Author: Mark Fiege
Publisher: University of Washington Press (Seattle), 2012.
ISBN: 978-0-295-99167-2
Thesis Statement
Mark Fiege’s The Republic of Nature argues that American history—from the Salem witch trials to the dropping of the atomic bomb—is fundamentally inseparable from the natural world, and that by recovering the environmental dimensions of familiar historical episodes, we can achieve a richer, more honest understanding of American politics, culture, and identity. Rather than treating nature as a passive backdrop, Fiege insists that nature is an active agent in the American story, shaping and being shaped by human choices.
Summary (400 words)
Fiege’s ambitious synthesis reframes the grand narrative of American history through the lens of environmental history. The book is organized as a series of closely observed case studies, each illuminating how natural forces and human interventions co-produced pivotal moments. Fiege opens with the Salem witch trials, demonstrating how the ecological anxieties of a frontier society—fear of wolves, crop failure, and the untamed New England landscape—fed the hysteria that gripped the village. He then moves to the founding era, reading Thomas Jefferson’s agrarianism not merely as political philosophy but as a deeply held ecological worldview rooted in the soils of Virginia and the promise of western lands.
Perhaps the most celebrated chapter treats Abraham Lincoln as a “physical” figure, examining how his bodily endurance, his encounters with the frontier environment, and his understanding of nature as a political resource shaped his leadership during the Civil War. Fiege also reconstructs the cotton kingdom as an ecological regime, showing how the enslavement of African Americans and the exploitation of southern soils were intertwined in a single brutal system of extraction. The book extends through the Gilded Age and Progressive Era by examining the rise of industrial capitalism and the concomitant transformation of rivers, forests, and urban landscapes, and culminates in the atomic bomb—the ultimate human manipulation of nature—as the signal event of the American century.
Throughout, Fiege’s prose is vivid and accessible, moving fluidly between micro-history and macro-analysis. He draws on a wide range of sources, from slave narratives and agricultural manuals to soil surveys and political speeches. His central contention is that ignoring nature in our chronicles of American history makes us poorer readers of the past—it blinds us to the material conditions that undergirded every ideological debate, every social movement, and every act of statecraft. The book is not a comprehensive survey but a provocative, essayistic meditation on a theme: that the republic is, literally and figuratively, a republic of nature.
Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown
- Introduction: Fiege lays out his core premise and method, defining “nature” broadly to include human bodies, nonhuman organisms, and physical processes, and urging historians to “follow the matter.”
- Chapter 1: “The Nature of the Past”: A theoretical manifesto that situates the book within environmental historiography and argues for the inseparability of nature and culture.
- Chapter 2: “The Witch in the Woods”: Examines the Salem witch trials as a crisis rooted in environmental stress, frontier fears, and the bodily anxieties of Puritan society.
- Chapter 3: “The Agrarian Republic”: Reads Thomas Jefferson’s vision of yeoman farming as an environmental ideology and traces its contradictions in the Ohio Valley and the Louisiana Purchase.
- Chapter 4: “The Nature of Slavery”: Analyzes the cotton economy, the malarial South, and the ecological logic of the plantation as a system of human and soil exploitation.
- Chapter 5: “The Body of Lincoln”: A biographical chapter that treats Lincoln’s physical strength, his frontier upbringing, and his bronchitis and depression as aspects of a “natural” political career.
- Chapter 6: “The Organic Industrial City”: Explores Chicago as an “industrial ecology,” tracing how meatpacking, grain markets, and the Chicago River reworked the relationships among animals, humans, and waste.
- Chapter 7: “The Nature of Imperialism”: Considers the Spanish-American War and the conquest of the Philippines through the lens of tropical disease, geography, and the racialized “nature” of colonial subjects.
- Chapter 8: “The Atomic Age”: Examines the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos as the culmination of human efforts to dominate nature, and the bomb as a new “natural” force that permanently altered the planet.
- Conclusion: Fiege reflects on the moral and political implications of viewing American history as a republic of nature, urging us to recognize our embeddedness in the nonhuman world.
Scholarly Reception
The Republic of Nature was widely praised upon publication and won the 2013 George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History, recognizing it as the best book in the field that year. Reviewers admired Fiege’s bold synthesis and his ability to make environmental history legible to nonspecialists. The book was also celebrated for its literary quality; many critics compared Fiege’s prose favorably to the work of the best narrative historians, while still maintaining rigorous scholarly standards. Critics occasionally noted that the thematic organization led to some topics receiving short shrift—the interwar period and the New Deal are relatively lightly treated—but most agreed that the book’s interpretive power outweighed its omissions. It has since been widely adopted in undergraduate courses on American environmental history and is regarded as one of the most important synthetic works in the field since William Cronon’s Changes in the Land.
“Fiege has written the rare kind of book that forces us to see familiar landscapes—and familiar stories—with wholly new eyes. He makes the case, convincingly, that the history of the United States is not merely mirrored in its environment but is, in fact, constituted by it.” — Journal of American History
“A brilliant and beautifully written meditation on the American past. Fiege’s insight that American freedom, equality, and democracy have always been entangled with the material world—its soils, bodies, rivers, and storms—should permanently alter the way we teach and think about the nation’s history.” — The American Historical Review