You're The Historian

News and Views

2009-12-23T22:02:00.000-08:00

The guest post today on "News and Views: The History of Science in America" blog is a tidbit from some of my research! I'm really excited go get to contribute to that awesome venture, and I hope that this guest post can encourage me to pick this blog back up.

What sorts of topics would be most interesting or useful for other graduate students or young scholars for me to write about or raise here? I'd love any input...

ABD

2009-12-16T21:59:00.000-08:00

Today, I had my dissertation proposal defense.

Which basically just means I had a (somewhat intense) conversation with my committee members (three historians, of science, environment, and public health) about my 20-page proposal that I sent to them a week ago.

And it went well! I passed! I got lots of feedback about questions that still need answering and problems that still need addresssing, so the work is only beginning, but it feels wonderful to have jumped through this penultimate hoop. And one of my committee members even said, "I think this is a great project. I love it! I can't wait to read the book." So that's good news.

So, now I'm ABD (All But Dissertation). And I'm a dissertator. All these new titles to make my own.

Now I just have to figure out where to go from here, how to go from a life filled with concrete assignments and deadlines to one wide open and free. Any sage scholars out there have any good advice for me? I sure would appreciate it...

A taste of what excites me

2009-05-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

One of my prelim advisors, in preparing to give me a question for my prelim essay, asked me to write a page or so on the themes that most interest me within environmental history. This is what I came up with:

Although many of the traditional tales of environmental history focus on production—of national parks, of industrial wastes, and of scientific knowledge—I find myself particularly drawn to the other side of the balance, to issues of consumption. I read production-based accounts and want to know about the people going to those national parks, and their reasons for doing so; about the consumers who create the demand for goods whose production leads to industrial waste; and about the lay audiences who take in scientific statements of expertise and interpret, modify, and apply them to their own lives.

A closer look at consumption also makes room for the study of gender in environmental history, another category that I find exciting. Because women in the early twentieth century had more power within the private, domestic sphere of the home than within the larger public stage of conservation and policy-making, thinking about women’s (and their families’) consumption practices invites us into that sphere. Further, analyzing the different (or not) ways that men and women responded to new scientific and environmental currents in dominant culture often seems to illuminate the variety of factors that contributed to the dissemination of expert opinion among lay audiences.

My intellectual interest in food also stems, at least in part, from this engagement with the linkages between production and consumption. Food, conceived both as an agricultural product and as a marker of cultural identity, provides a perfect lens through which to understand how a material good, produced from interactions between soil and human labor, becomes an intimate part of people’s daily lives and personal understandings. Some of the books I’ve read begin the work of writing food histories, but often without much attention to environmental history. There is still so much thinking to do about the agricultural, material, and ecological underpinnings of our diets and food practices.

Food also serves as the binder between the health of the physical environment and of human bodies. This connection—between environmental history and human health—is another theme that fascinates me. I’m convinced by arguments which suggest that looking at these two fields in juxtaposition can help us find a place for humans within nature. I’m also interested in the ways in which studying environmental history within the context of health can make our discipline seem more relevant and attentive to human needs than a (now increasingly-outdated) traditional view of the environment as something out there, disconnected from daily human lives.

Finally, this attention to food, human health, and consumption speaks to one of the last themes that I enjoy reading and thinking about: the relevance and application of our historical knowledge to issues of import in the present. Without losing historical nuance or the ability to study the past for its own sake, I believe (or would like to believe) that our studies can offer something to those with contemporary concerns about the environment, human health, or dietary practices. Authors I’ve been reading take up this problem variously, usually in a few lines in the epilogue or at the end of an introduction, but often in ways that feel rather shallow. If we are to see our environmental histories as having relevance in today’s world, I’d like to think more deeply about how historians create these connections and communicate across disciplinary boundaries.

