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Daegan Miller, Reading Tree in Nature’s Nation: Toward a Field Guide to Sylvan Literacy in the Nineteenth-Century United States, The American Historical Review, Volume 121, Issue 4, October 2016, Pages 1114–1140, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.4.1114
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Abstract
Daegan Miller, “Reading Tree in Nature’s Nation: Toward a Field Guide to Sylvan Literacy in the Nineteenth-Century United States”: In the nineteenth-century United States, trees were used for nearly everything: fuel, food, shelter—even for roads. But individual trees also were freighted with a host of specific cultural connotations: white pine trees signified, among other things, New England, and palms, the South; oaks were often figured as royal, Christian, and male, while apples were a bedeviling mix of intoxicating female temptation and the promise of virtue’s everlasting life. Trees were symbols, and as symbols they constituted a sylvan literacy on wide display throughout the nineteenth century’s images and texts. This essay traces a history of sylvan literacy, from its rise in the nature-based cultural nationalism of the 1830s to its eclipse in the early twentieth century by the language of professional scientists. It is also a theory of how sylvan literacy worked: more like poetry than a dictionary, open to multiple competing interpretations, put to contesting uses. Ultimately, this essay contributes to the cultural and environmental history of the nineteenth-century U.S. by arguing that learning to speak Tree can help us more clearly see a complicated, still unresolved U.S. culture that was struggling to root itself securely in a shifting world made by humans and nature, both.
