On a Mary land road in 1785, a slave family was torn apart. We might be tempted to tell the story of its sudden dissolution simply as a human drama acted out by a Mary land planter, a “Georgia trader,” an enslaved woman, and her four-year-old son. Even half a century later the boy, who published his life story in 1836 under the pseudonym Charles Ball, winced at how “the terrors of the scene return[ed]” to him “with painful vividness.”¹ Yet Ball could recollect neither the scene nor its terrors without introducing a fifth and more surprising player: a horse.²...

If you wish to see the lone survivor of the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, visit the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas. Tucked into a dark corner on the fourth floor is a humidity-controlled glass case containing the stuffed remains of a twenty-nine-year-old decorated veteran from Custer’s Last Stand. Nicknamed “Comanche” because of his bravery in past Indian engagements, he was found two days after the battle by a military recovery and burial team; he was still bleeding from a severe shoulder wound. A steamer rushed him to North Dakota’s Fort Abraham Lincoln, where army surgeons removed...

On the evening of February 3, 1978, Walter Cronkite ledCBS Evening Newswith the story of a brutal murder in Africa. A gang of six men in the remote mountains of Rwanda had repeatedly stabbed their victim; the body was found decapitated and with both hands amputated. Despite the violent spectacle of this crime, it was rare, given the larger political and economic issues that had continually plagued Africa in the post-colonial era, for a single murder in tiny Rwanda to make national news in the United States, but this was no ordinary victim. He was a silverback mountain...

Jane Addams set the tone forThe Spirit of Youthin the book’s first sentence with the charming double meaning she invested in “the youth of the earth.” Initially she uses the phrase to build her argument that humans have always yearned for a sense of authenticity; we must have faith that each and every dawn is the harbinger of a world, and a life, that can be made fresh. Humans inherently crave a young earth, she writes, a natural world that is receptive to their ministrations, pliant and impressionable, ready to receive an overlay of the culture we create....

“Race denotes what manis,” the economist William Z. Ripley declared in 1899, whereas “all these other details of social life”—environment, ethnicity, nationality, and language—“represent what mandoes.”¹ This distinction between what humans are and what they do, which gained influence over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, summarized a major shift in the understanding of human variation. Ripley’s remark underscores the binary thinking that underlay the new understanding: opposing nature to nurture, bodily inheritance to environmental influences, and perhaps most contentiously, race against culture. This final opposition proposed that on the one hand,...

Everything about him seems so serious: his stiff posture, his stern expression, and his three-piece suit, taut necktie, and collar pin (see Figure 7.1). With hands in pockets, his lips tightly pursed, he looks down at the child, who seems completely unaware of his presence. Below the photograph a brief sentence printed in bold letters summarizes the scene: “Dr. Spock is worried.”¹

Published as a full-page advertisement in theNew York Timesin 1962, reprinted in seven hundred newspapers and numerous magazines, and then appearing as a poster “in store windows, nurseries, doctors’ offices, and even on baby carriages,” the...

The year 2011 marked the sixtieth anniversary of continental nuclear testing. In the year leading up to this milestone interest in the subject surged, journalists rediscovered atomic history, and scholars from a variety of backgrounds took a second look at the science, technology, cultural artifacts, and landscapes of the atomic Cold War.¹ Artists and photographers have long gravitated toward things atomic and the tainted landscapes of testing in particular. Those creative folks who spent their careers working on representations of atomic events and environments found new interest in and audiences for their work during the year of remembrance.² The Fukushima...

A tall, athletic young businessman showed up in Green River, Utah, at dinnertime on July 9, 1940. He was looking for a small group of strangers and the river. Starting in Wyoming, the Green flows through Utah on its way to meet the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. There the river runs a mile below the Colorado Plateau and drops two thousand feet in less than three hundred miles. The man was joining the second ever commercial river trip through the Grand Canyon and was ready to go. He wrote in his journal that night, “Here I was starting...

Some geographical spaces have been visibly, many have said legibly,engraved by time, specifically deserts and canyons of the arid American West. These landscapes, including large areas such as the Mojave, Sonoran, Chihuahuan, and Great Basin Deserts (and smaller dry basins throughout the intermountain West), as well as canyons carved by rivers such as the Colorado and the Green, have always presented acute and life-threatening difficulties to travelers and produced ingenious approaches to habitation among ancient and contemporary indigenous communities. However the concern here is not the ecology or cultural or geological histories of arid landscapes, but something maybe harder...

World War II has been remembered as a popular conflict that rallied millions of Americans behind the United States’ effort to defeat the Axis powers and defend President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. To win popular support, the federal government, in cooperation with private industry, developed a savvy propaganda campaign of posters, films, and advertisements that encouraged Americans to do their part to win the war. When they opened their newspapers, went to movie theaters, or walked down streets, they were bombarded with these government appeals. Many...

Back in 2007 I attended the Pork Industry Forum in Anaheim, California. I had told the organizers at the National Pork Board that I was writing a book¹ on the relationship between humans and pigs and wanted to make sure I was getting the industry’s perspective on the major relationship Americans have with pigs: eating them. I attended two days of talks and seminars, a highlight of which was the announcement by Dennis Treacy, the vice president for environmental and corporate affairs at Smithfield Foods, that his company was going to require its producers to phase out the use of...

In the initial poster campaign that served as a catalyst for the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) in 2011, the central objective remained an open question: What is our one demand? Those drawn to participate shared a sense of outrage with economic inequality and alienation from the political process but generated little initial consensus on a list of specific reforms for which to agitate. The form of protest, however, was precise; instructions indicated a date, a place, and a single instruction: “Bring Tent.” The tactic took off in ways that surprised both organizers and observers. At the height of its...