Environmental History Archives

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

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.

15 Minute History – Climate and Environmental History in Context

Guests: Megan Raby, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin & Erika Bsumek, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin

How do historians teach Environmental History in an age where stories of climate change and catastrophe fill the headlines? Megan Raby and Erika Bsumek, both History Professors and Environmental Historians discuss what drew them to the field, how they talk about environmental history with their students, and the 2021 Institute for Historical Studies Conference, “Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented” (April 22-23). “Among many other questions, the conference will ask: Can history offer an alternative to visions of the future that appear to be determined by prevailing climate models, and help provide us with new ways of understanding human agency?”

Episode 131: Climate and Environmental History in Context

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Mentioned in today’s episode:

Slavery in Early Austin: The Stringer’s Hotel and Urban Slavery

by Clifton Sorrell III

On the eve of the Civil War, an advertisement appeared in the Texas Almanac announcing the sale of five enslaved people at the Stringer’s Hotel.

“Negroes For Sale––I will offer for sale, in the city of Austin, before the Stringer’s Hotel, on the 1st day of January next, to the highest bidder, in Confederate or State Treasury Notes, the following lot of likely Negroes, to wit. Three Negro Girls and two Boys, ages ranging from 15 to 16 years. The title to said Negroes is indisputable” —The Texas Almanac, Austin December 27th, 1862

Image of the cover of The Texas Almanac for 1862 — via Portal for Texas History

This hotel was one of the many businesses in Austin using enslaved labor, a commonplace practice that extended to every part of Texas. However, urban slavery in Austin differed substantially from slavery on the vast plantations that stretched across Texas’ rural geography. Unlike rural planters, urban slaveholders were largely merchants, businessmen, tradesmen, artisans, and professionals. The urban status of these slaveholders in Austin meant that enslaved people performed a wide variety of tasks, making them highly mobile and multi-occupational. Austin property holders, proprietors, and city planners built enslaved labor not only into the city’s economy, but into its very physical space to meet local needs. This examination of the Stringer’s Hotel provides a brief window for looking into Austin’s history of slavery and perhaps the history of enslaved people in the urban context.

Close-up image of the 1885 Sanborn Maps of Austin showing the map's title and the eastern part of Austin — Sanborn Maps of Austin, 1885 (via Library of Congress)

Close-up image of the 1885 Sanborn Maps of Austin showing the blocks around the Avenue Hotel — Sanborn Maps of Austin, 1885 (via Library of Congress)

On September 3, 1850, Swante Magnus Swenson purchased a city lot in Austin. In 1854, he built the Swenson Building on Congress Avenue where the current Piedmont Hotel stands today. Inside the building, on the first floor, were a drug store, a general goods store, a hardware store, and a grocery store; a hotel, (named the Avenue Hotel but locally known as the Stringer’s Hotel) was located on the upper two levels of the building. The Travis County Deeds Records show that sometime later, Swenson leased the hotel to a John Stringer, giving the hotel its name “the Stringer’s Hotel.” An 1885 Austin city Sanborn map of the Swenson Building shows that Swenson had a room built for “servants” in the hotel portion of the building. There is no documentation detailing whether enslaved people stayed in that room since the Sanborn map is dated twenty years after the Civil War. However, an 1889 Sanborn map shows that Swenson had the Stringer’s Hotel remodeled to remove the room for “servants,” which suggests that enslaved people originally potentially stayed there, given that “servant” and “dependency” were variant terms used for “slave” in urban spaces. The National Register of Historic Places Inventory notes that businesses on Congress Avenue did not have the financial capacity to maintain, let alone remodel, their properties right after the Civil War. This explains the twenty-year delay to remove the said “servants” room, no longer utilized by enslaved people in the 1880s. Further evidence also shows that Swenson himself had strong ties to slavery in Texas.

