John Larson
Please join me in congratulating John Larson, professor of history, for publishing Laid Waste! The Culture of Exploitation in Early America (Penn Press, 2019).
In this book, John explores 350 years of American history, evaluating how the heedless pursuit of wealth and happiness has endangered the very future of life on earth. According to Harry Watson, Atlanta Distinguished Professor of Southern Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the book is “extraordinary for its erudition, literary power, moral passion, and, most of all, its sweeping analysis of America’s ‘culture of exploitation’ and its disposition to treat the natural world as nothing more than a source of wealth to be stripped for private gain. It is an outstanding example of the unique value of good history in diagnosing the root causes of a contemporary problem and sketching the outlines of what must change to address it.”
Congratulations, Dr. Larson!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts