Dario Fazzi is Professor of Transatlantic Environmental History at Leiden University. This interview is based on his new book, Smoke on the Water: Incineration at Sea and the Birth of a Transatlantic Environmental Movement (Columbia University Press, 2023). JF: What...
environmental history
The Author’s Corner with Thomas Blake Earle
Thomas Blake Earle is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University at Galveston. This interview is based on his new book, The Liberty to Take Fish: Atlantic Fisheries and Federal Power in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell University Press, 2023). JF:...
When governors and business leaders sought to protect natural resources and “conserve the foundations of our prosperity”
Over Zocalo Public Square, environmental historian Adam Sowards calls our attention to the 1908 Conference of Governors held in Washington D.C. Here is a taste of his piece “When American Governors and Moguls Came Together to Prevent Environmental Catastrophe”: At...
What role should environmental history play at sites devoted to the American Revolution?
Blake McGready is program assistant at the Gotham Center for New York City History and a Ph.D candidate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Check out his piece at The Panorama on the what he...
The Author’s Corner with Janet Farrell Brodie
Janet Farrell Brodie is Professor Emerita of History at Claremont Graduate University. This interview is based on her new book, The First Atomic Bomb: The Trinity Site in New Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). JF: What led you to write The...
American animals
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, people doing early anthropology were very interested in climate and environmental conditions, but in very different ways from today. Early anthropologists connected geography to the nature of the people living there. Now, this...
The Author’s Corner with Joseph Giacomelli
Joseph Giacomelli is Assistant Professor of Environmental History at Duke Kunshan University. This interview is based on his new book, Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press, 2023). JF: What led you to write...
The Author’s Corner with Josiah Rector
Josiah Rector is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston. This interview is based on his new book, Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). JF: What led you to write...
The Author’s Corner with David Silkenat
David Silkenat is Senior Lecturer of American History at the University of Edinburgh. This interview is based on his new book, Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Oxford University Press, 2022). JF: What...
The Author’s Corner with Kate Mulry
Kate Mulry is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Bakersfield. This interview is based on her new book, An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic (NYU Press, 2021). JF: What led you to write...
Historian Megan Jones on teaching environmental history at The Pingry School
Over at NiCHE (Network in Canadian History & Environment), Megan Jones, the chair of the history department at The Pingry School in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, writes about her experience teaching environmental history. Megan is a 2003 graduate of Messiah...
The Author’s Corner with Kenneth Noe
Kenneth Noe is Draughon Professor of Southern History at Auburn University. This interview is based on his new book, The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2020). JF: What led you to write The Howling...
Was Abraham Lincoln America’s First “Green” President?
James Tackach of Roger Williams University, author of the book Lincoln and the Natural Environment, thinks so. Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo disagrees. Here is a taste of Hannah Nathanson’s Washington Post piece, “Lincoln’s Forgotten Legacy as America’s First “Green President“: It is “eminently...
Scientists Need the Humanities to Address Climate Change
“I want to do something about climate change, but I don’t like science and I am not good at it.” “I love history, literature, or philosophy, but I don’t see these disciplines advancing real change in the world.” If you...
The Author’s Corner with Strother Roberts
Strother Roberts is Assistant Professor of History at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. This interview is based on his book Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy: Transforming Nature in Early New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) JF: What led you to write Colonial...
Joseph Ellis: The Founding Fathers Wanted a Green New Deal
Would the founding fathers have supported a Green New Deal? I have no idea. But historian Joseph Ellis‘s thoughts at CNN are worth considering here. A taste: From the very beginning, there were critics who challenged the claim that “We...
Is Jimmy Carter an Antidote to Trump?
David Siders thinks so. Here is a taste of his recent piece at Politico: “Carter almost takes us out of the entire realm of what our politics has become,” said Paul Maslin, a top Democratic pollster who worked on the...
FDR’s New Deal Was Also Green
Over at JSTOR Daily, Livia Gershon draws on scholarship by Neil Maher to remind us that the first New Deal was concerned with the environment. Here is a taste of her piece: The Green New Deal concept championed by Democratic...
The Author’s Corner with Erin Mauldin
Erin Mauldin is an assistant professor of History and Politics at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. This interview is based on her new book Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (Oxford University...
The Author’s Corner with Joan Cashin
Joan Cashin is Professor of History at The Ohio State University. This interview is based on her new book War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2018). JF: What led you...