Environmental History Archives

Review of Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (2022) by Jennie N. Shinozuka

Jeannie Shinozuka’s new book, Biotic Borders, is not only a “history of bugs and other bothers,” [209] but also a demonstration of how ecological actors played a fundamental role in shaping sociopolitical responses to Japanese immigration to the US from 1890-1950. The book shows how racialized invasive species furthered American nationalism in the name of biological security. The othering of invasive species along racial lines and legitimate alarm over environmental destruction contributed to the consolidation of American biotic borders. This review of Biotic Borders highlights how ecological fears were deeply intertwined with racial politics of the era.

Frequently, these invisible eco-invaders—mostly agrarian insect pests—were used by American citizens and government agencies as an excuse to take action against an equally invisible ‘yellow peril’—the increasing number of Asian migrants—through discriminatory agriculture policies, scientific racism, accusations of treachery, medical discrimination, and the consolidation of borders. Indeed, Shinozuka argues that the erection of “‘artificial barriers,’ such as plant quarantines and other regulations ‘redrew’ imaginary lines determined by national boundaries.” [55] In this way, the transpacific ecological borderland enshrined at the end of a romanticized Western American frontier contributed to nationalist notions of a biologically native American utopia, and ultimately, an emergent American empire.

Drawings of frogs, snails, and insects from Japan, early nineteenth century.
Source: Library of Congress.

Throughout the book, Shinozuka uses ‘immigrant’ in reference to human migrants and the non-human plants and animals that crossed the Pacific during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The human immigrants were the large numbers of Japanese and Japanese-Americans who struggled against pervasive anti-Asian hostility in the United States. The non-human immigrants consisted of the hundreds of Asiatic plant species, and the insects that lived within their fibers, that were shipped and sold in the US to meet a growing demand for Japanese-style gardens and “Asian exotics.” [9] As these two types of ‘immigrant’ became entangled in the American imagination, so too did American hostility towards all foreign species, human or not. However, the word ‘immigrant’ is not the only parallel Shinozuka draws between these two subjects of her book. Biotic Borders is a compelling attempt to connect these two histories, which Shinozuka argues are inextricably bound together.

As agriculture in the US became professionalized and monoculture became standardized, the fear of invasive species, imported via increasingly globalized transportation networks, exploded. Entomologists empowered by newly-established government agencies like the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Plant Industry sought to uncover the origin of invasive insects. Yet by searching for their non-native origins, these scientists racialized the insects, giving them names such as the Japanese Beetle or the Oriental Scale and facilitating two-way comparisons between humans and insects: the personification of insects and the dehumanization of humans. In turn, these racialized species provoked widespread biological xenophobia, spurred on by the real fear of economic destruction in the agrarian sector, and by a growing desire for environmental border control to protect an illusory vision of American biological nativism. The fear of racialized insects shaped hostility towards similarly racialized human immigrants.

Dr. Wm. A. Taylor, Chief Bureau of Plant Industry, Dept. Agrl, circa 1920.
Source: Library of Congress.

Each of the eight chapters of Biotic Borders is loosely centered around a particular cross-border ecological crisis or invasive species. Chapter 1 focuses on the San José Scale (Quadraspidiotus perniciosus), Chapter 2 on the Chestnut Blight (Cryphonectria parasitica), Chapter 3 on insects at the US-Mexico border, and so on. However, the predominant thread of the book is dedicated to the experience of Japanese immigrants during the growing, racist, anti-immigrant hysteria prevalent at the time. In Chapter 4, Shinozuka explains how Japanese Americans were classified as “unhygienic,” [103] were accused of price fixing and unfair business practices, and were accused of bearing responsibility for hookworm and foodborne illnesses.

Chapter 5 shifts focus to Hawai’i. As a gateway between the US and Asia, Hawai’i became a central focus in securing ecological borders. Shinozuka uses the chapter to demonstrate how scientific authority was deployed as a tool of empire. The remaining chapters cover a growing anti-Japanese paranoia during WWII, including a discussion that joins the incarceration of the Japanese American population and the widespread use of chemical pesticides to combat Japanese Beetle infestations.

Biotic Borders is a thoroughly researched book. Shinozuka uses a variety of sources, including oral histories, to weave together human and non-human narratives. However, occasionally the exact relationship between the human and insect migration is obscured. Whether nativism was a driving force in the creation of ecological borders or whether the creation of ecological borders contributed to growing nativism is unclear in her telling. Similarly, the causal relationship between alarm over Japanese immigration and alarm over plant and insect immigration is sometimes confused. This said, what is clear from Shinozuka’s book is that these processes mirrored each other, and that through one, we gain a better understanding of the other.

By the end of the book, Shinozuka weaves the historical questions of globalization and racism with contemporary challenges. Citing the recent example of COVID-19, she demonstrates how politicians fixated on the Chinese origins of the virus, compared the pandemic to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and—just like at the end of the nineteenth century—racialized a biotic invader. The book concludes with a direct disagreement with environmental historian Peter Coates who once argued that the brand of “botanical xenophobia” and “eco-racism” [217] presented by Shinozuka had largely dissolved by the late twentieth century. To Shinozuka, as globalization accelerated, science played an increasing role in “the transnational flow of bodies, agricultural products and livestock, and pollution” [219]. She argues that this role is too often obscured when immigration is discussed in a vacuum. Despite its somber content, the book ends with a hopeful note that Biotic Borders could serve as an example for an interdisciplinary, open-ended dialogue about questions of science, racism, nationalism, and ethics.

William Dinneen is a pre-doc research associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s PDRI-DevLab. He graduated with a bachelor’s in history from Emory University where he wrote a thesis about the environmental restoration of the Rocky Flats nuclear facility.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

The Fellowship of the Tree Rings: A ClioVis Project

My grandparents and I looked down onto the vast Sonoran Desert from Mount Lemmon, north of Tucson, Arizona. At nearly 8,000 feet, quaking aspen, cottonwood, alder, and other tree species surrounded us—a stark contrast with the desert below. An audio guide played on my grandma’s Samsung Galaxy as we took in our surroundings. The voice, who I later learned is a singer named Joey Burns, told us about how researchers at the University of Arizona learned that fires are essential to healthy forests by studying tree rings.^[1] Burns continued, “Every tree you see around you has the story of its life hidden in its rings.”^[2]

Fast forward six years: Dr. Erika Bsumek sends me a podcast called The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, which explores connections between tree rings, hurricanes, the Golden Age of European Piracy, and even the Sugar Revolution.^[3] The podcast is based on research from Valarie Trouet, Marta Domínguez-Delmás, and Grant Harley, reconstructing 500 years of Caribbean hurricane records by studying tree rings.^[4] It is a remarkable resource that sheds light on the intersection between climate science and history.

A dendrochronological sample from a beam in Gödenroth Rathaus, Germany.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Meeting at the Second American Dendrochronology Conference in Tucson, Arizona, near Mount Lemmon, the three researchers discussed how shipwreck records and tree ring data could be combined to reconstruct a history of hurricanes in the Caribbean.^[5] After successfully reconstructing a chronology, the researchers observed a dip in the number of hurricanes between 1645 and 1715.^[6] Trouet noticed that this correlates with what is known as the “Maunder Minimum,” a period of low solar radiation.^[7]

This made sense—less solar radiation meant cooler temperatures, which is not the ideal environment for forming hurricanes. Hurricanes thrive in environments with warm water and air.^[8] But why is the connection between the “Maunder Minimum” and a period of fewer hurricanes significant? The work of Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley illustrates the ability of climate proxies to reveal new perspectives on history that would go otherwise unnoticed. Assistant Professor of History Melissa Charenko, whose research was influential in the creation of my project, defines climate proxies well in another article for Not Even Past. She writes:

Proxies are things like tree rings, ice cores, pollen, and lake sediments. They are material traces that indirectly reflect the climates of the past. For example, scientists can use tree rings to reconstruct past temperature and moisture. Or they can use the air bubbles trapped in ice to study the composition of the atmosphere through time.^[9]

In the case of The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, researchers used tree rings as a climate proxy to reconstruct a chronology of hurricanes in the Caribbean. Their use of climate proxies is especially interesting because of the subsequent historical connections they made using the chronology.