The Joy of Primary Sources

2009-04-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

Their are lots of days when I forget why I wanted to be a historian in the first place. It's not that I forget why I'm interested in academia, or in environmental history, or in exploring the role of scientific expertise in our culture. I just forget why history, in particular, is the way I chose to go.

One of the things that makes me remember, in the most powerful of ways, is the awesome wealth of primary sources out there, and all the digital ones, especially! There is just something that feels enormous about being about to go through all these preserved relics of another time and place, these words and thoughts and arguments that come to us from the past. Being able to rifle through someone's personal letters in an old and dusty archive someone makes me feel like that person has become so important, in this retrospective way. And that all my thoughts and words and reflections are so important, too, in that they might one day help some historian unearth what life was like in the beginning of the 21st century for a white, middle-class, Jewish, liberal academic woman in Wisconsin. Our records have enormous power.

One of my good friends just shared with me that all the records of the American Museum of Natural History are online, starting in the 19th century. And you can learn from these, for example, that over 30,000 people attended a lecture of a famed Arctic explorer in the late 1800s. 30,000 people! At a time when people didn't have cars, the roads were mired in horse manure, and transportation in general was difficult. That's the sort of interest there was in exploration in that era. Just from a little fact like that, we can learn so much.

Some of my go-to digital archives for when I need a reminder of how exciting all this is are Cornell's Home Economics Archive (HEARTH) and their Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) archive, as well as the North American Women's Letters and Diaries (NAWLD) collection.

Wanna know what rural black women in the 1870s wrote about in their diaries? Go to NAWLD, set your parameters, and you can find out. Wanna know what women wrote about, say, "bananas" between 1870, when the fruit was entirely unknown in the US, and 1925, when one could be found in almost every worker’s dinner pail? Click away! How about finding out what mothering manuals said about treating the common cold before germ theory became popular in America? Go to HEARTH's "Hygiene" section and browse around. Entirely different worlds are opened with the touch of a button.

Peaches come from a can...

2009-04-17T19:35:00.000-07:00

In order to help myself along with the project of actually learning more about American history as I go along with this whole Ph. D. (in History!), I've been trying to memorize the U. S. Presidents in order. I've pretty much got it down, thanks to this video:

And I'm still working on this one:

And the worst one I've seen so far (laughably so):

Anyone want to quiz me?

Go Time

2009-04-13T20:08:00.000-07:00

I just got my prelim questions! Ack!

No more procrastinating now.

I guess all those crepe paper flowers are just going to have to wait...

On the importance of mentorship

2009-04-11T19:26:00.000-07:00

This week has been one heavy with expectation, with a sense of the future.

As I imagine the future, one possibility that emerges has me as a professor at a university dedicated to teaching and to research, a university where the students are assumed to be first-rate and the professors are there to help mold them into the leaders of tomorrow. As I imagine this possibility and consider what I will be like and what I will prioritize in my varied academic roles as researcher, professor, seminar-leader, committee-member, mentor, and all the rest, all I can hope is that I can remember what it’s like to be a graduate student and can offer my own students the kind of support that I see being so very crucial to my own life today. I imagine that as a professor it becomes very easy to forget what it’s like to be a student, to get wrapped up in the daily grind of academic work and put aside concerns over students’ mental and emotional well-being.

This week, very different models of mentorship have prominently shaped how I feel about myself, my future in this business, my success with my upcoming exams, and my own self-worth. A mentor’s kind word is everything. Having someone in a position of power tell me that she has faith in me, that she thinks I’m good at this, that she won’t let me leave grad school, that she has every confidence I will pass these exams…well, it just means everything in the world to me. I need this support. (And I imagine others need it just about as much as I do. Who will give it to them?)

Don’t let me forget this.

Wash U love

2009-03-31T20:07:00.000-07:00

So, although this post isn't really about my current academic life, it certainly is about my previous one. A little sister of one of my close friends is trying to decide where to go for college and is considering Wash U, my alma mater. She asked me "if you had to say one thing that you didn't like about it, what would it be? and what is the absolute number one reason i should go there?:

Here's my plodding attempt at a response: (any Wash U readers have your own thoughts to add?)

