At a green crossroads: recent theses in urban environmental history in Europe and North America

Urban History ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-539 ◽  
Author(s):  
STÉPHANE FRIOUX
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Doctoral Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Urban Environmental History ◽  
Water Plants

Since the path-breaking work of prominent North American historians such as Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi, as well as more recent roundtables in Europe, urban environmental history is now a mature research field, at the intersection of various related approaches. Time has passed since a leader of environmental history, William Cronon, could write that ‘cities in particular deserve much more work than they have received’. In this field, urban history necessarily crosses with environmental history, but also with the history of technology and social and cultural history; whilst its scholars not only emanate from a traditional historical background, but also from geography, science and engineering. Urban environmental historians, as they are referred to here, have duly established the importance of studying the relationships between ‘nature’ (including non-humans) and humans in and around cities. This ‘nature’ is a complex and shifting entity: recent doctoral studies have, for instance, documented rivers transformed by human action, weeds growing in the spatial and social margins of cities and tidal wetlands progressively filled in and built upon. The recently completed Ph.D.s reviewed in this essay see the built environment more as a hybrid of natural elements, like water, plants, animals and human action. Aided by the environmental lens, the scope of the urban historian has also been broadened by studying the ways in which residents’ lives were transformed by the invention, spread and environmental impact of new technologies, as well as the political responses to environmental crises.

A Cultural History of Color in the Age of Industry

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Steam Power ◽  
Industrial Manufacturing ◽  
The World ◽  
Color Technology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Color Printing ◽  
Psychology Literature

Volume 5 A Cultural History of Color in the Age of Industry covers the period 1800 to 1920, when the world embraced color like never before. Inventions, such as steam power, lithography, photography, electricity, motor cars, aviation, and cheaper color printing, all contributed to a new exuberance about color. Available pigments and colored products – made possible by new technologies, industrial manufacturing, commercialization, and urbanization – also greatly increased, as did illustrated printed literature for the mass market. Color, both literally and metaphorically, was splashed around, and became an expressive tool for artists, designers, and writers. Color shapes an individual’s experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts. Volume 5 in the Cultural History of Color set. General Editors: Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf

Digital Resources: The Handbook of Latin American Studies

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine D. McCann ◽  
Tracy North
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Latin American Studies ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
Atlantic Studies ◽  
History Of

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article. The Handbook of Latin American Studies is a selective annotated bibliography of works about Latin America. Continuously published since 1936, the Handbook has been compiled and edited by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress for seventy-five years. Published works in multiple languages are selected for inclusion in the Handbook by a cadre of contributing editors, actively working scholars who provide a service to the field by annotating works of lasting scholarly value and writing bibliographical essays noting major trends, changes, and gaps in existing research. In 1995, the Hispanic Division launched the website HLAS Online, providing access to a database of more than 340,000 annotated citations. The ability to search across more than 50 volumes of the Handbook with a single query gave researchers unprecedented access to years of scholarship on Latin America. In 2000, HLAS Web, a new search interface with more robust functionality, was launched. The two sites link researchers worldwide to a vast body of selected resources on Latin America. The Handbook itself has become a record of the history of the field of Latin American studies and an indicator of changing trends in the field. With digital access to Handbook citations of books, articles, and more, scholars are able not only to identify specific works of interest, but also to follow the rise of new areas of study, such as women’s studies, cultural history, environmental history, and Atlantic studies, among others.

Girls’ Six-Player Basketball

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime Schultz ◽  
Shelley Lucas
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Community Identity ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
The Past ◽  
High School Girls ◽  
History Of ◽  
Physical Limitations ◽  
School Girls

This chapter focuses on a defunct version of high school girls' basketball known as “six-on-six” and how it expressed community identity in Iowa. Throughout the twentieth century, more than a million Iowa high school girls played the half-court, two-dribble version of basketball known as “six-on-six.” Originally conceived to accommodate girls and women's perceived physical limitations, six-on-six basketball often lent itself to fast-paced, high-scoring, crowd-rallying competitions. This chapter first provides a historical background on six-player basketball in Iowa before discussing how girls' six-on-six basketball has been relegated to the past, yet lives on in many places and memories, thanks in part to new technologies and understandings of community. It argues that the history of Iowa's six-player basketball is alive and thriving in alternative forms, citing the emergence of new, transitory communities to sustain its remembrance. The chapter considers two sites: a 2003 reunion game that gathered former players and supporters, and a Facebook page which fosters a virtual kinship of more than 7,000 members.

