Yale University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 480 pp. Until the trauma of the Civil War, many Americans sought to shape society into what they thought of as an Arcadia -- a public garden that depended on an ethic of communal care, and whose sense of beauty and repose related directly to an acknowledgment of mortality and limitation. Sachs explores the notion of Arcadia in the works of 19th-century nature writers, novelists, painters, horticulturists, landscape architects, and city planners. His insights suggest new ways of understanding American history and the environmental movement today.