A tale of two plains: migrating landscapes between Italy and Argentina 1870–1955

Modern Italy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Daniele Valisena ◽  
Antonio Canovi
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
South American ◽  
Po Plain ◽  
Rural Workers ◽  
Environmental Transformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Migration

This article offers an analysis of the encounter between the two natural environments of the Italian Po Plain and the Argentinian Pampa Gringa through the migration of Italian rural workers. Notably, we focus on the migration micro-histories of Emiliano-Romagnoli, who moved from Italy to Argentina during Italian Great Migration Era (1870–1955). Building on oral histories gathered in Italy and Argentina between 2005 and 2007, these micro-histories show how place-based landscapes of Italianness hybridised with the local landscape of the South American plains through Italian migrants’ embodied memories, labour, and socio-environmental transformation practices. By focusing on Po Plain migrants’ memories and experiences of the lowlands of northern Italy and the Argentinian pampas, we aim to offer a micro-historical perspective on the environmental history of migration.

scholarly journals On Italian mobilities and ecological fretwork

Modern Italy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Stephanie Malia Hom
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
Future Research Directions ◽  
History Of Migration

This invited commentary explores the ecological fretwork binding people and nature, and, specifically, how Italy and Italianness serve as critical frames for envisioning an environmental history of migration. It examines how each contribution in this special issue adds rigorous archival research to the growing body of academic literature on Italy and the environmental humanities. It also comments on the future research directions, which are connected to this emerging history. Situating these contributions in the wider context of climate change and planetary transformation, this article illuminates how mobilities, understood as an Italian phenomenon, have shaped the globe on a scale previously unknown.

scholarly journals Paleoenvironmental changes during the last 3000 years in Lake Cari-Laufquen (Northern Patagonia, Argentina), inferred from ostracod paleoecology, petrophysical, sedimentological and geochemical data

The Holocene ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (12) ◽  
pp. 1881-1893 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corina Coviaga ◽  
Gabriela Cusminsky ◽  
Alejandra Patricia Pérez ◽  
Antje Schwalb ◽  
Vera Markgraf ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Geochemical Data ◽  
South American ◽  
Northern Patagonia ◽  
Salinity Changes ◽  
Evaporation Ratio ◽  
History Of ◽  
Water Level Variations ◽  
Continuous Presence ◽  
The Tropics

South American paleoreconstructions are of global interest because it is the only landmass extending from the tropics to the southern high latitudes and intersecting the entire southern westerly wind belt. In this context, endorheic environments, as Lake Cari-Laufquen Grande (LCLG; 41º35’S, 69º25’W) are excellent sites for paleoenvironmental studies, since they react rapidly to changes in the precipitation/evaporation ratio. In this study, the limnological conditions prevailing during the last 3000 years have been inferred based on a multiproxy analysis of the sedimentary sequence of LCLG (water depth 4 m, core length 505 cm). Today, this is one of the few lakes in Northern Patagonia, providing a unique paleoclimatic and paleoecological lacustrine record. The ostracod assemblages, along with sedimentological, petrophysical and geochemical data, show hydrological changes in Cari-Lauquen Grande basin during the studied period. Our results indicate the continuous presence of a saline to brackish lake. However, changes in ostracod assemblages and sedimentological features reveal variations in the relative salinity of the system. The lake paleosalinity was estimated based on ostracod salinity optima, using a calibration dataset of 29 species and 72 different environments. Intervals of high salinity (24–26 g L-1) were dominated by L. rionegroensis (morph.I) and organic-poor sediments. Periods of lower salinity (14–20 g L-1) favored the occurrence of oligo-mesohaline taxa, such as R. whatleyi, L. rionegroensis (morph.III), Cypridopsis sp., L. patagonica and I. ramirezi. The sediments further display higher values of both TOC and magnetic susceptibility. These salinity changes are interpreted as water level variations, associated in turn to cold-wet and warm-dry periods in northern Patagonia. Our results provide new insights into the late-Holocene environmental history of the region, characterized by a paucity of records. In addition, the ostracod paleoecology modeled using a WA approach allowed quantitative inferences of salinity changes, highlighting their potential in Quaternary paleoclimate research.

Technology and the Environment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy James LeCain
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Material Environment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dynamic Hybrid ◽  
Synthetic Approaches ◽  
Cultural Turn

Technology and environmental history are both relatively young disciplines among Americanists, and during their early years they developed as distinctly different and even antithetical fields, at least in topical terms. Historians of technology initially focused on human-made and presumably “unnatural” technologies, whereas environmental historians focused on nonhuman and presumably “natural” environments. However, in more recent decades, both disciplines have moved beyond this oppositional framing. Historians of technology increasingly came to view anthropogenic artifacts such as cities, domesticated animals, and machines as extensions of the natural world rather than its antithesis. Even the British and American Industrial Revolutions constituted not a distancing of humans from nature, as some scholars have suggested, but rather a deepening entanglement with the material environment. At the same time, many environmental historians were moving beyond the field’s initial emphasis on the ideal of an American and often Western “wilderness” to embrace a concept of the environment as including humans and productive work. Nonetheless, many environmental historians continued to emphasize the independent agency of the nonhuman environment of organisms and things. This insistence that not everything could be reduced to human culture remained the field’s most distinctive feature. Since the turn of millennium, the two fields have increasingly come together in a variety of synthetic approaches, including Actor Network Theory, envirotechnical analysis, and neomaterialist theory. As the influence of the cultural turn has waned, the environmental historians’ emphasis on the independent agency of the nonhuman has come to the fore, gaining wider influence as it is applied to the dynamic “nature” or “wildness” that some scholars argue exists within both the technological and natural environment. The foundational distinctions between the history of technology and environmental history may now be giving way to more materially rooted attempts to understand how a dynamic hybrid environment helps to create human history in all of its dimensions—cultural, social, and biological.

