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The new narrative of world history must have ecological process as its major theme. This book includes seven essays written by historians who take different approaches but share a conviction that world-history writing must take ecological processes seriously. All the essays center on modern history ...

The new narrative of world history must have ecological process as its major theme. This book includes seven essays written by historians who take different approaches but share a conviction that world-history writing must take ecological processes seriously. All the essays center on modern history, particularly in the twentieth century, or treat it in an important way, although they may relate modern issues to their roots in earlier times.

This book will challenge world historians to take the environment seriously, as it also challenges environmental historians to take the global dimension of their subject seriously.

How and why have Americans living at particular times and places used and transformed their environment? How have political systems dealt with conflicts over resources and conservation? This is the only major reference work to explore all the major themes and debates in the burgeoning field of ...

How and why have Americans living at particular times and places used and transformed their environment? How have political systems dealt with conflicts over resources and conservation? This is the only major reference work to explore all the major themes and debates in the burgeoning field of environmental history. Humanity's relationship with the natural world is one of the oldest and newest topics in human history. The issue emerged as a distinct field of scholarship in the early 1970s and has been growing steadily ever since. The discipline's territory and sources are rich and varied and include climatic and geological data, court records, archaeological digs, and the writings of naturalists, as well as federal and state economic and resource development and conservation policy. Environmental historians investigate how and why natural and human-created surroundings affect a society's development. Merchant provides a context-setting overview of American environmental history from the precolonial land-use practice of Native Americans and concluding with twenty-first concerns over global warming. The book also includes a glossary of important concepts, people, agencies, and legislation; a chronology of major events; and an extensive bibliography including films, videos, CD-ROMs, and websites. This concise reference for students and general readers contains an accessible overview of American environmental history; a mini-encyclopedia of ideas, people, legislation, and agencies; a chronology of events and their significance; and a bibliography of books, magazines, and journals as well as films, videos, CD-ROMs, and online resources. In addition to providing a wealth of factual information, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History explores contentious issues in this much-debated field, from the idea of wilderness to global warming.

Before the Fall of Imperial Rome, priests cast the internal organs of sacrificial animals on temple floors, claiming to be able to divine the future from these entrails. By probing the remains of Alberta's past sacrifices -- reading her entrails -- Norman Conrad believes that we might dimly see at ...

Before the Fall of Imperial Rome, priests cast the internal organs of sacrificial animals on temple floors, claiming to be able to divine the future from these entrails. By probing the remains of Alberta's past sacrifices -- reading her entrails -- Norman Conrad believes that we might dimly see at apparition of Alberta's future. This controversial book vividly portrays the history of land and life in Alberta, from the Ice Ages to the present. Making no apology for his criticism of government, regulators and large corporations, Norman Conrad makes a strident plea for Alberta's dangerously imperiled environment and presents a model that can be applied anywhere.

This model monograph is the first scholarly study to put the Ainu--the native people living in Ezo, the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago--at the center of an exploration of Japanese expansion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the height of the Tokugawa shogunal era ...

This model monograph is the first scholarly study to put the Ainu--the native people living in Ezo, the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago--at the center of an exploration of Japanese expansion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the height of the Tokugawa shogunal era. Inspired by "new Western" historians of the United States, Walker positions Ezo not as Japan's northern "frontier" but as a borderland or middle ground. By framing his study between the cultural and ecological worlds of the Ainu before and after two centuries of sustained contact with the Japanese, the author demonstrates with great clarity just how far the Ainu were incorporated into the Japanese political economy and just how much their ceremonial and material life--not to mention disease ecology, medical culture, and their physical environment--had been infiltrated by Japanese cultural artifacts, practices, and epidemiology by the early nineteenth century.

Walker takes a fresh and original approach.Rather than presenting a mere juxtaposition of oppression and resistance, he offers a subtle analysis of how material and ecological changes induced by trade with Japan set in motion a reorientation of the whole northern culture and landscape. Using new and little-known material from archives as well as Ainu oral traditions and archaeology, Walker poses an exciting new set of questions and issues that have yet to be approached in so innovative and thorough a fashion.