ASEH Recent News
George Perkins Marsh Prize
for best book in environmental history
Winner:
Jamie Kreiner, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020)
Finalists:
David Fedman, Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020)
Grace Karskens, People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2020)
Rachel Carson Prize
for best dissertation in environmental history
Geoffrey Wallace, "The History and Geography of Beeswax Extraction in the Northern Maya Lowlands, 1540-1700,” McGill University
Congratulations to all of the winners of ASEH's 2021 awards and prizes!
ASEH thanks all of the selection committees for their hard work.
Join us for Environmental History Week in April to celebrate!
ASEH is excited to announce its
2021 Article Prize Winners
Leopold-Hidy Prize for best article in Environmental History (with Forest History Society)
Elizabeth Hennessy for her article “Saving Species: The Co-evolution of Tortoise Taxonomy and Conservation in the Galápagos Islands” (April 2020)
Alice Hamilton Prize for best article outside journal Environmental History
Christopher Conz for his article “Sheep, Scab Mites, and Society: The Process and Politics of Veterinary Knowledge in Lesotho, Southern Africa, c. 1900-1933" (August 2020) in Environment and History
Caroline Grego for her project "Hurricane of the New South: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Jim Crow Lowcountry"
Equity Graduate Student Fellowship
Teona Williams for her project examining Black women’s intellectual and social engagement with ecology, land, and Black national ideologies across the Mississippi Delta
Hal Rothman Dissertation Fellowship
Terrell Orr for his project "The Roots of Global Citrus in “Nuevo South” Florida and Rural São Paulo, 1965-1995"
Alyssa Kreikemeier for her project "Aerial Enclosures: From Commons to Conflict in the American West"
and
Matthew Plishka for his project “Battling Banana Blight: Panama Disease, Smallholders, and Jamaica’s Agroecosystem, 1870-1962”
ASEH is excited to announce the winners of its
2021 Awards
The Distinguished Scholar Award is given every year to an individual who has contributed significantly to environmental history scholarship. Congratulations to 2021 winner:
NANCY LANGSTON
The Lisa Mighetto Distinguished Service Award is given every year to an individual who has contributed significantly to the development of ASEH as an organization. Congratulations to 2021 winner:
MARK MADISON
The Distinguished Career in Public Environmental History is presented every two years to an individual who has promoted environmental history to the public over time. The winner this year is:
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS
The Public Outreach Project Award is presented every two years to an environmental history project that engages the public. The award was postponed in 2020. The winner this year is:
CLIMATE WITNESS: VOICES OF LADAKH
Join us for Environmental History Week in April to celebrate the winners of our distinguished awards!
Coming soon! The winners of ASEH's book, article, and dissertation prizes, as well as ASEH research fellowships winners.
Voting is now open for ASEH's 2021 election!
ASEH holds elections every other year according to the rules set out in our bylaws, which also detail the responsibilities and terms of each office.
The Nominating Committee assembled a slate of candidates for the positions of Vice President/President-Elect, Treasurer, Secretary, Council members (3), and Nominating Committee (2). Only active ASEH members are eligible to vote.
The candidates submitted STATEMENTS. Please read them to learn more about each person on the slate.
ASEH Election 2021
Start: January 15, 2021 End: February 15, 2021
VOTE NOW
Thank you for your membership and vote.
ASEH signed on to AHA's issued statement condemning “the actions of those who, on January 6, stormed the United States Capitol, the seat of the nation’s legislature, the heart of its democratic form of governance.” The AHA deplores the “inflammatory rhetoric of all the political leaders who have refused to accept the legitimacy of the results of the 2020 election and thereby incited the mob.”
ASEH was one of first 15 organizations to sign onto the statement. The full text and more information, including the signees, can be found here.
