The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History

The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History PDF Author: Carolyn Merchant
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231505841
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 469

Get Book Here

Book Description
How and why have Americans living at particular times and places used and transformed their environment? How have political systems dealt with conflicts over resources and conservation? This is the only major reference work to explore all the major themes and debates of the burgeoning field of environmental history. Humanity ́s relationship with the natural world is one of the oldest and newest topics in human history. The issue emerged as a distinct field of scholarship in the early 1970s and has been growing steadily ever since. The discipline ́s territory and sources are rich and varied and include climactic and geological data, court records, archaeological digs, and the writings of naturalists, as well as federal and state economic and resource development and conservation policy. Environmental historians investigate how and why natural and human-created surroundings affect a society ́s development. Merchant provides a context-setting overview of American environmental history from the beginning of the millennium; an encyclopedia of important concepts, people, agencies, and laws; a chronology of major events; and an extensive bibliography including films, videos, CD-Roms, and websites. This concise "first stop" reference for students and general readers contains an accessible overview of environmental history; a mini-encyclopedia of ideas, people, legislation, and agencies; a chronology of events and their significance; and a bibliography of books, magazines, and journals as well as films, videos, CD-ROMs, and online resources. In addition to providing a wealth of factual information, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History explores contentious issues in this much-debated field, from the idea of wilderness to global warming. How and why have Americans living at particular times and places used and transformed their environment? How have political systems dealt with conflicts over resources and conservation? This is the only major reference work to explore all the major themes and debates in the burgeoning field of environmental history. Humanity's relationship with the natural world is one of the oldest and newest topics in human history. The issue emerged as a distinct field of scholarship in the early 1970s and has been growing steadily ever since. The discipline's territory and sources are rich and varied and include climatic and geological data, court records, archaeological digs, and the writings of naturalists, as well as federal and state economic and resource development and conservation policy. Environmental historians investigate how and why natural and human-created surroundings affect a society's development. Merchant provides a context-setting overview of American environmental history from the precolonial land-use practice of Native Americans and concluding with twenty-first concerns over global warming. The book also includes a glossary of important concepts, people, agencies, and legislation; a chronology of major events; and an extensive bibliography including films, videos, CD-ROMs, and websites. This concise reference for students and general readers contains an accessible overview of American environmental history; a mini-encyclopedia of ideas, people, legislation, and agencies; a chronology of events and their significance; and a bibliography of books, magazines, and journals as well as films, videos, CD-ROMs, and online resources. In addition to providing a wealth of factual information, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History explores contentious issues in this much-debated field, from the idea of wilderness to global warming.

The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History

The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History PDF Author: Carolyn Merchant
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231505841
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 469

Get Book Here

Book Description
How and why have Americans living at particular times and places used and transformed their environment? How have political systems dealt with conflicts over resources and conservation? This is the only major reference work to explore all the major themes and debates of the burgeoning field of environmental history. Humanity ́s relationship with the natural world is one of the oldest and newest topics in human history. The issue emerged as a distinct field of scholarship in the early 1970s and has been growing steadily ever since. The discipline ́s territory and sources are rich and varied and include climactic and geological data, court records, archaeological digs, and the writings of naturalists, as well as federal and state economic and resource development and conservation policy. Environmental historians investigate how and why natural and human-created surroundings affect a society ́s development. Merchant provides a context-setting overview of American environmental history from the beginning of the millennium; an encyclopedia of important concepts, people, agencies, and laws; a chronology of major events; and an extensive bibliography including films, videos, CD-Roms, and websites. This concise "first stop" reference for students and general readers contains an accessible overview of environmental history; a mini-encyclopedia of ideas, people, legislation, and agencies; a chronology of events and their significance; and a bibliography of books, magazines, and journals as well as films, videos, CD-ROMs, and online resources. In addition to providing a wealth of factual information, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History explores contentious issues in this much-debated field, from the idea of wilderness to global warming. How and why have Americans living at particular times and places used and transformed their environment? How have political systems dealt with conflicts over resources and conservation? This is the only major reference work to explore all the major themes and debates in the burgeoning field of environmental history. Humanity's relationship with the natural world is one of the oldest and newest topics in human history. The issue emerged as a distinct field of scholarship in the early 1970s and has been growing steadily ever since. The discipline's territory and sources are rich and varied and include climatic and geological data, court records, archaeological digs, and the writings of naturalists, as well as federal and state economic and resource development and conservation policy. Environmental historians investigate how and why natural and human-created surroundings affect a society's development. Merchant provides a context-setting overview of American environmental history from the precolonial land-use practice of Native Americans and concluding with twenty-first concerns over global warming. The book also includes a glossary of important concepts, people, agencies, and legislation; a chronology of major events; and an extensive bibliography including films, videos, CD-ROMs, and websites. This concise reference for students and general readers contains an accessible overview of American environmental history; a mini-encyclopedia of ideas, people, legislation, and agencies; a chronology of events and their significance; and a bibliography of books, magazines, and journals as well as films, videos, CD-ROMs, and online resources. In addition to providing a wealth of factual information, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History explores contentious issues in this much-debated field, from the idea of wilderness to global warming.