S.M. Svensson (via Wikipedia)

S. M Swenson was born in Sweden and came to New York as an immigrant in 1836 at the age of twenty. A few years after his arrival, Swenson worked as a mercantile trader. Through his trade dealings in the south, he befriended a slaveholder by the name of George Long, who then hired Swenson to work at his newly relocated plantation in Texas. A year later, when Long died due to poor health, Swenson married his widow, who then too died of tuberculosis three years later. By 1843, Swenson became a full-scale slaveholder in Texas through inheriting his now-deceased wife’s plantation. In 1848, he enlarged his property holdings by purchasing the adjoining plantation and expanding his cotton crop. In 1850, along with purchasing 182 acres a few miles outside of Austin, he bought the lot on Congress Avenue and constructed the Swenson Building and inside, the Stringer’s Hotel.

There are no records that detail the lives of enslaved people at the Stringer’s Hotel but other sources show that slaveholders expected slaves to fill a variety of roles in running their establishments on Congress Avenue. In his book, a Journey Through Texas, Frederick Olmstead describes his encounter with an enslaved woman who was responsible for tending to the hotel’s patrons along with upkeep and building maintenance. These slaves were also responsible for running errands and transporting goods. Many slaves also lived and traveled to and from homes and communities that formed on the outskirts of town. Traveling to and from their labor obligations or social engagements in their free time illuminates the various networks of movement created by the enslaved. Hence, given their relative independence, expectations, and responsibilities, it is not impossible to imagine enslaved people taking on leading roles in running the Stringer’s Hotel and other establishments in Austin.

Black and white photograph of the Avenue Hotel — Avenue Hotel. Photograph, University of North Texas Libraries (via The Portal to Texas History)

The analysis of the Stringer’s Hotel through Sanborn maps and other qualitative sources illuminates the roles and occupations of enslaved people in Austin’s urban space. Unlike the enslaved people confined to the private domain of plantation estates, urban slaves worked in spaces with considerable mobility, meeting the needs of their owners and to fulfill their own social lives. Perhaps mapping the movement of enslaved people in this way, could allow for further interpretations of possible realities and lived experiences of enslaved people that archival texts obscure and make difficult to see.

Sources

“Negroes for Sale.” The Texas Almanac. December 27, 1862, 1 edition, sec. 34.
“Texas General Land Office Land Grant Database”, Digital Images, Texas General Land Office, Entry for Swenson, S M, Austin City Lots, Travis Co., TX, Patent no 429, vol.1
“Austin 1885 Sheet 5,” Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, Map Collection, Perry-Castañeda Library, Austin, Texas.
Olmsted, Frederick Law. A Journey through Texas: or, A Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989: 50;
Austin City Sanborn Map, 1885;
Bullock Hotel. Photograph, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, accessed December 3, 2019

Additional Readings

“Bullock House.” The Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association, June 12, 2010.
Gail Swenson. “S. M. Swenson and the Development of the SMS Ranches,” M.A. thesis, University of Texas, (1960).
Gage, Larry Jay. “The City of Austin on the Eve of the Civil War.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 63, no. 3 (1960).
Kenneth Hafertepe. “Urban Sites of Slavery in Antebellum Texas” in Slavery in the City, Edited by Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, University of Virginia Press. (2017)
Jason A. Gillmer. Slavery and Freedom in Texas: Stories from the Courtroom, 1821-1871. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, (2017)

You might also like:
Documenting Slavery in East Texas: Transcripts from Monte Verdi
Slavery World Wide: Collected Works from Not Even Past
Love in the Time of Texas Slavery

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.

IHS Talk: “Climate and Soil: An Environmental History of the Maya” by Timothy Beach, University of Texas (Reclaiming the Pre-Modern Past)

The Late Holocene history of the ancient Maya world provides a microcosm of the Early Anthropocene. Much of the region today is tropical forest or recently deforested, but from 3,000 to 400 years ago Maya cities, farms, roads, reservoirs, and fields altered most of this region. Although a literate society, the written record provides little for environmental history; thus we can turn to climate and soil records. Climate played some role in periods of instability and stability and perhaps the Maya themselves caused some climate change. Indeed, ancient Maya climate change provides our clearest comparison with the modern Anthropocene because the ancient Maya also experienced sea level rise and climate drying like the contemporary world. But we are still—and may always be— uncertain about attribution of climate change to Maya history because of the imperfections in proxy data and the many unknowns about Maya adaptation and unrelated cultural changes. Soil tells us much more than climate about the Maya. The soil record from geoscience and archaeology provides direct evidence of human responses or lack of responses at times that correlate with other changes. Some responses of Maya Civilization that show up in soil studies were positive long-term impacts on the built environment, like wetland field systems, terraces, and other practices that enriched soils and ecosystems. The soil also indicates negative impacts like erosion and eutrophication, both playing out again today. But the Maya Classical period—with its peak human population and land use intensity— experienced less soil erosion, perhaps due to soil conservation. All of this study is still in its infancy because of the proliferation of lidar imagery that is providing a much better footprint of the impacts and infrastructure of the ancient Maya on their tropical forest.