Approved by AHA Council, January 8, 2021 The American Historical Association condemns the actions of those who, on January 6, stormed the United States Capitol, the seat of the nation’s legislature, the heart of its democratic form of governance. This assault on the very principle of representative democracy received recent explicit and indirect support from the White House and from certain senators and representatives themselves. Not since 1814, when the British looted and burned the Capitol, has the United States witnessed such a blatant attack on the “People’s House.”
Everything has a history. What happened at the Capitol is part of a historical process. Over the past few years, cynical politicians have nurtured and manipulated for their own bigoted and self-interested purposes the sensibilities of the rioters. We deplore the inflammatory rhetoric of all the political leaders who have refused to accept the legitimacy of the results of the 2020 election and thereby incited the mob-and this on the day when the nation reported 3,865 COVID-19 deaths, the highest number reported in a single day since the pandemic began.
We note with dismay the iconography of the banners carried by the mob—the flag with the visage of the president emblazoned on it, as if loyalty were due an individual and not the rule of law, and the flag of the Confederacy, signaling violence and sedition. Not by coincidence, those people who attacked the Capitol have been described by the current president and his advisers as “great patriots” and “American patriots.” The rioters were neither.
A day that began with two significant “firsts”—the election of Georgia’s first African American senator and that state’s first Jewish senator—ended with Congress performing its duties according to the Constitution. Yet during the day we witnessed the unprecedented spectacle of a group of Americans desecrating the sacred space of the nation’s Capitol, and terrorizing everyone in it.
As historians, we call upon our fellow citizens and elected representatives to abide by the law and tell the truth. Our democracy demands nothing less of ourselves and of our leaders.
ASEH presents the third webinar in its Race and the Environment series
November 17, 2020 - 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM (EST)
WEBINAR LINK
Brinda Sarathy, Pitzer College (moderator)
Matthew Himel, Mississippi State University, "Hidden Labor at the Village of Pinehurst: Golf, Environment, and Middle-Class Expectations."
Rebecca Johns, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, "Not your Grandpa’s Sierra Club: Examining Racism and Exclusion in the Rhetorical Construction of the Environmental Citizen."
Hannah Ramer, University of Minnesota, "Planting Gardens, Cultivating Segregation: Real Estate and the Garden Club of Minneapolis, 1910-1925."
Addressing racial inequalities is not just a matter of increasing diversity, but also of recognizing and naming anti-Black racism. Humans’ relations with the environment also bear examination. This webinar offers a platform to four scholars who explore different aspects of anti-Black racism in environmental history.
The webinar begins with a paper on racialized labor. Matthew Himel, Mississippi State University, continues the exploration “Hidden Labor at the Village of Pinehurst: Golf, Environment, and Middle-Class Expectations.” Himel explains how hidden, African American labor created a pastoral playground packaged as unchanging and natural in North Carolina’s pine barrens.
Next are two papers on environmental organizations. Rebecca Johns, of the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg presents “Not your Grandpa’s Sierra Club: Examining Racism and Exclusion in the Rhetorical Construction of the Environmental Citizen,” which uses rhetorical analysis to examine the construction of audience and interrogate the Club’s responsiveness to criticisms about racial exclusion. Finally, Hannah Ramer, University of Minnesota, speaks on “Planting Gardens, Cultivating Segregation: Real Estate and the Garden Club of Minneapolis, 1910-1925.” Ramer explains how Garden Club leaders aimed to beautify the city, save money for working families, promote exercise and healthy eating, even while working to block labor organizing, boost profits for real estate developers and institutionalize racial segregation.
The webinar will begin with presentations by each speaker and conclude with half an hour of questions from listeners.
The American Society for Environmental History will sponsor a series of webinars around Race and the Environment during Fall 2020. The webinars will capture and expand some of the exciting sessions from the March 2020 meeting that ASEH was forced to cancel to the COVID pandemic. ASEH and its members are eager to engage in this transformative cultural moment by sharing their scholarship and discussing its larger implications. The 2020 Program Committee and the Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity are organizing the webinars.
