Published
in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest
Studies, Southern Methodist University.
In the late nineteenth century,
at a time when Americans were becoming more removed from nature than
ever before, U.S. soldiers were uniquely positioned to understand and
construct nature’s ongoing significance for their work and for the
nation as a whole. American ideas and debates about nature evolved
alongside discussions about the meaning of frontiers, about what kind
of empire the United States should have, and about what it meant to
be modern or to make “progress.” Soldiers stationed in the field
were at the center of these debates, and military action in the
expanding empire brought new environments into play.
In Taking
the Field Amy Kohout
draws on the experiences of U.S. soldiers in both the Indian Wars and
the Philippine-American War to explore the interconnected ideas about
nature and empire circulating at the time. By tracking the variety of
ways American soldiers interacted with the natural world, Kohout
argues that soldiers, through their words and their work, shaped
Progressive Era ideas about both American and Philippine
environments. Studying soldiers on multiple frontiers allows Kohout
to inject a transnational perspective into the environmental history
of the Progressive Era, and an environmental perspective into the
period’s transnational history. Kohout shows us how
soldiers—through their writing, their labor, and all that they
collected—played a critical role in shaping American ideas about
both nature and empire, ideas that persist to the present.
