Historical Perspectives on Oil Gushers
This post draws comparisons between the April-May British Petroleum oil crisis and the 1862 oil gushers in Oil Springs, Ontario.
Category Archives: Environment
Campaigning with History: Wildlands and Woodlands
Last week we have two great posts by Tom and Alix on historians engaging with current issues and the value of “thinking with history” for policy development. Both these post brought to mind a project in New England that I learned about at an environmental history conference a few years ago. The Wildland and Woodlands campaign is to protect 70%… Read more »
Re-membering a Lakeside Landscape in Japan
Sagami Lake is an artificial lake located about 50 kilometers west of central Tokyo, and is an important part of the Sagami River system. There are a number of landscapes within this river system that blur the distinctions between the rural and industrial, natural and artificial Japan. Maybe landscape is not the word because the concrete, steel, and greenery come… Read more »
A Class Project for the People
As an undergraduate history student, I wrote a lot of essays and exams meant only for my professor’s eyes. Despite the tremendous effort that went into crafting these works, they now exist only as PDFs on my personal computer where I secretly hope some future historian will find them and be fascinated by my analysis of the Chanak Affair or… Read more »
Earth Day turns 40
Today, Earth Day celebrates its 40th anniversary. Earth Day originated as a call to arms by US Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who hoped to draw on the grassroots movement for greater environmental consciousness in order to bring about positive policy changes in Washington. Earth Day drew much of its early enthusiasm from university campuses. Fittingly, then, NiCHE (Network in… Read more »
Volcanoes in European history: Exploring Environmental History Podcast
http://www.eh-resources.org/podcast/eh_podcast34.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadDr Jan Oosthoek has produced a podcast on the history of volcanoes in European history. The podcast can be found here or you can subscribe on iTunes here. This podcast and its supporting website are under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, so we have republished his text introducing the volcanoes podcast and… Read more »
History and the Problem of Auto-referentiality
by Jeremy Nathan Marks Historical writing has long suffered from the problem of auto-referentiality. Auto-referentiality, as I define it, simply means historians are writing only in reference to human subjects and human problems. I don’t mean to say that historiography is populated only by human beings but we do not currently possess an extensive literature where humans are not the… Read more »
History for Haiti
Today Foreign Ministers from the ‘Friends of Haiti Group’ are meeting with Jean-Max Bellerive in Montreal to discuss both the current situation in Haiti and longer term plans for the country’s stabilization and reconstruction. As they discuss Haiti’s future, it is important for them to also consider Haiti’s past.
“Copenhagen is PM’s big chance”, History PhD Candidates Argue
Jeremy Marks and Ryan O’Connor’s op-ed piece in the London Free Press argues positive action at Copenhagen would be good politics for the Conservative party.
Copenhagen, Climate Change, and History
Politicians from around the world are meeting this week in Copenhagen for the UN Climate Change Conference, in order to discuss global warming and propose policies to combat this social and environmental concern. Because global warming revolves around the concept of change over time, it is a subject to which historians can make a valuable contribution. There are at least… Read more »