award recipients

Distinguished Scholar Award

Year Recipient

2020  Harriet Ritvo

2019  John McNeill

2018  Jane Carruthers

2016  Martin Melosi

2014  James McCann

2012  Richard White [award presented in 2013]

2010  Carolyn Merchant

2008  William Cronon

2004  Donald Worster

2001  Alfred W. Crosby

1997  Samuel P. Hays

Lisa Mighetto Distinguished Service Award

Year Recipient

2020  Lisa Brady

2019  Steve Pyne

2018  Nancy Langston

2017  Carolyn Merchant

2016  Melissa Wiedenfeld

2015  Joel Tarr

2014  Paul Hirt

2013  Kathleen Brosnan

2012  Thomas Dunlap

2011  Jeffrey Stine

2009  Martin Melosi

2006  Hal K. Rothman

2004  Susan Flader

2000  J. Donald Hughes

1997  John Opie

Public Outreach Project Award

Year and Recipient

2018  Los Angeles Urban Rangers

2016  Schuylkill River Heritage Area for “Schuylkill River Sojourn” 

2014  Char Miller for his blog “Golden Green”

Distinguished Career in Public Environmental History Award

Year and Recipient

2019   Libby Robin and Tom Griffiths

2017   Christof Mauch

2015   Marty Reuss

George Perkins Marsh Prize (best book)

2020  Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. W. W. Norton & Company.

2019  Megan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power. Harvard University Press.

2018  Brian McCammack, Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago. Harvard University Press.

2017  Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048–1128. Cambridge University Press.

2016  Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest. Princeton University Press.

2015  Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City. Harvard University Press.

2014  Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. Oxford University Press.

2013  Daniel Schneider, Hybrid Nature: Sewage Treatment and the Contradictions of the I Industrial Ecosystem. MIT Press.

2012  David Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta. University of Washington Press.

2011  Brett Walker, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan, University of Washington Press.

2010  Timothy LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet. Rutgers University Press.

2009  Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War. Harvard University Press.

2008  Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa. Ohio University Press.

2007  John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States. University of Texas Press.

2006  McCann, James C., Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop: 1500 – 2000. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

2005  Donahue, Brian, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord. New Haven: Yale University Press.

2004  Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2003  Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land. New York: Basic Books.

2002  Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. University of California Press.

2002  Louis A. Perez, Jr., Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the Transformation of Nineteenth- Century Cuba. University of North Carolina Press.

2001  Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present. Johns Hopkins University Press.

2000  Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis. University of Washington Press.

1999  Theodore Catton, Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos and National Parks in Alaska. University of New Mexico Press.

1999  Ann Vileisis, Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America's Wetlands. Island Press.

1997  Elliott West, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains. University of New Mexico Press.

1997  Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. University of California Press.

1995  Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History. Harvard University Press.

1995  John Opie, Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land. University of Nebraska Press.

1993  William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. W.W. Norton.

1991  Robert Harms, Games Against Nature: An Eco-Cultural History of the Nunu of Equatorial Africa. Cambridge University Press.

1989  Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850-1980. Cambridge University Press.

Alice Hamilton Prize (best article outside Environmental History)

Year and Recipient

2019  Frank Zelko, “Optimizing nature: Invoking the “natural” in the struggle over water fluoridation,” History of Science (2019).

2018  Christopher Sellers, "To Place or Not to Place: Towards an Environmental History of Modern Medicine," Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Spring 2018).

2017  Caroline Peyton, “Kentucky’s ‘Atomic Graveyard’: Maxey Flats and Environmental Inequity in Rural America,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society.

2016  Philipp Nicolas Lehmann, “Infinite Power to Change the World: Hydroelectricity and Engineered Climate Change in the Atlantropa Project,” American Historical Review.

2015  Michael Christopher Low, “Ottoman Infrastructures of the Saudi Hydro-State: The Technopolitics of Pilgrimage and Potable Water in the Hijaz,” Comparative Studies in Society and History.

2014  Molly A. Warsh, “A Political Ecology in the Early Spanish Caribbean,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 71, no. 4 (October 2014): 517-548.

2013  Alan Mikhail, “Unleashing the Beast: Animals, Energy, and the Economy of Labor in Ottoman Egypt,” in American Historical Review (April 2013).

2012  Edward D. Melillo, "The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840-1930," in American Historical Review (October 2012).

2011  Paul Sutter, “What Gullies Mean: Georgia’s 'Little Grand Canyon' and Southern Environmental History,” in The Journal of Southern History (August 2010).

2010  Richard Keyser, "The Transformation of Traditional Woodland Management: Commercial Sylviculture in Medieval Champagne," in French Historical Studies (2009).

