What is it like to do field biology in a world that exalts experiments and laboratories? How have field biologists assimilated laboratory values and practices, and crafted an exact, quantitative science without losing their naturalist souls? In Landscapes and Labscapes, Robert E. Kohler explores the people, places, and practices of field biology in the United States from the 1890s to the 1950s. He takes readers into the fields and forests where field biologists learned to count and measure nature and to read the imperfect records of "nature's experiments." He shows how field researchers use nature's particularities to develop "practices of place" that achieve in nature what laboratory researchers can only do with simplified experiments. Using historical frontiers as models, Kohler shows how biologists created vigorous new border sciences of ecology and evolutionary biology.

The Basis of Belief tells the story of the University of Minnesota s unofficial educational agenda. Steven Keillor considers selected controversies that have been energetically debated by educators, administrators, and students for over a century at the University. Keillor describes the clash between an experimental, scientific basis for knowledge and a reliance on testimony, as in stories and first-hand accounts. Which means of obtaining knowledge was best? Which direction should a university take in influencing and promoting one or the other? These arguments concern the place in the University curriculum and student life of such matters as science, religion, psychology, literature, evolution, American Studies, academic freedom, and loyalty, as well as less scholarly activities, such as student protests and strikes. Keillor carefully draws upon diaries, letters, published accounts, and interviews to assess how religion affected these subjects in academic life.

From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain is an account of the making of a large part of the American landscape following European settlement. Drawing upon land survey records and early travellers' accounts, Dr Whitney reconstructs the 'virgin' forests and grasslands of the north-eastern and central United States during the pre-settlement period. He then documents successively the clearance and fragmentation of the region's woodlands, the harvest of the forest and its game, the ploughing of the prairies, and the draining of wetlands. The degree to which these activities altered the soil, climate, plant and animal communities, and water cycle are evaluated, and the sustainability of present-day ecosystems is brought into question in this account.

Provides historical coverage of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes information abstracted from over 2,000 journals published worldwide.