The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History

by Andrew C. Isenberg (Editor)

Overview

The field of environmental history emerged just decades ago but has established itself as one of the most innovative and important new approaches to history, one that bridges the human and natural world, the humanities and the sciences. With the current trend towards internationalizing history, environmental history is perhaps the quintessential approach to studying subjects outside the nation-state model, with pollution, global warming, and other issues affecting the earth not stopping at national borders. With 25 essays, this Handbook is global in scope and innovative in organization, looking at the field thematically through such categories as climate, disease, oceans, the body, energy, consumerism, and international relations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199394470
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/18/2014
Series:	Oxford Handbooks
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	640
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Andrew C. Isenberg is Professor of History at Temple University. He is the author of The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920, Mining California: An Ecological History, and Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, and the editor of The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Contributors Introduction: A New Environmental History, Andrew C. Isenberg Part I: Dynamic Environments and Cultures 1. Beyond Weather: The Culture and Politics of Climate History, Mark Carey 2. Animals and the Intimacy of History, Brett L. Walker 3. Beyond Virgin Soils: Disease as Environmental History, Linda Nash 4. Deserts, Diana K. Davis 5. Seas of Grass: Grasslands in World Environmental History, Andrew C. Isenberg 6. New Patterns in Old Places: Forest History for the Global Present, Emily Brock 7. The Tropics: A Brief History of an Environmental Imaginary, Paul S. Sutter Part II: Knowing Nature 8. And All Was Light? Science and Environmental History, Michael Lewis 9. Toward an Environmental History of Technology, Sara B. Pritchard 10. New Chemical Bodies: Synthetic Chemicals, Regulation, and Human Health, Nancy Langston 11. Rethinking American Exceptionalism: Toward a Trans-National History of Parks, Wilderness, and Protected Areas, James Morton Turner 12. Restoration and the Search for Counter-Narratives, Marcus Hall 13. Region, Scenery, and Power: Cultural Landscapes in Environmental History, Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller Part III: Working and Owning 14. A Metabolism of Society: Capitalism for Environmental Historians, Steven Stoll 15. Owning Nature: Towards an Environmental History of Private Property, Louis Warren 16. Work, Nature, and History: A Single Question, that Once Moved Like Light, Thomas G. Andrews 17. The Nature of Desire: Consumption in Environmental History, Matthew Klingle 18. Law and the Environment, Kathleen Brosnan 19. Confluences of Nature and Culture: Cities in Environmental History, Lawrence Culver Part IV: Entangling Alliances 20. Race and Ethnicity in Environmental History, Connie Y. Chiang 21. Women and Gender: Useful Categories of Analysis in Environmental History, Nancy C. Unger 22. Conquest to Convalescence: Nature and Nation in United States History, William Deverell 23. Boundless Nature: Borders and the Environment in North America and Beyond, Andrew R. Graybill 24. Crossing Boundaries: The Environment in International Relations, Kurk Dorsey 25. The Politics of Nature, Frank Zelko Index

Editorial Reviews

"An enormously valuable teaching and research resource for the practitioner of environmental history: many chapters will serve nicely as the first assignment for students working at advanced undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels within the broad thematic and topical areas of individual chapter coverage...Yet this Handbook will be equally valuable as a showcase of what the field has to offer other historians. It will demonstrate with vigour and verve that environmental history, rather than existing out there, somewhere on the margins, sealed off from other fields within historical studies, is actually quite near here, ready, willing and ripe for cross-pollination, and, actually not that strange after all, subject to all the usual trends and turns that shape and reshape historical studies."—Peter Coates, Reviews in History

"The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History is a job well done...One can hardly complain about the fresh insights brought here to climate history; animals; disease; grasslands; forests; tropics; science; technology; synthetic chemicals; national parks, wilderness, and protected areas; cultural landscapes; capitalism; private property; work; consumption; law; cities; race and ethnicity; women and gender; borders; and international relations. The authors tasked to write these essays are equally impressive and diverse."—Journal of American History

"[T]he 25 chapters of The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History provide outstanding examples of the penetration of an 'environmental approach' into the mainstream historical discussion....Turner's chapter on the history of parks, wilderness, and protected areas in the United States is a lucid and brave argument on the nature protection-local people dichotomy in the context of environmental history. The anti-imperialist and anti-elitist perspective of the essay, together with its criticism of Americentrism, is a refreshing addition to the conservation literature."—Zsolt Pinke, Conservation Biology

From the Publisher