Taking the Field

Amy Kohout is an associate professor of history at Colorado College.

• List of IllustrationsIntroduction: Preparation1. The Nature of Frontier Army Work2. Collecting the WestInterlude 1: Revising and Remembering3. The Nature of the Philippine Frontier4. Collecting the PhilippinesInterlude 2: Looking for Arrowhead Lake5. The Frontier in MiniatureConclusion: Unnatural HistoryAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

"Taking the Field is a thought-provoking consideration worthy of attention."-Erin Stewart Mauldin, Western Historical Quarterly "In the best tradition of environmental history, Kohout's graceful prose brings these far-flung places to life and invites readers to share an encounter with landscapes, labs, and libraries where material traces of the imperial past persist. Chapters from Taking the Field would work well as readings for undergraduate classes on US environmental history and the nineteenth-century US. Kohout's emphasis on methodology and sources also make this engaging book an ideal assignment for graduate seminars."-John Mayer Crum, H-Environment “Amy Kohout’s fascinating book examines soldiers as naturalists, the U.S. empire at home and abroad, and nature at the heart of expansionism. Her writing is both deeply moving and persuasive. Taking the Field is a thoroughly original study of the West and the nation.”-David Igler, author of The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush “Deeply researched and beautifully written, Taking the Field helps readers think about environment, science, labor, and the U.S. military in new ways. With Amy Kohout as our guide, we see American soldiers at work on the frontiers of empire, both in the U.S. West and the Philippines, turning landscape and nation into a new form of American power. Taking the Field is a marvelous success.”-Christopher Capozzola, author of Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America’s First Pacific Century “An eye-opening new narrative exploring how the American drive for empire was bound up with a quest to control and preserve nature. . . . Through innovative and affective writing, Kohout takes us vividly into the field-where the building and breaking of both empire and nature took place. In her hands, taxidermied birds collected by soldiers for American museums of natural history take flight again, allowing us to see the vast expanses of American empire with new insight and better appreciate its manifold impacts.”-Douglas Cazaux Sackman, author of Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America