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The Environment on History & History in the Environment

Environmental history is one of the most exciting fields of history at the moment as scholars seek to understand the role the environment played in familiar events and the ways the environment has been shaped by historical forces. Here is a list of important works selected by Erika Bsumek and Mark Lawrence, two of the authors of our featured book this month (some of which have been reviewed on NEP).

Kurk Dorsey, The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: U.S.-Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era (University of Washington Press, 1998). A landmark in the scholarship combining diplomatic and environmental history, this book examines U.S.-Canadian diplomacy aimed at managing migratory animals and birds — a notable and overlooked success of Progressive-era effforts to impose control over nature.

J.R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, Environmental Histories of the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Like Nation-States and the Global Environment, this book collects essays from leading international and environmental scholars, uncovering various ways in which the Cold War involved struggles for natural resources and an the horrific ways in which the Cold War damaged the natural environment.

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W.W. Norton, 1991).

Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Picador Press, 2009).
Reviewed by Cristina Metz on Not Even Past

Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

See also

Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation
Reviewed by Henry Wiencek on Not Even Past

John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption & Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States
Reviewed by Felipe Cruz on Not Even Past

Thomas D. Rogers, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil
Reviewed by Elizabeth O’Brien on Not Even Past

More on the environment on Not Even Past

Boomtown, USA: and Historical Look at Fracking, by Henry Wiencek

Her Program’s Progress: Lady Bird Johnson at the Glen Canyon Dam, by Erika Bsumek

The documentary film series on tourism in Panama, I am Tourism/Yo Soy Turismo by Andres Lombana-Bermudez and Blake Scott

International History and the Global United States: More to Read

by Mark A. Lawrence

Dennis Merrill and Thomas G. Paterson, editors, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations (Houghton Mifflin, 5^th edition, 2002). This pathbreaking collection, widely assigned in undergraduate classes, blends primary-source documents with excerpts from scholarly works that take contrasting positions on key interpretive questions. In this way, the book gives students a sense of scholarly debates along with a small amount of original material to use in assessing them.

Jussi Hanhimäki and Odd Arne Westad, editors, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford University Press, 2003). As the title suggests, this collection has a relatively narrow chronological focus – just the Cold War years from the 1940s to 1989. But it is admirably broad in other respects, collecting material from numerous countries and blending high-level policy documents with reminiscences by ordinary people.

Michael D. Gambone, editor, Documents of American Diplomacy (Greenwood Press, 2002). This collection contains an impressive 167 documents reaching from the Declaration of Independence to the Clinton presidency. All of the classics of American decision-making are here, making it an excellent choice for anyone trying to track down documents of indisputable significance.

Mark Atwood Lawrence, editor, The Vietnam War: An International History in Documents (Oxford University Press, 2014). Compiled by UT-Austin’s Mark Lawrence, this book collects documents from just a single episode in the history of U.S. foreign relations – the Vietnam War. But it brings together material from the United States with documents from Vietnam, China, and elsewhere.

Jeremi Suri, editor, Foreign Relations of the United States Since 1898 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Compiled by UT-Austin’s Jeremi Suri, this book collects approximately 50 documents, nearly all of them American. It’s one of the best brief collections for classroom purposes.

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