Crimes against Nature reveals the hidden history behind three of the nation's first parklands: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Focusing on the impact that conservation in these areas had on rural people, Karl Jacoby traces the effect of criminalizing such traditional practices as hunting and fishing, foraging, and timber cutting in these newly created parks. Jacoby reassesses the nature of these ''crimes'' and provides a rich portrait of rural people and their relationship with the natural world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This engagingly written study demonstrates the important ways in which class has influenced environmental history.