Now Exploring "Door Way"

Weaving a tapestry of lives and landscapes, past and present, earth and water, Norbert Blei celebrates the unique heritage of Door County, Wisconsin, a spectacular peninsula reaching into Lake Michigan.

Blei ponders the balance of nature in a place where locals, tourists, and developers vie with the native flora and fauna of forests and lakeshore.

Door Way

The People in the Landscape

by Norbert Blei

University of Wisconsin Press, 2014

Book Notes Wild
Nature Writing and Natural Histories
The Nature Pages
Outrider Reading Group

Food in America's Environmental History

Staking out American 'food history' is a promising way to change perceptions about the place and importance of the 'environment' in American history.  Food connects to the mainstream of 'American history,' and puts standard narratives in a new light: think of food and native America; establishing colonial societies; protests over tea and trade relations swirling through the American Revolution in the economic and political context of an Atlantic world; slaves growing rice and tobacco and the role of food in fighting the Civil War; the long westward conquest and the wholesale reordering of landscapes to support both a new regime of property and food production; immigration, foodways, identity, ethnicity and America as a Melting Pot; progressivism, home economics, and food reform; industrialization and corporate capitalism from Swift to Sunkist and Monsanto; the rise of tourism and consumer culture - especially consumer culture.

excerpted from:

A Companion to American Environmental History

Douglas Cazaux Sackman (Editor)

Wiley-Blackwell, 2014

Outrider Reading Group
The Nature Pages
Nature Writing and Natural Histories
History and American West Titles