The field of environmental history emerged just decades ago but has established itself as one of the most innovative and important new approaches to history, one that bridges the human and natural world, the humanities and the sciences. With the current trend towards internationalizing history, environmental history is perhaps the quintessential approach to studying subjects outside the nation-state model, with pollution, global warming, and other issues affecting the earth not stopping at national borders. With 25 essays, this Handbook is global in scope and innovative in organization, looking at the field thematically through such categories as climate, disease, oceans, the body, energy, consumerism, and international relations.

Not long ago, Republicans could take pride in their party's tradition of environmental leadership. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the GOP helped to create the Environmental Protection Agency, extend the Clean Air Act, and protect endangered species. Today, as Republicans denounce climate change as a "hoax" and seek to dismantle the environmental regulatory state they worked to build, we are left to wonder: What happened? In The Republican Reversal, James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg show that the party's transformation began in the late 1970s, with the emergence of a new alliance of pro-business, libertarian, and anti-federalist voters. This coalition came about through a concerted effort by politicians and business leaders, abetted by intellectuals and policy experts, to link the commercial interests of big corporate donors with states'-rights activism and Main Street regulatory distrust. Fiscal conservatives embraced cost-benefit analysis to counter earlier models of environmental policy making, and business tycoons funded think tanks to denounce federal environmental regulation as economically harmful, constitutionally suspect, and unchristian, thereby appealing to evangelical views of man's God-given dominion of the Earth. As Turner and Isenberg make clear, the conservative abdication of environmental concern stands out as one of the most profound turnabouts in modern American political history, critical to our understanding of the GOP's modern success. The Republican reversal on the environment is emblematic of an unwavering faith in the market, skepticism of scientific and technocratic elites, and belief in American exceptionalism that have become the party's distinguishing characteristics.

The field of environmental history emerged just decades ago but has established itself as one of the most innovative and important new approaches to history, one that bridges the human and natural world, the humanities and the sciences. With the current trend towards internationalizing history, environmental history is perhaps the quintessential approach to studying subjects outside the nation-state model, with pollution, global warming, and other issues affecting the earth not stopping at national borders. With 25 essays, this Handbook is global in scope and innovative in organization, looking at the field thematically through such categories as climate, disease, oceans, the body, energy, consumerism, and international relations.

For the last twenty years, The Destruction of the Bison has been an essential work in environmental history. Andrew C. Isenberg offers a concise analysis of the near-extinction of the North American bison population from an estimated 30 million in 1800 to fewer than 1000 a century later. His wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study carefully considers the multiple causes, cultural and ecological, of the destruction of the species. The twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new foreword connecting this seminal work to developments in the field - notably new perspectives in Native American history and the rise of transnational history - and placing the story of the bison in global context. A new afterword extends the study to the twenty-first century, underlining the continued importance of this ground-breaking text for current, and future, students and scholars.

"This is the best dead-on Earp deconstruction I've ever read." --"Tucson Weekly"

In popular culture, Wyatt Earp is the hero of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral and a beacon of rough justice in the tumultuous American West. The subject of dozens of films, he has been invoked in battles against organized crime (in the 1930s), communism (in the 1950s), and al-Qaeda (after 2001).
Yet as the historian Andrew C. Isenberg reveals, the Hollywood Earp is largely a fiction--one created by Earp himself. The lawman played on-screen by Henry Fonda and Burt Lancaster is stubbornly duty-bound; in actuality, Earp led a life of impulsive lawbreaking and shifting identities. When he wasn't wearing a badge, he was variously a thief, a brothel bouncer, a gambler, and a confidence man. As "Kirkus Reviews" said, "Isenberg shows us Earp as an early Jay Gatsby, reinventing himself continually."
Earp spent his last decades in Los Angeles, where he befriended Western film actors and directors. Having tried and failed over the course of his life to invent a better future for himself, in the end he invented a better past. Isenberg argues that even though Earp, who died in 1929, did not live to see it, Hollywood's embrace of him as a paragon of law and order was his greatest confidence game of all.
An authoritative account of the man and his legend, and a book about our national fascination with extrajudicial violence, "Wyatt Earp: A""Vigilante Life "is a resounding biography of a singular American figure.

"The Hunting of the Buffalo," originally published in 1929, tells all about the marvelous and useful animal that once roamed the American plains. Its gradual extermination is chronicled by E. Douglas Branch, who drew on rich materials, including Indian legends, old letters and diaries, and tales of frontier travelers. No one has ever written more memorably about the great herds, their habits and haunts, their importance to the Indians, their discovery by awed whites, their decimation by huge cultural and economic forces.

