Essays that investigate issues of race, class, consumption, and the body in an array of urban places, across a broad period from the late Renaissance to the present. This volume explores the intersection of cities and the natural environment in an array of urban places, including New York, London, New Orleans, Venice, and Seattle, across a broad period from the late Renaissance to the present.The essays investigate the ecological context of revolts-both real and imagined-by urban squatters and slaves; urban epidemics and their cultural and political consequences; the social and economic impact of natural catastrophesupon urban places; and the environmental history of the rise and fall of cities. The Nature of Cities brings together the work of scholars employing new methods of research in urban and environmental history. The contributors to the volume, who include Karl Appuhn, Joanna Dyl, Ari Kelman, Matthew Klingle, Emmanuel Kreike, Sara Pritchard, Peter Thorsheim, and Ellen Stroud, represent a new generation of scholars in urban environmental history. Their innovative and interdisciplinary work draws on race, class, consumerism, landscape studies, and culture to address such questions as racial and class conflicts in urban public spaces; the cultural construction and control of publicspaces by economic and government powers; and the idealization of cities as apart from nature. Andrew C. Isenberg is Associate Professor of History at Temple University. He is the author of The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (New York, 2000), and Mining California: An Ecological History (New York, 2005).

The once denuded northeastern United States is now a region of trees. Nature Next Door argues that the growth of cities, the construction of parks, the transformation of farming, the boom in tourism, and changes in the timber industry have together brought about a return of northeastern forests. Although historians and historical actors alike have seen urban and rural areas as distinct, they are in fact intertwined, and the dichotomies of farm and forest, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture break down when the focus is on the history of Northeastern woods. Cities, trees, mills, rivers, houses, and farms are all part of a single transformed regional landscape. In an examination of the cities and forests of the northeastern United States-with particular attention to the woods of Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont-Ellen Stroud shows how urbanization processes there fostered a period of recovery for forests, with cities not merely consumers of nature but creators as well. Interactions between city and hinterland in the twentieth century Northeast created a new wildness of metropolitan nature: a reforested landscape intricately entangled with the region's cities and towns.