Dr. Timothy Beach, holds a C.B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair and directs the Beach-Butzer Soils and Geoarchaeology Lab in Geography at the University of Texas at Austin. For twenty-one years, he taught at Georgetown University, where he held the Cinco Hermanos Chair and was Professor of Geography and Geoscience and Director of the Science, Technology, and International Affairs and Environmental Studies Programs. He has conducted field research on soils, geomorphology, paleoecology, wetlands, and geoarchaeology in the Corn Belt of the United States, the original corn belt of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, the Mediterranean in Syria, Turkey, and Italy, and some other places. His work earned funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, USAID, The University of Texas at Austin, and Georgetown University. His field studies have been the bases for more than one hundred peer-reviewed articles and chapters and hundreds of scientific presentations around the world, including at the Vatican in 2017. Most of his publications were on long-term environmental change, soils and geomorphology, paleoclimate, and geoarchaeology in the Maya world. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and awarded Guggenheim and Dumbarton Oaks Fellowships, the G.K. Gilbert Award in Geomorphology, Georgetown University’s Distinguished Research Award in 2010, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service’s Faculty of the Year for Teaching Excellence in 2014, the Carl O Sauer Award in 2017, and the CSU Chico Alumni of the Year in 2018.

The Anthropocene and Environmental History

By Jesse Ritner

The Trinity test, a proposed starting point for the Anthropocene (via Wikipedia)

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 of scientists, who specialize in geology, climate, historical ecology, archeology, and a host of other fields, have begun to question whether or not human impacts on climate mean that we have entered a new epoch in geological time. They call this new epoch the Anthropocene.

The concept of the Anthropocene is on one level quite simple. It is based in part on the science of climate change, which has quite convincingly shown that human activity is the most important driver of global warming. However, the science itself is quite complicated. The problem is that it is impossible to study historic changes in climate in of itself. Instead, scientists use proxies, such as methane or carbon dioxide concentrations in ice cores to measure greenhouses gases, pollen and charcoal in lake cores to measure ecological change and fire frequency, deuterium isotopes to estimate temperature, and a host of other proxies to try and trace how things like greenhouses gases have increased or decreased over time. In of itself, this is fairly routine, although by no means simple, work.

Another problem is that the concept of the Anthropocene is dependent on the idea of the human species as the ultimate driver of climate change. As such, scientists often have to work with archeologists or historians to discover if there is a corollary human action that may cause the climate anomaly they discover through their proxies. Proving these correlations is quite difficult, and often involves people with a number of specialties in order to account for long lists of variables. While radioactive dust dated to 1945 has a clear human cause in the dropping of nuclear bombs, other connections are harder to prove. As scientists look further back in time for earlier and earlier human impacts thousands of years ago, historical and archeological evidence becomes scarcer, making it more difficult to correlate climate change with human action.

(For a short video on the Anthropocene click here!)

Despite an immense increase in studies over the past two decades, scientists have been slow to officially adopt the Anthropocene as a new epoch. Difficulty in determining a starting point is perhaps the most famous objection, but concerns about human agency, anthropocentrism, and the validity of the proxies have caused some scientists to question the utility of the designation.

