Environmental History Seminar

This seminar paper explores how camping embodies the ways in which Americans envisioned access to nature as linked to notions of civic belonging, public culture, and political voice. It is drawn from Young’s book in progress.

This history of rail trails highlights the increasingly fractious relationship among urban constituencies and sheds light on the meaning of recreational trails as spaces of potential conflict between groups of walkers, landowners, policymakers, and residents.

This seminar paper explores how the commodity production activities of early settlers impacted the land- and waterscapes of New England’s longest river. It is the capstone chapter to a book project on the environmental history of the colonial Connecticut Valley.

This paper examines a frustrating question for those concerned with environmental issues: Why has land preservation been such a challenge for suburbs in the late 20th century? It considers how land preservation occurs by offering a case study of a grassroots environmental movement in Fairfax County that formed around 1970 in response to plans for a single-family residential development adjacent to the Potomac River.

By examining towns of Plymouth County, particularly Pembroke and Middleboro, this project shows how political, economic, and at times military power flowed from effective control of the waterways. The shift in what might be called “water regimes” was a crucial location of what Charles Sellers has called the Market Revolution.

In 1909, Elizabeth Lowell Putnam formed the Massachusetts Milk Consumers’ Association with the intent of tackling what was then known as “the milk question.” Using the MMCA as a case study, this paper argues that Boston milk reformers’ understanding of the new science of bacteriology fundamentally shaped their perceptions of the relationship between the rural environment, the food city dwellers consumed, and the health of human bodies.

The search for a heterogeneous menu of game animals allowed northeastern Indians a flexible pattern of winter mobility. After 1704, however, English soldiers patrolled Indians’ winter hunting grounds, interfering with native reliance on wild animals. Political ecology—how power affects people’s access to routes and resources—mattered more than environmental degradation to the fate of the winter hunt on the Maritime Peninsula.