ABSTRACT
Political Economy, Race, and the Image of Nature in the United States, 1825–1878 traces the nascency of older schemes for valuing “Nature,” when representations of the North American terrain became a site for the negotiation of conflicts between environmental and economic values, and where racial identity was a configuring force that influenced both. The stories just told aim to capture a sense that the way “Nature” had been regarded—as something possessed of aesthetic value to be preserved against the deleterious effects resulting from its potential as a resource, as something located in particular spaces whose borders were drawn clearly, as something that rightly belonged to a certain type of person, whose pleasure in it established the justness of his ownership—had all but passed away after World War II. While “the image of Nature” is the third term in this book's title, it is the most important for its position that Nature has long been a site where political economy and race were adjudicated. Regardless of one's conclusions about the merits of the scientific method or the complexities of the semantics of reference to the “real,” Nature, like any expressive term, is normative enterprise and a cultural artifact. “Nature” is produced in particular locales, one of which was the urban northeast of the United States, using a medial and technological apparatus undergoing rapid development, and intersecting a number of intellectual and social vectors.
