A Greene Country Towne: Philadelphia's Ecology in the Cultural Imagination

by Alan C. Braddock (Editor), Laura Turner Igoe (Editor)

Overview

An unconventional history of Philadelphia that operates at the threshold of cultural and environmental studies, A Greene Country Towne expands the meaning of community beyond people to encompass nonhuman beings, things, and forces.

By examining a diverse range of cultural acts and material objects created in Philadelphia—from Native American artifacts, early stoves, and literary works to public parks, photographs, and paintings—through the lens of new materialism, the essays in A Greene Country Towne ask us to consider an urban environmental history in which humans are not the only protagonists. This collection reimagines the city as a system of constantly evolving constituents and agencies that have interacted over time, a system powerfully captured by Philadelphia artists, writers, architects, and planners since the seventeenth century.

In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume are Maria Farland, Nate Gabriel, Andrea L. M. Hansen, Scott Hicks, Michael Dean Mackintosh, Amy E. Menzer, Stephen Nepa, John Ott, Sue Ann Prince, and Mary I. Unger.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780271078922
Publisher:	Penn State University Press
Publication date:	12/12/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Alan C. Braddock is Ralph H. Wark Associate Professor of Art History and American Studies at the College of William and Mary as well as Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (2009) and coeditor of A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (2009).

Laura Turner Igoe is the Maher Curatorial Fellow of American Art at Harvard Art Museums. She is completing a book manuscript titled Art and Ecology in the Early Republic.

Laura Turner Igoe is the Maher Curatorial Fellow of American Art at Harvard Art Museums. She is completing a book manuscript titled Art and Ecology in the Early Republic.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Imagining Urban Ecology

Alan C. Braddock and Laura Turner Igoe

Chapter 1: Ink and Paper, Clamshells and Leather: Power, Environmental Perception, and Materiality in the Lenape-European Encounter at Philadelphia

Michael Dean Mackintosh

Chapter 2: “Processes of Nature and Art”: The Ecology of Charles Willson Peale’s Smoke-Eaters and Stoves

Laura Turner Igoe

Chapter 3: Mapping The Quaker City’s Queer Ecology

Mary I. Unger

Chapter 4: Visualizing Urban Nature in Fairmount Park: Economic Diversity, History, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia

Nate Gabriel

Chapter 5: Netted Together: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion at the Dawn of Comparative Biology

John Ott

Chapter 6: Expansive Exhibitions: Agriculture and Environment in Walt Whitman’s Camden-Philadelphia Region

Maria Farland

Chapter 7: “Our yard looks something like a zoological garden”: Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia, and Domestic Animality

Alan C. Braddock

Chapter 8: “A Thorough Study of Causes”: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, and Progressive Era Materiality

Scott Hicks

Chapter 9: Exhibiting Philadelphia’s Vital Center: Negotiating Environmental and Civic Reform in a Popular Postwar Planning Vision

Amy E. Menzer

Chapter 10: “Entertainment for all of the senses”: Stephen Starr’s Experience Dining and the Revitalization of Postindustrial Philadelphia

Stephen Nepa

Chapter 11: “The water flows beneath it still. . .”: Remembering and Re-imagining Philadelphia’s Old Dock Creek

Sue Ann Prince

Chapter 12: Remapping Philadelphia’s Post-Industrial Terrain: A Network in Flux

Andrea Hansen

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

Performing remarkable syntheses of environmental history and recent materialist cultural theory, the essays in A Greene Country Towne confirm Philadelphia’s centrality to the political, commercial, scientific, artistic, and natural history of the United States. A milestone in the multidisciplinary environmental humanities.”

—Michael Ziser,author of Environmental Practice and Early American Literature

“There are moments of wonder and insights scattered throughout, including the English professor Maria Farland’s ecological reading of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the art historian Laura Turner Igoe’s environmental interpretation of the work of Charles Willson Peale.”

—Peter C. Mancall Winterthur Portfolio

From the Publisher