Dirt in the City: Urban Environmental History in the Mid-Atlantic

Abstract

The American Mid-Atlantic has no Yosemite National Park, no Walden Pond, no vast prairie or Great Salt Lake. Its mountains are comparatively small; its waterways are tamed; its forests cut over; its farmland mixed among suburban tracts. Environmental historians of the United States have often looked to more dramatic, more romantic, more seemingly pristine regions for their work—even as that work demonstrates the ways in which such places are not as “natural” as they seem. But those historians who look for nature in the city have long been drawn to the Mid-Atlantic for the very reasons others look away. Urban environmental historians have rich material in the landscapes of Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York City, Baltimore, and Washington, DC—both within the cities’ formal boundaries and in their relationships with environments beyond. The region’s intense intertwining of the urban, suburban, industrial, rural, and seemingly wild has meant that connections obscured elsewhere are inescapable there.