American landscapes are some of the best-known images in the world: we recognize Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, the Manhattan skyline, and the streets of San Francisco in a thousand advertisements and TV shows. But how have these places come to be as they are, and why are some places familiar while others are quite unknown?

The American Landscape introduces the reader to the changing face of the American environment, tracing the way in which the present array of forests and farms, parks and superhighways, cities and suburbs have come about, and how these changes have been thought about, painted, turned into movie sets, etc.