When looking at the larger history of the Caribbean, the lull in hurricane activity can be connected with an influx in Caribbean maritime activity, specifically within the context of the Sugar Revolution and Golden Age of European Piracy, which lasted roughly from 1650 to 1730.^[10] The Fellowship of the Tree Rings asserts that the sun—and, more broadly, the environment—played a vital role in both shaping and uncovering our past. By connecting solar phenomena like the “Maunder Minimum” to historical periods such as the Sugar Revolution, The Fellowship of Tree Rings illuminates the environment’s unseen hand in transforming human history. Furthermore, by understanding how Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley used tree rings to provide insight into a larger Caribbean history, we can reconsider our natural surroundings as a burgeoning resource in explaining our past.

Sugar manufacture in the Antilles Isles, 1665.
Source: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-72094 DLC

As I think back to my trip to the top of Mount Lemmon, I did not understand how impactful the story of a tree’s life might be to understanding human history. Human history is all too often framed as something separate from environmental history when really it should be seen as inextricable. The work of Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley demonstrates that the environment and human history are forever intertwined.

All of this inspired me to build a timeline that contextualized their research.

For this project, I took The Fellowship of the Tree Rings podcast episode and mapped information from it onto an interactive timeline using ClioVis—an interactive timeline software that allows you to chart historical (or nonhistorical) concepts, events, and themes, emphasizing connections between them. The Fellowship of the Tree Rings lent itself well to the ClioVis format as the story contains various historical and scientific connections. After mapping the RadioLab episode, I went through the timeline and added my own events, connections, and eras to give greater context to the story.

While building this timeline, I became increasingly fascinated in how interconnected piracy, the Sugar Revolution, and hurricanes were. I learned about the complex relationship between empires and piracy. Although they were outlaws operating in maritime spaces, pirates paradoxically facilitated the expansion of empires by assisting in territorial conquests.^[11] This took place against the backdrop of the Sugar Revolution, where imperial powers scrambled to gain control of lucrative trading ports and colonies. European states sought to extract as much wealth as possible from the Caribbean. To do so, they plundered indigenous communities and violently exploited enslaved African labor.^[12]

As millions of enslaved Africans were forcibly taken by these empires from Africa to the Caribbean, some African people were able to escape and join pirate crews.^[13] This all took place during a historic period of low hurricane activity. When the idea of the climate shaping these events is added to the picture, it changes things. Did the significantly reduced threat of hurricanes to ships propel both the Sugar Revolution and piracy? In my timeline, I attempt to map out this complex history and answer that question.

As the timeline shows, contextualizing The Fellowship of the Tree Rings demonstrates the complex relationship between the “Maunder Minimum,” hurricanes, the Golden Age of European Piracy, and the Sugar Revolution. Between 1650 and 1715, a lull in hurricane activity associated with the “Maunder Minimum” transformed the environment. As maritime trade increased, ships simultaneously faced a comparatively lower threat of hurricanes than in other periods in history. This meant that hurricanes did not play their traditional role in the Caribbean ecosystem—their check on human activity was temporarily weakened.

Why is this important? Between 1650 and 1715, European colonial powers cemented their position in the Americas through the Sugar Revolution. European ships transported a massive amount of wealth—including enslaved African people—in the triangular trade, which helped fund Europe’s industrial revolution.^[14] The Fellowship of Tree Rings introduces the environment as playing a role in accelerating that process, sinking fewer fleets because of hurricane activity. This connection reveals how historical periods are impacted by changes in climate, providing us with new understandings of the larger societal shifts that come with them.

Valerie Trouet, Marta Domínguez-Delmás, and Grant Harley make use of tree rings as climate proxies to establish these connections and illustrate the value of studying human history in terms of the environment. Their study joins the growing field of paleoecologists who seek to learn about our climatic history from the natural world around us. In addition to learning about climate history as it is narrowly understood, these scholars are studying the environment to learn about systems of power, like the rise of the Sugar Revolution and its relationship with the Golden Age of European Piracy.

Historians often leave out an important voice in their stories: the planet. In The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, we hear about the environment’s role in one of the most formative time periods in the Western Hemisphere, the Sugar Revolution and the Golden Age of European Piracy. As we enter an era defined by human-made climate change, it is even more important to understand the historical relationship between social changes and the climate. Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley tell us to first look at the environment itself.

Now, when I reflect on my work contextualizing The Fellowship of Tree Rings, I think again about what Joey Burns meant when he said, “Every tree you see around you has the story of its life hidden in its rings.”[15] A tree’s rings are not just the story of its life but a perspective on the history of the world around it.

Aidan Dresang is an undergraduate history major studying to become a public high school history teacher. He is interested in environmental history, resistance movements, and histories of the Americas. As a future history teacher, Aidan hopes to teach history critically and bridge the community-classroom divide. He is currently a ClioVis intern.

^[1] Joey Burns, “Mt. Lemmon Science Tour” (Audio Tour, University of Arizona College of Science, 2015).

^[2] Burns.

^[3] Latif Nasser and Lulu Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings,” RadioLab, accessed October 25, 2023, https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/fellowship-tree-rings/transcript.

^[4] Valerie Trouet, Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), 203.

^[5] Trouet, 201.

^[6] Trouet, 204.

^[7] Nasser and Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings.”

^[8] Hackney Blackwell, Amy, and Elizabeth P. Manar, eds. “Hurricane.” In U-X-L Encyclopedia of Weather and Natural Disasters, 398–407. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2016.

^[9] Charenko, Melissa. “IHS Climate in Context: Climate by Proxy.” Not Even Past, December 15, 2020. https://notevenpast.org/ihs-climate-in-context-climate-by-proxy/.

^[10] Nasser and Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings.”

^[11] Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge (Mass.): London Harvard University Press, 1986), 15.

^[12] Richard S. Dunn, Sugar, and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, UNITED STATES: Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 1972), 50–68.

^[13] Aimee Wodda, “Piracy in Colonial Era,” in The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 1st ed. (Wiley, 2013), 2, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118517383.wbeccj528.

^[14] Barry W. Higman, “The Sugar Revolution,” The Economic History Review 53, no. 2 (2000): 213.

^[15] Burns, “Mt. Lemmon Science Tour.”

Fear and Lust in the Desert, or How Lies, Deception, and Trickery Made California a Date Palm Monopoly

From the editors: The Digest: Food in History is a new series from Not Even Past that focuses on the exciting field of food history . Across these pieces, contributors will explore the intimate intersections between food, people, ecologies, and history. The Digest: Food in History will publish a range of research connected to food production, distribution, and consumption and use this to reflect on wider historical questions.

In the first installment of The Digest, Atar David, a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of History and the Associate Editor for Not Even Past, reflects on some lesser known and more controversial aspects involved in the creation Southern California’s date production monopoly. The article invites readers to rethink their food conventions and question the relationship between food and power.

Southern California produces almost half of the date fruits consumed in the US today. But that was not always the case. Date fruits became popular among American consumers during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but since no one in the US grew dates for commercial purposes, supply depended on imports from the Middle East, especially from the Arab Gulf. The first attempts to cultivate dates on a commercial scale in Arizona and California began at the turn of the twentieth century. However, America still ran on imported dates until the 1920s, when the region around the Salton Sea became the leading date-producing center in the country. By the 1930s, California production was robust enough to reduce the need for imports and provide most local consumption.

How did Southern California become the leading date-producing region in the country? One possible explanation has to do with the local climates. The region’s long and dry summers are notoriously harsh and, for years, posed a challenge to settlers. But these climatic predicaments are advantageous for date palms (Phoenix Dactylifera L.), whose fruits can only ripen during extensive heat. Common narratives of California’s date sector often stress how federal officials import date palm offshoots (more on that to come) from the Middle East and perfected cultivation, packing, and distribution methods until they finally achieved victory over nature’s setbacks. According to this narrative, perseverance and ingenuity made California a date production center.