African American Environmental Thought

African American Environmental Thought PDF Author: Kimberly K. Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines the works of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and several other canonical figures, to uncover a rich and vital tradition of black environmental thought from the abolition movement through the Harlem Renaissance. Provides the first careful linkage of the early conservation movement to black history, the first detailed description of black agrarianism, and the first analysis of scientific racism as an environmental theory.

What is Environmental History?

What is Environmental History? PDF Author: J. Donald Hughes
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745688462
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Get Book Here

Book Description
What is environmental history? It is a kind of history that seeks understanding of human beings as they have lived, worked, and thought in relationship to the rest of nature through the changes brought by time. In this new edition of his seminal student textbook, J. Donald Hughes provides a masterful overview of the thinkers, topics, and perspectives that have come to constitute the exciting discipline that is environmental history. He does so on a global scale, drawing together disparate trends from a rich variety of countries into a unified whole, illuminating trends and key themes in the process. Those already familiar with the discipline will find themselves invited to think about the subject in a new way. This new edition has been updated to reflect recent developments, trends, and new work in environmental history, as well as a brand new note on its possible future. Students and scholars new to environmental history will find the book both an indispensable guide and a rich source of inspiration for future work.

The Columbia Guide to the Cold War

The Columbia Guide to the Cold War PDF Author: Michael Kort
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231528396
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Cold War was the longest conflict in American history, and the defining event of the second half of the twentieth century. Since its recent and abrupt cessation, we have only begun to measure the effects of the Cold War on American, Soviet, post-Soviet, and international military strategy, economics, domestic policy, and popular culture. The Columbia Guide to the Cold War is the first in a series of guides to American history and culture that will offer a wealth of interpretive information in different formats to students, scholars, and general readers alike. This reference contains narrative essays on key events and issues, and also features an A-to-Z encyclopedia, a concise chronology, and an annotated resource section listing books, articles, films, novels, web sites, and CD-ROMs on Cold War themes.

The Turning Points of Environmental History

The Turning Points of Environmental History PDF Author: Frank Uekötter
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822977621
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the time when humans first learned to harness fire, cultivate crops, and domesticate livestock, they have altered their environment as a means of survival. In the modern era, however, natural resources have been devoured and defiled in the wake of a consumerism that goes beyond mere subsistence. In this volume, an international group of environmental historians documents the significant ways in which humans have impacted their surroundings throughout history. John McNeill introduces the collection with an overarching account of the history of human environmental impact. Other contributors explore the use and abuse of the earth's land in the development of agriculture, commercial forestry, and in the battle against desertification in arid and semi-arid regions. Cities, which first appeared some 5,500 years ago, have posed their own unique environmental challenges, including dilemmas of solid waste disposal, sewerage, disease, pollution, and sustainable food and water supplies. The rise of nation-states brought environmental legislation, which often meant "selling off" natural resources through eminent domain. Perhaps the most damaging environmental event in history resulted from a "perfect storm" of effects: cheap fossil fuels (especially petroleum) and the rapid rise of personal incomes during the 1950s brought an exponential increase in energy consumption and unforseen levels of greenhouse gasses to the earth's atmosphere. By the 1970s, the deterioration of air, land, and water due to industrialization, population growth, and consumerism led to the birth of the environmental and ecological movements. Overall, the volume points to the ability and responsibility of humans to reverse the course of detrimental trends and to achieve environmental sustainability for existing and future populations.

An Environmental History of the Civil War

An Environmental History of the Civil War PDF Author: Judkin Browning
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146965539X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
This sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship to the natural world. To be sure, environmental factors such as topography and weather powerfully shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns, and the war could not have been fought without the horses, cattle, and other animals that were essential to both armies. But here Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver weave a far richer story, combining military and environmental history to forge a comprehensive new narrative of the war's significance and impact. As they reveal, the conflict created a new disease environment by fostering the spread of microbes among vulnerable soldiers, civilians, and animals; led to large-scale modifications of the landscape across several states; sparked new thinking about the human relationship to the natural world; and demanded a reckoning with disability and death on an ecological scale. And as the guns fell silent, the change continued; Browning and Silver show how the war influenced the future of weather forecasting, veterinary medicine, the birth of the conservation movement, and the establishment of the first national parks. In considering human efforts to find military and political advantage by reshaping the natural world, Browning and Silver show not only that the environment influenced the Civil War's outcome but also that the war was a watershed event in the history of the environment itself.

