ASEH Recent News
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>.
Approved by AHA Council, July 2020 - link to statement
All students benefit from studying history at the undergraduate level. The American Historical Association has, and will continue to, assist history departments in making the case for the imperative of historical learning and thinking in higher education.
The Association recognizes that the compounding crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic implications have resulted in a dramatic decline in higher education revenues. Given the uncertainties—financial, epidemiological, and otherwise—of the upcoming fall term, administrators confront difficult choices. As historians, we recognize that an unprecedented combination of circumstances complicates decision-making even further.
Wise decision-making by leaders in higher education, however, must be informed by historical perspective. Historians know how to take the long view. Their work, by its very nature, draws from, integrates, and synthesizes a variety of disciplines. Colleges and universities need these faculty members as participants in governance. The negative consequences of closing a history department would not take long to observe but would take years to reverse.
A glance at recent references in the media reveals that our discipline is an attractive target for the budgetary axe. Because history education prepares students for careers rather than jobs, its benefits are readily underestimated. This is especially ironic given that the historical knowledge and thinking that undergird the work of citizenship are arguably more essential now than ever. For this reason alone, history education must retain its vibrancy and institutional integrity.
The AHA recognizes that every discipline has a claim to its centrality to higher education; moreover, each institution has its own mission, its own priorities, and its own culture. What we ask, however, is that individuals making budgetary decisions in higher education respect the established principles and procedures of faculty governance and consult with faculty from all disciplines at their institution. We expect that leaders will prioritize the educational missions of their institutions in a manner consistent with the humane values that stand at the core of education itself.
The AHA stands prepared to help history departments state their case. The content and methodology of history are crucial to the education of intellectually agile graduates who are well-prepared to navigate dynamic work environments and participate fully in civic life. History students not only gain knowledge and develop insights and judgement that help them succeed in college and contribute to their communities; they also learn skills-in communication, analysis, cultural competence, and research, among others-that are consistently cited by employers as important credentials. To succeed in college, and subsequently to be effective participants in workplaces and communities, students must learn to evaluate one or more potentially competing accounts and interpretations of things that (ostensibly) happened in the recent or distant past-whether those are accounts of an election, a riot, a religious awakening, changes in workplaces, or an intellectual breakthrough. Citizens of a democratic republic need to be able to evaluate sources and evidence in a glut of digital information, and to think clearly in the midst of a cacophony of voices in the public sphere.
Several higher education institutions have recently closed or consolidated history departments, or laid off substantial numbers of historians. Others now contemplate such measures. Doing so comes at immense cost to students and to colleges and universities themselves, and to society as a whole. To eliminate or decimate a history department is a lose-lose proposition: it deprives students of essential learning and skills, even as it strips institutions of the essential perspectives and intellectual resources so necessary to confront the present and shape the future.
Agricultural History Society American Catholic Historical Association American Journalism Historians Association American Society for Environmental History Association for the Study of African American Life and History Chinese Historians in United States Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History Conference on Latin American History Coordinating Council for Women in History Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions French Colonial Historical Society Hungarian Studies Association Immigration and Ethnic History Society Labor and Working-Class History Association National Council for Public History Organization of American Historians Sixteenth Century Society & Conference Society for Austrian and Habsburg History Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Society for the History of Discoveries Society of Biblical Literature Society of Civil War Historians Southern Historical Association Western History Association
Approved by AHA Council, July 2020 - full statement here
COVID-19 is not just altering historians’ everyday life; it has also upended historical research. Although most university and college administrators have issued FAQs, guidelines, and resources that relate to the continuance of laboratory and human subjects research, they have not always addressed the conditions under which historians work or considered how to make accommodations for historical research during the pandemic. Moreover, in assessing productivity at this moment, it is imperative that university administrations recognize the distinctions among disciplines in types of research and to take into account the unusually burdensome tasks of teaching now affecting all instructors.
Historical research generally involves identifying and analyzing primary documents, which can include written, visual, aural, or material resources. Archives, special collections at historical societies and libraries, museums, historic sites, and other repositories typically hold these materials. In many cases, scholars must travel to a particular archive to consult materials that are not available for external loan or in digital form. University departments and divisions, government sources of funding, and private sources such as foundations frequently support such research. Presently, however, domestic and international travel is prohibited or limited by many institutions, and many of these entities are suspending or postponing distribution of research money and cancelling fellowship competitions. Such actions are delaying or inhibiting historical research for an indefinite period. In addition, students and non-tenure-track and contingent faculty are in many cases experiencing restrictions to onsite-only library privileges. For graduate students, limited access to research is extending time to graduation. For early career scholars, limited research access is already slowing the publication of articles and books on which employment and tenure decisions are largely based. Lack of access to research materials also potentially disadvantages mid-level scholars in the promotion process.
At the same time, repositories that safeguard and allow access to researchers have suffered staff layoffs, lost revenue, and in many cases the closing of their doors. The tasks of librarians, archivists, and curators have multiplied; they have taken on new public health training duties while continuing to try to answer reference questions in the absence of shelf access. Future conservation and digitization projects have been put on hold. Libraries are instead engaging in many cases in rapid-response collecting initiatives to capture peoples’ experiences during the pandemic. Serving researchers under such conditions is difficult at best.
The AHA recognizes that sustaining historical research during the COVID-19 crisis requires flexible and innovative approaches to the conduct of research itself as well as to how we gauge productivity. To that end, the AHA makes the following observations and recommendations.
Because PhD students and early career scholars are especially disadvantaged right now, we suggest the following:
Evaluators of scholarship and dissertation and thesis advisors should keep in mind current limitations on research access when evaluating scholarly work. Now is the time to acknowledge a wider range of scholarly productivity. Under the current circumstances, several ways exist to facilitate historical research:
Departments, universities, and employers of historians should consider ways to document how the crisis is affecting research, writing, and the ability to disseminate research by introducing appropriate accommodations to the rate of productivity while preserving existing standards of quality. Advisors, chairs, directors of programs, and administrators should work to ensure conditions that allow scholars to progress toward their goals and advance their careers. These include:
The following organizations have endorsed this statement:
African American Intellectual History Society Agricultural History Society American Folklore Society American Journalism Historians Association American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies American Society for Environmental History Association for Asian Studies Association for Computers and the Humanities Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Bibliographical Society of America Business History Conference Chinese Historians in United States College Art Association Committee on LGBT History Conference on Asian History Conference on Latin American History Coordinating Council for Women in History French Colonial Historical Society German Studies Association Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China Hungarian Studies Association Immigration and Ethnic History Society Labor and Working Class History Association Medieval Academy of America National Council on Public History North American Conference on British Studies Organization of American Historians Polish American Historical Association Sixteenth Century Society & Conference Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Society for the History of Discoveries Society for Italian Historical Studies Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender Society of Architectural Historians Society of Civil War Historians Southern Historical Association Southern Labor Studies Association Western History Association World History Association
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