With the precision of a naturalist and the curiosity of a proto-archaeologist, Jeffries Wyman documents the ancient shell-heaps of coastal New England, revealing layered histories of diet, habitation, and human presence long before European contact. The work is as much an anatomical catalog as it is a quiet challenge to the prevailing myths of a blank American past.

In a breathless catalogue of geological might and national pride, Bombaugh’s “Our Wonderlands” stages a rhetorical duel between the natural marvels of Europe and the sublimities of the American West, where scale, spectacle, and patriotic conviction collide. What results is less a travel essay than a florid act of terrestrial boasting—part gazetteer, part hymn, and unmistakably a product of its imperial century.

Alice Morse Earle paints an intricate panorama of early American subsistence, where the woods teemed with deer and turkeys, the seas with cod and lobsters, and the air with the thunder of wildfowl wings. Her chapter on “Food From Forest and Sea” is less a quaint pastoral than a vivid account of ecological abundance, frontier ingenuity, and the uneasy edge between reverence and exploitation.