Garrett Peck — The Bright Edges of the World
Historian Garrett Peck traces the overlooked human and ecological consequences of industrial expansion along America's frontier waterways in the 19th century.
Why we picked this
Peck has built a career writing the history that gets crowded out by the standard American narrative. This book recovers a chapter in industrial and ecological history with the specificity the subject requires.
Garrett Peck is a Washington-based historian and the author of several books on American social and political history, including works on Prohibition and the Potomac River. The Bright Edges of the World turns to the 19th century, tracing the human and environmental costs of industrial expansion along the waterways that connected the American interior to the coasts.
The book recovers a history that tends to be subsumed by the triumphalist narrative of westward expansion — the people displaced, the ecosystems disrupted, and the communities that formed and dissolved at the edges of an industrializing frontier. Peck is particularly interested in the intersection of economic development and ecological consequence, a subject that takes on different weight viewed from the present.
Moderator Bob Attardi joins Peck for an evening that should appeal to readers interested in environmental history, American industrialization, and the practice of recovering stories that conventional historiography leaves out.