One of the largest estuaries on the North Atlantic coast, Narragansett Bay served as a gateway for colonial expansion in the seventeenth century and the birthplace of American industrialization in the late eighteenth. Christopher Pastore presents an environmental history of this watery corner of the Atlantic world, beginning with the first European settlement in 1636 and ending with the dissolution of the Blackstone Canal Company in 1849. Between Land and Sea traces how the Bay’s complex ecology shaped the contours of European habitation, trade, and resource use, and how littoral settlers in turn reconfigured the physical and cultural boundaries between humans and nature. Narragansett Bay emerges in Pastore’s account as much more than a geological formation. Rather, he reimagines the nexus of land and sea as a brackish borderland shaped by the tension between what English settlers saw as improvable land and the perpetual forces of the North Atlantic Ocean. By draining swamps, damming rivers, and digging canals, settlers transformed a marshy coastal margin into a clearly defined edge. The resultant “coastline” proved less resilient, less able to absorb the blows of human initiative and natural variation than the soggy fractal of water and earth it replaced. Today, as sea levels rise and superstorms batter coasts with increasing ferocity, Between Land and Sea calls on the environmentally-minded to make a space in their notions of progress for impermanence and uncertainty in the natural world. “An exceptional history that weaves broad and compelling theories with [Pastore’s] impressive, place-specific research. [ Between Land and Sea ] is easy to read and should be useful to professional historians interested in a wide variety of fields including environmental, colonial, maritime, and Atlantic world history, as well as to graduate and undergraduate students looking to expand their understanding of either the region or new methodological approaches to geographic-based historical investigation.” ― Brian Payne , American Historical Review “Written with grace and with admirable attention to both cultural and physical transformations, Between Land and Sea is an eminently readable (and teachable) book. It deserves a prominent place on any shelf of early American environmental histories.” ― Andrew Lipman , Environmental History “In this imaginative and remarkably well-written study of the coastal history of Narragansett Bay, Christopher Pastore offers a cautionary tale three centuries in the making… At the heart of Pastore’s project is the contention that in seeking to master the coastal Narragansett Bay space between continental North America and the Atlantic Ocean, for ostensibly rational reasons inspired by the Enlightenment and spurred by the Industrial Revolution, Rhode Islanders foisted a potential ecological and environmental catastrophe on themselves that persists to this day… Pastore adeptly integrates archaeological, biological, economic, environmental and religio-political evidence to craft a genuinely interdisciplinary argument.” ― Craig Gallagher , Itinerario “Pastore’s work [is] thoughtful, elegantly written, and clearly presented… In his hands, Narragansett Bay becomes not just an extension of the sea but also a set of ideas, attitudes, uncertainties, and ambiguities that accommodate a range of human understandings… One of the book’s greatest strengths [is] its ability to sit comfortably, engagingly, and provocatively between the imaginary and the material… Anyone interested in coasts and margins will enjoy his examination of this small but provocative place.” ― Matthew McKenzie , Journal of American History “Written with panache and startling flashes of insight, [ Between Land and Sea ] succeeds in illustrating the hidden perils of ordering a coastal landscape. It is also successful in drawing together the methodologies of historical geography and environmental history, and in piloting both disciplines into uncharted waters… Pastore’s book treats terra firma and terra aqua as a single ecosystem, which adds immeasurably to the understanding of both… As a thought-piece as well as a study in history and geography, this book has great merit.” ― Richard W. Judd , Journal of Historical Geography “Pastore ventures onto the marshes and the mudflats between them, exploring New England’s largest estuary in a fascinating, detailed, and often lyrical study of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay… He writes clearly and perceptively about the ways in which inhabitants shaped, and were more shaped by, these tidal waters.” ― Peter H. Wood , Journal of Interdisciplinary History “Human, animal (and oyster), and land interactions? The non-material construction of landscape? Encounters between Europeans and a new world? Humanly-induced environmental change? In this wide-ranging and finely-written book, infused with an autobiographical affection for the land and seascapes that he describes, Pastor