Yale University Press

Against the Grain

James C. Scott

Everybody knows the story: People figure out farming, settle down, build cities, and civilization takes it from there. Scott, an anthropologist and political scientist at Yale who spent his life studying how regular people dodge governments, points out the timeline…

Wilderness and the American Mind

Roderick Nash

The book that founded environmental history as a field. Nash traces what Americans have meant by wilderness — first a wasteland to be conquered, a place of moral danger, then, once it started running out, a national treasure and a…