Last year, Professor Peter Perdue visited York University to deliver the 2014 Melville-Nelles-Hoffmann Lecture in Environmental History. His lecture titled, “Mountains, Caravans, Rivers, and Salons: China’s Multiple Tea Trades,” explored one of China’s best-known export commodities. Drawing on scholarship in imperial Chinese history, the history food, and environmental history, Professor Perdue provided an […]
seankheraj
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On Tuesday, February 10, 2015, we held another “History and Computing” workshop in the Department of History at York University. This is a series of practical workshops on the use of digital technologies in historical scholarship and teaching. Alongside my colleague, Carolyn Podruchny, we led presentations on our respective experiences […]
Episode 46: Historical GIS Research in Canada, 26 January 2015 [38:27] Download Audio In recent years, environmental historians and other historians have been working with maps in new ways. Specifically, they have been using HGIS software, that is, historical geographic information systems. You may have heard a bit about this […]
Canadian environmental history is a burgeoning sub-field of Canadian history, but it is not very well known outside of academia. This is my own research speciality. On many occasions, I have had to answer the question: what is environmental history? Periodically, this is a question that environmental historians ask themselves. […]
Episode 45: The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project, 29 October 2014 [56:00] Download Audio It cuts through the centre of the continent linking all of the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Long the ambition of governments, industry, and continentalist visionaries, the St. Lawrence Seaway fulfilled the mid-century modernist dream of […]
As more of our reading moves from print to screens, learning how to write on the Web will become an increasingly important part of history writing skills. Just as we teach fundamental research and writing skills for print essays, we will likely begin to teach digital writing skills for the […]
Episode 44: The Second World Congress for Environmental History, 24 September 2014 [48:01] Download Audio For five days this past July, environmental historians from around the world convened in Guimarães, Portugal for the Second World Congress for Environmental History. This is the main event for the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations. […]
For most of its history, ecology has not been a guiding principle for the management of Stanley Park. This is one of the observations that I made in my book Inventing Stanley Park: An Environmental History. Throughout the twentieth century, Park Board officials and Vancouver residents struggled over how to manage the […]
In recent years, several scholars have expressed a desire to ban laptop computers and smartphones from the classroom. This urge to prohibit the use of computing devices, however, may be a reflection of our own shortcomings as educators. It may also be a future liability for higher education. What are the implications […]
Next week, I will be participating on a roundtable at the Second World Congress of Environmental History in Guimarães, Portugal. Our roundtable is titled, “Beyond Texts and Archives: Experiments with New Sources and Methods in Environmental History” and it is scheduled for Tuesday, July 8, 2014 from 14:00-15:30 in CO-04 (CFPG). All the […]
Episode 43: Environmental Scholarship and Environmental Advocacy, 2 July 2014 [47:04] Download Audio Environmental history has been both friend and foe to environmentalism. Historians can provide important context for understanding contemporary environmental issues, but they can also offer a critique of environmentalism that could undermine the political and social goals of activists. […]
Better late than never, here are our picks for what was worth reading on the #envhist tag for the month of May 2014. We track this tag every month and try to pick out some of the more interesting articles, videos, and audio that Twitter users shared. 1. Backstory with […]