*Date Palm Grove in the Coachella Valley, February 1937. Source: Library of Congress*

My research, which examines the global circulation of date palm commodities from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, paints a more complex version of this story. As a part of my work, I got to know the federal agents involved in establishing the California date cultivation sector. Since they operated during the Progressive Era and were motivated by visions of improvement, I call them Date Boosters.

After reading correspondents, their memories, and their official reports, I realized that scientific curiosity and dreams of greening the desert were not date boosters’ only motivation. Instead, they were driven by a desire to establish and then maintain their monopoly over date cultivation. To do so, they sometimes lied, deceived, and ostracized other growers and fellow federal agents. As it turns out, their at-times shady actions were as meaningful to California’s ascendent to a national (and later global) date production center as the local climates. Examining some of the shadier aspects of their operation reveals the messy politics behind California’s successful date cultivation operation and the often-unspoken realities of the politics of food production.

Offshoot Monopoly

Date boosters had already started dreaming about an all-American date sector by the early 1890s. At that time, no one cultivated dates for commercial purposes in the US, and the only date palms around were the offspring of palms brought to the country by Spanish missionaries during the seventeenth century. Boosters imported seeds from Mexico and various places around the Middle East and planted them in the Southwest, hoping they would produce adequate (read: marketable) fruits. Soon, however, they discovered a problem that growers in the Middle East, who had cultivated date palms for thousands of years, were well aware of.

Seedlings (plants grown from seeds) often differ from their predecessors, resulting in fruits of various sizes, shapes, and tastes. Commercial agriculture, which is built on uniformity, predictability, and standardization, cannot rely on seedlings. Luckily for the boosters, date palms are also capable of vegetative (sometimes called asexual) propagation. Mature palms sprout tiny offshoots from their base. These suckers are genetically identical to the mother tree and can thus be cut and replanted, serving as the perfect building blocks for every new grove.

Date Palms along the Nile circa 1850. — *Date Palms along the Nile, photographed by Félix Teynard circa 1850. Source: Library of Congress*

At roughly the same time, the Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson, established the Section of Seed and Plant Introduction (SSPI). This USDA sub-division sent federal agents to various locations around the globe to collect new plants suitable for commercial cultivation in America. Some plant explorers, like Walter Swingle and David Fairchild, were also date boosters, fervently supporting the new date sector. For example, Walter Swingle and David Fairchild traveled to Egypt, North Africa, Oman, and Iraq to look for the best date types. They cut (or, rather, oversaw the cutting of) offshoots and carefully shipped them to agricultural experiment stations across Arizona and California. Overall, plant explorers imported several thousand offshoots during the early 1900s.

However, only a few of these made their way to local cultivators. This was not because of a lack of demand. With the expansion of offshoot importations, farmers around California and Arizona grasped their economic potential and contacted boosters, asking for a piece of the cake. During the early 1900s, dozens of farmers reached out to the agricultural experiment station at the University of Arizona, begging for some offshoots. But boosters refused to share their precious biological repository and preferred to keep offshoots for their experiments. Robert Forbes, the head of the station and a leading date booster, refused all farmers’ requests, offering prospective farmers to take the uncertain path of seedling cultivation. Boosters, who realized the economic importance of imported offshoot, began entrenching their monopoly over the young industry, deciding de facto who got to grow dates and who did not.

Trimming date palm offshoots before shipping them to the US, Algeria, June 1900. Source: Walter Swingle, The Date Palm and its Utilization in the Southwestern States (1904). Available at the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Date boosters also used their political power to prevent prospective farmers from privately importing offshoots. They feared that unregulated importation would risk the purity of their slowly growing biological repository by introducing subpar types to the Southwest. Even worse, some feared that private importers would lay their hands on some prime types, fostering an over-importation boom that would shake up the entire juvenile sector. In short, date boosters had an effective monopoly over offshoots importation and no desire to share power with anyone deciding to challenge it.

Some nevertheless tried. Bernard Johnson, a farmer from Walters, CA, dreamed of importing and selling offshoots by himself. In May 1902, he contacted Forbes, asking for his advice. Forbes tried to dissuade Johnson, arguing that offshoot importation was expensive, way beyond the layperson’s abilities. “Most of us,” he wrote, “will have to wait until Uncle Sam is ready to help us out.”[1] Johnson abandoned his plan for a while, only to renew it two years later while working for the newly established governmental date orchard in Mecca, CA. But traveling to the Middle East would take at least three months, and Johnson’s supervisors frowned upon his intention to leave the Mecca Garden for such a long period. They contacted Forbes, asking him to convince Johnson not to go. They also threatened Johnson that if he decided to leave, the federal government would sell the deed on his small ten-acre property to the local land development company. Following these threats, Johnson decided to leave the Mecca Garden for good, writing to Forbes, “I am very sorry indeed that I entered the employ of the Department of Agriculture.”[2] Even after he left, Johnson’s supervisors showed no mercy, cutting his plot from the nearby government well, forcing him to spend roughly $750 on digging a new well and setting new irrigation lines. All because he dared to challenge date boosters’ monopoly.

Ostracizing Texans

California’s hot climate is ideal for date cultivation, and it is no wonder that the American date palm sector prospered there. Why did places with similar climates – like parts of Texas, Nevada, or New Mexico – never become major date production centers? One possible explanation has to do with California agriculture more generally. From the mid-nineteenth century, the temperate climate in the Central Valley drew investors and made the Golden State a global agricultural hub. When date palms joined the party, many investors were looking for a way to capitalize on the country’s prospering gardens and were willing to invest in new projects. But there is more to that story. Much like Bernard Johnson’s case, date boosters blocked any attempts to challenge their monopoly, even if it meant actively going against other government agents.

In 1904, Harvey Stiles, a state horticultural inspector from Corpus Christi, Texas, traveled to the St. Louis World Fair, where he probably visited the new exhibit on date palms, courtesy of our old friend Forbes. Upon his return to Texas, he witnessed “date trees at fully half a dozen points, from Bee [he probably refers to Bee County, A.D.] down the coast to Corpus Christi and Brownsville and up the river valley, all looking well.”[3] Stiles began studying these trees and their adaptability to the south Texas climate, documenting local date cultivation along the Rio Grande and traveling to Mexico to secure pollen that would later serve him to pollinate local palms manually. Stiles then began canvassing for establishing “a plant laboratory, or whatever name it may carry” to develop a date palm industry in Texas. He dreamed of dethroning California and Arizona and cementing the Lone Star state as the new American date capital.

The Rio Grande Valley circa 1915. — *The Rio Grande Valley, one of the potential sites for date cultivation in Texas, circa 1915. Source: Library of Congress*

But boosters were not ready to share their resources and knowledge with other people. Walter Swingle, who was recently described as a central figure in developing date cultivation in Texas, [4] saw the potential in Western Texas’ climate, writing that “the lower Rio Grande… is a fair prospect of growing third-class dates in bulk to be sold in competition with the Persian Gulf dates now imported into this country in enormous quantities.”[5] At the same time, Swingle was more reluctant to include Texans in the date bonanza, arguing that only experienced people (read, his associates) should monitor prospective cultivation. Needless to say, Stiles was not the experienced person Swingle had in mind.

Alternatively, Swingle suggested appointing a USDA arboriculturist named Silas Mason to survey the true potential of southern Texas. “It is important,” Swingle concluded, “That this work [of promoting date-related science and production in Texas, A.D.] be done by us and that these plants are not handled by Stiles who can pervert the facts to suit his pursuit.” [6] While the federal government went on to experimenting with date cultivation in Laredo and building a pest-free date farm in Weslaco and Winter-Haven, Stiles was left out, selling seedlings from his private nursery.[7] Texas, who shone momentarily as the next big thing in date cultivation, never became a leading producer. Just ask anyone who has ever eaten a date grown in Texas.

