The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s

“The Environment and the People in American Cities is one of those great and versatile books that any environmental social scientist would want to have sitting on her shelf. I have read many books on related topics over the years and I can’t recall any other that does anything like this one. By focusing on racial, ethnic, and class issues as they play out in the urban landscape, against such backdrops as public health concerns, parks, and industrial workplaces, Dorceta E. Taylor makes a major contribution. I’ll never view my urban surroundings in quite the same way again.” - Valerie Gunter, coauthor of Volatile Places: A Sociology of Communities and Environmental Controversies

“All future research on environmentalism and social change will have to reference The Environment and the People in American Cities. It is a pathbreaking, first-rate work of scholarship. As the first scholar to consider the relationship between social inequality and conservation issues within such an inclusive framework, Dorceta E. Taylor makes stunning links between the terrain of contemporary environmental and social-justice conflicts and those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” - David Pellow, author of Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago

“Dorceta E. Taylor has set out to write nothing short of a ‘People’s Environmental History of American Cities.’ At the core of her social history are inequalities based on race, gender, class, and ethnicity, as wealthy white elites shaped access to housing, workplaces, parks and even cemeteries to their wishes, at the expense of everyone else. Taylor’s book is a call for broader perspectives on environmental issues, to include segregation, labor market and workplace dynamics, social movements, politics, and social control. A magnum opus chock full of fascinating details of an untold history of the environmental injustices at the root of our society.” - Timmons Roberts, Director of the Center for Environmental Studies, Brown University

“[A] major contribution to the history of American environmentalism and American social history in general. . . . [Taylor’s] insights require serious engagement by every student of American environmentalism.” - Kimberly K. Smith, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences

“Dorceta Taylor’s impressive work not only more than fulfils an expectation to learn about how American cities and urban environmentalism emerged, but it contextualises these developments through some important and often neglected lenses. . . . Taylor’s work is a valuable companion to studying the sociology of urban environmentalism, today and in the past.” - Stewart Barr, Urban Studies

“Taylor has gleaned profound insights from the social sciences and humanities to weave them into this superbly written tour de force on environmental and social justice in the urban US. . . . In short, this is the best account of urban ecology that has come out in the past two decades. . . . [T]his magnum opus has the makings of a classic that is destined to be one of the most referenced volumes of our times. Essential.” - T. Niazi, Choice

“Taylor has written an important overview of what cities have faced from an environmental perspective, and readers from many different disciplines will find much to ponder.” - Lisa Keller, The Historian