Cronon’s study of nineteenth-century Chicago focused on the inseparable coexistence of city and country, tracing the journeys of goods and people—railroads, wheat, hogs, lumber, manufactured goods, credit flows—into and out of town. The central thesis is that neither the city nor its hinterland—and, by extension, neither natural nor unnatural, human nor nonhuman—can be understood independently.

Donald Worster’s 1979 Dust Bowl was a pioneering exploration of a profound ecological and economic crisis. History, for Worster, involves place: that context in which stories unfold, whose contours are shaped both by nature and by technology.