scholarly journals Hiding in Plain Sight: Uncovering Nuclear Histories

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Anderson ◽  
Marissa Bell ◽  
Claude-Yves Charron ◽  
Greg Donaghy ◽  
Sarah Fox ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Test Site ◽  
Uranium Mine ◽  
Reactor Accident ◽  
Nuclear Bomb ◽  
Bomb Test ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Public Archives

Nuclear histories are global yet worryingly incomplete. Linking a plutonium refinery in Washington, a uranium mine in Saskatchewan, a tsunami at Fukushima, a nuclear bomb test site in Rajasthan, a reactor ‘accident’ at Chernobyl, a shipping accident in the English Channel, and a president-to-prime-minister confrontation over the US-Canada frontier, these quasi-autobiographical essays prove the importance of public archives, personal files with fragments, oral histories, and private recollections. This is the social history, business history, environmental history, labour history, scientific and technological history, and indigenous history of the twentieth century. Hiding in Plain Sight offers everyone an entry to the irregularities of our ‘disorderly nuclear world’, and offers other researchers crucial insights to what richness lies within.

The Historiography of Environmental History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Industrial Pollution ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.

scholarly journals 1918 and the Habsburg Monarchy as Reflected in Slovak Historiography

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-229
Author(s):  
Júlia Čížová ◽  
Roman Holec
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
New Generation

With regard to the “long” nineteenth-century history of the Habsburg monarchy, the new generation of post-1989 historians have strengthened research into social history, the history of previously unstudied social classes, the church, nobility, bourgeoisie, and environmental history, as well as the politics of memory.The Czechoslovak centenary increased historians’ interest in the year 1918 and the constitutional changes in the Central European region. It involved the culmination of previous revisitations of the World War I years, which also benefited from gaining a 100-year perspective. The Habsburg monarchy, whose agony and downfall accompanied the entire period of war (1914–1918), was not left behind because the year 1918 marked a significant milestone in Slovak history. Exceptional media attention and the completion of numerous research projects have recently helped make the final years of the monarchy and the related topics essential ones.Remarkably, with regard to the demise of the monarchy, Slovak historiography has focused not on “great” and international history, but primarily on regional history and its elites; on the fates of “ordinary” people living on the periphery, on life stories, and socio-historical aspects. The recognition of regional events that occurred in the final months of the monarchy and the first months of the republic is the greatest contribution of recent historical research. Another contribution of the extensive research related to the year 1918 is a number of editions of sources compiled primarily from the resources of regional archives. The result of such partial approaches is the knowledge that the year 1918 did not represent the discontinuity that was formerly assumed. On the contrary, there is evidence of surprising continuity in the positions of professionals such as generals, officers, professors, judges, and even senior old regime officers within the new establishment. In recent years, Slovak historiography has also managed to produce several pieces of work concerned with historical memory in relation to the final years of the monarchy.

Desert Geopolitics

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-105
Author(s):  
Natalie Koch
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Political Geography ◽  
Us Southwest ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
The Us ◽  
Milk Cows ◽  
History Of

Abstract In 2014 the largest dairy company in the Middle East, Almarai, purchased a farm near Vicksburg, Arizona, to grow alfalfa as feed for cattle in Saudi Arabia. Almarai is headquartered at Al Kharj farms, just outside of Riyadh, where it has a herd of more than 93,000 milk cows. Given that dairy and alfalfa farms both require an immense amount of water to maintain, what explains these developments in the deserts of Arizona and Arabia? The answers are historical and contemporary, demanding an approach to “desert geopolitics” that explains how environmental and political narratives bind experts across space and time. As a study in political geography and environmental history, this article uncovers a geopolitics of connection that has long linked the US Southwest and the Middle East, as well as the interlocking imperial visions advanced in their deserts. To understand these arid entanglements, I show how Almarai's purchase of the Vicksburg farm is part of a genealogy of exchanges between Saudi Arabia and Arizona that dates to the early 1940s. The history of Al Kharj and the decades-long agricultural connections between Arizona and Saudi Arabia sheds light on how specific actors imagine the “desert” as a naturalized site of scarcity, but also of opportunity to build politically and economically useful bridges between the two regions.

scholarly journals Historia de la corrupción ambiental en España, 1939-1979. ¿Franquismo o industrialización?

2018 ◽  
pp. 646
Author(s):  
Pablo Corral-Broto
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Industrial Pollution ◽  
Essential Step ◽  
Russian Economy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Social Environmental

