Contributing to existing scholarship does not always mean forging a new or innovative methodology. Sometimes a book can be a worthwhile read and follow the structure of earlier works. It is in this manner that readers will most appreciate Timothy Silver’s A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, colonists, and slaves in South Atlantic forests. The author quickly acknowledges his appreciation for two earlier works in environmental history that inspired this book, Alfred W. Crosby Jr.’s The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, and William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. A New Face on the Countryside is those two books combined with a singular focus on the South Atlantic
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Instead of participating agents in an ever changing environment, they are reactionary characters swept up in capitalist forces. Survival was no longer a matter of finding enough resources from the land but in finding a place in this new economic system at the expense of the …show more content…
It would be easy, because of this, to write off Silver’s work as unnecessary. However, this would be doing the book a genuine disservice. Perhaps the most noteworthy element of A New Face on the Countryside is the way in which it emphasizes how similar the two regions were in their environmental development despite significant differences in their climate, soil quality, geology, and human populations. Historians generally portray the history of New England and the Southern colonies as a dichotomy of two distinct regions. Silver’s work shows us that although the two regions may have differed significantly in 1600, by 1800 they traversed a similar environmental progression spurred on by the same biological and cultural factors resulting from the mixing of the new and old
Instead of participating agents in an ever changing environment, they are reactionary characters swept up in capitalist forces. Survival was no longer a matter of finding enough resources from the land but in finding a place in this new economic system at the expense of the …show more content…
It would be easy, because of this, to write off Silver’s work as unnecessary. However, this would be doing the book a genuine disservice. Perhaps the most noteworthy element of A New Face on the Countryside is the way in which it emphasizes how similar the two regions were in their environmental development despite significant differences in their climate, soil quality, geology, and human populations. Historians generally portray the history of New England and the Southern colonies as a dichotomy of two distinct regions. Silver’s work shows us that although the two regions may have differed significantly in 1600, by 1800 they traversed a similar environmental progression spurred on by the same biological and cultural factors resulting from the mixing of the new and old