Benjamin Heber Johnson
Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX 75205)
FT-54726-07
Summer Stipends
Research Programs
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[Grant products]
Totals:
$5,000 (approved)
$5,000 (awarded)
Grant period:
6/1/2007 – 8/31/2007
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Escaping the Dark, Gray City: How Conservation Re-made City, Suburb, and Countryside in the Progressive Era
This book examines how Americans sought refuge in nature at the turn of the 20th century. What Americans of this time meant by “nature” and what they believed that it offered and demanded of their increasingly urban and industrial civilization lie at its heart. Its central argument is that conservation was a broad and ambitious social movement that understood itself to be restoring a spiritually renewing and materially sustainable relationship with a nature made vulnerable by the unprecedented power of humanity. Conservation involved not only the remote forests and wildernesses that epitomized nature for many Americans, but also dense industrial cities, leafy suburbs, and private homes, and the social relations of these spaces.
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