| Summary: | Despite Harcourt A. Morgan and his Common Mooring concept playing a prominent role in shaping southern society and its landscape, as well as helping to augment the meaning of resource conservation and the development of ideas concerning nature in the United States, historians have rarely included Morgan in America’s environmental tradition or in their analysis of the South’s transformation through the first half of the twentieth century. This thesis seeks to overturn this historical absence by making Morgan and his Common Mooring - a concept that brought together ideas from ecological organicism, civic pragmatism, modern agrarianism and his Methodist faith – the centre of historical focus. Using intellectual and environmental history, this biography will establish Morgan as an important figure within the historical landscape of American environmental thought, and as an individual essential to any examination of southern rural development during the interwar years. In bringing these points to light through an examination of Morgan’s formative moments and a exploration of his intellectual maturation, this study will also shift historians’ interpretations on the composition, chronology and regional orientation of U.S. environmental history.
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