Hi,

First, I'll address the absolute number one reason you should go to Wash U, because that's the sort of question I love answering. (Also, since I don't know that much about what sort of things you're looking for in a college, where else you're applying, what you might major in, what you like to do for fun, etc., this is the sort of standard answer I'd offer to anyone. I'm sure there are a lot of more specific pros and cons about WU relative to your specific needs, and I'm happy to go into those more if you want to offer me some of your criteria, but I'll give the general for now...):

Basically, I think the term "community" gets thrown around a lot in different circles to mean different things. But of all the places I've ever been, all the organizations I've ever been part of, all the groups of people I've ever known, Wash U embodies my idea of "community" better than any other. There's this sort of "we're in this together" feel about the place, the kind of assumption that pretty much anyone who's gone through the Wash U experience comes out the other end with a common set of values, a common set of ideas, and a feeling of immense pride in being a WU alum. This comes from a number of factors, I think. First and foremost is the residential life community. Although I may be a little biased since I was an RA for three years, I think that the cohesiveness of the res life staff and the importance of your freshman floor, your dorm, and the group of friends and acquaintances you build through your residential college is unparalleled. Then there's the kind of "rising star" nature of WU--it's not an Ivy Leaguer, but it's also really in competition with the best and the brightest in a number of ways (as my freshman roommate put it, the snobby smart people go to the Ivy Leagues, while the nice smart people go to Wash U). I think this aspect of the place makes people critically think about what they love about the university and what they could do to make it even better--so there's a lot of investment on the individual level (among students, among faculty, among staff, and among the administration alike) into the larger vision of WU's future. All of this stuff was very subtle while I was there--it wasn't like I thought about these ideas all the time and palpably felt all this at this level of analysis. It wasn't until after I left Wash U, until I'd been here in Madison, at the University of Wisconsin, for a number of years that this appreciation for the WU "community" came flooding over me. Most of my closest friends here in Madison are WU alums--but not even people I knew that well in college. It's just that when I got here, I found that WU alumni sought each other out, that I felt instantly comfortable around them in a way I didn't with people from my department and others I met. Just meeting someone who went to WU is often enough for the basis of a friendship, because there's the acknowledgment that we developed a common core of values and commitments to intellectual rigor, to community building, to Midwestern warmth, and to being part of something bigger. (Of course, this isn't to say I love every single person who ever went to Wash U, but as a general rule, it applies). As a point of comparison, I haven't seen this sort of mutual camaraderie from any of my friends who went to other institutions. When I have two friends who both went to, for example, UPenn, I always have this urge to introduce them, assuming they'll want to hang out as I do with any WashUer. But then I find that alumni of other institutions (across a broad range of other colleges) don't seem to have that same sense of community, that same desire for connection, that same assumption of shared values. So. That's a long-winded answer, but it really is the best thing about WU from my perspective, especially in hindsight.

As for my least favorite thing... I think this has more to do with criticism of myself and my decisions in college rather than the institution as a whole, but I do regret that Wash U didn't have more or an activist mindset, that there wasn't more support for activism around environmental, political, social, and progressive goals. People in St. Louis sometimes refer to the university as the "Wash U Bubble" because they see the fairly elite students inside WU as being uninterested in the community as a whole, somewhat spoiled, and too stuck inside an ivory tower sort of community. Although I think that is certainly a stereotype and doesn't apply to a large percentage of the students, it is true that being at WU sometimes makes it easy to forget that there's a larger world around us. And the studious nature of so many of the students often lent itself to a real focus on academics and the pursuit of a secure professional future over an engagement with important issues outside of academia.

