Graduate Reading List
Global Environmental History
Joyce E. Chaplin (chaplin@fas.harvard.edu)
(Oronce Fine, cordiform map of the world, 1566 ~ Harvard Map Collection.)
Background: Clive Ponting, A New Green History of the World (New York, 2007).
Introduction
Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Environmental Crisis,” Science, 155, no.
3767 (1967), 1203-07.
Carolyn Merchant, “Nature as Female,” in The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and
The Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980).
Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” in Problems of Materialism and Culture: Selected
Essays (London, 1980), 67-85.
William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative,” Journal of
American History, 78 (1992), 1347-76
Wilderness vs. Landscape?
Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, 1967).
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995).
William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness” in Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground:
Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1996).
L. Brett Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan (Seattle, 2005).
David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of
Modern Germany (London, 2006).
The Natures of Empire
Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of
1492 (New York, 1972).
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New
England (New York, 1985).
Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the
Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1996)
Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900
(Cambridge, 2004)
John McNeill, Mosquito Empire: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620
1914 (New York, 2010).
Conservation and Environmentalism
Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2d edition
(Cambridge, 1994).
Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York, 1999).
Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (London, 1999)
Ian Tyrell, True Gardens of the Gods: California-Australian Environmental Reform,
1860-1930 (Berkeley, 1999).
Frank Uekoetter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany
(Cambridge, 2006)
Harriet Ritvo, The Dawn of Green : Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern
Environmentalism (Chicago, 2009).
Paul Warde, “The Invention of Sustainability,” Modern Intellectual History, 8 (2011),
153-70.
Government, Science, and the State
Richard H. Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the
‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven, 2000).
Bruce J. Schulman, “Governing Nature, Nurturing Government: Resource Management
and the Development of the American State,” Journal of Policy History, 17
(2005), 375-403.
Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United
States (Princeton, 2005).
Matthew Connelly, “Seeing beyond the State: The Population Control Movement and
the Problem of Sovereignty,” Past and Present, no. 193 (2006), 197-233.
Art, Technology, and Design
John E. Crowley, Imperial Landscapes: Britain's Global Visual Culture, 1745-1820
(New Haven, 2011).
Andrew Kirk, "Appropriating Technology: The Whole Earth Catalog and Counterculture
Environmental Politics," Environmental History, 6 (2001), 374-94.
Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in
France, 1960-2000 (Chicago, 2003)
Peder Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse : A History of Ecological Design (Baton
Rouge, 2010).
Energy
Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (Chicago,
2002).
Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: A History of Whaling in America (New York, 2007).
Alfred Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for
Energy (New York, 2006)
Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke and Culture in Britain since 1800
(Athens, Oh., 2006)
Alison Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, Mass.,
2005)
Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York,
1995).
Labor and Economy
Stephen Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in
the Postbellum South,” Radical History Review, 26 (1982).
Richard White, “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?” in
Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground.
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991).
John Soluri, “Accounting for Taste: Export Bananas, Mass Markets, and Panama
Disease,” Environmental History, 7 (2002), 386-410.
Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, Mass.,
2008)
Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods, and
Identities in South Asia (Seattle, 2006).
Weather, Climate, Catastrophe
Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 (New York,
2000).
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts : El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third
World (New York, 2001).
Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Environment (Chicago, 2007).
Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York, 2005).
Scale (I)
Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of
Metageography (Berkeley, 1997).
Martin W. Lewis, “Dividing the Ocean Sea,” Geographical Review, 89 (1999), 188-214.
Helen Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep
Sea (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).
W. Jeffrey Bolster, “Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and
Marine Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500–1800,” AHR, 113 (2008), 19–47.
Scale (II)
Denis Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo
Space Photographs,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84
(1994), 270-94.
John McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th
Century World (New York, 2000).
J. Donald Hughes, “Global Dimensions in Environmental History,” The Pacific
Historical Review, 70 (2001), 91-101.
Joyce E. Chaplin, Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit
(New York, 2012).