William Cronon – WOW.com

William Cronon. photographed in the Madison, Wisconsin. Cronon is best known for his first book Changes in the Land. Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of.

Dig Deeper | Huffington Post

m.huffingtonpost.com /mary-ellen-hannibal/dig-deeper _b_5530473.html

Dig Deeper. 06/26/2014 02:44 pm. puts a marker at William Cronon ’;s book Changes in the Land. domesticating every inch of land today. Cronon ’;s 1982.

Seneca people – WOW.com

Many Seneca people are employed in the local economy of the region as professionals. William Cronon. Changes in the Land. Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of.

Soil fertility – WOW.com

Soil fertility is a complex process that involves the constant cycling of nutrients between organic. ^ a b Cronon. William, Changes in the Land. Indians.

Environmental history – WOW.com

Cronon. William, Changes in the Land. Indians. Pollution in a Promised Land. An Environmental History of Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)

Fur trade – WOW.com

^ Janet Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and Its Significance for Medieval Russia. Cronon. William. Changes in the Land. Indians.

Deforestation – WOW.com

In Changes in the Land (1983), William Cronon analyzed and documented 17th-century English. Using indicators of deforestation and land -use dynamics to support.

Pequot War – WOW.com

A Brief History of the Pequot War. Cronon. William. Changes in the Land. Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985).

Algonquian peoples – WOW.com

This article is about the numerous peoples speaking Algonquian languages. For the Algonquin of Quebec, see Algonquin people.

In December, when the snows began, the.

Agriculture in the United States – WOW.com

Agriculture in the United States is primarily governed by periodically renewed U.S. farm bills. ^ a b c Cronon. William. Changes in the Land. Indians.

William Cronon, Changes in the Land

Changes in the Land deals with the impact on the ecosystems of New England by Native Americans and colonial British settlers.

Cronon’s basic premise is that Native and English populations viewed the land and its use in fundamentally different ways, and that the decreasing population of the former and the increasing population of the latter led to a fundamental change in land use among both.

This in turn influenced the very environment itself, as the reordering of economies and land-use changed the landscape, the flora, the fauna, water quality… New England would have been almost unrecognizable in 1800 to someone who had seen it two hundred years prior.

The way man interacts with his environment fundamentally alters that environment. If Braudel was writing about how mountains and bodies of water influence human history, Cronon is writing about how human history influences mountains and bodies of water.

Cronon’s basic thesis—and the implications of adding the environment to how we view history—are unassailable and invaluable. This is definitely one of those books that’s a classic for good reason.

However, there were two small, niggling inaccuracies I noticed—things I only knew about due to later scholarship—that nevertheless I think point to some of the work’s biases.

I don’t feel that either of these damage the worth of the book, by any means, but they are telling or at least interesting.

First—on page 14, and again on pages 92-93, Cronon explicitly argues that part of the difference between Indian and English economies is one of scale. While this is true, the scale of the pre-Columbian North American economy is somewhat underestimated by Cronon, who argues that it was exclusively limited to inter-village and occasionally regional trade.

While it is true that there weren’t Native wholesalers shipping stuff out to the Pacific in the able hands of Indian Teamsters, Daniel Richter’s Facing East From Indian Country has demonstrated that the pre-Columbian Native American trade network was definitely a continental one, while still supporting Cronon’s assertion that it wasn’t a centralized one. Cronon, researching this book in the late seventies and early eighties, makes the common (and often but not always accurate) conflation of “low-impact” or “sustainable” with “small.”

Second—when comparing English and Indian views of land use, husbandry, and property, Cronon dismisses the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s understanding of land ownership as the product of land improvement as “little more than an ideology of conquest…” (57) While this is true in terms of how it was applied to Native Americans, it only tells half the story. In a working paper for the Rappaport Institute of Greater Boston, Harvard’s James Levitt has pointed out that this was actually a policy borne of quite progressive ideals.

The Massachusetts Bay Corporation, being allowed by its charter to govern itself from America without a direct overseer in London, brought many more of its shareholders to the new world than other of these colonial corporations. Once there, they quickly established this rule of land improvement as grounds for ownership—and then went the further step of making all land-holders members of the corporation. The result by 1631 was near-universal manhood suffrage in a direct democratic system via elections and town meetings—a level of franchise unmatched in the southern English colonies, and even in England after the English Civil War.

In focusing the book so exclusively on environmental concerns, Cronon’s history can at time lose sight of important things like civil rights and just governance.

Overall, though, I loved the book. It was a great read. I’ve been meaning to get around to it for a long time, and I’m glad that my Historiography class has finally forced me to do so.