"The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness,
draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and
subduing nature," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That's
largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today: a
country expanding unstoppably, bending the continent's natural
bounty to the national will, heedless of consequence. A country of
slavery and of Indian wars. There's much truth in that vision. But
if you know where to look, you can uncover a different history, one
of vibrant resistance, one that's been mostly forgotten. This
Radical Land recovers that story. Daegan Miller is our guide on a
beautifully written, revelatory trip across the continent during
which we encounter radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who
grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress in the very
landscapes around them, even as the runaway engine of capitalism
sought to steamroll everything in its path. Here we meet Thoreau,
the expert surveyor, drawing anticapitalist property maps. We visit
a black antislavery community in the Adirondack wilderness of
upstate New York. We discover how seemingly commercial photographs
of the transcontinental railroad secretly sent subversive messages,
and how a band of utopian anarchists among California's sequoias
imagined a greener, freer future. At every turn, everyday radicals
looked to landscape for the language of their dissentaEURO"drawing
crucial early links between the environment and social justice,
links we're still struggling to strengthen today. Working in a
tradition that stretches from Thoreau to Rebecca Solnit, Miller
offers nothing less than a new way of seeing the American past--and
of understanding what it can offer us for the present . . . and the
future.
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