Changes in the Genre: A Brief Survey of Early Mid-Atlantic Environmental Histories

William Pencak, editor of Pennsylvania History, wrote in 1996:

Pennsylvania’s history cannot be understood without reference to the regions around it. Pennsylvania’s role in the development of the Southern backcountry and the Ohio Valley, trade and culture in the Delaware Valley, and the contrasting rise of New York and Pennsylvania as the nation’s leading industrial and commercial states in the nineteenth century are only three obvious areas in which understanding Pennsylvania benefits from a regional perspective.¹

Pencak was explaining to readers why the journal had decided no longer to focus narrowly on Pennsylvania history, but rather, as its new subtitle would declare, to become A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies. Pencak’s stated reasons focus explicitly on aspects of cultural, social, and economic history, but his observation that the history of Pennsylvania cannot be fully understood without reference to broader regional trends holds just as true for environmental history. Rivers and streams, winds and rain, migratory wildlife and the commercial incentives that so often drive human-environmental interactions are notoriously poor observers of political boundaries.

And yet, one of the most obvious lacunae in the current historiography of the colonial Mid-Atlantic is that the region lacks an iconic environmental study, such as William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, to call its own. Nor, for that matter, can the Mid-Atlantic boast of an Ecological Revolutions, a This Land, This South, a New Face on the Countryside, or any comparable text. In the first two of these titles, William Cronon and Carolyn Merchant in a very real sense managed to create an ecologically defined New England. Albert E. Cowdrey and Timothy Silver did the same for the South in the latter two titles.² Regions formerly delineated by historical politics suddenly became distinct regional ecosystems (of sorts). The myriad transformations undergone by local landscapes during the colonial period suddenly assumed a larger significance as they took their place within a regional pattern that could roughly be described as the transition from a Native American subsistence ecology to a different, yet still-stable, colonial subsistence ecology, and, finally, to the emergence of an overly rapacious commercial ecology. Merchant even took this metanarrative of environmental declension a step further, declaring early New England “a mirror on the world” in which regional ecological transformations repeated, at an accelerated rate, changes that had already overtaken Europe and would soon, even more rapidly, overtake the developing world.³

These historians, and others who have followed their example, have given us the history of the northernmost among the original thirteen colonies, and of the South, but what of the middle? Peter Mancall’s Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture along the Upper Susquehanna, the first environmental history monograph with an exclusively Mid-Atlantic focus, appeared almost a decade after Cronon and Cowdrey’s works and limited its attention to the upper Susquehanna Valley—the sprawling hinterland where today New York meets Pennsylvania.⁴ Although a vast region, and one with a rich colonial history, this seminal history of the Mid-Atlantic environment did not approach in its geographic pretentions the standard for a synthetic regional history that had been set by Cronon, Cowdrey, Merchant, and Silver.

The best synthetic environmental history that embraces the Mid-Atlantic fails to treat the region as a unique historical-ecological unit. ABC-CLIO’s excellent Nature and Human Societies series of environmental histories lumps the Mid-Atlantic into a volume titled Northeast and Midwest United States. To make matters worse for those seeking a uniquely Mid-Atlantic environmental historiography, the volume’s author, John T. Cumbler, gives pride of place to the colonial history of New England. The cultural diversity of the Mid-Atlantic—with its Dutch, Swedish, German, and Scots-Irish settlers—along with its distinct geography and climate seemingly do little to alter the larger processes at work amidst European settlement. Despite cultural differences, Cumbler observes that settlers in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were “just as involved in the international trade” and “shared a variety of lifestyle experiences with...