Southern California became the country’s leading date-producing region thanks to its favorable climate and because the people who laid the industry’s foundations made sure to eliminate all competition from the get-go. That does not mean we should castigate or diminish their significant contribution to American agriculture. Instead, we should acknowledge the messy, awkward, and exciting histories of date cultivation and use them to reveal the political intrigues that shape food production. Date palms thus provide an excellent perspective into the history of fear and loath in the desert and an excellent gateway to larger questions of production and power.

Atar David is a Ph.D. candidate in the History department at UT Austin and the Associate Editor for Not Even Past. His dissertation research focuses on the circulation of agricultural commodities and agronomic knowledge between the Middle East and the American Southwest from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Together with Raymond Hyser, Atar founded the “Material History Workshop” – a bi-monthly graduate workshop centered around material culture. You can read more about the workshop here: https://notevenpast.org/uts-material-history-workshop/

[1] Forbes to Johnson, 5.31.1902, University of Arizona Special Collections, AZ 406, Box 11, Folder 6.

[2] Johnson to Forbes, 11.16.1904, University of Arizona Special Collections, AZ 406, Box 11, Folder 6.

[3] “Stiles to Wilson,” 5.14.1906, Date Palm Collection (MS 047) Box 2, File 40, Special Collections & University Archives, University of California, Riverside.

[4] Dennis Johnson and Jane MacKnight, “Date Palm Growing in South Texas,” PalmArbor, 2022.

[5] “Swingle to Galloway”, 10.19.1906, Date Palm Collection (MS 047) Box 2, File 40, Special Collections & University Archives, University of California, Riverside.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Johnson and MacKnight, “Date Palm Growing in South Texas,” 11–20.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010) by J. R. McNeill

For approximately three centuries, the greater Caribbean hosted the Spanish empire‘s most important social, environmental, and political connections. Interactions between people, the environment, and mosquitoes played an essential part in this history, as John McNeill explains in Mosquito Empires. A professor of history at Georgetown University, McNeill uses his book to explore the links between ecology, disease, and Atlantic politics in the Greater Caribbean from 1620 until 1914. Mosquito Empires won the Albert J. Beveridge prize from the American Historical Association in 2011.

Mosquito Empires serves as an excellent introduction to the field of environmental history. It opens an exciting pathway to understanding how the past’s ecological, political, and epidemic problems continue to impact our present. McNeill makes an important contribution to the field of environmental studies through connections to different fields, including history, politics, epidemiology, climatology, ecology, and others.

Book cover for Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010) by J. R. McNeill.

Throughout Mosquito Empires, we find examples that show ecology shaped the history of the Americas because of environmental changes and human agency. Its title is suggestive of the relevance of mosquitoes in an imperial age. McNeill also touches on other subjects, including the transport of animals between continents and the ways in which existing fauna exercised agency to influence how people occupied territory. Furthermore, Mosquito Empires allows us to recognize the role of disease in human and environmental history. As such, it may be even more interesting today, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As McNeill points out, humans prefer to understand and explain history based on human affairs such as war, revolutions, or conquest. But sometimes, we forget our ecological agency in the environment as a part of our history. McNeill’s book shows co-evolutionary processes bridging the gap between society and nature, demonstrating that the agency of mosquitoes is as important as human agency.

Mosquito Empires also helps us comprehend how the significance and understanding of disease has changed over time. For instance, many diseases did not impact all of the Spanish Empire’s diverse populations in the same way. Diseases encounter different environments, immunities, and susceptibilities as they spread. Moreover, as parts of an ecological chain, certain diseases depended on specific circumstances for transmission: temperature, flora, and land conditions determined how contagious they were. Consequently, McNeill also considers some unique features of malaria and yellow fever, which required mosquitos to spread.

McNeill uses a scalar perspective, beginning his analysis on a global scale before moving towards a local space. Mosquito Empires starts by looking at the Spanish empire from an Atlantic perspective and then focuses on its Caribbean ecology. From 1620 until 1820, the linkages between ecological and political affairs occupied most of the central historical interactions in the Caribbean. Atlantic American geopolitics gave local politics an ecological focus during the early colonial period when Spanish authorities focused on preserving Indigenous and enslaved populations because they provided a labor force for the Spanish empire. The colonizers also built plantations, which occupied most territories in Brazil and the Americans during this period and were more important than silver and gold mines or other sources of economic activity. Also, the creation of plantation systems helped the permanence of mosquitos, producing the conditions necessary for the ongoing existence of diseases. At the same time, geopolitical turbulence in Atlantic America coincided with ecological transformations in the Greater Caribbean. Most of their impacts were related to the introduction of new plants and animals in the Americas, which affected preexisting environmental conditions.

A drawing depicting a plantation on the San Juan River in Nicaragua. — *This nineteenth-century drawing depicts a plantation on the San Juan River in Nicaragua. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

One of the most exciting contributions made by Mosquito Empires is its creation of a unified historical and ecological framework for analyzing epidemiologic problems. Through his book, we can gain new insights into diseases by studying them in a single ecological and historical context. Mosquito Empires considers many variables: demography, ecology, immunity, and climate changes which could affect the spread of diseases in the Caribbean. McNeill compares how yellow fever affected Caribbean locals and European immigrants; he also shows that the disease impacted rural areas (where plantations were located) more than urban ones.

Other factors such as climate change and European immigration, contributed to the spread of diseases, leading to variations across time and space. McNeill’s framework shows how yellow fever’s agency operates and examines its transmission, immunity, and impact on humans and across landscapes. Nonetheless, the disease did not make its history by itself. As McNeill demonstrates, yellow fever acquired historical relevance only when it became an epidemic and had a persistent cycle of transmission. Through this argument, the author shows how human activity converted a diminutive organism into a historical and ecological concern for many years.

Another outstanding feature of McNeill’s book is the diversity of manuscript sources it taps, many of which come from Iberic-American archives. The demographic and health features presented in the book are essential to consider the perception of the disease, but also the knowledge (scientific or empirical) to cure or resolve the epidemics. Case studies examine Brazil, Jamaica, Kourou, Darien, and The Viceroyalty of New Granada. Mosquito Empires performs a valuable service just by gathering so much information. But the information is also critical to the book’s central aim because it documents the disasters created by geopolitical colonialism. According to McNeill, these events show “the power of imported diseases, after the 1640s establishment of yellow fever in the region, to prevent new large-scale European settlement in the Greater Caribbean (p. 135).”

Mosquito Empires serves to remind historians of the role of diseases in our environment. McNeill’s book presents a history of empire’s power as shown through the links between ecological and political matters. McNeill describes the mosquitoes as shields of empire, but readers should also consider them as actors in this geopolitical puzzle. Mosquitoes were protagonists with agency and specific power, capable of defending (through immunity) or destroying (through mortality) an army or a population group; they could also transform the environment.

Cindia Arango López is a doctoral student at UT Austin at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. She studies the relationship between the environmental and social history of the Magdalena River and its navigators, the bogas, during the 18th century in Colombia. She has researched thematics about enslaved history in the colonial period in Colombia. Also, she published relating to the current territorial dynamics of displacement in Colombia from a human geography perspective.

Review of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (2019) by Bathsheba Demuth

“It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to
explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must,
else all these chapters might be naught.”[1]

These few words show how difficult it was for Herman Melville, in his novel Moby Dick, to write from nature’s perspective in the 19th century. In the last decades, with the global climate change emergency in the background and enormous progress in scientific fields, this literary connection has been explored from a broader humanistic perspective. But most importantly, it can also be examined from a historical point of view, using the history of science, history of technology, and environmental history to understand extreme natural landscapes –in Antarctica, for example, or in Finland or Canada– and their relationship with extractivist, nation-state, and scientific knowledge. At the intersection of these diverse fields and research agendas can be situated the first book of the writer and environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait.

When Demuth was 18, she moved to an indigenous village in the Canadian Arctic and planned to stay there for 3 to 4 months. But instead, she ended up spending years training huskies for sled dogs. As she mentions in one of her interviews, to help to survive in this harsh and cold environment, her host family encouraged her to pay attention to the nonhuman world and how to imagine her actions from the perspective of the animals and natural spaces, such as the tundra, the ocean and the wind. As she remarks, this changed her perception and created two main questions for her research: “How do your ideas change nature?” and “How does nature change the way that we think about the world?”[2]. She recognizes that she wrote her book with these two questions in her mind.

