religious culture; the recent displacement of fundamentalists from the throne of social dominance. Religious-cultural traditions: The overwhelming influence of revivalism on American religion "contributed to a tendency to see things in terms of simple antitheses": saved or not saved, evil or good (224). Intellectual tendencies: An anti-modern view of history, which did not partake in the idea that "history was natural evolutionary development...and the present can best be understood as a product of the past" (226; again, see Miller on the difference between Cole and his successors), contributed to a tendency to believe in eschatological interpretations of the Bible.

Part Five: Fundamentalism Yesterday and Today (2005): An afterword that focuses mostly on increased political involvement on the part of fundamentalists and the paradox this implies when it comes to premillennial beliefs.

Another dispensationalist chart.

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, Donald Scott wrote that Marsden's book's strengths lie in the visualization of fundamentalism as both a genuine religious phenomenon and a legitimate cultural happening, one which could be analyzed in the same way as other cultural movements. Catherine Albanese, in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, wrote that the number of intellectual currents to which Marsden ties fundamentalism means that his interpretation can become confusing - but adds that since his writing is clear, the difficulty lies in the subject matter itself, and Marsden's book only clarifies the unclarity of the phenomenon. Meanwhile, the book was named one of Christianity Today's 100 "Books of the Century".

Vocab words: "cynosure" ("something that serves for guidance or direction; a ‘guiding star’"; "irenic" ("pacific, non-polemic"); "Pelagian" ("a believer in the doctrines of Pelagius or his followers, esp. in the denial of the transmission of original sin, and in the principle that human will is capable of good without the assistance of divine grace"); "chiliasm" ("the doctrine of the millennium; the opinion that Christ will reign in bodily presence on earth for a thousand years").

Books to follow up on: Primary: Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth (1970); HL Mencken's writings on the Scopes Trial.

Secondary: Anne Loveland, Evangelicals and the US Military (1996).