Title
Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City by Catherine McNeur (review)
Author(s)
Sanderson, E. W.
Published
2015
Publisher
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Abstract
McNeur’s book reminds us that even Manhattan, once upon a time, had its slums. Slums are associated with environmental problems, but as this valuable short history shows, such problems are more about the way in which human social and economic relations affect environmental decisions than about the environment itself. In antebellum Manhattan, pigs, dogs, offal, “night soil,” and parkland became battlefields where people fought about larger issues: economic inequality, property rights, corruption, greed, and government power—the “meta-environment” that frames environmental decision making, then and now.

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PUB27016