A Depiction of Epochs and Periods as Understood Through Geological Time Scales ( via Earth Environments)

Despite debate within the scientific community, the Anthropocene as a discourse has taken on a life of its own among humanists and social scientists. Their engagements can be split into three camps: those concerned with defining the Anthropocene, those concerned with the political ramifications, and those concerned the ethical relationship between nature and humans. For instance, historian John McNeill has written about the history of the great acceleration, its human causes, and how energy systems which result in high carbon emissions became standard. Others, like Dipesh Chakrabarty (also a historian), raise questions about the implications for contemporary politics if we begin to think of humans as a species, when humans do not all have equal impacts on climate. Issues of race, class, gender, and histories of capitalism and imperialism are all at risk of being overlooked by discussions about species level solutions to Anthropocene problems. Lastly, philosophers like Donna Haraway have critiqued the anthropocentrism of the idea that humans are just now changing climate. Haraway argues for what she calls the Chthulucene, a world in which humans begin to understand themselves as a part of nature, rather than outside of it. For better or worse, the Anthropocene is now unavoidable in conversations about the environment.

For historians in particular, the Anthropocene demands an integration of climatic and ecological change with the cultural, social, and political changes historians already study. This idea is not totally new. Classic works of environmental history, such as Alfred Crosby’s Columbian Exchange and William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, both written decades before the Anthropocene existed as a concept, examine the historical effect of people on environments and the relationship between people and nature historically. But, ideas connected with the Anthropocene have caused a resurgence of historical work on the environment. Recent books such as James Scott’s Against the Grain and Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s The Shock of the Anthropocene explore how historians can contribute to discussions about the Anthropocene, both in placing its origin, in critiquing its anthropocentrism, in studying the differential impacts of humans on the environment, and in reverse, the impact of the environment on humans.

At Not Even Past, we want to help people work through these complicated questions. So here we are offering a growing list of book reviews and articles related to the environment and the Anthropocene. We hope this brief introduction, and the list below, can act as a resource for teachers looking to build curriculum on environmental histories, while also providing an easy and accessible portal for curious readers to scholarly debates regarding history and the environment.

Books on Environmental History

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, by William Cronon (1983)

Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, by Karl Jacoby (2003)

Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption & Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States by John Soluri (2005)

Fordlandia by Greg Grandin (2010)

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)

The Republic of Nature by Mark Fiege (2012)

The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2015)

City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Andrew M. Busch (2017)

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (2017)

A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles. By Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry (2018)

Articles on Environmental History

Oil and Gas Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico

Boomtown, USA: An Historical Look at Fracking

Climate Change in History

The Public Historian: Quilombola Seeds

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6nMulSoBvw&feature=youtu.be

Enclaves of Science, Outposts of Empire

Of How a Hopi Ancient Word Became a Famous Experimental Film

Big Bend – “Some sort of scenic beauty”

Naming and Picturing New World Nature

For Native Americans, Land Is More Than Just the Ground Beneath Their Feet

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

The Empire of the Dandelion: Environmental History in Al Crosby’s Footsteps

US Survey Course: The American West, Native Americans, and Environmental History

The Environment i n History & History in the Environment

Great Books and a Film on the Amazon

Episode 118: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity

Host: Christopher Rose, Department of History
Guest: Megan Raby, Department of History

Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research.

Megan Raby describes how, from these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American “tropical biologists” developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity.

The Empire of the Dandelion: Environmental History in Al Crosby’s Footsteps

Photo of Alfred Crosby (via Washington Post)

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 in my undergraduate course on Global Environmental History, but long before I had ever read that book, I had unknowingly encountered his work. That is, of course, through the concept of the “Columbian exchange”––also the title of his most influential book. By the time I went to elementary school, this once revolutionary way of framing the role of disease, crops, weeds, and domestic animals as central to world history was presented simply as common knowledge.

By putting environmental history at the center, Crosby replaced the older narrative of conquest with a narrative of biocultural encounter and exchange. Instead of a one-way process largely determined by European might, Crosby showed the importance of, on one hand, the great tragedy of virgin soil epidemics and indigenous demographic collapse and, on the other, the ongoing story of how the crops domesticated by the indigenous peoples of the Americas remade the landscapes and cultures of the rest of the world.

In many ways, I think we take this narrative shift for granted today. But to be taken for granted in this way is, I think, a major accomplishment for any historian…perhaps especially for an environmental historian. Even as the field continues to be one of the most rapidly growing subfields of history, many environmental historians still fear that their work remains on the fringes. Is environmental history still seen as a novelty or fad? Do our colleagues take the field seriously enough, say, to give pigs and dandelions a key place in a survey course on U.S. or world history?

Al Crosby’s feat is all the more impressive because he was essentially writing “environmental history” before there was such a thing. In interviews, he often pointed out that half a dozen presses rejected The Columbian Exchange before it finally got published in 1972––its biological perspective on European contact with the Americas was seen as just too arcane of a subject.

But only a few years later Crosby could be counted among the first generation of self-described environmental historians. Crosby was one of the founding members of the American Society for Environmental History, for example, when it was founded in 1977. There was now a new group of scholars who insisted on taking nature seriously as an actor in human history––focusing not on military conquests or presidential politics, but rather on how humans and nature have fundamentally shaped and reshaped each other.

Crosby was no longer alone, but he still stood out. And the ways in which he stood out reveal the lasting impact and relevance of his contributions.

For one thing, it is important to note that the other major founders of environmental history were, for the most part, focused on the United States and especially U.S. Western history. In contrast, Crosby’s work was truly global in scope. Rather than the one-way story of European expansion, The Columbian Exchange shows us New World crops remaking Europe, Africa, and Asia. And with Ecological Imperialism, he tested his thesis about the interplay of ecology and empire not just in the Americas, but with cases everywhere from the Canary Islands to Iceland and New Zealand. In fact, in all his books––on everything from the rise of quantification to the history of energy––Crosby explored truly global exchanges and transformations.

Some of the most groundbreaking work in transnational African and Latin American environmental history in the 1990s and 2000s––works that are themselves now classics––were in fact directly inspired by aspects of Crosby’s arguments. Elinore Melville explored the process of ecological imperialism beyond the temperate zone, by following Spanish sheep into sixteenth-century Mexico. James McCann showed how New World maize became an African staple, adapted to local cultures and climates. Judith Carney argued that rice culture in the Americas took more than just the movement of seeds; its success was dependent on the enslaved Africans who worked in the rice fields and their agricultural experiences and knowledge. These works took the interconnections between biology and cultural knowledge that Crosby himself emphasized, but pushed them into new contexts and new corners of the world.

With the sole exception of his book on the 1918 flu pandemic, Crosby’s temporal scale was as grand as his geographical scope. Recently, there has been a surge of self-described “Big Histories” or “Deep Histories” that view human history and the present through the lens of evolution, neuroscience, or even cosmology.

Crosby was doing “Big” and “Deep” history well before the arrival of these studies. The full title of Ecological Imperialism notes that it starts in 900, but in fact, its explanatory frame extends back beyond the Norse expansion into the North Atlantic. It begins 200 million years ago, with the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea, and, hence, the beginning of the evolution of quite distinct biogeographic realms in the Old and New Worlds.

This event was cataclysmic because it brought human and geological history into the same frame, in Crosby’s words:

“The seams of Pangaea were clos[ed], drawn together by the sailmaker’s needle. Chickens met kiwis, cattle met kangaroos, Irish met potatoes, Comanches met horses, Incas met smallpox––all for the first time.” (131)

This, Crosby explains––along with the penchant of Old World humans for living at close quarters with domesticated animals––was the ultimate cause of that immunological difference that made the Columbian exchange so unequal and allowed the empires of Europe their sweeping success in lands with similar climates.

Crosby brought in Pangea and the Paleolithic, but unlike some “Big Histories,” he was not trying to write a history of everything. Nor, I think, did he reduce history to geological and biological science. The scope, scale, and interdisciplinary nature of his work flowed necessarily from the kinds of questions he asked. These were indeed big questions, and also fundamentally historical questions––questions about human agency, about global inequalities in power, and about the roots of global imperialism.

At a time when others might attribute the spread of European empire to “their superiority in arms, organization and fanaticism,” Crosby had the audacity to ask, in the Prologue of Ecological Imperialism, “but what in heaven’s name is the reason that the sun never sets on the empire of the dandelion?” (7)

In the years since, authors like Charles Mann and Jared Diamond have sold many books repeating or updating aspects of Crosby’s argument. Other authors have dug deeper into the theoretical frameworks he offered, building on and extending them. One example is Stuart McCook’s new work on the “neo-Columbian exchange”––by which he means a second wave of globalization of crops and plant pests since 1700, mediated by imperial scientific institutions and global corporations. Likewise, UT History PhD, Gregory Cushman, has explored the role of fertilizer in enabling a process of “neo-ecological imperialism”––the importation of nutrients and energy from far away ecosystems to prop up a new crop of colonial powers. Not coincidentally, both authors place seemingly mundane historical objects at the center of modern history––a common approach today in global histories, after Crosby’s dandelions–for McCook it is the humble cup of coffee, for Cushman it is bird poop!