Sponsored by the Initiative for Environmental Humanities at Brown (EHAB) under the auspices of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University.
Nancy Jacobs, Brown University (moderator)
Saheed Aderinto, Western Carolina University, “Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria.”
Bénédicte Boisseron, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, "Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question."
Yuka Suzuki, Bard College, "The Nature of Whiteness: Race, Animals, and Nation in Zimbabwe."
Human races and non-human species are intertwined. The Great Chain of Being, the western notion of a hierarchy of living creatures, arrayed species with humans at the apex. Among humans was the ordering of different hues, with lighter-skinned nations at the top and the darkest at the bottom. Whether Black people belonged above or below the line marking animals was a matter of discussion. More recent discourse in animal rights and conservation has continued this association of human races and non-human species by comparing factory farming with the enslavement of Africans, by associating indigenous hunting with animality, and by presenting white conservationists as saviors or as colonizers. In this current moment of reflection on the pervasiveness of race, its interplay with species in environmental thought merits attention.
This webinar brings together three authors of recent and forthcoming books about human race and non-human species. Saheed Aderinto of Western Carolina University will speak on his forthcoming book “Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria” (Ohio University Press, 2021). Drawing on rich evidence from a critically important case, this work makes the assertion that animals, too, were colonial subjects. Next, Bénédicte Boisseron, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, will present a synopsis of Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (Columbia University Press, 2018). Boisseron investigates the relationship between race and the animal in the Americas and the Black Atlantic, exposing a hegemonic system that measures the value of life. Finally, Yuka Suzuki of Bard College addresses The Nature of Whiteness: Race, Animals, and Nation in Zimbabwe (University of Washington Press, 2017). Suzuki’s work on the intertwining of race and nature in post-independence Zimbabwe explores how conservation has been a political resource for white farmers, even as the killing of Cecil the Lion by an American trophy hunter exposed the tensions in their claims.
ASEH presents the first webinar in the Race and the Environment seriesNew Perspectives on Black Ecology
Rob Gioielli, University of Cincinnati (moderator)
Justin Hosbey, Emory University
Tony Perry, University of Virginia
Allison Puglisi, Harvard University
J.T. Roane, Arizona State University
Teona Williams, Yale University
Join us on Tuesday, October 13, 2020 at 7pm EDT
Join us at
https://brown.zoom.us/j/92345337994?pwd=b1E3RlB6YmU1SGVEcGZUQnhBVmJjQT09
Sponsored by the https://www.brown.edu/academics/humanities/environmental-humanitiesInitiative for Environmental Humanities at Brown (EHAB) under the auspices of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University.
The AHA has issued a statement on last week’s “White House Conference on American History” deploring the tendentious use of history and history education to stoke politically motivated culture wars.
As of September 24, 25 organizations signed onto the statement.
Download the statement as a PDF.
Approved by AHA Council, September 23, 2020 On September 17, the White House announced, “In commemoration of Constitution Day, President Trump will travel to the National Archives to participate in a discussion on the liberal indoctrination of America’s youth through the 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, and other misleading, radical ideologies with a diverse group of professors, historians, and scholars. The President will deliver remarks on his Administration’s efforts to promote a more balanced, accurate, and patriotic curricula in America’s schools.”
This hastily assembled “White House Conference on American History” took place in the Rotunda of the National Archives, although the National Archives and Records Administration had no role in organizing the program. The organizers of the event neither informed nor consulted associations of professional historians.
The American Historical Association addresses this “conference” and the president’s ill-informed observations about American history and history education reluctantly and with dismay. The event was clearly a campaign stunt, deploying the legitimating backdrop of the Rotunda, home of the nation’s founding documents, to draw distinctions between the two political parties on education policy, tie one party to civil disorder, and enable the president to explicitly attack his opponent. Like the president’s claim at Mount Rushmore two months ago that “our children are taught in school to hate their own country,” this political theater stokes culture wars that are meant to distract Americans from other, more pressing current issues. The AHA only reluctantly gives air to such distraction; we are not interested in inflating a brouhaha that is a mere sideshow to the many perils facing our nation at this moment.
