Description: Christine Keiner applies perspectives of environmental, agricultural, political, and social history to examine the decline of Maryland's iconic Chesapeake Bay oyster industry. Her study breaks new ground regarding the evolution of environmental politics at the state rather than the federal level.
Brief description: CHRISTINE KEINER is a professor of science, technology, and society at Rochester Institute of Technology and the author of The Oyster Question: Scientists, Watermen, and the Maryland Chesapeake Bay since 1880 (Georgia).
Review Quotes:
Truly impressive. Keiner's remarkably detailed scholarship taps into multiple emerging subfields. Her sustained analysis of nonelite perspectives will contribute enormously by introducing environmental historians to the importance of class, race, religion, and local tradition in the larger conservation picture.
--Richard W. Judd "author of Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England"