Courses in this thematic area seek to apply the methodologies developed in a variety of fields to the question of the impact of nature, human as well as non-human, on history. Environmental historians have joined other historians of a more materialist or geographic bent in exploring the ways in which cultural values, technologies, and systems of labor and production have shaped–and been reshaped by–both urban and rural environments.
Historians of health and medicine have meanwhile explored the human body in historical interaction with a nature within as well as beyond. Still other historians, interested in the powerful and often controversial roles science and technology play in the modern world, have studied the origins and means by which our knowledge and manipulation of nature has helped reconfigure modern politics, society, and culture.
Stony Brook faculty members and graduate students have plied their research skills along all these fronts. Topics of courses and investigations might include history of the contrasts and inter-relations between city and country; technoscience in history; environment and health in global perspective; the history of technocracy; industry, place and politics; history of the body; and natural history and national culture.
Environment, Health, Science & Technology is one cluster in the History Department’s thematically-organized Research Program.
Prof. Chris Sellers has written a online blog entry for the journal Dissent, reflecting on recent industrial disasters in Texas and Bangladesh, and drawing on his edited volume Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World.
I’ve written an online blog entry for the journal Dissentthat may prove of interest. The argument is based on those I and others made in our edited volume Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World (Temple UP, 2011).
“How Industrial Hazards Get Overlooked,” Dissent Blog (April 25, 2013)
Chris
I’ve tried my hand at some blogging, with a new entry on the “Seeing the Woods” blog of the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. It’s about what the antipollution movement of the 1960′s may be able to teach the climate activists of today. I’ve called it “all environmental politics is local.” My argument is based on my recent Crabgrass Crucible.
Chris Sellers
Jim Quigley of Stony Brook’s Sustainability Program, interviews Christopher Sellers, a Stony Brook historian, about his new book Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in 20th-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Their discussion explores Sellers arguments about the suburban origins of environmentalism and their implications for efforts toward sustainability today.
Audio file recorded November 27, 2012; broadcast March 8, 2013 on WUSB.
Prof. Christopher C. Sellers has written an opinion piece for the New York Times called “How Green Was My Lawn?” based on his new book, Crabgrass Crucible.
The Departments of History and Technology and Society and the Humanities Institute
Stony Brook University
Present
Ann Green
Department of History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
“Rethinking Energy Histories and Landscapes”
Current concerns over energy consumption and environmental consequence are creating growing scholarly interest in energy history, and especially in understanding the energy transitions of the past. Changes in the kinds of energy consumed and in levels of energy consumption have long been central to an understanding of industrialization. Yet the focus has been largely on wood, coal and oil, overlooking other forms of widely consumed energies. This talk emphasizes the critical role of animal power in American industrialization, and reexamines how the question of transition away from animal power is understood in historical literature.
Monday, April 30, 2012
3:30 p.m. Humanities 1008
Ann Green is the author of, among many publications, “Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America” (Harvard UP, 2008), winner of the 2009 Pioneer America Society Fred B. Kniffen Award for best book.
