Category:History

Understanding the past to know the way forward. See also Eco-heroes

The Big Picture

Earth Days is a fantastic history of the American Environmental Movement. ****

Timeline

Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment By Joy Palmer, David Edward Cooper, Peter Blaze Corcoran

List of history research sources

World History

Collapse by Jared Diamond, (celebrated author of Guns, Germs and Steel) seeks to understand why so many civilizations have been unable to avoid destroying the environment they depended upon. In this selection he summaries the reasons, which may also be involved in your issue. TEDtalk video.

The Environment and World History edited by Edmund Burke (UCSC), Kenneth Pomeranz

Global Environmental History / I.G. Simmons Simmons, I. G. (Ian Gordon), 1937- Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2008 McH Stacks - GF13 .S56 2008 Link

A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations by Clive Ponting 1991 McH Stacks GF75 .P66 1993. Great overview.

Natures Past : the environment and human history / Paolo Squatriti, editor Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c2007 McH Stacks - GF13 .N38 2007 Link

Environment and Empire (UK) / William Beinart and Lotte Hughes Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2007 McH Stacks - GF551 .B45 2007

Late Victorian Holocausts By Mike Davis

The Nature of Cities / edited by Andrew C. Isenberg Rochester, NY : University of Rochester Press, 2006 McH Stacks - HT123 .N35 2006 Contents

Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Donald Worster S&E Stacks QH540.8.W67 1994

Major Problems in American Environmental History : documents and essays / edited by Carolyn Merchant Boston : Houghton Mifflin, c2005 McH Stacks - HC110.E5 M3 2005 Outline and study questions, plus links to other sources

The Vulnerable Planet : a short economic history of the environment / John Bellamy Foster S&E Stacks - GE140 .F68 1999

American Environmentalism : readings in conservation history / edited by Roderick Frazier Nash. S&E Stacks S930.N36 1990

The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future by Riane Eisler looks at how gender has structured culture of domination. Her new book rethinks the economy: The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics Link

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City By Greg Grandin. (Includes excerpt and audio interview with author).

American History

Brownfields are abandoned industrial hazardous waste sites, the most infamous is Love Canal, another site, which helped spark the third wave of the American eco-movement. CA railroads are offering land for development. Now, these are an important aspect of environmental justice.

The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Studies in Environment and History) by Adam Rome

The National Parks is Ken Burns' excellent PBS series that contains much info on pioneering environmentalists such as Muir. All online for free link

Changes in the Land by William Cronon was long the central text in the Core course, a pioneering work in eco-history, and it it still the best explanation of how we got where we are. These excerpts (requires course login) documents how Native Americans related to nature, and what happened when the market was introduced. Ch. 8 is the summary/conclusion. He was also wrote "Trouble with Wilderness," which set off a lively debate, which concludes here.

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America by Timothy Egan

Atomic America by Todd Tucker. On January 3, 1961, nuclear reactor SL-1 exploded in rural Idaho, spreading radioactive contamination over thousands of acres and killing three men: John Byrnes, Richard McKinley, and Richard Legg. The Army blamed "human error" and a sordid love triangle. Though it has been overshadowed by the accident at Three Mile Island, SL-1 is the only fatal nuclear reactor incident in American history, and it holds serious lessons for a nation poised to embrace nuclear energy once again.

Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History by Ted Steinberg

California History (Amazon search)

California Environmental History bibliography

The King of California This meticulous narrative of the rise of the cotton magnate James G. Boswell begins in the nineteen-twenties, when his family was driven from Georgia by boll-weevil infestations and brought its plantation ways to California's San Joaquin Valley. Not to be defeated by nature again, the Boswells leveed and dammed Tulare Lake, the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi, to the point of extinction. In its six-hundred-square-mile basin they grew cotton, while in Los Angeles office towers they built one of the country's largest agricultural operations, swallowing small farms and multimillion-dollar subsidies with equal vigor. Arax and Wartzman strive for evenhandedness but acknowledge the costs of Big Ag—such as evaporation ponds with selenium levels so high that ducks are born with corkscrewed beaks and no eyes, and the recurrent "hundred-year floods," stubborn attempts by the old lake to reassert itself.

Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath by Rick Wartzman.

Assembling California by John McPhee "takes readers on an intensive geological tour of California... looks at the conjectural science of earthquake prediction and gives an account of a recent San Francisco quake. His leisurely excavation meanders from Mexican explorer Juan Bautista de Anza's settlement of San Francisco in 1776 to 1850s gold-mining camps to the summit of Mount Everest, made of marine limestone lifted from a shelf that once divided India and Tibet. With this volume McPhee concludes his Annals of the Former World series, which he began with Basin and Range (1980).

Towers of Gold is about Isaias Hellman, who was California’s premier financier in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a man whose financial acumen catapulted the state into the modern era and laid the groundwork for one of the world’s most dynamic economies... Hellman was both a builder and financier, a major investor and promoter of eight industries that shaped California—banking, transportation, education, land development, water, electricity, oil, and wine.

Mining California: An Ecological History by Andrew C. Isenberg (see course reader)

The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area by Richard Walker

A history of California counties.

Californiahistory.com is absolutely devoted to the history of California. General and more difficult to search for details about one place.

Links to popular California history sites (e.g., railroads, museums)

History of the county of Los Angeles (not just the city--the entire county)

Land of Sunshine : an environmental history of metropolitan Los Angeles Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, c2005 McH Stacks - GF504.C2 L36 2005

History and nostalgia, for historic minded.

"Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century" is a story of the largest public works project in US history. audio interview

Bodie's Gold: Tall Tales & True History From a California Mining Town, Marguerite Sprague, College Eight '82 University of Nevada Press, 2003

Native Americans (see also Native American page)

Charles Mann, author of 1491(book exploration on how Native Americans used the land) has also written about interactions between colonists and Native peoples.

Another account of megafauna extinctions

Nature and the environment in pre-Columbian American life Kowtko, Stacy Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 2006 McH Stacks - E98.S67 K69 2006

Local History

UCSC organic gardening history, extensive oral history

Leftmost City by Domhoff includes environmental activism in the city of Santa Cruz.

Denzil R. Verardo, Porter '70, Jennie Verardo, Merrill '70 Napa Valley: From Golden Fields to Purple Harvest, Windsor Publications Inc., 1986 Restless Paradise: Santa Cruz County, An Illustrated History, Windsor Publications Inc., 1987

Histories of Environmental Movement

Earth Days PBS documentary. 2010 trailer

Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (1993) Review of Gottlieb book that tells alternative history of the environmental movement.

American Environmentalism: The U.S. Environmental Movement, 1970-1990 / edited by Riley E. Dunlap and Angela G. Mertig. Published Philadelphia : Taylor & Francis, c1992 (provides a succinct conventional overview of U.S. environmental movement in introductory chapter)

Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement, Island Press; Revised Edition, 2003

Nature and the environment in twentieth-century American life / Brian Black Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 2006 McH Stacks - GF503 .B54 2006 Link

Nature and the environment in nineteenth-century American life / Brian Black Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 2006 McH Stacks - GF503 .B53 2006

California Environmental History bibliography

US Environmental History bibliography

One of the early debates about the environment was between Preservationists such as John Muir and Conservationists such as Gifford Pinchot is explored in the video The Wilderness Idea, which can be found at McHenry Library (ask for VT2197) Discussion of the evolution of the term "conservation" See also "The Value of a Varmit " Ch 13 in Nature's Economy

Essay on Rachel Carson's influence