Floating Coast, as Demuth defines it, is the history of the Russian and American sides of the Bering Strait, where Alaska and Siberia almost encounter one another. More specifically, it examines the historical evolution of ideas about landscapes over the course of 200 years. The ideas in question come from indigenous communities, including the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia and the Iñupiat and Yupik in Alaska, as well as from U. S. capitalism and Soviet communism. Demuth also describes extreme natural landscapes from the perspective of whales and foxes in addition to examining the viewpoints of many kinds of people. She defined her studies as a “historical guide to ways that we can imagine our relationships with environment in the present.”[3] Between 2020 to 2021, Floating Coast received numerous awards from the American Historical Association, the American Society for Environmental History, and the Western Historical Association. It also received several non-fiction literary awards due to its beautifully written narrative construction of time and historical space.

Demuth divides her book into five parts– “Sea,” “Shore,” “Land,” “Underground,” and “Ocean”–with two chapters each and one Epilogue. To write these ten chapters, she used three different types of primary sources. The first comprises oral history from indigenous communities, collected using ethnographic methods and from state records. The second, used to follow state ambitions, is composed of local, regional, and national records from Imperial Russia, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Finally, Demuth also used individual memoirs and scientific materials. Floating Coast analyzes these sources using techniques developed by a range of fields, including environmental and transnational history.

Demuth showcases two of environmental history’s most significant methodological contributions. First, Floating Coast uncouples its analysis from traditional understandings of time and from nation-state structures to focus on places and the historical interactions between the human and non-human world. Across the landscapes of “Sea,” “Shore,” “Land,” “Underground,” and “Ocean,” Demuth invites us to rethink the classic notions of linear time and economic progress. In such extreme spaces as Beringia, environmental historians (and different scholars) need to write about time in a way that isn’t always strictly chronological. In Floating Coast, the conception of time comes from places, animals, and seasons.

Second, this chronological approach constantly flows through a historical narrative because it follows material and imaginaries of energy. Demuth’s book shows how an ecological space becomes a source of commodities through the hunting of whales, bison, and walruses, as well as through gold extraction. Demuth explains how an imperial view of extreme landscapes and natural resources developed in the United States, Imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union. She concludes that capitalism and socialism are similar insofar as they both look for commodities in landscapes. The Indigenous narratives Demuth explores present a very different perspective. “History life in Beringia,” she explains, “was shaped partly by the ways energy moved over the land through the sea.”[4] This concept of energy, especially energy transition, is behind every chapter. Demuth describes energy moving, “from sea to coast, coast to land, land underground and finally back to the ocean.”[5] For example, her book shows how whales turn into light.

*In this undated print, U. S. whaling vessels stand by while their crews hunt right whales in the Bering Strait. Source: Library of Congress.*

To conclude, Demuth immerses us in a world extreme natural scenery and creates an atmosphere especially well-suited to talking about nature, desolation, and frozen areas. It is a beautifully written book that presents an incisive analysis of primary and secondary sources. It also invites historians from different fields to read and rethink the way history is written, showcasing the methodological and theoretical options environmental history offers. Demuth’s decision to write about time from a nature perspective is especially provocative and worthy of note.

Yohad Zacarías is a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in History from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Chile). As a Fulbright doctoral fellow, her current research interests focus on electrification’s urban, environmental, and technological impact in Chile and Latin America between the 19th and 20th centuries. In addition, she has received scholarships from the Latin American and Caribbean Society of Environmental History (SOLCHA) at Stanford University (CLAS) and the Erasmus Program at the University of Copenhagen. Before graduate school, Yohad worked as an Outbound International Mobility Coordinator in the International Relations Office at Universidad de Chile.

[1] Herman, Melville. Moby Dick: or the Whale. Minneapolis: First Avenue Editions, 2014, 232.

[2] Bathsheba Demuth, “Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait,” YouTube, WW Norton, August 1, 2019, https://youtu.be/K4G42JyunzY, accessed December 01, 2022.

[3] Bathsheba Demuth, “Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait,” YouTube, WW Norton, August 1, 2019, https://youtu.be/K4G42JyunzY, accessed December 01, 2022.

[4] Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019, 4.

[5] Demuth, Floating Coast, 5.

Review of Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration (2022) by Laura J. Martin

In Wild by Design, historian Laura Martin points to an irony at the heart of our contemporary ecological moment: in the face of human-made threats to the earth’s biosphere, it is only through further intercession into the workings of nature that humankind may remediate the harm that it has already caused. The notion that through conscious action, people have the potential to revivify or enhance natural systems is not, however, new. The assumption rests at the heart of the field of ecological restoration, whose history within the United States during the 20th century Martin seeks to recount.

Martin writes that historians have typically presented the history of 20th-century environmental management as a duel between environmental conservation and preservation. The former asserts that certain designated lands should be actively managed to guarantee the long-term availability of economically desirable natural resources. Environmental preservation, on the other hand, has sought to protect lands from any human footprint whatsoever. The logic of ecological restoration has long existed as a middle ground between these two poles, but its history, when it has been written of, has been traced back only as far as Aldo Leopold’s 1949 Sand County Almanac. In her book, Martin casts her gaze farther down the well of the past to the early 1900s, and beginning there, she traces a deeper and longer history of ecological restoration in the United States.

Martin begins her narrative with the American Buffalo Society in the early 20th century and its ambition to create game reservations in order to repopulate portions of the Great Plains after they had been depleted of buffalo. From there, Martin advances chronologically up to the present moment. She concludes her monograph with a discussion of the practice of off-site mitigation, the contemporary approach to minimizing environmental harm that attempts to compensate for destruction done to one ecosystem by restoring another. As a whole, the book traces how efforts to revitalize United States wilderness areas have evolved from attempts to restore only a single species to now much grander schemes that aim to guard the resiliency of entire ecosystems. Martin successfully shows in clear prose how ecological restoration evolved from the pursuit of many small, private organizations into an institutionalized scientific field whose knowledge shapes the majority of federal ecological management policy today. Martin reconstructs this history by working through government documents, published and unpublished scientific papers, news clippings, and other sources.

As Martin weaves her narrative together, she is at pains to show how the evolving understandings of nature’s workings that lay at the heart of restoration efforts interfaced with contemporary material, political, and cultural circumstances. Thus, Martin emphasizes how the studies and conceptual frameworks that have advanced ecological restoration as a field have also benefitted from and furthered the harm done to historically oppressed groups within the United States. In addition, Martin shows that at the heart of ecological restoration’s history lie shifting understandings of what constitutes “wildness” and frequent debates around what should be the baseline against which an ecosystem’s current health is measured.

A photograph of a "government buffalo herd" in Yellowstone National Park from the American Bison Society's 1907 Annual Report. — *A photograph of a “government buffalo herd” in Yellowstone National Park from the American Bison Society’s 1907 Annual Report. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Martin’s ability to construct narratives from primary sources and, in the process, chart an intellectual, political, and cultural history of ecological restoration is extremely impressive. However, as is typically the case with histories that cover long lengths of time, any one of her chapters feels like it could be expanded into its own book. Furthermore, in limiting its scope to the United States during the 20th century, Martin’s work begs the question of whether the history of ecological restoration can be geographically and temporally broadened beyond one country.

Finally, Martin’s narrative focuses exclusively on the knowledge and actions of an extremely limited number of actors and official institutions. Given her concern with environmental justice and the deleterious effects that restoration efforts have had on oppressed groups, it is curious that Martin does not devote more space to recovering their voices. Ultimately, the book invites a richer genealogy of the knowledge and experiences that fed and were informed by the development of ecological restoration.

Such comments are, however, not meant to detract from the value of Martin’s work. Her book adeptly situates, both politically and culturally, the development of ecological restoration in the United States during the 20th century. Wild by Design constitutes a well-crafted, clearly written work defined by sharp analysis. As such, it is suited to everyone from informed general readers to specialists in environmental history and the history of science.

Gaal Almor is a 2nd-year PhD student in the History department at UT Austin. His research centers on questions of legal rights and epistemology in the early modern Atlantic.

Review of After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe by Lydia Barnett (2019)

Lydia Barnett’s first book, After the Flood, examines how early modern Europeans sought to understand the relationship between human activity, morality, and the environment through narratives of Noah’s flood. Barnett frames her post-Medieval history through the modern concept of an Anthropocene, or an era in which humans are a dominant influence on the environment. Although this term was coined to describe how man-made greenhouse gases have altered the planet since the Industrial Revolution, Barnett’s anachronous use of the term reveals a previously unexplored throughline in environmental history.

As a historian of science and religion, Barnett analyzes European texts from the 1570s to 1720s to expand upon two decades of scholarship on the advent of environmental consciousness in Europe and the relationship between religious and scientific knowledge. She contributes to academic conversations on the advent of the Anthropocene, arguing that a theological concept of man’s impact on nature and climate preceded the geological concept proposed in the twentieth century. Barnett also engages with foundational texts on the role of scale in environmental history—exploring early modern ideas of the flood on local, national, transnational, and global scales. Barnett argues that the search for evidence of a universal flood collapsed early modern Europeans’ conceptions of time and space and reflects prominent scholars’ acknowledgment of the human capacity “to instigate geologic change on human timescale” (21).

In the first chapter, Barnett explores different dimensions of gender in early modern Europeans’ conceptions of the biblical flood. Scholars of this time would often cite the flood as the end of the Edenic period of Earth, during which men were giants who lived for hundreds of years and fathered many children. Thus, the flood epitomizes the era’s focus on the effects of sin on male bodies and masculinity. Barnett highlights the rather obscure work of Camilla Erculiani, the only woman known to have published a text on natural philosophy in Renaissance Italy. A Paduan philosopher and apothecary, Erculiani conceived of both supernatural and natural explanations of the biblical flood and suggested that the disaster’s moral implications apply only to men. Barnett argues that, paradoxically, Erculiani’s gender allowed her to voice controversial opinions about sacred texts during a time of religious persecution but also limited her ability to fully engage in European scientific communities.

Next, Barnett investigates the motivations behind the desire to globalize the flood—both in a geographical and a moral sense—as part of the European imperial project and Christian evangelism. Early modern Europeans fixated on reconciling a universal flood narrative with a perception of their own moral and racial superiority. Efforts to collect fossil evidence of a universal flood provided both Protestant and Catholic scholars a mode of participating in a diverse (though primarily European) exchange of fossils across the Republic of Letters, a transnational community of intellectuals. Barnett’s synthesis of scholarship on the Republic of Letters, the biblical flood, and European environmental consciousness demonstrates a unique approach, as it falls somewhere between environmental history and the history of knowledge.

Deluge (anonymous, after Hans Bol, 1579), a print from an illustrated sixteenth-century Bible. Source: Rijksmuseum

Finally, the end of After the Flood returns full circle to Italy—where Erculiani was one of the first scholars to merge natural and supernatural explanations of the flood—to describe how scientist Antonio Vallisneri combined theories from Swiss Protestants and Italian Catholics to challenge English scholars and deemphasize a natural explanation for the biblical flood.

An expert of early modern European history, Barnett deftly weaves different European narratives of Noah’s Flood together over the span of a century and a half. Although beyond the scope of this text, Barnett’s analysis would benefit from a contextualization of the ways in which other forms of Christianity across the globe—such as the Egyptian Coptic Church and Ethiopian Orthodox Church—and other Abrahamic religions depicted Noah’s flood around the same time. Contrasting flood narratives between European and African Christians would yield more nuanced insights into Protestant and Catholic Europeans’ motivations for debating the scale and significance of the biblical flood, which Barnett herself acknowledges in her introduction. Furthermore, Barnett sometimes sacrifices broader accessibility of her book in favor of obscure Latin words and religious terms, potentially excluding readers less familiar with early modern Europe and Christianity. But overall, she has crafted a sophisticated argument with highly readable prose. After the Flood has wide appeal to historians and graduate students from different fields—such as geography, ecology, theology, gender studies—and deftly explores the intersection of these different disciplines.

Emily Cantwell is a Master’s in Global Policy Studies Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Review of The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (2002) by Conevery Bolton Valencius

banner image for Review of The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (2002) by Conevery Bolton Valencius

Both detailed environmental and medical histories of the Antebellum South are rare. Works that combine the two even more so. In The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land, Conevery Bolton Valencius does just that. She argues that 19th-century American settlers saw an important relationship between the “health” of the landscape they were settling and that of their own bodies. She asserts that most histories of Western expansion have overlooked this dimension of the Antebellum settler mentality, and in doing so have not accurately represented the thoughts and practices of the time.

White settlers in the Antebellum South saw the human body and the natural environment as connected, having similar “balances,” and undergoing similar processes. Naturally, this changed the way settlers viewed and used the land. They anthropomorphized landscapes, ascribing levels of “health” to the land, airs, and waters of their environments. Much of the Antebellum settlers’ logic about the health of landscapes mirrored the logic of their medical studies and practices. Stagnant water and air were seen as inherently sickly, just as blockages or a perceived lack of flow of fluid in the body was. Understanding this association between the way Antebellum settlers perceived human biology on the one hand and environmental landscapes and processes on the other provides valuable insight into patterns of medicinal practice, land use, and natural resource extraction during the period of American westward expansion.

Valencius’ thoughtfully constructed narrative highlights the extent to which white settlers and the enslaved Black populations they forcibly transported were vulnerable to environmental factors when migrating west in the Antebellum period. She describes in detail the difficulties settlers encountered during the initial period of “seasoning” or acclimation to the “foreign” new landscapes, climates, and illnesses of the Mississippi Valley and the western U. S. While they were armed with preventative measures and remedies for diseases, settlers commonly understood that their lives were ultimately at the mercy of the natural world. Additionally, settlers believed the process of clearing and cultivating land exposed them to the miasmas supposedly contained within natural environments. Migrants did not exercise full control over preventing and healing disease or altering the landscape, making colonization of new environments especially daunting.

In writing this history, Valencius diverges from the triumphant progress narratives often associated with the history of American westward expansion. She does not do so to downplay the centuries of horrific violence committed by European settlers against Black and Indigenous populations. Rather, this history is meant to disrupt the idea that white settlers were all-powerful and to represent their thoughts and fears of migrating west with more accuracy and nuance. Part of the explanation for the distinctiveness of Valencius’ Western expansion narrative lies in its unusual and diverse primary sources. Valencia does not rely solely on reports from white men in positions of power, such as political or military figures, who often had a vested interest in promoting “triumphant” frontier narratives. Instead, she analyzes the personal writings of white settlers through letters, diaries, and stories. She also makes use of medical exam documents produced by practitioners of “medical geography” and “Southern medicine,” many of whom were not formally educated doctors. Additionally, by incorporating the stories of enslaved people like Solomon Northup, as well as carefully engaging with the interviews of formerly enslaved people, Valencius highlights how Black populations conceptualized and experienced human and environmental health differently than their white oppressors.

A panel (Section 11) from John Egan's Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley (ca. 1850) — *A panel (Section 11) from John Egan’s* Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley *(ca. 1850). Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Valencius also outlines the connections between nineteenth-century American medical geography and the formal political process of settling, using, and acquiring land. She argues that coming to know a place by observing weather patterns, classifying natural resources, and charting areas with higher risk of illness contributed to the physical process of western expansion and settlement. These documents provided vital information about new territories that assisted military and economic operations and influenced the migrations of other white settlers. After all, as Valencius notes, “ambitious families moved to healthy places, not sickly ones” (6). Additionally, she describes how at times the “health” of landscapes was not only related to the perceived risks of illness but was closer to a description of the discomfort settlers felt in such an unfamiliar landscape. In labeling environments as unhealthy, or even “wild” or “savage,” settlers expressed an innate desire to “improve upon” new territory. “Improving” or “taming” the landscape, Valencius shows, contributed to a connection between farming and virtue, and almost always involved some form of environmental destruction.