The geodiversity of loess sequences in the Po plain (Northern Italy): scientific values, threats, and promotion opportunities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Maria Bollati ◽  
Andrea Zerboni
Keyword(s):  
Northern Italy ◽  
Parent Material ◽  
Chinese Loess Plateau ◽  
Tectonic Activity ◽  
South American ◽  
Po Plain ◽  
Chinese Loess ◽  
The North ◽  
Basin Scale ◽  
Scientific Value

<p>Quaternary loess deposits and complex pedosequences developed on wind-blown silt as parent material are very powerful palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental indicators allowing the reconstruction of glacial/interglacial cycles. For this relevant scientific value, loess outcrops are gaining great attention in the framework of geoheritage valorisation. Loess sequences are distributed along wide latitudinal ranges in both the Boreal and Austral Hemispheres, but they are less frequent if compared to other kinds of Quaternary sediments, and often characterized by a hotspot-like distributions. They are, hence, key-points in geodiversity assessment at basin-scale. Strategies balancing geoconservation and promotion are hence required, and they should be based on the assessment of sites specific values and threats sites may undergo. Loess sequences, in fact, are geosites of stratigraphic interest and geomorphosites that may suffer geomorphic processes (e.g., pedogenesis, linear erosion, tectonics, slope deformation and erosion) threatening their existence. The same processes, at the meantime, are generating spectacular landscapes. Besides the most famous Chinese loess plateau, the North and South American loess basins, and the central Eurasian loess belt, several other minor loess basins are distributed in the world. Among these areas, we can consider the Mediterranean loess areas, and especially the Upper Pleistocene Po Plain Loess Basin of Northern Italy. The latter includes several loess/paleosols outcrops displaying complex pedosequences formed under contrasting Pleistocene pedoclimatic settings, recording recent tectonic activity between the foreland of the Alpine and Apennine ranges (i.e., site-scale geodiversity), and preserving open-air Palaeolithic archaeological sites (i.e., cultural value). After examining the global values of and the potential threats to loess geosites, as proposed in the current literature, a detailed analysis on the potentialities (in terms of scientific features, values, threats, geoconservation, and promotion strategies) of a selection of loess sites from the Po Plain Loess Basin is proposed. The quantification of the values of the geosites is performed considering the global value (i.e. scientific and additional values) of loess-bearing sites and the potential for use, according to a methodology based on a database, already tested in similar thematic contexts. In particular, this methodology implies the geodiversity assessment at site-scale, and this is particularly relevant for loess sites. Finally, for each locality, tips for enhancing Italian loess sites through promotion and geoconservation are provided.</p>

scholarly journals Environments of Italianness: for an environmental history of Italian migrations

Modern Italy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Roberta Biasillo ◽  
Claudio de Majo ◽  
Daniele Valisena
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Fundamental Part ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Migration ◽  
Italian Diaspora ◽  
European Migration

Italian mobility played a fundamental part in the history of the peninsula, since it was a global phenomenon reaching every continent except Antarctica. The Italian diaspora counted over 26 million expatriates who left the country between 1876 and 1976 and, to date, Italy remains one of the states that has contributed the most to the Great European Migration. Although impressive, these figures do not take into account pre-unitary Italian mobilities or Italian settlements in colonial territories. By adopting the perspective of environmental history of migration, this collection of essays allows us to consider various contextually embedded migratory environments, creating a means to find common constitutive features that allow us to explore and identify Italianness. Specifically, in this special issue, we intend to investigate how Italians transformed remote foreign environments in resemblances of their distant faraway homeland, their paesi, as well as used them as a means of materially re-imagining landscapes of Italianness. In return, their collective and individual identities were transformed by the new surroundings.

Incidence and natural history of HCV infection in Northern Italy: Results of an epidemiological study

2001 ◽  
Vol 120 (5) ◽  
pp. A366-A366
Author(s):  
C MAZZEO ◽  
F AZZAROLI ◽  
A COLECCHIA ◽  
S DISILVIO ◽  
A DORMI ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Epidemiological Study ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Hcv Infection ◽  
History Of

Economic Views of L. Trotsky

2004 ◽  
pp. 142-157
Author(s):  
M. Voeikov ◽  
S. Dzarasov
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Russian History ◽  
History Of

The paper written in the light of 125th birth anniversary of L. Trotsky analyzes the life and ideas of one of the most prominent figures in the Russian history of the 20th century. He was one of the leaders of the Russian revolution in its Bolshevik period, worked with V. Lenin and played a significant role in the Civil War. Rejected by the party bureaucracy L. Trotsky led uncompromising struggle against Stalinism, defending his own understanding of the revolutionary ideals. The authors try to explain these events in historical perspective, avoiding biases of both Stalinism and anticommunism.

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