Past generations of historians participated in promoting a mythical view of the United States. Missing from this conventional narrative were essential themes that we now recognize as central to a complete understanding of our nation’s past. As scholars, we locate and evaluate evidence, which we use to craft stories about the past that are inclusive and able to withstand critical scrutiny. In the process, we engage in lively and at times heated conversations with each other about the meaning of evidence and ways to interpret it. As teachers, we encourage our students to question conventional wisdom as well as their own assumptions, but always with an emphasis on evidence. It is not appropriate for us to censor ourselves or our students when it comes to discussing past events and developments. To purge history of its unsavory elements and full complexity would be a disservice to history as a discipline and the nation, and in the process would render a rich, fascinating story dull and uninspiring.
The AHA deplores the use of history and history education at all grade levels and other contexts to divide the American people, rather than use our discipline to heal the divisions that are central to our heritage. Healing those divisions requires an understanding of history and an appreciation for the persistent struggles of Americans to hold the nation accountable for falling short of its lofty ideals. To learn from our history we must confront it, understand it in all its messy complexity, and take responsibility as much for our failures as our accomplishments.
The following organizations have cosigned this statement:
African American Intellectual History Society American Anthropological Association American Journalism Historians Association American Society for Environmental History American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies American Sociological Association American Studies Association Chinese Historians in United States Committee on LGBT History Conference on Asian History Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions French Colonial Historical Society Immigration and Ethnic History Society Massachusetts Historical Society Medieval Academy of America Modern Greek Studies Association North American Conference on British Studies Radical History Journal Shakespeare Association of America Society for Austrian and Habsburg History Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Society of Automotive Historians Society of Civil War Historians Southern Historical Association World History Association
The nominating committee works to identify outstanding candidates for elected leadership positions within ASEH. The next election will take place in January 2021, but, as described in the guidelines posted here, the work begins now. Over the course of the summer and early fall, the nominating committee will assemble a slate of candidates which represents the breadth and diversity of scholars contributing to the society, including scholars with a range of research interests and relevant experiences.
Do you seek to chart ASEH’s course in the coming years? Have you admired a fellow ASEH member’s commitment to our common principles, or their efforts to advocate on behalf of others? Perhaps you’ve been astounded by how effortlessly a colleague organized a workshop or conference panel. Or possibly you’ve long admired how a fellow ASEH member instills a rich appreciation for environmental history among public audiences.
If the answer to any of these questions is yes—the nominating committee of ASEH would appreciate your help. During summer 2020, the committee welcomes self-nominations and nominations of other ASEH members to elected leadership positions. The following positions will be filled by election in 2021.
As Vice President, this person will have overall charge of arrangements for the society's annual program, for which purpose he/she shall also appoint a program committee. This group shall consist of interested officers and members. He/she shall also arrange joint programs with other organizations in cooperation with the President and members of the executive committee. He/she shall act for the President in all other matters when the President is absent or unable to act. As President, he/she will preside at all business meetings of the society, shall appoint members of all committees except where otherwise provided for in the bylaws, and shall be ex-officio a member of all committees, except when the committee or its chairman is appointed by the executive committee.
The Secretary shall keep a record of the meetings of the executive committee and the Society's business meetings, and shall assist the President in arranging these meetings and distributing materials for review.
These members are charged with identifying candidates to stand for elections, which take place in the January of odd years.
To make a nomination, you can use the online Nomination Form or feel free to contact any of the four current nominating committee members via e-mail: Michael Egan <egan@mcmaster.ca>, Liza Piper <epiper@ualberta.ca>, Kendra Smith-Howard <ksmithhoward@albany.edu>, or Ling Zhang <ling.zhang.2@bc.edu>.
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