The People and the Bay: A Social and Environmental History of Hamilton Harbour

This paper challenges the wilderness ideology with which the Group of Seven’s coastal landscapes of the north shore of Lake Superior are often associated. Focusing my analysis around key works by Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald, and Franklin Carmichael, I offer an alternative perspective on commonly-adopted national and wilderness narratives, and instead consider these works in line with an emergent ecocritical consciousness. While a conversation about wilderness in relation to the Group of Seven often ignores the colonial history and Indigenous communities that previously inhabited coastal Lake Superior, this paper identifies these within a discussion of the environmental history of the region. That the environment of the north shore of Lake Superior was a primordial space waiting to be discovered and conquered only seeks to ratify the landscape as a colonial space. Instead, by engaging with the ecological complexities and environmental aesthetics of Lake Superior and its surrounding shoreline, I challenge this colonial and ideological construct of the wilderness, accounting for the prevailing fur trade, fishing, and lumber industries that dominated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A discussion of environmental history and landscape painting further allows for a consideration of both the exploitation and preservation of nature over the course of the twentieth century, and looks beyond the theosophical and mystical in relation to the Group’s Lake Superior works. As such, the timeliness of an ecocritical perspective on the Group of Seven’s landscapes represents an opportunity to consider how we might recontextualize these paintings in a time of unprecedented anthropogenic climate change, while recognizing the people and history to whom this land traditionally belongs.

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Setting the Scene for an Environmental History of Late Antiquity

Late Antique Archaeology ◽

10.1163/22134522-12340049 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 3-13

Author(s):

Adam Izdebski

Keyword(s):

Case Studies ◽

Environmental History ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Late Antiquity ◽

Late Antique ◽

Actual Experience ◽

The People ◽

History Of ◽

Modern Era ◽

New Framework

Abstract Environmental history is a well-established discipline that until recently focused mainly on the modern era and was dominated by historians. Numerous scholars agree today that this needs to change: a focus on Late Antiquity can help this happen. To make it possible, we should concentrate our efforts on three parallel projects. First, make late antique studies more interdisciplinary, i.e. joining the efforts of historians, archaeologists and natural scientists. Second, look at Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages as a source of case studies that are relevant to the central themes of environmental history. Third, use environmental history as a new framework that has the potential to modify our vision of the 1st millennium AD, by getting us closer to the actual experience of the people who lived this past.

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The People of the River

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643243.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Oscar de la Torre

Keyword(s):

Tropical Forest ◽

Environmental History ◽

Indigenous Peoples ◽

Natural Landscape ◽

Autonomous Communities ◽

Local Environments ◽

The People ◽

History Of ◽

Emergent Identity ◽

Getulio Vargas

In this history of the black peasants of Amazonia, Oscar de la Torre focuses on the experience of African-descended people navigating the transition from slavery to freedom. He draws on social and environmental history to connect them intimately to the natural landscape and to Indigenous peoples. Relying on this world as a repository for traditions, discourses, and strategies that they retrieved especially in moments of conflict, Afro-Brazilians fought for autonomous communities and developed a vibrant ethnic identity that supported their struggles over labor, land, and citizenship. Prior to abolition, enslaved and escaped blacks found in the tropical forest a source for tools, weapons, and trade--but it was also a cultural storehouse within which they shaped their stories and records of confrontations with slaveowners and state authorities. After abolition, the black peasants' knowledge of local environments continued to be key to their aspirations, allowing them to maintain relationships with powerful patrons and to participate in the protest cycle that led Getúlio Vargas to the presidency of Brazil in 1930. In commonly referring to themselves by such names as "sons of the river," black Amazonians melded their agro-ecological traditions with their emergent identity as political stakeholders.

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Reconstruction of the Recent Environmental History of Hamilton Harbour (Lake Ontario, Canada) from Analysis of Siliceous Microfossils

Journal of Great Lakes Research ◽

10.1016/s0380-1330(93)71198-3 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 19 (1) ◽

pp. 55-71 ◽

Cited By ~ 22

Author(s):

Jing-Rong Yang ◽

Hamish C. Duthie ◽

L. Denis Delorme

Keyword(s):

Environmental History ◽

Lake Ontario ◽

Hamilton Harbour ◽

History Of

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Introduction

Embattled Freedom ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643625.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 5-18

Author(s):

Amy Murrell Taylor

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Material Culture ◽

Environmental History ◽

Fundamental Aspect ◽

Refugee Camps ◽

Union Army ◽

Military Conflict ◽

Federal Bureaucracy ◽

The People ◽

History Of

The introduction offers an overview of the book by setting up its main questions and themes. It begins with a discussion of the geography of the refugee camps and describes how a new federal bureaucracy came into being in order to manage them. It describes the language used—then and now—to refer to the people seeking refuge from slavery and the spaces in which they lived. And it argues that“refugee” is a term that is rooted in the language of the 1860s and is more respectful of the personhood of these individuals than the term “contraband.” The introduction also urges readers to view this wartime period of emancipation as a distinct one, defined by its position inside military conflict and by the central challenge of seeking freedom inside the bureaucracy, culture, and spaces of the Union army. The introduction also describes the book’s methods, ranging from its examination of the material culture and environmental history of the refugee camps, to its microhistory approach that focuses on the stories of particular individuals. These approaches, the introduction explains, are necessary for understanding the most fundamental aspect of seeking freedom during the Civil War: survival.

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