Rendering Nature

Bridging the fields of environmental history and American studies, Rendering Nature examines surprising interconnections between nature and culture in distinct places, times, and contexts over the course of U.S. history.

We exist at a moment during which the entangled challenges facing the human and natural worlds confront us at every turn, whether at the most basic level of survival—health, sustenance, shelter—or in relation to our comfort-driven desires. As demand for resources both necessary and unnecessary increases, understanding how nature and culture are interconnected matters more than ever.

Bridging the fields of environmental history and American studies, Rendering Nature examines the surprising interconnections between nature and culture in distinct places, times, and contexts over the course of American history. Divided into four themes—animals, bodies, places, and politics—the essays span a diverse array of locations and periods: from antebellum slave society to atomic testing sites, from gorillas in Central Africa to river runners in the Grand Canyon, from white sun-tanning enthusiasts to Japanese American incarcerees, from taxidermists at the 1893 World's Fair to tents on Wall Street in 2011. Together they offer new perspectives and conceptual tools that can help us better understand the historical realities and current paradoxes of our environmental predicament.

Contributors: Thomas G. Andrews, Connie Y. Chiang, Catherine Cocks, Annie Gilbert Coleman, Finis Dunaway, John Herron, Andrew Kirk, Frieda Knobloch, Susan A. Miller, Brett Mizelle, Marguerite S. Shaffer, Phoebe S. K. Young.

Chapter 1. The Nature-Culture Paradox
—Marguerite S. Shaffer and Phoebe S. K. Young

PART I. ANIMALS
Chapter 2. Beasts of the Southern Wild: Slaveholders, Slaves, and Other Animals in Charles Ball's Slavery in the United States
—Thomas G. Andrews
Chapter 3. Stuffed: Nature and Science on Display
John Herron
Chapter 4. Digit's Legacy: Reconsidering the Human-Nature Encounter in a Global World
—Marguerite S. Shaffer

PART II. BODIES
Chapter 5. The Gulick Family and the Nature of Adolescence
—Susan A. Miller
Chapter 6. Children of Light: The Nature and Culture of Suntanning
—Catherine Cocks
Chapter 7. Dr. Spock Is Worried: Visual Media and the Emotional History of American Environmentalism
—Finis Dunaway

PART III. PLACES
Chapter 8. Prototyping Natures: Technology, Labor, and Art on Atomic Frontiers
—Andrew Kirk
Chapter 9. River Rats in the Archive: The Colorado River and the Nature of Texts
—Annie Gilbert Coleman
Chapter 10. Rocks of Ages: The Decadent Desert and Sepulchral Time
—Frieda Knobloch

PART IV. POLITICS
Chapter 11. Winning the War at Manzanar: Environmental Patriotism and the Japanese American Incarceration
—Connie Y. Chiang
Chapter 12. Unthinkable Visibility: Pigs, Pork, and the Spectacle of Killing and Meat
—Brett Mizelle
Chapter 13. "Bring Tent": The Occupy Movement and the Politics of Public Nature
—Phoebe S. K. Young

Notes
List of Contributors
Index