I hope this all is somewhat helpful. Let me know if you have any other thoughts. And most of all, good luck in your decision!*

Anna

*Honestly, when it comes down to it, as much as I think WU is an awesome place--a college to beat all colleges--I also think that any intelligent, friendly, well-grounded, curious, engaged person can find a good university experience just about anywhere (or at least at any of the colleges I assume you're applying to). So, the bottom line is, don't worry about it too much. Don't ever feel like if you make the "wrong decision," your whole life will somehow be compromised. That is not the case.

Rich gentlemen have it boys...

2009-03-22T08:30:00.000-07:00

So many great articles about food in the New York Times lately, all spurred, perhaps in part, by Michelle Obama's vegetable garden on the White House Lawn:

From the archive, 1991, Op-Classic: Abolish the White House Lawn (Michael Pollan)
March 10, Michelle Obama’s Agenda Includes Healthful Eating
March 20, Sugar Is Back on Food Labels, This Time as a Selling Point
March 20, Food, Glorious Food Myths
March 21, Washington’s Not-So-Secret Garden
March 21, Eating Food That’s Better for You, Organic or Not
March 21, Is a Food Revolution Now in Season?

More thoughts on all of them to come...

With gratitude

2009-03-12T10:50:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make: Sometimes when I'm reading books for my prelims, I spend more time reading the acknowledgments section than the whole rest of the book. (But shh... don't tell!) It often feels like the best way to get to know an author is not through their well-crafted analytic arguments, but through the way they express thanks to their families, friends, and mentors. I love reading these sections and imagining the personal struggles that went into the creation of every book I read, the many lives that were affected by a father staying up late typing at his computer, by a partner spending months away from home while visiting just one more archive, by the daughter who never gets to talk to her parents for quite as long as she'd like because she just has to finish one more chapter. And because I think about crafting my own acknowledgments section some day, I thought I'd begin that process by collecting some of my favorite acknowledgments here. (And it's probably no coincidence that my favorite acknowledgments come from my favorite books.) To begin:

From Aaron Sachs (of the "most disgusting pronoun" fame), in his Humboldt Current, a tribute to his wife and son:

"Christine Evans accompanied me on every step of this journey, and I am eternally grateful for her companionship--and her love. She also put in a great deal of hard work on various aspects of this project and put up with all my obsessions and compulsions, in a spirit of bemused goodwill. She's the strongest person I know. Samuel Evans Sachs came along while this manuscript was still an unfinished dissertation and I was a seemingly unemployable grad student. He immediately made it all worthwhile. Taking him on various expeditions has been my greatest pleasure in the past couple of years. Christine and Sam also provided excellent motivation to finish the writing. They are my cosmos as well as my hearth...Finally: my parents, Miriam and Murray Sachs, are the ones who got me into this mess in the first place. I can never thank them enough. And I can't help but think of this book, if it has any merits at all, as owing its existence to thirty-five years of their incredible nurturing and cultivation."

Another from Thomas Dunlap, in his 1982 book DDT: Scientists, Citizens, and Public Policy. I particularly like this one, because it reminds me of the role of secretaries in preparing manuscripts before everyone used a computer and word processor, and of how often mothers and wives and female secretaries did the grunt work for their sons and husbands and bosses:

"My wife and colleague, Susan Miller, who never typed a page for me, has my special thanks. She has been a relentless and perceptive critic of my work, a patient auditor, and an invaluable support."

This one from Sarah Igo's impressive book The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public , to her parents and husband:

My parents, John and Mittie Igo, have my gratitude for just about everything, but above all their unstinting stores of generosity, love, and confidence--not just during theses years of researching and writing but for my whole life. They provided the sturdy foundation upon which everything else was built. As for my husband, Ole Molvig, what can I say in mere words? His steadfast support, his stunning intelligence, his sustaining sense of humor, his quest for the good life, his dissection of my work but also his many and lovely distractions from it have made my life better in every way. It is to my parents and to him that I dedicate this book.