In many of these direct and more subtle ways, Crosby’s influence is indelible. Crosby helped to make mosquitos and sheep a respectable topic for historians––something that might even have something to tell us about “big questions,” like the rise and fall of empires.

I really regret that I never got a chance to meet him in person. At the same time, in some ways I feel almost like I have met him because, much more than most academic writers, Crosby’s personality, his great enthusiasm for his topics, and his often wry sense of humor shine through in his writing. Crosby’s voice and approach live on as much in the expanding new scholarship of environmental history as in his own body of work––as pervasive, permanent, and familiar in the historical landscape as the plentiful dandelions that sparked his imagination.

The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2015)

By Marisol Bayona Roman

Though the authors of The Shock of the Anthropocene apply their skills as historians of science throughout, the book is far more than a straightforward history. Written at the intersection of science, history, and the broader humanities, Bonneuil and Fressoz provide well-reasoned and well-founded arguments that surgically take apart the dominant view of the Anthropocene as an epoch of human-provoked environmental crises that have only recently come to our attention, and for which scientific advances and sustainability-oriented mindsets are the only solution.

The book is divided into three parts, each oriented toward a particular goal. The first part introduces the scientific data on greenhouse gas emissions, biosphere degradation, changing biogeochemical cycles, and energy mobilization upon which the definition of the Anthropocene rely. Fressoz and Bonneuil show how the distinction between the realms of nature and culture—think, for example, of the opposition that emerges in Europeans’ quests to conquer the wilderness of the New World and impose their ways onto “savage” and “uncultured” natives in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—is no longer so clear-cut, and how placing the blame for the environmental crises of the Anthropocene on an ambiguous human whole can propagate a hegemonic narrative. These observations set up part two of the book, in which the authors reintroduce the political and break down the hegemonic qualities of the Anthropocene discourse. They show the ways in which scientific research has helped produce an undifferentiated and distanced view of the Earth and the anthropos that minimizes the key role of major nation-states in the development of today’s environmental crises, and the dangers of designating the scientist as the ultimate hero of the epoch. This completes the foundation for part three, a collection of seven histories that expose the imprecision inherent in the concept of the Anthropocene by focusing on one aspect of its development. For example, in their history of energy—the Thermocene, as they call it—the authors note how the dominant account, which asserts that the transitions from wood to coal to oil have been driven by a search for efficiency, obfuscates responsibility for the negative consequences of these decisions. Bonneuil and Fressoz demonstrate instead that the history of energy is one of successive additions (i.e. wood and coal and oil) shaped by political, military, and ideological decisions that have often gone against principles of efficiency and technological progress. The authors close this history by addressing the political on a global level, highlighting the key role of Anglophone countries such as the United States and Great Britain in the technological changes and environmental consequences of the Thermocene.

This publication is of great merit. The sheer breadth of knowledge on which the authors rely is a wonderful example of interdisciplinary research, and the clarity with which they synthesize and present the information is impressive, to say the least. However, this feat produces a dense text that limits its potential readership. The section “The discourse of a new geopower,” for example, is crucial to the transition between Part Two and Part Three because it reveals how the current “authorized narrative” of the Anthropocene represents, reproduces, and supports certain hegemonies on a global scale. But in order to follow the thread of this chapter, the reader must contend with Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower, Peder Anker’s imperial ecology, and Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere, all introduced in the span of three pages. These concepts are explained briefly and cited appropriately, but their complexity prohibits this book from being a leisurely read for those who are not already familiar with the ideas. These shortcomings aside, The Shock of the Anthropocene is a welcome and necessary read for scholars of any field concerned with the status of the concept of the Anthropocene.

