The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920

by Andrew C. Isenberg

Overview

The Destruction of the Bison, first published in 2000, explains the decline of the North American bison population from an estimated 30 million in 1800 to fewer than a thousand a century later. In this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study, Andrew C. Isenberg argues that the cultural and ecological encounter between Native Americans and Euroamericans in the Great Plains was the central cause of the near-extinction of the bison. Cultural and ecological interactions created new types of bison hunters on both sides of the encounter: mounted Indian nomads and Euroamerican industrial hidemen. Together with environmental pressures these hunters nearly extinguished the bison. In the early twentieth century, nostalgia about the very cultural strife which first threatened the bison became, ironically, an important impetus to its preservation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107713468
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/28/2000
Series:	Studies in Environment and History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	779,831
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Andrew C. Isenberg is Professor of History at Temple University. Isenberg's research interests include environmental history, the history of the North American West, the United States from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and the encounter between Euroamericans and natives. He is the author of Mining California: An Ecological History (2005) and the editor of The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space (2006).

Table of Contents

1. The grassland environment; 2. The genesis of the Nomads; 3. The Nomadic experiment; 4. The ascendancy of the market; 5. The wild and the tamed; 6. The return of the bison.

Editorial Reviews

...elegant...Isenberg has found an impressive array of sources for his history...a detailed, convincing instance of how civilizationsexpand, it is profoundly instructive.

New York Review of Books

‘The Destruction of the Bison is one of those very rare books that manage to be the definite work on a subject and simultaneously profoundly change how we understand that subject. No one can write about the destruction of America’s national mammal - and the peoples who exploited and cared for it - without engaging with Andrew Isenberg’s bold masterwork.’ Pekka Hämäläinen, University of Oxford

‘In the nineteenth century, in the short span of a few decades, the great bison herds that defined the Plains for thousands of years almost disappeared. No book illuminates the causes and consequences of that fateful development so eloquently or concisely as Drew Isenberg's essential, classic study, The Destruction of the Bison.' Louis S. Warren, University of California, Davis

From the Publisher