Code-named the Manhattan Project, the detailed plans for developing an atomic bomb were impelled by urgency and shrouded in secrecy. This book tells the story of the project's three key sites: Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico.

George Alexander Grant is an unknown elder in the field of American landscape photography. Just as they did the work of his contemporaries Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, and others, millions of people viewed Grant’s photographs; unlike those contemporaries, few even knew Grant’s name. Landscapes for the People shares his story through his remarkable images and a compelling biography profiling patience, perseverance, dedication, and an unsurpassed love of the natural and historic places that Americans chose to preserve. A Pennsylvania native, Grant was introduced to the parks during the summer of 1922 and resolved to make parks work and photography his life. Seven years later, he received his dream job and spent the next quarter century visiting the four corners of the country to produce images in more than one hundred national parks, monuments, historic sites, battlefields, and other locations. He was there to visually document the dramatic expansion of the National Park Service during the New Deal, including the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Grant’s images are the work of a master craftsman. His practiced eye for composition and exposure and his patience to capture subjects in their finest light are comparable to those of his more widely known contemporaries. Nearly fifty years after his death, and in concert with the 2016 centennial of the National Park Service, it is fitting that George Grant’s photography be introduced to a new generation of Americans.

William Henry Jackson was an explorer, photographer, and artist. He is also one of those most often overlooked figures of the American West. His larger claim to fame involves his repeated forays into the western lands of nineteenth-century America as a photographer. Jackson’s life spanned multiple incarnations of the American West. In a sense, he played a singular role in revealing the West to eastern Americans. While others opened the frontier with the axe and the rifle, Jackson did so with his collection of cameras. He dispelled the geological myths through a lens no one could deny or match. His wet plate collodion prints not only helped to reframe the nation’s image of the West, but they also enticed businessmen, investors, scientists, and even tourists to venture into the western regions of the United States. Prior to Jackson’s widely circulated photographs, the American West was little understood and unmapped—mysterious lands that required a camera and a cameraman to reveal their secrets and, ultimately, provide the first photographic record of such exotic destinations as Yellowstone, Mesa Verde, and the Rocky Mountains. Jackson’s story was long and his life full, as he lived to the enviable age of 99. This biography presents the good, bad, and ugly of Jackson’s life, both personal and professional, through the use primary source materials, including Jackson’s autobiographies, letters, and government reports on the Hayden Surveys.

The book that launched environmental history, William Cronon's Changes in the Land, now revised and updated. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists' sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another. With its chilling closing line, "The people of plenty were a people of waste," Cronon's enduring and thought-provoking book is ethno-ecological history at its best.

Just as the look of the American landscape has changed since the nineteenth century, so has our idea of landscape. Here Bonnie Costello reads six twentieth-century American poets who have reflected and shaped this transformation and in the process renovated landscape by drawing new images from the natural world and creating new forms for imagining the earth and our relation to it.