Ted Steinberg appreciating his editor, his mother, and (who I assume to be) his wife in Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America:

Susan Day was a pleasure right down to the last en dash...Helen Steinberg read over the entire manuscript and tried valiantly to save me from myself. Marie del Monaco, with her unparalleled sense of justice, is, for me, the final arbiter of all that matters in the world.

And finally, Louis Warren acknowledging the important role parents play in the graduate student's life, in his The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America:

There has been discussion in academic circles of the need to move degree candidates to completion more quickly. The best way to accomplish that would be to give every graduate student parents like mine. Throughout this endeavor, I have been the beneficiary of my parents' unstinting moral support as well as occasional, much-needed grants from the Claude and Elizabeth Warren Bank of Higher Education and Field Research. To them, a heartfelt thanks.

Justice, in assessing environmental change

2009-03-11T21:08:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post, one of the major questions that continues to confront environmental historians is how to assess environmental change if we acknowledge the deep roots of human manipulation of the landscape, if we give up the idea of Clementsian ecology (that there is some stable state that natural systems revert to in the absence of human interference), if the science of ecology can't offer us a clear way of describing a "healthy land." Upon taking a second look at Andrew Hurley's Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 today, I realized that he offers a simple, but powerful new answer to this question, through the lens of environmental justice. Hurley writes in his preface:

"Thinking about environmental history in terms of social divisions also invites us to reconsider the way we assess environmental change. Environmental historians are well aware of the pitfalls encountered in evaluating ecological change. Recently, ecologists have thrown the concept of equilibrium into question, thereby making it difficult for historians to measure environmental change against any objective standard. The concept of social equity provides historians with an alternative. Thus, we can attempt to determine who benefited and who suffered when a particular society altered its relationship with the surrounding natural and built environment" (Hurley, xiv)

So, rather than worrying about, for example, whether we can call mountaintop removal coal mining "bad" because of the effects it has on native hardwood forests and on riparian ecosystems, we can just call it "bad" because it damages nearby homes beyond repair and decreases the value of surviving homes, because it undermines the local employment base by replacing labor with ruthlessly efficient explosives and machinery, and because it erodes the Appalachian culture. That is, rather than trying to convince others of the value of the natural environment--something which varies depending on individual viewpoints--historians can appeal to the value of human life, something which is more universally agreed upon (although not necessarily for any coherent philosophical reason).

I know that a lot of environmentalists don't like this sort of argument because they do, in fact, want to argue that the natural world has its own moral worth. But in absence of any clear explanation of where this worth comes from (a philosophical discussion not many historians want to get into), it seems that an appeal to human value is a pretty safe bet.

Chewing the apple through the middle...

2009-02-23T12:14:00.000-08:00

In response to the really insightful and provocative questions that Badger Bear posted in the comments of my first post, I decided to devote a post to what I see as being the "core ideas" of environmental history, and why I think they are difficult for the educated public to digest. (Although, in fact, I think philosophers are perhaps more capable of digesting these ideas then others of the educated public, since the ideas are actually quite philosophical in nature [and philosophical about nature. Ha!])

So some of the main questions that I see underpinning the study of environmental history are as follows:

Does order exist in nature?
If that order does exist, can it be understood through science?
What is "natural" or "cultural" in the landscape around us? How much "nature" exists outside of human manipulation?
Where do we derive moral authority if not from a "nature" that is outside of human control? Is there something "out there" in nature worth preserving or protecting?
If the idea of Clementsian ecology--that is, an equilibrium state in natural environments--has been undermined by the scientific discoveries of the last 70 years, then what do we use as a baseline for measurement of land health?
Did Native Americans in the pre-contact period manage the landscape intensively? How much "wilderness" existed before British colonists came to America?
How can a commitment to wilderness preservation as the ultimate goal of environmentalism undermine and erode our relationships with other natural and cultural environments, and with human communities?
How much does the physical environment determine the course of human history and culture?
How has capitalism shaped our relationship with the land?

