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Featured Title

Fire in America

A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire

Stephen J. Pyne

$33.95 Paperback
Release Date: 11/1/1997
ISBN: 9780295975924

680 Pages

Canadian rights only

Distributed for University of Washington Press

OTHER WAYS TO ORDER

About the Book

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books -- Cycle of Fire Originally published in 1992 From prehistory to the present-day conservation movement, Pyne explores the efforts of successive American cultures to master wildfire and to use it to shape the landscape.

About the Author(s)

Stephen J. Pyne has written extensively on fire in such books as Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire and most recently Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910. He is a professor in Arizona State University's Biology & Society Program, in which he teaches courses on the history of fire, exploration, and environmental history.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents: List of Illustrations Foreword by William Cronon Preface to the 1997 Paperback Edition Preface to the Original Edition: History with Fire in its eye Abbreviations Prologue: The Smoke of TIme Nature's Fire The Fire from Asia The Fire from Europe The Great Barbecue The Heroic Age A Continental Experiment The Cold War on Fire Fields of Fire Epilogue: The Forbidden Flame Bibliographic Abbreviations Notes Bibliographic Essay Index

Reviews

"On rare occasions, the historical literature is enriched by the introduction of a broad new field for study, by a book that dramatically expands the boundaries of scholarly investigation. Stephen Pyne's Fire in America is such a book. It achieves the Promethean goal of bringing fire to history."-Science "This unusual and imaginative work takes a phenomenon that seems at first glance to be so elemental as to have no history and no evolution, and gives it a dynamic role in the drama of American advance from frontier through agricultural to industrial society. By integrating the history of fire with ecology, agriculture, logging, and resource management, Pyne has made a unique contribution to the history of science and technology, as well as to cultural history in general."-Isis "Stephen J. Pyne compels our admiration for his gargantuan ambition and richly informed intelligence. He tells us more than anyone else to date has about the role of fire in the landscape, tells us we have been wrong in assuming a pristine state of nature before the white man's invasion, tells us what fire has meant to the rise of civilization and this nation. No one interested in environmental history can afford to ignore this massive achievement."-Journal of American History

Sample Chapter

A sample chapter of this title is not available at this time. For further information, please email info@ubcpress.ubc.ca.