Chapter 9, “Residential Constantinople,” considers Constantinopolitan domestic architecture by examining written sources and material remains. It discusses the evidence chronologically and according to social group, distinguishing between the early Byzantine period and the middle and late Byzantine periods to demonstrate that, institutional continuity notwithstanding, the makeup of the residential city and its components changed over time.

Chapter 10, “Commercial Constantinople,” examines the commercial developments in the capital. It concentrates on the city’s commercial topography, its provisioning, trade networks, merchant class, and manufacturing industries as well as government control over them.

Chapter 6, “Constantinople: Building and Maintenance,” considers the built environment of Constantinople as a thermodynamic system, examining such issues as the supply of materials, construction legislation, and architectural techniques in the context of three basic categories: urban infrastructure, public monuments, and vernacular architecture.

Bad Day at Black Rock is a Western set just after the end of World War II. The desert town of Black Rock, teetering on the edges of both a failed frontier and postwar disillusionment, was once home to a Japanese American man named Komako. At Black Rock, Komako had found water where others had failed – and water is worth killing for. After murdering Komako and burying him beside his well, Black Rock masks the deed by claiming Komako had been “shipped off” to an incarceration camp during the war. Examining the layered machinations at play in Black Rock's lie, this chapter turns to earth: it reads the landscape as a vital surround through which Komako and the incarceration of Japanese Americans physically and hauntingly manifest at Black Rock. It links the Western and the West to narratives of Japanese American incarceration, both bound to the settler colonial impulse that seeks to consolidate US power and authority over land, water, and people in the West. Simultaneously indebted to ecocriticism and comparative race studies, this chapter explores the ways Black Rock’s Hollywood Western becomes an incarceration tale – which in turn becomes a narrative of settler colonial eco-imperialism.

Chapter 7, “The Defence of Constantinople,” examines the factors at play in the defense of Constantinople – geography, fortifications, land and naval forces, adequate supply of water and provisions, and, most importantly in the eyes of its inhabitants, the miraculous tutelary powers resident in the God-guarded city.

From William Bartram to John James Audubon to Susan Fenimore Cooper, early American writers on natural history challenged anthropomorphic thinking and human exceptionalism. Imagining human diminishment amid scenes of natural wonder, they offered a way forward in thinking about “the world we did not make” (William Cronon) that remains largely untraveled today.

Chapter 8, “Imperial Constantinople,” maps the imperial presence in Constantinople’s urban and suburban space during its lifetime as a Roman capital, looking at the space reserved to the emperor and the court hierarchy, at satellite residences of the imperial hub, and at the use and politicization of public space

Chapter 21, “Byzantium in Early Modern Istanbul,” highlights the multiple ways in which the Byzantine past was present in and had a bearing on the lives and imaginations of Istanbulites in the post-Byzantine city within the framework of four topics: rupture and ruin, structures of longue durée, translation and notions of antiquarianism, and, finally, the lives and the reflections of Byzantine monuments and spolia.

“Slavery and the Anthropocene” argues for putting US chattel slavery – including both the suffering of enslaved people and the role of the “master” – and not just the steam engine or measurements of spikes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, at the center of how we understand the Anthropocene. It does so, in part, as a corrective to a tendency in contemporary theoretical work on the Anthropocene to stress the apocalyptic novelty of the problem, a focus on the immediate present and emerging future that, however understandable, nevertheless risks obscuring the profound historical embeddedness of our environmental crises in white supremacy and racial oppression. Drawing on examples from narratives of enslaved people, the chapter asserts that the racialized hierarchies of the plantation continue to shape the very different ways humans understand and experience the Anthropocene.

The chapter reflects on the impact of two waves of human colonization on North American biodiversity, focusing on three species’ literary archives. The first wave, the Bering land bridge migration during the late Pleistocene epoch, resulted in the extinction of megafauna such as mammoths. European settler-colonization beginning in 1492 resulted in the ongoing decimation of biodiversity, often termed the Sixth Extinction. Indigenous accounts of the mammoth, which may have persisted in oral tradition from the Pleistocene forward, came to the attention of Euro-American naturalists beginning in the eighteenth century. Exemplary authors include Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Nicolar. Ongoing interest in extinct megafauna has inspired proposals for “rewilding” ecosystems. The passenger pigeon was a wonder, a pest, and a source of food to early European colonists. After its extinction, it was mourned a symbol of settler-colonists’ decimation of the natural environment. Authors include John James Audubon, James Fenimore Cooper, and Simon Pokagon. The monarch butterfly, a candidate for Endangered Species designation, is threatened by local habitat destruction and global climate change but has inspired hopeful literary accounts. Authors include Barbara Kingsolver and Donna Haraway. A brief conclusion puts North American extinctions in global perspective.

This chapter rereads The Great Gatsby as a novel deeply concerned with the temptations and dangers of fossil fuel culture. After providing an overview of the contemporaneous Teapot Dome Scandal, Stecopoulos examines Fitzgerald’s subtle linkage of the novel’s more precarious characters with petro-modernity. By analyzing figural accounts of Gatsby as oil detector, Myrtle Wilson as gusher, and George Wilson as depleted energy field, the chapter offers an ecologically oriented account of a classic American novel.

This chapter argues that human and environmental sanctuary, operating within liberalism, is a constituent aspect of US colonialism, not an exception from it. The chapter offers a cultural genealogy of sanctuary as a justificatory logic of US settler expansion through a reading of Terry Tempest Williams’ memoir, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991). Against this, the chapter turns away from the canon of white American nature writing in order to center literary and material practices of survival that do not depend on international, colonial orders of protection. Here, the chapter reads Joan Naviyuk Kane’s collections of poems, The Straits (2105) and Milk Black Carbon (2017), written in the aftermath of the King Island Diaspora, as poetic and social experiments in thinking beyond colonial state sanctioned modalities of safety, return, and kinship.

Cities have traditionally been neglected settings in environmental writing and ecologically oriented literary criticism, but have played a central role in the thought and writings of the environmental justice movement. Recently, they have also come into focus as “novel ecosystems” of their own in fiction and nonfiction. This chapter surveys two thematic emphases in environmental literature that portrays cities at risk from either toxicity or climate change, both of which continue to emphasize the antagonism between urban landscapes and the forces of nature by describing cities as either sources or targets of environmental risk. It then focuses on a third and less explored approach to the city as a multispecies community to outline four recurrent templates: the awareness narrative in which individuals or communities discover urban species; the narrative of urban return in which wild species reclaim the city; narratives about cities as sites of newly emergent species through evolution or technological modification; and narratives of urban bonds between humans and nonhumans. All of these narratives shift the emphasis from the city as an ecological wasteland to a new understanding of novel urban ecosystems and novel biological habitats that need to be understood in terms of multispecies justice.