The Destruction of the Bison

A concise environmental history of the near-extinction of the bison from the mid-eighteenth century to the present.

The Destruction of the Bison offers a concise environmental history of the near-extinction of the bison. This twentieth-anniversary edition includes a foreword that connects the book to developments in the field over the last two decades and an afterword that brings the story of the bison up to the present.For the last twenty years, The Destruction of the Bison has been an essential work in environmental history. Andrew C. Isenberg offers a concise analysis of the near-extinction of the North American bison population from an estimated 30 million in 1800 to fewer than 1000 a century later. His wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study carefully considers the multiple causes, cultural and ecological, of the destruction of the species. The twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new foreword connecting this seminal work to developments in the field – notably new perspectives in Native American history and the rise of transnational history – and placing the story of the bison in global context. A new afterword extends the study to the twenty-first century, underlining the continued importance of this ground-breaking text for current, and future, students and scholars.