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.

Focusing on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, this chapter considers the Child as a conventional figure of futurity – as elucidated by Lee Edelman, Robin Bernstein, Natalia Cecire, Rebecca Evans, and Rebekah Sheldon. What happens to this figure when race becomes explicitly a part of narratives in which children, put into perilous motion by environmental collapse, struggle to find a safe place to grow up? One possible consequence, as Dimaline’s novel illustrates, is the granting to young characters an independent existence from the meanings encoded by the Child. Unlike The Road, which centers the father’s sense of guilt on the son having to find ways to survive in an environmentally destroyed world, The Marrow Thieves centers on young adult characters who struggle to hold together a non-familial community amid an environmental crisis. They think explicitly about how stories can bind them together in the pursuit of common survival even as they can tear individuals apart because of the horrors they recall, and in doing so imagines a future that comes into being in part as a result of the exercise of this agency.

This chapter argues for the rebirth of pastoral in the twenty-first century: as a genre responsive to climate change, mindful of the extinction of many species, and bearing the unique insights of indigenous peoples, with their memory of past catastrophes and their vision for a sustainable future. Woven into this argument are three classic American authors -- Washington Irving, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville – each preoccupied with the subjection of Native peoples, but imagining very different fates for them. In Irving, the ruthless ascendency of colonial settlers makes Native demise a foregone conclusion. Moby-Dick, on the other hand, tells a more conflicting story. In spite of the casual reference to the “extinction” of the Pequots, the persistence of Native characters throughout the novel suggests that they might be here to stay. It is Tashtego’s “red arm and hammer” that we see at the book’s climactic end. Thoreau also equivocates, at one point showing the Abenaki as more firmly ensconced in their habitat than he himself can ever be. In this way, he looks forward to the pastoral affirmation of indigenous survival in the philosophy of Kyle Powys Whyte, and the climate activism of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

Chapter 20, “Encountering and Inventing Constantinople in Early Modern Europe,” discusses the idea of Constantinople in medieval and early modern Europe, and the lure it held for early modern antiquarians. It examines the nature of the city these scholars imagined against the reality of the city they found.

Chapter 5, “The Supply of Food to Constantinople,” discusses the supply, distribution, preparation, and consumption of food to the capital, noting the importance of the relationship between the urban center, its hinterland, and the empire’s distant provinces.

Chapter 17, “Entertainment,” considers Constantinople as a nexus of social space, civic ceremony, commercial entertainment, and endless diversion where streets and plazas were regularly taken over by processions, churches and monasteries were filled with clergy and worshipers, and competitive games and performances took place in the open-air hippodrome.

Chapter 18,” Medieval Travellers to Constantinople: Wonders and Wonder.” From its very beginnings, in the 330s, Constantinople attracted a steady flow of visitors from around the empire and the territories beyond its borders, travellers who arrived from the cardinal points to experience the city from various stations in life and in myriad ways. Their interactions with the city are the subject of this chapter, which offers an overview of the people who came to the city, their motives for travel, and their perceptions of the capital and the empire of which it was a hub.