On the eve of European colonization, the Potomac River valley was a remarkably fertile place, teeming with game and fish, and with rich soil well suited to cultivation; yet when the first colonists arrived they found much of it apparently uninhabited. Why?
In his new book Nature and History in the Potomac Country; From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson Professor James Rice of Plattsburgh SUNY and presently visiting professor of history at Tufts University, begins with this very question and from there moves into the histories of both native as well as colonizing peoples, as well as the natural history of the place itself, and follows these interwoven threads up into the early part of the Nineteenth Century.