The Health of the Country reveals that the medical and environmental histories of the Antebellum South are inseparable. Moreover, it provides important context to the political and cultural history of the same period. Valencius urges readers to look beyond present-day distinctions between physical health, environmental conditions, and nation-building imperatives in order to better understand the language and experiences of migrants in the expanding American west. Her book pushes us to understand Antebellum medical and environmental histories as not only interconnected with each other, but also as deeply linked to the politics of colonialism and expansion.

Francis Russell is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. They study the social and environmental resilience and vulnerability of coffee farmers in Puerto Rico. In their work, Francis uses both quantitative geospatial and qualitative ethnographic analyses.

Review of The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World (2020)

Most of us prefer to avoid insects. A bee, a cockroach, or a fat yellowish worm confront us with nature’s “ugliness” and present a disconcerting threat to our modern, comfortable being. Perhaps even less appealing than meeting these weirdly shaped creatures is the thought of reading about them. And yet, despite this instinctive response, Edward Melillo’s The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World demonstrates that the same very creatures that we try so hard to avoid are the ones that enabled this comfort to begin with.

book cover for The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World

The book accounts for the shared history of people and insects in the last three millennia and is divided into two parts. Part one, made of five chapters, explores the interactions of people with insects through three main perspectives. The first chapter covers some main preconceptions and prejudices about bugs, and how these became a part of contemporary culture. Chapters two to four follow three main insect-related commodities – shellac, silk, and cochineal. These are, in my opinion, the best sections of Melillo’s current project, as they exemplify the capacity of transnational history to help understand the modern world. Chapter five covers the rise of “the synthetic age,” and focuses mainly on the environmental impact of the post-WWII synthetic boom. Part two contains two chapters about the centrality of insects to the scientific discoveries of (to name a few) Thomas Hunt Morgan, Charles Henry Turner, and Karl von Frisch. The final chapter stands as a delicacy of its own and covers the history and future of eating insects.

Melillo’s book is an example of an academic work worth reading for both its substance and style. Students of commodity history, history of science and technology, environmental historians, and curious readers alike will find this work both helpful and inspiring. Through the narrow prism of a bug’s viewpoint, Melillo tackles important questions about the biases of contemporary culture, the inherent contradictions of modernity, tensions between scientific and local knowledge systems, and the future of our decaying plant. Especially impressive are his arguments about the centrality of non-humans to the history of our species. He is careful enough not to call the symbiotic relations between humans and insects coevolution – as our shared history modified neither our nor our six-legged cousins’ genetics. Instead, Melillo proves once and again how the things we take for granted as the result of human ingenuity owe, in reality, a great debt to these creatures.

Melillo’s style appeals to both the academic and the general readership. His previous book – Strangers on Familiar Soil – explored how California and Chile coevolved through mutual displacement, exchange, and influence of people, commodities, and plants since the 18^th century. Melillo’s model of shifting back and forth between these two locations inspired scholars to think about cross-regional histories that, until then, remained obscured.

His current book project raises a new challenge – how to write about people and insects, two hyper-globalized creatures that are not bound to a specific location? Melillo’s solution is taken from the rich literature on commodities that might be summarized in one phrase: follow the thing itself. He refuses to bound himself to a specific place and time and takes the readers on a fascinating journey that benefits from an impressive array of historical cases. And so, we get to learn about insects as symbols of beauty in Chinese folklore, their importance to American parachute-making before WWII, and how they are used as social analogies in French literature. Such rich source material and methodological imagination will certainly inspire students and scholars to pursue global and trans-regional history. At the same time, Melillo’s elegant style and clear writing create a smooth narrative from what could have been a dreadful and disorienting collection of various histories. Furthermore, Melillo cleverly avoids convoluted language, historiographical debates, and exhausting footnotes, making the book an accessible read for non-academic curious readers.

“One striking characteristic of commodity history…” Bruce Robbins notes, “is a certain overkill in their subtitles.” And indeed Melillo cleverly never argues that insects were the ones who “made the modern world.” Rather, he confronts his readers with a strong statement – that what we think of as fundamentally modern, and therefore inherently human-centric, is the result of millennia-long inspiration from, cooperation with, and fight against insects. Our music, art, clothes, food, and science were never always exclusively ours, for we owe nature and its tiny beings a huge debt. The book concludes with a critique of another key feature of modernity: rather than accepting the naïve belief that somehow people will find a way to leave nature behind, we should resume one of our longest human traditions – listening to insects.

Atar David is a Ph.D. student in the History department at UT Austin, interested in the social, economic, and environmental history of the modern Middle East, with special attention to agricultural policies, commodities, knowledge production, and food provision policies. He is currently working on the circulation of agricultural commodities and their cultural networks throughout and beyond the eastern Mediterranean during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Together with Raymond Hyser, Atar founded the “Material History Workshop” – a bi-monthly graduate workshop centered around material culture. You can read more about the workshop here: https://notevenpast.org/uts-material-history-workshop/

Preservation and Decay as Public History at the Moon-Randolph Homestead

By Gwendolyn Lockman

Past the local dump and the interstate, and separated by foothills from the nearby historic neighborhoods of Missoula, Montana, the Moon-Randolph Homestead can be found, steeling itself against the modern world but not quite stuck in the past. It is an unusual historical site where the ecological and the human, and the past and the present melt into one another.

Figure 1: Entrance gate for the Moon Randolph Homestead Site, June 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

Before U.S. westward expansion and federal homesteading efforts, Indigenous people traversed the North Hills of Missoula on the Trail to the Buffalo. They passed through nearby Hell Gate Canyon, named both for the cold, rough waters of the river and for the ambushes between tribes that occurred at the canyon. Once the U.S. seized the land in the late nineteenth century, homesteaders in the Missoula valley tried to raise subsistence crops and livestock there. These small parcels of land had little of the potential for profit that large, thousand-plus acre ranches enjoyed.

Ray and Luella Moon came to Missoula from Minnesota staking their homestead claim in 1889. They came to “prove up,” sell the land, and move on. Ray Moon sold his land to his relatives, George and Helen Moon, the same day he acquired the deed to the property in 1894. Then Ray and Luella left Missoula. George and Helen Moon had moved to Seattle by 1907. William and Emma Randolph came to Missoula from White Sulphur Springs, Montana to buy a farm so Emma could raise chickens and get William to settle down. The Randolphs tracked down the Moons in Seattle and wrote to them to purchase the land.[1]

William and Emma lived the rest of their lives in Missoula, alternating between the homestead, which they called the Randolph Ranch, and a home in town. They raised their three sons there and often let extended family stay with them for long stretches of time. William and Emma passed away in 1956 within months of each other. Their youngest son, Bill, continued living at ranch until his death in 1995. In 1992, Bill put a conservation easement on his land, which protected it from development after his death. The City of Missoula purchased the nearly 470 acres in 1997 and created the North Hills open space and trail system. Of those acres, 13 became the Moon-Randolph Homestead site. The North Missoula Community Development Corporation, a local nonprofit, created the Hill and Homestead Preservation Commission in 1998 to advocate for the Moon-Randolph Homestead. [2]

Figure 2: Panorama of the Moon Randolph Homestead Site from the Barn looking South and West, August 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

In 1998, the city began a program to house caretakers on site to oversee the Moon-Randolph Homestead, raise livestock, host events, and interface with the public. The Department of Interior listed Moon-Randolph on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. It is open to the public on Saturdays from 11 am to 5 pm, May through October, and is used by several groups during the week, including the Montana Conservation Corps, Opportunity Resource, Youth Homes, and Parks and Recreation Homestead Camps.[3] Dr. Caitlin DeSilvey, Associate Professor of cultural geography at the University of Exeter, was the first caretaker for the Moon-Randolph Homestead. She wrote her dissertation about her work in the late 1990s and early 2000s cataloging the Randolphs’ belongings.[4] DeSilvey’s scholarship contemplates the role of decay in heritage sites. She advocates for what she calls “encounter[s] with the debris of history,” allowing deterioration to proceed as a mode of historic interpretation.[5] Her approach to Moon-Randolph was to interfere as little as possible with anything on site. Though DeSilvey catalogued all of the artifacts and documents at Moon-Randolph, the decision to curate decay combined with a lack of dedicated city resources left much of what was on site to erode away or be eaten by the mice that inhabit the site.

