Remaking Wormsloe Plantation: The Environmental History of a Lowcountry Landscape (Environmental History and the American South) - Tapa dura

Acerca del autor

Drew A. Swanson is assistant professor of history at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, USA and author of A Golden Weed: Tobacco and Environment in the Piedmont South.

De la contraportada

"This is a really fine book, rich in the kind of detail that explains the lived-in quality of a place, deeply researched and broadly contextualized, with writing that is often graceful and a pleasure to read.Remaking Wormsloe Plantation is a contribution to scholarship on the environmental history of plantations and place as well as a book that will appeal to a popular audience."

Mart A. Stewart, author of "What Nature Suffers to Groe": Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920

A compelling read with the plantation as the star on a stage whose supporting cast features not only the men and women who established, owned, and labored on it, reinventing it in each generation, but the processes linking it with lowcountry, Atlantic, and global arenas. Lucidly conceptualized and elegantly written, this is environmental history at its best.

Shepard Krech III, author of Spirits of the Air: Birds and American Indians in the South

De la solapa interior

Why do we preserve certain landscapes while developing others without restraint? Drew A. Swanson's in-depth look at Wormsloe plantation, located on the salt marshes outside of Savannah, Georgia, explores that question while revealing the broad historical forces that have shaped the lowcountry South. Wormsloe has remained in the hands of one family from 1736 through the 1970s, when much of it was ceded to the state for the creation of a historic site. Like many lowcountry places, Wormsloe is inextricably tied to regional, national, and global environments and is the product of transatlantic exchanges.

Swanson argues that while visitors to Wormsloe value what they perceive to be an "authentic," undisturbed place, this landscape is actually the product of aggressive management over generations. He also finds that Wormsloe is an ideal place to get at hidden stories, such as African American environmental and agricultural knowledge, conceptions of health and disease, the relationship between manual labor and views of nature, and the ties between historic preservation and natural resource conservation. Remaking Wormsloe Plantation connects this distinct Georgia place to the broader world, adding depth and nuance to the understanding of our own conceptions of nature and history.