Review: Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston by Michael Rawson

Abstract

Michael Rawson. Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010, xii + 367 pp., 29 b/w illus. and 3 tables. $29.95, ISBN 9780674048416 The removal of cows from Boston Common was a burning political issue of 1830. The anti-cow faction saw the 631-acre pasture on the western edge of the Shawmut peninsula as a potential site of leisure, recreation, and refinement. These petitioners often resided in the wealthier adjacent areas of the city. A counter petition emerged from pro-cow advocates who more likely earned their living, in part, from the keeping of animals. Boston’s town council decided in favor of the petition to ban cows; the common people appealed that decision the following year and lost again. This seemingly benign change in agricultural and social practice is presented as a turning point in the attitude of Bostonians to nature in the most important book published in recent years on the city’s nineteenth-century environmental history. Michael Rawson’s Eden on the Charles succinctly summarizes the relevant literature, opens new research territory, and provides a larger context for understanding the human relationship to nature in American cities. The book features five fascinating and interlocking chapters: “Enclosing the Common,” “Constructing Water,” “Inventing the Suburb,” Making the Harbor,” and “Recreating the Wilderness.” An admirer of Raymond Williams’s writings on the social construction of nature, Rawson examines the ways that Bostonians redefined their …