These questions are admittedly very broad. But they do underlie much of the foundational work in my discipline. (For a good introduction to the positions of some leading environmental historians on these issues see Worster, Donald, Alfred Crosby, Richard White, et al., “A Roundtable: Environmental History.” Journal of American History 76 (1990), pp. 1087-1147.)

Not all environmental historians engage with all these issues in all of their writings, of course, but at least some of them are at the core of most of the work we do. The problem with translating this work--and the importance of it--to our friends and families is that most people take the answers to many of these questions for granted, even if they don't think about them too hard. For example, most people outside my discipline (or at least most people I spend a lot of time talking to, which, admittedly, isn't really a representative group) believe in a wilderness "out there" that exists separately from human intervention. Believing in this wilderness is what lets us fawn over the Sierra Club calendar, lets us condemn polluters and destroyers of the earth, lets us revel in weekend hikes in the mountains...but which also lets us ignore the problems of environmental racism, lets us privilege problems of Arctic refuges over the problems in our own neighborhoods, lets us imagine that our own daily lives have little effect on the state of "the environment" so long as we recycle our plastic water bottles and donate yearly to conservation organizations. (Bill Cronon discussed these issues far more eloquently than I could in his famous/notorious essay, The Trouble with Wilderness.)

Alright, I guess I've maybe only chewed the apple through the skin for now--not quite reaching the core--but I think I'll continue with more thoughts soon.

The most disgusting of pronouns...

2009-02-21T14:49:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I picked up the next book I was going to read in the "Nature's Nation" section of my Science in America list, The Humboldt Current, by Aaron Sachs. I flipped the hardcover book open to look at the blurb and author's photo on the book jacket, as I always do. I was first struck by this author's photo. He looked young and happy and like someone I'd actually like to hang out with. This is in stark contrast with many authors' photos, in which they often look overly serious, overly ivory-tower-ish, or overly posed. So I decided to read more about this Aaron Sachs before diving into his book, and I came across a profile of him on the History News Network's Top Young Historians pages. In this profile, he describes his experience trying to publish his senior thesis and the criticism he got for using the first person singular--for daring to refer to himself in a work of history.

In reflecting on this, Sachs writes that the use of the "I" has "allowed me to maintain a sense of self in the all-too-impersonal world of academia..has made a better teacher...adds a layer of depth to my analysis...[and] allows me to tap different aspects of what I take to be my core identity." He continues, "I enjoy being a historical scholar, but I also want to be a teacher, an environmental activist, and a writer of creative non-fiction—preferably, all in the same essay, however short or long. I doubt I'll ever succeed at wearing all of those hats simultaneously, but no set of rules is going to keep me from the head-spinning joy of trying."

I couldn't agree more.

I suppose I've only sometimes reflected on how the injection of the "I" into my writing can help me wear these simultaneous hats, but I reflect unceasingly on all the ways I can go about trying to maintain these varied--but crucially connected--aspects of my intellectual life. Right now, I'm feeling entirely one-sided as I find myself being all historical scholar (or even just historical reader!) and not at all teacher, environmental activist, or writer of creative non-fiction (although I guess this blog is helping out a little with that last piece). I'm going to take Sachs as a model and am going to work in a pointed way (after these prelims are over, that is) on combining these different roles I want to embody--and perhaps I'll start by inserting that pronoun that too many historians consider a barrier to "objectivity."

Have you heard of Franklin Pierce?

2009-02-17T21:56:00.000-08:00

I had no idea he was the 14th president of the United States. In fact, before tonight I would've said that I had never heard of him. Bah!

