Taking the Field
eBook - ePub

Taking the Field

Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers

  1. 400 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Taking the Field

Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers

About this book

Winner of the 2024 Robert M. Utley Prize
Winner of the 2024 Hal K. Rothman Prize


Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

In the late nineteenth century, at a time when Americans were becoming more removed from nature than ever before, U.S. soldiers were uniquely positioned to understand and construct nature’s ongoing significance for their work and for the nation as a whole. American ideas and debates about nature evolved alongside discussions about the meaning of frontiers, about what kind of empire the United States should have, and about what it meant to be modern or to make “progress.” Soldiers stationed in the field were at the center of these debates, and military action in the expanding empire brought new environments into play.

In Taking the Field Amy Kohout draws on the experiences of U.S. soldiers in both the Indian Wars and the Philippine-American War to explore the interconnected ideas about nature and empire circulating at the time. By tracking the variety of ways American soldiers interacted with the natural world, Kohout argues that soldiers, through their words and their work, shaped Progressive Era ideas about both American and Philippine environments. Studying soldiers on multiple frontiers allows Kohout to inject a transnational perspective into the environmental history of the Progressive Era, and an environmental perspective into the period’s transnational history. Kohout shows us how soldiers—through their writing, their labor, and all that they collected—played a critical role in shaping American ideas about both nature and empire, ideas that persist to the present.

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Yes, you can access Taking the Field by Amy Kohout in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Asian History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Series Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright Page
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. List of Illustrations
  8. Introduction: Preparation
  9. 1. The Nature of Frontier Army Work
  10. 2. Collecting the West
  11. Interlude 1
  12. 3. The Nature of the Philippine Frontier
  13. 4. Collecting the Philippines
  14. Interlude 2
  15. 5. The Frontier in Miniature
  16. Conclusion: Unnatural History
  17. Acknowledgments
  18. Notes
  19. Bibliography
  20. Index
  21. About Amy Kohout
  22. Series List