After Revolution

Abstract This chapter situates James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater (1847) in the context of the nineteenth-century conservation movement and the American desire to reject the weight of history articulated by such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Like Frederick Douglass and Washington Irving, Cooper recognizes the inexorable influence of history on the present, but he also dramatizes the built-in limits to any attempt to engineer society and orchestrate the future. Chapter 1 argues that The Crater tests the idea, still central to the environmental movement and politically oriented scholarship, that placing enlightened restraints on living people will benefit future generations.