The Power of Thought: Ideas of Nature and the Making of Nineteenth-Century Boston

Urban historians have long known that the exercise of political, economic, and social power dramatically shaped the development of the American city. More recently, environmental historians have demonstrated that physical nature—a specific site’s topography, geology, hydrological cycle, soil composition—also played a major role in determining the outlines of urban form. But historians are still working to bring these two insights together: How have environment and power, the natural and the human, interacted to form the American urban environment? This paper suggests that ideas about nature provide an important key to answering that question. By tracing the construction of nineteenth-century Boston, the paper links material nature with human power through the many ideas about nature that shaped them both. How we think about nature has consistently informed human perceptions of and interactions with the natural world, and it has also pervaded the political, economic, and social discourses applied to expressions of power. Ideas about nature can therefore serve as a common thread that links environment and power in a coherent way. In short, the paper will argue that the competing meanings of nature favored by rival urban groups were central to the invention of the American city during the first great period of city building in the nineteenth century.