The Untilled Garden

Richard W. Judd is Col. James C. McBride Professor of History at the University of Maine and editor of the journal Maine History. He is the author of Natural States: The Environmental Imagination in Maine, Oregon, and the Nation (2003); Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (1997); and Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present (1995). His current research includes a survey of New England's environmental history.

• Part I. Forging a Scientific Community: 1. 'A country unknown': colonial explorers and their natural history; 2. Rambles in Eden; 3. 'A despairing curiosity': creating America's scientific academy; Part II. The Natural History of America: 4. Power and purpose in the geological record: the scientific beginnings of American romanticism; 5. Integrated landscapes: mountains, rivers, and forests in the balance of nature; 6. 'A distant intercourse': animal character and conservation; Part III. Improvers, Romantics, and the Science of Conservation: 7. From forest to fruitful field: settlement and improvement in the Western wilderness; 8. The naturalist's mirror: popular science and the roots of romanticism; 10. Challenging the idea of improvement.

"Richard Judd takes us on a lively excursion into the early American backcountry alongside the explorers who travelled through the great Eastern forest as it was being transformed into farmland. Writing in the century before Henry David Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh, this community of scientists helped give voice to Americans' love of nature and prepared the ground for the conservation movement to come." —Brian Donahue, Brandies University, author of The Great Meadow