Jack E. Davis is a professor of history and Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities specializing in environmental history and sustainability studies and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea (2017). Before joining the faculty at UF in 2003, he taught at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Eckerd College, and in […]
Environment
The Anthropocene and Environmental History
By Jesse Ritner If you open a textbook on geology and flip through to the chapter on geological time it will tell you we are currently living in the epoch of the Holocene. The Holocene started approximately 10,000 years before present with the end of the last ice age. However, research by a diverse array […]
The Empire of the Dandelion: Environmental History in Al Crosby’s Footsteps
By Megan Raby This essay is adapted from Dr. Raby’s remarks at a symposium to honor Al Crosby that was sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies at UT Austin on February 4, 2019. Alfred Crosby’s work has been with me for a long time––actually longer than I can remember. I routinely assign Ecological Imperialism […]
Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty
By Nathan Stone Preso en su lecho mi rio pasa, pero se acerca su libertad. Sus aguas dulces ya son saladas; ya no eres rio, eres el mar. A prisoner within its banks, my river rolls on, soon to find freedom. Your sweet waters now have grown salty; you’re no river, now, you are […]
Death, Danger, and Identity at 12,000 Feet
by Jesse Ritner On February 1, 1894, Frank Cook stumbled down from the Elk Mountain range, passed through the frozen town of Ashcroft, and trudging through the deep Colorado snow arrived in Aspen, Colorado. His mining partner, Mr. Spake, was dead. Mining accidents were common in late nineteenth-century Colorado. Mr. Cook, likely weary and cold […]
For Native Americans, Land Is More Than Just the Ground Beneath Their Feet
By Kelli Mosteller This article originally appeared in The Atlantic on September 17, 2016. Thousands of Native American protesters are currently fighting against the proposed construction of the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota. They are doing more than just trying to protect their land. They are fighting for their culture—and, as the Ojibwe activist Winona LaDuke […]
US Survey Course: The American West, Native Americans, and Environmental History
During the summer of 2016, we will be bringing together our previously published articles, book reviews, and podcasts on key themes and periods in the history of the USA. Each grouping is designed to correspond to the core areas of the US History Survey Courses taken by undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.
Remembering Chernobyl
In the early morning hours of April 26th, 1986, Chernobyl reactor number four experienced a series of explosions that resulted in the world’s most devastating nuclear disaster to date.
Diasporic Charity and Salonica’s Jewish Community after the Fire of 1917
The minutes of a 1922 meeting of the Council of the Jewish Community of Salonica, today’s Thessaloniki in Greece, recorded a cordial but contentious discussion.
Sowing the Seeds of Communism: Corn Wars in the USA
Today we often associate hybrid or genetically modified corn with agricultural monopolies, big business, and capitalism, in the early Cold War some feared that the rise of hybrid corn would sow the seeds of Communism in the United States.