Changes in the Genre: A Brief Survey of Early Mid-Atlantic Environmental Histories

Abstract

William Pencak, editor of Pennsylvania History, wrote in 1996:

Pennsylvania's history cannot be understood without reference to the regions around it. Pennsylvania's role in the development of the Southern backcountry and the Ohio Valley, trade and culture in the Delaware Valley, and the contrasting rise of New York and Pennsylvania as the nation's leading industrial and commercial states in the nineteenth century are only three obvious areas in which understanding Pennsylvania benefits from a regional perspective.

Pencak was explaining to readers why the journal had decided no longer to focus narrowly on Pennsylvania history, but rather, as its new subtitle would declare, to become A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies. Pencak's stated reasons focus explicitly on aspects of cultural, social, and economic history, but his observation that the history of Pennsylvania cannot be fully understood without reference to broader regional trends holds just as true for environmental history. Rivers and streams, winds and rain, migratory wildlife and the commercial incentives that so often drive human-environmental interactions are notoriously poor observers of political boundaries.