An environmental History of California during the Gold Rush
Between 1849 and 1874 almost $1 billion in gold was mined in California. With little available capital or labor, here's how: high-pressure water cannons washed hillsides into sluices that used mercury to trap gold but let the soil wash away; eventually more than three times the amount of earth moved to make way for the Panama Canal entered California's rivers, leaving behind twenty tons of mercury every mile--rivers overflowed their banks and valleys were flooded, the land poisoned. In the rush to wealth, the same chain of foreseeable consequences reduced California's forests and grasslands.
Not since William Cronon's" Nature's Metropolis" has a historian so skillfully applied John Muir's insight--"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe"--to the telling of the history of the American West. Beautifully told, this is western environmental history at its finest.
Andrew C. Isenberg is a professor of history at Temple University. He is the author of "The Destruction of the Bison": " An Environmental History, 1750-1920" and is a former fellow of the Huntington Library and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. A "Choice" Outstanding Academic Title Between 1849 and 1874, almost one billion dollars in gold was mined in California. The California gold rush was a key chapter in American industrialization, not only because of the wealth it produced but because of its heavy environmental costs. With labor costs high and capital scarce, California miners used hydraulic technology to shift the burden of their enterprise onto the environment: high-pressure water canons washed hillsides into sluices that used mercury to trap gold but let the soil wash away, and eventually thousands of tons of poisonous debris entered California's rivers. The profitability of hydraulic mining spurred other forms of resource exploitation in the state, including logging, large-scale ranching, and city-building. These, too, took their toll on the environment. This resource-intensive development, typical of American industrialization, became the template for the transformation of the West.
Not since Williams Cronon's "Nature's Metropolis" has a historian so skillfully applied John Muir's insight--"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe"--to telling the ecological history of the American West. Succinct and provocative, "Mining California" is environmental history at its finest. A "Choice" Outstanding Academic Title "At a time when [California's] residency has been forecast to grow by 13 million in the next 25 years, with its population probably stretching into its farthest regions, "Mining California" offers sobering reading on the consequences of unchecked expansion."--Tess Taylor, "San Francisco Chronicle Book Review" "At a time when [California's] residency has been forecast to grow by 13 million in the next 25 years, with its population probably stretching into its farthest regions, "Mining California" offers sobering reading on the consequences of unchecked expansion."--Tess Taylor, "San Francisco Chronicle Book Review" "A broadly researched history of the impact of human, especially Euramerican, settlement in California . . . Isenberg amply demonstrates how California's unstable geography, erratic weather, singular mix of natural resources, and shortages of capital and labor all encouraged growth of extractive industries (of which mining was the first example) and innovations to reduce labor costs and achieve economies of scale through the large-scale organization of enterprise . . . Offering excellent maps and a comprehensive bibliography, the book is richly illustrated, fully endnoted, and superbly written. This excellent read, a model for future studies, deserves highest recommendations and above."--D. Steeples, Mercer University (Emeritus), "Choice" "Based on extensive archival work and written in clear prose accessible to both a general and more specialist audience, "Mining California" is a welcome addition to the growing number of studies on the environmental history of mining in the American West."--Peter Coates, "Environmental History" "Andrew Isenberg's erudite new book explores the beginnings of European impact on my own state of California, to which I had moved under the spell of its supposedly pristine environment but unaware of its history, which is concisely recounted here."--Jared Diamond, author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" and "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
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"Andrew Isenberg shoves rustic myths aside to reveal a gold rush California that roared, buzzed, clanked, and trembled with machines, and bore the cost in polluted rivers, denuded mountain slopes, ruined ranches, and shattered Indian communities. Anyone wanting to understand the industrial, social, and ecological revolutions that constituted America's most famous economic boom must read this elegant and provocative book."--Louis Warren, University of California, Davis
"As entertaining as it is insightful, Isenberg's book does justice to the dramatic ecological transformations California underwent in the half century after the gold rush. This is environmental history at its best."--J.R. McNeill, author of "Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th-century World
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"Andrew Isenberg's superb new book analyzes the ecological domino effect set in motion by the California gold rush, which touched off the cycles of environmental degradation the scale of which we can only now fully appreciate. Filled with lessons and warnings, "Mining California" is a timely and important book."--William Deverell, Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
"Forget rugged individualism: corporations owned the Old West, agribusiness dominated the 19th-century landscape, and speculators looted the public trust. So writes environmental historian Isenberg, observing that the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862 did little to prevent the West from being carved into resource-extractive estates. In this setting, California suffered 'enclosure, ' much as the highlands of Scotland had; Indians were pushed aside, valuable properties appropriated and the government molded to benefit the largeholders. In Northern California, the driving forces were not only agricultural interests, but also companies devoted to removing ore and timber. They prospered, while their workers and tenants suffered; as Isenberg points out, for example, the miners who worked the first wave of the Gold Rush were earning $20 a day in 1848, but only $3 a day in 1856 (and that second number, he notes, 'represents only the wages of those who earned enough in the gold country to remain there'). One cause was the replacement of labor-intensive forms of extraction with machinery; on the American River, placer mining technology took the place of humans, and soon whole mountains were washed into the San Francisco Bay. Timber companies removed huge quantities of redwood trees, once