2015-2016

Global Environmental History

Introduction

Clive Ponting, A New Green History of the World (New York, 2007)
Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Environmental Crisis,” Science, 155, no.
3767 (1967), 1203-07.
Carolyn Merchant, “Nature as Female,” in The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and
The Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980).
Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” in Problems of Materialism and Culture: Selected
Essays (London, 1980), 67-85.
William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative,” Journal of
American History, 78 (1992), 1347-76

Imagining Environments

Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, 1967).
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995).
William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness” in Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground:
Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1996).
L. Brett Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan (Seattle, 2005).
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New
England (New York, 1985).

Governing Nature

Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900

(Cambridge, 2004)
Ian J. Miller, The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo
(Berkeley, 2013).
John McNeill, Mosquito Empire: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620
1914 (New York, 2010).
Richard H. Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the
‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven, 2000).
Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United
States (Princeton, 2005).
Matthew Connelly, “Seeing beyond the State: The Population Control Movement and
the Problem of Sovereignty,” Past and Present, no. 193 (2006), 197-233.

Conservation and Environmentalism

Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2d edition
(Cambridge, 1994).
Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York, 1999).
Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (London, 1999)
Frank Uekoetter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany
(Cambridge, 2006)
Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the
Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1996)
Paul Warde, “The Invention of Sustainability,” Modern Intellectual History, 8 (2011),
153-70.

Scales of Space

Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of

Metageography (Berkeley, 1997).
John McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20 th

Century World (New York, 2000).

J. Donald Hughes, “Global Dimensions in Environmental History,” The Pacific
Historical Review, 70 (2001), 91-101.
Joyce E. Chaplin, Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit
(New York, 2012).

Scales of Time

Martin J.S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in
the Age of Revolution (Chicago, 2005).
David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (University of California
Press, 2004).
Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, eds., Deep History: The Architecture of Past
and Present, University of California Press, 2011.
Vanessa Ogle, “Whose Time is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition,
1870s to 1940s,” American Historical Review 120, no. 5 (Dec. 2013): 1376-1402.

Extraterrestrial Worlds

Bernd Brunner, Moon: A Brief History (New Haven, 2011).

Roger D. Launius, “Writing the History of Space’s Extreme Environment,”
Environmental History 15, no. 3 (July 2010): 526-532.
Denis Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo
Space Photographs,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84
(1994), 270-94.
Gary Scott Smith, Heaven in the American Imagination (New York, 2011).
Debbora Battaglia, David Valentine, and Valerie Olson, eds., “Extreme: Humans at
Home in the Cosmos,” special collection in Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 4
(2012).

Weather and Climate

Stuart B. Schwartz, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean

from Columbus to Katrina (Princeton, 2015).
Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 (New York,
2000).
Simone Turchetti and Peder Roberts, eds., The Surveillance Imperative: Geosciences
during the Cold War and Beyond (New York, 2014).
Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Environment (Chicago, 2007).

Catastrophe

Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (Princeton,
2014). Lamont   
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third
World (New York, 2001).
Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the
French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794 (Ithaca, 2011).
Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York, 2005).

Oceans

Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (Berkeley,

2009).
Martin W. Lewis, “Dividing the Ocean Sea,” Geographical Review, 89 (1999), 188-214.
Helen Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep
Sea (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).
W. Jeffrey Bolster, “Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and
Marine Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500–1800,” American Historical
Review, 113 (2008), 19–47.

Energy

Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (Chicago,
2002).
Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: A History of Whaling in America (New York, 2007).
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991).
Alfred Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for
 Energy (New York, 2006)
Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke and Culture in Britain since 1800
(Athens, Oh., 2006)
Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York,
1995).