Cleveland History Blogs

It’s very hard to not compare The Columbian Exchange with Jared Diamond’s Gun’s, Germs, and Steel (as even the Wikipedia page for Diamond’s book notes).  It seems clear that Diamond builds on Crosby’s ideas, […]

In Environment and Empire, William Beinart and Lotte Hughes usefully connect environmental history and economic history through the concept of the commodity frontier.  With their broad range of case studies, which […]

One of the interesting aspects of In the Shadow of Slavery, by Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, was the way in which the African environment shaped the response of Africans to the conditions of […]

With The Ecological Indian, Shepard Krech admirably demonstrates how intensely the moral questions related to our exploitation of our environment color and shape our understanding of history.  As a result, this […]

This book—The Organic Machine by Richard White—is impressive for a number of reasons.  I find histories particularly valuable when they expose trends that can be seen in other settings: other places, times, and […]

The recent trend in environmental historiography is to emphasize the fickle and destructive vicissitudes of the environment, so it is not surprising that The Destruction of the Bison, by Andrew Isenberg, pairs […]

Some American historiography criticizes European imperialism for its destructive effects on American environmental conditions as well as Native American peoples.  Similar criticisms exist of other periods of […]

At the beginning of almost every chapter of his book The Sanitary City, Martin V. Melosi mentions the way in which the urban environment changed in a given historical period due to growth.  The design of sanitary […]

In class last week, we had an extended conversation about how to characterize environmental history.  I promoted the definition of nature, and the natural environment, as that which people do not control, but […]

Admittedly, when I first learned that we were going to be asked to read a history of Central Park, I was concerned that I would be uninterested in the topic.  My concern intensified when I further learned how long […]

I have lived my life rather far after the extinction of the passenger pigeon.  I was vaguely aware that at one point women wore hats adorned with taxidermically preserved birds, but I didn’t think much about them […]