"Typically American": Trends in the History of Environmental Politics and Policy in the Mid-Atlantic Region

Abstract

Pursuing a regional approach to history puts twenty-first-century historians in the strange position of unconsciously echoing their nineteenth-century predecessors, though with differing goals. When historian Frederick Jackson Turner pronounced the Mid-Atlantic region "typically American," he was of course intent upon divining an elusive national character, not currently a goal of historians. But Turner's frontier thesis emphasized geography and region in a way that would still be recognizable to environmental historians today. For example, Turner's observations concerning the Mid-Atlantic region hinged upon the physical geography of place, property ownership, and use of land. He noted that the Mid-Atlantic was a doorway for emigrants from all of Europe, who "entered by New York harbor" and were then intermixed; that the residents were "rooted in material prosperity" based on the land; and that the region, "with no barriers to shut out its frontiers from its settled regions, and with a system of connecting waterways," was uniquely situated as a mechanism for the admixture of peoples. In this way, the Mid-Atlantic served as a microcosm of Turner's conception of the frontier as a churning machine that intermingled people from regions and nations to create an essentially American temperament.