Environmental history of the United States

Environmental history of the United States studies how environments and human societies in what is now the United States have shaped one another over time.

Connect

Columbian Exchange: The transfer of plants, animals, diseases, and people between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia after 1492. It transformed Indigenous ecologies and introduced crops, livestock, and pathogens across the continent.
Homestead Act: A 1862 United States law granting public land to settlers who improved and occupied it. It accelerated western settlement and converted public land into private farms.
Indigenous peoples of the Americas: The diverse peoples and nations whose histories in the Americas predate European colonization. Their varied land practices shaped ecosystems long before the United States existed.
Wilderness: A landscape perceived as largely free from human settlement, development, or control. The idea shaped preservation policy while often obscuring Indigenous presence and stewardship.
American bison: A large North American mammal whose populations once numbered in the tens of millions across the Great Plains. Its near-extirpation linked commercial hunting, railroad expansion, and federal campaigns against Indigenous peoples.
Railroad land grants: Federal transfers of public land to railroad companies to encourage construction of rail lines. Railroads opened distant resources and landscapes to extraction, migration, and markets.
Indigenous fire management: The deliberate use of controlled burning by Indigenous communities to sustain landscapes and resources. It challenges the idea that precolonial American environments were uniformly untouched wilderness.
Conservation movement: A movement to manage natural resources for sustained use and public benefit. Its utilitarian approach differed from efforts to protect nature from development.
Dust Bowl: A severe period of drought and soil erosion on the Great Plains during the 1930s. It exposed how farming practices and drought combined to produce a national ecological and social crisis.
Reclamation Act of 1902: A federal law funding irrigation and water projects in the arid American West. It enabled agriculture and urban growth by redirecting western rivers.