Nelson, Megan Kate 1972–

PERSONAL:

Born 1972 in Colorado Springs, CO. Education: Harvard University, A.B., 1994; University of Iowa, M.A., 1999, Ph.D., 2002.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, California State University Fullerton, P.O. Box 6846, Fullerton, CA 92834-6846. E-mail—megannelson@fullerton.edu.

CAREER:

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, lecturer, 2002-03; Texas Tech University, Lubbock, assistant professor, 2003-06, director of honors arts and letters program, 2005-06; California State University, Fullerton, assistant professor of history, 2006—.

MEMBER:

American Studies Association.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Bowdoin Prize, Harvard University, 1994, for best essay in the English language; Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, 1996; Kern Award, University of Iowa, 2000; Suzanne and Caleb Loring Fellowship, Massachusetts Historical Society and the Boston Athenaeum.

WRITINGS:

Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2005.

Contributor to books, including Southern United States: An Environmental History, edited by Mark Stoll, ABC-Clio (New York, NY), 2006; The New Georgia Encyclopedia Companion to Georgia Literature, edited by Hugh Ruppersburg, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2007; "We Will Independent Be": African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States, edited by Leslie M. Alexander and Angel David Nieves, University Press of Colorado (Boulder, CO), 2008. Contributor to academic journals, including Atlanta History and Mississippi Quarterly.

SIDELIGHTS:

Megan Kate Nelson's book Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp traces two hundred years of people and events surrounding the titular region in southern Georgia and northern Florida. Nelson coined the term "ecolocalism" to describe the mix of race and class unique to the area from the country's earliest days; a sometimes contentious aggregation of rice planters, Seminole Indians (who fought two wars in the region), writers, fugitive slaves, business entrepreneurs, and swampers (the white settlers)—all of whom adopted a number of survivalist skills to live off the marshy land. In other words, the land itself was the defining factor in how people came to live, work, and form communities in the area.

While the earliest Okefenokee residents—the Seminoles primarily—lived harmoniously with the land, in the mid-nineteenth century developers believed that the swamp would be more useful if it were drained and converted into farm land. The land was surveyed extensively, and those surveys proved to be invaluable research tools for Nelson. While agriculture never came to the region, the lumber companies did. In the first decades of the twentieth century, old-growth cypress groves were harvested in an immense operation that displaced many native swampers who had lived off the land for years. Only after the lumber companies were done logging in 1937 did the federal government step in and declare the area a national wildlife refuge, thereby requiring the remaining swampers to relocate. The book's epilogue discusses the swamp's most recent incarnation as a tourist destination.

Jeffrey Kosiorek, in a review on Humanities and Social Sciences Online, appreciated the author's concept of ecolocalism; "as Nelson reveals the multiple, shifting views of the Okefenokee, Trembling Earth serves as a model for the ways ecolocalism can provide insight into the cultural history of an environment," he wrote. "This book is an intriguing read," wrote Mary Ellen Wilson in the Journal of Southern History, who also commended Nelson's explanation of the cypress milling process. And a writer for the Tampa Tribune called it "an insightful and lively history."