2009  Paul S. Sutter, "Nature's Agents or Agents of Empire? Entomological Workers and Environmental Change during the Construction of the Panama Canal," Isis 98 (2007).

2008  Tyler Priest, "Extraction Not Creation: The History of Offshore Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico," Enterprise and Society 8 (June 2007).

2007  Thomas Andrews, "'Made by Toile'? Tourism, Labor, and the Construction of the Colorado Landscape, 1858-1917," Journal of American History 92 (December 2005).

2006  Mark Fiege, "The Weedy West: Mobile Nature, Boundaries, and Common Space in the Montana Landscape," Western Historical Quarterly (Spring 2005).

2005  Linda Nash, "The Fruits of Ill-Health: Pesticides and Workers' Bodies in Post-World War II California," Osiris, 19 (2004): 203-219.

2004  Jason W. Moore, "The Modern World-System as Environmental History? Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism," Theory and Society 32: 307-377, 2003.

2003  William Boyd, "Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production," Technology and Culture 42 (October 2001), pp. 631-664.

2002  Nancy J. Jacobs, "The Great Bophuthatswana Donkey Massacre: Discourse on the Ass and the Politics of Class and Grass," The American Historical Review 106:2 (April 2001).

2001  Karl Appuhn, "Inventing Nature: Forests, Forestry, and State Power in Renaissance Venice," The Journal of Modern History 72 (December 2000).

2000  Ellen Stroud, "Troubled Waters in Ecotopia: Environmental Racism in Portland, Oregon," Radical History Review, 1999.

1999  Matthew W. Klingle, "Plying Atomic Waters: Lauren Donaldson and the 'Fern Lake Concept' of Fisheries Management," Journal of the History of Biology, 1998.

1997  Richard C. Hoffmann, "Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems in Medieval Europe," American Historical Review, 1996.

Leopold-Hidy Prize (best article in Environmental History)

Year and Recipient

2019  Andrew Baker, “Risk, Doubt, and the Biological Control of Southern Waters” (April issue).

2018  Paul Kreitman, "Attacked by Excrement: The Political Ecology of Shit in Wartime and Postwar Tokyo" (April issue).

2017  Kate Wersan, “The Early Melon and the Mechanical Gardener: Toward an Environmental History of Timekeeping in the Long Eighteenth Century” (April issue).

2016  Jakobina Arch, “Whale Meat in Early Postwar Japan: Natural Resources and Food Culture” (July issue).

2015  Alan Mikhail, “Ottoman Iceland: A Climate History,” 20:2 (April 2015 issue): 262-284. 2014 Faisal Husain, “In the Bellies of the Marshes: Water and Power in the Countryside of Ottoman Baghdad,” Vol. 19, no. 3 (October 2014 issue).

2013  Natalia Milanesio, “The Liberating Flame: Natural Gas Production in Peronist Argentina” (July 2013 issue).

2012  Cynthia Radding, “The Children of Mayahuel: Agaves, Human Cultures, and Desert Landscapes in Northern Mexico” (January 2012 issue).

2011  Recipi Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert and David Schecter, “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-Rush: Silver Mining and Deforestation in New Spain, 1522 to 1810” (January 2010 issue).

2010  Emily Yeh, “From Wasteland to Wetland?: From Nature to Nation in China's Tibet” (January 2009 issue).

2009  Nancy Langston, “The Retreat from Precaution: Regulating Diethylstilbestrol (DES), Endocrine Disruptors, and Environmental Health” (January 2008 issue).

2008  Mark Carey, "The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species" (July 2007 issue).

2007  Richard Judd, "'A Wonderfull Order and Ballance': Natural History and the Beginnings of Forest Conservation in America, 1730-1830" (January 2006 issue).

2006  Gregg Mitman, "In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History” (April 2005 issue).

2005  Walker, Brett L., "Meiji Modernization, Scientific Agriculture, and the Destruction of Japan's Hokkaido Wolf," 9 (April 2004).

2004  Edmund Russell, "Evolutionary History: Prospectus for a New Field" 8 (April 2003): 204- 228.

2003  John Soluri, "Accounting for Taste: Export Bananas, Mass Markets, and Panama Disease" July 2002.

2002  Ramachandra Guha, "The Prehistory of Community Forestry in India" (2001).

2002  Tom McCarthy, "The Coming Wonder?: Foresight and Early Concerns About the Automobile" (2001).

2001  Chad Montrie, "Expedient Environmentalism: Opposition to Coal Surface Mining in Appalachia and the United Mine Workers of America, 1945-1977" (2000).

2000 T amara Giles-Vernick, "We Wander Like Birds: Migration, Indigeneity, and the Fabrication of Frontiers in the Sangha River Basin of Equatorial Africa" (1999).

