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Prize for Best Book in Environmental Studies, Latin American Studies Association
Honorable mention for Best Book Prize in Visual Culture, Latin American Studies Association
Honorable mention for Best Book on Mexico, Latin American Studies Association 

Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis.

Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, historian Rick A. López explores the historical connections between political identities and the natural world. López analyzes how scientific intellectuals laid claim to nature within Mexico, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic, during three transformative moments: the Hernández expedition of the late sixteenth century; the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century; and the heyday of scientific societies such as the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural of the late nineteenth century. 

This work traces how scientific intellectuals studied and debated what it meant to know and claim the flora that sprang from Mexican soil—ranging from individual plants to forests and vegetated landscapes—and the importance they placed on indigeneity. It also points to the short- and long-term consequences of these efforts. López draws on archival and published sources produced from the sixteenth century through the start of the twentieth century and gives special attention to the use of visual images such as scientific illustrations and landscape art. López employs the term “visualization” in recognition of the degree to which officials, botanists, and draftsmen produced imagery and also how they and others viewed nature.

Rooted in Place reveals how scientific endeavors were not just about cataloging flora but were deeply intertwined with the construction of identity and the political landscape at three pivotal moments in Mexican history.

Discover unforgettable writers who taught Minnesota how to see its wild heart

In this engaging collection, environmental journalist Mark Neuzil revives the voices that showed generations how to appreciate Minnesota’s wild places. Comprising twenty vivid biographical essays, Rooted in the North traces the lives and lore of writers who shaped our understanding of this great state, from Minnesota’s northwoods to its tallgrass prairies to the storied landscape of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Readers will encounter towering figures of conservation such as Sigurd F. Olson, whose spiritual vision of wilderness helped define the modern environmental movement, alongside beloved chroniclers like Florence Page Jaques and Helen Hoover, whose intimate portraits of wildlife still resonate decades later. Neuzil also highlights writers Charles Eastman and Maude Kegg, who share insights into their Indigenous childhoods, and once-popular authors like Charles Hallock and George Leonard Herter, restoring them to their rightful place in the state’s literary heritage. Rooted in the North broadens our definition of “nature writer” to include novelists whose fiction grew from close observation of the land. Writers such as Martha Ostenso, Frederick Manfred, and Gary Paulsen appear here not just as storytellers but as keen interpreters of Minnesota’s natural world.

In what began as a popular series for the Minnesota Star Tribune, these essays explore the philosophy, science, adventure, faith, and everyday oddities that enlivened their subjects. The result is the only book of its kind—an illuminating portrait of the voices that helped us define and fall in love with Minnesota’s natural landscapes.

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