Only a few years ago, practitioners of urban environmental history bemoaned the supposed marginalization of their field. Their emphasis on the built environment seemingly left them at odds with many urban historians who focused on social and economic relations within the city. Alternatively, some feared that Donald Worster's proposed model of an agroecological perspective implied an exclusion of urban places from environmental history. Nonetheless, and while there remains a need for additional studies, the past two decades have witnessed a plethora of outstanding studies in urban environmental history-works that have drawn on the foundations of these two broader fields and expanded their horizons. As these fine books by Martin V. Melosi and Adam Rome attest, urban environmental history is a vibrant, creative discipline whose growing maturity merits recognition. 1 Urban history and environmental history emerged as sustained fields of study in the United States in response to the tumultuous events of the 1960s and 1970s. There were antecedents to urban history, but its disciples now approached their research with a new urgency as issues of urban decay, ethnic and racial violence, and the declining economies of rust belt cities dominated the headlines. Simultaneously, environmental history also developed as a separate area of inquiry. Ecological crises, such as the Cuyahoga River fire and the Santa Barbara oil spill, and a stream of federal regulations brought nature and its supposed demise to the forefront of popular debate and academic discourse. Joel Tarr observes, "Initially the two fields appeared to be largely concerned 115
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