This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent by Daegan Miller (review)

As an environmental historian, I came with certain expectations of a book with a title such as This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent. The phrase "a history" implied the construction of a trajectory across time, perhaps from a pre-European era through the twentieth century. "This radical land" evoked perhaps a tale of swirling movements painted across a landscape, a grand mural filled with stories of strikes, upheaval, mass meetings, and struggles.

On the other hand, with a little investigation I discovered that Miller himself described this volume (on Twitter) as "four essays on Thoreau as liberation cartographer; a black wilderness eutopia; unsettling landscape photography; & anarchists in the sequoias," and that is a perfect description of this book, which also includes an eight-page essay on an 1869 book by the name of Adventures in the Wilderness and a conclusion. It is likely useful to add that this book is entirely about the nineteenth century and is just as vignette-like as Miller describes it to be, drawing no explicit connections among the chapters to describe any arc or direction of historical movement across time.

The first chapter (entitled Act One) treats Thoreau as a surveyor and thinker, finding in him and his writings an antecedent for today's intersectional environmental thinkers. Understanding and interpreting Thoreau's paid work of mapmaking in terms of modern geographical theory, Miller explores the transcendentalist's concerns with slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, though Thoreau's thoughts played out in the vocabulary and issues of the nineteenth century, such as the Mexican–American War, manifest destiny, and Indian removal. He is understood by Miller in an old-fashioned Great Man historical style, or perhaps in a literary style, as a decontextualized individual rather than as a part of larger political landscapes and social forces.

Chapter (Act) Two opens with the promise of something more like a social history, uncovering a fascinating moment in Adirondack history in which Black Americans engaged in the start of a nineteenth-century back-to-the-land movement, aiming to settle in those mountains and form utopian or, as Miller terms them, "eutopian" communities. However this account, too, is powered by a string of Important Men in old-fashioned intellectual history style—John Brown (roundly vilified in this book), James McCune Smith, Ralph Emerson—and not by movements rooted in economics, politics, or social dynamics. It was in the midst of this chapter that I began to channel Virginia Scharff in her essay "Man and Nature!"¹ and felt compelled to count the names splattered across the pages, eventually stopping when I hit the mark of thirty men to zero women. Somehow I think this nineteenth-century back-to-the-land movement wouldn't have worked without women. Surely they are worth looking for?

Act Three returns to the realm of cultural criticism, being an essay on landscape photographer A. J. Russell, who traveled the American West after the Civil War. Miller argues that Russell's photographic work has been dismissed as the work of a boosterish apologist for American expansionism because of the explicit content of Russell's writing, but deserves closer examination for its implied critiques and subtler meanings.

Act Four is once again a more satisfying chapter for a historian to read, telling another unknown and delightful utopianist story, this one of a band of socialist anarchists who settled in the redwoods of California and founded the Kaweah community. The settlers bestowed the name Karl Marx on the largest living tree on our planet, a tree we know at the moment as General Sherman. The utopian community was eventually evicted from their land by the founding of Sequoia National Park; the originally proposed boundary lines of the park were redrawn to include the anarchists' land at the instigation of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which was feeling threatened by impending competition from the...