William Cronon is an environmental historian, and the author of several notable books on wilderness, American landscape, and history. Cronon grew up in Madison, Wisconsin and did his undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin. He won a Rhodes scholarship and spent two years studying at Oxford University, earning a doctorate. His first book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England, was published in 1983. This book was cited by reviewer Jim Miller in Newsweek as an "eloquent book" with "the rigor of first-rate history and the power of a tragedy." The book's tragic power lies in its subject-the destruction of the fertile habitat of pre-colonial New England by the colonists' farming...