Figure 3: Photos of decay at the Moon Randolph Homestead Site, June 2019. Photos by Gwen Lockman.

DeSilvey acknowledged in her dissertation the virtual impossibility that the city-managed property be allowed to totally decay. She suggested that, “Future management of the site will have to find a compromise between a celebration of entropic heritage and the conservation of material traces.”[6] As an intern for the City of Missoula Historic Preservation Office and Department of Parks and Recreation, the priority for my summer job at the Homestead was to help the preservation and interpretations methods for the site to evolve.

Figure 4: Photo of winch, still standing after original Mining Shed Collapse in 2014. Photo from Moon Randolph Homestead/City of Missoula.

My duties included the curation of the reconstructed Mining Shed. The Mining Shed had been entirely reconstructed, out of both new and salvaged materials, after collapsing in 2014, and exists in direct contradiction with the decay at the Homestead. The original Mining Shed stood from around 1900 until its collapse in 2014. It sheltered a hoist for the small-scale coal mining operation that William Randolph maintained on his land. Coal mining was not an especially profitable venture in Missoula, though at least one company, Hell Gate Coal, successfully mined the North Hills in the early 1900s. The naming of the Coal Mine Road, which led to the family ranches of the North Hills, Randolphs’ included, suggests Missoulians knew the area to bear coal. One must still use Coal Mine Road to get to Moon-Randolph and its neighbors, the city dump included.[7] Coal at the Homestead was likely found by George Moon, if not Ray Moon. Mining was a special interest for William Randolph, who was more of a dreamer and tinkerer than a farmer. The Randolphs’ quaintly named “Little Phoebe” mine produced low-grade coal, mostly traded with neighbors or used at home. They hired men to work in the mine, signaling either some profit or William’s financial dedication to his side projects. Robert, the middle Randolph son, wrote about the mine in his boyhood diary during the winter of 1916-1917. The Randolphs used coal from Little Phoebe until the 1930s, then let it fill with water to use to irrigate the pasture. In 1937, Robert wrote from Spokane, Washington to ask his father if he had given the coal’s use any further thought. William converted the building into a workshop but worked around the hoist, which still stands in its original place. Snow in the winter of 2014 caused the original building’s collapse. City and private crews completed the reconstruction in 2018. The new building is slightly larger than the original structure but is a close reproduction of the old shed.[8]

Figure 5: Photo of reconstructed Mining Shed, July 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

My curation of the Mining Shed sought to more formally interpret the space while maintaining the Homestead as a place both lost to time and still writing its history. The floor space must be kept free so that the building can be used as a gathering space in inclement weather. It is the safest and largest covered space on site, which will be slow to change, because historic site classification restrictions prohibit new permanent foundation construction. The Mining Shed interpretation does not recreate a specific year of its lifespan but instead illustrates the several layers of its use over time and restoration. We arranged artifacts from mining and shop work. We integrated elements of the original building into the structure of the new building. This protects the intact remains of the old shed and makes the reconstruction apparent through comparison. I wrote limited interpretative signage and selected for display original documents from the Moon Cabin archive related to William Randolph’s mining ventures away from the Homestead.

One of my goals for the Mining Shed was to connect the Homestead to Montana’s economic history from statehood in 1889 through the post-war era. The Moon-Randolph history connects Missoula’s river, trade, agriculture, timber, mining, and railroad economy and history. William Randolph’s investments and work in Montana and beyond call attention to the several ways he sought to make money outside of agriculture. His ventures included work for Standard Brick Company in Missoula, management of the Sibley timber property in Lolo, Montana, and attempts at placer mining in the Nine Mile Valley east of Missoula. Presenting this history highlights piecemeal economic survival in Montana prior to the 1960s and the survival of the Randolphs’ story through material and documentary evidence.

Figure 6 Photo of “Little Phoebe” Mining Adit, June 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

These changes marked a shift toward formal curation at Moon-Randolph. However, we sought to maintain “The Spirit of the Homestead,” a term defined in the Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update for 2015-2024. The Spirit of the Homestead aims to maintain Moon-Randolph as “a living place, where historic activities continue and new uses are established, and a place where natural processes of aging and ecological renewal can be appreciated.”[9] The idea of “living history” at the site is not produced as reenactment or period restoration. Rather, the Homestead is kept “alive.” Trees overtake metal refuse from rusty, repurposed farm equipment. There are mice, chipmunks, rabbits, songbirds, hawks, snakes, deer, and the occasional bear. Buildings collapse. Caretakers raise pigs and chickens, haul non-potable water for irrigation from a cistern, and tend to a 130-year-old orchard that still produces cider apples. There is almost no signage and very little written interpretation. The site is left to speak for itself, otherwise visitors must speak to a caretaker or volunteer to ask questions, enjoy a tour, or help with chores.

Figure 7: Photo of Summer 2019 curation in the Mining Shed, August 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

And speak for itself it does: when I returned to the Homestead in May 2020 for a socially distanced excursion, the mining shed had new tenants. Magpies built their winter nests in the rafters of the reconstructed shed. Springtime bunnies darted in and out of the shed. Their curation enhanced ours. As much as there is curated decay at the site, there, too, is resplendent life. History and the present, decay, life, and curation, negotiate their coexistence in the North Hills of Missoula.

Figure 8: Photo of magpie nest in the Moon Randolph Homestead Mining Shed, May 2020. Photo by Caroline Stephens, Moon Randolph Homestead.

[1] DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; Montana Association of Land Trusts, “About Conservation Easements,” http://www.montanalandtrusts.org/conservationeasements/; North Missoula Community Development Corporation, “Moon Randolph Homestead,” http://www.nmcdc.org/programs/moon-randolph-homestead/; United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Service, National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010, https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/presmonth/2010/Moon-RandolphRanch.pdf; “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 2-5.

[2] Caitlin DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties: a History of a Montana Homestead, second edition (Missoula, MT: Hill and Homestead Preservation Commission, 2002); Caitlin DeSilvey, Salvage Rites: Making Memory on a Montana Homestead, doctoral dissertation, Open University (2003); Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; City of Missoula, North Missoula Community Development Corporation, and Five Valleys Land Trust, “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” Final, Adopted by Missoula City Council May 4, 2015, 7, https://www.ci.missoula.mt.us/DocumentCenter/View/31846/MoonRandolphHomestead_StrategicPlan_2015?bidId=.

[3] Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; North Missoula Community Development Corporation, “Moon Randolph Homestead,” http://www.nmcdc.org/programs/moon-randolph-homestead/; United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Service, National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010, https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/presmonth/2010/Moon-RandolphRanch.pdf; Moon-Randolph Homestead, “Welcome,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/.

[4] University of Exeter, “Professor Caitlin DeSilvey,” College of Life and Environmental Sciences, Geography Department, http://geography.exeter.ac.uk/staff/index.php?web_id=Caitlin_Desilvey; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 4-5.

[5] DeSilvey, Salvage Rites, 10.

[6] DeSilvey, Salvage Rites, 176.

[7] City of Missoula, Historic Preservation Office, Moon-Randolph Homestead Records; DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010; J.T. Pardee, “Coal in the Tertiary Lake Beds of Southwestern Montana,” Contributions to Economic Geology, Part II (1911);

[8] DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010; Robert Randolph, Diary, 1916-1917, Moon-Randolph Archive; City of Missoula, Historic Preservation Office, Moon-Randolph Homestead Records.

[9] “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 7.

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