Several years ago I spent a summer in southern California on a research fellowship. One weekend while my family was away, I decided to go camping in one of the Sierra Nevada’s famous national parks, none of which I had ever visited. I chose Sequoia National Park, which was a bit more proximate than Yosemite and, I hoped, would be a bit less crowded. Sequoia National Park is home to some of the largest trees on earth, Sequoiadendron giganteum or giant sequoias, and they are among the great natural wonders of the North American continent. These giant trees gained fame...

“Egypt had its plagues and its all-consuming swarms of locusts. Beautiful tropical regions are cursed with the deadly upas tree. Delig[h]tful valleys are swept with destructive floods. But the United States are afflicted with a curse worse than all these—treason—secession.” For George W. Squire, a lieutenant in the Forty-Fourth Indiana Volunteer Infantry, secession was akin to a natural disaster laying waste to his beloved country. Three and a half years of war had taken its toll on the nation and on Squire, who told his wife he was “getting in an awful fever to leave this wilderness of...

In 1860 the mississippi river still flowed largely according to its own rules. Meandering, altering its course without warning, it littered the landscape with sinewy ridges of rich, black alluvial soil, oxbow lakes, swamps, and bayous. On the eve of the Civil War, humans had yet to build the massive dam and levee systems that would hem in its waters and straighten its path. Minor incursions on its freedom—small earthen levees thrown up by farmers, mostly conforming to the river’s own natural levee system—followed its course, pleas more than actual protection against the vagaries of the Father of...

As winter gave way to spring in 1863, renewed energy infused the Union forces just as it did the verdant Louisiana countryside. The men were eager to leave their camps at Milliken’s Bend and De Soto Point and distance themselves from the places they associated with floods, illness, and seemingly futile hard labor. Sherman lamented that after four months of being within sight of the city, they still had not “got at Vicksburg. We have not got on Shore.” Sherman reasoned that “no man can wade the Mississipi or the deep sloughs and marshes that surround it.” He noted at...

The shenandoah valley’s peaceful, pastoral reputation obscures its violent past. Powerful collisions of tectonic plates thrust the Appalachian Mountains into existence millions of years ago, then wind and water besieged the mountains’ exposed flanks of limestone and shale, separating the Alleghenies from the Blue Ridge and creating an open plain two hundred miles long and, on average, twenty miles wide. Fast-flowing rivers further penetrated the mountains’ defenses and formed narrow passes, or gaps, as the water fought its way to the sea. Thomas Jefferson described such a battle as “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature.” He explained, “On...

“We have devoured the land,” wrote William Tecumseh Sherman in a letter to his wife, Ellen, in June 1864. “All the people retire before us, and desolation is behind. To realize what war is one should follow our tracks.”¹ Sherman was reflecting on the damage wrought by the protracted battle for control over northern Georgia between his Union forces and Confederate general Joe Johnston’s army. Neither side intended to destroy the landscape; the devastation was instead an unavoidable result of armies in motion and one of the inevitable costs of war. By November, however, Sherman implemented a strategy that shifted...

In ad 84 the roman military commander and governor of Britain Gnaeus Julius Agricola determined to solidify Rome’s control over the island’s northern frontier. That year he engaged the last holdouts against Roman rule, the Scottish forces united under the chieftain Calgacus, at Mons Graupius. On the eve of battle Calgacus spoke to his warriors, rousing their courage by decrying Roman tyranny: “To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire.” Calling them “robbers of the world,” Calgacus accused the Romans of making “a desolation and [calling] it peace.” Agricola crushed the Caledonian resistance, but though he lost, Calgacus’s words...