"Managing the River Commons is a concise, readable book with an ambitious temporal scope that speaks directly to present-day ecological concerns while challenging narratives and chronologies of environmental degradation."-Keith Pluymers, American Historical Review
"Reardon persuasively argues for the importance of river fish for the ecology of the watershed, Native Americans, and early settlers. He also makes a case for their importance to the world today."-John T. Cumbler, author of Cape Cod: An Environmental History of a Fragile Ecosystem
"Managing the River Commons shows how central river fish were to rural/agrarian New England prior to industrialization and how farmer-fishermen sought conservation and sustainable resource use. It goes beyond this by suggesting that river restoration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century shares a basic environmental ethos with those farmer-fishermen of preindustrial New England."-Brian J. Payne, author of Fishing a Borderless Sea: Environmental Territorialism in the North Atlantic, 1818-1910
"Reardon should be commended for resurrecting the intractable historiographical debates of new rural historians and new labor historians of the 1980s and 1990s."-H-Net Reviews
"Reardon provides a cautionary tale of human impacts on the commons but shows that through proper management, people can overcome historical issues related to the use of a commons and restore impacted species. Written from the perspective of an environmental historian, the book provides a unique perspective on fisheries conservation in the Northeast and elsewhere . . . Highly recommended."-CHOICE
"In this timely and engaging book, Erik Reardon places pre-industrial communities' relationship with the environment under the microscope . . . This is a highly successful book that offers an important new insight into New England river economies."-Journal of Agrarian Change
