Land

“In an erudite, expansive, and elegantly written new work, Steven Stoll explores seven key concepts in the history of land: terra, field, commons, estate, colony, waste, and home. Gathering these seemingly disparate topics into the same analysis is eye-opening; there is no other work like it, though the reader soon comes to accept Stoll’s novel framework as self-evident, which is the mark of a great book.”—Michael R. Dove, author of Hearsay Is Not Excluded: A History of Natural History

“Steven Stoll calls his book Land a ‘riff,’ and that is what it is in the very best sense. Stoll takes readers across thousands of years of history and thousands of miles of geography, covering everything from politics to theology to linguistics to archaeology. This is the rare book that informs and inspires.”—Steven Conn, author of The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t

“Steven Stoll’s Land is a rare and wonderful work—a fresh retelling of the deep history of our complicated relationship with the land on which we live, and a handbook for how we might find our way into a better future, told in a beautifully written and intensely felt narrative from a scholar able to share a lifetime of learning through an engaging mosaic of story. A profound, wide-ranging, and important book.”—Christopher Brown, author of A Natural History of Empty Lots and Tropic of Kansas

“A book that asks—and answers—big questions. Steven Stoll treats his readers to an insightful survey of the never-ending struggle to find the language to describe our most fundamental of relationships: between human beings and the land that sustains us.”—Karl Jacoby, Columbia University

“Steven Stoll has long been one of our most nuanced, thoughtful, lyrical historians of the American landscape, and in the seven words and essays that comprise this book, Stoll has composed something richly complex. Harmony, dissonance, counterpoint, movement through major and minor keys: this is history as music as essay, and Stoll’s richest work yet.”—Daegan Miller, author of This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent

Steven Stoll is a professor of history at Fordham University and the author of Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia. He lives in Guilford, CT.

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