Changes in the Land

Changes in the Land PDF Author: William Cronon
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 142992828X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
The book that launched environmental history, William Cronon's Changes in the Land, now revised and updated. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists' sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another. With its chilling closing line, "The people of plenty were a people of waste," Cronon's enduring and thought-provoking book is ethno-ecological history at its best.

A Terrible Thing to Waste

A Terrible Thing to Waste PDF Author: Harriet A. Washington
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
ISBN: 0316509426
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description
A "powerful and indispensable" look at the devastating consequences of environmental racism (Gerald Markowitz) -- and what we can do to remedy its toxic effects on marginalized communities. Did you know... Middle-class African American households with incomes between $50,000 and $60,000 live in neighborhoods that are more polluted than those of very poor white households with incomes below $10,000. When swallowed, a lead-paint chip no larger than a fingernail can send a toddler into a coma -- one-tenth of that amount will lower his IQ. Nearly two of every five African American homes in Baltimore are plagued by lead-based paint. Almost all of the 37,500 Baltimore children who suffered lead poisoning between 2003 and 2015 were African American. From injuries caused by lead poisoning to the devastating effects of atmospheric pollution, infectious disease, and industrial waste, Americans of color are harmed by environmental hazards in staggeringly disproportionate numbers. This systemic onslaught of toxic exposure and institutional negligence causes irreparable physical harm to millions of people across the country-cutting lives tragically short and needlessly burdening our health care system. But these deadly environments create another insidious and often overlooked consequence: robbing communities of color, and America as a whole, of intellectual power. The 1994 publication of The Bell Curve and its controversial thesis catapulted the topic of genetic racial differences in IQ to the forefront of a renewed and heated debate. Now, in A Terrible Thing to Waste, award-winning science writer Harriet A. Washington adds her incisive analysis to the fray, arguing that IQ is a biased and flawed metric, but that it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. She takes apart the spurious notion of intelligence as an inherited trait, using copious data that instead point to a different cause of the reported African American-white IQ gap: environmental racism - a confluence of racism and other institutional factors that relegate marginalized communities to living and working near sites of toxic waste, pollution, and insufficient sanitation services. She investigates heavy metals, neurotoxins, deficient prenatal care, bad nutrition, and even pathogens as chief agents influencing intelligence to explain why communities of color are disproportionately affected -- and what can be done to remedy this devastating problem. Featuring extensive scientific research and Washington's sharp, lively reporting, A Terrible Thing to Waste is sure to outrage, transform the conversation, and inspire debate.

The Death of Nature

The Death of Nature PDF Author: Carolyn Merchant
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062956744
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 515

Get Book Here

Book Description
UPDATED 40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION WITH 2020 PREFACE An examination of the Scientific Revolution that shows how the mechanistic world view of modern science has sanctioned the exploitation of nature, unrestrained commercial expansion, and a new socioeconomic order that subordinates women.

Native Seattle

Native Seattle PDF Author: Coll Thrush
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295989920
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the 2008 Washington State Book Award for History/Biography In traditional scholarship, Native Americans have been conspicuously absent from urban history. Indians appear at the time of contact, are involved in fighting or treaties, and then seem to vanish, usually onto reservations. In Native Seattle, Coll Thrush explodes the commonly accepted notion that Indians and cities-and thus Indian and urban histories-are mutually exclusive, that Indians and cities cannot coexist, and that one must necessarily be eclipsed by the other. Native people and places played a vital part in the founding of Seattle and in what the city is today, just as urban changes transformed what it meant to be Native. On the urban indigenous frontier of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, Indians were central to town life. Native Americans literally made Seattle possible through their labor and their participation, even as they were made scapegoats for urban disorder. As late as 1880, Seattle was still very much a Native place. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, however, Seattle's urban and Indian histories were transformed as the town turned into a metropolis. Massive changes in the urban environment dramatically affected indigenous people's abilities to survive in traditional places. The movement of Native people and their material culture to Seattle from all across the region inspired new identities both for the migrants and for the city itself. As boosters, historians, and pioneers tried to explain Seattle's historical trajectory, they told stories about Indians: as hostile enemies, as exotic Others, and as noble symbols of a vanished wilderness. But by the beginning of World War II, a new multitribal urban Native community had begun to take shape in Seattle, even as it was overshadowed by the city's appropriation of Indian images to understand and sell itself. After World War II, more changes in the city, combined with the agency of Native people, led to a new visibility and authority for Indians in Seattle. The descendants of Seattle's indigenous peoples capitalized on broader historical revisionism to claim new authority over urban places and narratives. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Native people have returned to the center of civic life, not as contrived symbols of a whitewashed past but on their own terms. In Seattle, the strands of urban and Indian history have always been intertwined. Including an atlas of indigenous Seattle created with linguist Nile Thompson, Native Seattle is a new kind of urban Indian history, a book with implications that reach far beyond the region. Replaced by ISBN 9780295741345