With Thoreau’s Walden as a touchstone, Buell offers an account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of Western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more “ecocentric” way of being. In doing so, he provides a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.

The revised and updated third edition of The Making of Urban America includes seven new articles and a richly detailed historiographical essay that discusses the vast urban history literature added to the canon since the publication of the second edition. The authors’ extensively revised introductions and the fifteen reprinted articles trace urban development from the preindustrial city to the twentieth-century city. With emphasis on the social, economic, political, commercial, and cultural aspects of urban history, these essays illustrate the growth and change that created modern-day urban life. Dynamic topics such as technology, immigration and ethnicity, suburbanization, sunbelt cities, urban political history, and planning and housing are examined. The Making of Urban America is the only reader available that covers all of U.S. urban history and that also includes the most recent interpretive scholarship on the subject.

"Devoted to Nature explores the religious underpinnings of American environmentalism, tracing the theological character of American environment thought from their Romantic foundations to contemporary discourse about nature spirituality. This history is most readily visible during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, when religious sources tangibly shaped ideas about the natural world, recreational practices, and modes of social and political interaction. The roots of the environmental movement evidence explicitly Christian understandings of salvation, redemption, and progress, which provided the context for Americans enthusiastic about the out-of-doors and established the horizons of possibility for the national environmental imagination"--Provided by publisher.

Peter J. Schmitt describes the many ways in which America's urban middle class became involved with nature from the turn of the century to shortly after World War I, and he assess the influence of the "Arcadian myth" on American culture. With sympathy and gentle irony, he surveys the manifestations of the American love affair with the country: summer camps, the beginnings of wildlie protection and the conservation crusade, landscaped cemeteris, "Christian ornithology," and wilderness novels. The Arcadian drive reflected urban values, as the city-dweller sought virtue in nature. Landscape gardening, country clubs, national parks, and scenic turnoffs imposed the industrial ethic of order, neatness, and regularity on natural landscaps. Nature study and anthropomorphic animal stories taught moral values to children.

This book discusses various components of popular culture and the effects they have on politics. Some of the areas of mass culture which are discussed are: popular dramas, folk heritage, the Western myth, sports, religion, media, propaganda, and show business.