Description: "This anthology places itself at the intersection of Atlantic, environmental, and southern history, pushing for a new "confluence" of scholarship. There is clear overlap in interests and influences for these fields but they have proceeded, largely, on parallel tracks to-date. In their lucid introduction and throughout the collection, an emerging group of historians explore crucial insights that a self-consciously Atlantic environmental history of the American South can offer. By centering this project on a region, the American South-defined as the southeastern reaches of North America and the Caribbean-the authors interrogate ways in which European colonizers, Native Americans, and Africans interacted in and with the (sub)tropics, a place foreign to Europeans"--
Brief description: THOMAS BLAKE EARLE is an assistant professor at Texas A&M University, Galveston, and the author of "For Cod and Country: Cod Fishermen and the Atlantic Dimensions of Sectionalism in Antebellum America" in the Journal of the Early Republic.
Review Quotes: Just as the nature of the American Southeast resisted classification according to the rigid taxonomies of old and prompted William Bartram to evoke the sublime and make it known on its own terms, so do the essays in this collection suggest fresh new ways that environmental history can help us grasp the fluidity of the Atlantic world.--Tycho de Boer "Journal of Southern History"