The Best Time of my Graduate School Life

2009-02-17T12:37:00.000-08:00

This semester (and portions of the last one, too) I'm focused on reading the nearly 200 books on my preparation lists for my preliminary exams, which I'm scheduled to take, in oral form, on Thursday, May 14 at 10 am (preceded by the written exams, which I'll receive by about April 15). I'd heard a lot about this process since beginning my Ph.D. program and I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting myself into. I would spend a semester curled up on my futon, reading books in my sweatpants, gulping down information and ideas, developing the breadth and mastery of my subdisciplines that would prepare me to write my dissertation and to teach courses in these areas one day in the future. Oh, I knew there'd be tedium and difficulty and procrastination involved, but I was looking forward to it. And my advisor and other faculty kept telling me that reading for prelims would be the "best time" of my graduate school life. After all, how often do you get to spend a whole semester just reading all those books you've been meaning to catch up on? All your other time is spent racing to finish reading for class, putting together a lecture, prepare for discussion, attending meetings, and so on. But here was an oasis of self-scheduling and reading books I wanted to be reading, in sub-disciplines I chose.

And now that "best time" is here, and instead of reading those amazing books on the history of Science in America, Environmental History, and the History of Public Health, I'm fretting over my inability to be an intellectual, looking for yellow shoes online, and (somewhat more productively) attending to this blog. The weight of reading book upon book every single day--no matter how interesting they are--is pressing down on me, and I'm wondering how such sustained attention to on any one thing can lead to the right outcome. I compare this whole process to the scene in Roald Dahl's Matilda where one of Matilda's classmates sneaks a piece of chocolate cake he wasn't supposed to eat and so, to punish him, the evil head-mistress, Mrs. Trunchbull, makes the chubby boy eat an entire chocolate sheet cake, in front of the whole school.

Sure, one piece of cake is delicious. Even two or three pieces can sometimes be a welcome treat. But when you have to eat 2 or 3 or 4 pieces of cake every single day for months on end, I'd bet anyone would come to hate cake.

Beginning Thoughts...

2009-02-13T22:36:00.000-08:00

It just occurred to me tonight that pretty much no one knows what I do. Not only do they not understand what I--specifically--do, but they also don't really understand the content of my discipline when they happen across it in other contexts.

Tonight, I was sitting around, eating valentine cupcakes with a group of our close friends (three other philosophers and their partners, with whom Justin and I hang out at least once a week) when people got to talking about the Civil War and how much slavery really had to do with it. Justin turned to me and said, "Hey, You're the Historian..." He says this sometimes as a sort of joke since he knows that what I do isn't just an explication of major events in American history. I said, "In my work, the Civil War usually isn't that important as an event in itself, but as a backdrop to how the War changed people's relationship to nature or how the physical environment restricted or affected the way that the Civil War proceeded" (or, for another example, how the War changed American public health...)

One of the group is taking an undergraduate course on environmental conservation, taught by one of my friends who does environmental history and works with Bill Cronon. Because of this class, she realized that what I had said had some connection to the material she was studying in her course--the "Trouble with Wilderness," the difficult legacy of conservationist policies in developing countries, and so on. But as she explained her understanding of this material to the rest of the group, I felt a rising panic as I realized that not only were they hearing these ideas for the first time (which means I had not sufficiently talked about them) but that the nuances and importance of these ideas were not hitting home. I realized just how counter-intuitive some of the core ideas of environmental history are (even--or perhaps especially!--to intelligent, environmentally-minded citizens) and also that, for the first time, I think these questions are really damn important. I want very much to work out what I think that importance is, to clarify it, distill it, break it down, and share it with those around me who I care about--not only so that they can know me better, but so that the relevant and fascinating themes of environmental history can escape the confines of the ivory tower and actually affect the daily conversations intelligent people are having when they discuss environmental ideas. So, here's to that.

--

Also, on a somewhat related note, since today is Darwin Day, there have been different discussions all over about evolution vs. whatever-people-like-to-think-there's-a-controversy-with. And on both the Rachel Maddow show and on the Daily Show, who should be there to represent evolution, but Ed Larson--a graduate of my very own department. Not an evolutionary scientist, but a historian. What does this suggest about the importance of historians of science in contemporary debates? And is this particularly the case for science/religion (and if so, why?) or are there are other scientific topics today that would seem to benefit from historical input?