I’ve written an online blog entry for the journal Dissentthat may prove of interest. The argument is based on those I and others made in our edited volume Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World (Temple UP, 2011).
“How Industrial Hazards Get Overlooked,” Dissent Blog (April 25, 2013)
Chris
I’ve opened a website for my new book Crabgrass Crucible, which I will be developing further over the next while. In conjunction with an article I’m working on for the Long Island Historical Journal, along with Neil Buffet, and other maps and visual help by the Paul St. Denis and the folks at TLT, should provide a pretty cool resource for others interested in the subject.
I’ve tried my hand at some blogging, with a new entry on the “Seeing the Woods” blog of the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. It’s about what the antipollution movement of the 1960′s may be able to teach the climate activists of today. I’ve called it “all environmental politics is local.” My argument is based on my recent Crabgrass Crucible.
Chris Sellers
Jim Quigley of Stony Brook’s Sustainability Program, interviews Christopher Sellers, a Stony Brook historian, about his new book Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in 20th-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Their discussion explores Sellers arguments about the suburban origins of environmentalism and their implications for efforts toward sustainability today.
Audio file recorded November 27, 2012; broadcast March 8, 2013 on WUSB.
The Departments of History and Technology and Society and the Humanities Institute
Stony Brook University
Present
Ann Green
Department of History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
“Rethinking Energy Histories and Landscapes”
Current concerns over energy consumption and environmental consequence are creating growing scholarly interest in energy history, and especially in understanding the energy transitions of the past. Changes in the kinds of energy consumed and in levels of energy consumption have long been central to an understanding of industrialization. Yet the focus has been largely on wood, coal and oil, overlooking other forms of widely consumed energies. This talk emphasizes the critical role of animal power in American industrialization, and reexamines how the question of transition away from animal power is understood in historical literature.
Monday, April 30, 2012
3:30 p.m. Humanities 1008
Ann Green is the author of, among many publications, “Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America” (Harvard UP, 2008), winner of the 2009 Pioneer America Society Fred B. Kniffen Award for best book.
The Departments of History and Geosciences and the Humanities Center Stony Brook University
Present
Vernacular Science of the New Madrid Earthquakes: Creating Knowledge in the Early United States
In the winter of 1811-12, a series of sizable tremors rippled out from the middle Mississippi Valley. What we now term the New Madrid earthquakes were of immediate and pressing concern to the North Americans displaced, shaken, or frightened by them. This presentation, from a forthcoming book on changing historical understandings of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, argues that the intense public interest and discussion surrounding the New Madrid earthquakes reveals a multi-faceted world of vernacular science in the early United States.
During the long sequence of earthquakes and in the months, years, and decades after, observers took weather measurements; recorded the effects of the shocks on their homes, livestock, and their own bodies; created devices for revealing the intensity and direction of the shocks; and investigated a multitude of effects from fouled wells to strange mineral deposits. They reported Native American accounts from near the epicenters and from further west. In ways both idiosyncratic and creative, early Americans attempted to convey and come to terms with these sudden and disruptive temblors. Accounts of the quakes demonstrate the blurred nature of expert and nonexpert discussions in the early nineteenth century. Because of the lack of clear consensus about the mechanisms or causes of earthquakes, people in borderland regions along the Ohio and Mississippi Valley became not simply witnesses but theorists of the dramatic seismicity they had experienced. Their attempts to record and explain events that overwhelmed them reveal a broadly-shared and vigorous culture of science in the early United States.
This earlier history also highlights the surprising forgetting of the quakes in the late nineteenth century, a forgetting that took place for social and environmental as well as scientific reasons. The New Madrid quakes represent an event once taken for granted that receded almost into tall tale for the better part of a century.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012. 1 p.m. Humanities 1008