1999  Brian Black, "Oil Creek as Industrial Apparatus: Re-creating the Industrial Process Through the Landscape of Pennsylvania's Oil Boom" (1998).

1997  Robert B. Marks, "Commercialization without Capitalism: Processes of Environmental Changes in South China, 1550 1850" (1996).

1995  Robert MacCameron, "Environmental Change in Colonial New Mexico" (1994).

1993  Christopher V. Hill, "Water and Power: Riparian Legislation and Agrarian Control in Colonial Bengal" (1990).

Rachel Carson Prize (best dissertation)

2020  Ashanti Ke Ming Shih, “Invasive Ecologies: Science and Settler Colonialism in Twentieth-Century Hawai‘i” Yale University

2019  Leah Aronowsky, "The Planet as Self-Regulating System: Configuring the Biosphere as an Object of Knowledge, 1940-1990," Harvard University.

2018  Milica Prokić, “Barren Island (Goli otok): A Trans-Corporeal History of the Former Yugoslav Political Prison Camp and Its Inmates, from the Cominform Period (1949-1956) to the Present,” University of Bristol.

2017  Eric Steven Zimmer, “Red Earth Nation: Environment and Sovereignty in Modern Meskwaki History,” University of Iowa.

2016  Gregory Rosenthal, “Hawaiians Who Left Hawaiʻi: Work, Body, and Environment in the Pacific World, 1786-1876,” State University of New York - Stony Brook.

2015  Philipp N. Lehmann, “Changing Climates: Deserts, Desiccation, and the Rise of Climate Engineering 1870-1950,” Harvard University.

2014  Andrew Stuhl, “Empires on Ice: Science, Nature, and the Making of the Arctic,” University of Wisconsin-Madison.

2013  Catherine McNeur, “The 'Swinish Multitude' and Fashionable Promenades: Battles over Public Space in New York City, 1815-1865,” Yale University.

2012  Bradley Skopyk, "“Undercurrents of Conquest: The Shifting Terrain of Indigenous Agriculture in Colonial Tlaxcala, Mexico,” York University.

2011  Chris Manganiello, "Dam Crazy with Wild Consequences: Artificial Lakes and Natural Rivers in the America South, 1845-1990," University of Georgia.

2010  Gina Maria Rumore, "A Natural Laboratory, A National Monument: Carving out a Place for Science in Glacier Bay, Alaska, 1879-1959," University of Minnesota.

2009  Carol Kieko Matteson, "Masters of Their Woods: Conservation, Community, and Conflict in Revolutionary France, 1669-1848," Yale University.

2008  Gwendolyn Verhoff, "The Intractable Atom: The Challenge of Radiation and Radioactive Waste in American Life, 1942 to Present," Washington University in St. Louis.

2007  Joanna Dyl, "Urban Disaster: An Environmental History of San Francisco After the 1906 Earthquake," Princeton University.

2006  Liza Piper, "Harnessing the Wet West: Environment and Industrial Order on the Large Lakes of Subarctic Canada, 1921 – 1960," York University, 2005.

2005  Lawrence Culver, "The Island, the Oasis, and the City: Santa Catalina, Palm Springs, Los Angeles, and Southern California's Shaping of American Life and Leisure," University of California-Los Angeles, 2004.

2004  Thomas G. Andrews, "The Road to Ludlow: Work, Environment, and Industrialization, 1870-1915," University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003.

2003  Jacob A. Tropp, "Roots and Rights in the Transkei: Colonialism, Natural Resources, and Social Change, 1880-1940," University of Minnesota.

2002  Sara B. Pritchard, "Recreating the Rhone: Nature and Technology in France Since World War II," Stanford University.

2001  Matthew Dominic Evenden, "Fish vs. Power: Remaking Salmon, Science and Society on the Fraser River, 1900-1960," York University.

2000  Marcus H. Hall, "American Nature, Italian Culture: Restoring the Land in Two Continents," University of Wisconsin-Madison.

1999  Christian Warren, "The Silenced Epidemic: A Social History of Lead Poisoning in the United States Since 1900," Brandeis University.

1997  Mark David Spence, "Dispossessing the Wilderness: The Preservation Ideal, Indian Removal and National Parks," UCLA.

1995  Edmund P. Russell, III, "War on Insects: Warfare, Insecticides and Environmental Changes in the US, 1870 1945," University of Michigan.

1993   Barbara Liebhardt, "Law, Environment and Social Changes in the Columbia River Basin: The Yakima Indian Nation as a Case Study, 1840 – 1933," University of California, Berkeley.