About the Author

Cynthia Radding, Gussenhoven Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic and numerous edited volumes, chapters, and articles.

Reviews

“Radding’s impressive research and masterful ability to synthesize scholarship from diverse disciplines presents a comprehensive and compelling new understanding that places arid landscapes among the contested cultural spaces of the early modern world. She interprets the past with an explicit ‘poetics of history’ that embraces the contradiction of a bountiful desert to understand and explain the overlapping human ecologies of plant biomes in unexpected times and places.”—Emily Wakild, author of Revolutionary Parks: Conservation, Social Justice, and Mexico’s National Parks, 1910–1940