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (2017)

By Steven Richter

Beginning with the title and continuing through the final pages, James C. Scott’s Against the Grain seeks to subvert the historical narrative of inevitable progress toward civilization that has been dominant for millennia. Instead of framing agriculture as a driver of enlightened civilization, he conceives of it as a social and ecological building block that spawned early states that were more coercive than civil. Scott may not have launched the first attack of this kind, but his clear prose synthesizes evidence from a broad range of disciplines to craft a well-reasoned barrage of arguments, causing irreparable damage to a foundational element of western thought – that, since the first agricultural civilizations, the organized state has brought about enlightened and morally superior society.

Beginning from the perspective of a “thin” Anthropocene, a historical approach that emphasizes the ways in which human action has shaped the environment and landscapes, Scott emphasizes the richness of social-ecological relations before organized states appeared. The more traditional “thick” Anthropocene claims the environmental impact of modern industry has so thoroughly transformed the planet that it constitutes a new geological epoch. The “thin” perspective points out that that human activity, especially ecosystem niche creations through fire, so pervaded the landscape that it is difficult to think of ancient nature as separate from human influence.

Early settled communities built around the diverse and abundant sustenance activities along rivers and wetlands slowly domesticated plants and animals millennia before states first emerged. These novel arrangements, which Scott terms the “late Neolithic multi-species resettlement camps,” constituted the core of a long, slow transition. Contrasting with the more abrupt “Neolithic Revolution,” such a transition yielded not only plants with bigger seeds and more docile animals, but also dangerous new organisms that thrived in larger communities – diseases. Only through the combination of elevated birthrates and inherited immunity in settled communities could states eventually coagulate. But in many ways, these states represented, to borrow a phrase from Chief Seattle’s 1854 speech, “the end of living and the beginning of survival.”

Scott primarily defines states through the presence of tax collection, officials, and walls, with grain serving as the keystone to the political-economic system. Predictable, transportable, and calorie-dense, grain represented a surplus that could be monitored, collected, and, crucially, controlled. Put another way, grain was the perfect resource for taxation, allowing for the emergence of a ruling class. Despite the advantages yielded by such a surplus – a large, non-agricultural workforce – grain-derived civilization remained fragile. A single bad harvest could throw an early state into disarray, and even without catastrophic floods or drought, extractive agricultural and forestry practices often led to a slower demise. When combined with this ecological instability, the laborious nature of agrarian life made it so unappealing that early states likely built walls for restriction as much as for protection.

An Ancient Egyptian Statue of Grinding Grain (via Wikimedia)

Early states had to overcome tremendous social and ecological friction, so much that they typically were short lived. Only through the control and acquisition of its primary resource – people – could early states persist. The incorporation of human assets, whether by conquest of small neighboring communities or through slave trade, invigorated early states. Such a capricious system lacks robustness, and state failure could come from without or within. Such narratives of “collapse,” as it has often been framed, should be viewed critically. Scott argues what may appear to an archeologist as the catastrophic downfall of a monumental capitol may be more accurately, though not exclusively, thought of as disassembly into decentralized, independent communities. It is crucial to keep in mind that, perhaps as late as 1600, non-state peoples constituted the vast majority of global human population. States were “small alluvial archipelagos,” surrounded by hordes of ungoverned people who provided valuable trading and military allies, at least when they weren’t raiding and pillaging.

By incorporating innovative forms of evidence, Scott illuminates a critical perspective on the origins of modern states. He should have pointed out the difficulties of life outside states to create a more balanced narrative, but this omission takes little away from the central argument. Crucially, Scott compels the reader to be cognizant of the invisible or illegible, both historically and in our present lives. To make his argument, Scott relies on historical sources, such as dental analysis of ancient teeth, that prove just as informative as formal edicts or other, more visible historical sources. In a time with so much information, Against the Grain reminds us to be critical of whose story is told and why. For this reason, Scott’s work should have a place in courses focused on both the present and the future, not just the past. It suggests that students ask about the role coercion and bondage play in the twenty first century, or if our economy is built around appropriation or ecological wisdom. The reader, while learning about the distant past, cannot help but ponder what about our daily lives we take for granted and which narratives or stories should be elevated, and which should be relegated to the past.

Steven Richter is currently a PhD Student in the Community and Regional Planning program in the University of Texas School of Architecture whose focus is on sustainability, regional land use, and natural capital.

