Invited Presentations #Booked&Busy

These are all places that I will speak at in the 2022-2023 academic year. I am so grateful to have the opportunity to be invited to speak at these amazing places this academic year. This is especially important since this is my first year as a tenure track Assistant Professor! I spoke at the National …

War Capitalism: Notes on Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton #envhist

Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton examines the significant influence that the institution of slavery had on the foundation of the United States’ role in cotton production and dawning of global capitalism. In the years following the treaty of independence of 1783, the areas in the upper South where enslaved people were concentrated experienced a severe …

J.R. McNeill: Summary points and future issues on Environmental History

Notes on David Blackbourn’s “Conquest of Nature”

“The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany,” by David Blackbourn tells the story of how Germans transformed their landscape over the course  of 250 years.[1] The modification of the landscape included reclaiming marshes, draining wetlands, stream restoration, and dam construction. These hydrological projects, Blackbourn informs, changed the face of the …

Notes on Darwin’s Origin of Species

  The nineteenth century was rife with cataclysmic changes in economics, technology, and science. An increasingly diversified market of goods and services, new inventions, and population shifts were just some aspects of the rapid innovation and progress made during the 1800's. Additionally the ideological discourses thrived with print material that challenged, provoked and brought new …

Notes on Thomas Rogers’ Deepest Wounds

Thomas Rogers’ “The Deepest Wounds: Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil” expands our knowledge in understanding the rupture, continuity and change in the zona da mata region of Brazil. Rogers’ foremost concern in the book is assessing the damage that monoculture did to landscape and society in the region as well as …

Notes on Kate Brown’s Plutopia

Kate Brown presents the first decisive account of the major plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet Union in “Plutopia : Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters.”  Drawing on interpretation gleaned from government records as well as oral testimonies Brown tells an astounding story of two nuclear …

Currently Reading…

The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History synthesizes developments and resources in the field. This volume presents a survey of environmental history including an overview of significant topics and themes as well as a compendium of historical actors and policy... Also reading Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South by the late Jack Temple Kirby. …

Notes on Slow Violence by Rob Nixon

  Perhaps it is because of Rob Nixon’s background in environmental justice and the humanities that influenced him to explore what he terms slow violence through rethinking the political, imaginative and theoretical dimensions of this form of violence. Nixon defines slow violence as a “violence that occurs gradually and out of sight; a delayed destruction …

Notes on The Great Acceleration, by JR McNeil and Peter Engelke

"One can find reasons, as this book does, to prefer a more recent date for the beginning of the Anthropocene. Those reasons, in brief, are, first, that since the mid-twentieth century human action (unintentionally) has become the most important factor governing crucial biogeochemical cycles, to wit, the carbon cycle, the sulfur cycle, and the nitrogen …