Review: Making America’s Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands, by Adam M. Sowards

Abstract

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Making America’s Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands, by Adam M. Sowards Making America’s Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands. By Adam M. Sowards. (Lanham, Md., Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2022. 256 pp.) Nicky Rehnberg Nicky Rehnberg University of California, Santa Barbara Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2023) 92 (2): 299–300. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.299 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Nicky Rehnberg; Review: Making America’s Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands, by Adam M. Sowards. Pacific Historical Review 1 May 2023; 92 (2): 299–300. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.299 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search Hannah Arendt was not an environmental historian, but Adam M. Sowards suggests that we can learn much from her book The Human Condition to better understand the complicated, sprawling, and at times contradictory history of public lands. In Making America’s Public Lands, Sowards invokes Arendt’s metaphor of the public sphere as a table, in which all must gather around without “falling over one another.” He sets his history of public lands as such a table, dividing it chronologically as an interconnected process rather than by administration or region. This is a necessary approach in order to depict the wider story he desires. The first chapter “Gathering” traces the gathering of public lands and the work to make them private in the name of economic and political independence. As this process fails throughout the nineteenth century, the second chapter considers the “Forming” of the table, namely the creation of public land... You do not currently have access to this content.