Edited by Shepard Krech, III (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 1993–94; 2000–01), John Robert McNeill, and Carolyn Merchant In order to address today's global environmental challenges, it is important to understand them within the context of humankind's influences on its environment throughout the ages. The Encyclopedia of World Environmental History provides much needed explanation of urgent social and environmental … Continued
By Christopher Witmore (NHC Fellow, 2014–15) Old Lands takes readers on an epic journey through the legion spaces and times of the Eastern Peloponnese, trailing in the footsteps of a Roman periegete, an Ottoman traveler, antiquarians, and anonymous agrarians. Following waters in search of rest through the lens of Lucretian poetics, Christopher Witmore reconstitutes an untimely mode … Continued
Edited by Dane Kennedy (NHC Fellow, 2010–11) Exploration was a central and perhaps defining aspect of the West's encounters with other peoples and lands. Rather than reproduce celebratory narratives of individual heroism and national glory, this volume focuses on exploration's instrumental role in shaping a European sense of exceptionalism and its iconic importance in defining … Continued
By John Corrigan (NHC Fellow, 2014–15) While the concept of an Atlantic world has been central to the work of historians for decades, the full implications of that spatial setting for the lives of religious people have received far less attention. In Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World, John Corrigan brings together research from geographers, anthropologists, … Continued
By Richard J. A. Talbert (NHC Fellow, 2000–01) The Peutinger Map is the only map of the Roman world to come down to us from antiquity. An elongated masterpiece, full of colorful detail and featuring land routes across Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, it was rediscovered mysteriously around 1500 and then came into … Continued
By Richard W. Unger (NHC Fellow, 2008–09) Renaissance map-makers produced ever more accurate descriptions of geography, which were also beautiful works of art. They filled the oceans Europeans were exploring with ships and to describe the real ships which were the newest and best products of technology. Above all the ships were there to show … Continued
By Sumathi Ramaswamy (NHC Fellow, 2013–14) Why and how do debates about the form and disposition of our Earth shape enlightened subjectivity and secular worldliness in colonial modernity? Sumathi Ramaswamy explores this question for British India with the aid of the terrestrial globe, which since the sixteenth century has circulated as a worldly symbol, a … Continued
By J. R. S. Phillips (NHC Fellow, 1987–88) Between the year 1000 and the mid-14th century, several remarkable events unfolded as Europeans made contact with a very substantial part of the inhabited world, much of it never previously known or suspected to exist by them. Leif Ericsson and other Vikings discovered North America; European crusading … Continued
By Mart A. Stewart (NHC Fellow, 2002–03) “"What Nature Suffers to Groe" explores the mutually transforming relationship between environment and human culture on the Georgia coastal plain between 1680 and 1920. Each of the successive communities on the coast-the philanthropic and imperialistic experiment of the Georgia Trustees, the plantation culture of rice and sea island cotton … Continued
By Kären Wigen (NHC Fellow, 1999–00) Kären Wigen probes regional cartography, choerography, and statecraft to redefine restoration (ishin) in modern Japanese history. As developed here, that term designates not the quick coup d’état of 1868 but a three-centuries-long project of rehabilitating an ancient map for modern purposes. Drawing on a wide range of geographical documents … Continued