Resumen: El artículo abre un debate acerca de la corrupción ambiental en la historia de España. El estudio se centra en la España franquista, a partir de una perspectiva regional y social. Los estudios sobre transiciones metabólicas han demostrado que los patrones industriales en la economía rusa y en las economías occidentales no dependieron de las condiciones económicas y políticas (Krausmann et al, 2016). La historia ambiental social no dispone todavía de estudios capaces de realizar este tipo de comparaciones. Este artículo pretende pues definir la corrupción ambiental del Franquismo, como paso imprescindible antes de realizar comparaciones que dejamos aquí planteadas a modo de hipótesis. Los resultados demuestran que la corrupción ambiental franquista se ejerció mediante tres estrategias: una compleja laxitud y maleabilidad legislativa en la aplicación y reforma de la ley, la creación de duda por parte de ciertos expertos proclives a la industria y la represión y una justicia arbitraria.Palabras clave: Franquismo, medio ambiente, contaminación industrial, historia ambiental, España.Abstract: This article opens a debate about environmental corruption in the history of Spain. The study focused on Franco’ Spain, from a regional and social history perspective. Studies of metabolic transitions have shown that industrial patterns in the Russian economy and Western economies did not depend on economic and political conditions (Krausmann et al, 2016). Social environmental history does not yet have studies capable of making such comparisons. This article aims to define the environmental corruption of Francoism, as an essential step before making comparisons that we leave here presented as hypotheses. The results show that Francoist environmental corruption was exercised through three strategies: a complex laxity and legislative malleability in law enforcement and reform, the creation of doubt certain by certain experts with industrial interests and arbitrary repression and justice.Keywords: Francoism, environment, industrial pollution, environmental history, Spain.

Social and Environmental History in the Anthropocene

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Warde
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée

This chapter takes seriously the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’—the concept of the period of history from which human activities have had global effects on the environment—and looks at it historically, across the longue durée, noting that the environment is itself a concept with a history of its own. The chapter argues that environmental history is very largely entwined with social history and that this poses a challenge for historians. Should we think of ‘the social’ and ‘the environmental’ as two different (albeit connected) spheres, or should we reconceptualize what ‘society’ and ‘environment’ might mean, both historically and for the future?

Race, Gender, and Space Exploration: A Chapter in the Social History of the Space Age

2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
KIM MCQUAID
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social History ◽  
Space Exploration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

An era of space explorations and an era of expanded civil rights for racial minorities and women began simultaneously in the United States. But such important social changes are very rarely discussed in relation to each other. Four recent books on how the US astronaut program finally opened to women and minorities in 1978 address a key part of this connection, without discussing the struggles that compelled the ending of traditional race and gender exclusions. This essay examines the organizational and political dynamics of how civil rights in employment came to the US civilian space program in the decades after 1970.

scholarly journals Environmental history of a closed-basin lake in the US Great Plains: Diatom response to variations in groundwater flow regimes over the last 8500 cal. yr BP

The Holocene ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 1203-1216 ◽  
Author(s):  
William O. Hobbs ◽  
Sherilyn C. Fritz ◽  
Jeffery R. Stone ◽  
Joseph J. Donovan ◽  
Eric C. Grimm ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Groundwater Flow ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Northern Great Plains ◽  
Dust Bowl ◽  
Strong Connection ◽  
Lake Water Level ◽  
Closed Basin ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of

Sediment records from closed-basin lakes in the Northern Great Plains (NGP) of North America have contributed significantly to our understanding of regional paleoclimatology. A high-resolution (near decadal) fossil diatom record from Kettle Lake, ND, USA that spans the last 8500 cal. yr BP is interpreted in concert with percent abundance of aragonite in the sediment as an independent proxy of groundwater flow to the lake (and thus lake water level). Kettle Lake has been relatively fresh for the majority of the Holocene, likely because of the coarse substrata and a strong connection to the underlying aquifer. Interpretation of diatom assemblages in four groups indicative of low to high groundwater flow, based on the percent of aragonite in sediments, allow interpretations of arid periods (and probable meromictic lake conditions) that could not be detected based on diatom-based salinity reconstructions alone. At the centennial–millennial scale, the diatom record suggests humid/wet periods from 8351 to 8088, 4364 to 1406 and 872 to 620 cal. yr BP, with more arid periods intervening. During the last ~ 4500 years, decadal–centennial scale periods of drought have taken place, despite the generally wetter climate. These droughts appear to have had similar impacts on the Kettle Lake hydrology as the ‘Dust Bowl’ era droughts, but were longer in duration.

‘Born in the corridors of the OECD’: the forgotten origins of the Club of Rome, transnational networks, and the 1970s in global history

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Schmelzer
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Transnational Networks ◽  
Global History ◽  
Limits To Growth ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Club Of Rome

AbstractThis article re-examines a contested chapter in the international and environmental history of the 1970s. Even though largely neglected by historical research and in the public memory, the Club of Rome – widely remembered for its 1972 report The limits to growth – was not only born within the OECD, but was also in its early period strongly influenced by debates within this think tank of the industrialized countries. Using previously overlooked sources, this article analyses this highly unlikely OECD–Club of Rome nexus. It not only offers a privileged view into the social history of international policy-making and the related personal entanglements and ideological transfers at a key moment of post-war history. It also demonstrates that the social, intellectual, and economic turmoil of the late 1960s prompted a rethinking of the economic growth paradigm, even within those technocratic institutions that had aspired to guide the post-war industrial growth regime. The article argues that these links are not only vital for our understanding of the relationship between acquisitive growth capitalism and environmentalism, but also enable a more profound understanding of the role of transnational networks in global history and the appreciation of the place of the 1970s in world history.

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