Sowing the Seeds of Communism: Corn Wars in the USA

By Josephine Hill

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. Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick’s editorial cartoon, “Alien Corn,” published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on April 28, 1948, shows Henry A. Wallace grinning at a corn plant, whose leaves bear hammers and sickles and whose tassel sports a Soviet star –- the fruits of Communism.

Alien Corn (04-28-1948), by Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick. The cartoon is held at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Cartoon Collection. Courtesy of The State Historical Society of Missouri.

Wallace was the founder of the Hi-Bred Corn Company (today owned by the Dupont Corporation). He was also vice president to Franklin Roosevelt, Secretary of Agriculture (1933-1940), Secretary of Commerce (1945-1946), and 1948 presidential nominee of the Progressive Party. Appearing during the 1948 election season, the cartoon most directly reflects contemporary suspicions about Wallace’s possible Communist sympathies, which were fueled by his endorsement from the U.S. Communist Party, his progressive platform that included universal health care, voting rights for African-Americans, and an end to segregation, and his interest in Eastern religions. Here, the fear of the “alien” seems to have stronger political than environmental implications, yet this title presciently describes the many ways in which these two concerns would become more and more closely intertwined.

Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick at work. Courtesy of The State Historical Society of Missouri, Photograph Collection.

The cartoon also seems to reference concerns about the role that Wallace originally envisioned for hybrid seeds in the American agricultural landscape. During his early experiments in western Iowa in the late 1920s, Wallace invented and distributed hybrid corn seeds to farmers across sixteen counties. He imagined that the seeds could provide a means of developing a non-profit, quasi-cooperative agricultural model, that would allow many farmers to contribute a consistent product to a common pool, keeping fifty percent for themselves and donating the other half towards research that would in theory improve the quality of their future crops. Wallace’s model, therefore, for some evoked the ideological spirit of Soviet collectivism. However, in “Alien Corn,” Wallace’s hammer and sickle-laden corn stalk is ironically enclosed by a cement wall and a spiked iron fence, perhaps intended to portray Wallace as a personal profit-seeking hypocrite.

Henry Agard Wallace, 1888–1965. Via Wikipedia

The fence also points towards Pioneer Hi-Bred’s rising profitably and increasing corporatization. In 1949, a year later, it would sell one million units. Much of this expansion had occurred due to the environmental and economic events of the twenty years since Wallace began distribution. During the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the Department of Agriculture bought and regulated the drought-resistant hybrid seeds in order to stabilize food prices, a program that proved popular and contributed to Wallace’s rising political success. This remarkably rapid growth, combined with the marriage of hybrid seed companies with the chemical companies Dupont and Monsanto (who would provide the pesticides and fertilizers compatible with hybrid seeds), accounts for the major ideological shift in political conceptions of the role of hybrid seeds between the early 1920s and mid-century. Originally envisioned as lynchpins in a cooperative agricultural model, under control of the government, the seeds became essential to the success of a regulated capitalism that would position itself as an antidote to Soviet Communism.

The cartoon also foreshadows an important political moment that occurred about ten years later, as tensions with the Soviet Union escalated. Wallace’s head salesman, Roswell Garst, hosted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to Iowa. There, the two powers exchanged ideas for agricultural innovations and the Soviet Union acquired U.S. patented seeds to be planted on Russian soil. Described in a newsreel as one of the “most folksy and jovial days” of an otherwise fraught diplomatic visit, Garst’s and Hi-Bred’s participation signaled the importance of hybrid seeds as geopolitical instruments, through which the United States could assert its technological and ideological power.

“Alien Corn” highlights the ambiguous position of United States agricultural products as both public and private resources in a moment that in many ways represented a turning point in American agriculture. Today, while agricultural industries are intensely corporatized, they also receive state subsidies and the protection of the FBI, which is becoming increasingly invested in patented seeds as geopolitical bargaining chips to be used in diplomatic relations with national powers such as India and China. At the same time, there is mounting public concern over the environmental and health effects of the widespread cultivation and consumption hybrid seeds. The cartoon then prompts us to think about how the environmental conditions inherent to hybrid seeds –including their ability to thrive as monocultures and their dependence on chemical pesticides— affect their local and transnational ideological implications.

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