Asphalt kids and the matrix city: reminiscences of children's urban environmental history

Urban History ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIMO LAAKKONEN
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
History Of ◽  
Urban Environmental History

ABSTRACT:Existing research in urban environmental history is often characterized by a narrow viewpoint or limited material reflecting the rationalist approach typical of white, middle-aged, middle-class and educated men. This orientation risks overlooking the viewpoint of the majority of urban dwellers: ordinary men, women, children, the elderly and different ethnic groups. The article focuses on the urban environmental history of children, because childhood forms the foundation for our relationship with nature. Environmental reminiscences offer fruitful material for the study of children's urban environmental history as well as children's contemporary relationships with the urban landscape. The article integrates aspects of urban history, environmental history and evolutionary psychology.

Towards an Environmental History of Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 230-271
Author(s):  
Gunnel Cederlöf
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Small Region ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Land Conflicts ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Law ◽  
The Nilgiris ◽  
The Many

The concluding chapter brings together different aspects necessary for analysing the relationship between human action and nature in the process of perceiving, disputing and codifying rights in nature. It targets the many transformative visions for a particular landscape, the battle between interests pursuing different legal principles that underpinned the formation of codes, the influence of scholarly thought on legal debates and, finally, in a close empirical study, it focuses the trajectory of land conflicts during its most intense period until the first more encompassing code of rights in nature in the Nilgiris in 1843. Thematically, it discusses the importance of acknowledging the competing interests of individual absolute property and government sovereignty, and it points to the necessity to focus the process of making law in contrast to treating law as a given. A major emphasis is given to the specific characteristic of people’s resistance against colonial encroachments in a situation of multiple authority and internal divisions among the indigenous communities. Seen in terms of negotiation, it is a strategy of acknowledging, influencing and making use of the other party’s domain of authority—a strategy of keeping confrontation at a minimum level and making gains without open conflict. Land conflicts were characterised by multiple layers of authority. Thereby, it puts forward a complex and more nuanced situation of conflict and negotiation than the previously common binary of the colonial and the colonised. Both these domains were interspersed by conflicts and oppositions, and alliances cut across such imaginative divides. Lastly, the problem of defining regions of regional history is reassessed and revised against the north–south India divide as well as the analytical hill–valley polarisation. Thus four key arguments are derived from the study and brought into a discussion of an environmental history of law. As the study makes clear, the Nilgiris, in spite of being a small region in the hills, were a site where large even global issues were at stake.

scholarly journals The history of modern Western esotericism

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Tiina Mahlamäki ◽  
Maarit Leskelä-Kärki
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Thematic Issue ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Europe ◽  
Western Esotericism

The study of Western esoteric traditions and practices has been a growing research field since the 1990s. This thematic issue aims at opening this field particularly in the context of Finnish cultural history, although the articles cover also other parts of the long tradition of Western esotericism in the history of Europe.

scholarly journals What Drives Illegal Hunting with Dogs? Traditional Practice in Contemporary South Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-28
Author(s):  
Jaime Chambers
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Traditional Practice ◽  
Rural South ◽  
Illegal Hunting ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
History Of ◽  
Systematic Control ◽  
Rural South Africa

Illegal hunting with dogs in rural South Africa converges around issues of conservation, resource use, and livelihood. Hunting with dogs has a long cultural history, tethered to tradition and subsistence. Today, it is tightly regulated but practiced outside the law. Academic literature and mainstream media alike paint a multidimensional picture of the phenomenon. Some sources portray disenfranchised people practicing a culturally significant livelihood strategy; others emphasize illegal hunting’s destructive nature, severed from traditional context. The drivers of illegal hunting in rural South Africa sit at the nexus of multiple gaps of scholarly insight, linked to a history of widespread stratification of land use, prohibition of traditional hunting, and systematic control of African possession of dogs. There is a need for ethnographic work rooted in environmental history to grapple with the complex connections underlying this issue.

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